The Mechanical Snowman

The Procurement Man by Toadsgoboad

Volume 6, Serpent-Headed Monolith

Part Two: The Mechanical Snowman

Profanity of Tambourine

Not quite clear on the difference between the profane and the secular, I tried out for the Church of the Mechanical Snowman band. My instrument in those days was the tambourine. I hadn’t yet taken up the saxophone.
“Brother Toadsgoboad!” The priest welcomed me. “Are you ready to praise Freezer Bag Charlie with sweet-sounding song?”
“Sure.” I replied, though not as whole-heartedly as most of the other youths in the room would have done. Although I then had no idea that I would one day establish my own religion, I was still far from a blind faith believer. My mother said that I had always been very cautious as a young child. My lifelong fear of getting my teeth knocked out is related to this, I guess.
“You brought your own instrument?” The priest, a man with a pot belly and a past as a homosexual prostitute, seemed surprised as he pointed to the rounded leather case I carried.
“I did.” My beardless face showed no commitment. Was it good or bad that I had brought my own instrument?
“Well, take a seat and we’ll get started.”
A picture of Freezer Bag Charlie, the Mechanical Snowman and focus of worship, hung on the wall opposite. The picture illustrated a scene from the story of Freezer Bag Charlie and the Room Socket Rooster, taken from the sacred text of Redemptive Snowfaith, The Adequation. I had been given a copy a couple of weeks before, when I first started going to the church. Despite my promise to delve into its treasures with spiritual hunger, I was still too consumed with reading everything William Faulkner ever wrote to make the time for any other books.
“Everyone, let’s begin with ‘Soda for a Low-Hanging Moon,’ OK?” The priest had taken up his guitar and placed a lyric sheet for this song, which he had written, on the overhead projector. He began to play. All of us, accompanying him with our tambourines, kazoos, recorders, electric bass, and beetle trapped into a macaroniphone, together made a (to be truthful) unholy din.
Afterwards, as the kids enjoyed bulk purchase cookies and fruit punch, the priest told me frankly that I had “no sense of rhythm.” However, if I was willing to dance around a little in the ecstasy of worship, he might could use me.

The Moment When All is Revealed

Jennie grabbed Herbert’s arm and whispered to him without taking her eyes off the screen, “This is it.”
Herbert grunted appropriately. He began licking his fingers vigorously. He had had enough popcorn and now wanted no traces of it on him. Moistened towelettes—one more thing to remember to bring next time!
On the screen the monster Sarabdii has the hero and his girlfriend cornered in the professor’s tiny secret reading room.
“What’s he waiting for?” Veera, the girlfriend in the glasses of an intellectual, screeched. She and Stanley, who was presented as quick and able, if slightly less bookish than Veera, stood huddled behind the professor’s high-backed chair and faced the door. Stanley shook his head. He took up a small bronze bust of Charles Bukowski from a niche in the bookshelf beside him. It might serve as a weapon and he so hefted it in his hand.
A hissing noise issued from Sarabdii. One at first thought it was a prelude to something horrible, but the camera’s pan down to the creature’s torso indicated otherwise. Indeed, certain scales, horns, and flakes on his chest now were drawn aside. The whole of the chest opened up like a door on an airplane. Something was inside the chest cavity. When the steam issuing from various pipes about the opening had cleared one could see a man sitting inside.
“It’s the professor!” Stanley shouted.
“What?” Veera was floored at the revelation.
“I should think,” the voice of the professor was oily, a sneer coiled in each word, “That an even greater shock would be that Sarabdii is a machine.”
After this followed a quick shot of Stanley and Veera clutching and swallowing.
Back to the professor, who was now stepping down from his perch.
“One that I designed and built,” he concluded. His feet were just inside the tiny room.
Stanley held the Bukowski bust at shoulder height. Its craggy nose would cause some damage if swung effectively. He began to mock the professor’s standards.
Herbert leaned into Jennie’s ear.
“I’ve got to go pee.” He whispered.

Bird-Like Installations for Jet Wiener

Jet Wiener, half-mechanical crime fighter and botanist, accepted a gift of bird-like installations from the grateful people of Smermerk. The housing for these installations, however, was provided by Lincoln Voodoo, a band of musicians whom Jet Wiener had once saved from internet pirates. Now officially retired from both fighting crime and botany, Jet Wiener had time to roam the rooms of his installation building and admire their contents.
One day, while in the act of roaming, he discovered a small door inside the restroom (local building codes required that there be a restroom in any building, even a private one, devoted to art) that he hadn’t noticed before. He opened it and, bending over, looked inside.
“Why, it’s tiny bird-like installations!” He gasped. These installations, it seems, had never been installed, having been deemed by the Art Gratitude Committee of the Smermerk city council too small to merit inclusion in the main exhibit rooms. Some have disputed this, claiming that the small installations were always intended as part of the overall gift, representing, supposedly, even the smallest of Smermerk citizenry, but, so goes this theory, the architect hired by Lincoln Voodoo could find no way of integrating their display into his vision, so he tucked them away in the secret closet. I don’t know if I believe this story, but there is corroborating evidence (if you see it that way) in the fact that the architect, Ulrich Mauer, passed on the task of designing the restroom to an underling, seeing its inclusion as a galling disruption in the overall conception.
Jet Wiener, too big to go all the way into the little room, reached inside and removed one of these lesser bird-like pieces of art. Perhaps it was the onset of middle age, so abhorrent to one who had been closely identified with youth and vitality, but Jet Wiener, in looking on these ersatz avians, longed to fly away like a bird. It was then that he first began planning his next move.
Early the following spring Jet Wiener could be seen in the parking lot of his installation building standing with arms outstretched. Small bird-like objects had been mounted on his shoulders. At his word of command they began to flap their resin-stiffened wings. Jet Wiener took to the air! Unfortunately, due to aeronautical ratios, his weight distribution forced him to fly upside down.

Moist Pouch Facilitates Congress

Cobohickey plunged the furred exterior bag into a bucket of water and then shook it a couple of times over the bucket to keep it from dripping as much as possible on the floor. He was in a hurry. Senator Bufflingag was already late for his meeting with the Concerned Sons of Mothers’ Concerns.
“Senator, wait!” Cobohickey called as loudly as he dared to his boss as the latter was just stepping into an elevator.
“About time.” Bufflingag growled. He was carrying a purse borrowed from one of his secretaries. He exchanged it for the bag that Cobohickey handed him. Cobohickey held the purse away from himself. There was an inch of water in the bottom. The senator expostulated testily.
“Moist, Cobohickey, moist, not sopping wet!” He held the bag by thumb and forefinger and slung his other hand free of excess drops.
“Sorry, Senator, I couldn’t find the bag and then—“
“Yes, yes, I’ve got to go.” Bufflingag cut him off. Just before the elevator doors closed he reminded Cobohickey to give Janet a check for reimbursement for the use of her purse.
Cobohickey sighed and let his gaze fall to the floor after the senator had disappeared. He turned and began the trek back the way he had come. This whole business of supplying the senator with a moist pouch two, sometimes three times a day was so time consuming! And messy. Cobohickey avoided looking at the custodian mopping towards him.
If only there was a way for Senator Bufflingag, and indeed, all the senators, for they each required moist pouches, to have what they needed without all of this hassle, Cobohickey thought as he neared the office. Despite his idealistic optimism (or optimistic idealism, if you prefer), no miraculous revelation came to him however.
“Here’s your purse back, Janet.” He held it up so the secretary could see.
“Oh, you caught up with him. Good.” Janet held out a plastic grocery bag for Cobohickey to drop her purse into.
“He reminded me to write you a check for its use.” Cobohickey headed for his desk.
“Oh, that’s alright.” Janet smiled. “It’s patent leather. It’ll dry out. Besides, I don’t mind. Anything to help the boss carry out the business of the people.”

Place the Finger in the Receptacle as Shown

Mamalien read the laminated instructional poster on the back of the door carefully. He even read the tiny print at the bottom concerning copyright and the company that printed the poster. Again he returned the larger words near the top.
“After severing the chosen finger…” they read. Those were the words. Mamalien took a deep breath and let it out with his mouth pursed as if to whistle. He did not whistle, however, deciding to withhold that bit of amusement for afterwards.
“…place the finger in the receptacle as shown.” There was a strangely stylized illustration next to the sentence, in which the finger depicted could just as easily be a dildo or a bullet. It was perhaps not so strange that the illustration did not show a ragged edge on the cut end of the finger nor gouts of blood all about. In fact, Mamalien mused as he studied the picture, it was strange that no one had vandalized the poster with just such additions. He grimaced thinking that he hadn’t had the foresight to bring along a red marker. He looked at the floor. No blood. No traces of it. Everything cleaner than an industrial kitchen. So it wouldn’t matter if he had brought along a marker. The people who maintained this cubicle would just clean it off the poster when they cleaned the blood off the floor.
And on the hard little seat provided. And the doorknob. And the light fixture too, Mamalien thought looking up.
What do they do about… oh yes, that’s right, he remembered, scanning the next few lines of instructions and then, much to his own amazement, pulling one of the plastic smocks described on the poster out of the little box mounted on the wall. He pulled it over his head and sat down. Sitting down was recommended.
The next step was taking one of the individually wrapped scalpels from the dispenser and removing its paper cover—without cutting yourself! Mamalien would have smiled at that wry contrast, but he couldn’t have smiled now had he been offered a toffee by a toddler. He placed his hand on the panel secured to his seat like a minimalist desk and spread his fingers. His chosen finger (chosen, he realized, in the same way one chooses an old pair of shoes to work on the septic tank) lay there like a little man. He stared at it, conjuring a face to correspond with in the depths of the nail.

Recalcitrant Pensioner Wee-Wees as Planned

Old Canterbeck still had enough fire in him to defy the authorities at every opportunity. Opportunities, however, were becoming further and further spaced apart. Here at the Rewarding Obsolescence assisted living community his defiance was now limited to refusing to watch television with everyone else. The staff insisted on wheeling him into the common room where the giant screen awaited him like a strip of flypaper in an elevator. He sneered an asymmetric sneer and looked at the ceiling. As the host of whatever mercilessly superficial program was being shown bellowed empty cheerfulness at him, Old Canterbeck began to bellow back, never taking his eyes off the ceiling.
“Goddamn ceiling tiles remind me of the surface of the moon!” he declared. He secretly wished that one of the other people in the room would acknowledge his words. He even wished that someone would enter into a conversation with him about the moon and together have a crazy dialogue about traveling there and pissing into a crater. But this latter wish was a subconscious one and probably would not have been acted upon even if someone had responded appropriately. Canterbeck’s defiance was his overriding emotion at this stage.
“Shut up!” An old woman, whose name Canterbeck had no interest in learning, turned and yelled at him, flapping a hand filled with blue veins like a custard alive with worms. “Shut up!” She repeated. The old man would not stop. Everything the man on TV said he repeated sarcastically or mocked outright, insisting on the opposite.
“Now we’re sticking our camera up Tom Selleck’s ass to look for cash and valuable prizes!” Canterbeck roared, and, finding his own words quite clever, laughed unto he coughed.
“Shut up!”
“What’s going on in here?” One of the assisted living professionals demanded as she stepped into the room, thinking, not for the first time, that she would kill herself at the first sign of dementia.
“I’m on the moon!” Canterbeck choked out. He smiled as he filled the seat of his wheelchair with urine.

The Nutritionist’s Restricted Movements

Becky, a nutritionist with Amalgamated School Provisioners, had suffered a dreadful industrial accident some years before and now was confined to a small box on neoprene wheels. All the other women in the building where she worked thought her a saint whose determination and commitment were like something out of a movie, impossible to believe, yet there on view for all to see. Each day she came to work and threw herself into the thick of things like a general directing a critical battle.
“Threw herself” is only metaphorical imagery, of course. Becky couldn’t “throw herself” under a bus, even if her relentlessly positive attitude had allowed such a thing. In fact, it was nearly miraculous the way she had been able to embezzle all the money she had and keep up her heavy work load with so much enthusiasm at the same time.
If only the women at Amalgamated School Provisioners had known! They probably would have admired her all the more. A couple of them even cried the day that Becky had brought in cupcakes for Wanda’s birthday.
“She’s so… amazing.” One of them dabbed at her nose with a tissue in the restroom as she talked about it with another. “It almost makes me sick to my stomach.” Sobs were wrenched from her like a semen sample from a bull.
“Just when you think you’re use to it—that seeing her wheeling about in here has become commonplace—“ the other woman in the restroom couldn’t complete her observation, so overcome with emotion was she. The word “wheeling” echoed through their collective thoughts like a picture of one’s mother in a coffin.
It was, therefore, the shock of their lives to come out of the restroom after sufficiently restoring their appearances to see uniformed police and plainclothes federal investigators surrounding Becky’s mobile box, asking questions in their blunt male voices. Becky’s deformed hands, sticking up above the top of the box, were handcuffed.
“Jeffrey,” one of the women asked the division chief, “What’s going on?”
“I’m not at liberty to say at the moment,” the splotchy-faced redhead replied. “But let’s just say that there’ll be a position opening up here very soon.” He put his hands in his pockets and tugged at his scrotum.

Only in Jest Do I Withhold the Educational Plaything

“Give it to me! Give it to me!” The little man jumped up and down, snatching for the toy I dangled just out of reach.
“Oh, I don’t know.” I said seriously, as if considering doing something most unwise.
“Give it to me! Give it to me!” The little man begged again and again. His eyes were desperate, like those of a man with a nail in his head.
“Well…” I dropped the toy a few inches, just when the little man was gathering strength for another jump. He leaped again, this time with a frantic, frustrated scream of hope, only to see me jerk the toy away into the upper reaches of atmosphere. He bent over, his hands on his knees, panting.
“OK.” I agreed. I placed the toy on the ground before him. “Just wanted to make sure you really wanted it.”
The little man seized it as if he was a maroon rescuing a care package from the surf. With it he scrambled into a dark corner behind the sofa.
“You shouldn’t tease the poor fellow so.” Major Bloomcrust admonished me as I rejoined him on the veranda. The houseboy handed me a cold drink of refreshment.
“It’s all psychological, Major.” I explained. “If I make him work for it, he’s more likely to appreciate it.” There was, of course, more to it than that, but I felt I had to say something the major would understand, and, to my judgment, of his character, agree with.
“Maybe so.” He muttered reflectively, turning to stare at a four-masted ship in the bay.
From behind the sofa came a sudden expostulation of disgust. The major and I saw the little man crawling out of his hidey-hole, whacking his toy ahead of him like a man driving a reluctant sheep down the road.
“What’s wrong?” I asked in my graceful, lofty, patrician voice. I have another I use for speaking with truck drivers, but it would not have been useful here. Actually, I’ve been working on expanding my repertoire of voices. I have a sort of old man’s falsetto that I want to develop further. I think I could get work as a voice actor with an animation studio willing to take a chance.

