My current work is a dystopian novel, set in the year 2068 titled: Datesville; Out of the Land of Bondage!  A so called “Grand Depression” has engulfed the United States of America since 2029, almost forty years, and it seems endless to the millions of homeless people, trying to survive throughout the country.  Harvey Orange is our main character (and our first person narrator, telling the story) and a journalist who has recently fallen on hard times and now finds himself entering the world of the unfortunate people he has written so many stories about.  I hope you enjoy this little sample from Datesville, Chapter 4.

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Excerpt from Chapter 4 — The Hideous Depression

So eight months pass, and right before I move from New York to Tulsa, I lose phone service for not paying my bill, and I haven’t, yet, been able to replace it.  I’m sure Mom must wonder why I haven’t called.  Now, fifteen months have passed since then; I’ve tried calling twice using the pay-booth, but both times she did not answer.  Probably she did not recognize the number when the call came in and that was why she didn’t pick up.  Or perhaps she is afraid some other medical examiner from some other part of the country is calling with news about Patsy that she’d rather not hear.  So I’ve lost touch with my mother, and now I have no idea what the weather is doing in Churchill or what TV programs Mom finds entertaining.  Sorry, that was cruel.  And to be fair, when she and I still had contact, I wasn’t sharing all of the nitty gritty details of my life with her, either.  So she didn’t know anything about my deteriorating situation at the time nor how bad it has gotten since.

There is something else, perhaps, I should mention about myself—or about my career, I should say—because, if I neglect it, you might assume that my current predicament has somehow caught me by surprise.  It hasn’t really, or at least not completely.  I’ve known theoretically that something like this can happen to anyone, myself included.

See, my bread and butter story has never been the billionaire profile, like the one I planned to write featuring Marcus Purcell.  The billionaire profile has always and only been a bonus gig.  It pays well but audience interest in such an article is extremely narrow, limited mostly to those who like the SOB featured in the story.  No, my real bread and butter is, and has always been, the plight of the common American during this so called Grand Depression which began, by the way, in October of 2029, a year before my birth.  The Grand Depression has dragged on now for some forty years and appears to have no end.  “Grand!”  What a poor choice of adjective, if you ask me!  It implies that what people in this country incessantly endure is somehow magnificent—in a good way—or at least important.  But I say, why not call it what it is?  How about the Hideous or Perpetual Depression?  Or why not the Really Shitty Depression?  Wouldn’t these descriptors seem a bit more accurate?  Grand my ass!  Anyway—

But I’m one of the lucky ones (at least I was until recently) because I’ve managed to escape the dregs of this epoch and have avoided the great cesspool of terrible misery and despair into which so many of my fellow countrymen, and -women, have fallen.  But as stated, I’ve written upwards of forty to fifty articles which have appeared widely, over the years, in well-read periodicals and on popular news sites, describing the sufferings of ordinary people from every walk of life.  And for these bread and butter stories, there never seemed to be a lack of material because it was available everywhere throughout the good ol’ U S of A.

My stories featured former factory workers, school teachers, IT engineers, among so many others, who spent years outdoors in tent-camps, on desolate windblown mountains, in swamplands or deserts, in wooded ravines and on riverbanks, not to mention in the crumbling buildings of inter-cities, or on the margins of dangerous freeways.  Most of these lived in such conditions without shelter, for thirty years or more.  The old-timers were those who remembered life before the crash.  These were the best stories because they depicted the loss of a way of life which the victims, to some extent, had enjoyed.  Not many old-timers yet survive because so many perished prematurely.

I’ve written, too, about people who lived without homes, apartments, bathrooms, and running water for their entire lives—second-generation homeless, as they are known—who were still youths when their stories appeared in magazines they would never read.  Their mothers told how they gave birth in tents, and counted themselves lucky because so many former nurses also populated the camps in those days and were exceptionally generous and goodhearted women who volunteered as midwives and delivered their babies.

For ten years, I traveled and lived out of motels and wrote these stories, describing, basically, only one story—over and over again:  The story’s protagonist was always a middle- or working-class American who lost her job for one reason or another, who couldn’t regain financial stability thereafter, no matter how hard she tried, who prior to her present dilemma could never fathom losing everything she owned, including her family but, of course, did, and who, up until the very day I interviewed her, refused to relinquish hope that one day—without even the prospect of gainful employment anywhere in sight and suffering failing health because of lack of decent nutrition—that one day she would reclaim the modest dream of a “normal life” and that somehow she would find again what had slipped through her fingers a decade or two earlier.  This same protagonist would never concede that homelessness might be the last chapter of her life.  “No, no, this isn’t going to beat me,” she’d say, but in every case it was homelessness that won in the end.

And for ten years, periodicals, catering to the apparatchik-class of the American audience, whose hearts were “crushed” over the tragedy of the Grand Depression, couldn’t get enough of my stories, especially when uploaded with photos of the poverty and squalor in which these individuals lived.  But that was then.

Now Mark Tank informs me that the market for my bread and butter story has dried up, that people these days want “uplifting, inspirational narratives about those who’ve escaped the abyss of poverty and homelessness and pulled their lives out of the toilet.”  Basically, what the American audience wants to read now is that the Grand Depression has, at last, faded into history, so that they no longer have to pay attention to it.  Yes, that would be nice, I tell Mark, except there are no such narratives!  Nothing out there has changed! I tell him.

Or maybe inspirational narratives do exist, he suggests, and you’ve just overlooked them.

Whatever, I say.