page 15

Johnny Truant is on the outermost layer of this story. He was a tattoo artist who never quite made it to working on people, a drug abusing club-goer who used women as if they were just another drug to make him feel good, and, more importantly, a nobody who happened upon the tattered and damaged remains of an old mans manuscript. For as chauvinistic as he was, he was never quite as bad as his friend Lude (which, incidentally, is suspiciously similar to the word “lewd.” The author must have been running low on creativity when he named this character). The only thing that mattered to him was getting high and getting laid and he would often simply use his drugs just to get with women (who were usually so psychologically damaged that it was like taking candy from a baby). Until the manuscript engulfed his life, Johnny wasn't much different. It even got him into big trouble with Kyrie and her boyfriend Gdansk man. Women served only the purpose of informants and sex objects to him, so they rarely surfaced in his story. He would call them to meet up and talk about Zampano and his work, usually asking about one or more translations he needed, and somehow end up fucking every one of them. There are three possible interpretations of this. One being that this is how it actually happened. Two is that he used the manuscript as a means of getting into women's pants and just made up all the stuff about him going insane to make a better story. This interpretation is actually pretty likely, especially given Johnny's history as a wild story teller.
continue to next page