Wasted
For 24 hours after his world imploded, Nate lay in a St. Vincent’s Hospital bed, alternating between moaning like a homeless lunatic over Sheila and swearing at various masochistic Attack on America marathons, as a platoon of overworked Samaritans tested and treated him for respiratory system dysfunction. Every so often he could smell the benzene, PCB and sulfur dioxide-laden stench from the burning hole downtown, and late at night when the drugs wore off he would awaken himself coughing and puking up blood. When the saintly, disinfectant-scented night nurse finally succeeded in getting him calmed down and sedated, he tortured himself quietly to sleep thinking about what might have been Sheila’s left breast lying in its twisted C-cup on a West Street sidewalk.
Nate had been fished from the mouth of the river named for Henry Hudson by the stunned crew of a replica of the long-dead captain’s 1609 ship Half Moon, his lungs half full of fetid river water, the other half encrusted with skyscraper dust and complex petrochemicals, and eventually deposited on a gurney in a hallway at St. Vincent’s Hospital. He had lost his favorite hat, his glasses, his bike and his girlfriend, and felt as guilty to be alive as any of the losers blubbering their pathetic stories on TV. At least no one from FOX showed up for a bedside interview. They wouldn’t have wanted to hear what he had to say anyway.
After being stabilized and diagnosed with a variety of respiratory maladies, only one of which (chronic bronchitis, from the years of playing bad music in smoky bars) he’d ever experienced before, Nate was armed with a grab-bag full of industrial-grade antihistamines, expectorants and painkillers and released into the brave new world.
With a steady southerly breeze pushing the plume from the smoldering ruins slowly up the length of Manhattan, the air circulating through TriBeCa and SoHo, up through Greenwich Village and Chelsea and over to the Lower East Side was heavy with singed hydrocarbons and particles of decomposing flesh. To Nate the whole city smelled like a condom had caught fire in a sailor’s ass. The St. Vincent’s neighborhood around 13th Street and Eighth Avenue was eerily quiet, save for the intermittent siren blast and the muted whining of the scores of fancy, disgruntled young altruists loitering about expensively after having been told by some red-eyed official to go away. Feeling that history would be written without them, they were irritated that everyone who might have needed their precious blood was dead.
Most people just meandered, walking zombified into the traffic-less streets, looking as if the wind had been knocked out of them. Many of them wore masks or scarves over their worried mouths and noses. The only sense of purpose on display from anyone not wearing a uniform was that of a scruffy entrepreneur pushing a shopping cart bristling with newly minted American flags.
Nate shuffled along with the other shell-shocked and confused, trying to get back downtown to Sheila’s, but was rebuffed at Canal Street by a miniature African-American female cop and a trio of skinheads wearing camouflage National Guard outfits two sizes too big for them. Their preposterous Wehrmacht-style helmets looked as if they were crushing what was left of their brains.
Despite repeating the protestations that had successfully gotten him past earlier checkpoints, Nate was turned away with two blocks to go. The driver’s license in Nate’s still soggy wallet showed his old P.O. box address in Albany. “If you get caught down there looking like shit without authorization, you’ll be shot as a looter, sir,” one kid drawled as the other two twitched and smirked like Appalachian inbreds.
“You’ll be all right,” corrected the gentle cop lady, smiling beatifically. “Just get someone to vouch for you and we’ll see what we can do.”
“Thanks, officer,” said Nate, still smarting over the reality of an emaciated little fascist from Oneonta standing guard over his neighborhood, telling him where he couldn’t go. “Maybe somebody should check your pockets, cracker,” Nate muttered uselessly into his hospital-issue mask as he walked up Broadway toward Rico’s. “God bless America. Fuck.”
* * *
Until he moved in with Sheila five months earlier, Nate had for two years lived with Rico Exman, the band’s lead singer and primary sex symbol. Nate missed the apartment—four high-ceilinged rooms with a shower like a fire hose on the safest block in New York, rent free to Rico and his two cats for the past 13 years thanks to a tangled lawsuit over a forgotten tenant strike. It was on East Third Street directly across from the Hell’s Angels headquarters, and when Nate lived in it there was a Haitian ganja supermarket in the basement directly below. Every night Nate’s cluttered bedroom would fill with smoke from the Haitians’ Santaria rituals and he’d have to hide in the kitchen if he didn’t want to get high or sick, or both. There was a beautiful cloistered patio in the back, where he would sit and read and drink beer and make friends with the Haitians’ chickens and bunny rabbits in the sun-dappled shade of the locust trees. After a while he didn’t bother getting too close to the critters. He noticed that they would become increasingly mangled—missing feathers, tails and then a limb or two—before disappearing altogether, replaced by a fresh batch.
