Please miss, Justin go toilets?
| | The Timberlake Connection | Hello - Thomas Pynchon here, reclusive maverick of American letters and all-round general shadowy man-who-does-not-exist - you know, like Knight Rider. Who cares if my last novel was four hundred pages too long and featured a talking fucking dog? You want to give me gyp for that? What have you done lately that's so great, ya cunt, ya? Sorry. I get emotional sometimes. Cooped up behind closed doors, avoiding the press and the photographers ... fucking Salman Rushdie phoning me up ... it all gets a bit much sometimes. But enough of my grousing. It ain't couth. Join me now as I unearth one of the strangest stories of modern times, a tale of mystery, suspense and stupefaction; of espionage, dark motives and the grotesque; of the traversal of vast landmasses, of journeys lunatic and fantastical; of - uh - [Looks around uncomfortably.] LOOK, I CAN GO ON LIKE THIS ALL DAY, I'M NOT SHITTIN' YOU - [Coughs.] Ladies and Gentlemen, what you are about to witness is not a pretty sight! Avaunt ye, if be ye faint of heart! For I bring you -
THE TIMBERLAKE CONNECTION...
It was the year he rode the Northern Line to the ends of the city - or at the very least Kennington. Thirty-two miles of track. He stood at the front of the train as it smashed through the darkness, chiefly hiding out from the punk kids who'd started giving him a hard time lately. Not so long ago, his bodyguards would have taken care of those little bleeders. But the bodyguards, the stretch limos, the fans, the adulation - that shit was all over. Justin was grizzled, overweight, plummeting towards forty ... or was it fifty? Since he'd lost one of his hands, in an attempt to make himself more like Abu Hamza, he'd been unable to count up to ten and there was nowhere in town he could get a half-way decent abacus. He didn't believe in the pocket calculator. Literally. Nelly came round with one, not long after the accident; Justin shrieked "GET IT OUT OF HERE! JUST GET IT OUT OF HERE!" The innocuous, palm-sized device contradicted his whole sense of the universe. "You say it can add up any numbers you want," he gurgled, "But how do they get all the numbers in there? Huh? YOU GOT AN ANSWER FOR THAT ONE, SMART GUY? HUH? NOT SO FUCKING CLEVER NOW, HUH - huh? Where are you going?" Nelly was already making for the door.
Justin had lost faith in the American way. It was time to move on; he'd witnessed the fabric of American life shredded, its symbols pulped. The disillusionment set in when he saw General Zod tear the roof off the White House; then he realised that Colonel Sanders ("Here's yer Colonel comin' atcha!"), that deep south redneck bastard, could only have been a Confederate officer - "They sure hushed that up," he hissed to Nelly one night in some Morden piss-hole. "You can't trust anyone. KFC is built on slavery, homie." Nelly winced, "Please don't call me 'homie.'" "You got it, blood," gasped Justin. Nelly thought, not for the first time, of punching Justin's conspiracy-addled teeth out of his plausible-deniability-obsessed arsehole.
Justin knew what to do when the system turns its back on you: he bought a taxi. Set up his own minicab firm. It didn't go too well; he had a tendency to jabber apocalyptically at his passengers - "Some day a real rain's gonna come and wash all the scum from the streets." "Uh, yeah, sure mate. Can you get us to Holborn?" "Are you listening to me? I'm talking about a real rain here, you know what I'm sayin'? Washing away all the, the, you know, the scum -" "Yeah, alright mate. Thanks anyway. Think we might get another cab." Justin drove away, having alienated his fifteenth fare of the night. "They'll be sorry," he prated manically, "just wait, just wait." He loathed modern life - he loathed its politicians, its kiddie porn mongers, and a couple of rungs lower than those bastards on the moral ladder, its estate agents. He hated the fact that Nelly still had a recording career. Chiefly he objected to this TV show that "all the kids" were tuning into. "Calm down, Justin, calm down," said Nelly, swigging champagne in the back of his limo. "Is it really so bad? What's the name of this corrupting influence?"
"It's called 'Dawson's Crack Habit,'" seethed Justin.
<*dv_1*> "Hmm," said Nelly thoughtfully.
Back at his "crib", Nelly switched on "Dawson's Crack Habit," a bleak, fin-de-siecle study in apathy and confusion. It went like this:
JOEY [Smiling coyly]: Dawson! A bunch of us are meeting up tonight to, like, talk at extreme lengths about our misbegotten lives! And how the hell it is we can, like, afford huge apartments when we have no money! Plus, I'm fucking my, like, literature professor! Like, Oh my God!
DAWSON: Shut the fuck up, Joey, and, like, tie me off here - it's, like, taken me half an hour to find this, you know, like, vein.
JOEY [flustered]: But Dawson, that, like, leather band is wrapped round your, your, like, you know, nob -
DAWSON: Like I said, half an hour. You going to help me out or not, like, bitch?
JOEY: But Dawson, what about your career as the new, like, Steven Spielberg? How can you just, just give up on all your hopes and, like, dreams like this? Dawson, this isn't, like, like you -
<*dv_0*> DAWSON: When did you get so, like, uptight? You weren't so snotty when you were coked off your, like, tits last night.
[Etc.]
Nelly turned over to one of the news channels. OK, things were less lively since 24-hour Iraq Live had been cancelled due to unforseen ceasefire, but hey, here was something interesting - his pal Justin had tried to assassinate the President. It was the electric chair for that sucker! Nelly was briefly taken aback - he'd had no idea that Justin was so out of control. He thought briefly of how little we ever know the people closest to us, and the strange twists their lives can bring; then he thought, "Fuck that shit," and opened another bottle of champagne.
Submitted by Tom Muir
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