Work! Consume! Die!: I Am Actually Almost Completely Insane Now

336 Pages·2012·1.22 MB·English

by  Frankie Boyle

WORK! CONSUME! DIE!
YOU ARE BORED.
THIS IS THE ANTIDOTE.
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2011
This Paperback edition 2012
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© Frankie Boyle 2011, 2012
Illustrations by Nick Morley
Frankie Boyle asserts the moral right to
be identifi ed as the author of this work
The novel element of this book (identifi ed by the Nexus Typewriter font) is a work of fi ction.
The fi ctional names and characters are the work of the author’s imagination, as are the
incidents portrayed in it. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or
localities is entirely coincidental.
The remaining chapters (identifi ed by the New Century Schoolbook font)
contain previously published material.
p. iii John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer © the estate of John Dos Passos; p. 14 Slavoj Žižek,
Violence (Profi le Books, 2009); p. 76 Hakim Bey, Immediatism, reproduced by kind permission
of Autonomedia; p. 76 R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience © R. D. Laing, 1967. Reproduced
by permission of Penguin Books Ltd; p. 94 Bret Easton Ellis, The Informers © Bret Easton
Ellis, 1994; p. 122 Raj Patel, The Value of Nothing, published by Portobello Books © Raj Patel,
2009; p. 148 David Icke, Children of the Matrix, reproduced by kind permission of David Icke
books; pp. 161–162 Obituary of Jeff Conaway by Ronald Bergan, 30 May 2011 © Guardian
News & Media Ltd 2011; p. 168 C. P. Snow, reproduced by kind permission of Curtis Brown
Group Ltd; p. 182 Thomas Geoghegan, The Law in Shambles, reproduced by kind permission
of Prickly Paradigm Press; p. 190 and p. 302 Terence McKenna, reproduced by kind
permission of the estate of Terence McKenna; p. 228 Robert Anton Wilson, permission granted
by Writers House LLC as Agent for the Estate of Robert Anton Wilson; p. 252 Noam Chomsky,
What We Say Goes © 2007 by Aviva Chomsky and David Barsamian. Reprinted by
arrangement with Henry Holt & Co; p. 270 David Madsen, Memoirs of a Gnostic Dwarf,
reproduced by courtesy of Dedalus Ltd © 1995.
A catalogue record of this book is
available from the British Library
ISBN 978-0-00-742679-9
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
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,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior
written permission of the publishers.
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His stomach turns a somersault with the drop of the elevator.
He steps out into the crowded marble hall. For a moment not
knowing which way to go, he stands back against the wall
with his hands in his pockets, watching people elbow their
way through the perpetually revolving doors; softcheeked
girls chewing gum, hatchetfaced girls with bangs,
creamfaced boys his own age, young toughs with their hats
on one side, sweatyfaced messengers, crisscross glances,
sauntering hips, red jowls masticating cigars, sallow concave
faces, fat bodies of young men and women, paunched bodies
of elderly men, all elbowing, shoving, shuffl ing, fed in two
endless tapes through the revolving doors out into Broadway,
in off Broadway. Jimmy fed in a tape in and out the revolving
doors, noon and night and morning, the revolving doors
grinding out his years like sausage meat. All of a sudden his
muscles stiff en. Uncle Jeff and his offi ce can go plumb to
hell. The words are so loud inside him he glances to one side
and the other to see if anyone heard him say them.
They can all go plumb to hell.
John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer
If rape, poison, dagger and arson
Have not as yet adorned with their pleasing artistry
the banal canvas of our piteous destinies
It is, alas, because our soul lacks boldness
Baudelaire
Introduction
I sincerely hope you will be disappointed by this book. To disap-
point, anger and dismay has always been my ideal. Of course
I’ve made the book a fairly commercial collection of light-
hearted topical comments. This is so I can dismay you further
by pocketing a huge advance and spending the rest of my life
surfi ng, reading crime thrillers and fucking.
If I had it my way this book would be an impeccably
researched novel about the friendship between Tom, a young
white boy, and Jefferson, an old black gardener, set in turn-of-
the-century Mississippi. It would possess an air of complete
authenticity. The old gardener would have an encyclopaedic
knowledge of herbs and their uses, but he would be an illiter-
ate and solitary curmudgeon. He would heal the boy’s broken
arm with a poultice and later save his little brother from dying
of a fever. Young Tom would convince Mr Bridges, his school-
master, of the gardener’s gifts and together the three of them
would start to write a herbal encyclopaedia. The three protago-
nists would come from very different worlds, so there would be
a lot of confl ict but also a lot of wry humour and wisdom.
After the fi rst 50 pages the reader would wonder what kind
