"Escape from Thrillville" by Will "the Thrill" Viharo
"ESCAPE
FROM THRILLVILLE"
by Will
“the Thrill” Viharo
A fanciful short story in honor of my bidding farewell to the Bay Area as I relocate my home base to Seattle...also published in the online arts journal Literary Orphans
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| Image by Aaron Farmer |
When
booze becomes the only thing that floats your boat, it's time to
drain the lake.
This is
why I was seriously considering hanging up the fez hat, shades and
smoking jacket after 17 years in this thankless racket. Defending
Thrillville from a motley assortment of mad scientists, monsters,
gangsters, rapists, killers, kidnappers, and jaywalkers had
definitely taken its toll on my sanity, which eventually meant
sacrificing my sobriety. My giant martini glass had once been a main
source of my power. Now it had become my worst enemy. Even more than
lousy fashion and crappy music.
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| Photo by Jim Ferreira |
I'm Will
the Thrill, by the way. Lounge Lizard for Hire. I fight crime for a
living. Except it doesn't actually pay anything, so I'm always broke.
Cheap thrills do not pay bills. To be honest, I steal what little
money I have, typically from crime scenes. Sometimes I sell the dope
I've recovered. I'm not a good guy. I just act like one. I guess I'm
what's known as an “anti-hero.” I'm also anti-social. I hate
people. Except for the ones with nice tits. And even then, only if
they're nice to me.
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| Image by Fred Lammers |
Superficial appearances count. I only dress like I'm a swingin'
hipster. It's all part of my fabricated public image. People don't
believe what you tell them, they believe what you show them.
Before I donned the snazzy duds, I was just another poor (in all
senses), chronically lonesome schnook wasting his nights home alone
with a good book or a bad movie. But once I found the magical Fez in
a thrift shop one crazy day, my entire life changed. I soon
discovered that with great power comes...you know, all that jazz. I
hated the actual responsibilities of being a superhero. I'm a lazy
bastard. I don't even work out. I'm totally out of shape. I didn't
fit the popular profile. Plus my motivations were hardly altruistic.
I was only in it for the pussy. And boy, did I score on that front.
Chicks dig a cool uniform, even if there aren't any muscles
underneath. The only thing that turns them on more is money. That's
one superpower I did not have. But I managed to get by without it. As long as I wore the Fez, which protected my true identity as a
total loser. It was like a condom for my ego. I also found out it
paid to wear pinkie rings on each fist when punching people in the
face. My customized, unbreakable martini glass, the size and density
of a sledgehammer, made an effective weapon as well. For wheels I had
the Thrillmobile, a tricked out 1957 powder blue Thunderbird with
leopard skin upholstery and a portable cocktail bar in the trunk, for
on-the-fly crime-fighting fuel.
Rescuing
damsels in distress kept me knee-deep in nookie on a regular basis,
all right. If you can't get paid you might as well get laid. But now
even my penis was pooped. The pilot light inside my heart had blown
out, too. Inside, I already felt dead. I was just waiting for that
other cuff link to drop.
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| Photo by Jim Ferreria |
Anyway,
one recent night I was slamming back serial bourbon shots while
moping around in the Thrillpad – a single-room, pastel-painted,
plushly appointed, midcentury modernist studio apartment equipped
with a LP stereo system stocked with classic lounge/exotica albums; a
big screen TV with a DVD player and a few dozen carefully selected
old movies; a dime-store rack full of pulp novels; a closet full of
backup fezzes and alternate silk smoking jackets in varying colors; a
bureau with a mirror and a drawer full of black shades and pinkie
rings; a hatrack where I hung my various luchadore masks for
my undercover, international alias, “Guillermo El Thrillermo”;
and of course a round, rotating water bed. Behind the martini bar was
a portrait of the Holy Trinity: Frank, Dean, and Sammy. It was my
shrine, where I went to worship when I needed sustenance from a
Higher Power. And nobody got higher than those guys. The
Thrillpad was my Fortress of Solitude and my Batcave combined. Except
much smaller, with a lot more kinky sex toys scattered around, like
tiki-shaped vibrators, edible hallucinogenic dice, and pornographic
strip poker card decks.
It had
been one long, wild thrill-ride.
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| Illustration originally published in Too Much Coffee Man Magazine, 2001 |
But now
it seemed the party was over. I was a middle-aged wolf, after all.
