I’m disappointed with at least half of what I write, but publish it anyway. That’s the joy of “do it yourself” — nobody tells you not to. Some of the crap I’ve written, though, is so crappy even I knew better than to show it to anyone…
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Silly Dilly Willy Little Bus was a TV show, probably inspired by the “Neighborhood Trolley” scenes on Mister Rogers. It aired for several seasons, but only in my brain, and it was all about a living, breathing, somewhat sentient motorcoach that carried kids to and from school.
Episodes were acted out in my back yard, and nobody was involved except me. The main character was a bus, played by me. I also played all the kids. In my defense, I was perhaps four years old when the pilot episode was filmed without a camera. I was still playing ‘bus’ when I was 9 or 10, though, which seems a little late to still have a 5-ton, 4-wheeled imaginary friend.
In every episode, the kids made it safely to class, and safely home again, and the bus often sang its theme song. I can sing it even today, because the lyrics consisted only of the words, Silly Dilly Willy Little Bus, repeated a dozen times, and the tune was borrowed from from a church hymn.
In the very first episode, for reasons not remembered, instead of carrying kids the bus had to deliver pickles to the grocery. Hence the ‘dilly’ part of the title.
And there was an episode “based on a true story,” in which a kid wasn’t feeling well, but his mother made him go to school anyway, and he barfed all over inside the bus. That episode won an imaginary Golden Globe.
It counts as writing, because I kept a few pages of notes, describing the passengers and story lines. Years
later, when I was in high school, I found those notes, all written in my childish scrawl. Sentimental I’m not; I was mortified and ripped the paper to pieces.
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Poide and the Gang — This was another TV show on the same non-existent network, when I was 10-12 years old. The main character was named Poide (rhymes with annoyed), and I can’t remember his first name, but it might as well have been Doug. He was a lonely, mostly friendless kid, very much like me.
On the TV show, though, Poide had been recruited by police, and he was working as an undercover cop at his grade school and (in later seasons) junior high school. Helping him was ‘the gang’, a few other secret badge-totin’ kids, all of them seeking justice against bullies, bastards, bad teachers, and drug dealers.
Seriously, drug dealers? DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) hadn’t yet been invented, but anti-drug hysteria was everywhere, and we’d heard lectures about the dangers of everything from sniffing glue to shooting heroin. I was a kid and I believed it, but here and now I’ll issue a complete pardon to all my classmates who were fictionally arrested by Officer Poide.
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Newcombe — Now I was grown up, not merely scribbling notes about TV shows I’d made up, but typing actual words on an actual typewriter.
So what was I writing? Oh, my, golly.
Newcombe would be a novel about intrepid officers aboard a mighty Naval ship, the USS Newcombe. Armed with nuclear weapons, it was on perpetual patrol in the Pacific Ocean, waiting for a command everyone hoped would never be issued — to launch the missiles, and begin World War III.
There were several problems in writing Newcombe, though. I’d never been in the military or set foot aboard a Naval vessel, knew nothing of nukes except that they’re scary, knew nothing of how the military functions, or even which ranks outrank other ranks, and I had no real story to tell. Other than that, though, it was gonna be great.
Everything would build toward the novel’s final chapter, which would take place during a tense worldwide international showdown, something like the Cuban Missile Crisis but scarier and more dramatic.
By then, our story would be set in the White House command center, where the President would be receiving updates and issuing orders in a busy, bustling room full of military people running around, shouting, while bells and alarms were going off, etc — all very chaotic and precarious, with the fate of the world imperiled and uncertain.
Then someone asks the President which ship should be sent to carry a secret message of peace to some key foreign dignitaries, and the President replies, “Newcombe.” Which is pronounced exactly like “Nuke ‘em,” so missiles would immediately be launched into the air and under the water, all on their way toward Moscow.
I was old enough to vote, and dumb enough to try writing an entire novel to make a bad pun. It took five chapters for me to realize I was an idiot, and nuke it all.
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Iski of Hurn— I was a big science fiction fan, but frustrated that in movies and novels, the space aliens were usually only slightly different from humans. All the aliens walked around on two legs, had two arms, usually two eyes and one nose, etc. No way, man. Space aliens are going to be completely unlike humans, and that’s what I wanted to read about. But the only way to read about them was to invent them myself, and write about them, so I did.
My aliens were from planet Hurn, and they were certainly different. Instead of legs, they rolled around on a single unicycle-like wheel, and everyone was shaped sorta like this: The bottom circle is the wheel that they rolled on instead of walking, and the top circle is their head, with no eyes, no nose, and no ears. Sight, smell, and sound was detected instead through their very advanced, highly sensitive wheel.
Their faceless faces had short arms on each side, like ears if ears were deaf tubes with opposable thumbs. Their faces had no mouths, because instead they spoke and ate through the same orifice they pooped through, on their wheel. Speaking through their anuses made clothes impractical, so Hurnians always went around nude.
They had three sexes, male (he), female (she), and zimmerin (ze), and needed all three to reproduce. I was especially proud of a torrid, sweaty sex scene I’d written, involving three happy Hurnians using their hyper-sensitive sense of touch.
