Junky Funky

The last I heard about this, it was in the possession of one of my friends whom I lost touch with. It may turn out someday that it is still in his possession, and has not actually become a lost work. If that ever happens, I’ll have to transcribe the whole thing up on this blog, but until then I’m going to have to assume it is lost.

This was a collaborative work done around 5th grade by me and my friends Matt, Josh, and David. It was Matt’s idea if I recall correctly. He said he thought it would be cool if we started writing a story and every night one of us would write a different part of it. The rest of us all said that we had often thought of the same idea at one point or another, and had just been waiting for someone else to suggest it. (This is probably one of those things that occurs to every child at one point or another as a cool idea).

Somehow for reasons I don’t remember, I ended up being the one who was given the job of starting it off. The only instructions were I was to write one page only, and then leave the story for others to continue after that. No other caveats were given, and I was free to take the story in any direction I chose. In the end, I chose a bit of a bizarre tale which was meant half as a joke, but which the others agreed to follow willing enough.

Actually, the first installment ended up being two pages, because of some confusion. I was in the habit of skipping every other line when writing on lined paper because this made my appalling penmanship look slightly less messy. So I made an appeal, and was told if I skipped every other line, I could use two pages. There was a bit of a miscommunication however as to whether this was one side, or two pages front and back. I turned in two pages front and back, which wasn’t what Matt had wanted, but we ended up deciding that the first installment could be a bit longer because you need time to set the plot.

Junky Funky was the name of the hero, largely just because that was the first name that came into my head, and it was half as a joke. It’s the kind of name only a 5th grader would think of. But after we had been writing about him for a while, we actually got used to the name and it didn’t seem so funny.

I think Junky Funky was a forest ranger, or a zoologist, or some sort of animal related job. Somehow he stumbles across a plot by the bad guys, who plan to exterminate all the wolves in the world. And I think something involving time travel as well. There is a bit of a fight, Junky Funky is knocked unconscious, and then he has to go back in time to chase the bad guys and stop their evil plan.

At this point in my life, I felt like I had to write something with wolves in it. I had a reputation to keep up. The other guys were expecting it of me.
Actually we all had our own animals that we liked, and we always incorporated our favorite animals into all of our stories and games. David liked gorillas, Josh liked Duck-billed Platypuses, and Matt…Damn, for some reason I’m drawing a blank on what Matt used to like. Koalas, maybe. I’m going to have to look him up one of these days and refresh my memory.

Anyway, all of our favorite animals were incorporated into the story. The bad guys were expanded to be against all of our favorite animals, not just wolves. Junky Funky had to save all these animals, and at various points was helped by them as well. (I seem to remember something about Junky Funky being in a Nasa like control room run by talking gorillas, which must mean at some point we decide to give some of these animals more human like attributes.)

As to the bad guys…I’m not sure really why they wanted to kill off all animals. I don’t think we ever delved seriously into their motivations. I suppose this is a serious literary flaw, but if you look at the Saturday morning cartoons we were brought up on, is it any wonder we had bad guys who were bad just for the sake of badness?

I think in Matt’s next installment, Junky Funky goes back in time, is able to briefly foil the bad guys plan, returns to modern day, and the story continues in the present, where it is just one long battle between Junky Funky and the bad guys, filled with all the standard narrow escapes and rescues and battle scenes. My mind forgets the chronology, and I remember the story only in fragments.

Josh, at one point, had the bad guys actually take over our school, and then wrote himself in as the kid who saved the school. This was of course every kids fantasy to save the school from terrorists, but Josh was the only one of us with the ego to actually write it down on paper and then submit it to the rest of us. Matt was half genuinely disgusted, and half amused at this, but he took it as another opportunity to mock Josh.

I followed Josh in the circulation order, so I continued the story from there. I was doubly intrigued, both by the concept of writing oneself into one’s own story, and also by the humor of Matt’s disgust with Josh, so I tried to continue the theme in my next chapter to increase the humor.

Josh had not explicitly named the rest of us in his chapter (he had said something like “Josh and his friends”) so I proceeded to name David, Matt, and myself as Josh’s collaborators. My first act was to kill off myself, because the last thing I wanted was to be accused of Josh-like egotism. The bad guys had all of us at gun-point, I attempted a brash escape, and was promptly shot. That left David, Matt and Josh as Junky Funky’s remaining side kicks.

