What follows is everything written in the purely literary narrative part of this novel. It takes us from page 29, just after Rugwa's exciting adventure in the dead city, up to his godson's plunge through to life in a graphic novel, for really, that is what it is...
POONTUKKA- Party at
eight
Big Truths for the day:
1.The important thing in soloing is which note you end a
phrase on. Now that mainstream audiences
have accepted atonality and free jazz clichés as natural, the only thing you
have to worry about when improvising is which note you land on.
The Arctic Crowbob Faults His Snow-White Tonsure
“That’s him,” Vanderkeen announced,
pointing down at the host of people on the sidewalk below.
“Where?”
Tann begged; he couldn’t see what Vanderkeen was talking about.
“The one
with the mass of white on his head.”
Vanderkeen seemed eager for Tann to spy the lopsided bird creature
before the latter disappeared into the old theater.
“That big
thing moving sideways?” Tann was leaning over the parapet now, having just
caught sight of Vanderkeen’s target.
“I told you
he’s lopsided; that’s how he moves.”
Tann looked
at the other man.
“What’re
you going to do now?” he asked.
“Follow him
into that theater,” Vanderkeen resolved,
smacking a gloved fist into his palm (also gloved).
“I wonder
what they’re playing,” Tann Turnip said, starting to follow Vanderkeen to the
stairs.
Vanderkeen,
however, stopped.
“Are you
sure you want to come along?” he asked.
“It could be dangerous. Besides
which,” he looked at Tann crookedly.
“That theater may not be an actual cinema, but a theater
theater.”
“You mean,
like, plays and stuff?” Tann frowned.
Vanderkeen
stretched his mouth into a wry line of possibility.
Seven
minutes later the two men were making their way down the broad, inclined
hallway that led to the auditorium. The
scanned the room for the tell-tale head of hair, but saw nothing. Soon the film began.
“I’ve seen
this one,” Tann whispered to Vanderkeen.
“Eskimo Solids.”
As the
tragic story onscreen unfolded the crowbob was revealed by his loud
sobbing. Approaching him from either end
of his row, Tann and Vanderkeen saw that he had tried to disguise himself by
putting his popcorn bag over his head.
Sociology Was a Homo
After his
wife’s death in a car crash, Professor Flawturd felt free to take a male lover.
“My
children are grown,” he told a colleague at the university. “They’ll understand.”
“Have you
got anybody in mind?” was the question.
Flawturd
pushed his glasses further up on his nose.
“No. Perhaps a European.”
Mortal Strands of Ohio
I’ve been
to Ohio. When I was about three years old my parents
took me along on a visit to one of my father’s Vietnam buddies. He had a son about my age. All I remember about the trip was getting up
in the middle of the night to play with this kid’s hockey game. Looking back on it now, it’s interesting to
note that no kid in Georgia
would have had a hockey game.
I also
remember being told as we were driving through some urban sector, “This is OHIO.”
His Watery Withholdings Flattery Abed
Jimmy
Page’s Death Wish II soundtrack. What
if Led Zeppelin had kept going into the 80’s?
How strange that they are probably the most popular band of all
time. Arguably the Beatles are their
only rivals in general popularity. Who
would have thought that thirty years ago?
Why did Page only put out one solo album, the feeble Outrider? I remember getting to the record store before
it opened the day Outrider came
out. The guy at the register warned me
it was no good, but I had to have it. I
was a Jimmy Page nut in those days. He
was probably the greatest influence on me as a guitar player. Today of course I can say I’d rather sound
more like Steve Khan or Andy Summers, but, listening to the solo on The Song Remains the Same version of “No
Quarter,” I still love Page’s sloppy brilliance. Why has he sat on his ass for most of the
past twenty years? Is he just so rich
that he doesn’t care anymore? It seems
he’s spent half that time waiting for Robert Plant, but when they have worked
together, the results are nearly uniformly dull.
Trade the Scepter’s Impending Glare
Once the
King of Gotherama, Bronto Tonsil now drove the tram that took visitors from the
parking lot to the entrance of the Comatosery.
This was an amusement park built inside a former Post Office
facility. Tonsil handled the big
electric tram well; he had been in the habit of driving neighborhood children
around the palace grounds on a golf cart.
“But that
was back when I was a king,” he told an old couple from Tennessee.
The husband,
a retired postal contract station manager at a large university, shook hands
with the deposed monarch.
“God bless
you, Bronto!” he enthused, his low, breathy voice dressed in the cloth of
brotherly duty.
Later,
Tonsil was summoned to the office.
“Bronto,”
wondered Parker, head of operations, “How’d you like to start driving that tram
indoors?”
“Indoors! But that’s not safe!” Tonsil insisted in shock.
“We’ve been
having complaints from the visitors. The
park is just too big to walk around in.
They want the same service and courtesy they receive in the parking
lot—inside.” Parker smiled broadly.
“You’re
going to have accidents,” warned the old man.
“Trams running into each other—“
“Everything
will be laid out just like a city street,” Parker assured Tonsil, raising his
hands. “With traffic rules just like the
police,” he added. He caught Tonsil’s
eye.
“As the
operator of a ride—an attraction, which this new system certainly counts
as, you’d get paid more money.”
Tonsil only
wanted assurance that he could still talk to the people, and to share with them
the good news of Jesus Christ.
A Man Expresses Academic Reprisals with the Smell of the
Old Laundry House
(relates to drawing Debater’s Hope)
“I can’t
believe you became a chiropractor!” I
laughed, but the look in my eyes was of the saddest disappointment.
He took the
measure of me again, glancing from one of my shoulders to the other. He wasn’t going to bluster me. Nor fight me, for that matter.
“I can’t
fight. That’s what attracted you to
me. When we were boys.” His eyebrows, thin and high and arched
symphonically already, rose higher, the tiny black pebbles in their charge
betraying nothing. He had acquired a
good, thick neck, like George Lucas, it gave him a fey, compliant bulldog
appearance, if you can imagine a fey, compliant bulldog in a blond wig. Maybe I mean a bull terrier.
A Sandstorm in the Mind of the Obduration
“Nothing
was left,” wailed Sire Moot.
“Everything—the oasis, the cultural heritage, all buried beneath the
sand”
He fell
back in his chair with a violence that Torman found unnecessary. The furniture was nothing but the flimsiest
of props. The chair might have broken
under Sire Moot.
Torman
threw out his hands.
“Now, calm
down,” he ordered. We need to discover
just who is this obduration. We need to
find out exactly where the sandstorm took place. Anyone could go out there right now and dig
it all up.
Torman’s
mind, ever only one long blink away from disturbing fantasy, now conjured up a
life (well, half of one at this point, but oh well) of self-employment as a
creator and purveyor of relics and souvenirs of that land of disturbing
fantasy.
“It’s called
the Deserted Area,” Sire Moot explained.
“How
descriptive,” Torman nodded. “Deserted
of what?”
“People. Habitations.
The evidence or memory of… people.”
Sire Moot, representative of the Cleanliness Disconception Limited
company, and recruiter for same, smiled to himself as he observed the classic
symptoms manifested in Torman.
Note: the reason there are four tigers is because this is
the fourth data collection station. They
have only just now caught up with them.
Torman knew
about the tigers, but had said nothing to Shab or Grimmery.
A Man Suspects that He Will Feel More European if He
Watches Soccer
And so you
probably would. I wonder if Europeans
feel more like men when they watch soccer.
They live so closely there. I
should say “football” like the rest of the planet, but, being an American, I
have limited perception of the third dimension.
Thus my reference to the planet.
Three Women Consult the Oracle in the Dead Giant’s Belly
“Obviously,
some of you have realized by now that some of this material,” the young,
pretty witch in the green sunglasses nodded knowingly towards this here printed
page, “Is meant to be imparted over some other medium than the printed
page. Radio—back when there really was
radio, and some kind of beautiful pastiche of my memories of PBS the way it was
when I was a kid: strange, stark, and sterile.
“Enough of
that,” the second witch, an older woman we’ll call Hazela, snapped. She took the young witch by the shoulders
and turned her back to the crudely torn aperture made in the carcass by the
three of them, the three witches of Rabbity
City.
“That
sounds good,” the third witch, whose name definitely was Laura, sighed,
looking up into constellations unknown to modern day science, constellations
which actually look sort of like what they’re supposed to be.
“Alright,
alright,” Hazela brought everyone’s attention back to the situation at hand:
pulling the oracle bulb out of the giant’s dead belly. Hazela pushed her rolled-up sleeves a little
further up and looked at her comrades in turn, encouraging them too to take a
second’s preparation for the lifting process.
But then it
was done, not so difficult after all, as if the giant had willed the bulb to
them, his gift to the world and the reason for his whole existence, ultimately.
Hazela spat
in the empty, ragged socket, followed in turn by each of her sisters.
“Is that
what they do, Mommy? Do witches spit
into the empty cavity they have so ruthlessly hacked into the dead body of a
noble… giant.”
Roadnoise
continues for a bit. It is a quiet
country road.
“What kind
of giant? What kind is it?”
The Business is a Mock Bagel Golden with Pretzel
Toughness
“See those
kids over there?” Sheldon Bathrat pointed with his chin at a table far away
from where he sat with his two friends.
“Yeah?”
Moxie urged, following the chin.
“They’re
the ones from the last story.”
“The previous
story,” Euclid, the third member of the party, looked up from polishing his
boot, and interjected firmly.
“Yes,”
Sheldon sighed, “Previous
story.” He blinked. “Anyway, that’s them.”
As the
silence grew in the wake of this announcement, the other tables on the grand
patio also floated away; they were an island in a calm sea of green.
“So what
are we scheduled to do?” Euclid
wondered. His boots were long since
polished and buffed and dried in the glare of a single, hundred-watt bulb.
“Says
here,” Sheldon consulted an index card from his shirt pocket. “Something about a mock bagel, golden with pretzel toughness. That’s a quote, by the way.” He flapped the
card at them prior to tucking it away, noting as he did so the entry, “Pickup
Rx.”
“Well,
let’s have at it,” the nearly narcoleptic Moxie surprised them all by hauling
himself up from his slump and directing the action.
Sheldon
reached into a box and brought forth three bagels in turn. He passed one each to his companions and
turned to face whatever unholy travesty of the Christian god’s super camera
thing and smiled. He started to take a
bite of the bagel, but he hesitated.
“I’ve never
eaten one of these things,” he told Moxie and Euclid.
“Is it already cooked?”
Here Are the Illusory Pumps Beside the Cabin
“Now, if I
was to say, ‘Here are the illusory trapeze parts,’ would you go aloft in such a
dubious bundle of words? Of course not,
and yet you and I are flying blind every day, my friend, when we venture into
the unforgiving world of interactive speech.
Our fellow humans demand a certain level of contact through the medium
of speech, along with appropriate eye movements, and, frequently, gestural
auxiliary. But you and I are of a
special breed. We don’t automatically
accept the blood-red reality of our (seemingly) fellow individuals, maybe
they’re robots, maybe they’re fictions, maybe they’re just not worth our
time—but, I suppose, inevitably, they must be dealt with. Even at the loftiest perch on the ladder they
must be dealt with. Because, and you
see, here’s the interesting part: there are multiple ladders. And some, though you may not know it,
representing as they do fields of endeavor encompassing only a handful of
individuals, stand as tall as others clawed after and hacked at by teeming
dreck.
And, it so
happens, that I occupy the summit of just such a ladder as the formerly
mentioned one. This “ladder,” for the sake
of extreme simplification, is a symbol (heretofore known as ritual object #16)
of all the many complicated decisions that have went into my arrival at this
junction, which in turn is made possible only by those decisions. Ah, they laughed, my friends, they
laughed. They were amused that I had the
temerity to assert that I would master the arts of creation. That I would call myself artist in the
first place. No training, no discipline,
no trailer hookup of morality.
Well, look,
my tiny band of followers, look at where I am now. I sit before you artlessly, aimlessly on this
top rung, and from where I sit, I can tell you, that things look a little out
of proportion and fake.
Two Nearly Completed Pitfalls on the Old Postal Path
The
professor had enumerated two aphorisms on the, could it be? An old-fashioned
blackboard—with chalk!
“Now,
class,” the white-haired gentleman drew their attention to him. His voice was as calm and demanding as a line
of ships on the horizon.
“These are
your fundamental faults. These are the
two areas which you must focus on, if you are to succeed.” He tapped the two numbers with his index
finger.
“I don’t
know, I’d have to make an arrangement,” he looked down at the tabletop. “And by that I mean a rearrangement,” he added
with such an emphasis on grammatical force that I thought for a second that we
were going back in time.
As a child
I received a taste of mathematical one-upmanship and wanted no more to do with
it.
Impromptu
dirt clod throwing session after summer evening church. A bunch of us boys, throwing dirt clods into
the plowed field behind the church property.
My father walks up, watches for a second, watches me throw, then says, “Is
that as far as you can throw?” Scorn,
sneering scorn, and shame, oh, the vicarious shame, for he knows that the other
boys heard, but what he didn’t know, is that I didn’t care.
The class
numbered sixteen. Among them only one
puzzled over the professor’s words. His
name was that of the Stork in the Puma Costume. Perhaps it had been one of his frequent
daydreams, but he had failed to grasp something in what the professor
said. As the others diligently wrote
down what they heard, he sat there, wiping the beads of sweat under his eyes inside
the eyeholes of his mask.
It would be
so much easier just to get out of that costume.
All this ridiculous work could be over with.
But he had
come so far. By bullshitting Ravenstein
that he shared the latter’s views on social issues in a work context he had
managed to get enrolled in the management training service, a quasi-separate
organization within the Pecker Bait Company.
“Are you
having trouble grasping the dichotomy?” the professor peered closely at the
Stork.
“Well, no,
and I understand what a dichotomy is,” the Stork demurred, scratching his beak
through an eyehole.
“But…?” the
professor urged.
“What are
the two areas?”
Type Begun in Rotational Hiccup Will Blossom Under the
Udder
Torman knew
there were no fire ants, still he checked anyway. Anything might be lurking around under the
blades of grass. He knelt down in the
sea of grass. His old metaphor, that of
a little jungle, no longer was flexible enough to handle all of his imagined
perceptions of the concept “lawn.” Now
it was an ocean, a green ocean.
This is how
one could breathe underwater, he thought.
“He’s been
smoking pot?” Shab asked Grimmery.
“Yeah,”
Grimmery nodded, barely audible.
“You too?”
Shab examined Grimmery more closely.
“Yeah,”
repeated Grimmery.
“Wow.”
Shab
watched across the room as Torman plotted the completion of his route.
“I can’t
believe you’re going to go through with it,” he called out.
Torman
glanced up from the ping pong table on which he had set up operations. He met Shab’s eyes, long enough to let him
know that no matter how stoned he may be, he was still sane, still writing on
the lines, a man of resolution and indifference to its toll.
Grimmery
pushed a pipe into Shab’s face.
“I forgot,”
he said. “You’re supposed to smoke
this.”
“No, I’m
trying to stay clean.” Shab pushed the
pipe away.
“Pure?”
Grimmery sniggered.
Shab took a
big breath and held out his hand.
“The pipe,
Grimmery,” he requested patiently.
The Sun Abandons the Back Room
Many of the
items that Shab saw there might have been heaters. Actually, they could have been anything, but, given the still,
stone-cold air in the back room, Shab begged to know why none of them were
heaters.
He put the
gloves, which he had just now discovered in his back pocket, on his hands
before reaching for one of the strange objects.
Shab held the toaster-sized thing before his eyes.
“It has a
very specific purpose,” he decided.
Putting it back on the floor, he thought, “It reminds me of something in
a small apartment in a foreign city in a life a hundred years ago. Something I wouldn’t even think of.”
Two ceramic
pumpkins came to the doorway opening on a dark passage.
“You
haven’t touched anything, have you?” one of the pumpkins asked him.
“No,
nothing,” Shab held out his had and passed it over the collected objects.
“Come with
us, please,” the pumpkin (probably the same one, but Shab couldn’t be sure,
because both were already turning away), already turning away, disappeared into
the darkness.
Shab looked
around desperately for something small enough to shove in his pocket. He moved methodically to the door, grabbing
up a baseball-sized cube at the last second.
He didn’t get a chance to get a good look at it before he stole it, but
he got the impression that it was a giant Jimmy Durante lizard wrapped around a
squat apple-shaped skyscraper. Shab kept
thinking “skyscraper,” as he followed the two indistinct orange shapes ahead of
him, even though he knew it wasn’t right, that it wasn’t a skyscraper,
but an old-fashioned office building or something. Something brick.
Precognitive Commission at Least a Streamer in the Welt
“Of course,
the members of this commission realize that we are only aware that we sometimes
know something was going to happen only after it happened. And this is fully documented by such everyday
evidence as diaries, journals, interdisciplinary blogsite projects, and any
ongoing literary efforts with even a mild stink about them of the
autobiographical…” the witness, a neofictionalist filmmaker from Blue Kothba,
faded away. His name, should anyone wish
to follow up later, was Gilbert Nethers.
It’s there, in the file. Now,
does anyone have anything on this data collection station program? Stalkers, weren’t you supposed to be putting
that into some kind of context?
The one
called Stalkers, whose eyes were so far apart that one began to imagine a
third, intermediary eye straining to focus on either side of the bridge of his
nose. His collar was high, in the manner
of some old soviet functionary. It made
his bulging, top-heavy head only seem all the more unstable, which was probably
an accurate reflection of its contents as well.
But I don’t
mean to imply that any of us on the commission were any better off. It’s funny, isn’t it, how, when you’re
growing up, and don’t yet realize that you’re insane, how you imagine what it’s
like to be insane, because you equate being sane, or normal, with a checklist
of rational beliefs and a more or less homogenously presented viewpoint on the
world’s appearance, and yet you can no more imagine what it’s like to be… sane…
than you can…
“There,
there,” Raymond attempted both to console Mr. Buttermonk and to belittle his
dramatic emotions. “Gentlemen,” he
addressed the others around the table, looking up at each of them, “I really
don’t see how we’re going to get through all of our business today unless we
stop all of this intruding on each other’s thoughts and futures.”
“And
pasts,” another Raymond, slightly to the left and strangely shiny, added in the
exact pause, or interval, in which Fawn Dogwood would have said something, only
she wasn’t on the commission.
Dehydrated Cabbage Bombardment, My Partner’s Parsley is
Bartered
“I’m going
to show you something,” Ravenstein called to the Stork from the illuminated
doorway. “Come on.” He jerked his beak down the hall. The stork rose from his idlework and
followed.
“God know
you haven’t earned this,” Ravenstein continued, as the two ambled down a
plywood ductwork that seemed to ramble over and through several fields and
small, backyard farms, until they arrived at Quail You’d Man, a commercial
establishment dedicated to the promotion of the color green and a style of
interior decoration taken directly from the stately penthouse of Henry Cabot
Henhouse III.
