Grunge (ARC) Page 2

  These memoirs are a great find. We can learn a lot from the Hunters that came before us, and man, Chad was involved in some crazy stuff.

  Chad was one of the best Hunters we ever had. He’s not just another silver plaque on the wall. He was my friend.

  Milo Ivan Anderson

  Monster Hunter International

  Cazador, Alabama

  CHAPTER 1

  The other day I was dealing with a newbie who was telling me his tale of woe about how he got into hunting. Mother had been bitten by a zombie and rose. He had to kill her with a shotgun. My response was:

  “Nothing says ‘I love you’ like double-aught to the face.”

  He looked really shocked and hurt. One of the reasons to write these memoirs is to put that, yeah, seriously cold reply in perspective. ’Cause it’s true and I meant it from the heart.

  I’ve been writing these memoirs as diaries and notes for a while so they’re going to be choppy. And I’m not sure how much to write about myself. Earl says we learn about hunting from the Hunters that came before us. I’ve read some of those old diaries and you really don’t understand the person very well. Just what happened with very little perspective.

  So I’ll give you as much as I’ve learned about hunting and hopefully whoever reads this, if anyone bothers, it’ll help you out some time. And since family shit comes into it from time to time you’re going to have to learn about my fucked up family. So here goes.

  My mom and dad are academics. I’ve met some good academics over the years. And I think that academics are important. Research really does make the world a better place. But I fucking hate my family. I really, really do. The Good Book says that you should honor your father and mother. It didn’t anticipate my mother and father.

  Dad’s a professor of philosophy. He finally settled down to a steady gig at the University of Kansas since his alma mater, Harvard, knew better than to hire his philandering ass. I’ve come to the conclusion that modern philosophy is entirely devoted to coming up with new excuses for cheating on your wife. I really shouldn’t bitch about my dad. God knows the apple didn’t fall far from the tree there. But at least I don’t try to cloak my aggressive womanizing in faux philosophy. I figure my life’s bound to be short. I don’t want to waste any time and I’m philosophically against leaving behind a young widow and kids who can’t even know I was a hero. Hit and run is the only reasonable choice for a Monster Hunter, in my opinion.

  But the excuses finally ran out around the time I was eight. When I was ten, and whining about them getting back together, Mom gave me a way-too-age-inappropriate explanation of what it was like to walk in on your husband in bed with not one but three coeds and the suggestion that she join in.

  The divorce was around the time I was holding up a home-made sign, made by me under my mother’s tutelage, reading “Give Peace a Chance!” As everyone in the Vietnam Anti-War rally was chanting “What do we want? Peace! When do we want it? Now!” I was chanting “What do we want? Ice cream! When do we want it…?” I hated those rallies. Fucking unwashed hippies talking about the importance of Lenin and Marx while all I wanted was for my mom to bother fixing me a bologna sandwich. But no! What God-damned “good for you” shit was it this week?

  My mother was a professor of anthropology and mythological studies. It turns out she could have been a primo source of information on monsters. I probably could have asked questions along the lines of “Okay, but how do you kill a lamia?” But that’s getting ahead of myself.

  Then there’s my fucking brother, Thornton. Thornton, who had no problems with his stupid name, was the apple of my peace-loving mommy’s eye. That’s because the vicious prick kept his violent tendencies behind her back. My mom did not have eyes in the back of her head but I frequently had two black and blue ones. Thornton was as vicious a bully as you’d ever care to find. He was always big for his age, never tired of finding victims—me for choice—and, like Dad, always had an excuse. Mom knew damned well how disgusting the bastard was but she had that incredible ability found in so many minds like hers to simply ignore all the evidence in favor of her personal view of the world. And in her personal view of the world, Thornton Ainsley Gardenier could do no wrong. Thornton got straight As. Thornton’s goal was to be an academic just like Mom and Dad. Thornton was four years older than I was and firmly believed I needed a good kidney punch every day of my existence.

  You’d think I’d enjoy killing him but I really didn’t.