Now We Come to the Most Difficult Part of the Proscription

Keeping away from Boogle House and its environs would be easy. It was avoiding any contact (accidental or deliberate) with Lord Boogle’s daughter Latrenda that would be hard. McGifford, however, was determined to earn the powered industrial race his father had promised should he adhere to these new rules.
“Why do we have these new rules?” McGifford asked his mother as she was cutting up carrots and apples for some sort of pie.
“Times are changing.” She replied. The knife she used was a gigantic thing, passed down from her mother. One day McGifford would keep it under the seat in his car for protection against people he signed a deposition against, but that story will not be told here.
“It’s important that we remain unsullied by the changes all about us.” She continued.
“Unsullied.” McGifford repeated dubiously. His current reading had led him to the opinion that remaining unsullied in life was impossible. Any attempt to do so would result in madness and any success at the effort would make one an insufferable saint.
Later that day McGifford was throwing scrap metal from the abandoned peanut pulping works into the canal when Latrenda emerged from the weeds on the other side.
“Hey.” She said. She wore a white apron-like dress over a black long-sleeved shirt. Her eyelashes were as pale blond as the hair on her head, something that McGifford would have sworn was revolting if you’d asked him six months before. But now it seemed a specifically erotic trait.
“Hey.” He replied. “Listen,” he said softly as he squatted down. “I’ve been given instructions not to have anything to do with you.”
“Why?”
“Because I’ll get my racer if I do.”
Latrenda nodded in understanding. She fidgeted with a long-stemmed wildflower in her hand.
“I’ve been promised a pony if I stay away from you.” She told him.
The canal would one day have to be dredged.

Down Among the Delayed

Most of the men gathered in the tunnel worked for one of the money-shifting firms headquartered around Snodperker Square. However, Gribble, the still relatively young man in the green wiener suit, worked at Wank’s Embargo, a retail establishment specializing in the needs of still relatively young men. He wasn’t a salesman; Gribble worked in security.
“How much longer do you think it’ll be, Don?” A serious-looking fellow with the folded cardboard face of a movie star asked one of his contemporaries.
“Oh, I shouldn’t think more than a quarter of an hour.” The other man twisted his left arm elaborately about in his suit coat to bring his heavy watch up to contemplation level. He smiled like a man receiving a foot massage and looked back at the first fellow in insular confidence.
“I agree with Don.” Someone else chimed in.
“Do you, Phil?” Another asked, bringing his own heavy watch up for inspection.
Many of the men wore these heavy watches. They seemed designed to emulate the look of luxury amid the rigors of a post-apocalyptic world. Gribble too wore a watch, but his was a piece of black plastic performing a subsidiary role to the thick leather-bound instrument strapped to his right wrist. One or two of the financial boys saw Gribble clamber into the disused grease trap just inside the shadows, but turned away uninterested.
Gribble pressed a button on the instrument about his wrist. A florescent green light began to glow, just warming the tip of Gribble’s nose. Wireless transmissions from the office played out in the ether behind his eyes.
“Have you pinpointed the shoplifter?” was the import of the message received. Gribble responded in the affirmative and further indicated that he would soon take action.
Again a couple of the men in suits noticed Gribble as he stepped back into the circle of light, but an article in the paper on the latest gadget was far more compelling. Gribble maneuvered behind the shoplifter and pressed a button on his wrist, this time eliciting a red glow.
At that moment the monster of grease, awakened by Gribble’s earlier footsteps and the heat of his crotch, burst upon them all, making no sound except for the smack of criscous limbs on concrete.

Three Easily Articulated Management Routines

“Now the first management routine that I am going to articulate is called the Overly Emotional.” I had been selected to teach the class by a group of anti-capitalist revolutionaries whose jolly roger was tacked to the wall behind me, over my improperly used blackboard.
A hand shot up.
“Excuse me, Mr. Toadsgoboad,” the youngster implored, “But could we first have some background on how you came to be familiar with these routines?”
I made a face like a man looking away from a woman having an epileptic fit as I considered the request.
“Well, yes, I could do that.” I supposed. It was true that I needed something to pad out the material. Filling up forty-five minutes every day would be harder than I had thought. My original intention of having the class act out scenes from my life might not be necessary after all.
“But,” I suddenly decided, “You’ll have to give me a couple of minutes. There’s something in my car I need to get first.” This was a lie. I had no car. I rushed out of the room towards the iron doughnut in which I kept my supplies. On the way Nick, who had invited me to this grove of academia, asked me how things were going.
“I don’t know what I’m doing, Nick.” I gushed negatively. I threw open a hatch on the side of the doughnut and reached inside.
“Oh, come on.” Nick, a man with an enthusiastic beard, had completed his doctoral dissertation and served in the Peace Corps. “A guy like you, with your experience, you shouldn’t have any problems dealing with a class like this.”
“I’m not as…” I struggled for the right word. Intelligent? Original? Talented? Sexy? “Omnicapable as I think I am. Thought I was.” I hefted the masked puppet onto my shoulder.
“Oh, come on, you don’t need that.” Nick insisted, gesturing at Mr. Contumely.
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” I gasped. “I mean, I’m so against phonies. But the truth is I don’t know if I’m a phony or not. I don’t know when I’m being phony or not. I don’t know if being phony isn’t actually good sometimes.”

I Have Long Thought About the Tunnel Under the Playground

Was it only a daydream? The tunnel that I had thought about, longed for, that ran from somewhere inside the classroom, out under the playground, and opened on a faraway island of cartoon neo-art deco palm trees at room temperature—did it exist?
Eventually, as my senility first began to make itself known, I had to find out. Before it was too late, as they say.
In the middle of the night I packed a small knapsack with everything a man would need for a one-way journey to the end of a daydream tunnel. Is the island existed, what would I do there, other than dance with Bernadette Peters? I don’t dance.
Well, I can sashay in a cocky manner like Bon Scott, but that’s about it. Phil Collins is wrong—some people can learn, can piss on the tyranny of the prodigy.
Anyway, I brought a copy of Der Zauberberg, a fistful of pens, and a notebook good for drawing or writing. I brought a puppet and a jar full of buttons. One must make allowances for frivolity at the end of a daydream tunnel. On an island in the middle of a painted sea, up against a horizon painted on a wall, in someone’s dimly lit basement rec room, there must be allowances for frivolity.
“Where are you going?” She thought I meant the place where we first met.
“No, no, my old school.” I meant the place of myth, the place of the creation of myth.
“Have you got your notecard with you?”
As a matrafact I hadn’t. I added that to my paraphernalia.
“Write down ‘milk.’ We need some.”
As a child I wouldn’t get the chocolate milk in the little carton. It didn’t taste right to me. Later I wouldn’t get milk at all. I had become disgusted at the idea of drinking too deeply and getting a “milk moustache.” Moustaches were for nasty old men.

My Calves Are Too Big

I was examining myself naked in one of those three-mirror screens and my greatest flaw appeared to be that my calves are too big. Why that section of the human leg should be called the “calf,” I don’t know. Is it named after the baby cow or is the baby cow named after it? The associations were disturbing.
The too-bigness of calf was not due to musculature. It was an unsightly bulginess. I had always prided myself on my legs, even with this flaw. Yet think how much better they would look if the calves were, if not all that much smaller, then better toned.
“What is it you want exactly?” An associate of mine asked. “You want to start jumping or something?”
“No,” I dismissed his tack moodily, staring out the window at the panorama of Ocasektown. “I’ve tried jump rope and found it… unsatisfying.”
“What then? Surgery?”
My eyebrows flew up in contemplation.
“That is a possibility.” I admitted. “I’ve considered liposuction for my belly fat.”
“I thought you said the calves were the only flaw you have.” My associate cocked his head and examined me from behind.
“Belly fat is something I can actually do something about.” I explained. “Believe me, I’ve done it before. Many, many times before,” I added in a morose undertone. “But this calf thing,” I turned from the window with a great inhalation of office air, “Is something that has plagued me since I was seventeen.”
“Really.”
“Oh, yes. I remember standing in line in Greenville, South Carolina, waiting to get into the Ratt/Poison concert. I compared my calves to those of a friend of mine. And, scrawny as he was, I felt his calves were more near the proper proportions.”
“Who was this friend?” My associate chuckled.
“The hearing aid millionaire.”

Sylvia’s Sun Drips Yellow on the Schedule

The whole month’s activities were laid out on the large, wall-mounted grid. Above the grid was a happy Mr. Sun made from construction paper. Sylvia had always wanted to be a kindergarten teacher, but fate had directed her steps to a low-level supervisor’s job at the post office. The sun was her idea. The witty aphorisms that filled areas on the grid otherwise unfilled by work-related activities were also her idea.
“Look at this.” Pancho sneered, pointed to one of these aphorisms. “‘There is no secret so close as that between a rider and his horse.’ What is that supposed to mean within the context of the management-labor relationship?”
“No idea.” Beader answered distractedly. He took another cookie from the tin on the desk and continued to scan the work floor for movement.
“What’s an aphorism anyway?” Harry wondered in a raspy voice. He lay propped against the filing cabinets, his right hand clutching a bundle of rags against the bleeding in his chest. “Isn’t that a self-evident truth?”
“That’s an axiom.” Beader told him, not taking his eyes away from the window.
“Don’t talk, Harry.” Pancho ordered. He went to the window next to Beader. The two exchanged glances. Harry was not only a liability; he was a dead man. There was no way they could get him out of here to one of their medical units in time. The risk was too great.
“How long do you think it’ll be before somebody comes for us?” Pancho whispered.
“At least another hour or so.” Beader took another cookie.
Pancho scanned the row upon row of sorting machines now standing idle.
“There could be any number of inspectors out there.” He said.
“Then why don’t they attack?” Beader demanded. His desperation, great as it was, had not blunted his resolve. He was determined to obtain control over the facility and retrieve Mrs. Cotton’s letter from the system.
“Hey man,” Pancho placed a calming hand on his comrade’s shoulder, “‘The chapter of accidents is the longest chapter in the book.’”

Raw Parsnips and Rhubarb

“Are you going to make a pie?” Don asked Phil as the latter unburdened himself of a load of parsnips and rhubarb.
“I’m not sure yet. I bought this stuff from a roadside vendor.” Phil examined a cut on his index finger.
“‘Roadside vendor.’” Don smiled. “Such a cliché.”
“Well, I can’t think of what else to call him.” Phil washed his hands in the sink. He didn’t know when or where exactly he had cut his finger, but he feared getting something in the wound from the unwashed produce. Don remembered the story Phil had once told him about the time that Phil had done a couple of hours work for one of the farmers in his hometown. Phil must have been about fourteen or fifteen. The farmer had asked Phil to use a hand tiller on a field intended for beans or something. The word was hard. His hands were unused to it. By the time the farmer got back Phil had blisters on his hands. The farmer was not satisfied with the work, but he paid Phil anyway. He let Phil wash his hands in the stream from a water cooler. Phil had managed to get fertilizer on his hands somehow. They burned. It was the last day of farming he ever did.
“A farming entrepreneur.” Don suggested. He left Phil to continue his ablutions and went into the study. Here, in a series of bowls and pots by the window, Don was growing tiny plants. He liked tiny plants. He liked to think of them as miniature trees. He wasn’t a farmer, because he didn’t grow things to eat. No, he wasn’t a farmer because he didn’t have a farm. He was a gardener of sorts. Although, now that he thought about it, gardeners sometimes grew things to eat as well. Ah, he pounced. But did he have a garden?
“Phil, come here!” He called. Phil did not respond and did not join him.
“Phil, is this a ‘garden?’” He asked as he reentered the kitchen.
“What?” Phil barked in distraction.
“What’s wrong with you?” Don approached the sink.
“I’ve got weird little blisters on my fingers.” Phil examined his fingers closely, brows knitted (as they always are) in concern.
On the counter the parsnips, unsung cousins to carrots, elected a spokesman and sent him to parley with the rhubarb. The latter were connected in bunches and so had a distinctly different mindset.

The Coolest Part of the Day

The way Nesmith saw it, the coolest part of the day was the morning, when one first woke up. His decision was not based on temperature, but on the concept of “coolness,” a concept rendered vague through overuse. I suppose one could make the same claim about the concept of “love” or “poetry,” maybe even “Jazz,” although the last one doesn’t really matter to anyone anymore. Hopefully the same will soon be true of “cool.” After all, it happened to “neat,” which, for most purposes, was the forerunner to “cool.”
Nesmith had been asked to answer this vital question as part of his application to join the Small Personal Flying Saucer Cult. Was it a trick question? Would the answer be judged not on how one answered, but on whether one saw it as a temperature issue or a matter of aesthetic appeal? Certainly all of Nesmith’s immediate friends who had also applied for membership saw it as a question of thermal measurement.
“And then the time of year, the season, threw some of them off.” Nesmith concluded with a hoarse voice as he recapped the whole application adventure to his girlfriend as they sat in the Hoss Cartwright Memorial Steakhouse.
“He was far more intelligent in real life than you’d think to look at him.” Jan, the girlfriend, commented, jabbing a thumb in the direction of the statue that stood in the lobby, a plaster figure in a ten gallon hat.
“You mean Dan Blocker.” Nesmith demanded clarification. “Because Hoss Cartwright didn’t have a ‘real life’ as opposed to—“
“Yes, yes.” Jan sighed. “But people are more likely to eat at the Hoss Cartwright Memorial Steakhouse than the Dan Blocker Memorial Steakhouse.”
“You’re not. I had to browbeat you to get you to come here.”
“And you’re still beating the brow. Or is it beating with the brow?” Jan took a sip of her Mr. Pibb. “I’m just tired of steak.”
“You hardly ever eat it.”
“That’s why.”
Nesmith gazed at the salad bar. I’ll bet Hoss Cartwright would never have touched a salad, he thought. He suddenly laughed.
“What is it?” Jan asked.
“A vegetarian place could be called ‘Lorne’s Green’s.’”

A Liam Neeson Movie Plot

“We haven’t got a title yet.” Don explained. He and Phil stood before the studio head’s desk, gesticulating emphatically, legs apart as if readying themselves to jump off a train.
“But a good working title would be…” Phil paused for the effect it would give his words. “Menthol Advocacy.”
“Yeah,” Don nodded at his partner, “Anyway, here’s the deal: the whole project is concocted around Liam Neeson.”
“We have to have Liam Neeson.”
“He’s perfect for the main character.”
“Liam Neeson…” again an effectual pause. “Anti-cigarette activist.” Phil made a face as if to say, isn’t that the most right concept you’ve ever heard?
The studio chief, Mr. Gesichtsausdruck, mused with his bottom lip out like a perch on a bird feeder.
“Go on.” He instructed.
“Well,” Phil looked at Don for encouragement. Don excitedly smiled. “Liam Neeson’s character—“
“Zambo Rambini.” Don interjected, hands outstretched as if presenting a new car to an audience of heavy wallets.
“Yeah. His wife died of smoking. That’s all in the first ten minutes, very tragic, very eastern European.”
“We see a former communist Spielberg clone as the director—maybe Protoczynki?”
“Anyway, Neeson decides to go after the tobacco companies. He poses as a Mexican day laborer and gets a job on a farm in North Carolina, picking tobacco. Here he meets a waitress at a local barbecue place—“
“We want to play up the whole Deep South thing; everybody’s a Bible-thumping moron with a gun rack in his truck. The waitress, however, is teaching herself to read.”
“She’s a jewel in the rough. She wants to help Neeson murder the tobacco executives, burn the fields.”
Mr. Gesichtsausdruck rubbed his chin. “You think we can get a product placement deal with Phillip Morris? It’d defray some of the costs.”