“But I
digress,” Ravenstein croaked. He croaked
in such a funny sort of way that even he seemed tickled by it. He began to laugh a little and the feeling
was conveyed, as if by telepathy, to the stork that it was OK to laugh at this,
together they would laugh, but
the stork
did not laugh.
Sometime
later Ravenstein introduced the Stork to Clumberja, a young lady who ran the
boutique at Quail You’d Man. She sized
the stork up immediately. Wisely waiting
until Ravenstein was resting at the cosmetics counter, Clumberja whispered to
the Stork,
“Isn’t that
costume hot?”
The Stork
afforded himself the old German trick of staring into the other person’s eyes
before answering.
“I don’t
really have a choice anymore,” he told this strange young girl.
The Stork
wasn’t so quick to catch on that Quail You’d Man offered one the opportunity of
passing the time in an environment (a whole life experience mall some
called it) that was designed for those outraged by nature itself.
“A novel
about a man obsessed with fame, in a world where there is no more fame—and the
truly famous live lives of fear and degradation.”
Clumberja
laughed, sort of crushing the Stork’s hand-written manuscript to her chest in a
way that the Stork found a little too indicative of a less-than-properly
respectful of other people’s property attitude.
“Don’t
crush my book like that,” the chided with just the right amount of room
temperature to take the spiralbound notebook away from her without a “tussle.”
“Go on,
take it,” Clumberja snapped, shoving the notebook at him, but then snatching it
back with the words, “No, wait, I want to read it.”
“I want
you to read it,” the Stork insisted, “Only don’t crumple it up.”
Clumberja
did not respond. She was rediscovering
her place in the novel. She found it
while the Stork’s eyes jumped around the room.
It was her teenage (she was nineteen, soon to be twenty) bedroom. Big fluffy bed on which they sat, floor
almost as cozy as the bed, the corners of the room made indistinct by an
accumulation of the corporate and the individual.
“Well, as
much of one as remained after discounting the corporate,” Clumberja read
aloud. She had an accent that the Stork
couldn’t place. He later found out she
was from Germany.
“Go on,”
the Stork urged. He liked to hear her
read.
“My
thoughts,” she read, “Echoed in the manuscript,” oh, this is silly, she
thought, putting the notebook aside, face down.
“What is
it?” the Stork asked.
“This isn’t
one of those mindfuck books is it?” she demanded.
“No, no,
I’m too lazy for that,” the Stork replied, rolling over and wondering what was
in the girl’s refrigerator.
The Task of Registration is Not Limited to the Mingled
Footpaths
Stretch
Gloworm Man was offered an honorary doctorate from Waxing Gibbous
University. Of course, they did request that he make a
speech at the graduation ceremony.
Stretch didn’t want to make a speech, but, he shrewdly argued, if they
allowed him to register as a regular student prior to the presentation of the
doctorate, he would give them a speech both appropriate to the occasion and
full of unique Stretch Gloworm substance.
“Let him do
it,” Hades, the capillary movement planning director, decided, pointing with a
finger that had not done manual labor in years, connected to a hand that had
not done manual labor in years, and so on, down to his thin little socks, and
he took the responsibility for this decision onto himself, because it was so
obviously the right thing to do, that he didn’t worry about whose name would be
on what page of the encyclopedia twenty-five years from now.
“OK,”
Junior Graft, another member of the planning department, although to which arm
of that symbiote remains to be seen, acknowledged all this and much more. He slapped a rolled-copy of today’s Rough and Tumble (the college newspaper)
against his thigh and headed out to initiate these decisions. Once he was gone Hades made a face, quite
unexpectedly, at Fawn Dogwood, who sat on a chair against the wall,
waiting. She smiled in exchange, not
knowing exactly what the face indicated.
Apparently it was some kind of humorous gesture, as there could be
little else that a display of baboon-like gawping might appeal to.
“He’s a
jock,” Hades told Fawn, moving towards her.
“Ah,” Fawn
smiled again, rising to meet the much older man.
There were
rumors that Hades had been a mercenary in Africa
back in the 1980’s. These were
true. He observed Stretch Gloworm Man
flying up to the convenient drive-in service window on the orbiting virtual
invisible domo-cile.
He Shall Have His Heidigger Removed
“I’m sorry,
Torman, but the judge isn’t in this afternoon.”
Rebecca was the latest in a long line of young, pretty girls who had
served as Judge Tankard’s receptionist.
In all of the judicial complex, it was still seen as a sign of great
prestige to be picked for the job, though Tankard had been officially retired
for over ten years.
“Oh,”
Torman started rummaging in his bag. “I
nearly forgot. For you.” He presented Rebecca with a fairly expensive
candy bar, one from England
and full of things like hazelnuts.
“Thank
you,” Rebecca smiled crookedly. She put
the gift away in the big drawer and turned back to Torman. She had to laugh a little. A little at Torman. He was a strange one, alright.
“Do you
know where he’s at?” Torman demanded as fair recompense for the candy
bar.
“Yes. And since you’re on the judge’s list of
favorites, I’ll tell you: he’s at a meeting downtown. That spiritualist club he’s involved with.”
“Oh, the
monthly dinner.” Torman glanced at the
window. Outside was orange and red. He was still confused by the time change.
Rebecca
nodded and started taking pencils from one cup, sorting them by length, and
putting them into another cup.
Torman
paced back and forth, glancing up into one of those long, narrow photographs
from a hundred years ago of the graduating class of some nurses’ school or
military camp or something. Torman
suddenly hunted through the rows of faces.
The judge had shown him which one was the judge as a young man, but
Torman seemed to have forgotten. Was it
this one? This freckled kid?
“Was there
something you wanted?” Rebecca asked.
“I need
help, Rebecca. I’ve been coming to this
office for… over twenty years now. I
remember one receptionist here named Rita.
She was really something. She was
about my age, back then. Now, I’m just
an old man of no value to you—“
“Not
true. You’re one of the judge’s
favorites,” Rebecca interrupted.
“Does he
really have a list?” Torman asked. “Anyway, Rebecca, I want you to listen
carefully.”
Rebecca,
who was determined to show that she did not disrespect Torman because of his
age, sat up straighter and arched her small, pseudopod-like breasts outward.
“I got to
the fourth data collection station and was attacked by four tigers,” he told
Rebecca.
Rebecca
scratched her forehead. Or did she rub
it? Torman studied her eyes. Sometimes eyes gave off signals as to
people’s emotional states. Torman
couldn’t read anything. He hoped he was
getting through.
“I wasn’t
able to complete the route,” he erupted, emotional signals spilling out like a
split grocery bag. “I wasn’t able to
complete the route.”
“Because
tigers attacked you.”
“I know it
sounds crazy, but—“
“Where are
your friends? We heard there were three
of you out there.”
“You knew
about it?” Torman’s face was agape with shock.
Rebecca
snatched up a piece of paper from the desktop.
She read aloud from it.
“Torman and
two other men were spotted trying to ram a wild tiger near data collection
station #4.”
“Trying to ram...?”
Torman repeated. Had he any emotional
reserves left now that he had confessed his failure, he would probably have
been furious. Instead, he collapsed in a
chair. He stared at a staple on the
floor next to one of Rebecca’s desk’s legs.
He suddenly realized, the charade is over. I’m free if I want to be.
“My friends
are safe. The tigers are safe.”
Rebecca
scratched the side of her face.
Torman
looked up at a framed map of the way things used to be. Back in… whose grandfather’s lifetime? Patience, in edible portions, will fall from
the sky the day things are ever like that again.
“The
important thing, the most important thing,” he declared, “Is that I complete my
route. That is my purpose in life,” he
added, with a pouncing gesture towards Rebecca to mitigate the seriousness of
his assertion. But Rebecca did not
react. She understood the value of
purpose and fulfillment in life.
He Stole a Cheese Like a Moon
Torman
troubled no further with official policy.
He drove home to his parents house.
Shab and Grimmery were still at Grimmery’s house.
“Torman!” Chet
called to him from the pump room.
Torman
gasped. He had forgotten all about his
little brother. For so long he had been
the little brother, the last of three sons.
But then his parents had managed one more birth. He was surprised the boy wasn’t retarded, the
way women’s reproductive cells begin to rot after age forty.
“Chet.” Torman regarded his brother closely. He was a fine-looking young man. He took more after their mother. That made it two and two, for Torman himself
favored their mother. Interesting
development.
“I’m going
on an adventure, Chet,” Torman blurted out.
“I don’t know how much you know about my job, but—“
“The
tigers?” Chet’s eyes grew wide.
Torman’s,
however, narrowed.
“How’d you
know about that?” he demanded.
“Dad receives
the bulletins over the short wave.”
“Jesus,
does he still fool with that thing?” Torman glanced into the living room. “Are they here?”
“No,” Chet
told him, “They play cards every Tuesday night over at Tom and Judy Arnett’s
house.”
Torman
wished they were home. He would have
liked to have made some kind of contact with them before he headed out to face
everything that he had to face.
“What did
Dad say about the tigers?” Torman asked his little brother.
“He just
said that you knew what you’re doing.” Chet examined Torman’s shoes for a
moment. “What are you doing here, by the
way?”
“I… came for supplies,” Torman
was truthful; that is what he came for essentially.
“Like
what?”
Torman
opened the refrigerator.
“Like this,
for one thing,” he held aloft a circle of cheese.
“Torman,”
Chet sounded confused. “Who are these
other two guys?”
“One more
thing;” Torman put the cheese in his bag.
“Do we still have that long climbing rope?”
Alley Whine for the Application of Sophisticated Wings
“This won’t
do anything,” Hunkerbeck whispered to Anna.
Across the room the candidate was being fitted oil pressure wheel wings.
“I’m
talking to the Pilsner people,” Anna whispered back.
“Really?”
Hunkerbeck frowned. His eyes searched
among the coffee cups and napkins that covered his tiny desk. Rented desk, he thought tangentially.
“Why don’t
you come with me?” Anna invited. She
thought it would be fun to work alongside Hunkerbeck over at the Pilsner
campaign. After all, none of these
candidates was going anywhere. The
winning campaigns didn’t have people like Hunkerbeck and her.
“No, I’ve
got to stick it out.” Hunkerbeck was
thinking about his reputation. He was
trying to create one. He stared at the
crowd of staffers and engineers surrounding the candidate as the latter took
his first experimental flaps. Hunkerbeck
joined in the cheering. So did Anna.
“Think
about it,” she told him, rapping on his desk with her knuckles. “I can put in a word for you. I’m sure they’ll take you too.”
The candidate,
the former governor of Macklamona, had been warned that he might have to take
his shirt off to get the wings properly fitted.
He was so pleased that that hadn’t been necessary. Only the top two people on his staff (one of
them was his wife Judith) knew about the cactus puncture scars across his
chest. He laughed delightedly as his
pompadour collided with the ceiling. He
tried to think of a humorous quip, but couldn’t.
“I think
we’re about ready for the press, what do you think, Governor?” Samwise Snarly
advised once they had the candidate back on two feet.
“Uh, yes, I
think so,” the former governor agreed, glancing around.
Hunkerbeck
caught the candidate’s eye for a second.
“But let’s
do it downstairs,” he added, turning to Snarly.
“Hey, maybe I can fly down.”
The winning
design for the memorial sculpture was submitted by a twenty-one-year-old
college student named Barlach Smith. The
sculpture, which, as Smith explained in the letter accompanying his design
submission, depicted a bear emerging from a fog, was meant to memorialize the
life and legacy of Tomer Kramer, the former governor of Macklamona.
“But what
does a bear emerging from a fog have to do with Governor Kramer?” one man
asked.
“Here’s my
question,” a second interjected, “Where’s the bear? Where’s the fog? I can’t make anything out of this
thing.” He held the drawing of the
design in his hands and comically turned it this way and that.
“But how
could there have been six of us?” Grimmery tried to puzzle it out.
Shab was
driving; he started to answer, but Torman interrupted.
“There were
multiples of each of us—“ he began.
“Duplicates,”
interrupted Torman. “We were accompanied
each by a duplicate of himself.”
“We were.” Grimmery choked
back a snicker.
“You want
to know why you don’t remember it.”
“None of us
do,” Shab jumped in, “Remember it, that is.”
“Are we
robots?” Grimmery’s nerves were not camouflaged by this burst of humor, a funny
little expression passing over his face.
Torman
glanced at Shab, who returned the action.
“I
don’t think so,” Shab looked at Grimmery in the rear-view mirror.
Torman
threw himself heavily across the top of the seat and looked at Grimmery with a
grin.
“What else
do you want to know?” he demanded in a silly hippopotamus voice.
How Could Mary Tyler Moore’s Generation Have Been So
Profligate with the Decadence?
While you’re carving this into a Styrofoam rock or tree
somewhere overlooking the impenetrable valley of snakes, I sat here accepting
more and more indignities. The heaped
layers of reality, wheels within wheels, worlds within worlds. When I was a child I had boldness. I would penetrate these different
worlds. But now, one of the things that
I have finally accepted, and accepted at great personal loss, is the reality of
my existing place within a larger sociological system/structure. When I was a child I would go on trips and
see people who reminded me of people back home and I would say, “There’s only
about fifty (or whatever) people in the world.
Everybody is just repeats of some basic type.”
Rugwa and His Muchachos
“I’m not
Mexican!” Rugwa would often bark at people who recognized him as the
inspiration for the short-lived television show, “Rugwa and His Muchachos.”
He had been
thoroughly sickened by how they had portrayed him film after film. Eventually, he would become so famous that
suicide seemed the only way out. But
that was many years later; this was the Rugwa of the commercial licensing and
celebrity likeness years. He made good
money signing off on film adaptations of his adventures. These in turn led to the sale of posters and
t-shirts and things and there, unfortunately, the items were often produced
with a picture of the actor who portrayed him, instead of the man himself.
Soak in the
random dialogue, darling.
“I tell you
what I’ll do.”
“OK.”
“I’ll do as
you ask. I’ll put my affairs in your
hands, I’ll let you guide my career. But in exchange I want one thing.”
“What’s
that?”
“I want to
see your breasts. I want to see you with
your shirt completely off.”
“Hey, it’s a prosthetic.”
The Tigers Prepare to Ambush the Healing Autocrat
“I say we
wait until we get a fifth tiger,” the stirrup-pants-wearing big cat advised his
fellows yet again.
“We’ll see,
we’ll see,” Morzeck humored the other tiger.
“Who is
this ‘healing autocrat?’” the tiger in orthodontic headgear wanted explained.
Morzeck
glanced at the fourth and final member of the group, an older, slower tiger
named Fred who looked an awful lot like William Frawley.
“His name
is Cyril Dick Mance,” Morzeck told Phosgene.
“Most likely his only companion will be his apprentice. No information on the apprentice’s name.”
The cat in
the stirrup-pants was named Gule. He
offered to run to the next territory and fetch its tiger.
“That won’t
work and you know it,” Morzeck snapped.
He was getting tired of Gule’s nervousness.
“Better to
wait until more tigers are summoned in the same way we were,” Fred added.
Gule
slammed his tail against a tree.
“That could
take days,” he grumbled.
“What are
you worried about?” Phosgene asked him.
“The four of us can take care of this.”
“There’ll
be more to divide up afterwards too,” Morzeck reminded Gule.
But Gule
wasn’t worried about the distribution of edible parts. He had heard stories about these “living saints.”
“You want
to be a saint?” Cyril Dick Mance addressed his apprentice. “Be prepared for the darkness of
indifference. Why it’s dark, I
don’t know, but it is slightly counteracted by the spark of hope.”
“For god’s
sake, give it a rest,” Mindy, a young woman in a long robe, begged the saint.
“There
appear to be a young woman with him in addition to the apprentice,” Phosgene
whispered as he and the three others watched from atop a hill.
“I told you
we should get a fifth tiger,” Gule hissed.
“I tell you
what,” Fred rasped back. “You go get
another tiger and the three of us will take care of the three of them—without
you.”
Mance’s
apprentice glanced here and there among the dense woods around them. He could smell something, but the young
woman’s presence was confusing the scent.
The one
known as Captain Briefly had been Cyril Dick Mance’s apprentice many years
before.
“During my
time with Mance I was not allowed to use any kind of artificial grooming
aids. But, as you can see, I now indulge
in liberal applications of Duncan’s
Intestinal Slickness Pomade.”
“Liberal!”
thought Clomodall, eyes widening and hair standing on end. He cautiously looked around at his companions
to see if they had noticed the word.
They seemed not to have. Well, he
would speak to them about it later, in the van.
“Yes,”
Strassman acknowledged Captain Briefly’s testimonial and looked him over
closely. “It’s a complete cowboy look
you’re going for, isn’t it?”
“What with
the bandanna and all,” added Dooflig’s Recorder.
Briefly
smiled. Soon he would be part of a major
corporation’s line of screen-based entertainment products.
A Man Finds Nothing But Hay in the Stall
“What
happened to the horse?” Captain Briefly demanded, throwing his arms out and
kicking at the straw that covered the floor of the stall.
Rugwa
checked the number of the stall against the clipboard he carried.
“Supposed
to be a horse here,” he confirmed.
Captain
Briefly controlled his anger. It wasn’t
easy. Despite years of practicing his
“breathe-and-smile” technique, it was still an effort to keep from doing
something destructive. It seemed the
world was in a conspiracy to thwart his every move. First the doctors tell him that one puff—one
puff!—of marijuana could kill him (or at the very least wreck his health to the
point of complete unemployability), now the goddamned horse that was supposed
to be here wasn’t here—Briefly took a deep breath and smiled. He forced himself to laugh (even if only
inwardly) at the absurdity of it.
“Well,” he
told Rugwa, “It’s a good joke on me.”
“Do you
think you are being punished for something?” Rugwa asked. He tucked his clipboard into a leather
satchel hanging from a length of cord about his neck, silently counting the
remaining individually wrapped candies in the bottom thereof as he did.
“It’s
possible,” Briefly admitted. “I have
smoked pot while within the jurisdiction of an all-controlling authority that
has no understanding of pot’s demands.”
Rugwa,
shorter than Briefly by the span of a hand and yet not a short man by almost
anyone’s standards of height judgment, frowned.
“The
spirits are usually not so petty. In
fact, being an herb of the mystical allowance, pot is usually considered a
sacrament,” he demurred.
Briefly
glanced out the window of the stall at the camels in the yard.
“Well,” he
sighed, turning around, “I did once fail to contradict this cat-robot-thing
when it claimed that Mila Kunis is actually ugly.”
“Ah,” Rugwa
smiled and nodded. “That’ll do it.”
