Vault of Christmas

It's astounding how printed material can be so closely soldered to a time in your life. 

Take for instance Christmas Holidays in Grade 4, 1992 through to New Year's 1993. Back then, they had these reprints of the old EC Comics, like Vault of Horror and Tales from the Crypt. Gladstone was doing them, the same company that published Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck reprints. Well, for Christmas, I had got Vault of Horror number four, I believe it was by that enumeration, a double issue that had maybe Haunt of Fear as the back half. That was my Christmas gift, I think, just that one lousy issue. But that issue was fantastic. I mean, that issue was my Christmas Holiday from 1992 to the first few days of 1993. 

I can still remember the cover, a classy antebellum dame looking on in horror at some creature we can only imagine, because our perspective is from behind a rotted hand resting on a bannister. And the inside of that comic book, well, it delineated the very parameters of that holiday period—of that time and space. I spent most of that time in my parents' cabin in the woods, with its coal-oil lamps and its wood-heating and no electricity. The space of that confining cabin became the spaces described within the eight stories that spanned those two issues. 

There was the story of a man who, in his rise up the corporate ladder in the soap factory, had thrown his ever-hectoring boss into a vat of soap. Now, as he showered before a big date with a classy gal (a consequence of his inflated status), one of the bars of soap, apparently possessed by the murdered boss, slips away from the murderer and clogs the shower drain, leading to a death by drowning. I was in that shower all throughout that holiday. 

In another story, four or five Russian people in a sleigh are trying to escape pursuit by wolves. They finally decide that one of them has to be thrown to the canines to allow the others to escape. It's sort of a trolley problem as conceived by the Crypt Keeper. And for that whole holiday, I daresay I was in that sled. The narrow confines of the cabin were expanded by that well-thumbed EC reprint. There's no conclusion to that wolf story, so I can offer no real spoiler alert here, because we never get to see who volunteered to go over the side, or who was forcibly chosen by the group. So there are as many endings written in your mind as there were Russians in that sleigh. 

And so this comic book expands the space of this one story times five, multiplying the conceptual space into something much more expansive. You read it over and over again and the possibilities multiply. As such, my minimal little winter world, the four walls that seemed perpetual throughout my childhood, began to expand. Stories stretched space and time. Perhaps the expansiveness of narrative made that reprieve from school seem a little bit longer. I wouldn't have much wanted to go back to school. 

It was that year that I was really coming to terms with how much I wasn't getting done. I had this baseless, paranoid thought that I might fail grade four, just because I hadn't finished a few worksheets. I guess that's the first time I realized I was lagging behind in my effort to do things my best, and also that I was feeling the strain doing assignments I didn't really see the point of. I never wanted, at least from that point on, to be someone who did busy work and was driven by tasks. 

I see, then, why I gravitated to stories, because they could expand not only space that wasn't there but also time I felt like I didn't have. Seconds and minutes and hours never seemed long enough. Stories opened up new spaces of possibility; the interpretations of a narrative could stack the potentialities. Stories could fold time up in heaps, creating a strata of pocket universes. I wouldn't have been able to explain it then, and I can only vaguely intimate it now. Stories, or at least the best ones, have a multidimensional quality to them. 

I am glad I have had some limited opportunity to tell stories of my own. I hope I can compound those potentialities for other people through my writing. By giving up some of their time to read my works, I hope I can actually make some time for the reader, insofar as we collaborate in utilizing that extraordinary capacity imagination has of being able to multiply what can be, such that the present always seems so full. So while people might deride the EC Comics as corny and far too often predicated on cheap moral lessons (all of them wrapped in gore and gristle), I see them, when at their best, as fantastic stories that compound possibilities. They set the imagination going, and, if you let them, they may just keep it rolling on mercilessly. 

Take it from me—I can look back into Vault of Horror Gladstone reprint number four and I'm back on the cusp of 1992 and 1993, ten years old, in a cabin in the hard nadir of winter wondering about what happened to those Russians in the back of that sleigh, and at the same time experiencing all five possible fates.

Why We Were Danforth

Over the course of the spring and summer of 2016, Charles Norwood and I co-wrote and self-published a novella entitled The Feminist Pimp. If nothing else, the story delivers on its title, charting the confused life of and bizarre intrigues surrounding its eponymous protagonist, one Mr. Beauvoir. Many of the scenes wrote themselves, and the book was a pleasure from the planning phase straight through to “publication.”

But there was a complication. If Big Chucky Norwood and Little Johnny Gosham have anything in common, it’s a bit of a Neo-Victorian streak. What that means is that any time one or both of us is having too much fun with something, we assume that surely it must exact some sort of existential price. This might be the reason we initially found each other in the hinterland of unpublished writers looking to collaborate (It might also be what led us to write about an industry where every pleasure has an agreed-upon price). Accordingly, we assumed with certitude that anything as fun as The Feminist Pimp was too good to be true.

More saliently, we were well aware of the volatile nature of the subject matter. There was, after all, in 2016, a gaining social justice movement that seemed to genuinely enjoy being offended. The oxymoron that is our main character—our hero—was a man who profited off women's bodies while at the same time championing women's rights. If The Feminist Pimp got any traction, we knew that it could be a powder keg of offensiveness. Any given underemployed arts baccalaureate with a social justice slant and a blog could have a field day cherry-picking the grittier scenes from The Feminist Pimp and labelling them as “problematic.” Truth be told, Chuck and I knew there were problematic elements—it was precisely these legitimate conflicts within the main character, as well as in his employees and his less-progressive competitors, that we wanted to milk for madcap comedy and social commentary.

But bloggers weren't our worst fear. We were most afraid of our own friends and coworkers, most of whom swing leftward politically (as do Chuck and I, by the way), and have never been afraid to call out a perceived injustice. Chuck and I feared the awkwardness of these potential call-outs, especially since they would probably involve injustices that we ourselves were very aware of. We just wanted to write a silly book predicated on these injustices and maybe make some money at it.

