Punk Turned Around

an excerpt from my published novel

(This excerpt from my published novel is censored for the internet)

When he woke up the next morning, the first thing he became aware of was a headache and an utterly disgusting taste in his mouth like he’d been sucking on a dead rat all night. “Ugh, dead beer.” He sat up, planning to go brush his teeth and drink a whole lot of water, but saw the crazy nun looking in his bedroom window at him. “Aaaaaaah!” He pulled his blanket up and ran to the window, knocking aside a dozen empty beer cans on the floor, but she was gone. There was no ladder at the window. Unless she could fly it was impossible for her face to be there. Still, he could swear he’d seen her as real as anybody. “F###!” He shivered when he noticed there seemed to be something that looked sort of like snot smeared outside the glass. He remembered his dream and jolted. “Eyeball snot?”

Then Raven noticed that his bed was entirely backwards from how it had been when he’d gone to sleep. “F### me!” He quickly checked the door to see if it was locked, it was, and then he ran in dread to the stereo to make sure it hadn’t been stolen. It was still all there"the amp, the tape deck, the turntable, and the wires leading to his speakers. He sighed with relief. If his music was gone, he was sure he’d drop dead.

Then he just sat and wondered how the big creaky iron bed could have turned around in his sleep. And how could a face be at his attic window, and a nun at that"and a crazy one, to-boot! “I’m dreaming?” He checked again. His bed really was backwards. He checked the plywood floor for scratches and there weren’t any, and after tugging at his bed a few times, he decided it would stay in its new position since it didn’t want to move.

He ate some leftover spaghetti while thinking about Siouxsie Sioux. She was licking the insides of his legs, singing his name repeatedly in a heavy British accent until he had to get up and do something about it with a big squirt of hand lotion. After a quick sink bath to mop up his armpits, he brushed his teeth, rubbed a few drops of sandalwood oil here and there, and dressed in his funereal clothes.

He threw some empty beer cans in the garbage, a paper grocery bag on the floor. He vainly chased a cockroach across the room. He added a new layer of duct tape across the top of his black army boots, and then shoved on a bunch of bracelets. He added mascara to his eyebrows, lashes, sideburns and the very top of his goatee where the dye had grown out, put safety pins on his cuffs where buttons were missing, then clomped outside to head to work, thinking about how beautiful Siouxsie Sioux was. He wondered if she would still be cool in the 90s or if she’d get polyps in her throat and go disco and just redo 70s songs like everybody else.

Down the street a few blocks, he saw the crazy nun walking towards him. She didn’t look scary since she had a brand new big red Little Mermaid button on her lapel, the Disney lobster character, Sebastian. He tried to avoid her, knowing he couldn’t accuse her outright of being a flying peeping tom nun, but when she passed, and without any apparent peeping tom guilt, she said, “The end will come but no one will see it, they’re all turned around! Turned around!”

The blurb:

At a pizza place in uptown Minneapolis, scenesters and a psychic try very hard to find the next cool party and a pure state of punk living in the summating year of 1989. Their overripe imaginations (and beer) bring out bizarre fatal accidents, memories of once being devil possessed, and a vengeful ghost of a hippie who had overdosed.

Right now this novel is crazy cheap at Amazon - paperback and kindle under 3 bucks. Who knows how long that will last!

Here it is at Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Punk-Minneapolis-Peter-Joseph-Swanson/dp/1600761682/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1291224170&sr=8-1

It's on Kindle (you can read it now)!

http://www.amazon.com/Punk-Minneapolis-ebook/dp/B004BLJAPA/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1291224170&sr=8-2

Here it is at the publisher's, Stone Garden:

http://stonegarden.net/index.php?main_page=product_book_info&cPath=3&products_id=183

© 2011 Peter Joseph Swanson

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Safrina

you are crazy ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh i love it

Posted 13 Years Ago

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