Bucket
Ruhoy, who, without any formal training or social contact with anyone in the
arts community, had established himself as a painter of some note, was walking
across the fields of Champiosuma on the first pleasantly cool day in many
months when he was verbally assaulted by a stranger.
“You
privileged asshole!” the man, whom Ruhoy had never seen before, bellowed at
him. The man was dressed in motorized
trucking pants from Lahore’s
Committee on the Future. His skull came
to a disturbing point just behind the crown, making headwear hard to find.
“What will
he do when it gets really cold?” Ruhoy later wondered.
“These
pants have microscopic prickles on the inside that inject opiates into my legs
at calculated intervals,” the stranger, named Bronx F. Log, explained to a
friend.
“Does that
help you walk faster after you’ve insulted someone?” the friend asked him.
“I prefer
to think that I am helping others recognize their own foibles,” Log mused
dreamily. Another dose of opiates had
just entered his legstream.
For Bucket
Ruhoy, however, the encounter with Log had not been a teaching moment so much
as an incentive to create what he hoped would be his masterpiece.
“This will
be the fulfillment of one of my deepest artistic desires,” he told himself as
he fitted his pickelhaube onto his head.
Although incapable of exactly articulating what he planned to do, Ruhoy
yet realized that planning was exactly what he wanted to avoid.
“Say that
again?” chuckled the friend of Bronx F. Log.
“I’m going
to make a glorious mess,” Ruhoy reiterated, much as one might declare one’s
intention to buy some cheese.
A Man Foresees Himself Following His Host into the
Drainpipe
The walk up
the hill to the commissioner’s house was a stone path through minutely detailed
landscaping. As Torman made his way among
the precisely placed stones and around bizarre cacti up to the front door he
imagined what the evening would be like.
After an awkward dinner of straitlaced conversation and headache-inducing
restraint on Torman’s normal eating habits, the commissioner (Abraham Lingam)
would invite Torman to join him in spying on the production of the new Rugwa
movie.
“They’re
making another one?” Torman would whine.
Or maybe no: perhaps he should just express his doubt that any new
production could match the classic films of the Morris Buchanan era. Yes, say something mature, intelligent, and
dispassionate.
“Through
here,” the commissioner would indicate the entrance to a large drainpipe left
over from the days of the Civil War. It
would be uninviting: dark, muddy, filled with multi-legged microfauna. Torman wouldn’t want to go inside, but he
would, he just knew he would. Judge
Tankard had assured him that a favorable impression on the commissioner was
vital to the struggle between Bucket Ruhoy and Asger Jorgdorf.
“The one
who gets the commission to paint the Andy Summers Memorial mural will be in a
position to determine what art movement is dominant for the next twenty years,”
the judge had told him. “We must make
certain that Jorgdorf, the proponent of Luxurianism, gets it.”
Torman
could not decide what would happen once they were in the pipe. Would the commissioner try to scare him? To make a pass at him? Would Torman pick up some forgotten piece of
metal from a hundred and fifty years before and crush his host’s skull? The future was unclear.
Of course,
the flipside to being called a privileged asshole was knowing that, in truth,
one was a “lucky bastard.”
“Basically
the same thing,” admitted Bucket Ruhoy in a moment of candor. “It’s all a
matter of one’s self-perception, one’s knowledge of how one is perceived by
others.”
It came as
no surprise, even to those who were opposed to his being awarded the mural job,
that Ruhoy was the one chosen to do the mural for the Andy Summers memorial.
“The only
question is,” Ruhoy told himself as he drove out to the intended site of the
memorial, “Should I incorporate my ideas for my next painting into the
mural? Should I, in essence, make the
mural my masterpiece?”
“I wasn’t a
big fan of the Police,” the construction foreman told Ruhoy as he showed the
latter around the immense pit that would contain the foundation for the
structure. “But I appreciate the fact
that Andy Summers was ten years older than the other two guys. Ten years older than Sting, who was the big
star in that group.” He looked at
Ruhoy. “I know what it’s like to get my
big break just when I thought I was too old to make it.”
The painter
said nothing, but the foreman’s words had struck a chord with him. As he drove back to the city, past the
monuments to such musical icons as Bootsy Collins, Grant Hart, and Keiji Haino,
he determined to eat a bowl of ramen noodles and watch Mystery Science Theater 3000 when he got home.
The Glow of My Sociological Comparison in the Mail
As
requested, I met with Clumberja in a secluded location. We sat in chairs on the lawn of the Saint
Rosenberger Chemistry Set.
“How do you
think the novel is going so far?” I began by asking.
Clumberja,
wearing a pajama-like suit made of black silk embroidered with red dragons,
answered thoughtfully. “Not bad,” she
replied. I later found out that she had
taken one or more Quaaludes before our interview, so this thoughtfulness may
have only been a perception on my part.
“But,” her voice was relaxed and slow.
I should have recognized the signs.
“Weren’t you going to intertwine the novel with the graphic novel that
you’re concurrently doing?”
“Yes.” In the distance the rotors on the helicopter
that had brought Clumberja to this place finally came to a stop. “It’s just that I’m having a hard time
introducing the cartoon characters into the text. And,” I quickly added, forestalling
Clumberja’s next words, “The idea of actually drawing the characters from the
book is a daunting one.”
“Well,
let’s start with the characters from your graphic novel. Who are they?”
“There are
four central characters: Tann Turnip; Kenner Grantig; Athena Cowl; and
Vanderkeen.”
“I’ve heard
that they’re based on the main characters from Seinfeld.”
“Well, I
don’t know where you heard that, but, aside from their being three men and one
woman, there is no similarity.”
“If you say
so,” Clumberja smiled. Her lids were
heavy. She wasn’t all that great
looking, but she was sexy enough, I guess.
“Look,” I
insisted, “Kramer never had a cat.”
“OK.”
“Vanderkeen’s
got a cat.”
Point of Sterility in the Incarcerated Poolhouse
In as much
as a building can be said to be sentient, either through its similarity to a
robot of sufficient intelligence or by virtue of its possession by some spirit
from the Beyond, such a building may be subject to the laws and judicial system
of a given country. Thus was poolhouse
#761, suspected of complicity in the Pipewalk Murders, uprooted from its place
by the Frogmounts’ pool (itself the home of a sentient blob of polywater named
Edwin) and moved into a police warehouse for questioning.
“It can’t
really be said to be ‘incarcerated’ then, can it?” journalist Heinz Fragrant
challenged during a press conference with the band Twenty-Second Century Doors.
“I’ve
noticed that the peculiarity of one building inside another has gone unremarked
upon by most of the press,” Windy McClain, singer for the band, countered.
“Well,” the
Chief of Police responded, “It really isn’t that much of a peculiarity. We have had prefabricated office structures
inside police hangars for years and, as far as I know, have always thought of
them as separate buildings.”
“Look at
Spaceship Earth,” drummer Blonck threw in.
Poolhouse
#761 hadn’t been secured. It was free to
move about the warehouse. It struck up a
friendship with an old photomat booth that had been confiscated during a drug
raid, but this led to nothing more than a stack of correspondence and an
exchange of longing looks.
Out Captions the Bolt Sticking Up From the Floor
“This is
all that remains of the office complex that once occupied this floor,”
Strassman pointed to a thick metal bolt sheared off about an inch above the
concrete. The members of the tour group
looked intently at the bolt, some taking pictures, some glancing about, trying
to imagine what it had been connected to.
“I haven’t
come all this way to stare at a bolt,” Captain Briefly announced.
“I know, I
know,” Strassman answered. “If you’re so
impatient, go ahead and check out that little building there.”
The other
members of the group watched as Captain Briefly walked across the litter-strewn
floor to a small house inside the large room.
“What’s in
there?” one old man asked.
“Captain
Briefly is here on a sort of inspection,” explained Strassman.
The
Captain, already well known through the pages of Wonderchuck magazine, illustrated with thousands of cartoons each
issue, could see that the little house had been recently installed. The free samples killed hundreds during the
course of the next two days. As he sat
down in a threadbare sausage he wondered if Rugwa might be useful in this
situation.
Some called
them mothbats, while others called them batmoths.
A Man Assumes the Brightest Gantry with Echoes
“Who is
this man?” Captain Briefly asked, pointing to the painting’s central
figure.
“Why, it’s
me,” Bucket Ruhoy told the captain with a laugh.
Briefly
wrinkled his brows up like a wet towel kicked into the corner of a hotel
bathroom.
“It doesn’t
look anything like you,” he complained.
“You
all-American dope,” Ruhoy snarled back, but in a friendly way. Very friendly, like joshing with someone
you’ve known for thirty-five years.
“It’s just a stand-in for me. You
don’t really think I’m a good enough, or patient enough, painter to make
a realistic-looking image of myself, do you?”
Across the
room Asger Jorgdorf frowned.
“I’m a real
painter,” he told his circle of companions.
“Look at that idiot. You tell
him, ‘paint this bowl of fruit,’ and he paints a cartoon. All because ‘the camera has rendered accurate
depiction redundant.’ Hmph!” He swallowed a hearty measure of whiskey,
adding droplets of ornamentation to his beard.
“Look at
that beard,” Rugwa, standing on the gantry (or catwalk, if you prefer) overlooking the room, muttered to his
recently acquired (by way of a children’s animated adaptation of his character)
sidekick, Pfrango, a robotic snail puppet dressed as a puma.
“I’d like
to try some of that whiskey,” Pfrango mentioned, but his desires were swamped
in the lights and sounds that now filled the large room, adding many dimensions
of sensation to the art on display, even as financial restrictions demanded
that Bucket Ruhoy get two paintings out of each canvas, one as labor-intensive
as he could summon the strength for, and the other a sloppy, gestural thing
that was what he really longed to do.
“He’ll
never get to illustrate the cover of a Rugwa novel,” Jorgdorf promised those at
his table near the disused stage.
Up on the
gantry the subject of just such a novel waved wildly, trying to get Captain
Briefly’s attention.
A Man Struggles with the Renewal of His Pawnbooster
“You’ve
introduced me to so many concepts,” Torman, in his capacity as interviewer for
Katsumi Chagrin (the drinkable lotion of screen-based entertainment legacies!),
began, speaking to Sire Moot and his old friend Schiffwerfer. “I hesitate to inquire about one more, but
what is a pawnbooster? I’ve heard
of a pawnbroker, but never a pawnbooster.”
Sire Moot
and Schiffwerfer, both veterans of the old Javanese Talking Anus, looked at
each other, trying to decide which one should speak first. They laughed as old friends do, but, in the
end, it was Schiffwerfer, by far the more famous of the two, who took the first
crack at an explanation.
“I knew
that Lost Motorcycle Trading Cards
was just a comic strip,” Sheldon Bathrat, a proponent of the mothbat as opposed
to the batmoth, wore plaid slacks to show solidarity with the preppies of his
youth, “But, for me, it was more a graphic novel. I hope I haven’t confused you.”
Torman
nodded heavily in understanding.
“I always
identified with Tann Turnip,” he told the other man.
“You
would;” Schiffwerfer commented with a sour mouth, “Each of you being the
leading protagonist of a tightly knit group of heroic characters.”
Sire Moot
turned to his old friend.
“You see
Tann Turnip as the leading protagonist of the strip?”
“It’s a
graphic novel,” insisted Sheldon Bathrat.
“I like
those pants,” Torman told him.
“There was
a scene in Lost Motorcycle Trading Cards
where Tann Turnip bought a whole preppie outfit,” Sire Moot remembered. As the series of encounters could be
considered a comic book as well, the specter of John Glashan in what the
British still so quaintly call trousers began to loom about them like a nuclear
shadow burned onto the wall of the old room.
“It’s more
a series of hilarious one-act plays. He
wrote a series of hilarious one-act plays.”
They all
do, when they’re not writing novels and collecting prizes, living free, owing
nothing because they pawned their actual debt, do you see?
Video Drydock for the Chloromorphus
Eventually,
the Chloromorphus, a large, multi-legged beast with a tiny independent record
store located in the root of the tail, came to see me. I was working on a visualization of the
passage from Liverpool to Hamburg
and hadn’t expected to be called upon so soon.
“You busy?”
the Chloromorphus asked from my office doorway.
“Yes,” I
laughed, throwing down my pen. “Come on
in.”
The beast
squeezed his mountainous body through the door and found a seat on an
assemblage of sofas, couches, and studio beds under the shampoo monument. He seemed to sit down with both relief and
resignation, giving off a wave of weariness that I could understand like a
language of white noise.
“You OK?” I
asked him. He later told me that he
preferred to be called Scarborough, after the
rain blister impresario of the late 1940’s, but I continued to refer to him as
the Chloromorphus in my letters to the president.
“No,” he
sighed, giving me a crooked smile of reassurance. He wasn’t going to drown me in self-pity
apparently, no matter what his problems.
“Well, what
is it?” Was I a little rude? A little impatient? Maybe.
But I had things to do; I was strung out on green tea and poppy juice; I
hadn’t shit in days, or something like that.
“Lance,” he
said to me, “I don’t want to be in the film.”
I had to
think for a minute. What film?
“Oh, yeah,
yeah, the film,” I suddenly remembered.
“You don’t want to be in it?”
“That’s
what I said.”
“Now don’t
get nasty and hateful—“
“I’m not.”
“—just tell
me what’s going on.”
“I don’t
want to be in the film.”
“OK. That’s fine,” I agreed. “What do you want to do?”
“I want to
kill myself,” he said to the Kraftwerk poster on the wall to his left.
I didn’t
say anything. I scratched my
forehead. It didn’t matter to me if he
killed himself. If he did, I’d put him
in the film anyway, whether I was making a film or not.
“No, I
guess not… right now anyway. Is that
going to mess you up? If I back out of
the film?”
“I didn’t
know you were going to be in it.” I
glanced at the cartoon I’d been drawing.
A box of roosters spitting out VHS tapes, each of the latter a Tom
Cruise repudiation.
The
Chloromorphus, Scarborough, gaped at me.
“You said
you—“
“I know, I
know, I’m just fooling.” I turned my
attention back to the beast. “Actually,
though, I had intended to use you for the soundtrack, so you wouldn’t have been
‘onscreen,’” I made quotation marks with my fingers, “all that much.”
“Oh.” He looked to his right, where the cookies
grew.
“But it’s
OK,” I insisted. “You haven’t messed me
up. The only… change is that, by coming
here, you’ve advanced my time table by a couple of pages.”
“Advanced
it?” he wondered.
I didn’t
explain. A jumble of videocassettes and
a tangle of stubbled, disembodied legs and the film was the book and the book
was the film and I just didn’t care anymore, as evidenced by this story and my
own appearance in it. But (and) that’s a
good thing.
Overt Texan Symbology in the Trailing Edge of the Pallet
I noticed a
couple of the guys from farbendiktat examining a piece of board hanging from a
pallet of wax beans. Probably the only
vegetables in the world that I can’t stomach are wax beans. These were in cans, the cans in cardboard
flats, the flats shrink-wrapped; the whole array, as I say, on a pallet. This piece of board hung from the pallet like
some weird growth on the neck of an old woman.
“What are
they?” the blond guy from farbendiktat (one of the operations here at the
Redundancy) asked his friend, pointing at something on the board.
“Scientists
have attempted to combine human and chimp DNA in surrogate mother
experiments,” I said, stepping forward and giving in, as usual, to the
temptation to act like a know-it-all.
The blond
guy and his companion, a brown-haired guy, looked up from their hunched-over
positions. Their eyes registered my
approach much as a couple of antelopes at a watering hole would a baboon:
non-threatening, but outside their species.
They turned back to the board.
“It looks
like those little space age cowboy pictures on the inside of the second Dwight
Yoakum album,” the brown-haired guy decided.
I took a
look. Indeed, there was some superficial
similarity to the images he had mentioned.
I had seen them. I owned the
album. However, these little figures
were not space age cowboys, but cactus people; two-headed truckers; and
wild-eyed executives in boots, each seared into the wood as if with a branding
iron.
“They put
me in mind of Texas,”
I judged with the finality of Ragnarök.
The blond
guy glanced at me.
“Do they eat
wax beans in Texas?”
he asked, returning to the pallet, its contents, the mystery before him just as
a dozen supervisors came clawing around the corner, scattering our observations
and sending us back into the toil and attention demanded by the Redundancy.
I began to
plot my escape, but for now I must continue to endure.
All References in the Text to Gull’s Pookie Have Been
Highlighted
Having
written several books, I felt qualified to tell Clumberja exactly what was
wrong with her novel.
“But it’s
not finished yet,” she objected.
“It doesn’t
matter. Knowing who killed the mayor’s
dog and why won’t change my opinion of its fundamental flaws.”
She was
nineteen or twenty, somewhere in there.
This was her first serious attempt at writing a book. I thought the title was good: Her Womanly Farts. But the substance of it, political corruption
and moral decay in a small rural town, was not to my taste.
“Let me ask
you a question,” she challenged. “Have any of your books been published? By a real publisher?”
“Of course
not,” I snapped. “I’m an underground
artist: my work is passed from hand to hand.
Only a small group of people know about it.”
“That’s my
point,” Clumberja argued. “You’re a
completely different kind of writer.”
“Not so
different as you think.”
“Your work
is totally incomprehensible, while mine is deliberately more mainstream in
order to reach as many people as possible, to effect change.”
“Clumberja,”
I chuckled at her delusions. “If only
that was true. You don’t know how I long
to write incomprehensible nonsense. I’m
afflicted with a staggering amount of normality. It’s horrible,” I added violently,
wrenching my body to the side as my distress mastered me once again.
“I thought
you longed to be part of a ‘scene,’” I heard the young woman say to me
from far away, as I stared into an impenetrable world of hip silliness that
seemed buried in the swirls of the wood paneling.
“Lance?”
she tried to get my attention. “Gull’s
Pookie? Hello? What was that?”
I put on my
Paul McCartney face and turned back to Clumberja. I wasn’t in the mood now, but, like a true
men’s adventure series professional, I highlighted the similarities (or
differences) between her novel and this Gull’s Pookie thing she had mentioned.
“First of
all,” I began, “You’ve got to understand that the mayor’s dog entered the
vending machine business before related dynastic elements had been codified.”
“Codified
by whom?” demanded Spanish Jackson, who had been listening in from his
perch on the back of a giant snail. This
snail was the same one that appeared on the cover of Rugwa the Bitter, heading up a delegation of giant snails intent on
keeping Gull’s Pookie free of men’s adventure series like The Boxwatcher, The
Cangrabber, and The Gun Baker.
“Most
likely by Bronto Tonsil, the mayor of Gull’s Pookie,” I theorized later over
drinks at the cabin.
Spanish
Jackson nodded, jotting down notes on the back of a banana.
“I think
Rugwa’s sidekick Pfrango should hang out with Tonsil’s dog,” he suggested.
