This Book Is Not for You

  5220 Dexter Ann Arbor Rd.

  Ann Arbor, MI 48103

  www.dzancbooks.org

  This Book Is Not For You. Copyright © 2017, text by Daniel A. Hoyt. All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Dzanc Books, 5220 Dexter Ann Arbor Rd., Ann Arbor, MI 48103.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Hoyt, Daniel A., author.

  Title: This book is not for you / Daniel A. Hoyt.

  Description: Ann Arbor, MI : Dzanc Books, [2017]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017003748 | ISBN 9781945814341

  Classification: LCC PS3608.O9575 T48 2017 | DDC 813/.6--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017003748

  First US edition: November 2017

  Interior design by Michelle Dotter

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Carolyn Doty, 1941-2003

  CHAPTER ONE

  I am born.

  All right, that’s out of the way.

  This is not (not, not, not—pay attention to that word) a confession, a screed, a cry for help, a pack of lies, ghostly bullshit, or a murder mystery. It may be a rip-off of many other, better books—I’ll give you that. That’s a fair assessment. There’s a murder in it, but I won’t solve it. You won’t solve it. We aren’t going to unearth clues, dust anything (not to find fingerprints, not even to remove dust), interrogate anyone or some such shit. Don’t look for clues. Don’t come up with any “theories.” Don’t start thinking that I did it. Don’t come up with any “interpretations.” Don’t get all Agatha Christie on me.

  I know you will do these things anyway. I will be around the whole time to say, I told you so. Some fucked-up shit happened, which seemed awesome and mysterious at the time and perhaps should stay that way. I can’t explain most of it, and it happened to me. My entire raison d’être is fucked-up shit, and all of this still makes no sense to me. Do you comprehend? I have never ever used the term raison d’être before, but I’m trying to speak your language. You have taken French, right?

  You’ll have to deal with some things. I will end sentences with prepositions. I will swear. I will fornicate. I will get intoxicated. I will annoy you.

  I might become flippant about things you consider fragile and precious, and if I don’t become flippant about things you consider fragile and precious, I’ll probably wish I had.

  This book is about Marilynne and skinheads and reading and drinking and Saskia and the black holes in our spirits. I use the term spirits metaphorically, just so we’re clear, but this story is also about ghosts and time and the Ghost Machine and it might be about a bunch of other things, but it’s not my job to figure that out.

  That’s where you come in.

  Yes, you have rights, but you also have responsibilities.

  In fact, here is a quiz you should take before you continue reading this book. Sharpen your pencil!

  Yes  No

  1. Do you dislike books that talk to you?

  2. Do you want to solve mysteries?

  3. Do you need an explanation for everything?

  4. Do you dislike dirt, sex, profanity, and/or alcoholic beverages?

  5. Do you suffer from night sweats, rapid heartbeat, and/or tinnitus?

  6. Do you dislike quizzes?

  That last question was a trick question. There are no more quizzes. Go back and take the quiz and pretend question six doesn’t exist, and this time take the quiz like you fucking mean it.

  I’ll wait here.

  OK, now give yourself one point for each yes.

  * 5 points: Stop reading now and go wash your hands for a full thirty seconds. Burn this book in your backyard. Invite your friends—they probably have books they’ve been meaning to barbeque too. Also, apologize to your mother.

  * 4 points: We don’t want any.

  * 3 points: Reply hazy, try again.

  * 2 points: Proceed with caution.

  * 1 point: It’s only one point! That score practically doesn’t exist.

  * 0 points: Perhaps we are in love.

  We are probably not in love. Love is a concept like Bigfoot. You need to want to believe. We are probably not in love, but I’m willing to at least acknowledge the possibility.

  In all honesty, this is a grungy postmodern magical realist ghost story, with etiquette and grammar tips and all that shit. It’s a picaresque. It’s kind of a clap-trap noir.

  I don’t know why, but I almost forgot noir, your favorite French color.

  It’s also unadulterated pulp. It’s pulpy as all get out. This is the straight juice, unstrained.

  It might be a love story too, some kind of love.

  Fuck if I know.

  This is not a book for your mama’s book group. Oprah is not here to guide you. There aren’t any discussion questions in the back, like, “When Neptune and Saskia slam dance on page 151, it represents a surrender of hope to nihilism. What does your gentle and kindly soul think about this?”

  We were just dancing. We like friction. There are no book group questions here, and if there were, you would not like the answers.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Which brings us back to that Wednesday. Maybe that Wednesday is when all of this really started. I wasn’t a fetus. I was just about who I am now, minus a couple of months.

  If you’re one of those people who need to know what and when and in what proper order, I’m sorry. This must be pretty stressful to read.

  Marilynne was alive then. I had known Marilynne for about two years. Sometimes she was a good kind of crazy.

  She was calling on my cell phone. She was always calling on my cell phone. I sometimes shut it off. I sometimes left it at home. I sometimes said it was broken, even as she watched me talking on it.

