“You might as well hang yourself because we will get you in the end,” was the mantra of King Goona and his cronies.
Poor Nathan had discovered or suffered from one of the ways these people send you kaput. Kaput? What is kaput? Nathan didn’t want to know but kaput to him was either your dick didn’t work anymore or the fact you could no longer think anymore… Kaputness. It’s that kaputness. And really it’s not funny at all.
The door opened and there was no sound and no music. It was just a door in his min’s eye as Nathan slept. He didn’t realise it, no, that is a lie, he realised he was about to suffer from a mantra… Except this mantra was not the type to drive you to awaken into a sweaty moment of consternation and worry that you were actually losing your mind, or the very fact that you may never sleep again to the point of madness or death.
“Careful, you may go kaput,” said one of the women in the background as Nathan tried to recapture some of his long-lost sleep… The mantra which ended with the door closing only went for a minute or so but it kept repeating over and over again…
There was laughter as King Goona had formulated his latest plans for Nathan to die by his own hand but this mantra was not the one which was going to kill him.
“I’m going to kill you. I’m going to kill you. I’m going to kill you!” It was King Goona whispering happy sleeps in Nathan’s ear as his idee fixe this time was to take the novel manuscript Nathan had written and sell it online for fourteen million dollars including the film rights.
“You will be a homosexual,” said King Goona. “In your book. Your book will be destroyed and I shall have all the glory! And you shall also eat the liver of a child.”
The manuscript had been found among Nathan’s belongings after his family threw him out of home and had been written when he was nineteen. Nathan then had to transcribe it to a new computer but with people overhearing and people being able to record Red Planet and hack emails and computers there was no way he could keep the manuscript private. All he had was the copyright or intellectual copyright. Sadly it was open slather.
“We want you dead. We want you dead. We want you dead.” King Goona was very original with his spoken mantras and was a genius when it came to thinking of ways to annoy Nathan. “I know,” said King Goona once they had most of the manuscript: “Let’s adapt it and serialise it and then sell the book and then the movie rights. We’ll call it the same title but we’ll call the author Nathan Wynorski and just to nail that Yellow Star Nathan we’ll go heavy on the foreskin.”
Sadly, for King Goona, there was a hiccup in his plan…Was it divine intervention this door which appeared in Nathan’s mind or had it been planted by another for some other purpose? Nathan couldn’t sleep. He had spent the day transcribing the novel and in the background King Goona’s henchmen and women were talking and hanging on his every word which made it almost impossible for him to transcribe. The sleep gave him that feeling of kaputness… Have you ever had it? Nathan asked himself.
He surely had in terms of being on the edge of a madness that he knew would be complete and utter and all consuming. There was a chance this madness would not end and if it did, it meant not being able to think deductively or constructively ever again. It would mean thinking would consist of suppressing bad or mad thoughts and this would take all your time between moments where there would be no thought except for a queasy and uneasy feeling.
Always on the brink which meant anger as well. Easily provoked anger. This was kaput or kaputness … It meant to perhaps never sleep a good night’s sleep, it meant never having a beautiful thought and it meant the end of Nathan.
Nathan put on It came from Outer Space with its beautiful speeches and small mantras: “Is there? With a Mob After Us? All we needed was time!” And even as Nathan wrote the short story about the mantra, in the background was King Goona pointing to hell where he said Nathan was from, and to where he would return.
Nathan picked up another quote from the science fiction movie: “Yes, look at its power… power to drive a ship through space… power to tear your Earth apart!” And he wondered if he too was from the stars. He didn’t particularly want to go to hell since it would be a place of kaputness. He was certain of that and the people you’d meet there such as King Goona who already had Nathan marked as a goner… he’d be there with bells on. It would be so hot and crowded and depressing with all that hot lava type stuff. Even if the rent was cheaper… Nathan liked to think of himself as from the stars as if he had fallen from the heavens from another world.
It was possible…. Even if we came from the bowels of the Earth… It was still possible for a soul to be released… He got up at five one early spring morning and watched the sun come up and as the light hit a certain spot between the twilight and the light… He could see them, millions and billions of them. Small bubbles … or dots dancing in the sky, or were they simply fighting for space? Were they the souls of animals from ants to insects to neanderthals to modern man floating in the atmosphere? It was only for about a minute and he had never seen such a congregation. He had seen them before and who was to say that these souls sometimes escaped from the Earth’s atmosphere into space and continued their journey to some other far off planet… To perhaps live again or to dwell in their atmosphere. “There’ll be other nights. Other stars for us to watch… They’ll be back,” and Nathan just wished they’d blown up the planet and turned off the television. He thought he would have a sleep again since he’d hardly had any the previous night and all he got was that living dead feeling of kaputness.