Impromptu Divination is the Standard Reply

Whenever someone in the village of Wiwigi was asked, “What’s going on?” he would respond creatively, not merely answering, “Oh, nothing much,” ask is the usual case with the people that I know. No, the Wiwigians would say something like, “I see a man in a green wiener suit. He’s pushing a rhinoceros into a blueberry pie.”
The famous anthropologist Dr. Designation had some to Wiwigi to study this phenomenon. In order to avoid corrupting the natives with their modern, outside ways in the creepy forest that surrounded the village.
“Only two paths through the forest,” Nigel, the sexiest of the male grad students mused aloud. “One leading into the village from the west, and one leading out of it to the east.”
“That’s one path with the village in the middle of it.” Sarah corrected. She shook her head and continued filling in sociological diagrams of dubious worth.
Nigel scowled. Sarah might be attractive if she’d lose the glasses, bleach her hair, chew gum, and hold her head cocked to one side. He picked up a basketball and dribbled it outside, where a group of Wiwigians, hired for the day, were helping secure the anthropology team’s camper to the trunk of one of the giant trees.
“There.” Dr. Designation sounded pleased as he surveyed the work. “Now once we’ve erected the platforms we’ll have a regular Swiss Family Robinson tree house.”
Nigel, who didn’t know what the words Swiss Family Robinson meant, nodded in agreement.
“You guys want to stay for dinner?” Dr. Designation asked the men from the village. “You’re welcome.”
“No.” They said, glancing at their watches. “We must be back inside the palisade by sundown. Very dangerous to be out here after dark.” They accepted their payment of beads and chocolate and hurried away.
“What’s up with them?” Sarah wondered.
Nigel put his fingertips to his temples. “I see an unspeakably creepy monster enforcing a primitive lifestyle.”

The Person With the Load Takes Precedence

Two men approached each other from different directions on a narrow mountain path. On one side of the path was the heavily vandalized rock wall and on the other a series of forbidding drops down to the river. Fortunately, one of the men carried a goat over his shoulder, making the decision of who stood aside while the other passed easy to make. The man with no goat pressed himself closely into a tiny crack in the wall while the goat bearer squeezed past.
“That was lucky.” The goat commented once he and his companion were out of earshot of the other man.
“Yes. Most lucky of all is that the other man wasn’t also carrying a goat.” The man replied.
“Why’s that?”
“There are complex rules governing who gets to pass. We are going up the mountain, the monastery, so a simple goat to goat meeting would probably be decided in our favor, but if the other man’s goat were exceptionally large, he might have a good argument that he should take precedence.”
“What if he was carrying a music box?” The goat wondered.
“Shouldn’t that be ‘what if he were carrying a music box?’” The man, holding carefully to the straps of the jute bag in which the goat rode, returned.
“I don’t see why. Just because you put the word ‘if’ in front of a phrase, why should the tense of the verb change? He was carrying, if he was carrying. You wouldn’t say, ‘he were carrying.’”
“Doesn’t sound correct to me. When we get to the monastery, we’ll ask.”
“You’ll ask. Goats aren’t supposed to speak.”
“That’s the whole point of going to the monastery. I think you’re the special goat mentioned in the ancient prophecy.”
“‘And there shall come a talking goat.’” The goat mocked. “They’ll probably cut my throat and have me for dinner.”
“The monks are vegetarian.” Objected the man.
The goat was silent a moment.
“Hey, you never answered my question: what if he was carrying a music box?”
“I don’t know. I’ll ask the monks.”

A Tapeworm for the Czarina

The court physician, dressed in heavily embroidered robes of crimson and gold, rose from his seat on the edge of the Czarina’s bed. He caught the eye of the Grand Chamberlain and indicated by a movement of his head that he wished to speak with him outside. The two men stepped into the hall, a couple of other court functionaries beside them.
“Well?” asked the chamberlain.
“In my professional opinion,” began the doctor, “Her Majesty has a tapeworm.” This last word the doctor said in a discreet undertone.
“A tapeworm?” The chamberlain hissed incredulously. The other men in this huddled conference nervously cast glances about them.
“I’m sure of it.” The physician insisted.
“How is this possible?” The chamberlain demanded. This was a poor, and most embarrassing, reflection on his direction of the keeping of the royal household.
The court physician, who had received the job due to his famed work at the battle of Samoo, took a deep breath.
“Do you remember the royal family’s trip to Morbidino in the summer? Well, Her Majesty went swimming in the lake. It is possible that the tapeworm, in either the larval stage or as an egg, entered her system then.”
The chamberlain stared at the doctor for a moment. The physician stared back with an expression saying, that’s the best I can do.
The chamberlain drew himself up, tugged at the hem of his coat, looked down at the other men. He seemed to sigh with relief.
“Well then, what can be done?” He asked.
The court physician, heavily bearded and possessed of a splendidly capacious nose, looked down the hall. “I’ll have to consult with a colleague of mine,” he said, “But I think that with the proper tools and chemicals, we should be able to extract this thing alive and turn it over to the Special Branch for interrogation.”
“Anything you need, old man.” The chamberlain promised him.
Within the hour a telegram had been sent and the unorthodox Dr. Feeblis was on his way to the capital. Riding in a first-class carriage with his assistant Gobler, Dr. Feeblis threw his feet onto the seat and laughed with anticipation.
“This is going to be fun!” He cackled.

See Yourself in Feathers of Gold and a Beak of Lightweight Bronze

Again I stood in front of a three-sided mirror, this time trying on the traditional bird costume of the Morbidino people. A salesman in the employ of the store I was patronizing, Ragger’s, stood behind me.
“It’s a stunning apparition, sir.” He enthused. I turned about, getting a sense of myself as the bird god Abbeldegabbeda. “However, if I may suggest, the tail is a bit too… removed from your seat.” The man bent down and showed me what he meant, taking the tail in hand and positioning it where it should be. “That’s something we can alter. Only take a day.”
I faced the mirror head on. I held out my wings. I could see myself standing before the assembled priests of a Morbidino village, the central figure in a ceremony dedicated to Abbeldegabbeda’s triumph over the god of dead mice, whose name I forget at the moment.
“Have you got anything I can wear now?” I asked. I wondered what my voice sounded like coming from inside the metal mask. Authoritative? Fowl?
“Well…” I knew the salesman was fighting the urge to express his frustration in a most forthright manner. “As I say, alterations to make this particular costume perfectly fitted to your frame would only take a day, but if you’re looking for something to wear in the interim…” he paused to allow me to clarify my intent.
“Oh yes,” I agreed. “I’ll take both. Just show me what you have.”
Soon, once again looking like an indifferently attired wastrel, I stood before a table of accoutrements; yellow paint, paper beaks secured by elastic bands, and vests adorned with feathers.
“These feathers are, of course, not the traditional feathers of the mogo bird, but a less expensive substitute.” The salesman explained.
“What kind of feathers?”
“Chicken. New Hampshire bantam, I believe.”
I considered.
“I’ve been looking for a new vest.” I said.
“You’re a regular vest wearer then, sir?”
“Oh yes. It’s only a shame that Joseph Beuys became so associated with the look before I could think of it.”

Hunting for the Sports Section

Charles rooted around in the piles of newspapers littering the otherwise empty room.
“There’s no sports section anywhere.” He complained, disbelieving.
“You’ll have to make do with something else.” The voice from the speaker mounted on the wall informed him.
“But I’m not interested in anything else!” Charles, whose shaved head looked like that of a burn victim, so pitted was each individual hair follicle, revealed the full depth of his passion with these words. He sat down on the floor with a dispirited bump.
How long he would have sat there dejected, turning into something resembling a pile of old newspapers himself, I don’t know. I was only an observer in the room from which this experiment was being controlled. I do know that when the researchers offered the man a chance to earn a sports section he jumped up ready to run in whatever direction was indicated.
“You’ll have to answer a few questions about contemporary literature.” The voice, that of a man in a lab coat, named Kibitaki, revealed. Kibitaki tried to keep his voice clinically neutral, but I heard a hint of amusement creep in like a cat through the grass.
“Correctly?” Charles asked.
“Could you repeat that?”
“Do I have to answer the questions correctly?”
I smiled. There were a few moments confusion in the control room. They hadn’t expected cunning in their subject.
“You have to do your best.” was the best and vaguest thing they could come up with before appearing indecisive. Personally, I’d have let him wait all day before replying.
“Who wrote Bargeld für dein Muhsam?” The voice inquired.
“Oh man, I don’t know. John Grisham?”
“What book was made into a film starring Skeet Ulrich?”
Charles writhed on the floor, grabbing up fistfuls of newsprint, rubbing his face with it. He suddenly sat up, hope in his eyes.
“Did Oprah have it on her show?” He asked.

I Make Preparations for the Assault on Gander’s Nylon

“Aren’t you going to wear your bird costume?” My assistant, Mr. Hog, asked me as I stuffed a shoulder bag full of German crime novels.
“No, I’m afraid of getting it dirty.” I looked around the room. What else would I need?
“Gander’s Nylon is said to be very clean.” Mr. Hog, dressed in a vintage fireman’s uniform with many big buttons, not all of them original to the uniform, posited.
“What exactly is Gander’s Nylon anyway?” I asked, pausing to look at my assistant as I leaned on the table on the fighting side of my fist.
Mr. Hog gaped.
“I-I thought you knew.”
I smiled, enigmatically, it is hoped. I can’t be sure. I’ve tried practicing various smiles in the mirror in the bathroom at home, but in the heat of person to person contact they come out as they will.
“You do know where it is.” Mr. Hog, contractually bound to accompany me on my assault, wanted to reassure himself.
“Where ‘it’ is?” I repeated, suddenly remembering that I should take a small, potted cactus along.
“It’s not a place?” Mr. Hog wondered. Perhaps reconsidering that contact he signed.
“It’s not even a thing.” Coborensia deforbodeus would do nicely.
“It’s a person?”
“A character. A being. Like yourself, not a human being, but a being nonetheless. A character, a being. Like you, Mr. Hog, not a human being, but a being nonetheless. A character, do you see?” I left the room.
What happened in the room in my absence is unknown to science. Outside, in the landscape of small triangular hills that separated the world of commercial antagonism from an unreachable horizon, I stepped into my wading boots and found Gander’s Nylon door among the many set into the hills.
“I’ve called it off.” I told the little pig that answered the door.
“Called what off?” she asked.

The Pharmaceutical Elf Shoes

The old healer had diagnosed my malady as necropolitical gas.
“But not to worry,” he said, turning to a cabinet of hundreds of tiny drawers. “I have the remedy.”
I had been feeling strange for weeks. At first I couldn’t quite pinpoint what was wrong. It wasn’t until one of my many acquaintances told me that I didn’t seem my “usual happy self” that I realized. It was true. I wasn’t happy. And I mean happy as in confident in my own identity, my own unique self-created identity. Happy as in the contentment that one has when one is mindfully aware of one’s own integral place in the universe. I had had this happiness for years. Ever since I learned to stop imposing labels on myself derived from the world of the Beastly Outcropping. I think the whole feeling strange business started when somehow I got suckered into calling myself a “modern-day hippie.”
“And when was this?” the old healer asked as he rummaged about in his cabinet.
“A couple of months ago. It all fits.” It fit so well that I began to wonder if I needed the healer’s medicine. After all, isn’t realizing the problem half of the cure?
“You take ten of these.” The old man, who didn’t appear to be Chinese, directed. He handed me a fistful of what I first thought were pills.
“What are these?” I asked. I held one up to the light. Was it a dried ear from some endangered Asian critter?
“Pharmaceutical elf shoes.” The healer said. “I emphasize they are pharmaceutical to distinguish them from common elf shoes.”
“Of course.” I didn’t want to appear totally uneducated.
The old healer smiled and nodded. He evidently wanted me to take them now.
“Just eat them?”
“Yes, please. Just chew them up and swallow. I will get you a glass of water.”
“That’s OK.” I told him. “I don’t like to drink anything with my meals. It dilutes the digestive juices.”

The Half Egg Sneezer

When Bromwell sneezed on February 25, 1964, he only sneezed out half the egg he had snorted moments before.
“Was the egg raw?” Little Magiglian asked from the comfort of her big, cushioned chair in the front room.
“Of course it was raw.” Dr. Feeblis shot back. “You don’t think he snorted a hard-boiled egg, do you? How would it fit up his nostril?”
“It could be a sparrow’s egg.” Magiglian, who knew there was a big book all about birds somewhere in the house, suggested, a little finger upraised.
Dr. Feeblis smiled broadly. He too held up an index finger. “That is a very good suggestion.” he said. “However, unfortunately, this was a standard-sized chicken’s egg such as you might find on the local grocery store in a hinged Styrofoam container along with eleven others of its kind.”
“Ah.” Magiglian nodded, thoroughly reassured. She paused as the recollection of everything that had been said previously was replayed in her mind. “Then what happened to the other half of the egg?” She finally asked.
“Well, it didn’t develop into half a chicken!” Dr. Feeblis laughed. “That’s a little scientific humor,” he added quickly, seeing no laughter blooming on the little girl’s face. “The truth is, it probably rotted in Bromwell’s lungs. He probably got an infection and died.” Feeblis stared at the floor somberly. He suddenly remembered Gobler. Wonder when he’s coming back, he thought.
February 25, 1964, for those of you interested in musical history, is also the day when Eric Dolphy recorded the amazing LP, Out to Lunch. It is not probable that Dolphy and Bromwell knew each other, as the latter lived on the planet Alphatosis his whole life and the former was a Jazz musician who died in Europe of a non-egg-related ailment only a short while later. Some have speculated, however, that Tony Williams,the drummer on Out to Lunch, had once spoken to Bromwell through the etheric wall by means of an egg beater inserted in a phone jack outlet. Tony Williams is dead too, as all who read this one day will be. But you have one chance: put the contents of your brain—your memories, identity, personality, into a computer! That will make everything all better. And you’ll never have to eat another egg ever again.

The Falcon Will Be Missed

The Falcon disappeared sometime during my journey to Alphatosis. I was so busy visiting people and negotiating a deal with a major publishing house for the story of my trip that I completely forget to ask about the Falcon. It wasn’t until I was watching an old Frank Sinatra movie that my thoughts turned to the old boy.
“No one knows what happened to him.” Lucas told me. He spread his hands over the expanse of the table at which he sat, as if to show me the immense space in which the Falcon might be lost.
“But you don’t know for sure whether he’s dead or not.” I toyed with the mug of juice Lucas had offered me. I walked my fingers over the surface of the juice, pretending they were Jesus on the waves of Galilee. I took up a pen and doodled on the back of an envelope. Jesus drinking in a bar in southern California. Don the theater design professor sat beside him giving him valuable advice.
“Will you stop that!” Lucas snapped.
“Sorry.”
“No, I don’t know if he’s dead or not. But given the amount of damage we sustained, he must have been destroyed.”
“The Falcon.” I said. “He will be missed.”
I arranged for a memorial service in the Falcon’s honor. Due to a breakdown in my book deal negotiations I wasn’t able to pay for the whole thing myself. I collected money from everyone I could think of whose life had been touched by the Falcon. The obelisk I purchased wasn’t as big as I would have liked, but it was basically phallic in shape and that was the main thing.
“He was a hero.” I said at the service. “He was a hero in the old-fashioned sense of the word. I mean he actually saved someone from death. I know. I was there. He grabbed hold of the back of the old man’s jacket and kept him from walking into traffic.”
At the reception following the service I mingled with the teary-eyed and the confused.
“Who was this guy exactly?” A cousin of mine asked as he loaded up his plate with sausage balls and Danish wedding cookies. I started to explain, but stopped when I caught sight of a familiar beak on the far side of the room.