Moving back in with Rico was something Nate said he’d never do. But this was an emergency, and the two had stopped pretending they were enemies more than three months earlier. Rico had forgiven Nate for starting the inevitable mutiny that broke up the Ex-Men, and Nate had forgiven Rico for being a self-involved culture-appropriating blowhard who couldn’t help pissing people off. Rico had hired a new band of fresh young kids whom he could browbeat and low-ball to his heart’s content, and Nate was booking him every chance he got, because the bastard still had his fans, even with that bald head.
As he approached down the block, Nate tried to ignore the gathering Ground Zero aroma and noted the changes on Third Street. The Hell’s Angels had commandeered the greasy old bicycle garage out of which Nate had worked the messenger and pedicab rackets in times before the band got hot. A group of the outlaw bikers loitered menacingly—under the circumstances almost comfortingly—on the sidewalk in front of their storied headquarters, forcibly administering the entire street’s unique parking laws, as usual. In homage to the Angels’ many friends among the neighborhood’s martyred gendarmes and firefighters, their clubhouse façade was festooned with a missing persons’ shrine, a tattered, Iwo Jima-sized Old Glory dug out of the downtown rubble and a colorful gallery of scatological posters defaming America’s new scraggly-bearded enemies.
There were other, more disturbing developments. Sadly, the exotic snake and lizard shack on the corner had metamorphosed into a Starbucks. And the Haitians were gone, replaced by a repugnantly sleek Internet café crowded with trust fund babies in Caesar haircuts, who feigned cool detachment as they nervously plotted their escapes from the festering purgatory that New York had overnight become for them.
Nate suddenly and painfully recalled the Haitians’ fate—a memory he had apparently been blocking out. They had been busted in a raid on the same day he moved out to Sheila’s. He remembered having felt an uncharacteristic burst of empathy for the three dreadlocked brothers chained together on the bench inside their store, glowering at him as he wrestled his ugly sofa bed down the steps and into the van by himself. “It wasn’t me turned you suckas in,” Nate had blurted. “Must’ve been somebody didn’t like your skunky dope. I’m just moving in with my girl downtown.”
The jailbound troika had been neither amused nor mollified. To reassure them that he truly wasn’t a lousy rat worthy of a personalized voodoo ritual, Nate had given one of them his new phone number at Sheila’s, which the man made a point of calling when he got out of Rikers a week later. Sheila, God rest her opportunistic soul, had intercepted the call and struck up a conversation, quickly determining that he dealt more than just pot. Upon eliciting that the dealer had a line on some pretty high-grade Colombian coke, her tired eyes had lit up like Roman candles. Thus through Nate’s chickenshit act had Sheila become a steady client.
Nate’s sad realization that this new drug connection had accelerated Sheila’s emotional deterioration, coupled with his certainty that she had been driven into a psychotic, suicidal Nirvana by poring over his woman list, plunged him into unfamiliar fits of guilt and self-loathing. Worse yet, he was sure he had rammed the last nail into her coffin with a few thoughtless, sleep-slurred words on the morning of September 11. The fact that a fully-fueled airliner had been driven by a maniac into her workplace didn’t enter the equation. Religious extremism and centuries of bloody bickering over a few hectares of arid wasteland had nothing to do with it.
He would never admit it to anyone, but deep inside, Nate knew he was to blame for Sheila’s death. Somehow, he had to atone for it. Accused, tried and convicted in his own mind, he sentenced himself to community service. He would complete Sheila’s work, and save her “innocent lemmings” from whatever fate her despised employer had assigned them. But first, he had to save himself.
* * *
“Yo, Nate.”
“Hey, Rico. Thanks for putting me up.”
Rico was tall and angular; catlike. He had always looked and acted like a Hanna Barbera cartoon character to Nate, but women routinely wanted to crawl into bed with him, probably because of his sleepy Isaac Hayes baritone. Now, however, Nate noticed something was off. Rico looked tired and even more gaunt than usual.
His voice was ragged and phlegmy. “No problem. You’re like a fuckin’ hero already, you crazy old fuck. So sorry about Sheila, man. I’m serious.”
An acrid vapor hung in the hallway, even stronger than the smell in the street.
“Yeah, I really loved that psycho bitch. I let her get to me and now she’s haunting my dreams. You know, Rico, it reeks in here. Like the fucking Meadowlands.”
“I know, it smells like Mrs. Goldman’s sixth grade,” croaked Rico. “It’s from when the wind blows north. It’s hard to get rid of, like this part of the street is in an air pocket or something. I’ve been staying out at my mom’s, where at least I know the stink is from an all-American dump. I gotta keep out of New York for a while.”