Perhaps if he had a wank? No, that didn’t always work. And so rather than just go and do some work or go and watch another movie he just lay there a captive of the Red Planet Nazis which surrounded him in the neighbourhood. There were those who worked for King Goona who understood that Nathan was a human being but they were under orders and as for the high command if it existed King Goona was a lone nutter, the type not to necessarily be feared but one to be pitied.
Nathan didn’t want him dead as much as Sherlock Holmes didn’t want Moriarty dead but instead he wish he would cease and desist and do something all the more constructive than to follow a camp dream of fourteen million dollars.
The next morning Nathan got up and looked at the bags under his eyes. He started on his manuscript: “Can’t you just smell the shit rising?” was the line not related to buggery…. Strange mantra, I thought as I typed in the first person and then came the word on Red Planet: “You know, we’re plagiarising right now”…. Nathan couldn’t win. Not only was his manuscript being plagiarised but the story about how they plagiarised with their bugging was being plagiarised as well… It all seemed pointless and the kaputness seemed all the more necessary for him to, well, not to win, but to prove a point. He may as well be fucking kaput. He kind of thought of himself as Tor Johnson since that’s who he most resembled.
“Nathan, I command you!,” said King Goona. Worse still was the Hang Ten technique which was being used to kill Nathan in terms of his cigarette use. Hang Ten is used on smokers who are addicted to see whether they can actually be forced or tricked into smoking cigarettes in one conversation or furphy. The furphy could be a tall story in which the addict is involved otherwise nothing will work better than the seduction of flattery and getting the victim to wax lyrical. Nathan was prone to Hang Ten and it would probably kill him. Everyone did it to him and there was no other kaputness than dead. Dead. Dead.
So Nathan slept a little, finally, although the manuscript was not completely transcribed. King Goona had written his rip-ff novel from Nathan’s transcribed novel so far which he already had interest in terms of selling the ideas and meanwhile the first extract of the send-up had Nazi’s in the aisles with laughter.
They had Nathan convinced and it was killing him. No wonder he whispered tenderly in Nathan’s ear: “You will be kaput. You will be kaput. Et cetera et cetera et cetera as Yul Brynner said years before he said: “Whatever you do, don’t smoke.” Nathan had the doors in his mind again and they opened and closed as they presented that little Mantra which for the time being saved him. It was sent from deep within Nathan or from the Gods themselves… Nazis use toxic mantras on Red Planet to totally kaput people, sadly, as Nathan learned but the Gods sent this one for him to learn that very fact.
“All we needed was time!” King Goona needed those pages and he was going to get them one way or another and Nathan knew that. It was only a matter of time and Nathan’s dream of his first novel being published unhindered would be totally dashed … Or was it all a game on Red Planet? Was it the biggest furphy of all time which had him smoke two packs of cigarettes a day? And I say this again to underline that the furphy can kill just as surely as blackmail and the ‘fact’ can eat away like cancer just as well while the uncertainly means kaput. T
The pain that Nathan suffered was not just mental but physical as well as the mended wounds of yesteryear’s leap from a building which haunted his aching shoulders. “You’ll be a man my son,” he thought of Kipling’s If and his grandmother who gave him the poem and a badge which read: “Don’t Let the Turkeys Get You Down”. Mantra after mantra or maxim after maxim… They all have a purpose and some can kill.
Nathan also had the bad habit of waking up in the morning with a mantra in the form of the most annoying popular song whichever came into his head from the moment he hopped out of bed. Truly the Red Planet neighbourhood audience were tolerant of Nathan since they knew the mantra was a defence mechanism …. Even if he woke at five in the morning singing In Suburbia by the Pet Shop Boys. A hangover of his past life before he knew of life on Red Planet. Glen Campbell songs, Celine Dion songs over and over again and he couldn’t even remember the words and so he had to make them up. These were the mantras which had kept him alive and away from kaputness… until now.
But as everyone woke scrambled in the morning, was Nathan already kaput when he couldn’t even remember one complete line from a popular song. This morning there was no song. It would be back though the following day or later just like King Goona would be this very day as he demanded the rest of the manuscript. No way out. No way out. No way out… What do you do with the Broken Hearted, that’s a good song. “I came here to help you, not to kill….,” said Richard Carlson and that could’ve been Nathan at one point before everyone’s true thoughts and motives became apparent. Nathan played hang ten out the back for a moment to their Nazi tune of: “You might as well hang yourself because we’ll get you in the end…” And he began to finish the manuscript three cigarettes later.
Cult Film Alley 