The Two Things He Threw in the River

“Analysis of contemporary records and interviews with persons in a position to know suggest that the two things Buhl Cummings threw in the river were a photograph of Greta Garbo and a condom. However, until the man’s diaries become available we will never know for sure.” I concluded my presentation and sat down, only to be reminded by the chairman that I had agreed to take questions from the floor.
The first one to approach the microphone was a young man with a week’s worth of beard.
“I’d just like to ask why you hate Buhl Cummings so much.” He had his hands jammed into the pockets of his tight black jeans.
“I don’t.” I protested. “It’s just that—“
“You do. It’s clear from your presentation—“
“I don’t hate anybody.” I dissimulated. “It’s just that a great portion of my formative years were—“
“This is just more anti-American, anti-Christian—“ the young man continued to talk, not allowing me to respond, until finally the chairman stepped forward.
“Sir, if you have a question, please ask it. Otherwise, please sit down. This is an opportunity to ask our guest questions, not a forum for you to make your own opinions known.”
The young man mumbled something that no one heard and walked back to his seat. The next questioner was another young man with several days’ worth of beard and tight black jeans, the kind of jeans that grip the legs like pantyhose all the way down to the ankles, but don’t seem to offer enough coverage for the area just above the natal cleft.
“I don’t want to get into a confrontation with you like the last guy, but I would like to know what this Buhl Cummings ever did to you besides be a generally nice guy.”
“I think you’re all missing the point.” I sighed. “Buhl Cummings represents a philosophy that dominated my life for many years, a negative, wrong-headed philosophy that nearly destroyed me. He and the school he founded are partly responsible for so many wasted years of my life.”

The Remnants of Widow’s Peak

I used to have a prominent widow’s peak. Now it has eroded like the Appalachian mountains so that no one knows just how mighty it once was. A widow’s peak is said to be a sign of sexual prowess and great facility with women. Perhaps that is why the women don’t chase after me the way they used to. Like Samson, I have been bereft of my power through loss of hair. Not that I’m going bald. It’s just that the widow’s peak has almost completely gone away. I wonder if those hair transplant doctors have ever rebuilt a widow’s peak. Would it be worth the thousands of dollars I know they’d charge? I doubt the insurance company would see the procedure as medically necessary. Perhaps a signed affidavit from George Clooney testifying to the necessity of sexual prowess and appeal to women would help.
Of course, like Henry Miller, my reputation as a lover has been exaggerated. Nine times out of ten I’d rather eat than fuck. I’d rather do lots of things, usually something unrelated to what I’m doing at the moment. For instance, as I write this I’d rather be painting. But I have to wait until the studio heats up before I go over there. This is winter.
I don’t want to live on a tropic isle. Some people crave the sun. I would rather put up with the cold than the heat. I need to live somewhere that’s room temperature outside. And where there are no fire ants. Somewhere you can go outside and treat the back yard as an extension of the house, not a hostile, ugly wasteland. I admire Europe and the Europeans, and I sympathize with their lust for the Caribbean and so forth, but it’s the cold that has made them strong. Maybe I’ll get to live in Europe one day. An old man can be sexy in Europe.
Perhaps one of the reasons I haven’t started going bald is that I can’t grow a decent beard. The two things are related. It’s testosterone. It’d be great to have a messianic beard like a hippie patriarch. I’d love to grow my hair and beard for three or four years and then go into the barber shop and tell them to shave it all off. Give me a crewcut. Then look in the mirror and say, “I don’t know who that is. I don’t think it’d be right to use that man’s money to pay for anything.” Changing one’s appearance takes time. And time is money.

The Irregular Boy’s Diagram

No one seemed to have any idea what the diagram was supposed to depict. Found among the remains of the imploded briefcase, the diagram, and many more like it, was entered into evidence in the proceedings to determine the boy’s fate.
“Maybe it’s just a doodle.” General Moodecade suggested.
“Can’t be.” Stafford Lurd disagreed. “It conforms in too many details with what we know of Begorvanik punishment probes.”
“Then it’s definitely a weapon.” Another man around the table gestured with his eyeglasses as he spoke, jabbing the air with one of the arms.
Half the men present demurred while the other half agreed enthusiastically. Some thought it looked like a blender their wives once owned. Some felt that the drawings, taken as a whole, represented an alien arsenal too dangerous to be allowed to go unmanufactured.
“What does the boy say?” Raglan MacFlag asked.
Stafford Lurd read from a piece of paper in his hand.
“The doctors say the boy’s still too constipated to be interviewed.”
General Moodecade spoke across the table to Lurd.
“How long since he last shit?” His language was as coarse as his voice was hoarse. Each was a product of the battlefield.
“Hard to say. At least three days, but no more than five.”
“Hell, I once went a week without shitting.” The General recalled. “Summer camp. I was nine or ten years old. Scared to use any toilet except the one back home.”
“What steps are they taking to… loosen the boy up?” MacFlag moved his hand through the air in a manner suggestive of a bat visiting a tasty cactus blossom.
“The usual.” Lurd replied. “Water, oats, trampoline.”
“Instead of making him drink that water, they need to shoot it up his backside.” Moodecade jammed his thumb upwards, imagining the greased end of a garden hose and a tender pink anus.
Raglan MacFlag looked at Winston Bafflegab. The two men exchanged unvoiced words of contempt. This is what happened when the military was invited to comment on art!

The Penultimate Andy Summers Story

Not long before Andy Summers told me he never wanted to see my face or speak to me again I brought Robert Fripp around to see him with the intention of tricking the two men into recorded a third album together, this one with a piece of art by me on the cover.
“Andy, look who’s here!” I said as I emerged from the trap door inside Summers’ vegetable crisper.
“Fripp.” Andy said, confused.
“Summers.” Fripp greeted his fellow guitarist.
“You know the funny thing about you two?” I jumped right into the middle, wanting to avoid any unpleasant revelations, “Is that Andy is actually older than you… uh, Mr. Fripp.” I felt uncomfortable calling the King Crimson leader by his first name. His forbidding professor’s mien forestalled any intimacy.
“What do you want, Toadsgoboad?” Andy demanded. He was standing there in a kimono holding a dead emu. I must have caught him at a bad time.
“Well,” I began, slapping my hands together. “I think a good name for a collaborative album would be Stronghold of Mimesis. Isn’t that good?” I urged him to agree, nodding sharply with my nose wrinkled up.
“How’d he rope you into this, Fripp?” Summers asked the man in the glasses.
“He offered to trade me a handful of magic beans in exchange for a few tips on New Standard Tuning.” Fripp explained.
“Magic beans?”
“Yes. Just take a look.” I switched on the TV mounted on the front of Andy’s refrigerator. It was in the place where most people would have an ice cube dispenser. But you know Europeans: no interest in ice cubes.
The television screen showed fire trucks and police cars surrounding the base of an enormous bean stalk rising into the sky over the Spanish countryside. Nearby lay the body of a giant. A spokesman from the government assured everyone that the giant was dead. My Spanish was essentially nonexistent, but I think he told the reporter that the giant was in heaven now, although since he also said the beanstalk extended into heaven it was unclear if the giant had somehow managed to go home.

The Big Pea

The boy’s name was Nicky. He was a couple of years older than I and also a couple of degrees cooler. I always wanted to be a guy like that. Tall, thin, a mop of sandy blond hair. I wondered, and still do, what goes on in the mind of somebody like that. Is his self-identity different? Is he just confident in himself, totally without the nerves that plague me all the damn time? They certainly plagued me in earlier days.
We attended a summer program at the Presbyterian church on Prince Avenue in Athens. To this day I’m still not sure what the point of the program was. It was the summer between third and fourth grade. My transition from public school to private. We had to fill out a form on which we listed things we were interested in like cartoons and stories and whatnot. I had no idea that this was a project worksheet, telling the people in charge what we were going to do on our projects. Project? I had no idea we were supposed to be doing a project. The last day of the program we were supposed to show up with our completed projects. Of course I had nothing. The director, Mrs. Wolfe, made me feel like a fool in front of everyone.
It’s odd to me just how many memories I have of that summer program, too many for me to set down in a short piece like this. I must have been so starved for any kind of mental stimulation that I seized on everything that happened. Funny how I didn’t pay attention to what I was supposed to be paying attention. But I was like that as a child—lost in a fog. A daydreamer. I remember the other kids always being so much more in the know.
My mother agreed to drive another kid to the program with me every day. He was an extremely intelligent kid, a mathematical prodigy, somebody whose parents were also intelligent and who encouraged him in his intellectual pursuits, opening a whole world for him. I had two people obsessed with what Jesus thought. Still, for all that, he was a weirdo. I was “cooler” than he. That just shows you that the ladder goes infinitely up and infinitely down. Until the two ends meet on the other side. I had been friendly with this boy, but in the car one day I began to insult him with my mother listening in horror. I told him he should improve his appearance and demeanor, try wearing his shoes properly, not just step into them, flattening their backs.

The Thirty Shades of Lead

Dina was impressed with the thirty shades of lead on display at the Morbidino exhibition hall. She asked one of the attendants if that indicated thirty distinct varieties of lead, but the man was not very helpful. He handed her a pamphlet on emigrating to Morbidino and went to get a coffee.
From another visitor she learned that lead #27, almost the color of her mother’s hair, was relatively non-toxic.
“You’d have to eat a bucket of it before you’d lose any significant brain cells.” The man told her.
Dina decided to get a coffee too.
The world’s fair was being held in Atlanta. Some thought that after the debacle of the Olympics no major international event would ever come to Atlanta again, but a series of strategically targeted bribes had done the trick. Of course, the city had erected an enormous Exposition of Christ’s Love just across the street from the entrance to the fair, but most visitors saw that as a wonderful example of Southern naivete. So charming. It was the thousands of vendors issued licenses to sell official world’s fair flip-flops and official world’s fair peanut brittle that ticket buyers found so annoying.
Dina actually did buy a pair of the flip-flops, but only because someone stole her shoes while she was walking around in the Fountain of Peace. She did not buy any peanut brittle, however. Her teeth were bad enough as it was. By the end of the day at the fair she had spent over two hundred dollars and only wore half the original clothing she had walked in with. Back at the hotel she laughed the whole thing off and got in the shower.
A severe knock on the door brought her out prematurely.
“Who is it?” She asked.
“Hotel security, ma’am. I’m here with federal agents.”
The three men in the suits (the hotel guy wore a uniform, not a suit, and he waited outside) requested that Dina explain certain statements she had made while waiting in line at the China exhibit.
“It was just a joke!” She insisted.
“Not a very funny one.” Agent Broadass scowled. His colleagues took turns holding Dina’s underwear to the light.

The Chihuahua is a Deer

A pack of feral Chihuahuas included one individual who was a miniature deer. Of the same size and build as the Chihuahuas, the deer had gotten mixed up at the airport and found himself an accepted member of the pack before anyone realized what was going on. It wasn’t until a couple of days later when a couple of members of the pack dragged the carcass of some animal back to the pack’s den that the deer began to have serious doubts.
“What is this?” He asked the other guys, who were tucking in with gusto.
“I think it’s a gopher.” One said.
“Gopher?” The deer repeated in confusion. He had never heard of that. Until now his diet had consisted entirely of things that grew on the ends of twigs or grasses. He looked out the mouth of the den. He could see some grass just outside. Wonder what the others would think if I went out there and grabbed a mouthful?
“Try some. It’s got a nutty taste.” Another of the tiny dogs urged.
“OK.” The deer agreed uncertainly. He liked nuts. He reached in and bit a section of hindquarter with his totally inappropriate teeth. The food had no taste. It had none of the complex array of flavors of leaves or berries. It was not “nutty.” He swallowed it, but he didn’t like it. He wandered outside and began seriously to wonder, as I said earlier, what he’d gotten himself into.
The next day he was ordered to go out on the hunt.
“Hey, new guy,” one of the dogs, a young black male with a white chest, hissed at him, “Stay downwind and circle behind those rocks.”
The deer did as he was told, not really understanding the whole thing. He went behind the rocks as furtively as he could and carefully looked into the clearing where the “prey” was. To his surprise it was a deer. And what a deer, he thought. He’d never seen such a big female. She was mouthwatering alright, but not in the way his new comrades would appreciate. One of them crept beside him and asked him what he thought.
“Look at that udder.” The deer remarked in a daze.
“Ew.” The dog replied. “You like that part?”

The Beast is Driven to a Wedding by the Sea

“Whose wedding is it?” The beast, a gorilla-like creature named Kimzo, asked as he was ushered into the back of the limousine.
“Nick and Sarah’s.” The driver, dressed in a Korean War era fighter pilot’s uniform for the occasion, replied.
“Nick and Sarah.” Kimzo repeated as he settled into the leather seat. “I don’t believe I know them.”
Belinda Camofloop, acting as secretary, and already waiting in the car, explained to the beast that Nick and Sarah were good modern-day hippies who had lived together for two years now and were thinking of starting a cranberry farm.
“Hippies, eh?” Kimzo mused. “So they won’t fight back when I tear into them savagely.” He held his hands in the air, clutching and grimacing.
“We’re not going there for that express purpose.” Belinda informed the beast as the driver pulled the car onto the old beach road. “They wanted a celebrity at the wedding and you’re the only one available. They tried to get Judy Collins, but I told them it’d already been done.”
“You told them?”
“Yes. I’m acting as liaison between the intended couple and yourself.” Belinda was dressed for the part. She had borrowed a white silk blouse from a neighbor and picked up a wool skirt from the nearby Goodwill for a few dollars. Her hair was done up to resemble a style she had seen in a Lufthansa ad from some 1960’s magazine.
“But I will get to tear into them?” Kimzo wanted it made clear to him.
“Eventually.” Belinda answered. “But first we’ve got to do the ceremony, pose for pictures, cut the cake. There are a lot of formalities.”
“I don’t want to fill up on cake.” Kimzo said as he inspected the liquor cabinet in the back of the car. He was talking as much to himself as anybody. He did not partake of the strong drink.
“Why do you care whether they will fight back or not?” Belinda asked.
“I don’t want to get my coat too ruffled.” Kimzo lied. The truth was that he was getting old and couldn’t face the hassle anymore.

The Morkel

Some have speculated that the morkel originated among the Kiibaso people of the Upper South, but I have definitive proof in the form of a memo on Pleiosaur Corporation stationery that the morkel was developed in Dr. Femosunk’s laboratory in the extended 1970’s. For those of you unfamiliar with the instrument, the morkel should present a refreshing change from the saxophone. The morkel, in its electrified version, is even now becoming the preferred instrument among the new breed of progressive metal musician, those open-minded young people who embrace Jazz as the true progenitor of metal.
Simply put, the morkel is a long piece of PVC pipe with another piece of pipe inside it. The two should fit together snugly, so that when the inner pipe is pulled up and down it makes a squeaky noise, like a rusty door hinge. A handle on the side of the outer pipe controls the tightness of a bladder insider the pipe that further increases the squeakiness.
The door hinge-like squeakiness of the morkel is irresistible to those of us who love the sound of “out there” saxophonists like Ian Underwood and Captain Beefheart. We crave to make these kinds of sounds ourselves, but lack the time to learn the saxophone, having wasted most of our lives in a fruitless pursuit of guitar mastery and women who look like Roberta Pedon.
As I said, the morkel can be electrified, thereby increasing the range of noises it can make. One of the most prominent players of the electrified morkel is Don Erratus of the progressive metal band Scary Fartz. After years of practice and experimentation, Erratus feels that he can go head to head with any guitarist in the world.
“Or saxophonist.” He added as we discussed morkels, women, and life in general in a recent interview.
“Of course, you’re never going to be able to play single notes like a traditional instrument, but that’s part of the morkel’s challenging charm.”
I asked him if this lack of single not playing ability ever inhibited his band’s development of a song, but Erratus merely spoke of the morkel’s “charming challenges.”