“Is that where you’ve been? I’ve been trying to get another date out of you for the last two months. And you canceled your last gig.”
Rico looked troubled. “Yeah, well, sort of. Sorry.”
Rico grew up on Long Island in the shadow of its tallest peak, the ancient, steaming Atlantic Park landfill. Most of the thing had been paved over with blacktop, and a vast, gleaming shopping mall had been constructed atop it in 1996. Methane vents still flamed on its grassy slopes in order that the shoppers far above wouldn’t be blown to smithereens. One of Sheila’s pet conspiracy theories was that Rico’s tumor-ridden extended family was evidence of a “cancer cluster,” caused by years of illegal toxic dumping at the mobbed-up dump. She further maintained that the perpetrators were shielded from trouble and abetted in their crimes by a man she called “the highest ranking Mafioso in the U.S. government,” Atlantic Park’s favorite son, Senator Rudolf Viggiani.
Nate had to admit there was probably something amiss in Atlantic Park. Besides Sheila, no one he knew was more tainted with the pall of death than Rico. Rico’s father had expired of a particularly cruel and virulent form of brain cancer, and his uncle and sister were nailed by lymphoma. His mother had beaten breast cancer years earlier, but had just noticed a shiny new lump in her armpit. And it seemed as if Rico was always trotting off to the Island to visit some leukemia-afflicted high school pal in the hospital, or to attend the funeral of a fallen comrade.
And now Rico didn’t look so good, either. “You all right, little buddy? You look a little peaked,” ventured Nate cautiously.
At that, Rico’s already troubled face fell even further. His eyes began to water. His voice lowered to a barely audible rasp. “Natey, don’t tell anybody. I’m not all right. I found out four months ago I’ve got Hodgkins. I shaved my fucking head because I’m sick, dude. They’re zapping me three times a week and I feel like shit. I look like shit. My fucking hair is gone, and now my girl is gone. Fuck her anyway. She had a flat ass. My mom is dying, but I might beat her to the punch. I got a new record coming out next month and my first tour since you fuckers left, and I can’t even sing. If the label or my manager finds out, I’m fucked. Fucked.”
Rico folded onto his sagging couch and started to sob softly—for the first time ever, as far as Nate knew. Nate didn’t quite know what to do, so he put his arms around his stricken friend and tried to comfort him—another jarring precedent that would probably never occur again. Rico felt like a sack of kindling in his arms. “Aw, man. That’s all right. That’s OK. Just look at us now, a couple of bad motherfuckers, yo? You all ugly and bald and radioactive and me uglier and balder and crying over a dead sociopath who wanted to kill me. The city is a deathhouse—fucking asbestos, rent-a-soldiers, rats and body parts. These are the end days, my friend. A swell time to be alive. Consider yourself lucky.”
As the desiccated husk of his best friend finally let out a hoarse chuckle, Nate began to cry, too.
© Biff Thuringer 2018
This story is an excerpt of the novel Wasted by Biff Thuringer
For 24 hours after his world imploded, Nate lay in a St. Vincent’s Hospital bed, alternating between moaning like a homeless lunatic over Sheila and swearing at various masochistic Attack on America marathons, as a platoon of overworked Samaritans tested and treated him for respiratory system dysfunction. Every so often he could smell the benzene, PCB and sulfur dioxide-laden stench from the burning hole downtown, and late at night when the drugs wore off he would awaken himself coughing and puking up blood. When the saintly, disinfectant-scented night nurse finally succeeded in getting him calmed down and sedated, he tortured himself quietly to sleep thinking about what might have been Sheila’s left breast lying in its twisted C-cup on a West Street sidewalk.
Nate had been fished from the mouth of the river named for Henry Hudson by the stunned crew of a replica of the long-dead captain’s 1609 ship Half Moon, his lungs half full of fetid river water, the other half encrusted with skyscraper dust and complex petrochemicals, and eventually deposited on a gurney in a hallway at St. Vincent’s Hospital. He had lost his favorite hat, his glasses, his bike and his girlfriend, and felt as guilty to be alive as any of the losers blubbering their pathetic stories on TV. At least no one from FOX showed up for a bedside interview. They wouldn’t have wanted to hear what he had to say anyway.
After being stabilized and diagnosed with a variety of respiratory maladies, only one of which (chronic bronchitis, from the years of playing bad music in smoky bars) he’d ever experienced before, Nate was armed with a grab-bag full of industrial-grade antihistamines, expectorants and painkillers and released into the brave new world.
