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Intro To the Great American Novel


by Robert Crisman


     First, the title: How George Bush And the Lovely Danielle Saved Planet Earth From Zork the Galactic Destroyer. A little unwieldy perhaps but still, a grabber. Already you're thinking, George Bush? Saving Earth? Did he die by his own fucking hand? What's the deal?
     The deal is, I smoked some good kickass weed, sat down at my laptop, and cranked out a book! Yessiree Bob!
     And here's how I did it:
     The original title was Two Rotten Weeks, the story of Joey and Danny, two feckless crooks who kept chasing the roadrunner into the tunnel, the one where the light at the end is a train. It was going to be Looney Tunes brought back to life, one cartoon fuckup after the other, straight ace, deuce, trey--but this time with people!
     None of whom happened to be George Bush, a cartoon in his own fucking right.
     Still, it was real-life drama. You would have loved it!
     Except--I didn't have enough for a novel. The way that I'd mapped it, Joey and Danny had maybe 100 pages to flounder around to finis. Enough for a feature-length screenplay.
     In fact, that's how Two Rotten Weeks started out. My plan had been to hook up with Robert Rodriguez, who'd put it on screen where the thing would make billions, and then I'd go shopping for mansions and Bentleys, and then spend the rest of my life getting laid by young freaks. But Rodriguez had other shit going. Quentin was busy. Van Sant said, "Fuck no!" Visions of Section Eight housing, or maybe a lean-to under a bridge trestle, loomed.
     Hollywood showed me the back of its ass, am I right? I thought to myself, I've got to do something.
     Why not a novel? Something to do til my Social Security kicks in...
     But, like I said, what I had was a screenplay. One hundred pages. I had to pad that bad boy!
     So I tossed in some killer sci-fi shit, mixed in with political intrigue for days--about how George Walker Bush, the Forrest Gump of malevolent dipshits, saved Earth from the Zorks with some help from the Lovely Danielle. It had time travel in it and all that good shit, and all I had to do was keep the mix plausible, dig it?
     You're asking, how'd I do that?
     Well, as it happens, I'd written a screenplay called Bone Thugs in 2006. The thing was a hard look at Bush and the rest of those ratsucking bandits, and nobody'd touch it. They were scared that the Feebs would ship them to Gitmo, and then maybe off to Morocco for six years of torture in dungeons or something.
     I couldn't say that I blamed them, you know?
     But this is a story that has to be told! I need to eat! And so now, under cover of Joey and Danny's timeless and heart wrenching tale, a tale of low crime and late-inning redemption, the story of one man's love for a woman all men wish they had--the Lovely Danielle whom you'll meet down the road, who makes Nicole Kidman look like a boy, who sooner or later will give up the pussy to Joey, most likely right at the end of this saga's last chapter, who sure made him wait a long goddamned time, who in fact has his nuts in her sack, and who, assuming we still have a future, will rule the Dominions foretold by Zoroaster and--
     Where was I?
     Oh yeah! And plus, she can flat cook her ass off!
     And I could sneak Bush and the Zorks the rest of that shit right into the middle of this nonsense!
     Am I a stone fucking genius or what?
     Also--think of this as a bonus!--I padded the book even more, to be safe. Publishers these days all thirst for tomes. Novels today cost as much as down payments you put on the houses you lost when the variable interest rates landed, and publishers feel, the bigger the book, the better you'll like it and won't bitch so much about price. What helps this, they think, is the fact that most people are size queens.
     Anyway, to beef up my book I took a break at a quasi-logical point to show by way of a little vignette how jails in this country get filled up with dopefiends. Ironically, my dopefiends stay out of the hoosegow because one of them, Leann, is a stone fucking fox and the cops are a gaggle of dick-thinking morons.
     All this of course has nothing to do with Joey or Danny or George or Danielle or the Zorks, but it sure is a clown show, full of the same kind of laughs as my epic and, consequently, a sort of thematic companion.
     Lastly, yes, the whole goddamn tale is surreal. I mean, George Bush saving the Earth? Not even in dreams, buddy boy! Still,  life is surreal these days, don't you think? Hell yeah--more than ever!
     You won't even have to suspend disbelief.





















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