The Evaluation

“You want me to shut the door?” Don asked as he entered the office.
“If you want to.” Phil replied from behind the desk, then changed his mind. “Sure, go ahead.”
Don closed the door and took a seat.
“OK, Don,” Phil began, his eyes on the computer screen. “This is your ninety days’ evaluation.”
Don said nothing, scratched his nose, looked about the office. Someone, probably Sylvia, had brought in a potted plant. Don wondered how soon it would die.
“OK, according to your information here, you haven’t missed any days work so far.”
“Mm-hmm.” Don acknowledged.
“And as far as my personal evaluation, using this form as a guide,” Phil turned a piece of paper on the desk around so that Don could see it. “We start with number one: responds to instruction. I can give you a grade between 1, 2, 3, and 4. One is, as you can see, poor, and four is excellent. I’m giving you a four on that one.”
This went on for some time, with Don receiving a four on most of the approximately one dozen areas of evaluation. He received a three on a couple, which Don attributed to Phil’s understanding of the process, which was probably to discourage the employee from having too high of an opinion of himself.
After it was over Don was dismissed to return to work. He got behind one of the hampers full of compressed bricks of human excrement and began to push.
“How’d it go?” Ramona, another employee, asked.
“OK. I received a satisfactory evaluation.”
“That’s what everybody gets. Unless you’ve called in sick.”
“Why is that?”
“Because everything is subjective. They don’t have a work quota here, so they really don’t have any objective criteria to judge a worker’s performance, so they fall back on whether or not you call in sick.”

The Priestess

I met the priestess at a party for interns working for the local newspaper. You might wonder what I was doing at a party, knowing, as you do, that I am not a social person. The reason I was there was because I was at a lonely point in my life. I craved experiences. The person who invited me was the wife of a friend of mine. She assured me there would be no violent people at the party. Really, it was a gathering more than a “party.” I walked in and was almost immediately drawn to the priestess.
She was sitting on the sofa surrounded by men and women talking to her. She wore a green dress. A nacreous blue and white ornament was about her throat. Her hair was up so that one could see all of her long, lovely neck. She could have been a giraffe, but one all a single, tawny shade. The priestess, for that was what I soon learned she was, was beautiful.
I, of course, knew no one there except for my friend and his wife. He hadn’t arrived yet and she was talking with some of the other women in her department at the paper. I said hello and got a glass of water from the kitchen. I spoke with no one, although I was introduced to a young woman whom my sponsor probably expected me to take an interest in because she liked poetry. But she was homely and desperate, not my desire.
With no guile or craft I drew the priestess to me. I went back in the main room and began examining items on the shelves. Young newspaper interns can’t be expected to have a life of surpassing depth on display in their rented apartments, but these shelves were pathetically devoid of any evidence of intellectual interest. I picked up a couple of toys from Happy Meals and acted out my forlornness, arranging a tableau of disease.
“You were looking for a book?”
I turned around at this and found the woman in the green dress behind me. My first thought was to shield her from my bad breath.
“I should have brought one.” I said, my mouth pointed up and away.
“You like to play with toys?” Her friends on the sofa laughed. Could they hear us from there?
I chose a barely articulated action figure and had him kiss her foot, a prelude to mountain climbing adventure, but it was me that had to fight her boyfriend.

The Cusp

I found myself on the cusp of deep philosophical and poetic insight. With the help of a metaphorical three-sided mirror I was able to step outside myself and see my would-be post-hippie identity as others saw it. Even if my identity had been that of a lumberjack this would have been beneficial. Merely to have my own image as a cartoon in my head to cherish and idolize was a great boon, but to have the validation of its appeal, not only to myself, but to a legion of imaginary operatives and casual observers, brought me a confidence I had not known before.
“You’re totally out of step with everyone else.” A friend of mine at the time complained.
“Why would I want to be ‘in step?’” was my query.
“Look at these shoes.” He pointed to his feet. “These are the most popular shoes in the world.”
I wondered how he had obtained this information.
“Look at my cigarettes.” He held up the pack. “This is the most popular brand in the world.”
I didn’t tell him that there was probably a brand in China that he’d never heard of that sold twice as well.
“Why does that sort of statistic appeal to you?” I wondered.
“Because to do what is popular, to own what is popular, is to be popular yourself.”
“And you want to be popular?”
“That is self-evident. Everyone wants to be liked.”
“I want to be liked for what I do, for what I’ve created, not for perfectly assimilating the mindset of the crowd.” But, barring that, I added mentally, I will take being admirable and pleasing to myself.
This is hard sometimes, however. I look out of my own eyes at a world that is not a reflection of me. I can look into a mirror and still not see either the truth, nor what I want to see. The self-image must be constantly built up and reinforced with a series of metaphors, in this case a parallel between Sun Ra and a lean and solitary man pursuing his vision in the purity of his obscurity, but secretly beloved by a wealthy coterie.

The Stump

Deep in the woods behind the house was the stump. Signs were posted that the woods were private property and that trespassing was not allowed, but they didn’t stop my friends and me from making the twenty minute trip to see the stump.
“The Great Stump.” Don corrected me as we started on the path through the grass to the woods.
“Yeah!” Phil agreed. He had his father’s old army field jacket on and a sack of sandwiches over his shoulder.
I hadn’t thought about it before, but, looking back at Don and Phil, I saw it as a good idea. The Great Stump. Yes, that’s what we’d call it from now on. For truly it was the Great Stump as it had once been, must have been, the Great Tree. I found it hard to believe that no one knew about it except us. After all, somebody must have cut the tree down, right?
We reached the clearing dominated by the stump. It was a mysterious place like the pilot’s chamber in the wrecked spaceship in Alien. The stump was approximately ten feet tall, as big around as the raccoon cage at the zoo. Four teenagers were goofing off on top of it.
I stopped short when I heard their voices.
“Hey!” Phil shouted. I turned on him with a snarl. How much better would it have been to keep our presence a secret, my eyes flashed. We could have observed and made a plan.
Normally I think they would have jumped down and surrounded us, challenging our intrusion with their teenage hauteur, but climbing up and down the stump was, as we knew ourselves, a pain. There was only one way up, a series of jagged cracks on one side, and it wasn’t easy.
“Don’t you kids know how to read?” One of them shouted. He had that cool, in-the-know, surfer-kid voice that I always found simultaneously alluring and intimidating. “No trespassing.”
“Fuck you.” Don cursed.
“Kid, I’m going to kick your ass.” The teenager swore. He started making his way to the descent, but the stump interrupted him, laughing in a low rumble like a moon rolling over an obsidian lake.

The Gelengine

The gelengine was first described in a paper by Gambolin Wickease in the early part of the last century, but no one attempted to manufacture one until the late 1950’s. It was then that an experimental offshoot of Ford Motors, the Slapdash Foundry, began working to realize Wickease’s vision. Wham Frudling was director of the project, although it was Enid’s cousin Barabbas Melcorn who was actually in charge of the Foundry.
Melcorn saw the Foundry one day becoming a successful company in its own right, an important source of revenue for Ford, and, to that end, initially supported Frudling’s team’s efforts wholeheartedly. As debts piled up, however, and Frudling seemed bent on pushing the gelengine as an affordable means for the average family to visit the moon, Melcorn began to keep a secret journal of negative thoughts. He also began to drink heavily. His wife at the time, Helen Estrangementary, took the journal with her when she left Melcorn in 1975. Todd Sturgid’s new film about the development of the gelengine was largely based on this journal.
During the installation of a gelengine it is traditional to display a photograph of Wham Frudling and recite the Crotonic oath, a grouping of words first put together in the 1750’s as a method by which workers new to the industrial process might delude themselves into thinking that a world of universal brotherhood lay just around the proverbial corner. This ceremony performed by gelengine installation personnel may seem like a lot of extra work, but, given that each gelengine is as big as a very large thing can be and still not be clearly discernible from the moon, it is not performed often enough to cause resentment.
“Some people have wondered what sort of machine would be big enough to require the use of a gelengine.” Mr. Brownlung’s Return stated as the two of us were waiting for Barabbas Melcorn to be lowered into the ground set aside for the storage of his rotting corpse.
I fiddled with the laces of my shoe. Did this statement require that I make a response? How much of my persona was an unconscious disguise created by my secret identity to keep me from seeing myself reflected in other people? Can I know myself through my art?

The Weestercrow

Among the approximately forty-five actual rides at the Pancakes of Mercury Amusement Park perhaps none is so dear to my childhood as the Weestercrow. I have heard from a cousin that they’ve changed its name to something else, but I refuse to call it anything but the Weestercrow. This same cousin is the one that was afraid to ride it. Even as a child I thought this was silly, for among the many thrills to be had at the park the Weestercrow was clearly one of the tamer. It now costs a day’s pay to visit the Pancakes of Mercury, so I haven’t been in many years, but one day I’ll go back and find everything the same: the red, white, and blue glitter disco decorations in the pinball arcades and the shops selling posters of the Bee Gees and Kiss and Lynda Carter and blaring cotton candy rock ‘n’ roll over the loudspeakers. And the Weestercrow, in its original colors of green and orange, will still be next to the frightening Contemporary Theater, where puppets jump off the stage and run up the aisles to scare the shit out of little children. Yes, the Weestercrow will be ready to take me in its arms and fling me over the walls of the park and into my sister’s back yard.
The Weestercrow, for those of you unfamiliar with such ancient devices, is a mechanical snake monkey in a witch’s hat with eight looping arms, each of which has four buckets on its end. Each bucket seats two park patrons. I don’t know how many jaded park employees can fit into a bucket after hours and I doubt I ever will. Once everyone is buckled in as securely as state regulations demand, the Weestercrow begins to spin and lurch, its arms moving up and down, each bucket spinning independently and animatronic presidents of the United States protrude from concealed portholes in the witch’s hat, screaming prerecorded Satanic gibberish. Of course, today’s youth find this sort of thing terrible trite, having been exposed to elephant sodomy on their cell phones from an early age, but for children of an earlier time, such rides were like a day on another planet, one on which the psychedelic fantasies hinted at on Saturday morning television were almost realized. I say almost because at Pancakes of Mercury you still had to pee in a smelly toilet, get stung in the mouth by a wasp while you were eating your Now ‘n’ Later, and got out to the parking lot to eat lunch in the car.

The Berkarpus

Imeldo, rock star and would-be actor, was just about to step into the car that would take him to the airport for a long-awaited trip to Japan when his manager/father Gibson LaFoe caught up with him.
“One more thing.” The white-haired gentleman demanded.
“Yes?” Imeldo gasped with exasperation.
“Who’s going to take care of the berkarpus?”
Imeldo’s mouth soured.
“You are, I guess.”
“Oh no, not me.” Gibson LaFoe was many things, but animal handler was not one of them.
“Then hire somebody.” Imeldo rubbed his eyes. The last tour had nearly killed him. He wanted to see Mount Fuji. “Use your executive authority and hire somebody, a professional.”
LaFoe nodded as he watched the car moving towards the wrought iron gates. Yes, he thought, a professional.
That afternoon a man with stout calves and a hat that pinned up on one side was shown to the holding pens at the rear of the house. As the man spoke at some length on the inadequacy of the facilities, LaFoe reflected on how a man’s hat defined his position in society. It was a shame that the rise of youth culture and its attendant emphasis on non-baldness had killed the great tradition of hat-wearing. Today one must display one’s great mop of hair if one wanted to be seen as sexy—and being seen as sexy was the preeminent concern of everyone nowadays. Take his own son, for example: though Imeldo longed to relax and be creative, in order to keep his career moving forward he had to devote five hours a day to working out, else his body would return to the unacceptable shape it had been in eighth grade. Who would buy an album or go see a show by a fat, nerdy eighth grader?
“Did you hear what I said?” The professional animal handler asked in his parody of an Australian accent. “This berkarpus isn’t getting enough raw goldfish.”
“That hat.” LaFoe nodded his mass of white locks towards the other man. “That’s a professional animal handler’s hat, right?”

The Gravityphone

Contact between the worlds of the human and the madadisplor was impossible before the invention of the gravityphone. We only knew of their existence from some descriptions left behind by the Rhubabra tourists, and that was merely a couple of postcards and a vague, dubiously analog photograph.
“But now,” explained Mumphrey Humfinn on the occasion of the gravityphone’s unveiling, “We are able to call the madadisplor existence-plane whenever we want.”
“How come a scientist didn’t do the presentation?” Gage Golgo asked a contemporary at the reception following Humfinn’s speech and the first public use of the gravityphone.
“That’s the old way of doing things.” The other man, a mysterious figure that one wouldn’t figure to be an intellectual if one was to judge based solely on stereotypical imagery, gathered a plateful of fried mozzarella sticks as he spoke. “Some mad scientist didn’t invent the gravityphone in isolation somewhere. It was developed by a team working under the guidance of a large corporation, in this case Gemächlich Sodaworks, and Humfinn happens to be the CEO.”
The Oglethorpe String Quartet, once known as the Pigsty Fiddle Fellers, played a dissonant mid-twentieth century piece as the reception continued. The invitees ate sausage balls and took turns using the ten gravityphones set up at closely guarded tables around the room. One young man seemed particularly delighted with the opportunity. He stood in line at one table and then another, placing call after call through the interintestinal ether separating the existence-planes.
“Just press these buttons…” an attendant started to instruct him.
“I know how to do it.” The young man interrupted, taking up the receiver. He entered the eight-digit code and waited for some random madadisplor to answer the ringing of the phone.
“Hello?” Came the basso profundo brogue on the other end.
“Hello, is Tiffany there?”
“No, you’ve got the wrong number.”
“Don’t lie to me. I know she’s there.”

The Sciencematriarch

Sermona, the sciencematriarch for the independent fraternity Phoenicia House, roused her charges from a chemically induced sleep of twelve hours by electronically stimulating the boys’ spelunker glands. This was done without any insertion of devices or even the necessity of going into their sleep chamber. Sermona merely flipped a switch on the wall outside the room. The Phoenicians woke up sticky and loose, but mentally ready for the charity science quiz match against a group from a rival college.
“Thanks, Sermona!” Ivan gushed as he stepped into clean underwear.
“Yeah,” added Hosni, “I feel ready to take on those fellows!”
“Not until you’ve had a good breakfast.” Sermona urged. The smell of eggs and waffles was in the air, floating up from the kitchen downstairs.
“Recent studies by the department of nutrition and airflow at the University of Subdivision have called into question whether a big breakfast is really beneficial to someone about to take on a great mental challenge.” Justin, whom the other boys called “Legolas,” informed the sciencematriarch.
“Well, I don’t care what scientific research has been done,” Sermona returned, “You’re not facing Tupperware State without something substantial in your tummy.” She swatted at the boy’s backside with a metal detector.
“Sermona, you don’t really mean that!” Jai looked shocked.
“Well, no.” Sermona admitted. Her devotion to science was the only thing greater than her devotion to the men of Phoenicia House. “But until I actually see the statistics and confirm the control methodology with my own apparatus, you’re going to eat your oatmeal.”
The boys laughed and barreled downstairs. The house, formerly the home of an antebellum soda pop manufacturer named Indentureme Bob, once again rumbled with the indelicate vibrations of young life. Sermona cast her gaze about the poster bedecked and tissue strewn room and sighed.
Later, as the last of the Phoenicians skipped off to the match, she and the head of the custodial staff, Mr. Polk, shared a marijuana cigarette and remembered the days when none other than David Letterman had been a resident of the house. “What a scientist he would have been.” The old janitor enthused.