With a steady southerly breeze pushing the plume from the smoldering ruins slowly up the length of Manhattan, the air circulating through TriBeCa and SoHo, up through Greenwich Village and Chelsea and over to the Lower East Side was heavy with singed hydrocarbons and particles of decomposing flesh. To Nate the whole city smelled like a condom had caught fire in a sailor’s ass. The St. Vincent’s neighborhood around 13th Street and Eighth Avenue was eerily quiet, save for the intermittent siren blast and the muted whining of the scores of fancy, disgruntled young altruists loitering about expensively after having been told by some red-eyed official to go away. Feeling that history would be written without them, they were irritated that everyone who might have needed their precious blood was dead.
Most people just meandered, walking zombified into the traffic-less streets, looking as if the wind had been knocked out of them. Many of them wore masks or scarves over their worried mouths and noses. The only sense of purpose on display from anyone not wearing a uniform was that of a scruffy entrepreneur pushing a shopping cart bristling with newly minted American flags.
Nate shuffled along with the other shell-shocked and confused, trying to get back downtown to Sheila’s, but was rebuffed at Canal Street by a miniature African-American female cop and a trio of skinheads wearing camouflage National Guard outfits two sizes too big for them. Their preposterous Wehrmacht-style helmets looked as if they were crushing what was left of their brains.
Despite repeating the protestations that had successfully gotten him past earlier checkpoints, Nate was turned away with two blocks to go. The driver’s license in Nate’s still soggy wallet showed his old P.O. box address in Albany. “If you get caught down there looking like shit without authorization, you’ll be shot as a looter, sir,” one kid drawled as the other two twitched and smirked like Appalachian inbreds.
“You’ll be all right,” corrected the gentle cop lady, smiling beatifically. “Just get someone to vouch for you and we’ll see what we can do.”
“Thanks, officer,” said Nate, still smarting over the reality of an emaciated little fascist from Oneonta standing guard over his neighborhood, telling him where he couldn’t go. “Maybe somebody should check your pockets, cracker,” Nate muttered uselessly into his hospital-issue mask as he walked up Broadway toward Rico’s. “God bless America. Fuck.”
* * *
Until he moved in with Sheila five months earlier, Nate had for two years lived with Rico Exman, the band’s lead singer and primary sex symbol. Nate missed the apartment—four high-ceilinged rooms with a shower like a fire hose on the safest block in New York, rent free to Rico and his two cats for the past 13 years thanks to a tangled lawsuit over a forgotten tenant strike. It was on East Third Street directly across from the Hell’s Angels headquarters, and when Nate lived in it there was a Haitian ganja supermarket in the basement directly below. Every night Nate’s cluttered bedroom would fill with smoke from the Haitians’ Santaria rituals and he’d have to hide in the kitchen if he didn’t want to get high or sick, or both. There was a beautiful cloistered patio in the back, where he would sit and read and drink beer and make friends with the Haitians’ chickens and bunny rabbits in the sun-dappled shade of the locust trees. After a while he didn’t bother getting too close to the critters. He noticed that they would become increasingly mangled—missing feathers, tails and then a limb or two—before disappearing altogether, replaced by a fresh batch.
Moving back in with Rico was something Nate said he’d never do. But this was an emergency, and the two had stopped pretending they were enemies more than three months earlier. Rico had forgiven Nate for starting the inevitable mutiny that broke up the Ex-Men, and Nate had forgiven Rico for being a self-involved culture-appropriating blowhard who couldn’t help pissing people off. Rico had hired a new band of fresh young kids whom he could browbeat and low-ball to his heart’s content, and Nate was booking him every chance he got, because the bastard still had his fans, even with that bald head.
As he approached down the block, Nate tried to ignore the gathering Ground Zero aroma and noted the changes on Third Street. The Hell’s Angels had commandeered the greasy old bicycle garage out of which Nate had worked the messenger and pedicab rackets in times before the band got hot. A group of the outlaw bikers loitered menacingly—under the circumstances almost comfortingly—on the sidewalk in front of their storied headquarters, forcibly administering the entire street’s unique parking laws, as usual. In homage to the Angels’ many friends among the neighborhood’s martyred gendarmes and firefighters, their clubhouse façade was festooned with a missing persons’ shrine, a tattered, Iwo Jima-sized Old Glory dug out of the downtown rubble and a colorful gallery of scatological posters defaming America’s new scraggly-bearded enemies.
There were other, more disturbing developments. Sadly, the exotic snake and lizard shack on the corner had metamorphosed into a Starbucks. And the Haitians were gone, replaced by a repugnantly sleek Internet café crowded with trust fund babies in Caesar haircuts, who feigned cool detachment as they nervously plotted their escapes from the festering purgatory that New York had overnight become for them.
