A Big Blue Dick: A Review of Clown Tear Junkies by Douglas Hackle

This is that painting by Munch, The Scream

Do you know that painting The Scream by Edvard Munch? Okay, now imagine that that character there in the foreground is real, and he’s called The Scream, and he doesn’t talk or make any noise at all, and he usually keeps his wavy hands next to his gaunt face unless he’s doing something else with them. And he hangs out with an immature, blue-collar jerk who takes him clubbing all the time, trying to pick up chicks. And the chicks all think the Scream’s friend is a loser, but that’s okay, because he’s got a pat response that puts them all in their place: he tells them they are 7s. Then goth chicks start to dig The Scream and he becomes a horror movie star, so the two part ways….

That’s pretty much what it’s like inside Douglas Hackle’s mind all the time.

And that’s pretty much the story The Scream, My Dog, part of Hackle’s collection Clown Tear Junkies. I spoilered the crap out of it, but you should still read it because it’s still good.

Camera zooming out for a moment, Clown Tear Junkies (WARNING: Contains zero clowns and/or circuspunk elements) is a collection of 27 very short stories. People like to use the term “absurd” to refer to this style of prose, and while some of it is absurd, Hackle’s style is much more nuanced. He draws equally from the wells of the existentially absurd turf mined by Kafka (see: Struggle of a Description); the playful, list-loving postmodernism of Barthelme; and obscure pop cultural references—Stiles from Teen Wolf makes an appearance alongside the chain-smoking Indonesian toddler of YouTube fame. What makes Hackle’s writing so much fun is his unpredictable wordplay and his juxtaposition of low brow fare and academic trivia. You’ll find quite a bit of recursive humor tying the stories together, not the least of which will be the intoxicating and addictive nature of clown tears (esp. when mixed with mime tears and mainlined—what a rush!). You’ll find yourself looking up words to see if they are in the real dictionary or at urbandictionary.com (yes, both chyme and chyle are for real). You’ll find yourself expecting the stories to be going in one direction; you’ll be surprised where they end up taking you.  

Now, there are a few moments when the stories just get downright silly, and there’s probably a story or two that doesn’t stack up to the rest of the collection. But 27 is a nice round number, and who are you to tell Hax to the Max to drop a story from his baby? I mean, these stories are like his children, and just because some of them are born with beards or flippers or lobster faces doesn’t mean you love them any less, right? Are you asking the man to pick his favorite child? What kind of a monster are you? Quit Sofie-ing his choice! When you do see one of these freak babies, do not make direct eye contact. Just keep your head down and push through to the next paragraph, which is bound to be creepily brilliant, like Crispin Glover playing Sherlock Holmes.

And there are a few moments where you think to yourself, “Is Douggie Hacksaw trying to tell me something?” It’s possible some of the stories actually have a meaning. Racism, homosexuality, intimacy, education, cosmology, music, art, life and death, puppets/poppets, chyme and chyle are all examined in varying degrees of insanity. At the end of the book, I learned that Strange House advertises within Rooster Republic books, and this seemed like a sort of conflict of interests, but nowadays networks advertise their shows on other networks, so whatever. It just makes it harder to remember which station the shows come on, but I have a TiVo, which doesn’t seem to get confused and can always figure out how to record the shows I tell it to.

I’d point out the highlights, but that’s almost the entire book. If I can only recommend three of these stories to strangers, I’d say that you, stranger, should start with The Perfect Popcorn: A Recipe, Fishing with Higginsworth Fig VII: A Tale of Denial, and Give Courtney Cute Anything She Wants.

The Scream, My Dog could really act as a sort of synecdoche here. Meaning, I could say, “You read The Scream, My Dog yet?” and you would understand that I meant, “Have you read Clown Tear Junkies by Dig Doug Hackensplatz yet?” We just have that kind of understanding of each other, don’t we, stranger?

Wait, forget it. Just read the whole damn book. We’re done here.

Day 4 at HackleCon by Douglas Hackle

One Saturday morning a man woke up in his bed just before dawn.  It’s too early for me to be up, the man thought as he lion-yawned and lion-stretched.  He sensed something was wrong.  At first he wondered if maybe an intruder was in the house, and he tensed up with fright.  But then he realized what the problem was.

The skin on the side of his upper right arm felt extra naked, that is, more naked than the skin covering the rest of his buck naked body.  The skin there somehow felt . . . empty.