The Precisemucous Book

Precious to the memory of the former students of Mr. Nethernun is The Precisemucous Book, a collection of his informal talks and sayings as remembered by his closest followers after his death. During his lifetime Mr. Nethernun self-published four books detailing his philosophy. These form the core of the Randolph Nethernun Foundation’s curriculum as it tries to spread the word of Mr. Nethernun’s teachings, but it is The Precisemucous Book that one turns to after one has become acquainted with these teachings and wants to know more, not just about the philosophy, but the man himself. The Precisemucous Book provides insights, for example, on the deeper meaning behind such concepts as “The Smell of Gold” and “The Naked Camel Paradox.” It also reveals Mr. Nethernun to have been a man of warm humor, as in the many anecdotes about his work at the tax assessor’s office, where he worked most of his adult life.
These last are collected in The Precisemucous Book’s final chapter, “Remembering Mr. Nethernun,” edited, as was the bulk of the book, by the chosen successor to Mr. Nethernun, Bob McShea, the first director of the Randolph Nethernun Foundation. His tenure as director was brief, for he died in 1970, only four years after Mr. Nethernun. The next director, Andrew Beshang, has served in that capacity ever since. It was Beshang who made the decision to begin including The Precisemucous Book in the box set edition of Mr. Nethernun’s collected works. This box set is usually the version that the newcomer to Mr. Nethernun’s philosophy purchases, saving himself a little money rather than buy all five books separately. For, as Beshang has often said, “You’re going to want The Precisemucous Book eventually anyway, so why not get it in the first place?”
Some have grumbled that the box set’s title, “The Complete Works of Randolph Nethernun” is misleading, that it ignores his 1937 science fiction novel, Abcess #1 for the Groove, as well as his dozen or so informal essays on the subject of tax assessing, but if that is the case, why not throw in his letters to heads of state and celebrities of the day or his juvenilia? Let us not trivialize Mr. Nethernun’s work and thought with extraneous material. I know I don’t need to know the color of his socks to appreciate the man.

The Doorbat

Just inside the door to my studio is a baseball bat my father bought for me when I was a child. It hangs on two nails and waits to be used against anybody who tries to assault me while I’m in the studio. I think the idea behind my father’s giving me the bat, along with a softball and a glove, was to encourage me to take up sports, since it was apparent even by the age of seven that I wasn’t going to become an athlete on my own. I don’t know what his concern was, because he was never into sports the way other men usually are. It was probably that his brother’s son was an all-around and he was jealous.
I was just too lazy and bookish. I did play little league football, although I had no concept of how the game was played, what the rules were, or what I was supposed to be doing. During our practices I would avoid getting hit as much as possible. That seemed to me the most logical course of action. I remember clearly my parents asking me if I wanted to play and my agreeing, not really knowing what I was getting into, but wanting to do something fun. They took me down to the county recreational fields for the tryout. I promptly crawled under a truck and stayed there, refusing to associate with a bunch of aggressive boys that I didn’t know. They let me on the team anyway.
Later in high school I played football again. I only joined to go on trips and hang out with cheerleaders. I was a big fat kid, which was enough to see me through on the level we played at, a private Christian school athletic league. I lost weight between my junior and senior seasons and never was as good again. But looking good for the girls was more important than the team. I wish I’d had that attitude when it came to deciding between keeping my job as a cashier at Kroger or playing that last year. Stupidly, I quit because I felt the team needed me. I was moved from tackle to guard because of the weight loss and didn’t play much. Not that I really cared.
I earned the right to wear a letter jacket, but I threw the thing in the trash in protest over the bullshit I increasingly saw at the school. I never did play baseball, but I kept the bat. One of these days I’m going to plant it in some teenager’s head.

The Maglicovespuary

Under the category of Mental Health by Harmonious Location of Person, we find the idea of the maglicovespuary, which, when taken in concert with the related musical ideas of the maglicovespuary’s inventor, Waxby Boogerman, seems to offer the hope of peace of mind for the man sickened by modern media carcinogens and the congenital debilitation of ancient misconceptions. If only we could create a working maglicovespuary as described in Boogerman’s writings we might find the healing we seek, the healing that such techniques as meditation, hypnosis, and telepathy promise, but never fulfill.
One attempt at creating a working maglicovespuary has been made by a group of students at the University of Phlanxumallday. In a disused portion of the campus’ physical plant they have set up an oasis of identity according to Boogerman’s description and filled it with the music of Sun Ra and others whose work is virtually indistinguishable from the former. This is an important point, as Boogerman himself has said that Sun Ra’s music provides an aural vision of what the maglicovespuary looks like. Students who have spent time in the maglicovespuary have reported a feeling of dislocation in regards to their received identities, such as those based on gender, race, nationality, and/or religious upbringing. Indeed, as one young woman put it, “It’s like stepping onto another planet.”
But what of the older fellow, unlikely to give Sun Ra’s music a chance, set in his ways of sports affiliation or dreams of Rock stardom? Can he find emotional and imagistic solace in the maglicovespuary? It is this question above all others that our reporter wanted to answer, for himself if no one else. Digby Dorowdy went to the University of Phlanxumallday and met with Towne Ralpher, the leader of the team of students who created the maglicovespuary.
“Do you really like the music of Sun Ra?” Was one of his first questions. “Wouldn’t you rather be listening to Blur or the latest imitation of the Rolling Stones?”
“It is precisely the lack of sexual attraction or consumer emphasis in Sun Ra’s music that makes the maglicovespuary viable as a healing tool.” Ralpher responded, looking, despite his disclaimers of hipness, as sexually attractive and consumer-ready as a vagina-shaped automobile.

The Stylpouiste

There are certain people who are known only celebrities. Are these people “super-celebrities?” No, they are stylpouistes. The really big stars of music and film try to keep them secret and exclusively within their circle because the whole point of the stylpouiste is that it represents something that they, whose lives are so public, don’t have to share with everyone. It is also a way for celebrities to experience the devotion of fandom from the fan’s side.
If you are having difficulty in grasping this concept, let me give you an example. One of the biggest stylpouistes is Douglas Grappler. He is at the center of the David Bowie-Paul McCartney-David Gilmour axis. Nominally an interior decorator, his actual value to the celebrities he serves lies in his abilities as a conversationalist. Obviously, as a successful stylpouiste he does not seek to become famous in his own right. Some do. Some grow impatient with their roles and seek to move into the light. Grappler, however, is content to be a friend and inspiration to his famous associates and make a living doing projects for them.
Of course there are many kinds of stylpouistes, many levels of access to which they are privy. There are Heavy Metal stylpouistes, known mainly to musicians of that genre. There are stylpouistes who are known only to a handful of people. To use the above example of Douglas Grappler, he is an intimate of not only Bowie, McCartney, and Gilmour, but another dozen or so celebrities connected to them. At some point, however, the circle closes about him, with the celebrities jealously keeping anyone else from knowing Grappler. As a successful stylpouiste, he has to be content with that.
It is an interesting notion, wondering where the line is drawn. Bowie and Brian Eno know about Grappler. David Byrne does not. But perhaps Byrne knows about an assemblage artist that Paul McCartney is unaware of. The spheres of exclusivity and possession are interconnected and overlapping.
As a total unknown myself, the path before me has not yet begun to diverge, offering me the choice between a life as a star or a stylpouiste. It is far more likely that my path leads only to obscurity and the dead end of posthumous recognition.

The Phaelosus

“By some bizarre coincidence the Phaelosus has been rediscovered just when mankind has most need of it.” Professor Fontainebleau told his comrades excitedly as they all gathered around the object for a photograph.
Robby rolled his eyes. This was caught by the camera, making it look as if he was staring at Susan Untermeyer’s chest, when he was actually expressing his dismissal of the professor’s silly enthusiasm.
“As if ‘mankind’ gives a rat’s ass about an archeological discovery.” He complained to “Dingo” McCoy a minute later. The Phaelosus was being loaded into a jeep for the trip to the distant metropolitan hive. Fontainebleau would accompany it. Meanwhile the dig would continue.
McCoy took a sip of water from his canteen. He didn’t trust the water in the camp, professing to obtain his from a creek high in the surrounding hills.
“The Phaelosus was supposed to endow the people of Gmorge with the wisdom to distinguish between menu and exit.” McCoy defended the professor obliquely.
Robby rolled his eyes again.
Now many miles away, being driven by one of the other members of the team, Fontainebleau glanced at the priceless artifact in the back seat. The Phaelosus represented impending fame and fortune for the professor. It was a calculating machine made of meticulously hand-milled brass parts. When manipulated by a crank on its front it displayed one of sixteen primary symbols in a window. This would be interpreted by a priest, leading to peace and prosperity for the people of Gmorge. Fontainebleau smiled. He planned to make those sixteen symbols as familiar to the public as the zodiac.
As the jeep entered the small town of Winterville the professor and his driver found themselves behind a slow poke. Fontainebleau answered the driver’s questioning look with a nod. They passed the other car, though the double lines in the road prohibited such action. A policeman in a patrol car saw them and pulled them over.
“I’ll take care of this.” The professor promised. By the time the cop was walking towards them he had the Phaelosus cradled in his lap. He slowly turned the ancient gears with a screwdriver, as the original crank was still lost. The symbol of Limpia, the cigar store owner, appeared in the window.

The Brandumalted

“Go on, try some. You’ll like it.” The man in the green apron and black string tie urged. He pushed the concoction a little closer to me. “You’ll feel better.”
I was queasy from the pain medication I had taken nearly seven hours before. And to think: I used to stay intoxicated all the time! Now I couldn’t handle such things. I had a friend who loved pills. How did he function?
“OK, OK.” I said. The glass was heaped with a chocolate milkshake-looking substance. It smelled like a nutritional supplements store. It wasn’t as cold as I had expected. I took a sip.
“It’s thick.” I told the man on the other side of the counter.
“Yeah.” He smiled, thinking that my description was praise. Hardly. The stuff reminded me of liquefied hay. Tastewise, it was vaguely chocolatey.
“Excuse me.” I abruptly begged.
In the room with the toilet I secured myself to the facilities. Turning my head I saw a crude drawing of a stereotypical pimp. A word balloon coming from his mouth read, “I come back ON the bitch.” On the opposite wall was the following piece of information: “Todd Roche eats shit. Smell his breath. It smells like shit.”
“You need to try to down at least half of this.” The man in the green apron told me as I returned to my seat. Reading my reluctance like an illuminated billboard he added, “It contains stomach soothing herbs.”
I took a deep breath and “manfully” downed my required half.
“I like your tie.” I said.
“Thanks. Some people call it my Colonel Sanders tie.”
“You ought to part your hair in the middle and grow a big moustache.”
He shook his head. “Nahh. I don’t want to get carried away.”
“You know what I want?” I made my prelude. “A black bucket hat. A nice one.” As the man started to open his mouth I forestalled him. “One without a logo on it.”
He closed his mouth and looked down at his smeary reflection in the polished wood of the counter. He tried to look thoughtful, but I knew that thought had reached the edge of known space.

The Leederghist

“Did you steal this leederghist?” My wife asked me.
“This what?” I asked. From the inside it felt like my face was contorted into an approximation of George Clooney’s on confronting a group of quaint evildoers, but probably more closely resembled an old man’s shame at shitting in his pants.
“This leederghist.” She held up the t-shirt with the picture of Tobin Sprout and Justin Broadrick threatening Robert Fripp with flash photography on it.
“What’s a leederghist?” I craved to have the knowledge.
My wife sighed.
“It’s a t-shirt—just like this one—that is illustrated with one individual’s fantasy. It’s the opposite of a mass marketed t-shirt, one with say, a picture of Batman enjoying a Coca-Cola on it.”
“Well, if that shirt is the manifestation of one individual’s unique vision, it’s hardly likely that I stole it, is it? I mean, I’d have to have had it custom made. And the manufacturer is hardly likely to have let me get away without paying for it.”
“Ah, that’s what I wanted to know.” She closed her eyes and nodded her head as she tossed the so-called leederghist on the bed. “So that is your conception?”
“Well… it’s one I whole-heartedly endorse.”
“But where did you get it?”
I took a deep breath preparatory to a deep explanation.
“There’s an automated t-shirt customizing machine where the fotomat used to stand in the middle of the parking lot that used to be the Georgetown shopping center parking lot. Is that clear?”
“Show me.”
We drove over there, listening to Sonny Simmons during the drive.
“See?” I pointed. The machine, like a great yellow walrus of fun, was just as I had described.
“‘Leederghist.’” My wife read from the sign.
“I didn’t even notice that.” I said truthfully.
“You were too busy planning to run away without paying.”

The Cerealforcer

The children’s breakfast was interrupted by the loud and violent arrival of the Cerealforcer. The entire house shook as the red, white, and brown costumed character thundered into the kitchen from seemingly nowhere.
“Eating breakfast, eh?” The Cerealforcer roared like the deck of an aircraft carrier as he leaned over the table where the three little boys say, enveloping them within the scope of his presence like a giant beach umbrella sheltering a pony. “That’s good!”
“Who are you?” Demanded Bruce, the freckled, tough-looking boy. He looked like a tough bully to those raised on stereotype-driven TV, but in reality he was a good kid who had aspirations to be a hearing aid company marketing representative. We know this because he wrote it on a form at school.
“Who am I?” The Cerealforcer boomed. “I’m Major Milkbowl! I travel through the kitchens of America’s breakfast time youth, seeing to it that a good breakfast is enjoyed by all!”
“Even homeless children?” Evan, the boy sitting next to Bruce, asked.
The Cerealforcer raised a mighty, brown-gloved index finger and opened his mouth to speak. Yet speech did not come, not for a full two seconds. “That’s right! Now, I see you’re having breakfast, but are you having a good breakfast? One based around a milk-softened, cereal grain-based, ready-to-eat food?”
Bruce and Evan paused wide-eyed over their bowls. They didn’t know what to do. They know if they took too long to finish eating, their cereal would get soggy and therefore inedible. Once, Evan’s father had forced him to finish his cereal after it had gone soggy and Evan had thrown it up on the front porch thirty seconds later.
“Are we on TV?” The third boy, a little younger than the other two, sitting on the opposite side of the table, wondered. He glanced around.
Bruce and Evan cautiously began shoveling their cereal into their mouths as the attention of the costumed intruder was turned to the one they called Mikey.
“Would it matter if we were?” The Cerealforcer asked slowly, his words creepy and deliberately enunciated.

The Chronolfactory

The initial work on the temporal characteristics of odor was done by Hassel Bladling in the prosperous years after the last big war. It was Bladling that coined the term chronolfactory and first postulated that, in addition to being strongly linked to memory, the sense of smell itself was like music, in that odors themselves played out their existence over a period of time. However, Bladling’s work was but a footnote to his greater interest in the mass production of chickens and was not developed fully.
It was left to me and my expensive, and largely theoretical, staff to being the discipline of the chronolfactory to its logically determined fruition. This involved the construction of an actual, working chronol factory on the banks of the Locustitty river and the distribution of thousands of pocket-sized informational comic books on the interrelated topics of time and odor. I named our enterprise the Lingering Moment, and was surprised at the amount of confusion and controversy that it seemed to engender.
“Some thought we made perfume.” I recalled with a laugh when I was interviewed by the BBC many years later.
“What did you actually make?” The interviewer, a young man in a black suit, asked.
You know, now that I think about that young man, it seems to me that he must have been a member of one of those British bands that were so popular back then, the bands with one-word names like Soap, Dish, Dash, Goal, Post, or Miasma. He had the truncated mullet hairdo like Paul Weller, and the retro inspired clothing that only a skinny drunkard could wear effectively. I wonder if he could have been the one that sang, “Love Will Drive Us to Drink at Home.”
Of course, he could have been a spy. A hip, post-modern spy who didn’t take his job too seriously. I wonder what ever happened to him. He could have been the star of a series of spy films and related novels. I can see him now, driving a car of envy-churning make, but one run down and battered, just like his angst-ridden soul. A good-looking young man, but good-looking only because he was young. As he got older he’d take on an Albert Finney frog-like bloat. At least he didn’t stink of cologne.