Nate suddenly and painfully recalled the Haitians’ fate—a memory he had apparently been blocking out. They had been busted in a raid on the same day he moved out to Sheila’s. He remembered having felt an uncharacteristic burst of empathy for the three dreadlocked brothers chained together on the bench inside their store, glowering at him as he wrestled his ugly sofa bed down the steps and into the van by himself. “It wasn’t me turned you suckas in,” Nate had blurted. “Must’ve been somebody didn’t like your skunky dope. I’m just moving in with my girl downtown.”
The jailbound troika had been neither amused nor mollified. To reassure them that he truly wasn’t a lousy rat worthy of a personalized voodoo ritual, Nate had given one of them his new phone number at Sheila’s, which the man made a point of calling when he got out of Rikers a week later. Sheila, God rest her opportunistic soul, had intercepted the call and struck up a conversation, quickly determining that he dealt more than just pot. Upon eliciting that the dealer had a line on some pretty high-grade Colombian coke, her tired eyes had lit up like Roman candles. Thus through Nate’s chickenshit act had Sheila become a steady client.
Nate’s sad realization that this new drug connection had accelerated Sheila’s emotional deterioration, coupled with his certainty that she had been driven into a psychotic, suicidal Nirvana by poring over his woman list, plunged him into unfamiliar fits of guilt and self-loathing. Worse yet, he was sure he had rammed the last nail into her coffin with a few thoughtless, sleep-slurred words on the morning of September 11. The fact that a fully-fueled airliner had been driven by a maniac into her workplace didn’t enter the equation. Religious extremism and centuries of bloody bickering over a few hectares of arid wasteland had nothing to do with it.
He would never admit it to anyone, but deep inside, Nate knew he was to blame for Sheila’s death. Somehow, he had to atone for it. Accused, tried and convicted in his own mind, he sentenced himself to community service. He would complete Sheila’s work, and save her “innocent lemmings” from whatever fate her despised employer had assigned them. But first, he had to save himself.
* * *
“Yo, Nate.”
“Hey, Rico. Thanks for putting me up.”
Rico was tall and angular; catlike. He had always looked and acted like a Hanna Barbera cartoon character to Nate, but women routinely wanted to crawl into bed with him, probably because of his sleepy Isaac Hayes baritone. Now, however, Nate noticed something was off. Rico looked tired and even more gaunt than usual.
His voice was ragged and phlegmy. “No problem. You’re like a fuckin’ hero already, you crazy old fuck. So sorry about Sheila, man. I’m serious.”
An acrid vapor hung in the hallway, even stronger than the smell in the street.
“Yeah, I really loved that psycho bitch. I let her get to me and now she’s haunting my dreams. You know, Rico, it reeks in here. Like the fucking Meadowlands.”
“I know, it smells like Mrs. Goldman’s sixth grade,” croaked Rico. “It’s from when the wind blows north. It’s hard to get rid of, like this part of the street is in an air pocket or something. I’ve been staying out at my mom’s, where at least I know the stink is from an all-American dump. I gotta keep out of New York for a while.”
“Is that where you’ve been? I’ve been trying to get another date out of you for the last two months. And you canceled your last gig.”
Rico looked troubled. “Yeah, well, sort of. Sorry.”
Rico grew up on Long Island in the shadow of its tallest peak, the ancient, steaming Atlantic Park landfill. Most of the thing had been paved over with blacktop, and a vast, gleaming shopping mall had been constructed atop it in 1996. Methane vents still flamed on its grassy slopes in order that the shoppers far above wouldn’t be blown to smithereens. One of Sheila’s pet conspiracy theories was that Rico’s tumor-ridden extended family was evidence of a “cancer cluster,” caused by years of illegal toxic dumping at the mobbed-up dump. She further maintained that the perpetrators were shielded from trouble and abetted in their crimes by a man she called “the highest ranking Mafioso in the U.S. government,” Atlantic Park’s favorite son, Senator Rudolf Viggiani.
Nate had to admit there was probably something amiss in Atlantic Park. Besides Sheila, no one he knew was more tainted with the pall of death than Rico. Rico’s father had expired of a particularly cruel and virulent form of brain cancer, and his uncle and sister were nailed by lymphoma. His mother had beaten breast cancer years earlier, but had just noticed a shiny new lump in her armpit. And it seemed as if Rico was always trotting off to the Island to visit some leukemia-afflicted high school pal in the hospital, or to attend the funeral of a fallen comrade.
And now Rico didn’t look so good, either. “You all right, little buddy? You look a little peaked,” ventured Nate cautiously.