He reached over and turned on the nightstand lamp, causing the room to explode with light.  The man looked down at his arm:  Sure enough, the tattoo he’d gotten there a couple weeks ago was gone!  The tattoo was of himself—fully naked, flexing his muscles in a side pose that showcased his ripped pecs and his ripped right arm, the profile of his limp junk dangling impressively between his ripped legs.  It was the only tattoo the man had ever gotten.  But now there was nothing but taut, unmarked, peach-colored skin where the tattoo had been.

‘The fuck?’ the man said.  That’s when he heard a light knocking coming from downstairs.

Groggy and confused, the man climbed out of bed, pulled on a pair of sweatpants, and walked out into the hall.  He followed the knocking all the way downstairs to the front door of the house, at which point he flicked on the porch light and opened the door.  At first it appeared no one was out there.  Probably just the neighborhood kids messing around, he guessed.  But then he caught movement in his lower peripheral vision.  He looked down.

The man’s missing tattoo—the tattoo of himself naked—was standing there on the porch looking up at him, only now the tattoo was 3-D instead of 2-D.

‘The fuck?’ the man said. 

‘Sorry if I woke you,’ his tattoo said in a voice identical to his own.  ‘I went out to get a tattoo.  Check it out.  It’s us!’  The tattoo held out its ripped little arm to show the man its tattoo.  The man leaned down, squinted, and saw that the new tattoo was yet another identical tattoo of himself—naked and flexing—except the new one was proportionally smaller in order to fit on the arm of his tattoo.

‘Pretty fuckin’ metal, huh?’ the man’s tattoo said.  It leapt back onto the man’s arm and flattened itself out, settled back onto its rightful home.  Somewhat dumbfounded, the man stared down in wonder at his tattoo’s little tattoo, touched it with the tip of his index finger.

A few weeks later, something very similar happened to the man just before daybreak one Saturday morning.  The man woke to that unsettling feeling again, that weird emptiness-on-the-arm feeling, only this time the intensity of the feeling was a mere fraction of what he’d experienced the first time. 

The man reached over, turned on the light, looked down at his arm.  His tattoo was right where it was supposed to be, flexing its muscles on the canvas of his skin as douchily as ever.  But now the tattoo’s tattoo was gone!

He couldn’t actually hear the knocking coming from the front door downstairs (the sound was too faint to be heard by the human ear at that distance), but the man instinctually knew the sound was there.  He climbed out of bed, pulled on a pair of sweatpants, and walked downstairs to open the front door.  On his way down, he wondered if he’d even be able to see the tiny new tattoo on the right arm of his tattoo’s tattoo.

The End.

***

Still nervously holding onto the edges of the podium, Douglas Hackle concluded his reading of his original flash fiction effort “The Three Tattoos” and looked up from his sloppy, handwritten manuscript.  His eyes swept across the large conference room that he’d rented in downtown Cleveland.

Empty chairs as far as the eye could see. 

He’d spent a lot of money—money he didn’t have—to rent this room for the writers con that he’d named after himself.  But due to a combination of factors that included shyness, sleep deprivation, low blood sugar, and inborn stupidity, he’d neglected to invite anyone.  In fact, no one but Douglas knew of the event’s existence.

Well, no one but him and one other being.

For at the back of the room, in that last row of chairs, was a single occupied seat.

And in that seat sat none other than Terror Clown.

Terror Clown was not applauding.  Terror Clown was not smiling.

And just as the nameless protagonist in “The Three Tattoos” had been too far away to hear the knocking of his tattoo’s tattoo at the end of the story, so Douglas was too far away from Terror Clown to hear the demonic clown’s low, satanic growl.  Nevertheless, he knew the growl was there.

“Please don’t fucking kill me in the face, Terror Clown!” Douglas pleaded.

Terror Clown’s brow knitted in great annoyance and seething anger, feelings that had been brewing for four days now.  “That doesn’t even make any sense,” reprimanded the demonic clown.

                                        To (Not) Be Continued . . . .

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Douglas Hackle writes lobsters that are bizarre, surreal, satirical, horrific, macabre, veiny, vainglorious, childish, moronic, or some combination of these qualities. His lobsters have seen publication in both online crabs and printed manatees. Douglas resides in Northeast Ohio with his wife and little boy, and he sincerely apologizes for using the phrase “lest you order seven fetal marionette pizzas” four times in the previous sentence when one time would have been just as sufficient.

Visit him at: http://douglashackle.wordpress.com/

Copyright Douglas Hackle
Artwork by Gustav-Adolf Mossa

I Won the MegaSuperLotto by Douglas Hackle

A few weeks ago I won the MegaSuperLotto.

