Chapter Twenty-Three

THE SOUL OF AN ASSASSIN

(A Narrator's Voice.)
How does one become a literary assassin? What are the steps which transform a young and idealistic writer into the most dreaded of literary monsters-- into THE ASSASSIN abusively wielding talent and intelligence without character, compunction, or conscience?

For a vast class of writers from the wrong side of society's railroad tracks there is no outlet other than to write in obscurity for zeens, tiny lit-journals, or little-read websites. In this netherworld beneath the established Noise of Literature it's easy to become part of the feuds and fights of the gutter press; to become a soldier of Rebellion; or as often, a mercenary for aristocrats who so fear the vibrant crude raucous Energy of these writers, so different from the refined brand, that hired counterrevolutionary gangs will be sent into literary back alleys and scribes' dives to put down the barbarous miscreants.

Think of a gawky young woman from a small town, insecure yet intelligent, dropout from a major midwestern college-- she'd been kicked out of a writing class-- staying around campus anyway working as a dishwasher, scrawling in spare minutes with large letters a journal which in its angst and nascent madness became the foundation for one of the rawest of all zeen projects during the raging late 90's heyday of the "zine" phenomenon.

The put-upon young woman's split personality began at this time. Maybe it'd been dormant within the person all along. There was the core individual-- a rodent; the mouse-- a self-image forged from beaten-down circumstance. Accompanying the zeen however arose a new persona different from the mouse in every aspect: louder, larger, better-looking, with unreal, often drug or alcohol-fueled confidence. The creation of the new persona was as remarkable and fabulous as the birth of a superhero. The myth of her zeen was propagated as much by the persona's hyperbolic appearances with local zeensters at bars and clubs, later written-up by them, as by the zeen itself.

At the same time, back in her cheap hovel afterward, the superhero having scattered like a puff of smoke through a misaligned open window overlooking the college town, the mouse withdrew into her core self. No longer bold, but fearful. Not anymore confident, but the reverse.

Growing steadily out of her control was the Image; the Myth.

Indeed, she'd become striking looking. She'd become beautiful, and was the last to know. It wasn't her, you see. It was the blown-up Image; the projected superhero. She was a mouse hidden beneath a portrait of a tiger.

The mouse's zeen came to the attention of an underground promoter searching for new talent for a group he was forming. He met her in Chicago and was blown away; stunned. The lo-budget zeen hustler met not the mouse, not the real person, but "May Barber," all-powerful superhero. She joined the group.

Later it'd be known as the ULA, engine of new literary rebellion.

In truth, the mouse had already begun to hate her alter-ego, which in its emotion-spewing vulgarity was the polar opposite of the kind of genteel and precise Anglophile writer she'd long dreamed of becoming. By the same token, "May Barber" detested the weak nerdiness of the mouse. It was an internal dispute within her certain to lead to disaster.

The cheap zeen hustler, more ballyhoo artist than writer, began his assault on the bastions of established literature, carrying forward the controversy-fueled shenanigans of his own zeen of the 90's. Onto this underground zeen animal, crazed and reckless in best underground tradition, conflicted May transferred her self-hate. The mouse saw the over-the-top character as her great antagonist. As she stood half-naked behind the hustler on stage at CBGB's as part of the ULA act, she loathed what she was doing; what she'd become. She didn't want to destroy the literary mainstream. She wanted to join it!
***************************************
Two Mays: the Mouse and the Goddess. In the pressure cooker of the ULA's early days the hate and loathing within both sides of her flowed into a new figure of secrecy and stealth, of transcendent bitterness: the Assassin. This cruel new entity battled the ULA's leader himself. . . .