BENeFACTORS

by Hertzan Chimera

At first he thought it was great.

He spent the money on all sorts of things; cars, jewellery, gadgets, restaurants, his girlfriend Jenny, his family on both sides, his group of mates at the recording studio where he worked. Hell, he bought drugs every day from every dealer, took drugs every day in every convenience, became an alcoholic, got help. Straightened out. Lost his girlfriend. Shamed his family. Showered them all with gifts. To no avail.

But this was just the beginning of his windfall.

He didn’t know who was sending him cash money – it never came from the same place. The post marks were all different. The envelopes came in all shapes and sizes. The handwriting was all sorts of odd, when they enclosed a note. But two thing were fixed.

1) they always contained cash money, notes of the correct denomination.
2) they always encouraged him, in their legion way, to keep on writing.

He had been writing now under an assumed name, an assumed identity for fifteen years. You would pass him in the streets and you would not know it was him – it was not that sort of arrangement he had with his readers. Not even his fans could trace him, nor did they ever seem to want to. He had totally “done a job” on himself, in the parlance of the secret agent. It was for the best, the sort of subversive works he wrote; his oeuvre would attract only the whacko, the socially maladjusted, the stalker.

Was the sending of cash money equivalent to “stalking,” he wondered?

He never intended his little sick stories to be successful. Writing for him was an ablution, a cleansing, a washing of the darkness, an expunging of that sordid part of himself that no-one should hold in their arms. His writing was more than Catharsis – somewhere between sacrifice of the monster he was (he hadn’t yet killed anyone) and the searing of his soul in the sadomasochistic tortured fires of literary hell. He was too sincere for his own good, often times. It wasn’t ‘light’ reading by any means. You look at him, you speak to him, you hear his opinions on life and you think, “Nah, this guy is a pushover, he has very little to say of any worth.”

But the money (and the encouragement) kept flowing in.

After years writing for sordid e-rags and forever imploding websites, he found he could afford to publish his own material. His production values were shoddy as a rule. He was producing nothing more than pamphlets, scraps of horror-porn to sell by mail order. He even put a few adverts in Time and Life and People magazines knowing that his, as he put it, ONE MILLION READERS were out there, waiting to be told that his words, his muse, his publications were out there.

He would give away his vision, so that his readers could live in his twisted world.

He actively sought out his one million readers but the money was a complete surprise. He got up late that fateful morning, as he has every morning since; turns up most days just before lunchtime at the recording studio. Refuses to resign, he has always said a full-time writer is a dying animal caught in a trap. It was the morning he received his first bulging package in the mail.

He just sat there in the kitchen. After his new girlfriend had gone to her job in the city. He sat there holding the cheque in his hand. A smile scraped across his face like the first razor blade of the week. His hand actually trembled as he thought that someone out there thought it right and fair to send him cash money. It wasn’t the earth, by any means, just £35. He opened a brand new account for it and put it in there in the hope the further checks would join it. And, he imagined, more readers would turn up to buy his cheap books. But that’s not how things happen.

The cheques just kept coming.

The next day there were two, the next three, the next day was a Sunday, so nothing came. Monday, a small sack was delivered from the Post Office, in which were more envelopes containing cheques; this bag delivered his first “fan mail.” He had never received fan mail before – no, this has to stop, we can’t call it fan mail. What was written in that letter was not really fan mail. It was simply a short note to accompany a cheque of £10 that he carry on with his “mission” and keep “ploughing the furrow.” He assumed that meant he should keep on writing.

And he did. And the coffers swelled.

By January of the next year, we arrive at this part of his story. Broken life of overspend and reconciliation, a good deal of dirty water under the creaking bridge. He had learned some hard lessons about life but still the cheques came. One cheque via Paraguay, of all places, was for £1000. The local press somehow got hold of the story and started to pitch outside his house in the hopes of getting a statement from him. Clearly someone had ratted him in to the press and his life would never be his own again.

He wondered if this was how money warped a man’s priorities, wondered if the charity of his benefactors would be his eternal misfortune—“Damn that double-edged sword,” he murmured to himself as the Paparazzi stalked him round Tesco as he shopped for his daily groceries. He had always wanted to become a famous writer, worshipped for his penmanship, despite the sullied vocabulary and morbid cast of his sick worlds. He thought he could write them out of the gutter. But hardly any mention was made of his writing skill or the inspirational quality it inspired in readers, editors, publishers.

No, only the money mattered, and it kept pouring in to his account.

This was the only reason the Press were on his tail. They wanted the gruesome gossip on his benefactors, they wanted names and they would not let go until they had torn every name from his records. But he had no names. No one ever bothered to leave a forwarding address, never mind a name. Funnily, not many of his self-published books sold, those terrible rags he printed with someone else’s money. He had an idea: he’d test the loyalty of his benefactors.

