With a name like Gideon
Ernest (the surname need not be mentioned here), he would either turn out to be
a wimp or a ladies’ man. There could be no middle ground; that much we know and
we’re sure of. That he was small of stature placed him firmly, by the hand of the
all-powerful author, in the camp of the former, where all the kids prefer to
stay inside on hot summer days, in the air conditioning. It’s safer. The big
bad world outside occasionally jumps up to bite you, unlike the softly
upholstered innards of the prototypical suburban house.
But appearances
can be deceiving. Good authors know this; that’s why we put characters like Gideon
Ernest into the word processor and hit frappe.
Gideon Ernest,
for instance, may have looked like a dweeb, he may have tipped the scales at
just over a hundred and twenty pounds wearing his birth control glasses and his
trademark white button-down shirt and black polyester trousers…but he was a
killer.
They say clothes
make the man. But a real man makes his clothes do whatever the hell he tells
them to do, even if it means broadcasting a certain image that doesn’t quite
line up with the truth. In Gideon Ernest’s case, he had a reason for looking
like a total nerd. And for working at the local Seven Eleven hawking Slurpees
from noon to night. It is a reason no one will see coming.
Appearances can
be deceiving. We’ve said that before. But that was precisely why he had been
written into life: to confuse the crap out of the reader for as long as
possible.
Because that’s
what good writing means.
Take this, for
instance: Gideon Ernest walks to work on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays,
Fridays, Saturdays, and sometimes Sundays. Why? Because he’s selling you
something. You the reader may think he’s selling you pseudo-cute nerdiness and
the occasional chilled beverage or Slim Jim. You may even snap into all that.
But what he’s really selling as he walks innocently into the Seven Eleven for
the millionth time is the idea that he’s just your average innocent pantywaist.
Mister milquetoast is selling you the idea that his shirttails are connected to
his white cotton sock tops by way of elasticated stocking garters that keep
everything just so. It’s a uniform he wears. It’s always the same, day in and
day out. Why? So that authors can deceive readers so thoroughly that eventually
the readers are so taken with the ruse that they actually want to be deceived.
The change
occurs. It begins skillfully, so that the reader does not perceive its germination.
A customer, one of the regulars, is at the Slurpee kiosk, self-servicing
sloppily, getting some Coca-Cola flavored slush all over the machine, and it
drips onto the floor. This sort of thing has happened millions of times before.
This selfsame customer has also, many a time, strolled right up to the register
and then held up the line by ordering a different brand of cigarettes,
preferably ones that Gideon Ernest has to search for, each and every time. But
today, the customer suddenly remembers that he wanted to buy five different kinds of Lottery tickets,
insisting on paying in cash—using all his loose change. Most of it is nickels
and pennies.
And when that
happens…
BANG!
Gideon Ernest
turns out to be Billy Badass. He appears to be a freak of modern science. His
white button-down shirt begins to rip asunder, revealing mountainous slabs of
tanned and bulging muscle. His polyester trousers were designed to have “a
little give” in the seat and thighs, and God knows as Gideon Ernest his body
never availed itself of such a textilic engineering marvel, but as Billy Badass
the fabric begins to show signs of strain. Indeed, as the metamorphosis
progresses, the trousers inexplicably shed their lower extremities, now
appearing to be a sort of beachcomber gentleman’s capri, complete with jagged
hems just at the top of his now bulging and shapely calves.
His glasses remove
themselves from his face as his rapidly growing—and tanning—body rips his white
shirt into miniscule shreds that fall away and disappear without a trace. The glasses,
having barely escaped their own kind of doom, now transform into a shiny black
male robot hawk. The hawk cock swoops around the room shrieking its fury at the
various convenience store patrons, wide-eyed customers holding Twinkies, bad
coffee, useless newspapers, and the odd half case of piss water domestic beer.
The mechanized black bird returns to its master’s now prodigiously wide
shoulders, spreads its wings, lowers its head, and shrieks once more.
Billy is now
fully manifest, an awesome replica of the perfect Tom Selleck moustache now
perched upon his upper lip. Billy Badass then reaches beneath the counter for
what one can only assume will be the sawed-off 12-gauge. But ah, dear reader,
thou dost assume too much. The author is still ahead of you by a mile, and this
will be a cliché of an entirely different sort. From under the mild and
unassuming Seven Eleven counter, Billy Badass, purveyor of fine low-cost
dessert wines and certain smutty periodical publications, produces a gleaming
custom made masterpiece of weaponry.
At least five
feet long, as much for the visual effect as anything when this story goes to
print as a graphic novel, his weapon is a Gatling gun with five barrels,
already rotating with electric whir, ready to fire, fed with belted ammo. Only
the ammo, naturally, isn’t ammo. No, to satisfy certain requirements for irony,
the belts that feed this monster are linked to the change drawer in the cash
register.
Billy Badass, who
is now incidentally glistening with sweat and covered with grime from the
pyrotechnic explosions that just went off in the cigarette case overhead,
stands under a shower of sparks and winking fluorescent lights as he lowers the
pentapotent muzzle of the weapon into the face of the regular customer.
Again, the reader
expects Billy Badass to speak his lines a certain way by now, now that the
author has established certain cliché criteria. But that’s where dear reader is
wrong again.
You see, Billy
Badass isn’t a man at all, and the robot cock isn’t what, certainly by now,
you’ve assumed, is a sidekick. No, in fact, the ungainly eyeglasses-cum-transforming
bird is the master, and Gideon Ernest-cum-Billy Badass is his wee little pet.
Therefore, when he speaks, the language is garbled and unintelligible by all
but the most rabid fan of Battlestar Galactica.
Yes: Billy Badass
is a Cylon drone.
And all of it
conspires to produce the Everest of accomplishment for any author: the moment
when the reader says, “Whoa. Didn’t see that one coming.”
And then Billy,
formerly Gideon Ernest of the Seven Eleven and now robo-puppet of the Cylon
master race, speaks, his finger on the trigger of his Gatling money gun, his
handy autotranslator dipping into the dank commonness of the English language
of the Earthlings: His voice gnarled and metallic, his says with extreme
prejudice, “Keep the change!”
We hear the
ratatattat, we see the offending customer blasted by spare quarters and pennies,
jerked up and back off his feet into the Hostess pies display case, everybody
else dives to one side, Billy is standing there like Rambo blasting everything
with his five foot long gun, holding it with one arm, screaming in rage. The
robo hawk takes flight just as the ceiling gives way under a massive fireball
caused by a supersonic dime slicing through an exposed gas main, and the whole
place goes up in flames.
The robo hawk
flies away to its mountain lair.
A new plan will
soon be hatched.
And Book II will
be out soon. This is how it’s done.