The Bla

The Bla (some said the mighty Bla) sat on his symbolically important chair and gazed down at the television box his followers had placed before him. These followers, numbering in the past as many as a dozen, but at the moment sadly reduced to three, promised the Bla that WKRP would soon fill the screen and delight his exalted consciousness.
“I particularly like the character of Andy Travis.” The Bla commented as he removed his shoes and tossed them into the box provided for the storage of these very shoes. A gift from a former follower, now moved on to the devotion of a more socially prestigious guru.
A commercial for a local used car dealer appeared. The Bla glanced at the artificial sundial standing in a niche to his right.
“I guess it will be a little longer than we expected.” He remarked without a trace of impatience, a hallmark of his personality that had been one of the major selling points of his cult for some years now.
“While we’re waiting,” Wallace Roethke spoke up, hoping to water down the tension brought on by the delay, “Would you please tell us the difference between a guru, such as yourself, and a cultural icon?”
The Bla took a deep contemplative breath preparatory to answering. He looked up at the ceiling painted black overhead and then brought his gaze down along with his response.
“Now, as I’ve explained previously, I only use the term ‘guru’ out of a lack of any other word in the English language having the same general connotative impetus. I’d rather use something else, but, barring coining my own word for what I am and what I do, which I might just do before the day is out, I will make do with ‘guru.’” The Bla paused and snapped his dreamy eyes at Roethke. “I’m assuming you mean ‘guru’ in the sense in which it is applied to me.” Roethke affirmed that this was so with a dignified nod. “However, a cultural icon, in differentiation from a guru in the sense that I am a guru, does not necessarily imply a dedicated group of followers. Oh sure, the cultural icon, Thelonious Monk, Groucho Marx, Garfield, (the Bla permitted himself a smile), may have dedicated followers, or fans, but—oh look, it’s starting!” His smiled now was a wider one, brought on by the familiar theme song of the old show.

The Ulginwater

As Todd and Cuspidora began removing their groceries from the plastic bags in which they had been transported Todd looked for the ulginwater he had purchased.
“What bag was it in?” He wondered aloud.
“What?” His wife asked.
“The ulginwater.”
“You can’t wait, can you?” Her tone was disapproving, almost hateful, but not quite. They had had a nice time out together, shopping and walking about. Todd was more relaxed, more tolerant and pleasant than usual. Cuspidora’s habituated inclination to get some payback for transgressions years old was blunted by the desire to keep the nice time going a little longer.
“No, I can’t. I want to try it.” Todd pulled out a bag of frozen peas and frowned.
“I’ll put everything up.” Cuspidora insisted. “I’ll find it for you.”
Todd stepped back, surveying the teeming counter like a general a battlefield from some commanding height. He suspected it was in… that bag. He reached in and withdrew the distinctively packaged product before he could once again be balked by his spouse.
“So you’ve got your magic ulginwater.” Cuspidora was contemptuous, but understated. “Take it away.”
“You want to try some?” Todd asked as he got out a glass, a fancy one not used for everyday drinking.
“No.” Cuspidora was firm. “Well, maybe a sip.” She decided as Todd cracked the seal and began to pour.
Todd sniffed closely, quickly, like an army surgeon weighing an injured man’s chanced with the briefest of glances. He took a great mouthful and swallowed it down.
“Well?” Cuspidora asked, taking the glass from him.
“It’s a little more bitter that I was led to believe.” He paused. “But I feel it working already.” He looked at his hand as the beverage began acting on his system.
“You’ll always be a drunk.” Cuspidora handed the glass back untasted.

The Zastriami

It so happened that Wrackenam Brothers began producing a line of sausage made from a mixture of llama and duck meat. Secret taste tests indicated that the meat-eating public would really go for this new kind of sausage.
“But we can’t rely on the product alone to sell itself.” Vice President Copely McGuh insisted at a board meeting held, for security’s sake, by a disused swimming pool on the fourteenth floor.
“Indeed.” Joe Wrackenam, fifth generation sausagemaker, concurred. “We need a marketing campaign that will fix the newness of this llama-duck sausage in the mind of the consumer like a… like a…” He grabbled (his word) for an analogie correlatif.
“Like a finger stuck in an electrical socket.” Dobie Wrackenam, Joe’s uncle and the oldest man on the board, supplied the necessary imagery in his creaking voice of evil.
“Exactly.” Copely McGuh stabbed his finger in the air. He wanted to get his idea out there before anyone else could think of it. “And nothing says new like a new word.”
“What do you mean?” Joe was sly, ready to acquire more slyness.
“I suggest we come up with a new name for this new kind of sausage.” McGuh put it right on the line as he always did. This was why, although married to only a small and little known female in the Wrackenam family, he had been made vice president in charge of stuffing over the heads of far more senior men.
All agreed, rubbing their chins and dipping their toes in the water, each trying to think of a good name.
“Shall we send this round to an ad agency?” Young MacReady Wrackenam wondered.
“No.” McGuh replied. “I’ve got the name”
“How convenient.” Joe thought. He wanted to say it out loud in a sneering tone that would make them all realize that McGuh had clearly thought of everything in advance, perhaps weeks before, back when he was giving that careers day lecture at the university. But Joe kept his tongue in check, like a bridle on the head of a mighty steed.

The Paperfilmer

After graduation from Doc Settlemore’s University of the World Cinema, Bradon Eyespot found himself unable to get a job in Hollywood. He put this down to his lack of contacts with anyone in the industry.
“They all hang out together in alcoholic venues that I just don’t frequent.” Bradon told himself. “I’ll never get the financing I need to make my epic.”
This epic that Bradon referred to was a dramatization of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying to be performed by midgets in crude masks make of burlap sacks. He had envisioned himself as an uncompromising artiste, but, after an impromptu meeting with Penn Jillette ended in outright condemnation and almost violent rejection, Bradon began to revise his plans.
“Perhaps there is a cheap way to make a film.” He suddenly thought pone morning as he exited his tent to make water.
Thus was born the career of the paperfilmer.
Feeling that Hollywood, with its bloated “stars” and ancient formulas, was no place to inaugurate such a radical venture, Bradon Eyespot traveled home to Smutcheon, South Carolina, and began to film the pages of Faulkner’s masterpiece one at a time. He cut the pages from an actual copy of the book and placed them in rural settings, then filmed them, allowing the vagueries of outdoor light and the random actions of insects to make spontaneous commentary on the text. This, however, was only the beginning.
“I only did the Faulkner project to be able to say that I had fulfilled that particular dream of mine.” Bradon explained to a writer from the Smutcheon Conservative. “Now I’m working on a project that is much more personal—a seventeen hour film in which a morbidly obese woman slowly turns the pages of my tenth grade diary. I play the woman.”
It shouldn’t surprise you, given the mania for filmmaking that has swept the nation since the introduction of inexpensive digital cameras and editing software, that Bradon himself became the subject of a documentary. The Eccentric Recluse, made on a budget of whatever money happened to be in the director’s pocket that day, won many prizes at regional and national film festivals. Robert Redford, dressed as a rodeo contestant, presented its maker, Kamika Hill, with tokens of wealth and celebrity.

The Negatorturial

Bracchus was asked by upper management (the men in the green suits and pig masks) to take a negatorturial on a Saturday. “It’s completely voluntary, of course,” they said, adding that he would be paid overtime for coming in on his off day. Something, perhaps it was the menacing way they kept twisting their riding crops in their hands, told him that it would be best if he interpreted the word “voluntary” as “mandatory.”
So Bracchus cancelled his date with Yvonne at the park and attended the negatorturial. They were supposed to meet another couple and have a picnic, maybe play Frisbee in the not-too-hot late spring weather. Yvonne was not happy. “You have rights.” She insisted.
“I have massive credit card debt.” Bracchus thought. He told Yvonne that they could still get together if he got out of the negatorturial early enough. Slim chance of that. He’d heard that these were all-day affairs, inevitably slowed down even further by the inane comments and questions of his fellow participants. Why didn’t anyone else understand that these things were over with so much faster if no one said anything?
This negatorturial, however, was apparently entirely for his benefit. There were no other participants. Bracchus was instructed to take a seat before a desk behind which sat a person in a blue suit wearing a parrot mask. He couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman; the voice was just on the edge between the two.
“Before we begin I need you to fill out this form.” The instructor, who identified itself as Nure, handed Bracchus a multi-page document that, as he soon discovered, contained spaces made to be filled with detailed summaries of some of the most embarrassing moments of his life. As Bracchus began filling in his name (a task that often proved confusing to those aforementioned fellow participants) he asked Nure what sort of things he would be learning in the negatorturial.
“That depends on you.” Nure replied. Its riding crop was symbolic: a golden emblem pinned to the indeterminate breast of its outfit. “Everything depends on what you put into it, on the attitude you take towards it.”
Bracchus debated whether to draw a smiley face on his form.

The Dollarhead

The dollarhead, the essence of the monetary divine, the embodiment of money itself as a deity, was enshrined in the temple of Moola in the form of a great clock with a hand for every minute on its face. One of the priests, who had been appropriately remunerated for the job, explained to a visitor that this form had been chosen for the idol because not only was time money, but “money is time. It is time itself made tangible, exchangeable. It is the time of the working man made manifest.”
Pogrammo Edsel, the visitor to the temple, nodded in acknowledgement of the information. He didn’t know if he agreed, but he understood. After another five minutes on the tour he asked where the restroom was. “Restroom” is a euphemism for toilet room. Another euphemism is “bathroom.” If a room has an actual bath tub in it, then it is an actual bathroom. However, if it only contains facilities for the disposal of bodily wastes, then it seems the height of denial to call it a bathroom. Of course, calling it a restroom is another example of denying the truth of our animal natures. I don’t know which is worse. I’m not saying we should come right out and rename it the “shitter,” but I am sick of the little lies we all tell to disguise the fact that we’re all just intelligent animals that are going to die like everything else.
When Edsel got to the shitter he found that he was required to pay a fee for its use. This was because the temple, run strictly according to the principles developed in the Republican Party’s conservative ivory tower think tanks, felt that every single aspect of human existence should be put on a paying basis. Why should anyone do anything for another person unless he received financial compensation?
“This makes us the world’s first honest religion.” Explained the attendant standing guard over the entrance to the modesty cubicle (or stall) around the toilet.
“Then why do you use the equivocation ‘restroom’ in describing this place?” Edsel demanded, gesturing about the room like a desperate man. The answer, something about the religion’s Christian roots, did nothing to take the sting out of handing over a dollar for the privilege of urinating. There was even a meter on the sink and a charge for each paper towel!

The Croupowder

Most of the croupowder had been wasted trying to drive the skunks and their smell away.
“It’s supposed to work.” My mother claimed, but she didn’t seem so sure now. My studio still stank and there was no way of verifying whether the skunks had left.
“Well, I can’t waste any more of this stuff. I’ve got to save some for… other projects.” I trailed away, my “other projects” a vague secret, even to myself.
“Do you want me to pay for an exterminator?” My mother asked. We were standing in the little moss garden before the entrance to my studio.
“No, no.” I answered in horror. My mother is on the edge of bankruptcy at any given moment. “I’ll cut the grass and burn some incense or something. That should take care of both problems.” I subtly urged her to go home so I could get some thinking done.
I examined the remaining croupowder. It was in the bottom of a sack stenciled on the outside with the mysterious logo of the Rabdaabi Collective. There wasn’t much left. Although there are various formulas for making croupowder, the constants are ground cinnamon and phosphate of mange. It was used in ancient times to ward off the spirit of modernity. No skunks in the Middle East.
I had purchased it in the Big City. My idea at the time was to begin taking a more symbolic, quasi-religious approach to my art, imbuing it with emotional investment and reverence by creating ceremonies or rituals to be performed in conjunction with it. The point is that I must have been in one of my confused periods when I bought the stuff. It was rather expensive.
The aromatic powder glistened in the bottom of the sack, the little grains reflecting the light. I decided to use up the rest of it. What was I saving it for? There was never going to be any ritual magic in my life.
As I approached the studio I saw the skunks. They were getting into a skunk bus, a conveyance about the size of a vending machine on its side. Mr. Skunk, in a snappy homburg, caught sight of me. He pushed his wife and children ahead of him and stuck out his middle digit at me.

The Flashspader

“I’m looking for a flashspader.” I told the old man behind the counter. He looked at his old wife beside him. They stared at each other in encyclopedic bafflement.
“Did he say flush paper?” The old woman croaked. The old man looked back at me. What did he see? A creature from the hippie lagoon? The look on his face suggested that he had no idea what I was doing there in his store. Did I look that peculiar to him? The fact that his wife reacted exactly the same to my presence, my appearance, nearly shook my self-confidence. Maybe I did need to cut my hair according to regulations and adopt the attire of a conservative archetype.
“Did you say flush paper?” The old man repeated his wife’s query.
“No, a flashspader.” I made the appropriate hand movement, miming the action using a flashspader. The old man jumped back as if I had repeatedly stuck my finger into my fist with a lascivious grimace.
“I don’t know what that is.” He acted as if I was holding a gun on him, threatening the termination of his isolated existence. He staggered back, the old woman clutching at his sleeve both to support and comfort him and to be supported and comforted in turn.
“OK, OK.” I said, holding up my hands in the universal sign of “I’m-not-going-to-harm-you.” But even this gesture seemed to spook them. I backed away from the counter and turned to exit the smelly old store. And there, in a dilapidated barrel by the door I saw an array of flashspaders. I had obliviously walked right past them earlier.
“Why, here’s one!” I gasped, pulling out the nicest-looking one. I marched back to the counter. “This is a flashspader!” I said.
The old man looked down at the implement as if I had presented him with a lime-colored dildo.
“Trouble in here, Ernie?” Came a voice from behind me.
It was a sheriff’s deputy with a big belly and his own personal cactus garden growing under his nose. He stepped across the creaking wooden floor to confront this strange visitor in the black garb of an assassin threatening elderly shopkeepers with the evidence of their own senility.