And so, before we ever put pen to paper, we decided upon writing The Feminist Pimp under a pen-name. Not two pen-names, but one for the both of us, which I suppose we assumed made us even less identifiable. The name would have to be androgynous, too, further veiling our identity and making the author's positionality less problematic than that of two white dudes. With these parameters set, we then spat out the most boring, lazy name could think of. And so Pat Danforth was born.

Once we set to work writing the actual manuscript, we made a pleasant discovery. The book wasn't ultimately that offensive. Oh, it had its questionable parts—for instance, Mr. Beauvoir's “I have a dream” speech. But what we found as we moved through the chapters is that the book was undeniably feminist. In fact, the last chapter includes an encouraging and concerted message about feminism with which I don't think any feminist would disagree. If Charles and I had doubted the strength of our feminism at the outset of the project (e.g. insofar as we could exploit such a potentially offensive idea), we didn't by the end. Having completed The Feminist Pimp, we the authors realized that we were feminists.

In July of 2016, The Feminist Pimp appeared exclusively on Amazon Kindle. Norwood and I didn't even have the collective cojones to send it out for legitimate publication. We figured the book's title alone would render it dead-on-arrival for most publishers, given the liberal sensibilities one assumes of small presses. Moreover, Chuck and I were still deluded enough to believe that the idea—the paradox of a feminist pimp—could sell itself. Needless to say, The Feminist Pimp sold very poorly. Nonetheless, its publication marked the beginning of a productive collaborative relationship between Chuck and me, which culminated in a few legitimate publications (see, for instance, "The Centaurist Manifesto.")

In the four years that followed, The Feminist Pimp was never fully out of mind for either of us. Even as Charles and I managed a few more publications to our credit, we still thought about Mr. Beauvoir. We were starting to get our due as writers, but Mr. Beauvoir wasn't getting his.

And as our careers were transforming with the passage of time, so too was the world. By November of 2016, the American people had elected Donald Trump as their president. Here was a man who had bragged on record about groping women without their consent. Here was a man who, as a sitting president, would go on to speak sympathetically about marauding hordes of neo-Nazis and would defend Confederate monuments tooth-and-nail. Here was a man who would teargas protesters to clear the way in front of church so that he could pose there with a Bible. Here is a man letting two pandemics—systemic racism and the coronavirus—go on unchecked. Trump was and is the totemic animal of a white America rediscovering its foundational bigotry. Trump is the apotheosis of a significant section of the American populace—Caucasian and androcentric—that has embraced this bigotry and all its attendant chauvinisms in full.

In short, our current reality looks far more offensive than anything in the fictional world of The Feminist Pimp.

The sorry state of western society has had its upsides, though. Leftists near and far from center, and even some conservatives, have seen that protest against systemic discrimination is not only in order but absolutely necessary. The most salient examples come from the protests prompted by the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement that has subsequently become pervasive in popular culture. Similarly, the Me Too Movement has been making tangible progress in removing privileged predators from seats of power.

And so, the offended-by-everything social justice movement of 2016 has evolved and matured into more constructive forms of social protest. I think most of us would agree that the protests that occurred all across the United States in 2020 have been and are more productive and beneficial than, say, independent acts of bloggers crying foul about fiction writers’ choice of topics (to say nothing of throwaway comedic eBooks).

With that being the case, in this year synonymous with hindsight, Norwood and I took a good, long look at The Feminist Pimp once again. Why not put our names on it? Is it really anything to be overly ashamed of? In a world of pervert presidents propped up by racist voting bases, probably not. And there's also the matter of marketing to consider, too. While Norwood and Gosham aren't bestsellers by any stretch, the handful of “legitimate” publications we have to our credit makes us more of a commodity than dear Pat Danforth, god rest his or her or their soul.

In this spirit of better marketing, I'll go ahead and make the suggestion to you, the person reading this, that you head over to Amazon and check out The Feminist Pimp. By doing so, you can take up these vexing questions of whether or not the book is sexist, and if its authors are indeed feminists or actually the exact opposite. Read to the very end and decide for yourself.

***

The Feminist Pimp eBook is available here for less than a buck!

About the Blogger

Tameless piston of the American Dream

John Adam Gosham was born in Williston, North Dakota on November 6, 1984, the day Ronald Reagan was re-elected President of the United States of America. His father was a raging but affable alcoholic, his mother a high-functioning astrologer. A rebellious child, little Johnny Gosham excelled in the sciences, and was an avid reader therein. From a  young age he spurned all fictions, though he'd make exceptions for the occasional creature feature. He received a full scholarship to a local cow college and moved away with intentions of doing science for a living. The dream didn't last long -- only two weeks, in fact. John Adam made an abrupt about-face when he accidentally read Kurt Vonnegut's "Welcome to the Monkey House", mistaking it for non-fiction. He promptly gave up science in favor of literature, embarking on a quest to write the perfect story to carry on Vonnegut's legacy. Within days, he'd dropped out of college, realizing at age seventeen that he was smarter than all his professors. He spent the better part of the next two decades couch-surfing, taking his entertainment exclusively from slasher flicks and erotic thrillers on VHS. In 2014, he wrote and self-published the novel The Stink Ape: An Erotic Ensemble. Everything he's written since then has been a let-down, as he could never reclaim the pinnacle that was The Stink Ape.

But enough with the third-person façade. My name's John Adam Gosham, and this is my personal blog. Call me a schlockmeister, a gore-hound, or even a goddamn comedian. It doesn't matter. All I care about is getting paid and maybe making some part of you hitch, hiccup or harden in the process. Welcome to the monkey house.