“I prefer
to continue in the tradition of extended narrative,” Clumberja announced,
rapping on the table and leaving me to work in something like an abstract
mosaic.
Now, that’s all you’re going to get from me, banana back.
A Man Decalcifies a Crude Date for the Perihelion
Detective Matriarch speaks:
“As the
date had been sent anonymously to the lab there was no way of verifying the
authenticity of the enclosed claims that it had been found in the vicinity of
the Salton Sea.”
“I want
something clarified before we go any further,” Nano the Clown piped up from his
seat in the florist’s luggage. “Are we
talking about an actual date here, the kind you eat?”
“Of
course,” Matriarch sounded peeved, but then he often did. “You don’t think they decalcified a date on
the calendar, do you?”
“Or a date
with Marilyn Monroe?” added Zoominor with a laugh.
Matriarch
frown at his assistant’s impertinence.
He remembered that first issue of Playboy. A host of bald people, each one’s brown head
garnished with at least one piece of gold jewelry, entering the bridal chamber
with threads of crimson silk.
“Or was it
satin?” Nano the Clown wondered. “What’s
the difference?”
“Who are
you really?” Matriarch stared closely at the lines of a manly face beneath the
greasepaint.
“Could he
be a member of Kiss?” Zoominor posited.
The great
detective ignored the younger man, whose ovipositor was tucked tightly into a
woolen sock knitted expressly for the purpose of controlling the decalcifying
process.
“Otherwise,”
explained the knitters’ union president, “You could have a situation like the
one you have today, where a nothing band like Wolf Eyes,” he said the name with disdain, his eyes rolling like a
ball of yarn, only there were two of them, “Can usurp the place in the heart of
a true Rock ‘n’ Roll fan’s heart of a great band, living legends, like—“
He was
interrupted by the arrival of Nano the Clown singing “Heaven’s on Fire” and
brandishing a chart showing the exact position of the sun on August 5, 1962.
A Henchman Retains His Oracular Spangle for the Near Term
“Fingers” Singapore, the
one in the red mohair suit with the skinny black tie, was proud of the talking
brooch he wore to the bishop’s party.
His mother, who ran with the Gottlob Mob, as you may recall, had found
it in the pocket of an elderly fishperson passed out on the floor of a restroom
in some booger-besmirched Chinese buffet up in Gainesville.
“The
clientele of this place was overwhelmingly Latino, so much so that there were
bottles of Mexican hot sauce on the table,” Hatman related the tale to his
accomplice, Ray, as the two sat listening to one of the world’s really great
accordionists, Recognizably Feathered.
“My only
regret,” Ray commented, as the feelings of warmth and beard engendered by his
presence there, in that place, among such druggy, beardy presences began to
seep into even the remotest ends of his elbows and where his wings would have
been connected had he had wings.
Strangely enough, perhaps unconsciously influenced by such musings,
Recognizably Feathered began playing the old Tony Bennett song, “Bandage Up My
Wings.” His sweaty smile was evidence of
his delight at having stumbled into this interpretation.
“I thought
Frank Sinatra sang this,” the bishop (choose one of over 1,000 synonyms for
“said”) to the talking brooch.
“Oh, you
think Frank Sinatra sang everything,” the brooch retorted. Its voice was reminiscent of David Thewlis
Warner in a brown suit, but imitated by some other, cheaper David. “I bet you didn’t know that Sinatra didn’t
sing ‘The Editing Makes It Good.’”
Across the
table “Fingers” Singapore
guffawed lightly. “Frank Sinatra and me have the same initials,” he told
everyone.
Two Women Take the Rector’s Anus Back to the Farm
The bishop,
long a friend of the annual pumpkin oncology, was equally a friend (though not
without misgivings due to certain unresolved issues regarding the shape of the
henhouse) of the rector, whose band, Missing Anus, was named in tribute to the
late viceroy. The farm, to which our
illustration refers with such blueprint-like accuracy, was home to several
typical Fisher Price barnyard playset animals.
These creatures, clad in motley and sporting a spool, gathered about the
bishop as he passed through.
“I’m
looking for t-shirts with images that reflect my current obsession with noise
music,” he told them. “Does anyone know
where I can find something like that?”
Chickens
looked at donkeys, freemasons looked at pincushions, but no one seemed to have
an answer to the bishop’s query.
“Nazi
imagery?” one of them (I think it was a puma, but I can’t be sure) needed
clarification.
“Could be,
could be,” the bishop admitted, though he was quick to point out that, aside
from his preference for the shirts to be brown or black, he wanted nothing
overt. “A numbered skull, or some fusion
of teeth and feathers, something like that.”
Over the
hills outside the circumference of the farm two women rolled a large pink and
brown anus. One of them complained to
the other, “If only this thing was perfectly round. These ridges and indentations make it hard to
roll.”
“Well,”
replied her companion, the one with the big red hair, “We can take a break.
Until the bishop leaves the farm we can’t go down there with this thing
anyway.”
The one
with the straight blond hair nodded, taking a seat on a milk crate. “Good thing we brought gloves,” she said.
“And
condoms,” added the other.
Hold Obscurathon Funnelcake Tightly at Home
Recently at
a writers’ conference in the Marmelade Duchy of Rabbit’s Toll I stood outside
the venue where those invited to the conference were reading their latest
stories about the emptiness of all existence and discussing ways of
incorporating morality into fiction and, as I say, I was standing outside
passing out copies of my latest piece, “Hold Obscurathon Funnelcake Tightly at
Home,” illustrated on the opposite side with a picture of the King of All
Potato Chips hitting Scrappy-Doo on the head with a mightly redwood plucked
from the earth like a fallen arrow. Of
course I had more than one person tell me that it didn’t look like Scrappy-Doo
at all and, as by this point I was sick of explaining that that was the point,
I stuffed all the remaining copies of the “story” into an envelope and mailed
them the City of Portland at large, and ambled into a thing very much
like a konditorei and sat down.
“What is
‘obscurathon funnelcake’ anyway?” Torman asked.
He had joined me at the tiny table (just to annoy me, I’m sure) and now
he asked me this thing.
“I will
answer in the literary equivalent of noise music,” I told him, cutting into my
obscurathon funnelcake with a fork. This
fork, by the way, accompanied me back home to Neoflavor. Various figures integral to the production of
soup in our imperial cheesery rose from the discarded chewing gum mound at the
decorative end of the fork, necessarily balancing the inedible confection at
the pointy end. All of this, I snarled
in Torman’s face, held tightly at home because, in truth, I have no business mingling
among other writers.
Page to Jar the Harrowing Wheels that Recapture the
Attention of My Horse
You can listen to some black ambient music while you read
this if you want.
“Or you can
listen to a CD of ‘spooky’ Halloween sounds,” thought Cheap Victor, who was now
my horse. As we rode through the
Bekonkeral Forest on our way to a meeting with a couple of characters from
later in the book, his own headphones were occupied by an album’s worth of
unreleased Jimmy Page demos featuring Irene Aebi on vocals and Steve Gadd on
drums. “If only the will had been
there to continue:” mused Cheap Victor, “Vital work might yet have been
produced.”
The forest
was a penumbrous thicket of milkteeth and mallowpaste; hence the necessity of
such music as I have suggested. Sounds
like those of voices heard through plaster walls seemed to come from all
around, but I knew it was just a combination of giant insects and the friction
of furry leaves. The path through the
forest was wide enough for an automobile.
Good thing, because Cheap Victor and I were riding in an
automobile. He steered for a while and
then I would, exchanging control of the vehicle through a complex system of
pulleys and spools added to the car’s mechanism by a family of Heineken skunks
I knew. My horse reminded me that this
violated the warranty, but do you think I cared? I didn’t care when the fellows at the library
mocked my reluctance to ride my horse and of course I coded Morse on my
spores abundantly sprinkled throughout the forced pores. Sure, this made traveling through this
monochrome jungle all the more of a slog, but I knew that Cheap Victor wouldn’t
mind.
“A
customized hose rises from the transmission and collects my droppings,” Cheap
Victor later explained at the meeting with Wink and Davenport.
“For, as you probably know, being a horse I can’t control my bowel
movements.”
Wink looked
at Davenport.
“Bowel
movements,” he repeated meaningfully.
“Bowel
movements,” Davenport
affirmed.
The Wilderness Receiver is a Hat Chewing Brace
“What fine
words you use,” Old Scump, the last of the men of weathered rock and cactus,
praised Ted Yabbo as they sat in his cabin one desert evening in late fall.
“Soon the
winter will cover this land like a flag draping the coffin of God Himself,” Old
Scump remarked. His beard was home to
one of the last colonies of the Pimiento People, who had once sat among the
Iroquois and nodded politely.
Ted Yabbo,
our nation’s leading advocate for environmental spirituality, secretly wrote
down the old man’s words on a scrap of handmade paper. He would put them into the mouth of some
character eventually, or perhaps have them carved into the tailgate of his
steam-driven pickup truck. Oh, how he
longed to kill.
“I can’t
read myself, you know,” Old Scump told the writer, “But the Hendersons’ girl
comes by every so often to see if I’ve turned into mulch yet. She’s read me a good bit of your novel…” he
paused, trying to recollect the title of the book.
“Which
one?” Yabbo asked. “Teach the Burro to Dance or The
Puma Is a Deceiver?”
Old Scump
shook his head. Many Pimiento People
spilled their drinks. “It’s the one,” he
recalled, “Where the two men go into the old drainpipe?” He looked at Yabbo
questioningly, vitamin deficiencies evident in every wen and buboe.
“You’re
thinking of—“ Yabbo started to explain, but the alcohol mist that preceded the
arrival of authority in all its irrigatory ignorance sent him into a panic.
“We’ve got
to get out of here!” he insisted, jumping to his feet and sending the disused
TV set that served him as a chair flying into an imaginary igloo.
“Nowhere to
go,” Old Scump reminded his guest. “Death
comes in many forms; as many as Mother Moon may matriculate moreover mostly
maudlin.”
Yabbo wrote
the old man’s natural frontier poetry down on a piece of calico, certain that
another winter would finish this bipedal page of history off.
Sculpture of Two Men Next to a Film Camera on a Tripod
Mogden and
Mr. Productplacement wandered through the retrospective exhibition of Asger
Jorgdorf’s sculpture, each with a different apprehension: the former liked
almost all of it, the latter found little that he cared for.
“What about
this one?” Mogden asked his friend as they stood before a piece in the last of
the rooms containing the exhibition.
Mr.
Productplacement, a large, lumpy man with glasses shaped like a cat sleeping on
a phone and a beard ready to frighten the cat away, answered the phone with a
nod and an outthrust lower lip.
“Yeah,” he
expressed approval. “I like this one.”
Mogden sighed.
“Well, at
least we agree on something.”
“Do you
think it’s the subject matter?” Mr. Produceplectrum wondered.
“Two men
and an old-fashioned film camera?” Mogden described the piece.
“Is that
what it is?”
“Sure.”
“What’s the
title?”
Mogden looked
around, found the white sticker assigned to the piece. “National
Jive Bait and Jewelry,” he read aloud.
Mr.
Prolactinplacard frowned. “Well, that
could mean anything,” he objected.
“I think
it’s pretty obvious,” Mogden replied, gesturing at the sculpture, which was a
green bronze about six feet tall evidently cast from an assemblage of household
items like brooms, buckets, toasters, and tea kettles.
“I suppose
so,” Protracted Mister Plup relented.
“It’s just that: don’t you think the ‘film camera’ looks like it could
be another being, a three-legged creature, an even more heavily abstracted
companion to the other two?”
“I thought
you liked it.”
“I do,” the
big, round man assured his old friend.
“I’ll tell you this: it’s the best piece in here.”
Mogden said
nothing in reply to this. He had liked
the statue of the conjoined sloths sharing a hamburger far more.
The old
Korean woman serving as docent in this section of the museum stepped forward at
this point.
“Do you
think that National Jive Bait and Jewelry
is the name of the movie they are filming?” she asked Mogden and Mr.
Placementproduct.
Mogden
glanced up at his friend.
“Now that’s
a good question,” he admitted. “Why do
you think this piece is called National
Jive Bait and Jewelry?”
Mr.
Plateletductwork, who didn’t like the old Korean woman intruding on their
conversation, put forth an alternative question.
“I think a
better question is why, of all the sculpture in this retrospective of Asger
Jorgdorf’s work, this is the only one really that you and I both like.”
Mogden
smiled. “Perhaps we see ourselves as the
two men in the sculpture,” he replied, turning to the old lady, trying to
negate some of his friend’s rudeness.
“And she’s
the camera?” Mr. Progrockpuptent jerked his head toward the docent.
“Oh no,”
she denied it. “That wouldn’t work. I don’t have a third leg.”
The Ape-Man’s Essays
Strep
Toccakus, the only surviving individual from Stalin’s infamous “ape-man”
breeding program, had a productive, though much lesser known, second career as
an essayist. Although created to be a
mindless killing machine, one of the first of a theoretical army of inhumanly
strong, but unquestioningly obedient ape-man soldiers, Toccakus turned out to
be rather gentle, a disappointment to the paranoiacs in the Kremlin, and, as
amply evidenced in the newly published Collected
Essay of Strep Toccakus, far from being the simple-minded half-man
envisioned by Soviet scientists, rather a thoughtful and intuitive observer of
life both human and “other.”
His
adoptive father, Lem Roberbalski, a test tube washer at the lab in Phlebotkin
where Toccakus was born, raised the young ape-man in his own home after the
latter proved wholly inept at any of the basic tasks of warfare demanded of him
by the Stalinist regime. It is he that
inculcated the qualities of thrift and simplicity in his ward that are
displayed in the first essay in the book, “Toilet Paper.” In this essay, written in 1958, the year
after Stalin was killed by two-headed pig-men employed as the dictator’s
personal bodyguards, Toccakus realizes that “toilet paper keeps your hands from
getting shit on them.” He also asks
himself why we don’t just use gloves to wipe our backsides with, but then, with
keen insight, answers his own question: the gloves would then need to be
washed.
Dr.
Bulldark Omertang of the University
of Felth has written a
luminous introduction to the collection.
He has spent the last twenty years documenting the various writings of
all nine ape-men born in the Phlebotkin facility. “Only Toccakus,” he concludes, “Had any real
feeling for the essay form… while (other ape-men such as) Smylyakov and
Ragnariffic excelled at long-form fictional narrative.”
In his
pursuit of the full truth behind the literary activities of the ape-men Dr.
Omertang has found himself in some strange places. In the fall of 1998, at the suggestion of a
cab driver in Glimsk, he visited the attic of a former tire patching
business. There in a corner, beneath a
crudely installed bat coop, he discovered a box of nesting dolls made from eggs
of the now-extinct lumbago bird. With
trembling hands the retired economist drew one doll after another, each
apparently a portrait of one of the greats of South American literature, from
inside the previous one, until finally he arrived at a naively rendered
caricature of what he assumed was Julio Cortázar. Pressing a recessed button on the top of the
doll, Omertang released a spring-loaded word balloon that read, “Even monkeys
masturbate.” Try as he would, however,
he was unable to find the source of this quote in any of Cortázar’s
considerable ouvre.
The Intended Was Stamped Along With the Admission
As I said
before, the elderly railroad man considered the new wigs far too informal. He waited until lunch for Brown Allen to cut
what until then had only been a cigar, but, what with his grandson’s noise
generator acting up (“showing its age,” he joked to a cyclist down at the
parasite house) and the thin edge of redemption revealed like yellowed lime
peelings through his own snapping fingers, started to think that the miswak was just a gimmick, yet another
deception arranged to frighten him into some rainbow-patterned afro like a
drunken Kink.
“Showing
its age,” he joked again, this time to an ambulatory vending machine out near
Brutal Bobkin’s thrombosis of the downs.
He held up his hands to emphasize the irony (was it irony? He was never quite sure).
Dispensing
sweaty malignancy along with tiny bags of corn chips, the machine, whose name
was Corporelli, replaced the fiber on a cap of fours and gave the elderly
railroad man a look.
“What’s
your name?” it asked in a series of comic automobile honkings from even before
this locomotive lounger’s time.
“No time
for that now!” Captain Briefly interrupted.
His sanity and cigar-cutter-like presence made us all smile and breathe
with recognizable breathiness and listen for the sounds of the vacuum cleaner
deep in the mix and expect the smell of clean carpet to rise up and obliterate
that corn chip bad foot odor similarity making us gag. We all looked to the Captain like children at
a cup of hot black coffee.
“Repair our
noise generators!” we seemed to cry, if cry we did, for Captain Briefly
certainly did not. He was some kind of
cowboy.
“Is your
supervisor here?” he demanded in tones of wrung gingham and horse blanket
surprise.
Parsec and Partial Swastika
After the
schism the remaining members of the Disposal Greed Collective put all their
money into the construction of a spaceship that would take them to the molecular
dung comb. Just before leaving the earth
their leader, little Cormig, gave one last interview. Once again, to his intense irritation, he had
to explain how the swastika, an ancient sun symbol, differed from what the
Nazis referred to as the hakenkreuz. And once again, he had to explain his
organization’s use of the former, even if in altered form. He managed to describe their destination and
to urge the other disaffected residents of the planet to join them there before
the countdown began and the interview had to be terminated.
“Thank god
that’s over,” little Cormig swore as he entered the spaceship and the hatch was
sealed behind him.
“You know,”
Ocean Bob remarked, “I’ve just now realized we’re never coming back.”
“Strap
yourselves in,” a voice, probably automated, ordered from a loudspeaker box,
wood grained and fronted with gold-flecked nylon mesh.
Rather than
blasting straight up like some crude NASA-era rocket, the spaceship, named The Lucky Ovule after one of the
collective’s sacred texts, flew like a conventional aircraft, rising higher and
higher until it entered space.
“Why didn’t
anyone think of this sooner?” wondered Bakshi’s mom; she had so recently joined
the group that she had no direct knowledge of the schism that had left 75% of the
collective’s membership back on earth.
Most of those who had quit had formed the Wax Bean Appreciation
Society. Others drifted into solitary
hobbies like peeing on the toilet seat or working for the post office.
Little
Cormig thumbed through a magazine for most of the trip. The pictures made him think of the music of
the White Suns or My Bloody Valentine, “only heavier and more jagged,” he
nearly salivated. “And the text—“ he
continued, drawing Ned and Oburger into his extravehicular enthusiasm, “—what
little there is of it—is just gibberish mostly, at least when read in
conjunction with the incongruous imagery.
For example: look at this picture—it’s a collage of hippopotamus people
and fin de siècle architecture and
someone’s refrigerator juvenilia; both scholastic exteriors and interior
depictions—and here, printed crossways, crookedly, is the phrase, ‘we’re going
to need a LOT of ice;’ I mean, what does it mean? Is it a reference to some rednecks trying to
keep a body preserved in the back of their pickup truck in the middle of the
night, the legacy of a hunting accident—anything is possible.”
