Probably inevitable, I suppose, but still disconcerting. When I first showed an interest in writing, my mother gave me Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, which contains the invaluable advice to “write like your parents are dead.” I found that hard to do, and realized that if I ever wanted to be a serious writer, I would just have to kill my parents and get on with it. Fortunately, writing is just a hobby, but I realized that if I could manufacture a persona – a blogonym – I could tell myself I have no parents, apart from Disease and Despair, and thus nobody to disappoint.  Alas, this pretense has become difficult to sustain, but my writings so far are very much in disregard for my otherwise sterling parentage – LoM in particular. If you read any of this and think, wow, this dude is fucked up – well, fair enough, but you really can’t blame my parents for that. They did fine.

For the record, my parents never saw a word of LoM before I put it online. Mom tells me that she and dad found themselves asking, “did this happen?” as they read it. Let me be clear: it is fiction. None of it happened, ever, especially the naughty bits. Doesn’t make it any less true, but it does save everyone the effort of trying to guess which of my girlfriends went down on me in the hospital (answer: none).

In fact, I will now admit that I didn’t even write it, I just copied it from someone else, who got it from a pack of Ebola-crazed monkeys who cobbled it together from feces-covered Scrabble tiles. I ran out of ideas, and had to put something on my blog. Any similarities to my actual life are an astonishing coincidence but not worth thinking about in any depth whatsoever.

So there, mom and dad. Welcome to the blogosphere.

Most of the book was written based on my own experiences – meaning I did almost zero research. Chapter 66, however, required a bit of work, and I’m quite pleased with how it turned out. I knew that I wanted to address the paucity of literature on the subject of illness, and started looking for books that I could incorporate into the story. Little Women was a blessing: a classic book with a pretty complex attitude towards illness. If you’ve read Little Women, even if you read nothing else of this story, you should read Chapter 66. Here’s a taste:

“And you don’t like that,” said Wallace.

“No, sir,” I said. “Destiny is a cop-out.”

“What did you call it? The ‘second worst diagnosis in the history of literary medicine’?” Wallace said.

“Right,” I said. “I mean, it’s one thing in a book, but if books matter to how we live our lives, then we can’t go around assuming people get sick and die because of destiny. That’s basically giving up, when we owe it to each other to at least try to understand their experience.”

If you’re at all enjoying this, tell your friends. I intend this book to be something that sick people can relate to, but also something that helps non-sick people understand what it means (at least, what I think it means) to be chronically and terminally ill.

One more thing: I am getting pretty close to the end – maybe 20 chapters or so – and when it’s all up, I want to make it available as single document. I will definitely have a PDF format, but if there are other e-book formats I should look into, let me know.

My massive inconvenience is apparently your gain, insofar as reading my soul-crushing bildungsroman counts as a gain. Anyone actually following the adventures of young Wesley Peary will wonder: why so long since last time? The problem was that I discovered the chapters were appearing in my search results, which made search useless for anyone looking for actual information. So I decided not to put up any more chapters until I could get that problem resolved, and it took me until today to do so: thank you, Jonathan Dingman.

In the meantime, I meant to flag this story from the NY Times, which asks whether patient memoirs are worth reading. Obviously, I have concluded that a straight-up memoir isn’t worth writing, and for good reason: the events of my life have not happened in the right order to be compelling reading. Instead, I’ve condensed more than ten years of my life into a single year of narrative, which ends up being entirely true to my experience, even if not strictly factual. (I even get to be more candid, since I can always deny anything that’s too embarrassing.)

And indeed, the only reason I can justify writing the horrible things I write is that they are, at some level, absolutely true. Too often memoirists try to tie their lives together, to package them and wrap them in meaning, so as to justify themselves and their work to the audience – with the result being too pat, too easy, too comforting. Fiction requires no such defense; my only obligation is to be as true to my experience as I can.

So I now have through Chapter 40 available: if you are just getting started, start here. Otherwise, Chapter 32 was the last chapter I posted.

I’ve also uploaded Chapters 41 through 45, and scheduled them for publication next Tuesday. I should be still on vacation, or fleeing from authorities, depending on whether I get that prescription filled. In any case, that should put me ahead of the ball, and with the technical problem fixed, I should be able to upload the rest of the chapters fairly regularly through the rest of the summer. Thanks for reading.

I meant to do this weekly, but have been super busy the last few weeks – nothing bad, but still enough to keep me from giving this blog and project the attention it deserves. I am hoping things will mellow out enough over the next few weeks to let me get back into regular posting, and so that I can finish uploading Mortals in a timely fashion.

This work is obviously semi-autobiographical; it is based on my own experiences, but rearranged and stylized to make it more interesting. For example, my dad really did tell me the “Spartan Boy” story once, when I was much younger and had a stomach ache. The difference between fiction and reality is that where Wesley (the fiction) sees through it immediately, yours truly (the reality) accepted the story and aspired to be like the Spartan Boy. In retrospect, I don’t blame my dad – we were between flights overseas, and there wasn’t a lot else he could do – but it is a really terrible story to tell a kid. Not that I hold it against him.