  If you have a phone, it will ring, buzz, chime, ding, play some song that sounded trampy even when it was a virgin, even the first time you heard it. Your phone will make demands. Your phone will connect you to other people, and it will make these connections staticky and unclear. You will not know where they are. You won’t see the look on their faces. They might be on the toilet. They might be making the international symbol for “the human being on the other end of the line is a jerkoff.” Your past will sometimes call you up. Sometimes it will text.

  Your phone will let you take pictures. Your phone will let you access the Internet, which contains all of human knowledge and all of human disknowledge—which is not a word, but I discovered it via the Internet via my phone.

  I tell you all this because my phone was blowing up. I wish it were literal, and, yes, there will be an explosion, but for now I am pedaling a metaphor.

  I am not peddling. I’m not selling you anything.

  I was known for stupid stuff. A fella can get a reputation like that. It’s not hard.

  Two separate factions wanted me.

  One was Marilynne, a faction unto herself. The other was a group that specialized in stupid anarchist shit and they wanted to upgrade to bad shit. They wanted to get known real fast and in a big way. They wanted my help.

  I was ignoring both of these factions.

  I was where I almost always was, where bad ideas and hookups begin. I was at a bar, at the Replay to be exact, hanging out with a friend of mine, Uncle X, an old punk from Britain. He shows up a couple of times in this story, but he’s not really part of it. He is but he isn’t.

  Uncle X draped his arm over my shoulder. He breathed in through his nose in a loud and jovial way. I felt the weight of his arm. Our bodies were scrunched together, and I could smell
the Guinness from his glass, the Guinness on his breath. We were somewhere close to drunkenness.

  The Replay has a couple of pinball machines, and a tiny stage for bands, and a long wooden bar. Through the glass front, you can stare out at Massachusetts Street. Outside, the back patio is about a hundred feet by fifty, surrounded by a seven-foot fence. It’s all pressurized wood, some kind of deck stuff. The creatures of the night picnic out there, dance to old soul, laugh at things that aren’t funny.

  I can’t remember what we were talking about, but I know I said, “What’s next, Uncle X?”

  “I don’t know, mate,” he said. “I don’t know.”

  We watched a woman with smug breasts under a black turtleneck enter the Replay from the back patio. She waved to us.

  “I think she’s waving to me,” Uncle X said.

  “Us,” I said.

  “She has to be the smuggest woman I’ve seen in a while,” he said.

  “She even has smug feet.”

  “Smug arms!” Uncle X said, and then the woman was next to us, and Uncle X was pouring the thick black muck of beer into her glass.

  “Neptune and I were just having a moment, love,” Uncle X said. “Come on in. Come on in.”

  And then I think the three of us maybe hugged for a while, something like that.

  Uncle X knew this smug woman somehow. She had been waving at him. I couldn’t deny it anymore, and when my phone hissed in my pants to the left of my nuts, I broke from the scrummy hug. I went outside to answer.

  I had missed all of these calls from Marilynne. Calvin, leader of the anarchists, had been calling me too.

  It was him now. “Are you ready?”

  “I told you I want no part of that shit,” I said.

  “Just come talk about it,” Calvin said. “Come see the stuff.”

  You would think I would stop doing such asinine things, but I did want to see the stuff.

  I figured it wouldn’t hurt to look.

  I peeked through the tinted window. Inside, Uncle X and the smug woman conspired over Guinness. Her smugness was distorted, smudged by the glass. If I had just stayed there and drank with them, this probably would have been a different book. This probably wouldn’t have been a book at all.

  I think this was my first bad narrative decision, but it’s hard to keep track.

  They’re kind of my specialty.

  CHAPTER ONE

  All of this happened.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Life (n): the state in which stuff keeps happening.

  Some of it was random, and some of it was planned out. Right before all of this began, a black mole in the shape of a comma appeared on my right thigh. I’m not joking. It was the pause between one thing and the next. Marilynne said she had one just like it. Perhaps her mole has surrendered into dust. Perhaps it was just one of Marilynne’s stories. Perhaps I should have looked at it when I had the chance, but Marilynne is no longer engaged in this thing called life, which I have graciously defined for you.

  My comma mole felt designed and shaped and destined for something. Last week, I cut it out with a Swiss Army knife. Now, I have this little comma scab.

  Look closer. Here it is:

  Go ahead and touch it if you want.

  It didn’t hurt that much. Yes, I sterilized the blade with a disposable lighter. It will heal. Flesh does that. And, by the way, I plan to leave the moles that look like periods as they are.

  If you don’t want to touch the scab, it’s fine, and if you think I’m obnoxious and disgusting, well, I haven’t really been obnoxious or disgusting yet. Not by my standards. I haven’t even tried to be obnoxious or disgusting yet. I don’t think I’ve tried to be much of anything yet. I haven’t even introduced myself.

  But first I have to tell you something, just in case you didn’t know: A comma means something else is coming, more words. A comma means things ain’t finished yet. I’d rather be a comma than an exclamation point, maybe even more than a question mark.

  And, yes, I know that’s not really a scab and I am not this book, but in some ways I am this book, and you know it.

  Okay, sorry. Pleased to meet you and such. Where are my manners? My manners are reading a book. My manners are pedaling a mountain bike down by the Kaw. My manners are steaming at the bottom of a coffee cup.

