My Experiment
a writing adventure
A WRITING ADVENTURE
Last month, I tried something different, something challenging. Could I write a novel one chapter per day? Get up, drink coffee write chapter and post it here on Substack. Next day, do the same thing. Fifty days, fifty chapters. THE HEAD, a novel by Gary Arms. Horror plus humor. Lots of dialogue. I did it. I wrote an entire novel in less than two months. Imagine me jumping up and down. Imagine me feeling proud. I never had time to revise. Every day was exciting, stressful, fun, terrifying. Every day, another self-imposed deadline. No time to fret and second guess myself. I had a small group of readers who read every chapter the same day I posted it. Was it any good. It hooked that small group of readers. High speed serializing.
When I finished it, I thought I better look it over again. Clean it up. Improve it. Since then, I have gone over every chapter, adding and subtracting. Fixing things. This is the new and improved Chapter 1. Every chapter links to the next one.
Here’s the blurb.
To raise a child, you need a village. To fight evil, you will need a neighborhood, at the very least a trailer court and a bar.
What does a guy want? More readers.
THE HEAD, a novel by Gary Arms
from the Theaetetus of Plato:
But it is not possible, Theodorus, that evil should be destroyed—for there must always be something opposed to the good; nor is it possible that it should have its seat in heaven. But it must inevitably haunt human life, and prowl about this earth.
Most of this story took place in Watertown, IA, in 1979.
THE HEAD
Chapter 1
On a hot Wednesday morning in July, two Watertown sanitation workers, a black guy named Buddy Jackson and a white guy named Mitch Nelson were sweating like pigs. They were half-way through their route. Toby was driving and Mitch and Buddy were working the back of the truck, emptying garbage cans into its maw. Mitch, still in his twenties, was pawing through the trash in his can, and explaining to Buddy that their luck was due to change. Buddy, forty years old, getting a little grey in his beard, was pretending to listen.
The two sanitation workers had a way of supplementing the paychecks they got from the city. They looked through the cans of trash before dumping them to see if they contained anything valuable. Empty beer bottles and soda pop cans for example could be sold to the recycling; every bottle or can was worth a nickel. Other valuables could bring a decent price at the pawn shop. When either of them found an item worth money, he tossed it into the canvas bag they had hanging on the back of the truck. Buddy and Mitch split the money. Toby the driver didn’t want any part of it. He said pawing through folks’ garbage was likely to get them fired.
Buddy mopped the sweat off his face with the back of his hand, noticed an item of interest in his can, and pulled it out. A round thing, gold.
Mitch dumped out his can which had not contained anything of worth and set it back at the border of the alley. “What you got?”
“Think it’s real gold?” Buddy was holding the item up in the hot sun. A golden head.
Mitch came over to look. “No one would throw it in the trash, not if that was real gold.”
“It’s heavy.” Buddy was turning it around in his hands, looking at it from all angles. “Ten pounds at least. What you think ten pounds of gold is worth?”
“Give it here.” Mitch took the head and turned it around with his hands, looking for damage, dents, cracks. “Even if it’s fake, it must be worth something.” He dropped it into the bag.
When they finished their route and got back to the barn, Buddy said he had to get home because his wife had chores for him to do, so it was Mitch who took the canvas bag and its contents to the recycling center.
While turning in the latest haul of cans, Mitch showed the head to the old guy who ran the place. Already, Mitch was feeling protective about the head. “You can look but don’t touch.”
The old guy whistled. “It’s a beauty. Hard to believe somebody just threw it out.” He offered Mitch fifteen bucks for the head right on the spot.
Mitch said he figured the head was worth three times that easy. “I’m gonna have it appraised.”
The old guy said he doubted the head was real gold. “Definitely not twenty-four karat. Probably one of them alloys. I’m willing to offer twenty-five bucks but that’s my limit.”
“In your dreams.” Mitch was beginning to get ideas about the head. He wished he had never shown it to the old man.
The old man rubbed his chin which was covered with white grizzle, “I’ll go thirty. That’s my top bid.”
“Forget it. I gotta go. Got things to do.”
Driving home with the head in the passenger seat beside him, Mitch thought about taking his find to the pawn shop, but he decided he would take it home instead. He wanted to look it over carefully. Weigh it. Maybe give it a good polish with a soft cloth.