Travis is based on a real person, named Chuck, who was one of my best friends. I say “was” because his illness eventually claimed him, back in 1997 or so. When I first got sick, my parents thought it would be a good idea for me to hang out with Chuck, as he was also sick and dealing with some of the same issues. I thought it was a stupid idea, but I literally had nothing better to do. Besides, Chuck was in to fishing, as was I. Contra my extraordinarily low expectations, Chuck and I got along and became good friends. We discovered that we both greatly disliked the patronizing attitudes the “adults” expressed about our illness, and our friendship was more subversive in nature than my parents had intended. I don’t know how I would have gotten past those first years without knowing Chuck, but I strongly suspect I would have been far weaker and less successful in coping with my illness. Part of the reason I am writing and sharing this work is to pass along the sensibility that Chuck helped me form, and which I credit for a large part of my resilience and strength against my disease.

I have published the first five chapters in this new format, so you don’t have navigate them like you do blog posts, but more like you might a book. It’s a lot easier for me, too, to publish them—which was part of the reason I ran out of steam in my first attempt last summer.

Start here for disclaimer and licensing information: League of Mortals . As you click through the chapters, the next chapter becomes available in the right-hand bar (clever, no?). I will try to post another five chapters a week, since it’s easy for me to work in batches.

Let me know if you have any problems with the format; the actual content I will just go ahead and apologize for again, and remind you once again it is Not Safe For Work.

I have written what might charitably be called “a novel”. The title is League of Mortals. It is terrible in many, many ways – among other things, NSFW. Fortunately, this verbal excreta is not available for sale at any price. You can only find it one place: here.

I started this blog after I finished the second draft. I needed to stop writing LOM for a while, but I wanted to keep writing. I thought a blog would keep me writing without committing me to a specific project. I was wrong. Blogging took up all of my writing time, so LOM has sat next to my desk since. Getting it ready for publication would take up a lot of time. Even if I had the time to get it into shape, I doubt there is a market for a book that boils down to relentless poop, sex, and breast cancer jokes. I’d rather blog than spend the time on probably pointless labor.

So I have decided to do just that: to blog it. Each Friday, I will post a new chapter as a separate blog post. I deliberately wrote the book to be easy to read in small bits; if you’ve ever been sick, or otherwise limited in your attention span, you know how annoying it is to read books that go on and on without good places to stop. The chapters are short – I shoot for around 2000 words per. There’s about 90 of them. I’ll edit as I post, so that what you see will be in effect the third draft. It should give me about two years to work on it, and get it all out there.

I am doing this under a Creative Commons attribution/non-commercial/no-derivatives license – which means you are free to share my work with others, so long as you attribute it properly (with my name, a link to this page, any my email address). You may not sell my work nor to change it in any way. (See the legal code for more information.)

If that sounds like your idea of fun, click through the jump to start the first chapter. I am trying to implement a somewhat book-like format, but typography on HTML can be a pain in the butt. Let me know if you have any problems reading it – meaning, any problems beyond the obvious and inevitable problems with what I have intentionally written. Of course, you’re free to complain about those problems, too.

League of Mortals by Duncan Cross is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

LEAGUE OF MORTALS

Chapter 1. Aquatic life

The one thing that made me think I could be a competent adult was my job: starting just after my sixteenth birthday, I worked summers as a lifeguard for Orange County (FL) Parks and Recreation. The pool supervisor, a thirty-something slacker named Joey, hired me because I already knew pool maintenance. Otherwise, he had to train the other lifeguards to do it. After 11 years of formal education, the only marketable skill I had was pool maintenance.

The pool was open for general swim 9 to 3, and most of the swimmers were stay-at-home moms and their little kids. During hours, I was a lifeguard – a glorified babysitter, really. The moms would strap floaties on their kids’ arms, then drop them in the shallow end to splash and squeal and pee for a few hours.

Meanwhile a massive pump sucked water through intakes along the sides of the pool, catching most of the hair, skin flakes, dirt, and boogers in a battery of filters, then pushing the cleanish water back into the pool. At night, an automatic vacuum crept along the bottom, slurping up any sunken debris. My job in the mornings was to run the manual vacuum over anything the automatic missed, clean the filters, check the chemicals, and empty the atrium grate.

A couple weeks into my second summer at the pool – the summer after my junior year of high school – I found a rubbery wad in the mesh basket of the grate. I lifted the basket from its socket and shook the wad out onto the grass, where it unfurled.

As I pushed the blob back into the grate with the edge of my sandal, Kelly, one of the other lifeguards, saw what I was doing and walked over. “Hey, Wesley – what’cha got there?”

“You’re here early,” I said.

“Yeah – my dad dropped me off,” she said. “He needs – is that a condom?”

