And in keeping with the theme of this book, there is no epilogue.
I am in love with each of you.-Shubert Fieffer
Across the fields of Nebraska, a dry wind swept across the earth with the force of God's till, stripping the land of all things, until nothing remained above except the earth which spawned it. It was a one eyed monster and all the men folk gave it a name. Some would stand in the face of it, screaming to its unsympathetic gusts,"Get off my land! Get off my land!" And, of course, a few of the more obstinate were picked up and thrown by the ogre. This was never spoken about. There was no reason to. It was as natural as the turning seasons. It was May.
The world was flat in all directions, a perfect Euclidean plane which went on forever. And for most it did. Some tried to leave and some tried to stay, but inevitably, some of the fields' children were uprooted as if by the twisters, and carried to a place so foreign, it might as well have been a different country from the America they knew.
Such was the fate of adult film star Sexy McPoodle.
Sexy McPoodle was conceived and born in a barn to a farmer's daughter. That night, following a dim light in the western sky which turned out to be a Bob's Big Boy, three businessmen, one white, one black, and one hispanic, brought gifts for the mother, expecting their tale to end up in the back of a Tasteless Joke Book. To their chagrin, the farmer asked them to stay somewhere else.
Sexy matured rapidly, both mentally and physically, and soon left the rural life for the glamour and glitter of The Big Apple. After having her photo taken next to the enormous genetically mutated fruit, she headed for New York City, and promptly had intercourse with everyone in the 212 area code.
It is now five years later, and Sexy McPoodle is sharing a cab with Gary Coleman's enraged dietitian.
Webster's dictionary defines "penis" as a small coastal city on the eastern edge of Florida. Whoops. That's Pensacola. But before I could flip to Q, the raspy voice of an ancient drunk filled my ear.
"Dagnabit!" he muttered between vomits." Blacks aren't blacks anymore; they're AFRICAN-AMERICANS!" He seemed less distressed with the race than the moniker.
He took another swig as I impulsively checked to see if my vasectomy scar was visible.
"Balls aren't balls anymore!" he ventured. " They're TESTICLES!"
A pause. Yes, he could see.
"You know," he said to his foot insanely," Things are changin'...and I don't like it!"
The largely hispanic bowling team that passed him shouted no epithets, made no suggestions. They did not ignore him. No, they did not even see him.
Nor did they see the Mack truck barreling down the sidewalk behind them, its driver dead of a massive coronary. At the moment of impact, the deceased jaws of Hank Jennings, confirmed bachelor of Wheeling, West Virginia, released the remnants of a Chili Dog whose vendor's parent company was declaring bankruptcy at a sparsely attended press conference on the opposite coast. It was a fitting tribute to both.
I made it onto the eleven o'clock news. "It was horrible" was the heavily edited clip they used.
What I had actually said was:
"It was horrible the way this chain of events has postponed my indepth analysis of Nell Carter."
Little did I know that, not three weeks later, I would be nude, drunk, and comfortable in her very spacious bed.
"We all chipped in, " Chet said, pausing for a moment as if embarrassed. "And we bought you a penis."
The other fellows laughed and laughed. To them, this was hilarious. Into my hand, he thrust a small pewter replica of the Empire State building so as to complete the joke. This was, in itself a joke, as we had all seen "The Erotic Voyages of Dr. Sigmund Freud" merely a week before.
"Bless these damned fools, " I thought to myself."It's not my lack of genitalia that concerns me. If it were only my penis and not my legs and torso that were also missing, I would giggle hardily at your joke, my faithful chaps."
But perhaps I am getting ahead of myself. When I stepped on an Playtex Antitank mine in church, carelessly discarded by a techno savvy alter boy, my body below the nipple line was instantly disintegrated. The remainder did not fare much better. My cleft chin was just a memory, as was my entire lower jaw. My nose... well, you get the idea.
And now I was responsible for the spiritual reawakening of Finland. What a day!
You just don't walk into a congressional hearing dressed like a large phallus accompanied by a mariachi band. That's not etiquette. That's just common sense.
But that's exactly what happened in our nation's capital, one sweaty August afternoon in 1977.
A thin quivering rage filled his hands, his arms, his shoulder, and finally into his pulsating pectorals. He emitted a screech akin to a gibbon.