After three-way boinking, Hurnians slept hanging wheels-up from the ceiling, like bats. If they hadn’t boinked, though, they’d sleep on the wall, to announce their availability to potential sexmates.
Oh, and days on Hurn had ten hours, called glorfs, and two meals, blorp and blurp. Weeks were called wurfs, and consisted of five days. Crazy, huh? It was like a whole ‘nother world!
Iski was my hero, a scientist who was trying to warn everyone that Hurn was moving out of its ordinary orbit, which would be catastrophic, causing planetary quakes, famine, pestilence, severe acne, and destroying life as they knew it.
All this was supposed to be a novel, but after writing several chapters, I decided that these characters were so flamboyantly un-human that no human would want to read about them. The author had come to hate the Hurnians’ strange and confusing physiology, and kinda wanted their world to be destroyed, so I destroyed it myself — into the fireplace it went.
But I still remember the novel’s opening line: As Iski rolled into the room, ze could tell by the smell that Trister didn’t believe what ze had said the wurf before.
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Payne — This was my masterpiece, a science fiction novel about Paul Payne, an ordinary young man who has a headache.
Aspirin helps, but only at first, because the headache keeps coming back, stronger. By the fifth chapter he’s at a doctor’s office, and by the tenth he’s gone through several prescriptions for painkillers. The headache is a stubborn opponent, though, and returns again and again, worse and worse.
The pain makes Paul bad company on dates, so his girlfriend dumps him. He keeps calling in sick, so he loses his job. His family is panicked, because he can barely talk to them, or anyone — the pain is too much for him. And yes, perhaps the cleverness of naming the character ‘Payne’ wasn’t as clever as I’d thought.
His headache then outgrows his brain, and begins malforming his skull. He’s admitted to a hospital, still screaming, of course. My favorite chapter was set at the admissions desk, with the hospital’s receptionist calmly asking all the ordinary questions — What allergies do you have? Any history of liver disease in your family? Do you have insurance? But Paul can’t answer, he can only scream in agony.
In the hospital, his headache can’t be numbed, and his head keeps morphing, eventually absorbing the pillow and sheets from the bed. By chapter 20 his head has also absorbed a doctor’s stethoscope, and it’s been assimilated into Paul’s body, covered by his own skin, with nerves and blood pulsing through the pillow and sheets and stethoscope.
Then our pained hero is transferred to a special isolation chamber at a secret sci-fi hospital in Washington DC, still with the pillow, sheets, and stethoscope as part of him.
Is this great literature, or what?
By chapter 30, Paul is comatose, or rather, the doctors think he’s comatose, but actually he’s still conscious and in intense neverending torment. He’s unable to communicate any of that to the doctors, though, so they take him off all the pain medications, making his now-silent misery even more miserable.
An intrepid reporter finds out about Paul’s case, sneaks into the secret hospital, and breaks the news nationwide, making Paul Payne a major celebrity, though of course he doesn’t know it.
The next few chapters are all in Paul’s mind, as he tries to describe what he’s going through, but he can only describe it to himself, because he’s completely cut off from the world beyond his brain and his pain.
And now, the grand conclusion: Beware, spoilers ahead! The pain becomes so intense, so all-consuming that Payne suffers a fatal heart attack and dies. His family gives the doctors permission to talk about what had happened, so it’s all over the newscasts, and the world mourns the death by headache of a man they’d never heard of while he was alive, while scientists worry that whatever disease he had might be contagious.
But the twist, worthy of M Night Shyamalan, is that Paul’s not dead. Sure, his heart has stopped beating, and the brain scans are all flat, but his headache-infested brain has a mind of its own, driven only by pain, and that pain has become immortal. Even as our protagonist-agonist is sliced apart for the autopsy, even as his body is embalmed, even as he’s lowered in his coffin into the ground, he remains conscious, awake, and in worse pain than you can imagine.
And his diseased brain, tasked only with reporting pain pain pain, now needs no nourishment, so the pain of Paul Payne continues, forever and ever, amen.
I had a great time writing that novel, and it’s still the only book I’ve written all the way to the end. It taught me that I am capable of writing a novel, but not a good one.
It was an unpleasant, unreadable rough draft, humorless and tedious, and even with a good thesaurus there are only so many words to describe pain. It would’ve needed at least months of rewriting and editing before it could maybe, possibly rise to being lousy.
But doing that rewrite work, or even looking at the manuscript from across the room, was anguish and misery and dare I say PAIN I didn’t want to put myself or Paul through again. So I tossed it, a happy ending which made the world a better place.
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After that, I thought it might be better to stay away from trying to write science fiction, and instead write about life among humans, here on this planet. That’s the only thing I know even a little bit about, but I had no stories in me. Nothing to write, nothing to say.
Still had a typewriter, though, and wanted to use it. Instead of trying to write yet another pathetic novel, I decided to write a zine about my pathetic life.
10/27/2021
Republished 4/2/2025
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