Even my sidekick, The Tiki Goddess, the most beautiful and exotic
woman I'd ever met, whose superpower was seduction, didn't answer the
Thrill-Phone or respond to the Thrill Signal anymore. I think she was
tired of waiting around for me to marry her or something. I'd blown
it. I was retiring from this racket exactly the way I'd started:
alone.
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| Photo by Jim Ferreira |
That's
when a beautiful brunette with familiar bangs whom I wanted to bang
on the spot knocked on the door then walked in when I opened it. She
was a dead ringer for Bettie Page.
“I
want you to find someone for me,” she said.
“Who?”
“Me.”
“No, I
mean who do you want me to find.”
“Me. I
want you to find me.”
“Who
are you? You look just like Bettie Page.”
“Bettie
Page.”
“Yea,
that's who you look like.”
“That's
also who I am.”
“I
thought you were dead.”
“So
did I.”
“Um...don't
take this wrong, but you didn't die in your prime. You were,
y'know...old.”
“Exactly.
Weird, huh?”
After
nearly two decades of facing off with everything from nympho vampires
to alien hit men to rampaging robots to lycanthropic mobsters, I was
accustomed to weirdness. Overly-familiar with it, in fact. This was
exactly the kind of thing I was trying to get away from.
Then she
suddenly let out a long, evil laugh.
“I'm
just fucking with you,” she said. “I'm not actually Bettie Page.
I'm just messin' with you.”
“What?
Why?”
“Because.
That's what I do. I'm The Mindfucker. Pleased to meet you.”
“Oh...well,
please to meet you too, doll.” I extended my right hand for a
shake.
“I'm
sorry, I can't shake your hand, because that would require corporeal
presence.”
“Huh?”
“I'm
not actually here. You're imagining all this.”
“How.”
“Because
I made you imagine it. In fact, I made you.”
“Huh?
But...why?
“Because.
I'm The Mindfucker. It's what I do. Well...see ya!”
Then
poof, she was gone.
I didn't
know what to make of this mysterious encounter. Did she present any
actual danger? A pain in the ass, sure. But an actual public enemy
that needed to be stopped? Hard to say, though given her unique
powers of mind control, the potential certainly existed. I was
reminded of my old nemesis, The Headshrinker. She was an impossibly
sexy voodoo priestess who made one head swell while shrinking the
other one – basically sucking both till they were left limp, empty
and useless. But last I heard she was locked up in the Thrillville
Asylum. And projecting mental illusions wasn't really in her trick
'r' treat bag. I also flashed back to the notorious bitch known as
The Ballbuster, but as far as I knew, she was dead. This was most
likely an entirely new player. Just when I thought I was out...
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| Image by Bob Ekman |
At the
time I was wearing only my wife beater, silk boxers, and argyle
socks. I put on a white shirt, black slacks, skinny pink tie, aqua
green smoking jacket, striped white tiger fur fez, and shades and
went downstairs to the garage where I climbed into the Thrillmobile
and drove around town, lost in thought, my perpetual jazz soundtrack
on the radio. There was a full moon over Thrillville, which was a
shadowy town even by daylight, though the sun hardly ever shone here.
It was perpetually cloudy, which meant the neon signs on all the
nightclubs were never turned off. And Thrillville was almost nothing
but nightclubs, cheap residential hotels, diners and dive bars, all
Googie style, the city council's architectural mandate. The denizens
were of both supernatural and human origin, mixing and mingling and
mating in general harmony until a crime of passion or opportunity was
committed and I was called into action. But things had been quiet for
a while, and I figured they could live without me. The question was:
could I live without them?
After
driving around aimlessly for a while, I finally stopped at the urban
tropical oasis known as Forbidden Island, the tiki lounge where The
Tiki Goddess performed her nightly torch singing gig. Entertainment
was her real career. She only became my crime-fighting sidekick after
we were accidentally thrown together onto a case when Thrillville was
being attacked by The Grunge Gang, a bunch of ugly thugs whose
superpowers were bad hair, bad clothes, and bad attitudes – and
they were contagious. They really rubbed her sense of style the wrong
way, and she took on the task of sticking her sweet high-heeled feet
right up their torn blue-jeaned asses before I jumped in and helped
her. So I guess in effect I was her sidekick. In any case,
we'd been close allies ever since. We slept together a few times, but
I could tell she was getting serious, so I told her I couldn't see
her as often, and she cooled off from the crime-fighting bit. The
truth was she was getting to me and the one vulnerability a
crime-fighter can't afford is a loved one. I worried too much she'd
become a target of my many enemies. Also, I was afraid of commitment.