His heart wasn’t in it but he started to write like an angel and his production standards improved in direct parallel to his word count. Now he was pushing out proper mass market product, two, maybe three a year. He should have felt shame, he’d let himself down, had gone back on everything to which his earlier manifesto aspired. But, in many ways, he had just moved on, left the old anger and despair behind.

What should have happened didn’t, he got richer and richer as larger and larger cheques arrived day after day after day.

It was unbelievable. He could shit a rope of brown sludge onto a white table cloth and still receive those cheques. Eventually, he agreed to appear on morning TV and nothing of his earlier work was mentioned – none of the great philosophy or absurdity—none of the psycho-erotica he’d written in a steady stream of unconsciousness at 1000-words per hour, three hours every working night, and more at the weekends. Nope, now, as if by magic, he was a celebrity of his weird situation. The product of invisible benefactors.

First question was obviously about money:

Interviewer #1: Nykamp Grapewine, we have heard a lot about you recently; you are what we call in the industry One To Watch, but, more than this, is the bizarre method by which you fund your writing career. (capped teeth, flashing grey eyes) Mister Grapewine, to what do you attribute this really unique method of fan worship?

Grapewine (shaking): I am not sure if I can talk about it. I’d rather talk about writing and some of the ideas I have for future projec...

Interviewer #2 (insistent): Is it true that you spent 6 months in a drug rehab clinic?

Grapewine: (his mouth dry as old logs) I always wanted to be a proper writer. I would write about things that mattered to me, daily things that got stuck in my mind, things that kept me awake at night. Shopping lists. Men’s magazines. Some songs. I would write these scenes down like I was transcribing from a dream document. I don’t write about Soap Operas from the rotting barracks of Auschwitz, I don’t write about the Occupation of Iraq by Western Forces, I don’t write about the Catholic/Protestant situation in Northern Ireland, nor do I write about GreenPeace, Friends Of The Earth, Amnesty International, or the National Front. Mine is an insular world of personal torture where the flesh is my...

Interviewer #1: You recently made a large donation to a number of reputable charities. Are you running out of ideas of what to do with all this wealth? Have you thought of real estate?

Grapewine: The important thing for me is to write from the heart...

Interviewer #2: Why have you not bought a house in L.A. or New York yet? Our accountants have calculated that from the scant information we have about your ‘benefactors,’ is that what they’re called? With this scant knowledge we put you fortune in the £17,000,000 category. Any one with that sort of clout should simply be getting out of the country to avoid taxes at least – a holiday home in Malibu would certainly be a fine diversion from the chill and oppression of the English system every other tax year, no?

Grapewine: Nykamp Grapewine is not my birth name – what sort of parents would name their child Nykamp? I am a product of subversion and a victim of my own ego. I have learned the lessons of my youth and am embarking upon a new life as a full-time writer. I want neither fame nor fortune, but I do want the world to know that I will be there for them and their thoughts are in my heart with every stroke of the keyboard. I aim to reflect the society that chokes the life from creativity, I aim to shift the literary target a few paces closer to the mainstream. I aim, ultimately, to spread my world across this and then you’ll see things you people never dreamed of.

Interviewer #1: Could you tell us a little about your most famous novel. BlitzKrieg, that sprawling drama of West meets East? That was such a wild romantic ride, such a fat chunk of words. What was your inspiration for such a setting?

Grapewine: I can’t read that. Mass market twaddle. It’s like it was written by another human, someone who knew nothing about the way I think, act, write. Someone who stole my fingers and let them dance across a keyboard like a mischievous kitten for too many pages (turns to the camera) the reader should pick up my older, rougher, more honest pieces, they...

Interviewer #2: (to camera) Nykamp Grapewine has now sold in the region of 970,000 copies of his mass market novel BlitzKrieg and every indication shows that his one millionth reader is only another live broadcast away. He is scheduled to appear on National Radio Station One tomorrow, nine-thirty, to talk about his riches and how it has changed him as a writer. Nykamp Grapewine, thank you.

The truck that ran over Nykamp Grapewine as he crossed Piccadilly Circus the next day ensured his fame for many years to come.

Hertzan Chimera is the skin of fingertips on a keyboard. The rest of his human body lives in Oxford, England. Massacre Publishing, DoubleDragonPress and CyberPulp publish his novels (Szmonhfu and United States), his collections (BoyFistGirlSuck, Chimeraworld and Chim & Her) and his interviews (Spidered Web). Hertzan Chimera exists in three online flavours: editor/designer of Terror Tales http://www.terrortales.org; salesman http://hertzanchimera.com; navel gazer http://hertzanchimera.blogspot.com