CHAPTER 00 YEAR 00, MONTH 00 NARRATOR: FIREBIRD I remember when life was beautiful and boring. Boring is underrated. If you're lucky enough to be bored then thank your god. And tell your god I said fuck you. People call me Firebird. I was born in New Jersey USA but I grew up real fast in New South Wales Australia. Mom was an economist. She spent some time in Chile helping them get their economy off the ground. She was known as the "Chicago Gal" cuz she studied at the University of Chicago. Her mentor was a Nobel Prize winning economist named Milton Friedman. He was on the daytime talk show Donahue twice. I know this cuz Mom made us watch it both times. Dad was a radiologist. He was into cars. He taught me to drive as soon as I could reach the pedals. He loved movies. Sometimes he let me come with him to see R rated flicks. In his spare time he made electronic gizmos. He built the goddamn television we watched every night. The seventies were crazy. For a while there in New York City a bomb was going off every other day. One terrorist group alone set off a hundred bombs in New York and Chicago. A hundred bombs. A bloke in an office building found one of their bombs with twelve seconds left on the clock. He shouted "It's a bomb!" and all fifty people in the room evacuated. Fifty people in twelve seconds. I guess everyone was just ready and expecting bombs to go off at any moment. Hijackings were so common that they seriously considered building a Fake Cuba in Florida so planes could fly there when they got hijacked. And it wasn't like hitting New Year's Day in 1980 made all that shit go away. There was still an oil crisis and a hostage crisis and the Cold War. Australia's economy was going downhill the way Chile's had been so they invited Mom to give a presentation at a political conference in Sydney. Dad had just lost his job so we all tagged along. It was at this point that my life stopped being beautiful and boring and started getting ugly and interesting. The news was all over the TVs at the Sydney airport when we arrived. Bombs going off. People being shot. Not just there but all over the goddamn world. It took four hours to get through customs and immigration. Then they stopped everyone again and told us we couldn't leave the airport. Everyone was stressed the fuck out. I got out my favorite Hot Wheels car so I could have something to fuck around with. It was a 1977 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am just like the one Burt Reynolds drove in Smokey And The Bandit. Dad had this cool self winding dive watch. I asked if I could try it on and he let me. My sister was screaming that she was hungry. I got sick of listening to her scream so I told her to shut the fuck up. Mom got mad and grabbed the Hot Wheels out of my hand. She made me tell my sister I was sorry. Then she gave me some shrapnel and told me to go buy my sister some bikkies. Well she probably said cookies but whatever. "Then can I have my Hot Wheels back?" I asked. I didn't realize it at the time but I realize it now. What my mother said next was real fucking important. So I'm gonna put it in big fucking letters: ATTACHMENT LEADS TO SUFFERING I went to the newsstand and grabbed some Tim Tams. They had the new issue of Byte magazine with the IBM PC on the cover so I grabbed that too. The bloke pushed some buttons on his cash register. We call it the Big Bang but it wasn't big for everyone. It wasn't one single thing that happened. There were big bangs. There were little bangs. Hell froze over and heaven got too hot. Depends who you ask. For me it was just a little bang but it was big enough. The cash register bell rang and the drawer opened. Then there was a KABOOM. I saw my Hot Wheels Firebird go racing across the floor. The cashier had a piece of a chair stuck in his face. I wasn't sure what was going on. I grabbed the magazine and the Tim Tams and I ran after my Hot Wheels. There was smoke and fire and confusion everywhere. No one knew how to get out of there but I managed to follow that Hot Wheels car right out the exit door to the sidewalk where the cars and taxis were waiting. I bent over and picked it up. An asshole with a mohawk slammed into me and we both fell to the ground. He had a big fucking gun which he proceeded to point at my brain. "Are you going to kill me?" I asked. He chuckled. "Either that or make you stronger." Then a heap of coppers jumped on him and took away his gun. I turned around and looked out into the street. Everything was chaos except for one thing. It was like the universe was apologizing for being such an asshole to me that day cuz sitting right there before my eyes was a Stellar Blue 1975 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am. The driver's door was open. Its engine was running. The radio was playing AC/DC's Back In Black. Ok I made that last part up. Really it was Close To You by The Carpenters. But whatever. The car was sitting there calling to me. Luck is preparation plus opportunity. I got in and pulled the door closed. I rolled down the window. I took a look back at Mohawk Asshole. Cops were beating on him. He was fucked up in handcuffs. He shouted "That's my car you little shit!" I shouted "Attachment leads to suffering." I peeled out of there and drove off in my newww car! Hell yeah The Price Is Right. Johnny Olson. Bob Barker motherfucker! Once I'd gotten the hell away from that exploding airport I found a spot in the hills to pull off and watch the world burn. I ripped open them Tim Tams and munched them all down. I looked in the glovebox of my new badass car and found a pistol. Then I checked the boot. Rifles. Shotguns. Revolvers. Semiautomatics. Machine guns. Heaps of ammo. Fuck yeah. Having all them badass terrorist guns helped a lot cuz I was just a kid and I had to raise myself in the apocalypse from then on. Since we'd pushed the reset button on the whole world some of us called it Year Zero. In Year Zero I was an American kid stuck in Australia. Things were bad for a while. Assholes bumped off motherfuckers for fun or cuz they wanted to eat them. I didn't bump off too many people and I didn't eat anybody but I would have if I'd had to. As Maslow said "Grub first then ethics." Mostly I read a lot of books. Economics and electronics. I was gonna be one of them clever cunts who creates wealth by inventing shit. Not one of them assholes who grabs money out of other people's pockets. I've grabbed plenty of shit in my time but it's never been my preferred way of life. I'm probably not telling this story right cuz I'm supposed to be making you like me. I probably sound like I don't care that my family got blown to bits. If I could tell this story in the voice of that little boy then I might tell it differently. I probably cried or whatever. But we see who we were through the eyes of who we've become. Nowadays I don't give a fuck about anything. I had lots of good memories back then but that's all gone now. Everything changed that day. I became a different person. Well one of me did anyway. There's another version of me who might be that nice guy you were hoping to meet. But really he ain't so nice neither. He's gonna tell you his story too but let me get through mine first.