“I’d like
something with a little more text, relatively speaking,” Ned made it known.
“You got
that too,” little Cormig enthused.
“There are supplementals, addenda…”
Oburger,
saintly and sublime in his robes of polished oak, asked little Cormig for the
name of the magazine.
The Futility of the Lion’s Hooded Sweatshirt
Intermediate ideas: The
Wire (magazine), noise music/noise rock, Wolf Eyes, Nautical Almanac,
Controlled Bleeding, prose poems, poppy seed juice, Norm Macdonald, dress all
in black and brown, feet hurt constantly, radishes and raw broccoli…
Dinah Shore
and Iggy Pop, together in heaven…
Torman,
Shab, and Grimmery, our three heroes, have retreated to Grimmery’s house
following the debacle (if you want to call it that) at recording station
#4. As we join them around the kitchen
table, Torman is explaining his concept for a magazine that he wants to put
out…
“It will be
called…” Torman held up hands in mock drama, “The Lion’s Hooded Sweatshirt.”
Shab
smirked at Grimmery. (Grimmery is
nursing on a beer this whole time)
“Why?” he
asked.
“Well,”
Torman leaned back in his chair. “It’s
sort of a joke. You see, a lion, male
lion that is, has a mane and a hooded sweatshirt would be sort of superfluous
or redundant—“
“You mean
like a fringed hood,” Grimmery attempted to clarify.
“A what?”
“You know, not fringed, but
uh…”
“Fuzzy?”
“Fur
trimmed or lined.”
“No, no,”
Shab brought everyone back to his original question, “Why a magazine? I assume you mean real print
magazine.”
“Yeah.”
“In this
digital tree-loving age.”
“Fuck
trees,” Grimmery swore, recalling the recent debacle (if you want to call it
that) in the woods. The three men grew
silent. Their eyes wandered to every
window in the room.
“How’re we
going to finish the route?” Shab asked.
“Never mind
that now,” Torman waved a hand in dismissal.
“This is what’s important.”
He tapped the stack of many-times-folded papers before him on the
table. These were his notes, his ideas
for the great magazine project that he now realized would be the fulfillment of
a desire he had harbored since, well, childhood, I guess. “This magazine,” he continued, “It has
to be print, it has to be tangible, a real object, not some mass of
digital blips that people don’t give a shit about.”
“Yeah they
do—“
“No they
don’t. They don’t know—“
“Yeah they
do. Look at Slate or Slant or—“
“With some
web thing you don’t know where it begins or ends—“ Torman held up his hand to
forestall any further objections. “And,”
he played his trump, “You can’t collect the issues with some computer
thing.”
Shab
shrugged his shoulders, sipped his coffee.
Grimmery
sniggered at the two of them.
“So why is
it futile?” Shab asked later.
“Well,
that’s like the text portion of the magazine.
It’s like a department. You
remember when magazines had departments?
Like Mad magazine used to have departments? Well, the Futility is the text
department of The Lion’s Hooded
Sweatshirt.”
“You’ve got
it all figured out, haven’t you?”
Torman
scratched his head, glanced at the window.
He thought he had seen a tiger.
“I hate to
explain stuff. It ruins it.”
“Well,
explain one more thing for me and I’ll let you go.”
‘“Let me
go?”’ Torman thought.
“What is ‘Dinah Shore
and Iggy Pop Together in Heaven?’”
Torman
sipped his green tea, began hunting through the ragged collection of papers
before him. Grimmery looked at his two
friends. He hoped the afternoon would
never end.
Flogman
built an empire on tape dispensers.
These gentle devices, which serve no function that a good thumb couldn’t
perform, the back of my thumb smelled like shit, performing poorly as it
collapsed under the weight of ambition, despair, Dinah Shore, and Iggy
Pop. Maybe it’s just a legend, three
things at once or more. An opium
treat. Ah, the delicious fulfillment of
the anti-aesthetic. Flogman, whose logo
was a square-headed, frowning fellow, could have been anyone’s horse, only
without telltale ears of vertical or even, as shall be seen in the Martian
revelations of the next few weeks or the past thirty years (and it’s always the
past thirty years) or so, that categorization, far from being obsolete or
rejected outright by today’s randomly-grab-whatever-from-the-pile culture,
“Is
actually becoming even more finely tuned,” explained Iggy, “Much to the disdain
of people like Lemmy, whom I actually like and respect.”
Dinah
reflected on this as she glanced at the door to see that it was shut.
“So you’re
saying,” she wanted to make sure that she had it all correct, “That Flogman is
both an actual person,” she held out one finger, “A corporation,” another
finger, “And a… a… corporate mascot or cartoon character like,” a third finger. On his side of the sofa Iggy had two of his
own fingers out, still practicing the gesture with which he accompanied his
“finely tuned” remark. He mimed the act
of turning a tiny knob. He seemed unable
to stop.
“But he
didn’t have a tiny knob,” Dinah later told Dick.
The latter
was skeptical, thinking it might be an illusion created by a regular-sized
penis being attached to such a little guy, but he didn’t say anything at the
time. He waited until all concerned were
dead.
Tangential Addendum: The following poem appeared in the first
issue of The Lion’s Hooded Sweatshirt
With sideways trim and trip the semester duck
Just too much work to change the outdated vending machine,
I’m all in brown and black. That’s their
colour scheme. The band—the girl
immediately flashed a smile, I’d made a good impression earlier—a thousand
years erased it all eventually. They
said stupid things in concert.
“Reeking of
perfume,” Solmania told me. “And not
good perfume—there is no good perfume—caught up in a fantasy world, riding in the
little boat along the blue water canal—it can be most intoxicating.
Don’t want to be intoxicated. Want to be high, sure. Superficial smile—Blue Öyster Cult, Charles
Mingus, get Ben Watson on the phone. The
phone? The envelope? The rendering plant? You eat that?
Shoreline’s Compulsion to React
If the
so-called “goat scurvy,” from which the collective members of farbendiktat were
supposedly suffering, could be said to have acted upon their lymphatic systems
in such a way as to produce these inhabited abcesses we see before us on the
screen, then is it not likely that Shoreline’s reaction to the imposition of
rent on those inhabiting the abcesses, whether as dwellings or small shops
selling music albums to exquisitely discrete cliques, is a compulsory one? All of this seems to fall under the rubric of
nervous infestation, the same that with which a fungus drives an insect to
climb to the top of some grassy stalk and await death. Now, Dr. Omertang has suggested that I don’t
know what the word “rubric” actually means.
Ignoring such obsessions with theoretical details for the moment, let us
examine the interplay between (or among,
from a hermeneutic perspective) these dwellings and shops, for we see, in a
small square near the bottom of the image on the screen (let us be precise)
that often so-called “hipster-types,” equally suffering from “goat scurvy” as
any hard-working anti-hipsters down in farbendiktat, will combine their living
spaces with their specialty shops so that their lives can be fully subsumed
(like a rubric, one might even go so far as to say) with ART. I say “ART” like that because I was once a
member of just such a collective whose aim was the intermeshing (what the
Germans call ineinandergreifend) of
art and life and who, coincidentally enough, were called “the Dwellings.”
At this
point in Shoreline’s advocate’s discourse Dr. Omertang, who had sat fiddling
with an origami violin, indicated his desire to interject by hitting a large
robotic squirrel in the back of the head with an origami abstraction.
“You were
in the Dwellings?” the framed primatologicaliterature researcher asked once his
interjection had been acknowledged by the Condition of the Heart.
Sire Moot,
who at this point must be revealed as the one standing by the projector, smiled
thinly and nodded at Dr. Omertang, immense satisfaction evident on his
countenance. countenance countenance
“I played
bass with them during the recording of The
Means of Goat Spray Reunion album and the subsequent tour,” he
answered.
At one time
goat spray was considered an effective means of combating “goat scurvy” (Tool’s
Polka), but, since the advent of the New Outlook and its apprenhension of the
manifestation as a benefit rather than an icky disease, it was now relegated to
the pages of some book of historical jokes such as Laughing Panda’s Guide to the Way Grandma Cleansed Herself. The Peedle, a shop in the Chloromorphus’
fourth intergardine abcess, sold such books.
The authorities had tried to put a stop to the trade, but, since the abcesses
were now linked by tunnels leading from their back doors to a community of
freaks and would-be hipsters (though they didn’t use that term) (Peedle Deedle
Syndrome and its growing-worse-ness), a warren
of weirdness, if you will, the book continued to be sold. Why, just the other day Endo Miso, the owner
of the Peedle, was explaining to a customer that he lived in the shop and could
easily hide anything of dubious propriety back in the warren if need be.
“Is that
so?” I asked, making sure my copy of the book was wrapped up good and
hidden. “You know, I’d like to be more
than just a customer.” I wondered if I
looked pathetic, sounded suspect, or smelled too clean. “I’d like to be part of
your… closeted clique.” It was the best
I could do in the anxiety of conversation.
The hip
young Japanese dude looked at me like a beaver staring at a fireplug.
Blanches Fevered in Discus Festival
“At some
point in the show Cheap Victor will take his shirt off. That’s when we leave,” the Stork, comfortable
in his puma costume despite the heat, advised Fawn Dogwood. The latter, on a leave of absence from
Buttermonk Foods Inc., was dressed in a green turtleneck sweater and jeans.
“I told her
not to wear green to the festival,” the Stork later revealed in his memoirs. “I told her that orange or brown or even
black were the colors to wear, that it was earth
tones that were acceptable at a festival of that particular kind of noise
music, but she wouldn’t listen. She kept
saying ‘I’m a redhead. I’m a redhead.’”
Actually,
there were many people dressed in black, but these were mostly audience members
who didn’t understand that this was a new kind of noise music or noise rock,
one not directly descended from goth or dark ambient. Still, jeans seemed to be nearly ubiquitous.
“You think
my jeans are too blue?” Dogwood demanded of the Stork.
“They look brand
new,” the Stork complained, unease evident even on the features of his
mask.
“What’s
wrong with that?” Fawn Dogwood, product of an elite college atmosphere, would
never understand the aesthetic here on display.
It wasn’t just the clothes; she interpreted the sounds made by Cheap
Victor’s group, Lavadook, as some kind of jazz.
“Is this
what they call ‘free jazz?’” she asked.
The Stork,
however, ignored the woman. He was
watching Cheap Victor closely. Once he
had got a good look at the man’s pecs he would know everything he needed to
know about the man himself. The music
was essentially two men throwing electronic noises at each other, supported by
a third man who worked independently of the first two, using his own array of
synthesizers and gadgets and closely miked wooded boards and kitchen pots to
create an arrhythmic foundation for the chaotic duet going on in the fore. The Stork, an aficionado of the genre, had to
admit that it was good, even as his hatred, contempt, and jealousy for Cheap
Victor remained steady throughout.
“How much
longer?” Fawn Dogwood yelled in the Stork’s puma ear.
The Stork
frowned. It was taking a long
time. Could his reading of the man be
wrong?
“Isn’t he
worried that the redhead will be attracted to the man once he takes his shirt
off?” Cyril Dick Mance, one of the
festival’s organizers, asked his colleague, Bronx F. Log. Together they observed the performers and the
audience from an observation post hidden inside the belly of the giant John
Wayne statue. Now, some in the
mainstream music press have questioned the presence of a giant John Wayne
statue at a noise music festival, but, as the festival’s organizers pointed
out: firstly, the statue was already at the venue, having been put there back
when the place was a retrograde roller skating video arcade, and, secondly, as
with this particular genre of noise music, John Wayne was no drone.
“Well, what
was he then?” Chet asked. “A
worker? They’re all females you know.”
Cyril Dick
Mance glared at the journalist, who, if you remember, was Torman’s younger
brother. His mouth had just begun to
open, to croak out some threat or insult, when Bronx F. Log checked his
partner’s wrath. He put a steadying hand
on Mance’s forearm and with a reassuring sidelong glance assumed the role of
interlocutor.
“The Discus
Festival isn’t interested in John Wayne qua
John Wayne; we’re interested in promoting Noise Redundancy, an exciting, new offshoot
of the noise music genre that encourages a cerebral apprehension of the
music. Besides,” he turned to Mance with
a crooked smile, “I think they’re two different species.”
There Are No Freckles on the Taco
Marty
Runcible’s 1975 hit song achieved renewed popularity through its use in a TV
commercial for the Mexican fast food chain Heces En El Plato. Of course, Runcible was dead by then, having
been eaten by an alligator not long after Reagan took office, but an actor
dressed in Runcible’s trademark leather patchwork tablecloth lip-synced along
to the song in the commercial, giving viewers a good idea of the man’s
appearance. The only difference really
was that the actor (a young Bronzino Revlon) was much taller than the late
singer.
“How tall are
you?” gushed an intoxicated young lady at a Hollywood
party upon meeting Revlon.
“Uh, eight
foot seven,” the Romanian nobleman replied.
He was but recently arrived in America and still had to take the
time to translate the more familiar metric measurements into the archaic system
of feet, inches, and hands.
“Seven,”
the young woman repeated, awestruck, before puking into an ornamental basin
near the yarmulke-laden mattress.
Pilot
Ramirez drove all these young women away, entering the scene with clapping
hands and the snapping tones of a radish-eater.
“Alright,
alright, everyone,” he brayed, “Out, out, out; we have work to do.”
Thus did
the meeting begin, Bronto Tonsil and his dog Plutongas taking the chair at the
head of the table, though the man was but fulfilling a ceremonial role; he said
nothing, only sat and fed his dog sausages the whole time.
“I want to
get back to Marty Runcible and his marvelous song,” I announced, sounding
petulant, I’m sure.
“Well, of
course you do,” Ramirez replied. “‘There are no freckles on the taco.’ A humanitarian sentiment and a gentlemanly
observation.”
Bronzino
Revlon, seated in a specially designed eggcup, impatiently made it known that
he yearned to grow his moustache back.
“How much
longer must I continue with these ridiculous public appearances?” He pounded on his dogeared copy of the script
in exasperation.
“Until we
have made it clear to everyone, and I want to emphasize it once again,” I
looked into everyone’s eyes in turn, including the dog’s, “There are no
freckles on the taco. No freckles,” I
repeated. “Does everyone
understand? The taco has no freckles.” I paused.
“They’re age spots.”
Goldfish
swam in the ornamental basin.
Laughing Molar’s Moon Leaning Out to Vomick
Two
veterans of the late eighties/early nineties metal boom sat around the kitchen
table talking about music. The one of
the left, with his back to the refrigerator, was named Big Morris. The other man was Duckbill. Behind him was the old sideboard, the one
Doyle found in the woods.
“They had
the gall, the ignorant gall,” Big Morris related the tale of his indignation,
“To compare Uriah Heep with Queen, as if they were nothing more than two sides
of the same coin.”
Duckbill
shook his head. Such stupidity was
common among mainstream rock critics.
“They’ve
always hated metal and hard rock,” Duckbill lamented. “Have you ever noticed, that every time a
certain metal era,” he placed his hands on the table in karate chop positions
about a foot apart, “A metal phase, comes to an end, you know, like
either it peters out or it suddenly comes to an end like when Nirvana came in
and ended our metal phase,” he picked his hands up from bracketing the
hypothetical block of time and gestured between himself and his friend, “The
rock critics always say something like, ‘Well, thank god that’s
over.’ Like, metal is finally done for this
time; now we can get back to the serious music.”
Big Morris
nodded. He knew exactly what Duckbill
was talking about.
“And you
know what’s funny?” Big Morris added.
“When Nirvana first came out big with the Nevermind album—they were marketed as a metal band! It’s true,
I’ve got the proof.” He pointed towards
the darkened living room.
“Yeah.” Duckbill looked away, rubbed his chin. “I don’t know how they got away with it,
making that change.”
“Well, they
didn’t wear metal clothes.”
“That is
part of it. Grunge started that shit,
with the flannel and the plaid. But you
know—“
“Grunge was
just metal too,” Big Morris completed the sentence. “Or hard rock. Pearl Jam was really hard rock really.”
“Look at
the band they came out of—Mother Love Bone—they were marketed as metal too.”
“I know,”
Big Morris pointed to that darkened half of the house again.
Duckbill’s
gaze followed his friend’s indicative finger.
He kept staring into the darkness as the two men fell into silence. Big Morris stared over his friend’s shoulder
at the sideboard. Finally he opened his
mouth.
“Doyle
pronounces the word ‘vomit’ ‘vomick.’”
Duckbill
turned back to the light. He wanted to
ask, “Why?” but realized that the universe was full of mystery and that some
things had no explanation. “To know all
is to forgive all,” he remembered.
Insect Under the Dome Held by Ernest Man
“I guess I
really shouldn’t get so upset,” I admitted with a sigh.
“No, you
shouldn’t,” agreed the man whose beard I wanted.
“I really
ought to focus on my meditation and let these things… go.” I threw away an
imaginary fleet of ships with my outflung hand.
The man
with the mighty Baljo beard couldn’t see any ships.
“What is it
that’s got you so upset?” he asked.
“Oh,” I
didn’t want to tell him, but I couldn’t resist bringing it up one more time,
like picking at a half-healed scrape, “I really liked Norm Macdonald and now I
find out he’s a believer.”
Beard man
squinted.
“A theist,”
I reiterated. “Roseanne Barr too. And I liked both of them. Roseanne mainly because I thought she was
cute.”
“You
thought Roseanne Barr was cute?”
I looked into a passing
car. The driver looked like James
Thurber, if you know who that is.
“I can see
this isn’t going to go well. Maybe I’ll
just leave.”
“No, don’t
leave,” the man with the enviable beard begged.
“It’s just that—they’re celebrities. People you’re never going to meet—“
“Because
it’s all luck, right?”
He
shrugged. Out of his beard fell a
picture of Kanye West, who I don’t really know anything about, but can’t stand
anyway. Now I knew it was all over. I knew I couldn’t trust him just like I
couldn’t trust anyone. Later, while
carefully shaving I reflected on my jealousy and bitterness, my impuissance and
many scars, most of which wouldn’t be scars if I had just left them alone and
not picked at them.
Scrabble My Downey
Moved the
seeds the more jealous I became. Lies
that spun around and around like bananas in the contradiction, what grubs back
to the first thing I resort to. So it’s
personal relationships now. Can you name
one? I’m reluctant. Cheap blinds moved by the fan. She can’t get them exactly at the height she
wants. These words are playthings. I won’t betray my wife by bringing her
amongst them. The clock on the stove is
always fast, but the pizza or the pie doesn’t get burned for all those minutes
rushed.
