— Yes, quite right. Another Scotch? You really tossed that one down.
— Yes, I think I'll have another one… Join me?
— Yes, I could use another myself. (He pours two large Scotches over ice, hands one to Sondra, and takes a long sip from his.) Yes, quite right.
— One could, I suppose, go as far as to say that you're swindling your own mother.
— But apparently it doesn't offend your sense of propriety enough for you to stop wanting to see me.
— I fancy you, Bruce.
— Sondra, would you like to watch a movie called Nabonga with Buster Crabbe?
— Actually I could use a bit more Scotch.
— Let me freshen these up. (He refills both glasses.) By the way, how do you like this Scotch?… I think it's special.
— Bruce, I don't know how to say this without sounding a bit precious… but when I drink this sort of very special Scotch, I feel like I've been placed in the bipolar field of the sacred and the profane, the licit and the illicit, the religious and the blasphemous— I feel as if six tungsten carbide blocks have converged on my brain from six directions, compacting it into a dense and perfect cube— Bruce, why don't we take these out onto the patio, it's a terribly lovely evening.
And as she steps out onto the patio, her Valkyrian bosom undulating with each step like a viscous liquid, a pterodactyl swoops down from the sky, snatches her in its beak, flies her to its nest, and drops her into the shrieking rictus of its offspring.
10. psychotechnologies of the somber workaholics
i presume that you're there the weight of your invisible body straining the leather seat of my director's chair that strange fart wafting past me like the mildew of old books inhaled cigarette smoke assuming the shape of a trachea and two lungs you are a vivid impasto of vanishing cream you are the negative aggregate of a lifetime's ablations this is you after your gastrectomy and your laryngectomy and pancreatectomy and craniectomy but chйrie, you insult me by offering to buy me a drink in my own home — drinks here are gratis and i do the offering what's more, you have the audacity to try and pick me up while my wife is asleep in our connubial bed not fifteen yards from here! such bold incorporeal lust! most american men want to fuck something hairy — either a vagina or an asshole, but all you offer is a circle — a bald circumference well, maybe i will, just to keep the night alive go ahead, muse, bend over and tell me i'm the greatest thing after being chased across the pampa all day by a bola-swinging centaur with wine cooler on his breath and sodomy in his eyes…
the doorbell rings…
— hello, we're selling ourselves to raise money for the gestapo we're like peppers — we come in two colors, red and green if you buy one of us, me for example, you can bring me as your date to the gestapo club and then when you take me home you can split me open and lay me out across a hot cheese steak and eat me
— what if i want to buy both of you, i asked
— tant mieux, said the cop-cum-pepper, gently drawing the tip of his nightstick across his partner's crisscrossed bandoliers of bullets and tranquilizer darts
— well, i still don't understand… what are you? are you like transsexuals or what? i don't get it
— no, man, essentially we're cops, but we were bred to be like peppers it's like we're hybrids mengele developed in his garden in paraguay so we're cops, we're gestapo — but essentially you can eat us and if you open us up, we're essentially like peppers — fleshy-walled, many-seeded, etc. etc. etc.
thick white smoke billows from the factory smokestack
and forms an undulating somatic shape
but, like a sung dynasty poet, i am too drunk to
assume gigantic proportions and embrace the industrial genie,
too drunk to lick the white soot from her big molecules with my
tongue
i'm playing with a hair in my ear — and i tug the hair and there's a very strange, slightly painful sensation deep in my head, followed by a flood of memories — the hair turns out to be connected to the mnemonic section of the brain (the hippocampus) — it's like pulling chatty cathy's string — instead of talk though, memories ensue:
shaving cream gurgles up from a plaster of paris volcano
in miss cosgrove's social studies class
oh man, i wanted to kiss the harsh authoritarian words of miss cosgrove
i wanted to find the source of her voice with my tongue
i wanted to strum the taut, cold, acrid strings of her vocal cords with my tongue
but like you, su tung-p'o, i was too drunk
jill is teaching tess how to speak in a flat tone of voice
you have to sound like this, jill says flatly
jill, i just can't speak with that flat affect! says tess
with fierce gesticulation, her voice cresting with emotion
male hormone oozes from every fucking pore in my body i sweat male hormone i drool male hormone my tears are pure male hormone when i exert myself i stink of testosterone my balls are like giant planets engulfed in chaotic storms of toxic gases i'm like some beast who marks off his territory with his reeking yellow urine my sperm is like a virulent milkshake of recombinant worms my penis smells like an uncorked decanter of fermented smegma geysers of purple molten shit explode from my asshole, destroying villages in its path i'm all man 100 % man
there's a bar on the highway which caters almost exclusively to authority figures and the only drink it serves is lite beer and the only food it serves is surf and turf and one night the place is filled with cops and state troopers and gym teachers and green berets and toll attendants and game wardens and crossing guards and umpires
each man loves his wife so very much sometimes he hugs her with such ardor that it leaves her gasping for breath he feels as if he wants to literally get inside her skin with her, to draw her flesh over them both as if it were a sheet or a quilt, to feel the palpitations and quivers of her internal organs warm and slick with their secretions against his nakedness when she eats, he puts his ear to her cheek as she chews to better savor the music of her mandibles he puts an ear to her stomach and enjoys the churning and gurgles of her digestion and an ear to her lower abdomen to note the sibilant rush of gas as it winds through her intestines, to the small of her back to hear each crack of her vertebrae, between her shoulder blades for the soft expansion and contraction of her lungs at night, while she sleeps, he puts his ear against her scalp and listens for the almost inaudible rustling of her hair as it grows
in the old days they'd just throw you in a big iron caldron and boil you now they put you in a teflon no-stick saucepan and they saute you for a while in walnut oil i knew one guy who was poached i know one guy who was fricaseed i know one guy who was diced benihana style and stir-fried i knew one guy — he was only in the steamer for three minutes and they said, take him out we'll eat him al dente and they give these people varsity letters my father took me to an endocrinologist and the endocrinologist said, he'll always be eine kleine mensch, don't send him to no state school 'cause see he's bite-size… he'll make a perfect hors пoeuvre that night my mother came up to my bedroom and she said, if you ever see one of them in a letter sweater or letter jacket you run as fast as you can unless you wanna end up with a frilly toothpick through your back or unless you wanna end up between two slices of wonder bread 'cause ain't no deus ex machina gonna swoop through the skylight and save your white ass i never suspected you though, baby you were so nice to me i took you back to your apartment you poured me a nice cold heineken i said, baby, i've been lonely for too long i got six years of pent-up rhapsodies in me then i saw that fuckin' varsity ankle bracelet i said, uh-uh, no way, and i tried to escape but you squirted me with bug spray and my legs went numb