  Oliver Chadwick Gardenier, on the other hand, could do no right. Every kid at some point wants to please his mother but I gave up real young. Maybe it was trying and failing to get either parent to notice that I was being used as a punching bag by the apple of their eye on a daily basis. Maybe it was when I came home from kindergarten with a note that said I was “too advanced.” I was already reading at college level and doing algebra, and was making the other kids look bad. And my parents sat me down and told me I needed to be “socially appropriate.” God, Mom hated herself for that lecture in later years. I threw it in her face with every subsequent report card showing straight Cs.

  Yes, I got straight Cs, with very few exceptions, all the way through school. Got any idea how hard that is? When you’d taught yourself Aramaic at the age of nine? Getting straight As is easy. All you have to do is a little studying and get all the answers right. Graduating every single paper and test, precisely, so as to get exactly a C? Especially papers. You gotta be able to read your teacher’s mind to get a C on every single paper.

  But I was duly centered in my social peer group. Just like mommy said I should be. Fuck you, Mom, you monster-loving bitch.

  She forced me to take violin lessons. It turned out that it came naturally to me. I was a virtuoso. This would come in handy later on in life. When Mom was around, I played badly on purpose.

  There are lots of books and memoirs about the poor misunderstood smart kid surrounded by dumb people. I suppose I was one of those (as an IQ test later proved) but it was really more the “poor misunderstood kid who just wants to be normal.” I wanted to play football. “Too violent.” I got scolded and a three-day grounding for playing cops and robbers. “How dare I support the fascist prison state?” Then there was the time I brought home papers for JROTC and managed by the tiniest of straws to fail to give my mother a stroke. It was close. God it was sooo close. On the other hand, that attempt to kill my mother led to the best times of my life and a new family who finally understood me.

  The summer when I was twelve I rode my bike five miles to a barber’s on the other side of town ’cause I’d asked one kid, who was bitching about it, where he got his hair cut. The barber had been a soldier once, turned out he was airborne back in World War II, and had cut military hair for years at Fort Knox. I walked in with shiny blond hair down to my ass, still with some of my baby curls, and climbed into a chair.

  “Sir, I hate to use foul language. My mother is a fucking hippy bitch. And I am sick and tired of this God-damned hippy hair. Would you please cut it all off? I promise not to tell.”

  “Son,” he said, breaking out his clippers, “parents, as with children, are a cross we all must bear. But as long as she does not discover the source of your haircut, we have a deal. And it’s free.”

  When my mother came home from another of her damned committee meetings, which meant I had to scrounge as per usual, I was waiting by the door sporting a high and tight with my formerly ass-length hair in one hand.

  “Here!” I said, gleefully. “You can make a wig out of it!”

  Since New Orleans I’ve shaved my head bald. Not that it matters to my mother anymore. We haven’t spoken since Thornton’s funeral nor do I ever intend to see her again.

  About that time, my mom arranged for a series of psychological and learning tests through one of her “close personal friends” at the University of Kentucky. (Did I mention Mom eventually went gay?) I had become “obsessively violent” (I really wanted to play football), “sexually dangerous
” (I was dating a seventh-grade cheerleader) and had “clear learning disabilities” (perfect straight-C average).

  Between bouts of testing I was subjected to “therapy” which consisted primarily of ongoing militant feminists rants about the evil male patriarchy. The tests came back that I was:

  Borderline paranoid schizophrenic, check; oppositionally defiant, at least with idiots and bitches like my parents and their friends (well, except for some of my dad’s “close personal friends” who even at the age of twelve I tried like hell to pick up); obsessive heterosexual (that means so straight you can use me to adjust lasers); and, oh yeah, that IQ test?

  My bastard brother had crowed like mad when he’d tested as a 136 IQ and immediately joined MENSA. My parents were both high IQ academics, proud MENSA members with letters after their name and papers to their credit. I was the official family moron.

  It was like that line in The Princess Bride.

  “Have you ever heard of Aristotle? Socrates? Morons!”

  Yeah. It was like that. I’d decided to just see if I was as smart as I thought I was and blasted through the test full bore.