After he carried the head inside his trailer, all Mitch wanted to do for half an hour was look at it. There was something about it that fascinated him. He set it down in the middle of his dinette table and put a TV dinner in his oven. Mitch lived in a trailer. While his dinner was heating up, he sat at the table and stared at the head as if it was the TV. He felt different somehow. Bigger, more alive. More important.
People are gonna know me now, he told himself. People are gonna fuckin pay attention to me.
Mitch got a bottle of beer out of his fridge and sat at his table looking at the head. He felt almost as if he had a new friend, almost as if he could hear his new friend whispering to him.
Before he went to bed that night, Mitch couldn’t stand it anymore, so he called up a guy he knew, Rodney Schwartz. Rodney was not a close friend, more like an acquaintance. People called Rodney “the Slob” on account of his weight problem.
While he was punching the digits of Rodney’s number into his phone, Mitch made up his mind. He was going to tell his co-worker Buddy that the head they had found was not real gold, just some kind of tin made to resemble gold. He’d tell Buddy he got forty bucks for the head from the recycling, hand twenty bucks to Buddy. His coworker would be happy as a pig in shit to get twenty bucks and never again have a single thought about the head.
Mitch remembered an expression he had heard a few times. “You gotta get ahead.” Buddy was the kind of guy who didn’t get ahead. He’d probably be a sanitation worker his whole entire life.
The head was sort of looking at him, smiling a little bit like that famous painting, the Mona Lisa.
Rodney Schwartz answered his phone.
In appearance, Rodney was a fat slob who weighed close to 300 pounds, but he had a brain. He was the only person in the neighborhood, the only regular at Red’s Place who had experience with stocks and bonds, that kind of thing. Rodney made a decent living sitting at home, poring over the financial pages of the newspaper, making investments. He was like a gambler but with stocks and bonds. He always seemed to win just a little more than he lost. As a result, at Red’s Place, the neighborhood bar, Rodney was considered a genius.
Rodney had few close friends, so he was happy to talk to Mitch over the phone about the value of gold. Generally speaking, Rodney was happy to talk to anyone at all, especially if he could do all the talking. The Slob liked to talk but he was boring to listen to, unless you were interested in stocks and bonds. At the bar, people avoided sitting beside him. Also, there was the fact that Rodney had a body odor problem.
Mitch told Rodney the reason he was calling; he had found a trinket in someone’s trash, just a little gold thing, a bit of jewelry like a necklace, but it appeared to be real gold. What would something like that be worth if you melted it down?
“You wanna know what gold’s worth these days? That’s your question? Let me think.” Rodney said this year, 1979, was a great time for investing in metals because of the oil crisis, not to mention the fact the whole country had stupidly abandoned the gold standard in 1971. “You should show your trinket to a jeweler.”
Mitch knew about the oil crisis, it was making gas expensive, but he had never heard of the gold standard. “OK, sure, show it to a jeweler, but how much would you say if you had to guess? Like if you had one ounce, what would that be worth?”
Rodney said a little bit of gold jewelry might be worth something depending on how much it weighed and the purity of the gold. “If it’s just a little trinket, it’s probably less than an ounce.”
“Just pretend it’s an ounce. How much?”
The Slob said the last time he checked, an ounce of gold was worth around $450. “If you want, I can look it up, but that’s my best guess. It fluctuates.”
“Right, I get it, OK,” Mitch said. The gold head was sitting right there on the dinette table in front of him, staring at him, smiling a little bit. “$450. Just for an ounce. Good to know. Well, that’s something alright. Just for an ounce.”
“Like I said, if all you got is a trinket, it’s probably less than an ounce.”
After he hung up the phone, Mitch carried the head into his bathroom and set it down on the scale. The head weighed a tick over thirteen pounds.
Mitch got out a piece of paper and did the calculation. $450 an ounce. Sixteen ounces in a pound. The head weighed a little more than thirteen pounds. 450 x 16 x 13. When he finished, he drew a circle around the total.
His heart was thumping. He felt a little dizzy and a little nauseous. He needed a drink.
$93,600.
I like the blurb!