“I think so.”

“In the pool?” She peered into the basket. “Oh – gross. Is it… used?”

“Can’t tell,” I grimaced.

“That’s so disgusting. Ohmigod – I am so not going in today. Ewww. You have to show Joey.”

Joey was our boss. I took the basket to his office, and showed him what was in it. “I think somebody had sex in the pool,” I told him.

“You think?” he sighed. “Don’t tell the other staff, and don’t talk about it in front of the swimmers. I don’t want to ever hear the word ‘condom’ or ‘rubber’ from any of you guys. If it happens again, I’ll get the sheriff to send somebody by.” The condom went into the trash.

I didn’t have to tell anyone. Kelly did. There were four other lifeguards besides me: Greg, Nick, Andrea, and Kelly. The first three were all in college, more or less; Greg and Andrea went to junior college in town, and screwed each other in their free time. Nick went to one of the minor state schools out of town, but came back to work the pool in the summer. Kelly was a year behind me, and had just started working that summer. And Kelly made sure everyone knew what I had found in the pool.

After the first one, I found rubbers in the pool two or three times a week. Sometimes they didn’t even make it into the atrium grate. I found them floating in the pool, like latex jellyfish.

One afternoon, a half-dozen rubbers into the summer, we were all sitting in the pool office waiting out a thunderstorm. The sky shook and flashed as heavy drops pitted the pool and raised steam from the asphalt parking lot. Most of the swimmers had gone home, and the rest were safely inside the rec center. The lifeguards were still on the clock, but we had nothing to do except play cards and talk about the mysterious condoms.

“Three twos,” said Greg. He lay three cards face down on the pile.

“Bullshit,” said Nick.

“No way, bra,” Greg protested, but he took the pile anyway. Greg thought Hawai’i was the coolest place on earth, even though he’d never been there. He called everybody “bra” and got annoyed if you pronounced it Huh-WHY-eee, instead of Hah-wuh-EEE.

“I wish it’d stop raining,” said Andrea. “One four.” She was smoking hot, so much that Nick and I were both too intimidated to talk to her. We knew for fact that she waxed her bikini line every Tuesday night: her choice of bathing suit made it that obvious.

“We’re on threes,” said Kelly.

“One three -”

“Bullshit,” said Kelly. Andrea took back her card.

“Don’t think we don’t know you’re the ones doing it in the pool,” said Nick, looking at Greg. Nick lay down his cards. “Two fours.”

“That’s bullshit, bra,” Greg said. “It’s not us.”

Nick handed Greg the cards.

“You called ‘bullshit’.” Greg started to protest, but the rest of us pointed out that rules are rules.

“Three fives,” said Kelly. “I don’t understand why they keep showing up. I mean, once or twice – okay, I see how maybe that could be fun. But twice a week all summer?”

“Two sixes,” I said, putting two cards down.

“Bullshit,” said Kelly. She added my cards and her cards back to her hand.

“Maybe they’re really fat, like gigantic whales,” said Andrea. “Maybe they can only do it in water.”

“How do they get over the fence?” I asked, to no reply.

“One seven,” said Greg. He put his card down. “Maybe’s it just one girl with, like, a mermaid thing, and different guys every time.”

“What a slut,” said Andrea. “Two eights.” She put her cards down.

Nick put down two cards. “Two nines. If it’s one girl, she owes Wesley a turn.”

“Three tens,” said Kelly, putting down her cards.

“Two jacks,” I said. “Thanks, but I’ll pass. I know too much about her sex life to enjoy it myself.”

“Why not?” asked Nick. “If she’s wearing a rubber every time, you’re safe.”

“One queen,” said Greg. “Still, you probably want to double-bag it, bra.”

“I’d just be too creeped out,” I said, “knowing about all the other guys – whether or not they wore a rubber.”

From behind me, a small high voice asked: “Whassa rub-ber?”

The hair on the back of my neck rose, and I saw the startled looks from everyone else. I twisted in my seat and saw a six-year old girl in a Piglet bathing suit.

“It’s short for ‘rubber ducky’,” I said, to giggles from the other staff. I got up from my seat and knelt next to her. “Do you have a rubber ducky?”

The girl looked at me dumbly.

“You know,” Kelly started to sing, “‘Rubber ducky, you’re the one’ – someone left their rubber ducky in the pool.”

“I haf’ta go to th’ baf’room,” said the girl, as if the world had begun anew that very moment.

“Miss Kelly will show you where it is,” I said. I gave Kelly a pleading glance. She giggled.

Kelly took the girl by her hand and led her out of the lounge – Kelly humming, the girl with a finger hooked on her lower lip.

I sat back down at the table and sighed. “Nice save,” said Nick.

“Duckies” stuck – that was our codeword. It kept us out of trouble.

Then, a few weeks later, I was fired – but not for anything to do with duckies. Instead, I got sick.