  Einstein would have gone “Whoa!”

  “Figures,” I said when shown the results.

  “How can you have this IQ and get straight Cs?” my mom shouted at me.

  “Got any idea how hard it is to get straight Cs?” I asked. “I mean, a perfect C average? You said I needed to be ‘socially appropriate’ in my academics all the way back in kindergarten and what’s more ‘appropriate’ than absolutely in the middle of the pack?”

  I’d carefully kept from her that I was already reading some of her research material, even the stuff in ancient languages. I’d figured out Latin at six, Greek at seven and Aramaic by the time I was nine. By twelve I was working on Hindi and Hittite, having already mastered Coptic and hieroglyphs.

  On the JROTC thing. When I started high school, I tried every gambit to get into “normal” stuff. My mother was, in general, against all competitive sports—at least if it was a “go/no-go” situation. Football? Too violent. Baseball? Supports the concept of linear thinking. (Seriously.) She was fine with soccer which was also “go/no-go.” See the above about being able to justify anything that fit her world view. Soccer was European and thus good. So, I tried out for soccer. I’m naturally athletic, fast as hell and had been kicking a soccer ball around since I was a kid since soccer was “appropriate.” The coach moved me straight to varsity forward. Mom even came out for the first game. I scored both goals and she happily congratulated me for I think the first time in my life.

  I quit immediately. Damned if I was going to do anything my mother supported. There had to be something wrong with it. Which there is. Soccer is for pussies.

  But giving her the JROTC papers was mostly an exercise in seeing if I could really get her to stroke out. She, recognizing the gambit for what it was, tore the papers up in front of me, threw them in my face and then slapped me, not for the first time. She couldn’t hit nearly as hard as Thornton, who thank God was safely in Stanford by that time, so I just took it, per normal, and looked at her.

  “That all you got?” I asked. “You hit like a girl. And what about violence never settles anything?”

  Oh, I really loved when I started getting smart and knowledgeable enough to have that argument with my “peace-loving” mommy.

  “What about Hitler? Was using violence against Hitler okay? What about the Viet Cong fighting the evil right-wing tyranny of the South Vietnamese government? They used all sorts of violence. Was that okay?” Later, as my reading expanded, it was “Violence seemed to settle the question of Rome versus Carthage well enough. Cartago delenda est, right?” Which would start a lecture on “How can you discuss Rome and Carthage in depth and get a C in Ancient History?”

  Pro-tip: If you’ve got that teacher who hates smart kids, use all the correct names of pharaohs on the paper. ’Cause those kinds of teachers never know how stuff should be spelled. Khufu instead of Cheops. Things like that. Which are all “wrong” from their perspective. I wrote a paper in seventh grade Social Studies that I got an F on. I later turned in the same paper, word for word, with more annotations and citations, in a senior level college Egyptian History course. Got an A.

  I never ever used any form of violence against my mother. I just cannot raise my hand to a lady. Not that my mother was ever much of a lady. But the reverse was not the case. Apparently violence is all good when it’s getting your mad out at your “inappropriate” son. Or if you’re a good commie killing evil fascists. Or if you’re the Weather Underground. Etcetera.

  Anything to fit the world view.

  Don’t get me wrong. I’ve found God since those days and I still have an issue with Christians and Catholics (including some priests of my experience) who think that Jesus is going to keep fags, prostitutes and people who sleep around out of Heaven. God would have before Jesus. Sure. Definitely. And the Old Testament isn’t entirely to fill page count. But basing all your so-called Christianity on Prophets, Isaiah and St. Paul is cherry picking like mad. It’s adjusting reality to fit your world view.

  Jesus is when God started to realize he’d created something weirder than even He realized and stopped having such a mad-on at us.

  I think in the old days He gave a lot of orders He didn’t realize weren’t ever going to be perfectly obeyed by ninety percent of humanity. Since He made us in His image, I suspect after Jesus died for our sins, the Savior reported in how seriously messed up we all were and why. I mean, puberty! Puberty for God’s sake! You gave us puberty! And you think masturbation is our fault? We don’t even know what it is the first few times! “Don’t commit the sin of Onan.” “What is the sin of Onan?” “To spill your seed upon the ground.” “What if I’m laying down grass seed?” “Not that kind of seed.” “What kind of seed then?” “Never mind.”

