Curator Rex shared his home with this pulpish prole for a week. He retired early from a corporate job in order to look out for his widowed mom, and to write a book he has been researching for 30 years! Mom is a doll, a good cook, who broke me down day-by-day… just eating a little potato, some carrots, just a spoonful of corn—bread I could pass up, but homemade dumplings? Then, by my last day, Easter Sunday, I was eating carrot cake and chocolate pie for desert! Eggs and sausage every morning for breakfast was good for the writing thews, as was the pot of coffee for the nerves. There is something special about living with another writer, knowing that he understands the many lashes of the muses, two rooms away, as you both make your separate way.

Curator X is a man of fierce and precise intellect and a good narrative sense. Having gone to university to be a film maker, and then going to Hollywood and discovering it was gay, treacherous, toxic and insane, the man some ten years my junior, went to work for a large company taking care of their documentation. As a retired man he devotes his time to his history omnibus and curating his own family history. He acquires old photos, researches them, cleans them, scans them at a high digital resolution, and then tediously restores them. He is a film historian who helped with my movie education by showing me classics, such as the Maltese Falcon and Fort Apache. He can name the actors, biographical anecdotes of the directors, sometimes extensive narratives of the authors.

The man plays it close to the vest, having never let me know a thing about himself, simply offering writing space. He told me that his coworkers of three decades had no idea about his thoughts, preferences and hobbies until he retired. We traded my book master files for much of his digital pulp library. He is hoping to be able to figure out how many books I have written. I got much the better of the trade.

I named him Curator Rex based on his history project and his size, standing nearly seven feet and having a voice like a gravel smasher. Then he invited me into his room/office. He reads and writes in bed, the bed looking like a recliner for his size 17 shoes. At the foot of his bed is a large screen TV—to me. To him it is his desk top screen. He has a massive digital archive, backed up in ways I do not fathom, organized chronologically and by source. His command of sources, the use of letters, interviews, published works, estate archives, photos and tours of the places where his subjects lived and died, is astounding. Then I discover he knows the names, careers and afterlife of stunt men from 75 years ago!

For all of this he is pained by the academic drones who dominate his field, by a lack of narrative skill and more than that, the masturbatory overuse of footnotes intended for peers, and not the common reader—as if any reader can be common in our post-literate time.

I did not expect to find out that this historian was a Harm City reader. Here are three samples of his unapologetic dialogues. The following is written from memory four days later, and amounts to about 50% paraphrase, as Curator Rex is a new subject for me, with a diction more unique than what is imperfectly salvaged here. Capitalization of the n-word varies with intensity.

Race

“Just like you and your family were driven out of Baltimore by an army of Niցցers, mine were driven from Southeast Chicago by Niցցers. Even then, in Indiana, the violent crime that was committed was by the tiny minority of niցցers. Then I go to school and am taught to worship niցցers. By the time I am in LA working, I am surrounded by violent Niցցers, am told that it is my fault that they are violent—and I suppose their stupidity, laziness and immorality are my fault as well! The corruption of the Boomer mind, the deep steeping in guilt, has doomed this country to the loss of all of the hallowed traditions of our ancestors. The democrats do not even realize that they are nearly extinct, that their party will soon be all minorities—angry idiot, racists pining for an ever larger part of an ever shrinking pie, at the every same time that their lying and thieving accelerates the decline. Gen-X are the generation that first saw the Niցցer for what it is.

“Racism is real, and it reflects reality. Asians have no time for guilt. I knew many Koreans—the heroes of the LA Riots—who had endless stories of niցցers attacking them, robbing them. The other Asians get it too—whites and Asians are the only civilized races. One Thai woman I worked with went to jury duty and told the judge that she could not sit on a jury for the trial of a Mexican, that Mexicans, were stupid, violent, thieves, that they stunk and must by guilty as accused! The judge could not talk any guilt into her and the lawyers—even the prosecutor—wanted nothing to do with her. I am a big man living in a place that is an oven in summer, so, I, don’t, have, to, live with NIGGERS! The Boomers will have to die out before reality can become part of the American viewpoint again. Gen-Z gets it—they have been fucked even harder than Gen-X. When you are being attacked, threatened and discriminated against, by and on behalf of, NIGGERS it is kind of hard to catch that white guilt.”

…

Conspiracy Theories

“Elaborate conspiracy theories are mostly based on a person not working in a large corporate environment. Subtle neglect—making sure the presidential candidate has poor security—is more like it. When you work in a large organization you realize that you can never keep a secret from getting out.

…

Vampire Fiction

For fifty years vampire fiction has been plain old bad story telling. God was in Dracula, as the counterpoint to the evil monster. Of course, anything written by women about men will be gay, will have super powered monsters and evil will win, because there is no good. There is no duality in the narrative, no balance. The story becomes a dance above an abyss of hopeless dismay. As far back as the Exorcist the devil—even just a minor demon—was stronger than God. If you can put God back into a vampire story, I would read it.”

That last monologue, as well as a confidential one about the subject of his history being motivated by hatred, was the inspiration for Blood Hate.