Heroes
always let you down. Don’t look too
closely at anyone. The complete works of
the Nobel Prize winner include his bowel movements too.
And thus is
my quagmire concluded. I remember I used
to ape Wols in my early days.
You’re Ruining the Plague Tour
Marlon
Brando urinated into an empty spaghetti sauce jar held by two members of the
king’s household. This was in November
of that same year. Filming in Naples had not gone
smoothly. The local press had been
critical of the king for serving spaghetti, which is a pasta more closely
associated with Genoa.
“Feed the
Americans ziti,” the editorials urged.
Brando,
impolitic as usual, laughed as he filled the jar with his champagne-colored
piss.
“It’s all
noodles to me,” he declared.
The two
servants, dressed in costumes that were a parody of standard western business
attire, complete with hats like the humps on a Bactrian camel, glanced warily
about: Edith Head was somewhere among the invitees.
A
particularly good episode of The Love
Boat, the film was about the adventures of a sculptor during the year 1837,
when plague ravaged Sharecropper
Valley. Consulting an ancient grimoire, the
sculptor, played by Marlon Brando, crept from one narrow, differently colored
passageway to another, leaving behind a series of coded messages designed to
fool the members of a secret society that he was one of them.
“I would
have preferred to play the part of the rug,” Brando told the local socialist
paper, Il Scrotomo, upon leaving the
palace. Strands of spaghetti hung from
the big beard he had grown for the film.
“But,” he added to himself, in his own coded thoughts, “Even here in the
heart of the European film industry, far from Hollywood, the cinematic aesthetic is
dominated by physical types. After all,” he concluded with bitter humor,
“Film is actually a medium of width.”
Demanding Results in One Orange
Envelope After Another
Although
Rugwa’s friend had moved away he remained in contact with him through postal
correspondence.
“This was
in the days before digital communications,” Dr. Beshafunk explained to the
elderly monkeys in his case study.
“I didn’t
know Rugwa had a ‘friend,’” little Monday Bruisit joked from the back of the
cage.
But it was
true. Rugwa did have a friend. Perhaps Pfrango, his puppet sidekick of later
years, was a substitute for this now-lost friend, for each had an almost
grotesquely asymmetrical face and a propensity to boast of his
accomplishments. Under normal
circumstances, however, Pfrango could not hold a pen.
The
collected letters of Rugwa and Zed Hawtry are now available for all good
monkeys to read. They have been
recovered from Rugwa’s coffin by the Department of English Literature at Crooksewer College and thoroughly annotated by the
department’s director, Coach Font. It
was he that discovered Rugwa’s last name: Niwab.
“There is
much speculation and debate in the community as to whether Zed Hawtry, who
later became a congressmen from the state of Mimsigano, even knew what Rugwa’s
last name was,” Coach Font’s wife Chow commented. “They went to high school together, but Rugwa
called himself Doopsy Sheldon at that time in an attempt to make himself into a
preppie, so who knows?”
Of course Rugwa
signed his letter to Hawtry with his infamous paw-print logo, but put the
letter “R” above his return address on the envelopes he used. In true outsider tradition Rugwa insisted on
making his own envelopes out of reflective plastic strips, not unlike modern
day Christmas tree tinsel, woven tightly into an airtight fabric. His friend, on the other hand, used a series
of orange envelopes purchased in bulk through his father’s contacts in the
insurance industry. These latter often
contained exquisitely scrawled diagrams designed to teach Rugwa about such
subjects as the location of various regions of the vagina, how to play the
saxophone, and extremely liberal concepts of the afterlife. One letter, from Rugwa to Hawtry, contained a
small insect smashed into the paper just above the word ‘oligarchy.’ Whether it was killed by Rugwa deliberately
is unknown, but to him it looked like one of those long helicopters with two
rotors. We know this because he circled
the smashed insect and wrote a note detailing his perception of its appearance.
“It is
rising from the Colorforms Vietnam playset.
Perhaps there is a proto-metal band on board, either kidnapped by the army
to provide entertainment for the troops, or themselves the hijackers of the
‘chopper,’ on a mission to bring powerful narcotics back from the war-torn
jungle.”
At this
point in our narrative we must acknowledge the objections of various monkeys
and hornets who feel that the above passage, along with the bulk of the letters
themselves really, reflect an articulation and an eloquence and a visual
imagination seemingly at odds with the popular image of Rugwa as a crude
barbarian bent on nothing more than violent adventure, loot, and various
regions of the vagina. However, as Dr.
Beshafunk has pointed out in his recent monograph on the newly published
commentaries on the Rugwa/Hawtry correspondence annotations, it is possible
that the author of the Rugwa letters was actually Covay Parker, the first actor
ever to portray Rugwa on film. He would,
therefore, have a legitimate claim to call himself “Rugwa.”
“The real
question,” Beshafunk asked Font at this year’s Necronomicomicon Obvioservation,
“Is whether the young congressmen Hawtry knew he was corresponding with the
real Rugwa or not.”
Coach Font
chuckled. He was sitting opposite
Beshafunk on a dais. Each man held a
microphone. Some three hundred people
had crowded into the room to hear them discuss these matters. He found the situation amusing.
“The ‘real’
Rugwa?” he repeated, his smile evident even within the obscuring mass of white
bristles around his mouth. “You might as
well speak of the ‘real’ Captain Briefly.”
A gasp went
through the audience, followed by a smattering of applause and even a “boo”
here and there.
“Well, you
know what I mean,” Beshafunk countered good-naturedly.
“Scientifically
speaking, no.” Font chuckled again,
though his tone was serious. “However,
in comic book terms, yes, yes, I know.
However, I think it is important to remember the significance of knowing
Rugwa’s last name.”
“Niwab,”
Beshafunk intoned for the benefit of everyone, both in terms of information and
the thrill of hero worship.
“Yes, yes,
Niwab,” Font repeated. “Now that we know
that, we can correlate the name and all its ramifications through the most
pertinent of sources: the Rugwa comic book published by Whitman in the
mid-60’s.”
“I
disagree,” Beshafunk shook his head. In
appearance he was very much alike to Font, except that his t-shirt bore the
image of Clark Gable in a Santa Claus costume.
Font’s t-shirt picture was more relevant: the classic movie poster for Rugwa Meets the Noisician. “I see the original novels by Spanish Jackson
as the most pertinent of sources.” More
gasping, clapping, and booing followed this exchange.
Later,
during the question-and-answer session, one young man (well, young to me,
anyway) in glasses and something approaching a white boy’s afro, asked about
the helicopter image formed from the smashed bug.
“Well, that
about it?” Coach Font demanded, getting irritated. He was tired, hungry, and a little upset with
Dr. Beshafunk, so perhaps he wasn’t the best person to ask about that
helicopter. But neither was his
counterpart, Dr. Beshafunk, now busy autographing copies of the graphic novel
based on his research. It fell to me to
do justice to the subject, which I did in a story entitled,
Never Got the Poncho
Now, since
the helicopter, which was a CH-47 variant known as a PCH-47B, with extensive
modifications to its stereo system and lounging facilities, could hold up to
twenty or so people along with all of their gear, it was ideal to transport the
band Half Nigger Baby and its road crew and management team on its tour of
South Vietnam and the surrounding islands.
“There’s
one problem,” lead guitarist Columbo Manmucus revealed. “That’s square army green color: that’s got
to go.”
“Yeah,
yeah,” the rest of the band agreed. The
dual rotor whirly bird had to be repainted, both inside and out, with
psychedelic graphics befitting the band’s pro-mind expansion aesthetic.
Coach Font,
the band’s manager, sighed and ordered that it be so. He contracted with noted German artist Asger
Jorgdorf to get crazy with the colors and, for good measure, bought some bead
curtains to divide the interior of the helicopter into several vaguely-defined
zones, such as one for sex with admirers, one for smoking the best quality
weed, and another for enjoying the latest Rugwa or Captain Briefly comic
books. It would cost a good bit, but
nothing was too good for the band that created the anti-war anthem, “Cross Your
Legs, My Kangaroo Compatriot.”
As these
and other vital preparations were underway, the band’s singer, Glavin Integer,
went shopping for a poncho. Of course,
being a rock musician in the late 1960’s, Integer had in mind a poncho very
much like something worn by Clint Eastwood.
Trawling for trinkets for Troubadour
Street, he ran into Fragrant Sam Applepooper,
singer for the rival band Goddamned Nigger Lover. Each band had the word “nigger” in its name,
an obvious source of friction. However,
Half Nigger Baby had little to worry about: most of the members of Goddamned
Nigger Lover would be dead within a year, trampled under the hooves of
migrating wildebeest.
“You don’t
want that,” Fragrant Sam advised Integer as the latter fingered the
material of a Chihuahuan poncho.
“You think
it’s low quality wool?” Integer wondered.
“Brother,
the quality of the wool’s got nothing to do with it,” Fragrant Sam
countered. “You don’t want wool
at all; you want a space age polymer, something that’s going to last all the
way to the moon and back, man.
But besides that,” Fragrant Sam added, moving closer and adopting an
almost conspiratorial tone, “The hip ponchos now, I mean absolutely contemporary,
are these.” He led Integer to a
rack of shiny red and black garments bearing the seven-pointed star of the
Egyptian snake god Pissis.
“These?”
Glavin Integer’s eyes grew wide. A
remarkable feat in itself, as he was heavily narcotized at that moment. Impressed by Fragrant Sam’s enthusiasm and
evident expertise, however, he tried one of the new style ponchos on.
“Look in
the mirror,” Fragrant Sam urged. As
Integer stood before the mirror, Sam stood behind him and declared, “You’re a
space cowboy.”
Yeah,
Integer thought, involuntarily smiling, yeah, that’s what I am.
On board
the band’s helicopter, now christened the Holistic
Crisis, Coach Font was lecturing the band on the importance of treating the
local people with respect once they landed in Vietnam.
“Avoid
using words like ‘introduction’ and ‘economist,”’ he warned.
From behind
one of the packing crates full of guitar picks emerged Glavin Integer, dressed
in his new poncho, a leather helmet, green suede pants, and boots of braided
whale baleen.
“What are
you supposed to be,” drummer Seth Hooper asked, “A superhero?”
Integer put
his fists on either side of his pelvis and announced, “As of o-seven-hundred
hours I am assuming command of this starship.”
“It’s a
raincoat thing,” Columbo Manmucus articulated his surprise as he touched
Integer’s person, while Coach Font rubbed his chin and turned the word
“starship” over and over in his mind.
Because of Your Proximity to the Combo
On the last
day of the convention Dr. Beshafunk interviewed Coach Font about his days as
the manager of the long-forgotten proto-metal band, Half Nigger Baby.
“Now, let’s
get one thing out of the way, right here at the start,” Dr. Beshafunk, sitting
opposite Coach Font in a hotel room with only a cameraman and a sound engineer
in attendance, began his interview.
Coach Font
thought that Beshafunk was going to clear the air following their contentious
discussion earlier in the week; it never occurred to him that Beshafunk was
talking about the necessity of using the word “nigger” multiple times in the
course of the interview.
“Well,
obviously,” Coach Font argued, “We can’t repeatedly euphemize ‘Half N-Word
Baby’ over and over. It would be
awkward, inaccurate, and insulting to the truth.”
“Agreed.” Beshafunk nodded in reply, much to Coach
Font’s surprise. “Although,” Beshafunk
added, “I have to say that I repeat the name of the band only because I believe
in the truth, and not because I get a thrill out of saying the n-word over and
over.”
In the
interests of moving forward and harmony itself Coach Font merely raised his
eyebrows and sighed.
“But just
to be clear about everything,” Beshafunk continued, “Why did the band
choose that name?”
“Well,
first of all,” Coach Font recalled, “You have to remember that this was a
different time. People weren’t so touchy
about the word. True, blacks had not yet
‘reappropriated’ the word for their own ironic use, although some did,
admittedly not openly, but also, and this is the main reason, the name’s origin
is in a story that actually happened to Columbo Manmucus. Back in high school he dated a black girl,
much to his parents’, especially his mother’s chagrin. His mother made some disparaging comment
against the relationship, saying she didn’t want him getting married to a black
girl and bringing home a ‘half-nigger baby’ for a grandchild.”
“Really,”
Beshafunk despaired at such intolerance.
“Yes, so
the name was both a joke and a protest, an ironic one, at those sorts of attitudes. Remember, this was a band with an aesthetic
of ‘ugly beauty’ or ‘beautiful ugliness.’”
“That’s
interesting,” Beshafunk admitted.
“Still, the name is probably why they’ve been forgotten, whether
intentionally or not, by rock history.”
Coach Font
smiled and shook his head.
“Rock ‘n’
Roll never forgets,” he said.
The
cameraman and the sound engineer exchanged glances full of pity, amusement, and
disgust.
“Now,
moving along,” Beshafunk continued, “You, Coach Font, because of your proximity
to the combo, are in a unique position to relate the whole story behind the
band’s ill-fated effort at making their own, hippie-era space opera take on a Hard Day’s Night-type film.”
“Ah, yes,
the reason we’re here,” Coach Font smiled, leaning back, getting comfortable. He referred to the imminent release of the
restored DVD version of the heretofore unreleased, unfinished film, Poocher’s Mill and the Fellow.
Poocher’s Mill and the Fellow
In the film
the members of Half Nigger Baby portray exaggerated versions of themselves
thrust into a series of situations in which they battle an extraterrestrial
adversary known as Suedge. The titular
Poocher’s Mill is an isolated piece of property which the band has rented with
the intention of recording their next album there. As for “the fellow,” it is left unresolved
whether this appellation refers to the character of Wink, a fictional record
company executive dreamed up by the band, or Davenport, the band’s eccentric,
comic relief bus driver, played by veteran British comedian Jake Oates. Remember, this is an unfinished film. The DVD’s special features include extensive
commentary regarding the unfilmed portions of the screenplay, but, as that
latter document was largely a collection of improvised scenes and chemically
influenced notes scrawled on whatever paper was at hand, many plot points
remain a mystery. In order to give you a
taste of the film, we now join the band as they arrive at Poocher’s Mill. Bear in mind, however, that several scenes
are missing, even in this literary version of the action.
Davenport, dressed in a
repeatedly belted and zippered leather jacket and a cloth cap pulled down over
one eye, emerged first from the old, repurposed bus. He flipped a cigarette butt onto the thinly
graveled driveway and proclaimed,
“Let me be
the first to desecrate this holy ground.”
One by one
the band descended from the bus. Columbo
Manmucus coughed into his hand just like Jimmy Page stepping down from the
airplane in The Song Remains the Same. He even wore a colorful silk shirt, only this
was filmed three years before the Led Zeppelin film. So who copied whom?
“What a
dreary spot,” Seth Hooper, the band’s drummer, remarked, looking up at the gray
building that dominated the little glade.
“I’ll bet
you there’s not a woman within ten miles of this place,” Glavin Integer
guaranteed.
“Women are
nothing but a distraction,” the band’s manager, dressed in a fuzzy white coat,
joined them. This was an actor. The real Coach Font was thousands of miles
away, dealing with the attempted suicide of his other major client, Alex
Theory. As such, the character of the
manager was referred to throughout the film only as “Coach” and not “Coach
Font.” “You’re here to work.”
“What about
drugs?” Columbo demanded. “That’s a necessity.”
“Columbo,”
Coach substitute clasped the guitarist by the arm and gestured about them. “My sources tell me that these woods are full
of secret pot patches.”
“We have to
harvest our own pot?!” Columbo was incredulous, borderline outraged.
Next we see
the band sitting around an enormous rough-hewn wooden table in the millhouse’s
kitchen. Davenport enters, carrying two guitar cases.
“That’s the
lot,” he said, pulling a red handkerchief as big as a pillowcase from inside
his jacket and wiping his forehead. A
phone rang somewhere.
“Can you
get that, Davenport?”
requested Integer.
The other
man gaped. He shook his head and stamped
out. After a montage of quick cuts
showing Alex Theory onstage; signing autographs among a crowd of fans; and
puking into a toilet, the driver returned.
He jerked his thumb towards the hallway and announced,
“Wink sends
his regards.”
“Ah, Wink!”
the band members cried, holding aloft cans of beer or joints. “Wink!
Wink!”
Coach rose
halfway from his chair, his eyes on Davenport. The latter nodded in return. Coach exited.
Jams from the Ogre by Mail
Suedge, the
name given to the monster lurking in the woods surrounding Poocher’s Mill,
fancied himself both a composer and a musician.
As he was a multi-corporeal entity; that is to say, he had several
interconnected bodies controlled by a single intelligence, it was easy for him
to put together a band. I know from
personal experience how hard it is to find a group of people willing to work as
a unit on a common musical goal. Suedge
was lucky in this regard.
“What I don’t
like,” he said to one of the local farmers during a chance encounter at Bill’s
Barbecue restaurant, “Is this name, ‘Suedge,’ that’s been foisted on me.”
“But what
else are we to call you?” demanded the farmer, picking up his takeout order in
a big paper bag.
Suedge
didn’t know how to answer that. Despite
having a single controlling intelligence, it seemed that the various parts of
his gestalt were at odds over the
choice of a common name. All of the good
names were taken.
“I wish I
could be Led Zeppelin, Miles Davis, Wolf Eyes, Gang of Four, Can, Black
Sabbath…” Suedge trailed away, mentioning ten or fifteen names, some of them
not exactly musical in origin.
“I like Led
Zeppelin,” the farmer agreed.
Suedge
tried doling out different musical personalities to his different bodies; for
example, being Led Zeppelin in the guitar-playing part and Miles Davis in the
horn-playing part, Wolf Eyes in the electronic noise-maker body and Gang of Four
in the propaganda leaflet-writing body, but, despite creating some interesting
results musically, this left him no closer to a better name that Suedge. He decided to start sending some of his recordings
to the hippies staying in the old Poocher’s Mill place. Maybe they’d have some insight into the
direction he should take.
“What’s
this?” Seth Hooper asked one day on opening a padded envelope addressed to the
band. The envelope contained a small
plastic rectangle with a tiny window on either side.
“That’s a
tape cassette,” explained Coach. “That’s the way of the future. One day all music will be released on
cassette. I learned about them a couple
of weeks ago at a meeting in New York. As a matter of fact,” he added, rummaging
about his bags, “The record company gave me a prototype cassette player.”
The band
gathered around to listen to the new technology. Nothing contained on the cassette interested
them so much as the cassette itself.
Glavin
Integer brought up a good point. “This
is what I want to know:” he wondered, “What will be the point of producing a
great big piece of cardboard to go along with this tiny cassette?”
“There
won’t be any more record sleeves.” Coach told him.
“What?”
“That’s
right. Half the expense of producing an
album is the packaging, the artwork. The
cassette will free artists to create pure music, unencumbered by an
accompanying visual vision.”