Matt and David were not pleased about being written into the story, nor with the fact that I was continuing to emphasize Josh’s character. Josh went along with it for a while, but as the story continued even he began to tire of the gag. Every time the chapter came around to me again, I would find some excuse to bring back Josh into the story. Sometimes David and Matt as well, but always Josh.

The rest of them were at times upset about this, but they put up with it. Only once did Matt (who followed me in the rotation) resort to using the “Junky Funky woke up, and realized the proceeding chapter had all been a dream” tactic on me, and that was when I genuinely had gone to far.

It started, as usual, with Josh going to far. Josh wrote in Samus Aran (sp?), the hero from then popular Metroid video game, into the story. Samus Aran crashes through the wall, rescues Junky Funky from the bad guys, and tells Junky Funky, “call me Samus Aran, for I will never tell you my true name.” (If memory serves, this was before it was common knowledge that Samus Aran was actually a girl, this being only revealed at the end of the Metroid game. I think he was a masculine character in our story).

Matt was again appalled at Josh’s chapter, and I once again took the ball and ran with it. In my chapter Samus Aran turns to Junky Funky and said something like “Oh you know what, I’ll tell you my real name anyway. It’s Josh. Want to know another secret? I don’t have a brain”. (In those days, we used to tease Josh by saying he didn’t have a brain. Somehow it seemed like the height of repartee at the time.)

Anyway, everyone agreed this had gone too far, and Matt erased the previous two chapters with the dream sequence.

After that last outrage, I made an effort to be more conciliatory. I didn’t kill off Matt and David, but I gave them a nice send off where they part company from Junky Funky, and ride off into the proverbial sunset. I kept using the Josh character, but I made an effort to use him more seriously, and eventually everyone came around to accepting Josh as Junky Funky’s sidekick.

By the start of 6th grade, Matt had transferred schools, and Josh, David, and myself took it upon our selves to bring the Junky Funky story around to an end. But of course it had to be an all out climatic end, pulling out all the stops. We decided that the one page rule was to be ended. The only goal was to build up as much action as humanely possible before handing the story off to the next person. (I think this was mainly Josh and I at this point. For some reason I don’t remember David writing too much of these end parts, but I could be wrong.)

For the climatic final, we also agreed to bring back all the characters that Junky Funky had thus far interacted with, which meant especially Josh. In theory that also met David and Matt come back to make another appearance, although I don’t remember if that was the plan or the reality. I only remember writing about Junky Funky and Josh near the end.

At one point, either Junky Funky or Josh (I think it was Junky Funky) gets his arm cut off in a fight, and it is later replaced by a super strong robotic arm. I don’t remember which arm was lost, but I remember writing scenes in which Junky Funky uses his arm to cut down trees, or punches all the way through the chest of a bad guy. (I think both of those scenes were part of a 6-page long blow-by-blow fight scene between Junky Funky and Josh against a bunch of bad guys. I wrote it up, then it got lost and I wasn’t sure what happened to it. I accused the real Josh of loosing it after I handed it off to him, but later I found it in my folder. By that point, however, we had already written ahead with the story, so I guess it never got to technically be cannon status.)

Eventually we brought it to some sort of conclusion, although I don’t remember what that was. At that point we decided our story was epic enough that we wanted to give it a proper write up, so we gave it to a classmate who had a type writer and knew how to use it (this was in the days before word processors were common) and paid her something like $5 to type the whole thing up. I don’t remember ever seeing the finished product after that. Last I heard it was residing in the house of Matt, where it is either still there today, or one day went out with the garbage.

Josh's recollections:
I e-mailed Josh, the only one I'm still semi in touch with, about his memories. He's not near as verbose as me, but he did send me a couple paragraphs:

Junky Funky. I haven't thought of that in a long time. didn't matt end up with the transcript we paid jenny to type up? Wasn't that the story that ended up with terrorists in ada christian, time travel and the continent of animal comming into play somehow?

I feel like you might have killed your own character off in a bathroom collapse. Other than that, my memory is very shaky.

Influence on Other Works
Because I had a lot of fun writing this with my friends, “The Story of Giddo” was an attempt to replicate this within my family. It didn’t work out so well, mostly because my siblings were too young to write whole pages on their own, and we had to trade off sentence by sentence