The Sound of Hammers Must Never Cease: The Collected Short Stories of Tim Fulmer Party Crasher Press ©2009, 2010, 2014, Tim Fulmer. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of Tim Fulmer. This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and perhaps the result of a psychotic breakdown on the reader’s part. This definitive collection of Tim Fulmer’s highly entertaining short work includes an introduction by the author and sixty-one stories that chronicle the restless lives of what have been called Gen X and Gen Y. From the psychotic disillusionment of inner city life in “Chicago, Sir" and “Mogz & Peeting” to the shocking and disturbing discoveries of suburban dysfunction in “It’s Pleonexia” and “Yankee Sierra,” Tim Fulmer tells us everything we need to know about growing up and living in North America after 1967. His characters are very scary people -- people with too much education, too much time on their hands, and too much insight ever to hold down a real job long enough to buy a house and support a family -- in short, people just like how you and I ought to be all the time. These are stories of concealed poets, enemies of the people, awful bony hands, pink pills, sharp inner pains, Jersey barriers, and exquisite corpses. The language throughout is unadorned, accurate, highly crafted, ecstatic, even grammatically desperate. The observations are firmly established and adequately enduring. – And the list of modifiers and qualifiers could go on and on. But the result, finally, is a model of “outcast fiction” and a signpost for a new approach to avoiding happy, coherent endings. Author’s Introduction: The Meanest of Them Still Shines I glance out the window today and see it’s raining. Does that perception signify anything beyond its own presence? Well, perhaps not, at least in terms of everyday, day-to-day life. I open a book and read the first sentence of the first paragraph. Does that sentence signify anything beyond its own presence? Well, perhaps it does, at least in terms of the expectations of someone seeking out a good story to read. But why the difference between those two scenarios really? Why does a reader expect so much more from a piece of fiction than from his or her experience of everyday, day-to-day life? I believe the sixty-one short stories collected here provide an answer to those vexing questions. And the answer is simple: everyday, day-to-day life is repetitive and boring -- stable societal organization requires it -- and therefore we turn to the arts for an artificial environment of surprise, shock, and excitement. The problem, as we all know, is that those artificial environments become addictive, so much so that they may destroy our ability to appreciate everyday, day-to-day life and lead us into very dark, destructive corners. This collection of stories focuses on people who find their way to those corners, people who, for the most part, are earnest, competent, and highly intelligent but who nonetheless experience an unrelenting unease with daily life. They want more than what daily life can offer, so they go out and seek something else. What they find, however, are places they never sought out or even imagined in the first place. I believe such a life narrative is especially indicative of anyone born after 1967 in North America. While that covers a lot of people from a lot of diverse backgrounds, personal experience living in six different locales over fifteen years leads me to stand by that statement. Nor is such a life narrative unique to American generations born in the last half century. Gustave Flaubert describes it more than adequately in Madame Bovary. The French poet Arthur Rimbaud already lived it more than a hundred years ago. Perhaps the French were the first to experience that restlessness. I don’t really know, and I don’t really care because it doesn’t really matter in the scheme of things. In any case, these short stories serve to provide an entertaining glimpse into that reality, not an explanation of how it arose and how it’s sustained. I have my ideas on that too, of course, and they all source back to the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. Please understand there is a lot of humor here, despite the violence and insanity -- or maybe because of it. I don’t really know, and I don’t really care. These stories, as a whole, sit somewhere between my more experimental fiction like 2 Sides of the Same Coin and my longer novels and novellas like They Really Were Outsiders. With the former, the stories share a certain “wisdom in psychosis,” while with the latter they share a certain “insight through rebellion.” With both, these stories ultimately agree that human life is worth leaving behind in pursuit of a higher, non- human reality. Table Of Contents Half Cruel, Half Voluptuous Vocations The Poor Man’s Process Eat It While You Ride Which Way Is Oklahoma? Countdown On Martin Luther King Day Japan 9 The Bend Sinister I’m Afraid I Don’t Quite Follow See also Causes of Delight Marcie Timmons The Concussion God Is a Fire In the Mind Very Fishy Best-Case Scenario Beat the Drums Pink Pills Zagovor Open Payment Shiva Nova РАДЕНИЯ Dangerously Detachable Disruption Novel Combinations UBL It’s Pleonexia Awful Bony Hands The Transformation of a Concealed Poet Yankee Sierra A Story about Alice & Bob Zest with Ease The Dynasty And So the Night Passed. Memoirs Too Don’t Forget Dirty Singles Enemy of the People Aitch & Racah The Great Game Called Seeing Five Fingers Up Milwaukee Deep The Kicks, Man! On Whitcomb Street Potential Trouble Source The Promenade The Meanest of Them Shines The Key Is Not A Key Uncle Clyde The Hanged Man Jersey Barriers Sponges, Paper Towels, Garbage Bags, Gloves, a Hammer, & a Saw The Spherical Art Unconfessed Preoccupations Inconvenience Ars Moriendi Peggy Mogz & Peeting Chicago, Sir I Clean My Gun & Dream Of Galveston Three-Zero-Four Zeek Exquisite Corpse Half Cruel, Half Voluptuous . I proceed to give an account upon these plates of my proceedings . You, the pedestrian, must hate me for intruding upon your consciousness like this. You look upon my visage with disgust and scorn. You’d sooner let me die in the street than accept this invitation to listen to my tale. Of course the easiest thing would be to act as if you’ve seen nothing, to let events take their course. In fact, if you prefer, this very moment you could picture a whole different time, a whole different place. But where is the truth in that? You really think the whole world is dancing around your feet? In actual fact, our attention is mainly manifest elsewhere. We’re all guests even in our own lives--and only crushing a worm can be called meaningless. Shall we go then? To seize everything was and still is my imperative. Not to get bored with very little difficulty. Not to meddle in politics. Not to make excuses for myself, the next minute making life miserable for everybody else. That said, I won’t pretend it’s possible to determine to what extent I’m a charlatan and to what a proper man of science. I’m often uncertain myself. To seize everything has set me at odds with my own form, made me want to topple myself. To seize everything has a tiresomeness about it too (my arms are always numb). And a bit of posing is naturally unavoidable. The future terrifies me: if it’s not one thing, it’s another. All my life I didn’t know what to do with my hands--until I made seizing everything my fundamental imperative. I beg your pardon? Oh, I’ll have a vanilla ice, a bowl of pea soup, and, let’s see, the tender wing of chicken. Perhaps I could use that army blanket over there? Thank you. I must say we have a highly refined scene here--dinner is served. So I apologize for this bit of soot on my left elbow. I hope you’re not at all distracted by it. Anyhow, like I said, with the help of such an imperative, my hands are eternally occupied. Now they’ve seized upon you. I’ve always been interested in the oddities of mankind, preferring to the word ‘insane’--I’ve not heard of any lunatics in the neighborhood, aside from that murderous assault on your cat--the phrase, ‘mentally impaired owing to childhood conditioning.’ So see what you can make of this: the story a dead man told me several years go in Los Angeles, California. Well, less a story than the continual accumulation and disintegration of objects and people at a modest, assembly-line pace. Doing things in the presence of a corpse is not quite the same as doing them elsewhere, of course, especially if it’s the corpse of a Moroccan businessman, a well-connected Moroccan businessman, a fashionably dressed, expatriated Moroccan businessman living, at that time, in a two-bedroom condominium that gave an unobstructed view onto the Pacific Ocean. This businessman’s adopted name was Oliver Boyd. In all matters business, he gave the impression of pursuing very important destinations--quickly across the globe, both forward and backward in time.