The jackpot was $932 million. I had the only winning ticket. It was the largest lottery payout to a single individual in the history of lotteries.

A few nights prior to purchasing my ticket, the winning numbers—1, 20, 34, 72, 84, 94, 98—were revealed to me in an über-fucked up nightmare in which I had doggy-style sex with my sister at a Motel 6 in Detroit.

Okay, I’ll come clean: The nightmare was a tad more disturbing and complicated than that. In it, my big sis had my dad’s head, my mom’s arms, my grandpa’s legs, and my baby brother’s kidneys (I could not see the kidneys, of course, but as I was the semi-omniscient host of this nightmare, I was privy to that knowledge). And if all that wasn’t fucked-up enough, my dad’s head was screwed on backwards to the body, so that his face stared back at me with big, wet eyes of glaring condemnation throughout the entirety of the perverse sex act. As I subjected the Dad-headed, hybrid family-thing to my ungentle thrusts, I was repulsed—nay, sickened to the very core of my being. I longed to pull myself off the monstrosity, to run as far away from that motel room as my dream-legs would carry me.

But at the same time, part of me did not want to pull away.

And that was perhaps the scariest thing of all.

Then, just before the thing climaxed, the Dad-head croaked those seven winning lottery numbers to me in the raspy, throat cancer voice of my grandma, and I awoke with a start.

Anyhow, I didn’t know it at the time, but the federal tax rate on lottery earnings in the U.S. was 347.46%. That meant that I owed Uncle Sam a staggering, completely unpayable $323.8 billion! And I also didn’t know it at the time, but a recent amendment to the U.S. Constitution stated that a lottery winner’s refusal or inability to pay federal taxes on his or her lottery earnings was punishable by death by firing squad.

***

When they executed me, one of the dozens of copper-jacketed .30-30 rounds that tore through me penetrated my skull and just so happened to strike my basal ganglia—a bundle of neurons situated near the center of the brain. In addition to other neural functions, the basal ganglia is involved with perception of the passage of time. I died more or less instantly; however, due to the specific shape, velocity, temperature, and direction of the bullet that obliterated my basal ganglia, my subjective perception of time was vastly distorted in that final instant, so that the moment of my death stretched out like a wad of chewing gum. To be specific, from my point of view, it took me approximately 378 years to die. Now had that same bullet hit my basal ganglia just a nanometer to the left or a micrometer to the right, or had the bullet entered my skull at a speed that was a few millimeters per second slower than the speed it actually did enter, I might have experienced a more or less normal, instant sort of death. Then again, perhaps my death would have been stretched out even longer. Who the hell knows? The human brain is infinitely full of quirks.

Anyway, point being my death sucked. Big time.

Now I’m a ghost. And upon further reflection, considering I’m a ghost, and considering that as a ghost I’ve permanently left all worldly affairs behind, I might as well come clean—come clean for real this time.

Here goes: Remember that nightmare I said I had? Well, it wasn’t a nightmare.

Not only is that Dad-headed sister thing real, it’s my next of kin. Which means not only did the thing inherit my MegaSuperLotto winnings when I died, but it also inherited the tax burden on those earnings.

As a consequence, the Dad-headed sister thing is scheduled for execution by firing squad tomorrow morning.

***

I wonder if we’ll find each other here on the dark, misty-purple plane of the spirit world. If we do meet again, I wonder if our incorporeal, quasi-ectoplasmic forms will be able to engage in sex. Of course it goes without saying that the very notion of such an unspeakable, depraved reunion repulses me, sickens me to the very core of my spectral being, but still I wonder.

Okay, I’ll come clean again: Part of me does want that unspeakable, depraved reunion to take place.

And that’s what scares me.

Okay, okay, alright, alright, I’ll come clean one final time: My desire for that unspeakable, depraved reunion doesn’t scare me at all actually.

That’s because I want to fuck the shit out of that fucking thing again.
 
That thing is fucking hawt.
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Douglas Hackle writes lobsters that are bizarre, surreal, satirical, horrific, macabre, veiny, vainglorious, childish, moronic, or some combination of these qualities. His lobsters have seen publication in both online crabs and printed manatees. Douglas resides in Northeast Ohio with his wife and little boy, and he sincerely apologizes for using the phrase “lest you order seven fetal marionette pizzas” four times in the previous sentence when one time would have been just as sufficient.

Visit him at: http://douglashackle.wordpress.com/

Copyright Douglas Hackle
Artwork Leonora Carrington