You Know My Fucking Name

Warren Ellis has let Transmetropolitan‘s Spider Jerusalem out of his box with a frighteningly accurate portrayal of el presidente and his daddy:

When they’re not around, I put the TV on. Purely out of curiosity, you understand. Up here, we can snatch some forty thousand channels out of the air. Most of them, of course, are still showing CSI and LAW AND ORDER. There are twelve different channels showing LAW AND ORDER 24 hours a day. In some countries, Jerry Orbach has become a cargo-cult figure. They don’t understand the language or much of the situations. They comprehend only that Jerry Orbach is immortal. They watch and divine from the show that he outlives the young gods who are selected to be his assistants. Criminals fall. DAs change. Assistants fade away. Jerry Orbach is forever. Jerry Orbach is, in fact, some kind of avenging God-King who will hunt and incarcerate Scum until the end of time.

Speaking of which, here’s the President.

Not the real President, you understand. The actual elected President is elsewhere, no longer the President, hiding in some remote residence with a Federally-mandated Secret Service team who make no secret of their loathing for him and shit on his breakfast every morning. No, he’s long gone. I’m talking about the Acting President. The one who wasn’t elected.

The one who looks like one of those fucking experimental Chimp-Things we used to stick electrodes in and fire into space.

The worst thing is that I used to know the bastard.

Back then, he was simply Junior, living large in Texan sinbins at night while his crazed Daddy ran naked among his cattle herds, his awful ululating howl echoing across the plains as he brought down another cow with his garotte. I met him once. He showed me the garotte and told me it was made “from the guts of Sand Gooks.” Daddy was obsessed with the Sand Gooks. He saw them everywhere. His handlers shivered nervously as Daddy got down on his hands and knees and sniffed my crotch like a dog. “You,” he snarled, “have known the dusky terrorist pleasure of a Sand Gook woman.” He asked me what it was like and stuck his gnarled hand into his pants. His handlers rammed a sedative spike into the top of his head and dragged him off, brownish urine spraying from within his twitching fist.

Junior just laughed. He slapped me on the shoulder and said, “Let’s go to the den, Fellow American.” The “den” was a bunker under the family mansion. There was a mountain of cocaine on the big teak desk there. Gulls were flapping around its peaks. Tony goddamn Montana would have quailed. Junior slipped on a gas mask, shoved its open intake pipe into the pile, and flipped on the compressor. Enough coke to kill a flock of young tyrannosaurs hoovered up into Junior’s head. He ripped off the mask and shrieked. Bloody residue dripped out of the pipe and back on to the pile. Eyes bulging, he looked down at the pile. He yelped. “My God! I see Jesus! I see His Face in these Satanic drugs! I am Saved! Glory Be!”

He looked at my face and laughed. “Relax, sport. I’m just practising. I’m going to be President one day.”

I backed up towards the door, reaching behind me and cranking the gun hidden under my jacket up to the “Rectal Vesuvius” setting. “I thought you were a religious man, like your daddy.”

“Ringo says religion is a political tool,” he honked, squeezing his eyes shut and trying to claw through to his sinuses.

“Who the fuck is Ringo?”

Junior wrenched open a draw in the desk and ripped from it a scrawny-looking cuddly toy with its eyes plucked out and awful stains on its mouth.

“THIS is Ringo!” he exulted. “RINGO is my FRIEND!” He clutched the scabby thing to a chest already pebbledashed with cocaine, bloodclots and snot.

My back bumped into the door. “And? he says things, does he?”

“Yeahhhhhh,” Junior sighed, stroking Ringo’s stomach in a disturbingly sexual way.

“Well, um, excellent. I should be going. I have to accept a shipment of dolphin steaks tonight.”

“No,” he intoned. “You have to press his stomach.”

I took a good grip on the gun’s butt. “Why?”

“You have to. You can’t leave until you’ve pressed his stomach.”

Well, shit, I thought. How much harm can that do? Junior held the skinny mutilated horror out at arm’s length towards me. “Press his fucking stomach!”

I moved forward and pushed two fingers into the thing’s gut. A voicebox ground into life, with the hideous rasp of an eighty-year-old chainsmoking hooker.

“Women are best when they can’t talk any more.”

I flinched back, but he grabbed my wrist with a crazy man’s strength. “Morrrrre.”

I pressed the stomach again.

“Where’s my dinner, bitch?”

And:

“God says queers are special firewood.”

I twisted my arm around and he squealed as his wrist bent, but he refused to let go. I put the base of my left hand into his nose and turned it into a bathmat. He reeled backwards, clutching the toy, his fingers twisted into it. It kept rasping: “Americans are born, not made.” “Stupid people just like stuff simple.” “If they can’t see you drinking, you’re not an alcoholic.”

Junior dragged himself into the seat behind the desk. “You’re doomed now, you stupid fuck. I’m gonna be the President one day. Daddy says. He says Presidents are people like us.”

Ringo said: “Fuck America and get rich like astronauts.”

“Oh God,” Junior groaned. “Where’s my Womb Thing?”

He scrabbled in the desk for a moment and produced a glass screw-top jar filled with a thick, clotted yellow fluid. Junior unzipped a badly discoloured little penis and began to jerk off into the jar with the maniacal fury of an ugly ape in humping season.

He left him there. I believed it was all over for Junior: that soon he would be found wearing a Big Bird suit while balls-deep in a spaniel on Main Street at noon. But no. Here he is on my television, telling me he’s my President now. America’s last sick joke at its own expense, before it sinks into the finality of senility and incontinence.