At that, Rico’s already troubled face fell even further. His eyes began to water. His voice lowered to a barely audible rasp. “Natey, don’t tell anybody. I’m not all right. I found out four months ago I’ve got Hodgkins. I shaved my fucking head because I’m sick, dude. They’re zapping me three times a week and I feel like shit. I look like shit. My fucking hair is gone, and now my girl is gone. Fuck her anyway. She had a flat ass. My mom is dying, but I might beat her to the punch. I got a new record coming out next month and my first tour since you fuckers left, and I can’t even sing. If the label or my manager finds out, I’m fucked. Fucked.”
Rico folded onto his sagging couch and started to sob softly—for the first time ever, as far as Nate knew. Nate didn’t quite know what to do, so he put his arms around his stricken friend and tried to comfort him—another jarring precedent that would probably never occur again. Rico felt like a sack of kindling in his arms. “Aw, man. That’s all right. That’s OK. Just look at us now, a couple of bad motherfuckers, yo? You all ugly and bald and radioactive and me uglier and balder and crying over a dead sociopath who wanted to kill me. The city is a deathhouse—fucking asbestos, rent-a-soldiers, rats and body parts. These are the end days, my friend. A swell time to be alive. Consider yourself lucky.”
As the desiccated husk of his best friend finally let out a hoarse chuckle, Nate began to cry, too.
© Biff Thuringer 2018
This story is an excerpt of the novel Wasted by Biff Thuringer
Narrated by Biff Thuringer
Narrated by Biff Thuringer
POST RECITAL
TALK
BR: Hi, Steve. Welcome to The Strange Recital.
TN: Steve? Who’s Steve? Did you forget who our guest is?
BR: But he’s...
TN: We better start over. Hi Biff, welcome to The Strange...
BR: His name’s not really Biff.
TN: But today’s story is by the author Biff Thuringer. Are you saying the guy sitting here is an impostor?
BR: Not exactly...
SH: Hey guys, maybe I can clear things up… Yeah, my name is Steve, Steve Hopkins but you know if you go on the internet and you google Steven Hopkins you get a lot of trash out there—mostly people who died in the early 1800s. There's some pretty bad film directors and insurance agents, and you know it was hard to get through the clutter, so I had had that name in the can for many years. I was working for the tax department and I was moonlighting on the side as a musician, and for one thing the name Steve doesn't sound very good shouted. “STEVE”... It sounds a little... so I was trying to think of something to get the crowds worked up, so it's like...BIFF... you know “BIFF”—“Yo BIFF”. What goes with “Biff”? Well “Thuringer” goes with Biff because there was Rick Derringer, now there's Biff Thuringer. It just stuck and, you know, all my friends up in Albany did call me Biff for years and I had a thing called “The Biffogram” and that's how it stuck so...
TN: Well okay, then -- welcome, Steve.
BR: Or Biff.
SH: Well thank you.
BR: Is Wasted your first novel?
SH: Apparently yes. I've been writing for years—I'm a late-blooming journalist but I was a programmer analyst and I was a... I moved to New York City and I got in a band pretty quick and the band blew up in New York City. We got a record deal with Mercury and we were on the road with The Neville Brothers. We were doing really well and got “mercury” poisoning and the band broke up and I wandered upstate, back upstate because I'm from Albany but I got half way back and bum-rushed a newspaper—started working for like $5.00 an hour for eighty hours a week and then I was able to work my way up. I love being a journalist for investigating things, messing with people, and this novel is really... it's got a lot of what I was going through in it, so I would say it's about sixty percent fact and leave it up to people to figure out what that is.
TN: So does the excerpt we just heard appear at the beginning of the novel? Maybe you could give us a capsule version of the full story.
SH: All right, well it's near the beginning of the novel. The beginning of the novel... it's 9-11 and Nate's girlfriend Sheila is working in the World Trade Center for an evil corporation called USE, modeled on some sort of IBM thing. She's working in the Trade Center, she's a PR flack and she's a whistle-blower. She's looking into what the company is doing all over the world and upstate, and her father is a guy who basically deals with the company's toxic waste, among other things. He's a mobster and she hates him... anyway she dies in the Trade Center and as she's going down she's calling Nate, who she's already been pissed off at, and gives him a little information to keep her jihad going against the company and see if he'll pick it up.
And so he ends up... the little excerpt we heard was him dealing with his life directly after this, and he hits up his old friend for a place to stay. His old friend's got cancer, basically from the same kind of thing that her father was doing—that's the reason this guy has cancer. They go on a little junket and I'm not going to tell you all about what happens there but Nate ends up moving upstate, donning the mantle of a reporter and he takes up Sheila's quest and it leads him further and further into radicalism basically. And I'll let the rest of the story play out, when people read it.