Integer and
Barlach Smith, the band’s bass player, looked at each other.
“I don’t
like the sound of that,” growled Smith.
“Neither do
I,” Integer agreed. “Looking at the
album cover while listening to the music is half the fun.”
“This Suedge,”
Columbo Manmucus read the name on the envelope, “Is nothing but an ogre.”
Of course,
all of this got back to Suedge somehow and he thought, aha, at last, I’ve found
my collective name. “It’s serendipity;
I’ll call myself the Ogre.” But
then he found that there was already a band from Arizona called Ogre and his mind snapped.
Chips of the Backpack Radiator
During a
particularly intense jam session Suedge went into a feedback-laden bass solo
that damaged his backpack radiator.
Pieces of the radiator were chipped off by the fury of sound and fell
into a dark pool of shampoo water. Small
forest animals and butterflies, sniffing at the edge of the pool after Suedge
tromped away in disgust, were themselves equally disgusted (although far less
self-consciously due to their more primitive brains) at the smell of the
radiator chips growing into bizarre creatures under the influence of the magic
black water and psychedelic bubbles.
“It
frightens me,” one of the bunnies declared, running away to barf into one of
nine segmented holes.
“Emotion of
revulsion level three,” a butterfly signaled, using the rudimentary fingers to
either side of its food intake orifice.
Many days
later, having gone through the three stages of infancy, the radiator chips
emerged from the pool and dried themselves on towels provided by the Governor’s
Council on Literacy, Mustard, and the Arts.
“Thank
you,” Regurgitron told one of the Council volunteers.
“You’re
welcome,” replied Andy. He was a
clear-eyed youth with a thin beard and glasses from the dawn of America’s
industrial might.
“You can
get glasses like these from the online reproduction Sears 1900 catalog,” Andy
later told a fellow volunteer as the group sat around a fallen log and ate
their lunch. In the distance the
radiator chips marched into town, pillaging only when driven into frenzies of
rage.
“I didn’t
think Sears did mail order anymore,” the other youth expressed his doubt.
“It isn’t
Sears; it’s Reproduction Sears,” explained Andy. “It’s a totally separate company based in Guacamole Town.”
“Ah, Guacamole Town.”
The name conjured visions of sleepy palm trees and adobe huts, all
beaten down by a horde of red-eyed mechanibbles, of goats gone crazy from fear
of beans.
“Say, I
noticed you’ve got a Wigsaway sticker on your van. What’s up with that?”
“Well,”
responded Andy, “It’s an ironic statement, given that the surrounding stickers
are of a liberal bent, as you know.”
Even Uglier Shrimp in the Blind Man’s Parade
High
overhead in the aquarium suite of Ben Dixiecrat, the discussion revolved around
liability.
“I think
the real problem,” Justin the tire washer opined, “Is that shrimp look like
they’re wearing sunglasses.”
“Good. That’s good.
If we get sued we can use that,” Jimmy mused was he fiddled with his
slide rule.
There is a
gray felt sheriff’s badge that spins parallel to the ground. It is not a sheriff’s badge, but it does have
five points. Each point is connected to
an event happening as it passes through the zone in which the event is
happening. Thus, one fifth of a certain
baloney slice of the earth is connected with each point of the spinning
indicator at any given time. Ben
Dixiecrat, a large humanoid shrimp whose criminal empire extended into the
manufacture of Braille paper, was reminded of Movement Detected Beyond the
Fence as he slowed the sheriff’s badge with an angry jet of anal fluid.
And then:
Movement Detected Beyond the Fence
Anyone who
has seen the film will know what we’re talking about. You can talk about these things in the third
person passive as if the subject isn’t even in the room with you. I’ll give you an example: One day I stumbled
onto a field in the middle of the woods.
It had been deliberately cleared to provide a killing ground for
deer. Tall stands like lifeguard roosts
stood on each side of the field. No one
was there. It was the middle of the
day. I got the feeling I was somewhere I
shouldn’t be.
Now, should
we confuse the veterinarian with an English professor, it will be no more than
what the blind men did as volunteers from the Governor’s Council on Literacy,
Mustard, and the Arts described the floats to them. Each float bore a representation of several
shrimps. Each shrimp depicted embodied a
cliché of governmental secrecy or pop star panache.
Money Spilling out of the Old Man’s Wallet in Amber
Colored Lights
After being
forced to retire from the Comatosery, Bronto Tonsil moved into his son’s house,
which was located inside the tiny forest
of Straintilyableed. Already broken by the loss of his throne
years before, Tonsil had been unable to bounce back from this latest blow. All he did was sit in the window of his
upstairs room and mutter, “Pieces of feces, pieces of feces,” over and
over. Even Wilhelmina, his little dog,
had given up on him. She ran downstairs
just in time to see the UPS man hand a package to Tonsil’s daughter-in-law,
Cardene.
“Interesting
place you have here,” the UPS man commented.
“I had a hard time finding you.”
Cardene
nodded. “Yeah, but once you know where
it is, you won’t have any trouble finding it again.” She glanced at the package. It was addressed to her father-in-law.
“This
forest is so tiny,” continued the UPS man, “I bet you could count every tree in
here.”
“As a
matter of fact,” Cardene informed him, “It’s been done. As of last November there are 102 trees
bigger around than the president’s left wrist, which, as you probably know, is
the defining characteristic of a mature tree.”
“But how
far up from the ground though?” The UPS man was cautious. He had been taken in by dazzling rules of
thumb before.
“It depends
on the tree,” Cardene explained. “I’m
not convenient with all the details, but, I think, on average, it’s one tenth
of the tree’s total height starting from the top of the ground or the highest
exposed root.”
“Not the
lowest?” the UPS man questioned, which angered Cardene. She was getting tired of the conversation and
only wanted to open the package.
Wilhelmina
provided the necessary distraction.
“Barky
barky,” she yapped.
“Oh, that’s
my father-in-law’s dog,” Cardene identified the creature. “She probably has to shit or something.”
The UPS man
excused himself and climbed back into his van.
The Straintilyableed forest was so tiny that the rear end of the van
protruded several feet from the encircling trees. He opened the rear doors of the van and
looked into the face of the sun itself.
“The
package has been delivered,” he reported.
“Good,” the
sun, or something very much like it in these sad times, replied. “Who took possession of it?”
“A
woman. Presumably the wife of the owner
of the house.”
“She may be
the owner, Schiffwerfer,” the sun-like entity reminded the driver. “Never assume the nature of property rights.”
The driver,
apparently named Schiffwerfer, wrote this down on the back of an envelope.
“Now,”
continued the sun, glowing like a freshly spanked bottom, “Did she mention the
monarchy?”
“No. But she did reference the presidency.”
The sun
rolled backwards an inch or two in its trough of gold. “Did she?” he mused. “Interesting.”
Back in the
house Wilhelmina stood on the kitchen counter sniffing excitedly around Cardene
as the latter opened the small parcel.
“Oh my
god!” Cardene exclaimed. She had pulled
a vacuum-sealed transparent bag from the parcel, but now dropped it in
disgust. She had been hoping it was
prescription painkillers, but it was some variety of shit.
Lake
Governor—In Case
the Phone Rings Again
The rowboat
was a rental. Someone had left sticky
rings on the seats. Mare’s Wood and
Cheap Victor refused to clean them off.
They sprinkled tiny feathers from a can onto the rings until they were
obscured enough that the two men could sit down. Out on the lake they compared their situation
with that in the movie Master and
Commander, Mare’s Wood observing that there were no women on board to
unnecessarily complicate their outing, while Cheap Victor felt a cozy
insularity in being a microcosm of the larger world. By the time that Sir Kenneth Clark had been
mentioned their primitive equipment indicated that they had reached the center
of the lake.
“OK,” Cheap
Victor said softly, turning his head toward the dock whence they had come. “Can you hear anything?”
Mare’s Wood
listened carefully.
“Yes.”
“You can?”
Cheap Victor’s eyes grew wide.
His
companion nodded. His eyes were on the
feathers that had fallen off the seat to join the dead leaves around the two
men’s feet. “I hear an atonal guitar
yammering away.” He looked at Cheap
Victor. A person of great sensitivity
might have detected the memory of pain in the face of Mare’s Wood. But Cheap Victor only answered, “No,” after
slowly turning his head about.
“Well, at
least it’s not the phone,” Mare’s Wood assumed an optimism he could not
rationally defend.
The other
man nodded. “Let’s not talk about it,”
he requested.
They
unfolded the refrigerator from their supplies and removed a lunch of egg salad
sandwiches and potato salad. While they
ate Cheap Victor corrected his friend’s misconceptions about the origins of the
lake’s name.
“I always
heard it was named Lake Governor because it’s not technically a lake at all,
but a natural-edged canal providing flood control for Lake Mildred
further north,” babbled Mare’s Wood.
“Not at
all,” Cheap Victor tried not to smile.
He remembered their disagreement of many years before when Mare’s Wood
had insisted that Jamie Lee Curtis had been named Jamie Lee Curtis because her
parents wished to pay tribute to her supposed hermaphroditism. Only a phone call to Smudgecutter castle in Wessex had
finally satisfied Mare’s Wood that this ancient rumor was completely
unfounded. Now the two men were doing
all they could to avoid any calls from either Curtis or Carrie Fisher.
“They say
powerful interests want them to make a film starring the two women,” the
rowboat rental man explained to his wife.
“Well, they
are each the daughter of a famous couple,” the old lady expressed her
understanding as she put her saxophone to her lips and began calling to the one
called Mr. Octopus.
Wrasslabix and the Elders
It had
rained for two weeks without relent. The
backyard was a spongy mess. Wrasslabix
got his shoes soaked reaching the shed.
“Do you
think he’ll bring back the correct garden implement?” The voice was that of one of the silently
drifting bags of essentialist plasma known as the Elders.
Ms. Brown,
who had only recently joined the Elders, frowned, the splayed toes lining her
purple gums winking like distant mansions on fire in the Hollywood
hills. Her lips were like an old vinyl
sofa dredged up from a flooded basement, cracked, swollen, and peeling. She listened with growing outrage as those
about her calmly discussed the man Wrasslabix and the possibility of his
fulfilling the assignment.
“I
estimate,” another Elder, this one weighted down by years of sheer
ponderousness accumulated in partially vestigial scrotums dependent from the
hem of his corporeal envelope, “That he has a ninety percent chance of
success.”
Much
nodding and analytic croaking followed this reply.
Ms. Brown,
however, would have none of it.
“If the man
can’t do the job one hundred percent,” she yapped, “He should receive corrective
action!”
“Brownelia,”
one of the Elders addressed Ms. Brown by her new name, “Do you not understand
that this task we have set the man Wrasslabix is not remunerative or functional
in nature, but a test, designed to reveal his inner worth, both to us and to
himself?”
“I
understand that if he don’t bring back the shovel like we told him to, he
should be written up, sent home, and reported to the internal security
enforcers.” Ms. Brown sounded like a
wind-up toy whose only purpose is to flail about on the kitchen table until it
knocks over a glass.
The other
Elders used their meaty, smoothly shaven legs to exchange glances among
themselves.
Out in the
backyard shed Wrasslabix was confronted with not only a choice of garden
implements, but a choice of shovels. He
knew he had to get a shovel, but which one?
The Elders’
cryptic instructions were of little help.
“Select the
one that most nearly resembles the progenerative organ of a xiphoidal sea
snake,” they had told him. But which
gender? Wrasslabix had been too
intimidated to ask any questions; he had only rushed out into the waterlogged
backyard and gotten his feet wet. Now he
stood before a jumble of rakes, shovels, mattocks, and a pickaxe or not,
scrunching up his toes inside what had been a new pair of shoes.
“You’re not
being paid to goof off!” The voice of
Ms. Brown exploded from the shed doorway like that of a large, flightless bird
defending a nest of unfertilized eggs.
“I’m not
being paid at all,” Wrasslabix retorted before he could stop
himself. After all, he reasoned
incorrectly, his shoes were ruined.
“If you
don’t like it, you can just go home!” Ms. Brown snapped.
“Really?” Wrasslabix sounded surprised and pleased at
the offer. He started for the doorway,
making sure not to brush against the ugly old windbag.
“Stop!”
commanded the collective mentality of the other Elders. They were now present in the shed, but not in
any physical sense. They were merely there,
not there merely.
“You,
Brownelia,” the voices were ominous, laden with the dread of eons. “You are not ready for the company of the
Elders. Prepare for Divestiture of
Inflation.”
Ms. Brown,
for perhaps the only time in her existence, was rendered speechless. Her mouth stood open, but no words were
forthcoming. Each separate toenail-like
peg rising from behind those pneumatic lips served as a counterpoint to the
lowered eyebrows, which remained lowered no matter what emotion was contorting
the rest of her withered countenance.
Slowly, before Wrasslabix’s shocked gaze, the old woman shrank smaller
and smaller until only a wisp of discolored material, like a discarded condom,
lay on the ground.
Wrasslabix
glanced around. He was alone in the
shed. Summoning his courage and good
humor, he began to step over the remains of the demoted Elder when a voice,
like that you might hear in your head when rereading a page from last year’s
diary, told him to dig his own grave.
Feedback Baguette
“What does
a real Rock and Roller eat? Why, hot,
fresh bread—made in the traditional French manner, of course! Such things are possible, now that automated
baguette kiosks stand on every corner of Paris. Treat yourself to the latest slab of heavy
Rock music while hygienic hands of stainless steel turn relatively lifeless
dough into a crunchy, steaming loaf—all in a matter of minutes! Now, I know what you’re thinking--“ the man in the capillary beret continued,
“The French have never been known to be particularly crazy about Rock music. Why should they be the source of two such
disparate passions coming together? Why
not serve up those long sticks of bread with some typically accordion-based
tune?”
The answer
to this question, if it ever was forthcoming, was drowned out by the arrival of
Tiger Beater, the biggest band in all of Taiwan, landing on the roof of the
museum. Their superhero hovercraft,
emblazoned with the band’s stylized whisker cat logo, dropped them off and then
retreated into the skies over the city to flash colored lights down on the
makeshift venue. It also served as an
omnidirectional loudspeaker system, receiving signals from the band’s
instruments and playing them for all to hear.
After Tiger
Beater had played their current hit, “A Collection of Tired Yeasts,” the
singer, Yuan Leung, addressed the crowd below.
“Hello,
People of Mortality! We’re Tiger Beater,
world-class rockers from Taiwan! We want you to know that bread rocks! Eat some enjoying bread today! Thank you to our sponsors, Taipei Rice and
Bean Assembly of Jesus the Christ and Bushmills Irish Whiskey
Distilleryship—drink some enjoying Bushmills today! And now,” Leung held his fingers out in
claw-shapes, “We will fight and defeat evil—with the song of love!”
The band
then played “Apostolic Dimensions in 1984” while costumed actors pantomimed an
attach by diabolical monsters around them.
Down on the sidewalk people dressed as yeast cells passed out small
packaged samples of dinner rolls to passersby.
The man in the capillary beret, momentarily overwhelmed, put on his
platform shoes and remounted his portable stage.
“Don’t be
fooled, ladies and gentlemen!” he cried.
“Real bread, today’s bread, is apolitical, made by
machines, and sends a Heavy Metal message of hope!” He pulled a lever on a box beside him,
releasing a fog of scented carbon dioxide.
Observing these events, I wondered what kind of music lent itself to
fasting, a practice which, as I’m sure you know, is gluten-free.
Filtered through the Jacket’s Material, the Laser Warms
His Meat
By coating
his legs with Vaseline, Mr. Millens was able to get his pants to remain in
place while he climbed up the scaffolding around Gwen’s brassiere. Mr. Millens had picked up a takeout order
from Waffle House on his shopping trip to get the Vaseline. As he climbed he ate his scrambled eggs and
waffles using auxiliary feeder limbs attached to his choker-and-chest unit.
“I knew
Torman, Shab, and Grimmery,” he told Mr. Arruldeo, a researcher who collected
ancient styluses.
“That’s a
funny word, the plural of ‘stylus,’” noted Torman to his friend Shab. The third member of the gentle team,
Grimmery, was standing in the back somewhere, looking at a cabinet full of
untouchable teacups and nonfunctional thimbles.
“Somewhere
in there is a miniature mason jar full of pond water and a dead salamander,”
Shab warned Grimmery. The latter only
grinned and waved away such concerns.
And now, for a while, I’m just going to write gibberish.
Wrought Clock Concerns
I remember
black iron implements mounted on red velvet—the rooms in those days were
bullfighter motif—leftover abstract expressionism by minor artists indeed. Weapons you could play with, but they weren’t
anywhere near real—other people’s houses—pants full of shit, left a stink on
their fuzzy white mushroom stool. Always
imposing on people—but damn sure made to feel bad about it. You’ve hurt other people’s feelings with your
requests and your sense of entitlement—spoiled, that’s what you are. My mother read a Josh McDowell book and told
me: “I’ve read this book and now I know the truth: I’m a giver and
you’re a taker.”
Large Postcard Sent from Maine
Unfortunately the postcard, along
with the rest of Aunt Merlota’s correspondence, was sold to an antique shop in
a neighboring town. As badly as
Clumberja’s mother wanted to obtain the postcard and compare it to the
photograph over her microwave oven, she wouldn’t go into the antique shop
because the owner smoked a pipe.
“It’s a violation of state law,”
she complained. “But they won’t do
anything about it.”
“Who
won’t?” Clumberja asked.
“The
police.”
Clumberja
nodded in acknowledgement, but kept her thoughts to herself. She volunteered to visit the antique shop and
find the lost postcard.
“Don’t pay
more than ten or eleven dollars,” her mother advised. “I don’t want it if it costs more than that.”
Clumberja
could smell the pipe as soon as she stepped inside. The old man that ran the place sat in a
rocking chair smoking and watching the dozen security monitors next to
him. The store specialized in small
items. There was no furniture in the
place.
“What can I
show you?” the old man asked Clumberja.
“Postcards.”
The old man
showed her where they were and explained the filing system.
“Don’t you
have any oversized postcards?” Clumberja asked.
“I’m looking for something that came from an estate sale in Roggle about
a week ago.”
“Already
sold it,” the old man knew exactly what she was talking about.
“You did?”
Clumberja frowned.
“But,” the
old man took the pipe from his mouth and pointed its stem toward another part
of the store, “I’ve got a print over there with the same picture.”
“Really.” Clumberja followed the old man to a section
of the shelving running all around the store.
His pipe didn’t smell all that bad to her, but it was a little
overwhelming.
The old man
thumbed through a stack of posters and things until he found the picture he was
looking for. How did he hold that pipe
between his teeth all day long? That’s
probably what gives you cancer—that constant pressure on the jaws. He handed Clumberja the picture. It was of a lobster the size of a dump truck
climbing up the side of a barn. Several
farmers stood around looking at the situation.