He soon paused.... The world was a urinal cake. But it was his urinal cake.
At an investor's meeting a half hour later, Kiam casually notified his board of directors that they would cease their annexation of Poland, and stunned their ranks by announcing he would invest all of his money into a ruby crusted boat, complete with ruby sails and ruby oars, a ruby brig, and a ruby radio. The chairman stood up, breathless. He passed out from asphyxiation.
Another took his place. "You can't make a ruby radio," he exclaimed.
Kiam pulled out a Zerplon laser rifle from Dimension X and shot the large man dead in his ample tracks. "You tell that to my insane cerebral cortex," he inveighed.
Within the hour, Victor Kiam, who once promised a nation that his products "Shaved as close as a blade or your money back," was now known as the Captain, and stood in his ruby uniform on the deck of his jewel-encrusted vessel. His crew waited for their orders, festooned in the finest jewels of the ages. This was truly a new era in Maritime buffoonery. Kiam smiled. Everything was going as scheduled.
But then Wilhelm always flouted convention. Man did he flout, night and day, seemingly unable to stop his 24-hour flout-a-thon. He could never do anything the right way. He always had to make a scene. He had to walk backwards. He had to wear his shoes on his hands. He would always argue about the check in a restaurant, even when it wasn't his. He would tip at the beginning of a meal, even at his own home. He had to speak Chinese although he was raised in Ottawa and didn't even know Chinese. He laughed with every amputation and cried with every limb reattachment. When he was employed as a brick layer, he refused to lay bricks, at least not in the accepted sense. When his clothing style went out of favor, he forced it back into fashion, spending all of his money on full page newspaper ads, urging consumers to go "shoes on hands".
And when old Wilhelm died, that only made him more alive, invigorating that rotting corpse of his. Soon, he was running for Mayor, taking up the flute, volunteering at a blind children's day camp and patronizing seedy strip clubs which catered to blind, flute playing children with political ambitions, as if only to say: "I am dead and kicking!" His conversational skills, formerly nondescript, increased geometrically. He was as smooth as silk fresh from a worm's butt. He could talk a woman out of a dress and a man into one. He could talk a pre-op transsexual into anything. That was Wilhelm.
But then, yet again, just to annoy the rest of us, his fellow Poker players, Pleistocene products all, Wilhelm the Living Dead Man, with a Straight Flush tucked carelessly in the velcro laces of his Adidas handshoes, spun the following yarn:
"Misery loves company, especially when company brings a present, eats lightly, then forgets his wallet when he leaves. And King Richie McYaboo was miserable. As King of Bigbonia, he had sweeping powers.We all beat the shit out of Wilhelm after that. I mean, come on, I'm Richie McYaboo. How could he humiliate me like that?He invited all the men, women, children, dogs, cats, mice, mosquitoes, clergymen, Avon saleswomen, fisherman, and wholesale tuna exporters of the kingdom, as well as his friend Pete to a massive banquet at his castle, in which there would be a bountiful feast. All the men, women, children, dogs, cats, mice, mosquitoes,clergymen, Avon saleswomen, fisherman, wholesale tuna exporters, and his friend Pete fervently RSVP'd, but when it came time for the party, King McYaboo, deliciously disguised as a sprightly squire, threw open the great palace doors, the grand courtyard stood empty. The King closed the palace gate angrily, cursed his rotten luck and called for his horse. King Richie rode into town, where he himself had been born, shouting, "Fuck you, fools, ungrateful penis pinching bitches!" He dropped a tablespoon of Napalm in every mailbox and rode home. He went to bed and fell fast asleep."
"You see, King Richie never realized, all the men, women, children, dogs, cats, mice, mosquitoes,clergymen, Avon saleswomen, fisherman, wholesale tuna exporters, and his friend Pete were waiting at the back door all along.
"The moral of the story: Plainly obvious."
To make matters worse, millions mistook their current disquietude with
genuine artistic pain, and unfortunately for the tattered remains of
humanity's dignity, turned to poetry, constructing the largest mass of
shit this side of a blue whale. No superlative sentence can encompass the
utter poopiness, and one hesitates to imagine the reaction of the
pencil's creator at the terror he'd wrought. Had an infinite number of
these nitwits worked for an infinite amount of time, a well-worn maxim
dictates that they would produce the works of Shakespeare, but dear God,
I've got my doubts. Despite the statistical certainty of such an outcome,
I've still got more faith in my simian forebearers if such a project ever
depends on my suggestions.