BR: Yeah, no spoilers needed. If any event in our recent history made us question the nature of reality, it was 9-11. And as far as I'm concerned, the bizarreness has escalated ever since. So it sounds like one thing you’re trying to do with this novel is shed light on certain facts that might shake up the reality-definition of many of our complacent citizens.
SH: Yeah. This novel... I basically wrote it in about six months after 9-11. I'd had a job ghostwriting for someone in New York City. I'd just given three weeks notice two weeks before 9-11, so I was sitting on my bicycle seat in downtown Manhattan watching the towers fall and you could feel, as the thing was going down, you could feel the death and the... it was like it hit right past you like “Boof”. Right then you knew that things were going to be very, very different. And I realized I'd made the right decision and I was all set to move upstate and basically I just started writing this novel and it took about six months, and then I sat on it for a few years because I don't think our nation was ready yet to have an alternate view of what was going on. So, it was really hard to get through that kind of rah-rah political wasteland that we were in.
BR: Oh yes. I remember.
TN: So Steve...
SH: Yeah...
TN: Or BIFF!
SH: Yeah you can call me Biff.
BR: Maybe we should call you Stiff.
TN: Or Beve.
SH: Well actually Stiv is another one of my names but that's another story.
TN: I understand you’re also planning to run for President of the United States.
SH: That's just to sell books. But you know like Howard Schulz... I mean he took a page from—not a big page... but you know I also do have a platform, you can see it on thebiffogram.com. I'm fairly all over the map as far as politically, I agree with AOC about a lot of things but I also agree with a lot of things that aren't so leftist, so I'm really an anarchist but that's not for everybody.
TN: Okay, but you're not running?
SH: I could be running, if you want to be on the team or...
TN: Well you know, one of the authors we had here—this guy called Sparrow, he's been running for president like every election I guess for the past thirty years I think. Hasn't made it yet.
SH: I actually know him. He's a very good guy.
BR: Yeah.
TN: Funny.
BR: Well we thought maybe you were just crazy.
SH: Maybe. Some people have told me that but I'm...
BR: But crazy people always say they’re not anyway, or so I’ve heard.
SH: Yeah. So you've heard.
BR: I quite often read your former news publication, The Hudson Valley Chronic. What else are you working on these days, writing-wise?
SH: It looks to the casual eye, at the end of this book that Nate may be no more but he's going to resuscitate somehow and...
BR: Ah a sequel.
TN: Like Sherlock Holmes going over the waterfall.
SH: Yeah. I think I might turn it into some sort of Marvel series or something, you know—with super powers. Who knows, but I do have other things in the can. I don't know if I want to talk about them right yet but there are some things.
BR: Well good.
TN: Well, Mr Steve Hopkins-Biff Thuringer, that’s all we have time for today. I'm glad you could join us.
BR: Yes, thank you!
SH: It was my pleasure. Thank you very much.
BR: Wow, two names… just one identity is hard enough for me to handle….
TN: Yeah, I’ve noticed.
BR: Hi, Steve. Welcome to The Strange Recital.
TN: Steve? Who’s Steve? Did you forget who our guest is?
BR: But he’s...
TN: We better start over. Hi Biff, welcome to The Strange...
BR: His name’s not really Biff.
TN: But today’s story is by the author Biff Thuringer. Are you saying the guy sitting here is an impostor?
BR: Not exactly...
SH: Hey guys, maybe I can clear things up… Yeah, my name is Steve, Steve Hopkins but you know if you go on the internet and you google Steven Hopkins you get a lot of trash out there—mostly people who died in the early 1800s. There's some pretty bad film directors and insurance agents, and you know it was hard to get through the clutter, so I had had that name in the can for many years. I was working for the tax department and I was moonlighting on the side as a musician, and for one thing the name Steve doesn't sound very good shouted. “STEVE”... It sounds a little... so I was trying to think of something to get the crowds worked up, so it's like...BIFF... you know “BIFF”—“Yo BIFF”. What goes with “Biff”? Well “Thuringer” goes with Biff because there was Rick Derringer, now there's Biff Thuringer. It just stuck and, you know, all my friends up in Albany did call me Biff for years and I had a thing called “The Biffogram” and that's how it stuck so...
TN: Well okay, then -- welcome, Steve.
BR: Or Biff.
SH: Well thank you.
BR: Is Wasted your first novel?