The reality was, she was the one and only person who knew my true
identity as a complete schmuck, but still accepted me. For some
reason, I couldn't handle that.
The Tiki
Goddess was onstage performing a moody medley in her smokey Julie
London/June Christy style, backed up by the house band, a bunch of
beret-wearing, bongo-beating beatniks called The Moon-Rays. I took a
seat at the bamboo bar, ordered a classic Mai Tai, and waited for her
set to end.
When she
was finished, she joined me, but with a cool demeanor that clinked
around in the air between us like the ice in my glass.
“Welcome
to Chillville,” I said.
“What
do you want?” she asked, cutting the chit-chat while nodding at the
bartender, who responded immediately with a ready-made French 75.
“Besides
you?”
“You
had your chance.”
“True.
And I regret that choice daily. But I'm only here with one question:
Have you ever heard of a super-villain called The Mindfucker?”
“Sure.”
“What
do you mean, 'sure'?”
“I
mean yes, I've heard of The Mindfucker. It's been around forever.
Why?”
“'It'?”
“He.
She. It. Whatever. It assumes whatever form suits its particular
agenda.”
“Which
is what?”
“That
constantly changes as well.”
“So
how do I find it?”
“You
can't.”
“Why
not?”
“That
the secret power of The Mindfucker. There is no Mindfucker.
Not in singular, tangible form, anyway. That's how The Mindfucker can
operate without ever being captured. He/she/it remains at large, a
perpetual perpetrator, precisely because he/she/it is constantly
being regenerated by his/her/its own victims, even though the victims
are in fact the perps.”
I
couldn't believe what I was hearing. “So The Mindfucker is an
eternal entity?”
“Yes.
It's common knowledge, really. Surprised you're just hearing about
it. But then you've always been trapped inside your own head, haven't
you? That fez is more a like locked lid.”
“That's
crazy...so how do we know The Mindfucker isn't controlling our senses
right now?”
“We
don't.”
“So...my
entire life, all of my memories, this very moment, could be...an
illusion? Like a dream?”
“Yes.”
“Even...you?”
“Yes...”
She leaned closer to me. The mutual attraction was to strong for
either of us to resist.
“Even...this?”
I said.
“Yes....”
She closed her eyes, bracing for passionate impact...
But
before our lips met, there erupted an abruptly disruptive chorus of
screaming from the surrounding patrons as a swarm of moaning undead
monster men (and women) with glazed eyes and drooling mouths suddenly
invaded the place. I recognized them right away, especially since
they all dressed alike in gray sweat pants and T-shirts with matching
corporate logos, but their physical appearances had deteriorated a
great deal since I'd last noticed them. A steady diet of cloned pop
culture will do that to a person.
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| Image by Aaron Farmer |
The
Corporate Corpses, as they were dubbed by the local media, were a
ragtag band of normally peaceful zombified consumers controlled by an
unseen but all-powerful billionaire industrialist known as The
Conformist. The Corpses were dismissed by society as sad annoyances,
stumbling around the local mall, bumping into each other while
shopping for stuff they'd never need, but for some reason they'd
suddenly developed a taste for other human brains, perhaps because of
their own cerebral deficits. That may have been The Conformist's
master plan all along. But was The Conformist really in cahoots with
The Mindfucker? Or were they in fact the same being?
A
particularly aggressive zombie tore off The Tiki Goddess's shiny
satin dress, so she was wearing nothing but her leopard skin
underwear and snake-skin pumps. I found this very distracting, but it
didn't detract from The Tiki Goddess's ass-kicking abilities, as she
swung her magnificent gams around with lethal athleticism,
kick-boxing her way through the horrible hordes, smashing the skulls
of her avaricious attackers, their putrid brains spilling all over
the bamboo floor.
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| Image by Aaron Farmer |
So why
would The Conformist’s mindless minions, normally as harmless as
mannequins, suddenly morph into cannibalistic predators, feasting on
human flesh? Was The Mindfucker behind this sudden, radical change of
behavior? Or was this even really happening? No time to debate
myself. The screams of the patrons attempting to flee the zombies
sounded all too real.