  I am not this book. I’m Neptune.

  Five years ago, when the high school teacher with the over bite called the class roll, he said, “Let me know what you want to be called, you know, like a nickname or whatever,” and we all stared blankly at him, and he stared back at us as if he had the knowledge to fill in the blanks, and he read his carefully ordered names. We were all lined up alphabetically. He read them with a deep, loud voice, and then smaller, shallower voices said “Here” and sometimes “Yo.”

  I don’t remember what class it was. When he read my name, I just blurted out, “Neptune.” I thought people would laugh, but no one did.

  The teacher said, “Neptune?”

  And I said, “Neptune,” and then he wrote the name down on his roll sheet, and he said quietly and thoughtfully, “Neptune,” and ever since, I’ve been Neptune. His overbite made it seem serious. I had nothing else to make me seem serious. I was on something called “academic probation” and something else called “home release” and something else called “Quaaludes.” All of those things wore off after a while. And that’s about all that I got out of high school: a name.

  I can’t even think of myself in any other way. I am Neptune.

  Neptune is the blue planet. I’ve read that winds there blow at seven hundred miles per hour, but I’m not sure how we know this. This smells like a guesstimate to me.

  I’m Neptune, and I’m full of poisons, and I come fully endorsed by the teacher with the overbite, whatever his name was, whatever his class was.

  I’ve been shaving since twelve. I’ve been six foot one since fourteen. I’ve lived on my own—on the streets, off the streets— since fifteen. I’ve lived for eons, and I just turned nineteen.

  I have a really good fake ID. I’ve had to fake some things forever.

  You’d think I was older. Maybe you thought that already.

  I have a small scar, about a quarter-inch long, to the left of my left eye, and if anyone asks about it, I look at them in a square, fierce way and say, “Knife fight,” and then I laugh. But the truth is it did happen in a knife fight.

  For a while I hung out with the skinheads, but my hair is back now, and I don’t see ghosts at all anymore. They’re not that kind of skinheads anyway.

  I got my GED when I was seventeen. I got these scholarships to study English at the University of Kansas and a Pell grant, and I might have been a genius if I wasn’t so stupid. I had been homeless for a while. I had been in juvenile detention. That’s not all of it.

  Marilynne was an English professor when I first met her, about two years before she ended up dead, and then I don’t know what she was. A ghost, I guess. Maybe some other language has a better word, but it’s all I’ve got.

  There’s other stuff I should tell you, but I don’t feel like getting into all of that right now.

  Isn’t that enough to start? How far do you have to go back to find the beginning? I don’t plan on becoming a fetus for you.

  Haven’t I told you about my name? Haven’t I shown you my scab? I let you touch it! Isn’t that enough for now?

  CHAPTER ONE

  You hate me already. I can tell.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The anarchists lived about six blocks away. I walked there on the kind of early night that has some sort of possibility to it, maybe clouds, maybe stars, maybe lightning on the way to stars.

  This is Kansas: Ad Astra Per Aspera, which means To the stars through difficulties. That’s the state slogan, thought up by the abolitionists in search of a slave-free state in the 1800s. I’ve got it tattooed on my hip. I did it myself with guitar string. I medicated with beer, traced those letters with careful pain, and bled i
nto an old T-shirt. It’s my best tattoo. Yes, I spelled everything right.

  With the exception of seventeen and a half days, when I hitchhiked to San Francisco and back a summer ago, I’ve breathed every one of my breaths in Kansas or Missouri, those two states that hated each other around the Civil War, but you know that—or you should. Look it up. I’m generally found in Kansas, the Free State, and, yes, there’s a bar here in Lawrence called the Free State too, but I only go there on Mondays when pints are half price. I’m talking about the greater metaphysical, geographical region of freedom, and, yes, I use the term metaphysical without having a true sense of its definition, but I feel it, you know? If you don’t feel words, maybe we need to call quits on this whole literary partnership, this whole fucking expedition.

  Fucking is a word I feel too. It’s a striated muscle. Anyway, Google metaphysical. Google Bloody Kansas. I’m not going to give you a history lesson. I’ve got other things to write. This book is on the way to see the anarchists. Those assholes had their own plans for blood.

  I just wanted to see the stuff.

  Those assholes rented a large green Victorian on Kentucky Street.

  In Lawrence, the main east-west streets were named for the United States as they entered the Union, each in their proper order—state No. 1 Delaware to the south, then No. 2 Pennsylvania, No. 3 New Jersey, and so on, with No. 6 Massachusetts Street cutting the main downtown swath because the abolitionists came from Massachusetts.

  The abolitionists came first, and the bars along Mass came later. The bars are named with less precision than the streets. The Replay Lounge, Harbour Lights, the Taproom, the Red Lyon.

  I don’t think the abolitionists would have imagined me or the bars or the anarchists, although maybe they’d understand everything all too well. A Confederate guerrilla named William Quantrill marched in and burned this town in 1863. His raiders killed men, boys too: 183 in all.

  And here I am, giving a history lesson.

  CHAPTER ONE