SH: Apparently yes. I've been writing for years—I'm a late-blooming journalist but I was a programmer analyst and I was a... I moved to New York City and I got in a band pretty quick and the band blew up in New York City. We got a record deal with Mercury and we were on the road with The Neville Brothers. We were doing really well and got “mercury” poisoning and the band broke up and I wandered upstate, back upstate because I'm from Albany but I got half way back and bum-rushed a newspaper—started working for like $5.00 an hour for eighty hours a week and then I was able to work my way up. I love being a journalist for investigating things, messing with people, and this novel is really... it's got a lot of what I was going through in it, so I would say it's about sixty percent fact and leave it up to people to figure out what that is.
TN: So does the excerpt we just heard appear at the beginning of the novel? Maybe you could give us a capsule version of the full story.
SH: All right, well it's near the beginning of the novel. The beginning of the novel... it's 9-11 and Nate's girlfriend Sheila is working in the World Trade Center for an evil corporation called USE, modeled on some sort of IBM thing. She's working in the Trade Center, she's a PR flack and she's a whistle-blower. She's looking into what the company is doing all over the world and upstate, and her father is a guy who basically deals with the company's toxic waste, among other things. He's a mobster and she hates him... anyway she dies in the Trade Center and as she's going down she's calling Nate, who she's already been pissed off at, and gives him a little information to keep her jihad going against the company and see if he'll pick it up.
And so he ends up... the little excerpt we heard was him dealing with his life directly after this, and he hits up his old friend for a place to stay. His old friend's got cancer, basically from the same kind of thing that her father was doing—that's the reason this guy has cancer. They go on a little junket and I'm not going to tell you all about what happens there but Nate ends up moving upstate, donning the mantle of a reporter and he takes up Sheila's quest and it leads him further and further into radicalism basically. And I'll let the rest of the story play out, when people read it.
BR: Yeah, no spoilers needed. If any event in our recent history made us question the nature of reality, it was 9-11. And as far as I'm concerned, the bizarreness has escalated ever since. So it sounds like one thing you’re trying to do with this novel is shed light on certain facts that might shake up the reality-definition of many of our complacent citizens.
SH: Yeah. This novel... I basically wrote it in about six months after 9-11. I'd had a job ghostwriting for someone in New York City. I'd just given three weeks notice two weeks before 9-11, so I was sitting on my bicycle seat in downtown Manhattan watching the towers fall and you could feel, as the thing was going down, you could feel the death and the... it was like it hit right past you like “Boof”. Right then you knew that things were going to be very, very different. And I realized I'd made the right decision and I was all set to move upstate and basically I just started writing this novel and it took about six months, and then I sat on it for a few years because I don't think our nation was ready yet to have an alternate view of what was going on. So, it was really hard to get through that kind of rah-rah political wasteland that we were in.
BR: Oh yes. I remember.
TN: So Steve...
SH: Yeah...
TN: Or BIFF!
SH: Yeah you can call me Biff.
BR: Maybe we should call you Stiff.
TN: Or Beve.
SH: Well actually Stiv is another one of my names but that's another story.
TN: I understand you’re also planning to run for President of the United States.
SH: That's just to sell books. But you know like Howard Schulz... I mean he took a page from—not a big page... but you know I also do have a platform, you can see it on thebiffogram.com. I'm fairly all over the map as far as politically, I agree with AOC about a lot of things but I also agree with a lot of things that aren't so leftist, so I'm really an anarchist but that's not for everybody.
TN: Okay, but you're not running?
SH: I could be running, if you want to be on the team or...
TN: Well you know, one of the authors we had here—this guy called Sparrow, he's been running for president like every election I guess for the past thirty years I think. Hasn't made it yet.
SH: I actually know him. He's a very good guy.
BR: Yeah.
TN: Funny.
BR: Well we thought maybe you were just crazy.
SH: Maybe. Some people have told me that but I'm...
BR: But crazy people always say they’re not anyway, or so I’ve heard.
SH: Yeah. So you've heard.
BR: I quite often read your former news publication, The Hudson Valley Chronic. What else are you working on these days, writing-wise?
SH: It looks to the casual eye, at the end of this book that Nate may be no more but he's going to resuscitate somehow and...
BR: Ah a sequel.
TN: Like Sherlock Holmes going over the waterfall.
SH: Yeah. I think I might turn it into some sort of Marvel series or something, you know—with super powers. Who knows, but I do have other things in the can. I don't know if I want to talk about them right yet but there are some things.
BR: Well good.
TN: Well, Mr Steve Hopkins-Biff Thuringer, that’s all we have time for today. I'm glad you could join us.
BR: Yes, thank you!
SH: It was my pleasure. Thank you very much.
BR: Wow, two names… just one identity is hard enough for me to handle….
TN: Yeah, I’ve noticed.
Music on this episode:
Elevator by xj5000 from the album Roundthing
Used by permission of the artist.
Song of Doom by Biff Thuringer
Used by permission of the artist.