I ran
outside to the Thrillmobile to retrieve my own trademark weapon, the
giant martini glass, then returned to join the defense against the
violent assault. But something unprecedented happened: my unbreakable
martini glass broke. I just
dropped it on the floor by accident, and it shattered. Defenseless, I
was overwhelmed by the zombies. I felt them tearing into my body and
my soul. I couldn't see The Tiki Goddess anymore. One of them stabbed
a metal straw right through my fez, penetrating my skull, and my
brains were being sucked out right through the top of my torn
scalp...
I was
saved by the shrill ringing of the alarm clock. I looked at the time
and groggily realized I was almost late for work. Again. I
couldn't afford to get fired from another job. I hopped out of my
Murphy bed and into the shower after putting on an Esquivel album to
set the mood for my day, which I was determined would be special.
Then I neatly combed my hair, put on cologne, and wore my best tie,
even though I was only a clerk in a chain store. Maybe today was the
day I'd finally summon up the courage to ask my my dream girl and
favorite customer out on a date, first summoning up the courage to
actually talk to her outside of the heartless transactions. Then I'd
quit my job. It was time for me to outgrow reality in favor or my
fantasies. I was going to spike my coffee with whiskey, as usual, but
instead settled for cream, and ran down to meet my bus.
By the
way, I thought I should tell you that none of this actually happened,
except in my own mind. And now yours.
ESCAPE FROM THRILLVILLE as well as my Tribute To Ingrid Bergman
are included in this issue of Literary Orphans
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My live reading of "Escape from Thrillville" is featured in this cleverly edited clip from
Jeff M. Giordano's upcoming documentary The Thrill Is Gone
Another excerpt, discussing my youthful friendship with actor Mickey Rourke...
Another excerpt, discussing my youthful friendship with actor Mickey Rourke...
Cheers from our future home base!
world of the 1960s BATMAN series...
My TV horror host growing up in South Jersey throughout the 1970s,
Philly's DOC SHOCK!
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| ) |
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| Valentine's Day 2014 at Trabocco, Alameda CA |
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| Celebrating Monica's acceptance into the School of Drama PhD program at the University of Washington, at Butterfly Restaurant in San Francisco 3/14/14. |
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| With co-author Scot Fulks aboard the USS Hornet in Alameda CA for a book signing of IT CAME FROM HANGAR 18, Grey Ghost Paracon, 2/22/14 Scenes from my final SHATFEST: TRIBUTE TO WILLIAM SHATNER, The New Parkway, 3/20/14    William Shatner tribute clip show edited by Mark Bowen of Le Video, San Francisco: Reading from Love Stories Are Too Violent For Me, part of this interview for the San Francisco Weekly |
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| Melissa Wortman (top) and Webberly Rattencraft (below) of San Francisco's CREEPY KOFY MOVIE TIME plug my novel LOVE STORIES ARE TOO VIOENT FOR ME on the air! |
Our own personal appearances on this show, in September 2009 and
September 2010, respectively:
NOW ON SALE BACHELOR PAD MAGAZINE #27
featuring my regular movie column!
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| I am a judge for this contest sponsored by Bachelor Pad Magazine. THE MOON-RAYS wrote and recorded the official "Thrillville" theme song! |
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| Lobby cards created by Sci-Fi Bob Ekman |
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| Preparing my Bay Area exit strategy...aloha, and thanks for all the thrills, cheers! |
A WRONG TURN AT ALBUQUERQUE (1982) and THE IN-BETWEENERS (1987)
LITTLE BLACK BULLETS (1989) and NIGHT NOTES (1990)
COFFEE SHOP GODDESS (1990) and THE EMANCIPATION OF ANNE FRANK (1991)
PEOPLE BUG ME (2013)
SUCKER PUNCH OF THE GODS (Flash Fiction Offensive) (2014)
THE STICK-UP ARTIST (Flash Fiction Offensive) (2015)
THE STICK-UP ARTIST (Flash Fiction Offensive) (2015)
Radio play based on my unpublished novella SHADOW MUSIC (1996)
NOW AVAILABLE from THRILLVILLE PRESS:
THE THRILLVILLE PULP FICTION COLLECTION!
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| VOLUME ONE: A Mermaid Drowns in the Midnight Lounge and Freaks That Carry Your Luggage Up to the Room BUY
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The new Vic Valentine novel HARD-BOILED HEART now available from Gutter Books! BUY
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NOW AVAILABLE: NIGHTMARE ILLUSTRATED #5
with my short story "PEOPLE BUG ME"
NOW ON SALE:
featuring my short story "BEHIND THE BAR"
