Bio Hazard
They’re always trying to gut you. They’ll gouge you with the pay checks and then stick their dirty finger nails in that wound to collect Mr. Sam’s taxes. Editors string you up by your ankles and beat your organs with aluminum baseball bats. They leave you hanging there, bruising like a old banana. The lights off. Enough time to sway and think about what happened. Then they’re back in again with a cattle prod and nipple clamps. All they want to do is hear you beg for mercy. It’s not about power and control, they want structure. They’re not big on gambling. They’re hedging their bets by belting on you. You need gambling. The odds make life fun, even bad odds.
Once in a great while, they really dig their heel into your jaw. They tell you to write an author “bio.” Forty some-odd words about yourself. They feed you poison out of the gate by making you write in the third person. “Yeah, that will be great. What could be more authentic? You’ll write a little blurb about how great you are. Everyone loves doing that.” This is where it gets cruel and customary.
As a writer, you sit there with a mouth full of sand and all the veins sticking out of your neck. It’s more like genital mutilation than writing. An excruciating dilemma. Eyes closed, vomit leaping up the throat like the stinky kid in the back of the classroom who finally has an answer to one of the teacher’s silly questions. The answer — high treason for two hundred, Alex.
You try to skirt around it. Every corner leads you head into the nostrils of a shotgun, or a speeding truck, or viper pit. Then you prance your way, delicately, shaking, one word at a time. You’ve got a sentence. Then two. Written in the grimy third person. Self-congratulatory, not yet braggadocios. But as putrid as any vomit you’ve ever stepped over in an alleyway. The maggots are already running through your sentence, lapping it up. Flies buzz over those few lines like police helicopters looking at a crime scene.
A few more diseased words. The suits called for a forty word bio. Written by you, about you. They promised to paste your mugshot photo beside it. To show everyone what’s become of you. There’s no battle for power and control. They run a monopoly. They play strategically, withholding the checks until the bio is finished. They’ll blast you with the firehose for pleasure, then they’ll wring you clean and deem you sanitary.
Whatever you stood for, forget it. They’ll reject the humor and use their red pen to kill any self deprecation. They want blood. A sterile finger painting so the audience can categorize you in half a second. It’s nice when the reader can, in a matter of three dopey sentences, stash you in a particular drawer, labeled and organized.
How long have you been working at this thing you do? Years? Decades? Wonderful. Now give me forty words. No, no, no — not like that. Give them to me, but pretend the words are coming from someone else. Someone deep down inside your psyche who hates you and wishes you nothing but the most flamboyant failure. Who else would demand such a disingenuous tap dance? Don’t forget the cane. That third leg is essential for this desperate and aggravating maneuver. Shake your hat. Shake it. Make sure they know exactly who you are. Shake it harder, bum. Bow to the audience.
Why aren’t they clapping? It’s probably because in a matter of forty words, you’ve depreciated considerably. The dumb ones will read the bio with juicy, nodding heads, unaware of the fuckery. Then there will be the bunch with brains. Their mouths will grow stale and dry. They’ll heave up smells of their lunch. They’ll cover their mouths and curl their toes into fists inside their shoes. They’ll imagine you, the writer, in the act of penning this tiny, awful, masturbatory bio. They’ll scan one inch up and see the prom picture the editors highjacked.
After that, they’ll be so put off and nauseous from it all, that they’ll have no choice but to draw a little Hitler mustache right across your upper lip. This will progress. They’ll poke the eyes out and hold a lighter to the lower half. It will produce a nasty black stain across the whole thing. If you’re lucky, the page will catch fire. First that bio will go up in smoke, then the photo. Maybe it will spread, uncontrollably, to the curtains, to the ceiling, to the Christmas tree or the house cat, or an old mattress. Everything will burn. The fire will be blown by hurricane force winds engulfing every paper mill with a hundred mile radius.
Only then, after all of those printed bios have turned into soft, gray dust will things be okay again. The evidence lost to the wind. The readers too blistered and shellshocked to remember the horrid third person blurb. All will be well.
All but that triangular space in your brain. the special unshakable memory that holds onto that gutless bio. It holds it like a cigarette lighter under the thick skin of you heel. It doesn’t burn straight away. It takes a few seconds to get through the callus to the nerves. Then it jolts you like electricity. It brings shame in buckets and douses you with them. The author bio is like the first girlfriend that cheated on you, before you knew how sharp the edges of love were. It slices you in half. You may recover, eventually. You’ll stitch yourself up and trudge along, but there will always be that scar. Staring back at you, with one hand tucked into the lapel of its prom jacket — as a reminder, that you suck for ever agreeing to write a despicable, third-person bio. Ughhk.
