My advice to the young people of today? I’m tempted to say: Surround yourself with flunkies and yes-men and have naked slaves, perfumed with musk, fan you with plastic fronds as you write. Because that’s what’s worked for me. But what does history teach us?
The 83rd President of the United States, Hallux Valgus, had no mouth or gastrointestinal tract. How did this Christian Scientist who refused intravenous nourishment survive? Only during the autopsy following President Valgus’s assassination were scientists given the opportunity to solve this riddle. After painstaking dissection and analysis, pathologists found that Valgus was nourished from within by symbiotic bacteria. Their research revealed that the “tissue” of his trophosome, a large body structure which comprised half of Valgus’s torso and which Valgus kept concealed beneath his ubiquitous spandex unitard, was composed of closely packed bacteria — over 100 billion per ounce of tissue. They found that his blood, deep red from a rich supply of hemoglobin, absorbed oxygen, carbon dioxide, and sulfur dioxide from the polluted atmosphere and transported it to the trophosome. Thus ensured a rich supply of chemical resources, the bacteria living inside Valgus produced carbohydrates and proteins, which Valgus then metabolized. Hallux Valgus, the 83rd President of the United States. The first occupant of the Oval Office to depend on symbiotic chemoautotrophic bacteria living within him. (His long and detailed Memoirs provide a unique picture of the personalities and politics of his times.)
Be petulant, narcissistic, and charismatic. That’s what President Valgus would have exhorted today’s young men and women, had not a hit-squad of gnat-sized robots filed stealthily into his ear and mined his brain with plastic explosive. And love. Love with extreme lucidity and barbaric ferocity. One of my foster mothers couldn’t wait to shove me onto the school bus each morning so that she could get inside, doff her frowzy terry cloth robe and greasy housedress, squeeze into her edible lingerie, and await the arrival of the electrician, plumber, UPS delivery man, cable TV installer, exterminator — whichever beefy workman was fortunate enough to ring the doorbell first. That’s not what I mean by “love.” When I use the word love, I’m thinking about the witty, urbane, wasp-waisted Arleen Portada.
They were the heady, idealistic days of the early Valgus administration. Congress had just officially designated Bernard Herrmann’s shrieking score for strings composed for the shower murder scene in Psycho as the national anthem. The Look that year was “postcoital”—tousled hair, runny mascara, smeared lipstick. Scientists working on the Human Genome Initiative announced identification of the specific gene that not only predisposes a person to take dancing lessons, but that actually determines his or her dance predilection: ballet, jazz, tap, or ballroom. It had been an exceptionally rainy spring, and indeed on the day we met, the sun was out for the first time in weeks …
I was climbing trees that afternoon and Arleen happened to be below stalking live subjects for a research project she was doing as part of her MSW program at Fordham University. She shot me with air-rifle darts full of tranquilizer. I lost muscle control gradually — one hand missing its grip, then the other — and fell into a net Arleen held outspread below. She carried me tenderly back to the lab for processing and measurements: total length, arm length, chest diameter, testicle length and width. “Look at the lunch-pack on this guy,” she said, appreciating my scrotum. I hadn’t really been planning to “get involved,” but how could I resist the subtle, sophisticated blandishments of this young and beautiful psychotherapist?
Winning your place in the hierarchy is a basic part of primate life and each day is a savage, pitiless battle for dominance — so don’t expect everyone to like you. Today I am the most intense, and in a certain sense, the most significant young prose writer in America. And I have the body of a grotesquely swollen steroid freak. Yet, I have many enemies. And these enemies will hurt me, unless I hurt them first, ergo the punji sticks and claymore mines that riddle the grounds surrounding my headquarters. Ergo my phalanx of bodyguards: seven formerly frail, arthritic nonagenarian widows with heart disease selected from a nearby nursing home. Arleen and I took them in, treated them as members of our own family, administered large doses of synthetic human growth hormone and testosterone to each woman, and replaced her atrophied musculature with powerful artificial muscles made out of polymer gels that contract when electricity is applied and expand when the current is turned off. Do you want to see carnage unparalleled in the annals of internecine strife? Try laying a finger on me, Arleen, my dog Carmella, or one of my fans.
I had a friend from my high school wrestling team named Jorge. After graduation and for the entirety of his adult life, Jorge worked on a huge ant farm in southern New Jersey. Every morning Jorge would get into his car and drive to the ant farm. But one morning Jorge got into his car and he didn’t drive to the ant farm — he selected suicide-exalting heavy metal music from among the cassettes in his glove compartment, and he turned the volume up full blast, and he headed north on the New Jersey Turnpike. After traveling for some 90 minutes, and having reached an area within a mile’s proximity of Newark Airport, he exited the highway and pulled into a desolate industrial dump. He got out of the car, opened the trunk, and removed a shoulder-held Stinger antiaircraft missile launcher. And he proceeded to blow a Federal Express jet en route from Chicago out of the sky as it made its final descent. Miraculously, the crew was able to eject from the plummeting aircraft and parachute to safety. But the plane’s entire cargo of overnight letters and parcels was destroyed. I visited Jorge on death row.
“How could you do it?” I asked.
“Every day of my life I went in to that goddamn ant farm. Every single day. And every single day it was the same goddamn routine — they’d feed me steak or chopped meat which I’d digest, and then they’d force me to regurgitate to feed the queen and her larvae. Day after day after day, year after year … I just couldn’t take it anymore. I just couldn’t.…”
He collapsed on the floor. I knelt down to help him, but he waved me away.
“There’s nothing you can do. I’ve taken a massive dose of Bromadiallone — a powerful anticoagulant. In a minute I’m going to die of internal hemorrhaging. But please … there’s one thing I want to tell the young people of today. If you …”
He began to lose consciousness. I shook him and wet his lips with a couple of drops of Gatorade.
“If you what, babe?”
“If you … if you squander your precious beautiful days on meaningless labor whose”—he coughed up blood—“whose ultimate purpose is to further enrich the ruling elite or solidify the hegemony of the state … you’re a sucker.”
His eyes rolled back in his head. I shook him furiously and threw the rest of my Gatorade in his face. But it was too late. He was gone.
Chapter Two
First Fisherman [stammering]: Could you … uh … please … [He hands the fish hook and worm to the Second Fisherman.] I can’t … I knew him … way back … high school … I just can’t … I can’t bring myself to hook him …
Second Fisherman: You knew this worm?
First Fisherman: He was my … well, I was his … I … I knew him … yes …
Second Fisherman: This particular worm?