Witness:
THE END IS NIGH
By Liberty Cabbage
I learn the numbers backward
And count myself to sleep
The gears will turn and we still learn
The comfort of the sheep
As a younger man, I kept
Myself in lockstep with death
Wending my way to nothingness
Ascending trapezes with my breath
The end is nigh, mother'd said
And now I must return to bed
What a load of shit. It's so toxically bad it would give Edgar Allen Poe the runs. I mean, you teach someone even a slightly obscure word, or a single poetry technique, and within twenty seconds, it'll become the centerpiece of an overwrought and underfed Dr. Suess-a thon.
Suess, by this time, was dead. Enemy agents had penetrated his technologically superior army and snuck into his paper fortress, murdering him in his sleep. It is rumored that Raoul, who actually did the shooting, was one of those frat boys wearing a Cat in the Hat T-shirt.
This is a clear case in which blatancy had far more visceral impact than subtlety.
It should additionally be mentioned that the messiah had returned to earth, twice, in fact, but, rightly so, was basically ignored. It's just the same as when a popular several-time incumbent candidate is glanced over in favor of an unheard of backward and bucktoothed country bumpkin- Like when Margaret Thatcher lost the British Prime Ministership to John Major. Sometimes you just need new blood. We were pretty tired of the current administration, and humanity's solution, their first good idea, was to do away with the office all together.
Actually, the disregard of the savior was due more to bad planning on his
publicist's part. In his first incarnation, an angry Bronx crowd beat him to
death when he used a racial epithet while attempting to explain his cure
for world hunger at a nationally televised press conference. apparently,
he'd been out of the loop for a good hundred years (or bad, depending on
whether you actually had to live in them.)
In his second form, he accidentally came back as a veal and ended up in a
'mad veal disease' stock cleansing hoax. After that he stuck to Vegas.
"Okay," she said, rolling over to face him. The glistening dew on her ass caught the sun's rays momentarily, blinding Roger. For ten minutes afterward, every time he blinked he only saw the outline of an ass he had spent twenty-five dollars to see. He realized that he had gotten his money's worth exactly. This was certainly a twenty-five dollar ass. Not a bargain, not a rip off- A genuine, certified twenty-five dollar ass.
"You know, Finky" she started. Roger had told her his name was Finky. This had never failed to get a woman into bed. Everyone wants bragging rights for fucking Finky. And by this time, everyone had.
She smiled knowingly and said, "I'm a guy."
"Twenty-five bucks," Rodger thought. "What a rip."
"The night was full of stars. I stood on the desert plateau, alone in my thoughts, playing a glass harmonica, and crooning about the ancient indifference and obsequious majesty of the silent mesas. In my mind it all became clear- I was no longer Dick Tinycock- I was the Cap'n!"
And then the Cap'n just fell and died.
I've still got the brain in my fridge if you want to see it.
That man is me. Hi, I'm Mitch Wiglet.
We in this country stand at a crossroads. Gone are such Proper Nouns as New York, Hibachi, and Shemp. Words are disappearing every day.
Thus, we stand at a crossroads and we have many fewer words to describe this crossroads. When was the last time you heard the word "Tits"? I wouldn't have even remembered "Tits" even existed had I not found a copy of "Tits" Magazine in my attic.
Tits, ladies and gentleman. Tits are everywhere. But the hoi polloi can only call them "thingies". What happened to us as a culture?
A historian has informed me that there were once 763 different words used in this town to refer to thingies. That was 3 weeks ago. Where are the other 762?
My opponent is in favor of a crosstown expressway. I say to my opponent: Show me your tits!
Thank you and get out there and vote!
Oh, you know the close-minded dolts who think beastiality is wrong? Well, how many of them have actually had sex with an animal? Damn few, I'll wager.
They'll never know the sheer joy of saying "Down, boy!" and really meaning it. And I'm not just talking about dogs, my friends.
After all I've seen on this speckled orb, I would have to submit that man's best friend is really a liberal llama. If you've been around one when it was nude, there is no doubt, and ignore those PETA dolts that tell you otherwise, that llamas like a little bit of lovin'.