The Turquoisite

There was a time when it was de rigeur for a young man in the rock star profession to wear Southwest Indian-inspired turquoise and silver jewelry. Although that time is long past and I am not exactly a rock star, I felt the overwhelming need, while under the influence of some powerful medication pinched from my wife’s collection, to obtain and wear just such a piece of jewelry. My narcotized imagination conjured a complete look, with bell-bottomed jeans and a flowing silk shirt, that would further my illusion of importance.
At one of the many shops downtown specializing in handcrafted jewelry I discovered that the only thing I could afford was a rather unimpressive pendant for a chain that would have to be purchased separately. I looked about at the array of silver and turquoise items and realized how easy it would be to take this thing too far. Belt buckle, bracelets, necklaces, earrings, maybe even silver and turquoise detail work on my theoretical cowboy boots. Either the pill was wearing off or my natural disinclination to spend money was kicking in, but I left the store unaccessorized.
Avoiding the mendicants, I remembered the only piece of silver and turquoise jewelry anyone in my family had ever owned. It was a small ring that I found at the Lincoln Memorial, in the little room underneath where you can look at the building’s unbelievably massive foundations. I was about eleven or twelve years old. My father, whom I showed it to, told me to say nothing to anyone, keep it a secret, put it in my pocket. I think I remember the incident more for his surprising attitude than the ring itself. You’d think he would insist that I turn it in. The ring, however, didn’t fit me, so I gave it to my sister.
I wondered if she still had it. Still smarting from past mistakes, I sent her a message via this dubious new digital nervous system which binds our world into an easy controllable lump of slavery instead of phoning.
“I don’t remember any ring.” She responded.
By the time I read her answer I was losing my interest in that particular look. Now Matt Pike was captivating me with his shirtless laborer’s image. I wondered how much medication I would need to expose my pale belly.

The Banjoinder

The old man, who might have been labeled a hobo at one time, although I have been assured by people who disdain society’s rules and rigid definitions that there are specific requirements for being a hobo, most of which this old man didn’t meet, squatted in the gravel-strewn white dust and told us about the Banjoinder.
“He was born in the east, in one of the great manufacturing towns.” He said. His face was unshaven, whiskers sticking out of a face tanned like a body preserved in peat moss. His hat bore an incongruous patch extolling a brand of children’s breakfast cereal.
“I wonder if he’s ever even had a bowl of Dora the Explorer cereal.” One of the faceless men in the dark beside me murmured. I snickered, wishing I could see this fellow’s face. Of course, if I could I probably wouldn’t want to associate with him. There was a nighttime party mood that prevailed in the no-man’s land of abandoned machinery and low, weed-dotted hills. For some reason it reminded my of a party I went to at the old UGA Acacia house. Some guy was there making fun of what he called Bryan Adams’ “two-chord theory.” There are bubbles of intimacy around everyone. Every other bubble is repellent and the ones that aren’t are attractive. I’m always conscious to remain in the repellent areas of acquaintances and strangers. This is to protect me from having my time wasted or being imposed on. But once in a while by accident I find myself having a positive experience with someone I don’t know and will never know any deeper. I think that’s the reason I don’t want anyone else to get close to me. I feel an asphyxiating sadness thinking of never seeing someone again or having a relationship dwindle to nothing.
I wandered away from the group, no longer interested in the old man’s story of the Banjoinder’s origin and rise to underground notoriety. From a pushy loudmouth in adolescence I surely had changed. Now I avoided all extraneous contact with people. Though I yet craved fame, even if only to get some outside analysis of my work.
“He doesn’t know anything about the Banjoinder.” A voice from under an old dump truck informed me. “Half of what he says he saw in an old movie and the other half he makes up.”

The Abstractosphere

Having attained some kind of emotional balance, I felt confident enough to attend the opening of the Abstractosphere. You may have read about this new house of worship, if you happen to be a regular reader of such periodicals as Epicene Nag, The Suggestive Fisherman, or Skeletized. It was not through any of these that I learned about the Abstractosphere, however. I found an anonymous handwritten invitation on the front seat of my car.
The Abstractosphere, dedicated to the veneration of the spirit of Modern Art, is located on the filmmaker Travis Honker’s secluded ranch. Obviously, this is not a place that the average working class person can visit. I showed my invitation to the guards at the entrance to the ranch and was actually surprised they let me in. They told me to save the invitation, that I’d need it again when I got to the Abstractosphere. I looked at the paper, wondering what invisible-to-my-eyes message it contained that they should recognize it as genuine. Perhaps they recognized the handwriting. Could it be that of their employer, maker of such films as Bloody Rag, Coma Toes, and I Am Dressed for Portage?
The road from the guardhouse to the Abstractosphere was long. I reached the fork from which one could veer off to Honker’s personal residence in about ten minutes. After that an additional five minutes was needed to get to the Abstractosphere. As promised, I was asked to show my invitation to the security personnel at the entrance.
“What is it about this piece of paper that lets you know it’s genuine?” I asked.
“The watermark, the size, the distinctive spelling of the word ‘refreshments.’” It was not the costumed employee who answered, but a voice behind me. I turned and found myself facing a robotic duplicate of Robert Hughes.
“Oh shit.” I groaned.
“I am happy to greet you, Toadsgoboad. It is my honor to show you around.” The robot stepped forward with its hand outstretched. I recoiled.
“What is wrong?” It asked. “Are you repelled by my lack of humanity?”
“No,” I told it. “I didn’t like Robert Hughes in life. Why would I like him in simulacrum?”
There were no refreshments that I could eat.

The Pohldagger

You might think that the pohldagger is in some way related to the author of speculative fiction by a similar name, but you would be wrong. Having been addressed as “Toadsgoboad” by the robotic Robert Hughes, I began to think seriously about my pen name. It isn’t that I debated getting rid of it; I’ve used it too long and too successfully to do that. It’s just that I began to tire of the notion, fostered by me, I must admit, that Toadsgoboad is anything other than another name for me, Lance Ash. I felt that Toadsgoboad as a character must be separated from Toadsgoboad as a pseudonym. (Of course, Toadsgoboad remains a character in all those past works in which he appears: I can’t undo what’s been done.) This is where the pohldagger comes in.
I can’t afford to buy a pohldagger, but, when Travis Honker wasn’t looking, I managed to sneak into his reliquary and make use of his. The procedure was relatively painless. I only felt the pangs of failure and second-guessing. These are easy to endure if you’ve been battered by them, as I have, for over forty years. Pressing the pohldagger into the surgery scar under my upper lip in between my teeth and the bottom of my nasal cavity, I reached for the secret area where Toadsgoboad is attached. One careful twist of the arcane instrument and I was freed.
“Ten years.” I told Honker when he caught me. He is a magnanimous man (he can afford to be) and did not get too upset. “Nearly ten years since I first adopted the name of Toadsgoboad. Originally it was a magic word that I invented at the age of five or six, maybe younger. But it became a burden, it took on a life of its own.”
“How did it happen?” Honker asked as he put the pohldagger back in its case.
“I had quit drinking finally and I felt the need to mark that decision with the taking up of a new name.”
“Something similar happened to me.” He said.
“Oh really?”
“Yes. I used to be George Lucas. But then you abstracted me for your own purposes.”
“Not me.” I demurred. “That was Toadsgoboad.”

The Criticalcreme

Harold accepted the shipment of criticalcreme on behalf of the station and saw that it was stored in Vickie’s office. The next morning it was gone.
“It must have been someone on the cleaning staff.” He theorized.
He and Memustis and Vickie and Richard stood about staring at the vague indentions on the carpet where the stack of boxes had sat.
“Or someone from Accounts Payable.” Richard pointed out. Accounts Payable was the department upstairs.
“You’re sure nobody came in here after you put the boxes in here.” Mesmutis, a tall, thin creature with an aristocratic bearing, put it to Harold.
“I’m sure. And anyway, I know nobody walked out of here with four heavy boxes.” Harold finished his coffee and looked concerned, but then his eyebrows were constructed in such a way that he always looked concerned.
“Four heavy boxes,” repeated Richard. “One of the students might have walked in here while no one was looking and made off with them.”
“It would have to have been more than one person.” Mesmutis objected.
“Four heavy boxes.” Vickie emphasized.
“Nobody came in here!” Harold allowed his exasperation to show.
“Well, there’s nothing for it but to call the police.” Richard threw up his arms in a characteristic gesture and allowed them to flop against his hips.
That night Vickie retold the whole story to her date, a large man of rural affiliation. They sat on her sofa, socked feet nestled in the white shag before the conflagration in the fireplace.
“We all had to be fingerprinted.” She found this detail most exciting. “What is this criticalcreme?” The burly fellow wondered. His voice was gruff, like a bear in overalls stuck in a well, but still possessed of his pipe so as not to be overly anxious about his circumstances.
“It’s a blemish highlighter. We were going to give a tube to each of the students as a thank you gift for their patronage.” Vickie set her wine glass down on the side table. Her companion, who didn’t care for wine, preferring beer, slipped his callused paw under Vickie’s white sweater and caressed her belly. Soon he was atop her, making steam engine puffs while she bucked and heaved.

The Tespot

“She was bucking and heaving.” Rath Mackmord told his buddies on a break from moving the red mud about the empty lot.
“Good choice of words,” thought Dracht, one of the other men. He was far too intellectual for this job, but his situation was such that he had no other choice. As a college dropout with no social skills and no rich uncle, moving mud was all he could reasonably expect. He had been working at McDonald’s, but this job paid fifty cents more an hour and the likelihood that someone he knew from high school would see him was far less. He said nothing, however, only smiled at the idea of Rath’s naked backside, a single slab of pockmarked pork, glistening with sweat as he struggled to mate with this tiny butterball of a woman he described.
“Have you guys ever noticed,” Sammy, the other man in the discussion group, began, “That fat girls always have a name beginning with ‘P?’ Pam, Peggy, Paula, Pahhhh…” He trailed away as Leach, the foreman, called out from the other side of the mud flattener machine.
“I bet he couldn’t think of any more names.” Dracht told himself with satisfying smugness.
The three men rushed to answer Leach’s call. As they rounded the sharp end of the machine they were confronted with a sight of comic book impossibility. Rising from the overworked mud field was a snake-like head attached to gorilla-and-saxophone-like shoulders.
“What is it?” Sammy bellowed.
“It is a tespot.” Dracht said without realizing he spoke aloud.
“Grab shovels!” Leach ordered. “Grab anything you can!”
“What did you call that thing?” Rath demanded a minute later, after the men had scrambled under the dump truck for protection.
“A tespot, a creature from ancient Sidewipe mythology.”
The monster’s hose-like tail whipped against the truck once more, spattering the men with mud.
“You goddam egghead.” Rath cursed Dracht. People like him were exactly why this country was in such a mess. When you departed from the ways of your grandfathers this is exactly what you got.

The Angelickspoon

Rob had kept the Angelickspoon since childhood, since the days when he was called Robby. No one called him that anymore except his mother. The spoon, which he had named the Angelickspoon, had been part of a set belonging to her. But that was so long ago that she had replaced all of her everyday silverware at least twice since.
“Why do people get rid or perfectly good silverware?” Bravard, a colleague of Rob’s, wondered one day as Rob showed him around his house.
“They think they have to. My wife, for example: she got rid of a set that I really liked. They had thick grips, thick enough for a man’s hands. But I guess they weren’t fancy enough. Now we’ve got these spindly things.” Rob sighed. “But I’ve gotten used to them.” He admitted.
“So where’s this spoon of yours?” Bravard asked.
“Just up ahead.” Rob pointed. His hand was around a sweaty glass of iced tea. The index finger, standing out from the arrangement to point the way, held a drop of water on its end that might hold a million microorganisms, the seeds of life should all else fail.
“You see,” Rob offered explanatory detail, “When I die a great many of my things will wind up sold or give to thrift stores. It’s just logic: there will be things that meant something to me, but that will be incomprehensible to anyone else. I guess I could write a book about my things, a picture book, with the stories behind each of them, but I’m too busy for that.”
Bravard raised his eyebrows and nodded in agreement.
“So,” Rob continued, “It occurred to me that in order to at least save the Angelickspoon from disappearing into the great mass of cutlery at Goodwill, I needed to do something with it that would force people to keep it.” He had timed his words well; they now stood before the Angelickspoon, screwed into a cabinet door as a handle.
“Well, I’ll be damned.” Bravard declared. “How clever.”
Rob smiled.
“Go on. Open it up.”
Bravard grasped the spoon-handle and opened the cabinet. Inside he found the recapitulation calipers, with which Earth’s genetic legacy would be doled out.

The Puwuchim

I don’t need to tell you, who watch so much goddamned TV, what the Puwuchim is. I’m positive you’ve either seen the show or seen something about it. The Puwuchim is one of the main characters on A Handshake of Denials. The first season he was a mysterious creature, looking a little like H.R. Puffinstuff, if that creepy thing was dark and serious, standing in the background of the other characters as they attempted to shelter Earth’s genetic legacy through the looming apocalypse. The second season, however, the producers, recognizing the Puwuchim’s popularity, made the mistake of giving the viewers his origin story and the details of his hidden past. This is similar to the mistake that Lucas made in laying bare the workings of the Force and the bureaucratic structure of the Empire. Too much information. It killed the show. Some say that Hank Chambers’ leaving for a film career is what killed it, but you and I know that the humanization of the Puwuchim is what did it.
It is therefore, with my relief that I tell you that the Puwuchim, in his earlier, mysterious format, is returning to television this fall as part of AT&T’s first season of original programming. How, you ask, can the Puwuchim again be all that he was now that we know all about his birth in the larval tanks of Dr. Cumberland and his failed marriage to Queen Umbrassieria? The answer is provided in the first episode of the new show. It seems that the earlier show, A Handshake of Denials, was all just a dream. The new one, Caver’s Bathrobe, is the reality. Once again the Puwuchim is free to act unburdened by ordinary human motivations and sentiments.
Baluchi MacGravely, who plays the Puwuchim, is happy with the situation.
“Since the Puwuchim is mute and I’m concealed under forty-eight pounds of makeup and prosthetics, it would have been easy for the producers to have hired another actor for the part. But the fans really came through, demanding that I come back along with the character.”
“He’s talking about fans like you and me. Although, in all honesty, he’s really referring to you since I don’t watch TV. I know that sounds smug, but, as much as I admire the Puwuchim and what he stands for (I even have a Puwuchim t-shirt), I don’t have time to waste on some stupid, predictable TV show.

The Enddle

We’re all hypocrites. If one isn’t a hypocrite then one is a saint. And saints, as we can see from history and a little imagination, are incompatible with normal human life. I say I don’t watch TV, that TV is stupid and bad for you, but then I’ll sit down and watch old Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes on YouTube. The difference, I will explain if you’ll listen, is that I choose what I will watch and I don’t have to sit through commercials. Lack of choice and the advertising, along with the goddamned stupidity of 99.99% of television: those are the main problems with TV.
I guess most people don’t want to choose. Devo was right. It’s like George Carlin said about radio: why would you listen to music selected for you?
But anyway, enough of that. This is just a rambling little essay at the end of the book. I’m just talking about this and that, filling up space, killing time until the book is over. Not only is the book over, but, I’m happy to announce, the first phase of The Procurement Man is over. I finally filled up the notebooks I set aside for these one-page pieces with the preordained titles. Now I can focus on longer pieces, pieces that are as long as they need to be.
It’s tied in with being a hypocrite. I’m a purist. I really didn’t want to finish these short pieces. I wanted to move along into writing a novel, but my younger self had made the resolution to do a certain number of volumes of the one-page things, so I plodded along until it was done. These volumes, like the individual pages, were also titled in advance. That’s how nuts I am. A purist, but also a hypocrite. A hypocrite because I extol freedom of choice, but then I’m bound by my own internal restrictions.
Incidentally, if you’ve ever wanted to write a book but were balked by the difficulty of the task, my method is quite simple. Two seventy-page college-ruled notebooks, with writing on only one side of each page, will amount to approximately the standard number of words in a novel. You write two pages a day and in a little over a month you’ll have a book. It doesn’t have to make sense. They things you write on one page don’t have to correlate to anything on the next. Nobody’s going to read it. Nobody’s ever going to publish your work. You’ll never make any money at it. You might as well do exactly what you want, but only because you want to do it.
THE END