Evidently there had been a caption, probably humorous, at the bottom of
the picture, but it had been torn off.
Only the word “hardware” remained.
The farmer
nearest the viewer was a typically porcine American. His hair was white and cut as close to the
scalp as possible. He wore a straw hair
that had done nothing to prevent his bright red neck from being carved into
multiple X’s by a lifetime of servitude to the sun. He spoke of the Bible and the End of the
World to his fellows, all of whom were overalls-wearing clones of himself.
“Reckon
he’s after the rye?” one of the farmers, this one wearing an “I Like Ike”
button on the left-hand strap of his overalls, wondered aloud.
“How would
he know there’s any rye in the barn?” another asked. “Unless he could smell it somehow, but
lobsters don’t have noses.”
“Neither do
catfish, but they can smell,” pointed out Old Puice, the makeup artist from
Dodgem’s Porridge.
“Yeah, but
they do have olfactory glands.”
Clumberja’s
mother, named Dawn after the circumstances of some victorious sea battle,
explained that in her photograph the lobster smoked a pipe and the farmers all
voted Democratic. “That barn was the
site of the first Ronald McDonald House,” she added.
Strengthened Like a Candle or a Drill Bit
Dr.
Beshafunk, now working at Buttermonk Laboratories in Demester, Wooftenshire,
knew personal sacrifice. His thumbnails
were permanently deformed from repeated accidents during the development of the
new finger-stiffening agent he and his team were working on.
“See how
they are now oddly shaped?” he asked his girlfriend, Louisa McBarnowl.
“The right
one looks like the lower half of Michigan,”
Louisa gasped. “While—while the left one
looks like the upper half!”
“Indeed, “
Beshafunk agreed. “Only in real life the
upper half is much smaller in proportion to the lower.”
Miter
Peteropolis, standing on the other side of the aquarium, posed a question. “Can either of you name the so-called ‘capital
of upper Michigan?’”
Beshafunk
stared blankly at Miter, while Louisa kept her eyes fixed on the hundreds of
spoons cluttering the worktable before her.
“I doubt
it,” Beshafunk stated flatly.
Miter took
a deep breath. Any hope of a smile
withered on his face.
“It’s Mondofisk Bay,” he mumbled, more out of a sense of
obligation than anything else. He
reminded himself again, like a man whipping a kitten, that he would never be
accepted by these people; never, never.
Now
Beshafunk took a deep breath, ridding himself of unpleasantness. “However,” he returned to Louisa and the
lecture at hand. “It has all been worth
it. If you will hold out your finger.”
Louisa’s
brows came together like a bus and its reflection.
“Any
finger,” Beshafunk encouraged his lady.
“It’s perfectly safe. Trial and
error and the eventual triumph of achievement have assured us of that.” He flexed one of his thumbs as a symbol of
science, while keeping the other in abeyance, possibly to reflect its brother
commerce, although I often read too much into such things and could very well
be wrong about which thumb represented what and/or whether they symbolized
anything at all other than a general thumbiness.
Miter
sulked at this good natured semantic display and idly watched the teeming
catfish in the tank while Beshafunk carefully painted Louisa’s right index
finger with the substance (named kovis ka
dovis in patent applications).
“Now what?”
Louisa asked. She held up her glistening
finger and sniffed at it. It smelled
like wet rye flour, only stronger and more briny.
“Once it
dries you’ll plunge it into the rind of this watermelon and suffer no ill
effects,” Dr. Beshafunk told her.
The drying
process took some time and involved sitting under a modified hair dryer dome
from the days of the Kennedy administration.
While she waited, Louisa looked through a scientific journal about
geriatric literature. She was just
getting engrossed in an article about the conflicting messages of conservatism
and liberalism in the collected writings of Erma Bombeck when her boyfriend
turned off the finger dryer.
“Are you
ready?” Dr. Beshafunk asked.
“I guess
so.”
“Then jab
your finger into this watermelon!” the fat, bearded scientist gestured at a
large green watermelon with black stripes.
“Pretend you’re poking a lump of dough.”
Louisa
shrugged and obeyed… and was amazed that her finger made holes in the rind of
the melon as easily as she would holes in wet sand!
Obviously
she was stunned and her face reflected that fact. Equally stunned was Miter Peteropolis when he
involuntarily blurted out that her finger should work just as easily on other
melons like cantaloupes and honeydews—and was not reprimanded, but actually
seconded by Dr. Beshafunk.
“That’s
right,” Beshafunk smiled at him.
Miter
smiled back, but then mastered himself.
“They grow
honeydews the size of engine blocks in Mondofisk Bay,”
he snapped.
Empress of the Barracuda’s Ramrush
In the lake
was a small island. On the island was a
camp. To me the most interesting feature
of this camp was a rack of used books for sale or trade at the camp’s general
store. I was going through this rack
when the old lady’s replacement arrived.
“The boat’s
here,” the old lady told another customer, an old man in a red baseball cap
standing at the counter.
I glanced
out a nearby window, but couldn’t see the dock.
How did the old lady know? Did
she have a light or something behind the counter that flashed with the boat
pulled in?
“My
replacement will be on it,” the old lady added.
The old man showed some interest in this, but I didn’t. My attention was on the books. I had found two volumes from two men’s
adventure series, The Destructor #21,
Watching in Wichita
and The Funeralist #42, Deadly
Penetration. I loved collecting
these numbered series. Their discovery
had brightened this trip to the island camp as there really was nothing to do
there except sit around a fire waiting to eat or swimming and I was much too
pudgy to go swimming.
“Your
replacement?” the old man repeated. “You’re
leaving?”
“It’s time
for me to go. Twelve years I’ve been
here.”
“I’ll be
sorry to see you go.”
I took my
books to the counter.
“You have
any books to trade?” the old lady asked me.
“No,” I
shook my head and smiled. Books were
precious. I had none that I didn’t want
to keep, certainly none with me.
“You get
about double for your money if you trade,” she told me.
The old man
put his finger on The Destructor.
“I read
that one,” he announced.
I smiled in
response, but kept quiet, waiting to be told the price.
“Two
dollars,” the old lady determined, having figured it out.
“Didn’t
want any of the westerns?” the old man asked me.
I waited
until I had handed over the money before telling the old man “No,” with another
smile, this one thin and flat, like a fault line. His hat had a patch that read “Trucks Bring
It.” I had found no other books of any
interest. These two seemed to be
anomalies among the romance novels and supernatural thrillers and political
capers and, yes, westerns.
Two days later
it was time for me to go. I stepped into
the general store just before departing to get a packet of ibuprofen. Behind the counter was the old lady’s
replacement. She was a clean-faced, slim
woman in her mid-to-late twenties.
“I was told
you like to read,” she said to me as I fished in my pocket for my money.
“Yeah,” I
nodded.
“I’ve got
something here you might like.”
She reached
under the counter and retrieved a hardback book with a dust jacket that showed
a two-headed astronaut holding an ice cream cone. Next to him was a short, buxom woman in some
sort of mechanical suit. Together they
faced a bear-like monster holding a TV.
Dick Cavett and Lester Bangs were on the TV. The name of the book was Empress of the Barracuda’s Ramrush.
“Wow,” I blurted
out.
“Take it.”
“What, you
mean free?” I asked, already tearing open the ibuprofen.
“Yeah. I’m cleaning out and rearranging and…” she
went on, but suffice to say that I took the book, read it when I got home, and
let me tell you: it was the greatest book I ever read in my life!
Clasper in Suspicious Containment
The
contractor had been so certain of his calculations that he allowed for the
procurement of only one extra brick.
“Just in
case one of you breaks one,” he joked to his men.
“This is an
old Chinese legend,” thought Nancy.
As it
turned out, the contractor was right and, indeed, there was one brick left over
after the family container was built.
This extra brick was put to use in later years by the family as a
doorstop. It was wrapped in hopelessly
outdated Christmas wrapping paper and shoved against the door to the living
room, the door that wouldn’t stay open and was never closed in any case.
“Ought to
just go ahead and take it off the hinges,” Old Fred grumbled on many on occasion.
Many years
later a subset of the family moved into a new container, this one made of metal
and fabricated in a factory in a distant land.
Among the many things the subset took with them was the brick. Old Fred was long dead; the door had been
taken off its hinges soon after the funeral.
“What are
we going to do with this brick?” Mrs. Jones, Nancy’s daughter, wondered aloud during the
unpacking.
“Well, in
an open-plan container such as this, there are no extraneous doors,” Rupert
noted, “So we really have no need for a doorstop.”
“I’ll
take it,” Homodus declared, stepping forward from amid the stacks of
magazines. “I know just what to do with
it.” He turned the brick over in his
hands. It startled him to see how much
brighter and more colorful was the side that had faced the carpet all those
years. Santa Claus and his Merry Men
looked as vibrant as the latest characters from “The Booger Eaters.”
“What’s he
going to do with it?” Mrs. Jones asked; she and Rupert watched Homodus going to
the far end of the container.
Rupert
shrugged. He stole a couple of magazines
and entered the toilet area.
“I’m
creating a shrine,” Homodus explained.
He cleared away a space on top of the occupancy meter and put the brick
in the center of this space, vibrant side down, to preserve it. On either side of the brick he placed an
urn. One held old Fred’s ashes, the
other was full of cumin, but no one could remember which. Around these objects Homodus set up a ring of
small plastic cavemen that somebody’s grandfather had played with as a
child. In time, as Homodus came to be
called “Old Homodus,” he added things like Hello Kitty stickers and a large
poster of Jimmy Page in full Nazi regalia to the wall behind the shrine and it
became a focal point for family emotions during celebrations and a backdrop for
group photographs.
Of course,
over time new members joined the family.
As children they were not as respectful towards the shrine as their
elders. They didn’t know the history of
the shrine and how it came to be.
Sometimes people put trash into the urns: gum wrappers and cigarette
butts. The cavemen were taken down,
played with, lost, broken, replaced with painted spools or religious figures. One day, little Terry pulled the brick down
and unwrapped it.
He told his
grandmother, “Look what I found,” but she only snapped, “Well, it wasn’t lost.”
“What is
it?” his mother asked.
“It’s that
brick that was on the occupancy meter,” the old woman replied, taking the
object in her hands, “But look what he’s done, he’s torn off the wrapping
paper.” There was real regret and
remonstration in her voice.
“Brick?”
Little Terry’s mother questioned, leaning forward and examining the object in
her mother’s lap. “Mama, that’s not a brick. You mean that’s what was inside that wrapping
paper all this time?”
“What is
it?” another woman, sitting with them in the summer sun, wondered.
“It’s a
brick that came from the family’s old place in Zwischenpaste,” the grandmother
explained.
“Mama,
that’s not a brick,” repeated her daughter.
“That’s a squirrel coffin!”
Little
Terry’s eyes grew wide. Later he would
wonder that a dead squirrel would weigh so much, but for now he felt only
confusion and shame. Did his grandmother
not realizes that there were more uses for the word “found” than her sarcastic
reply would seem to indicate?
Tape Up the Bat for the Coffee Cake
“Do you
remember Happy Days?” Cyril Dick
Mance asked that week’s guest, Congressman Hooper.
“I remember
happier days, certainly.” The
congressman revealed both his basic conservatism with this remark and the fact
that he was retired from active politics.
“No, I mean
the TV show.”
“Oh,”
Hooper nodded. “Yes, yes, of
course. Fonzie, Henry Winkler, Ron
Howard, all that. Although I believe
there was a show called Happier Days,
wasn’t there?”
“If you
mean Happy Days Again, then no.”
‘“Happy Days Again?’ What was that?” Hooper toyed with a jar of
cold cream. The two men sat in one of
the studio’s dressing rooms. Production
assistants and studio personnel came in and out with the regularity of children
in the summertime.
“It was the
name given to the syndicated version of Happy
Days while the original show was still on the air, to avoid confusion.”
“Like Laverne and Shirley and Company,” one of
the makeup artists threw in on her way out the door with a bag of cotton balls
in her arms.
“Right,”
Cyril Dick Mance agreed.
“Well?”
Hooper urged him along in the direction of actual conservatism.
“Well,
anyway, the thing about Happy Days,
and other shows of that era, but especially Happy
Days, that bothered me, was how at the beginning of the show, somebody, in
this case Tom Bosley, would announce ‘Happy
Days is filmed before a live studio audience,’ in order to fool you, the
home viewer, into thinking that the laughs were real. But they weren’t. Sure, they had a studio audience, but they
still used a laugh track. 99% of the
laughter you heard on all those shows was added later.”
“99%?” the
former congressman was dubious.
“99%.”
Mance was firm.
A woman
came into the dressing room.
“Time to
get your wig on,” she told Mance.
Hooper
watched Mance, the host of The Booger
Eaters, face the mirror while the woman fitted a bright orange wig on his
head.
“She’s
getting paid fifty dollars an hour to do that,” he thought.
“Of course,
our show has no laugh track,” Mance told Hooper, “But then, on the other hand,
our ‘audience’ is just a couple of sofas where the families and guests of the
cast and crew can sit and watch the taping if they happen to be visiting the
studio. If they laugh, they laugh. If it’s caught on the soundtrack, great; if
not, it doesn’t matter.” He turned to
Hooper, transformed.
The
congressman smiled.
“It’s a
kids’ show,” Hooper commented, “And yet you don’t have any kids in the
audience.”
“Yeah, our
model was the old Flack and Slack
puppet show. How do I look?”
“Suitably
silly, I guess. What do you want me to
do?”
Cyril Dick
Mance explained the premise of the sketch that Hooper would be participating
in. He showed him exactly how he wanted
him to hold the baseball bat.
“This is a
twenty-four-hundred dollar suit,” Hooper informed Mance.
The host of
the kids’ TV show thought for a moment.
“Maybe we
can get you into the British cow costume,” he suggested.
The Man Called Flap is Preparing to Explore the Tiny
Neighborhood
“I heard
you have a shower in here,” a young Captain Briefly (then known as Chet
Marimbus) stated, looking around Cyril Dick Mance’s office.
“I do,”
Mance replied. “In here.” He showed Chet the mechanism for opening the
door hidden in the blond ash paneling.
“Wow,” Chet
gushed. The hidden room also contained a
toilet and a sink.
“This also
serves as a secure hiding chamber in case of danger,” Mance let Chet know. He didn’t tell him about a further secret
door within the small bathroom that opened on a passageway leading out to the
Gavoindak Depression.
“Now,
remember,” Mance told Chet, snapping off the light, “You’re in charge while I’m
away. Don’t take any shit off anybody.”
Chet
blushed at the use of the vulgarism. In
later years, after adopting the Captain Briefly persona, one of his defining
characteristics would be the G-rated language he employed both on- and
offscreen. He looked around the office. It was a 1970’s era dentist’s dream. Blond ash paneling throughout, as I have
mentioned; a blue vinyl chair and a yellow vinyl chair for visitors; an orange
settee; a large, bulbous, standing, chrome lamp that gently arched from its
place behind the desk, beside a potted jade tree, to an intrusive position
between the person seated at the desk and his visitors. Framed paintings in the anyone-can-do-it
post-abstract expressionist style were on the walls. Metal blinds covered the large windows,
admitting nothing in the way of natural light.
“You don’t
drink,” Mance noted, “But here’s where the liquor’s kept anyway.” He showed Chet another hidden door and the
well-stocked pantry within. “I wouldn’t
advise taking it up in my absence, but occasionally you might have to entertain
someone.”
“I
understand,” Chet nodded. He looked down
at the run, which was thick enough and soft enough to sleep on. If he was a child he would have loved to
crawl around on that rug, pushing teams of plastic soldiers though its burnt
orange grasslands. In fact, he
determined to do so, just as soon as he was assured that his employer and
mentor was gone on this bizarre excursion of his.
“I’ll be
gone at least a week,” Mance told Chet.
“You’ll be able to handle things for that long, surely?”
“Oh,
surely.” Chet nodded seriously, brow
appropriately wrinkled.
Mance
looked the young man up and down.
“OK,” he
pronounced.
“One
thing:” Chet added as Mance was hefting his travel kit to his shoulders. “Can I let Amanda use my office while I’m in
here?”
Mance
opened his mouth to speak one thing, but instead said, “You’re in charge.” Then he was gone.
Chet
returned to his regular office and sat there for nearly ten minutes before
returning to Mance’s with a toy car and some dolls.
A Trellis of Corndogs My Academic Response
I went
under the name Flap for the duration of my time in the Gavoindak
Depression. Secrets and new beginnings.
The tiny
neighborhood that I visited was truly tiny.
It consisted of eight or nine buildings scattered about the periphery of
the belly of the depression. The town
was so small that it didn’t have a name.
“What do
you call this town?” I asked one old man.
“Town?” he
replied, briefly glancing up from the aimless whittling that consumed him on
that dark morning.
The
Gavoindak Depression is like a valley, located in the heart of an intertwined
compound organism known as the Bekonkeral
Forest. The abovementioned belly of the depression is
a soft, partially penetrable field that covers perhaps a half a square mile,
crossed with a grid of dark lines. The
field is green, composed of downy growths that sometimes admit passage through
to another place, a place from which apparently no one has ever returned.
“Have you
ever been out in the belly?” I asked one of the townspeople, this one a lean,
dirty-faced woman standing in the doorway of her crude wooden shack.
“Hell no,”
she spat. I glimpsed small, ragged
children behind her, like tarsiers in a hollow log. “Sometimes deer, chased by hunters, fall down
from up there,” she pointed at the tangle of pale blue flowers and enmeshed
vines overhead, “And fall into the belly.
They sink like stones in a pot of water.”
“But people
have waded out there and come back,” I suggested, relying on what I had read.
“Sometimes,”
she admitted, “If you’re real careful, you can tiptoe through it. I’ve seen it done. But only a fool would try it.”
I wondered
how big of a fool I was.
Fumigation Lunches Fill the Interesting Gap
Flap asked
the woman to wish him luck, but got nothing from her but a look of
incomprehension and aversion. He walked
forward into the edge of the belly. The
sparsely set buildings of the tiny town occupied a thin, rocky strip that ran
around the belly, separating it from the pink and purple tufts of the
surrounding jungle. He stepped gingerly
as he waded into the moss-like substance.
It was like walking on gelatin.
He saw that it was possible to cross the expanse, if one took care. The question was how much pressure it would
take to fall through to the other side.
He was almost to the middle of the belly by the time he decided to try
it.
He jumped
up and down. When he landed he seemed to
bounce as if on a trampoline, although no waves or ripples of energy from his
feet moved through the belly. He jumped
again and again, each time landing a little more violently, until finally he
fell
through
the
green
fluffy stuff
and
found himself
on a blank page.