of follow-up this was to the jokey autobiography of a panel-
show contestant. After 100 pages they would be completely
drawn into the world of Tom, Jefferson and Mr Bridges. After
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Frankie Boyle
150 pages they would be nervously wondering whether Tom’s
stepmother could really have been so spiteful as to burn the
manuscript.
For the fi nal 50 pages I would have a description of Old
Jefferson surprising Tom in a hay barn and the two of them
having brutal, unprotected consensual sex. As he fucked the
boy, he would scream about how he didn’t give a shit about
plants. Perhaps in modern words, because he was a time trav-
eller or something. His cock would grow to a fantastical size
within the boy, and glow and hum like a lightsaber. The boy’s
arsehole would start to talk. ‘I clench and unclench just like a
vagina’ it would note cheerfully in poor French.
Perspective would shift jarringly to a microscopic civilisa-
tion that lived in the hay under Tom’s face. They would be a
poetic, romantic people for whom time moved incalculably
slowly. Tom’s face would have hung in their sky like the sun for
millennia before Old Man Jefferson started fucking him. Its
gradual change to a rictus of pain would excite and disturb the
minds of their greatest philosophers. Eventually, the glowing
tip of a huge black cock emerging from his mouth would cause
the whole society to commit mass suicide.
Ideally, the title of the book would be an endless binary
number and it would scream when you opened it and then a
brawny fi st would shoot out from between the pages and rip
the nose right off your face. As you fell to the ground squealing,
the hand would hail a cab that would run over your head. A
passer-by would fi lm your death on a mobile, making it an
internet phenomenon. Huge crowds of Japanese teens would
gather at stadium events to masturbate each other as they
watched it on overhead screens. This footage of your noncha-
lant and motiveless murder by a book would attract a billion
YouTube hits and not a single sympathetic comment. In a
million years a super-advanced civilisation of androids would
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WORK! CONSUME! DIE!
misinterpret the fi lm and you would become a fi gure in their
culture analogous to a paedophile Guy Fawkes.
Through advanced scientifi c methods they would re-create
your consciousness and you would re-live your whole life over
and over again, but with all the enjoyable stuff taken out. On
the day of your 18th birthday someone would hit you so hard
on the back of the head with a polo mallet that your eyes would
pop out. Crawling from your burning house you would have
your arse clawed out by a mountain lion and when you reached
the hospital you would be diagnosed with AIDS of the leg and
cancer of your empty eye sockets. Through a synaptic quirk
you would have one image frozen in your mind so it was as if
you were looking at it constantly – your long-dead Chinese
stepfather’s dead arsehole. The only way to treat your eyes
would involve, every night just before bed, playing the screams
from a horror movie loudly to encourage a wolverine to fuck
the sockets. Somehow its stinking cock would numb the holes
even as its scrabbling feet shredded your face and scalp. You
would continue to re-live this life in ever-increasing detail long
after the universe had ended, praying for death to a God who
was already dead himself.
I got into comedy because I loved watching comedy as a child.
I later discovered that’s a bit like loving burgers as a child and
deciding to become a cow. I’ve never found anything in life
particularly heart-warming or uplifting. Except the smiles of
my children and even those are ruined by the knowledge that
someday my children will die, their smiles having long gone as
they struggled with the mental and social handicaps they
developed from having a cunt like me for a dad. If you want to
hear something uplifting go read something else. You are well
catered for in our culture; there are hordes of halfwits who
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Frankie Boyle
want to help you fi nd an upside. One day both you and I will
be hipbones and shinbones buried in a box being eaten by
worms. You will fi nd no solace here.
Just fuckin witcha! I’ve always had an instinct to laugh at
everything, the good stuff, the horror, everything. With laugh-
ter comes perspective. You might be scared of the dark, you
might be sitting alone in the woods in the dark but if you
suddenly heard laughter … no, wait a minute. Some people
don’t hold with the old ‘gallows humour’, it’s not civilised,
there’s some stuff you shouldn’t laugh about and so on. I think
we’re all in this trench together and everything is fair game.
Do me a favour. Any time you have a problem with somebody
having a laugh, have a think about where your grand-
parents went, look around and tell me what you think a gallows
looks like.
4

‘Slowed by the grass, the guys laugh as they spacewalk
on the suddenly deep carpet’