There really aren’t enough awesomely bad books.
There are thousands of mediocre, disgusting, ugly, juvenile, sickeningly sweet, dead boring, horrible and virtually unreadable books out there. And I’ve read a lot of them. Yet none of them have reached that awesome plateau that is so bad that you want to share it with all of your friends…so bad that you can’t really believe it. Did some publisher read this shit and pay cash money to put into print? Wow!
One of the worst I ever read…and that’s what got this post started…a vagrant memory that intruded last night while I was on my way to the bathroom. One of the worst I read, happened more than fifty years ago. While I was in the army still. In those days we weren’t at war with anybody but the military likes to keep it’s troops on a sharp cutting edge just in case. In my corps (Engineers) we maintained a cutting edge sharpened by all things alcoholic. But what can be done? You can only march around a parade square, remake your bed, shine things, iron things, fold things, paint things, salute things…for so long before dangerous youthful exuberance causes problems. So the army organized a kind of summer camp far away from normal humans. It brought trucks and jeeps and tanks and artillery. It brought tents and kitchens and hospitals and water purification plants. It brought tons of guns and hundreds of soldiers and even brought some from other countries. There was mud and dust and rain and mosquitoes and black flies and bad food and latrines and twisted ankles and gallons of beer…There was a month and a half of playing war. To say that it was nothing like the real thing would be the understatement of the year.
The place for all of this was a military preserve that included a couple of expropriated hamlets in eastern Canada. It was a glorious summer by any weather standards…and as we were “working” only about three hours a day…there was plenty of time to explore…(watch out for poison ivy, poison oak, snakes, other soldiers on war parties, and don’t get lost). So three of us found an abandoned farm house on the edge of a non-existent village…spread our ponchos and poured on the sun tan lotion…settled in to catch some rays. It was still early in the day…the sun was simmering on the long grass and a fine haze signalled another warm day. There was a distracting buzz in the air but aside from that…hey…we were nineteen, in great shape, playing with tons of boy toys and getting drunk whenever we could.
Black flies. If you’ve never met one…don’t. The little fuckers are less than half the size of a house fly…but they have the teeth of a full grown pit bull. They settle down at night in the long grasses and wait until the sun warms up the morning, dries their wings and then about a million of them jump out of the grass looking for breakfast. O.K. now…honest to god, I have no idea how any living thing survives in that part of the world because those little bastards will eat anything. And they don’t sting…they bite. And fifty of them hit you at once…you bleed and there isn’t enough calamine in the world to deal with that itch… and the itch stays for days…maybe months.
We couldn’t dress fast enough and you had to be careful not to trap them inside shirts or pants because they just kept biting. They bite anywhere…have no shame…bite right through cloth. Bite inside your ear…and those army issue undershorts? feel like canvas when you first get them…but those babies didn’t even slow those black flies down.
We grabbed everything and ran…(later I counted twenty two bites) I made it back to my tent and got covered in calamine…and drained two or three beers…unrolled my poncho to make sure there were no little demons hiding there. That’s when I found the book…it must have been lying in the grass under my ground sheet. I say “book” but it was missing the first fifty pages and seemed to have been ravaged by weather…I wondered if the previous owner hadn’t been devoured by those imps. It was ratty and water damaged…but I shook off the dust and started to read.
“The tiger walked across the kitchen floor, huge fangs dripping saliva on the linoleum…”
Well, I had to read the rest didn’t I…and combined with the merciless itch of two dozen black fly bites…it was by far, the worst book I ever read.
They don’t make them like that any more.
Chagal4's Blog 
Leave a comment