SoMa Literary Review

War Boy

By Kief Hillsbery

A Clockwork SoMa

By Kemble Scott
Editor SoMa Literary Review
San Francisco
June 2000

When Anthony Burgess wrote the rebellious A Clockwork Orange he constructed a new language. Nadsat. By combining Russian with English slang, Burgess hoped the language would help distance the reader from the graphic "ultraviolence" perpetrated by his characters.

It’s not rape, after all. It’s the "old in-and-out."

Kief Hillsbery’s War Boy is also written in another tongue, one that can neither hear nor speak. It’s the "kewl with a k" voice of 14-year-old deaf mute Radboy, whose prose is a combination of e-mail chat, skateboarder slang, and the remnants of a troubled childhood drenched in mass media consumption. While Burgess made Clockwork’s Alex face conformity or death, Hillsbery brings us to life on the farthest edge of America’s social fringe.

San Francisco.

South of Market.

SoMa.

But instead of being distanced by this new language and strange world, we like it here. A literary universe where punctuation and grammar are as foreign as regular meals and eight hours of sleep.

Radboy escapes from the ultimate dysfunctional biological family and finds a new one. He’s rescued by a fellow skateboarder and taken to SoMa’s basement world of meth dealers, revolutionaries, HIV lovers, missing pet rabbits and aging rock stars.

Radboy, who still gets pubescent thrills over the sparks his board can create on granite curbs, is the most worldly of this adopted new family. Not being able to hear all of the planet’s endless chatter means Radboy has absorbed his knowledge through words, even if some of them have been television closed-captioning. He’s young and deaf, but he’s smart.

Which is why the others are so eager to follow when Radboy suggests a little war on corporate America. It’s revenge for the death of someone he never met.

His journey takes him into SoMa’s underworld of drugs, dark rooms and gay subculture. He learns that (for some) gay means sticking to one’s own kind. Just like some "deaf boyz just live silent days silent nights with no hearing friends and hardly anything to do with hearing people. They just don’t trust them. They’d rather be around someone they don’t have anything in common with who’s deaf than their fucking soul mate who’s hearing."

With Radboy’s young view, Hillsbery takes us on a compelling journey through a world of earthquakes, pay toilets turned into "crack houses," and the dark DJ booth at 6^th Street’s famous club The End Up. "It’s never-never land really. The way you think it will be when you grow up someday and can do whatever you want eat ice cream for breakfast Lucky Charms for dinner stay up all night every night so you don’t miss anything. And maybe that’s why the only thing standing still down there is time. Because however old they are and some are even forty they’re all waiting to grow up and putting off everything until they do and what do they call themselves. Club kids."

This gritty urban life is full of wonders, and suburbia is a four-letter-word. At one point, the band of misfits discovers there’s no place in San Francisco to buy arms for its little war, so they hit the road.

"It’s called Fremont. And in the world according to Finn it’s basically beyond the valley of the fucktards. But what the hey. It’s not like we’re moving there. Just driving there."

Conformity is the real enemy, and Radboy only sees the joy in radical individuality. "I want to be the same. I want to be that pure. I never want to be a stranger to myself. Like most people are."

He will learn the price paid for thinking like that. And for speaking with a such a unique voice.

It is the language of War Boy that’s the real story here. Radboy’s shorthand for what he sees speaks volumes more than the plot. FA, NFW, and WTF are the abbreviations of the realm of grrls and kweers. They live by rules such as "All Storytellers Lie," "Ignore Heroes" and "Never Make Decisions Based on Fear."

Through its provocative use of language, Clockwork brought us to a possible near future. With Kubrick’s help it became cult classic rallying cry for those who fought conformity. It was a warning of what could happen when compliance becomes more dangerous than ultraviolent individuality. Maybe human beings were supposed to do more with their lives than just consume and die.

San Francisco and SoMa once embraced that thought. Or at least a watered down version of it. Hillsbery brilliantly takes us to that time and place.

But even the author admits by putting a date on his story that War Boy is pure 20^th Century. A glimpse of SoMa’s near past. This is historical fiction. Dotcom money means there’s no room these days for the fringe world of Radboy and his friends. SoMa was home to the last remnants of the Free Love city that once embraced all types of people. It now comes with a price of admission too steep for anyone making less than six figures. Clean Pottery Barn design is quashing individuality, especially the messy type seen by Radboy. The interesting characters and places in Hillsbery’s SoMa are quickly being bulldozed and replaced by Starbucks franchises, million-dollar lofts, and GetRichQuick.com.

If only Radboy and his cohorts targeted something web for their war.

Maybe that’s for the next book.

And it would be kewl with a k.

Related Links: Nadsat, War Boy, The End Up