  After Jesus died for our sins and carried up the full download of just how messed up it was to be stuck in a human body, God must have gone “Well, Me, I guess We’ve gotta forgive the poor saps.” These days I think you’ve gotta seriously mess up to get Hell. I’ve even got some supporting evidence.

  My brother is probably in Hell and I’m sort of comfortable with that even if I’m still wrestling with how he got there. Maybe I should change my name to Cain.

  Back to JROTC. I’d gotten the papers from the assistant JROTC instructor, Mr. Herman J. Brentwood. He also taught shop and, of all things, chemistry. I had his shop class (another thing to poke a sharp stick in my mother’s eye, just like as a kid I used to go around jumping up and down on every crack I could find in the sidewalk) and had picked them up there.

  The next day he asked me about them.

  “Did you get the papers signed?” he asked as I was trying not to cut my fingers off with a jigsaw.

  “No, sir,” I said. I was polite just to piss off my mom. She hated it when I said “sir” and “ma’am” since they were “antiquated social constructs of the dominant patriarchy.” Besides, Mr. Brentwood was one of those people you just automatically tended to say “sir” to and if you didn’t you regretted it. “My mother does not approve of the military. I knew that. Truthfully, sir, I got them as much to infuriate her as to join.”

  “The Good Book says that you should honor your father and mother, son,” Mr. Brentwood said. There might have been a Supreme Court ruling that prayer in school was banned. But that sort of statement wasn’t out of place in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1977.

  “Sir, with respect, you don’t know my father and mother,” I said, carefully. “I cut my hair when I was twelve to get back at her. It was down to my butt.” I carefully did not say ass. “She was upset about that and thought it was great when my older brother started smoking dope. With her and her friends. She’s a member of the American Communist Party, an anti-war activist at least if it’s fighting commies, commies murdering people to support the downtrodden is all good. And my dad, who is a professor in Kansas, has neve
r found a coed he wasn’t willing to…engage in carnal knowledge with, sir. He’s the kind of professor a cute girl can always get a good grade from for…sexual stuff, sir. Sir, I’m just counting the days until I can get out of hell.”

  “Any idea what you’re going to do with your life, son?” Mr. Brentwood asked.

  “So far, all I’ve got is what I’m not going to do with my life, sir. Which is anything that my parents approve of.”

  Which was how I found new parents.

  My mom and I were barely on speaking terms at that point and I had already found other places to be most of the time. I had friends, and their parents were often cool with couch-crashing. But the Brentwoods’ really became my new home and I finally found a mother and father I could relate to.

  Mr. Brentwood looked like a straight-up stereotype. He’d joined the Marines in 1942, right after Pearl Harbor, gotten put in the infantry and proceeded to slog his way across the Pacific. When the War was over he went home, married his high school sweetheart, went to school on the GI bill and after spending some time working in the chemical industry he got a job as a teacher at Central High School and had been a fixture there ever since.

  He still wore a high and tight and could still fit in his WWII uniforms.

  Mrs. Martha Anne Brentwood had raised four children and had “empty nest syndrome” something fierce. From what I got from their kids, who still dropped by frequently, she’d always been the Kool-Aid mom, meaning theirs was the house all the neighborhood kids frequented. She cooked a full dinner every night. My mother considered cooking to be a relic of the evil patriarchy and also was a just horrible cook. My mother not cooking was probably the only thing she ever did to make the world a better place.

  Not so Mrs. Brentwood. It was all “Southern Style,” heavy on fried, but she used more original herbs and spices than the Colonel could count. After long years of inedible health food and badly cooked Indian food or some similar…fecal matter, I just seriously pigged out. (Not that good Indian food is bad food. I’ve gotten to be pretty serious about good ethnic food. My mother burned water.)