Wake up, fools. Life is very brief. When you're standing before Mikkoko at the Golden Gateway to the Afterworld, do you want to go through it dancing or limping?
Exactly.
But the real story begins one summer afternoon, when I discovered that, not only did God not exist, but I didn't either!
Once, sometimes twice a week, a writer from some medium or another stopped by his cell, with the begrudging approval of prison officials. He was not considered a threat to visitors, so they were allowed into his waiting room. They scribbled furiously as hey talked to him, cocking their heads toward him as if just the two of them were in on this little injustice, making sweeping generalizations that they hoped he would agree with. This would make them feel good, since he was a special man who was concurring, a martyr with a terminal case of peer judgment.
But Oscar did not concur.
There are a thousand quotes of his, or exchanges with reporters that get written up in the more open-minded, which is to say, magazines close-minded to what was being said in most other magazines. The reporters always were (or at least to this omniscient narrator convincingly behaved as though they were) fascinated with Oscar, despite his utter contempt for them and their worthless education. They loved him, he knew, but they weren?t really interested in actually getting him freed. He behaved accordingly.
Sandy Halifax, New York Times once wistfully sighed, "But I guess in a way we?re all just sitting in a room waiting for our death date."
Oscar Sanguine replied, "And if you believe that I?ve got a mountain of horseshit I?d like to sell you."
College professors thought Oscar?s "metaphor blender" as they called it, was sheer brilliance- A brilliance that shouldn?t be eradicated by cyanide gas or lethal injection. It was a brilliance that should meet it?s logical end in a drug overdose or at the bottom of a case of gin. An artistic self inflicted execution was what this artisan justly deserved. To be honest, Oscar just wasn?t very bright, or rather, didn?t have as much extraneous information at his disposal as those college professors. Still, the professors? proclaimed it and their students transcribed it into their loose leaf binders, even though everyone knew it was in the textbook. Such is life.
The professors loved his brashness. Irwin Sacksville, Z magazine:
"Have you thought about what your last words would be?"
"How the fuck should I know," Oscar Sanguine replied.
These were, in fact, Oscar?s last words, and he planned them since his final gavel. He secretly knew they could be decoded into the most meaningful words in human history, but he didn?t know how.
Oscar ended every interview with the same sentences, which Albanian schoolchildren still recite when bowing to Memphis each and every lunar eclipse:
"The universe is a big whore. And the laws of the universe? Gravity, Planck?s constant, and those two others? they?re it?s pimp. Sure, the laws slap the universe around, but the universe never thinks of leaving, because it?s the only way of life it knows. It?s just used to the humiliation. But we?re the ones who get fucked!"
Oscar Sanguine was, in fact, executed, but he had died long before. His spirit had been in an iron maiden for years. His faith had been guillotined, his hope had been burned at the stake, and his love had died during complications of routine outpatient plastic surgery. In that way, we are all like Oscar Sanguine. Except you, in the back, you fucking freak! Get outta here!
So Tipsy, a militant prohibitionist in the tradition of the ax-wielding Carry A. Nation, had to wear a false nose for his public functions. It was a grand roman, semetic nose that simultaneously said "I am of society shaping lineage and demand respect accordingly" as well as "Punch me in my fake nose!" To Tipsy?s credit, most people were more intimidated by the former message than provoked by the latter. And soon Tipsy O?Loon was the Pope.
Unlike his predecessors, who were informed of the will of the Almighty through lengthy periods of hypnotic contemplation, Pope O?Loon received his messages from God every Sunday night by fax machine. Of course, it was all the work of a few Sicilian teenage pranksters who?d accidentally stumbled upon the Vatican switchboard while ordering pizza. Still, their advice (except for the ?nude nun? edict) was surprisingly informed and sound. First, they suggested investing all of the Vatican?s holdings into the Godex corporation, and subsequent speculation doubled its worth. Pope O?Loon was heralded by all Catholics and not a few jealous Mennonites as a genius. He did quite well on Religious Leader week on Jeopaardy! (the Norse version of the beloved game show), besting the Dali Lama and the Greek Orthodox Patriarch, losing only on an exceedingly difficult Audio Daily Double. How the fuck could the Pope, much less the Dali fucking Lama know anything about Iron Butterfly? I mean, come on!
