the next thing i know i'm in the emergency room at the hospital and the doctor looks at me and says, "mah man, you dead" he says, "i gotta help get your soul out of your body but it's gonna cost you a little extra" "feel around in my pocket," says my eerie disembodied voice, "you can take my visa card" "i'm gonna have to squeeze the soul out of your body by rolling you up like a tube of toothpaste…"
now, i am the sound of a playing card
ticking the spokes of a bicycle wheel
that is not a sky, it is a grid it is a grid of thin black lines superimposed over a bleached ceiling the stars and planets and moons and satellites are bleached out the constellations which once seemed indelible have been expunged by sweaty grim-faced charwomen who came to the beach at night with scouring pads and long poles the logos, graffiti, toponyms, and exhortations to "love and be loved" were soon replaced by the glaucous swaths of industrial stripping machines the technicians did not polish the sky with their lamb's wool pads because the artists and designers had decided that the sky would be more beautiful and more numinous with a matte finish as opposed to a high sheen and when the black grid was installed even the most mawkish elegiac poets could not mourn the demise of the old sky because the black grid which stretched endlessly in all directions was so unspeakably lovely, because language was made superfluous by the black grid's perfect representation of the godliness of the human imagination today, beneath the black grid, teenagers disport themselves on the beach they move with one will from their blankets to the surf and then, as if motivated by a single atavistic instinct, they move back to their blankets en masse they eat hot dogs and then suddenly en masse they drink pepsi and when nightfall comes and the lymphatic teenagers (the gawky, squat, sinewy, and nubile) fall asleep en masse and their tucked recumbent bodies litter the beach, it is perfectly quiet and perfectly dark except, suddenly, for the white headlights of a sports car careening down the corniche
when i first met trudy she was wearing a t-shirt that said SMITH COLLEGE SQUASH TEAM i asked her if she went to smith yeah, she said are you on the squash team? yeah, but i hang out with a bunch of animals, she said, pointing to a group of clean-cut all-american kids in turtleneck sweaters and white loafers sitting on a three-foot-high chocolate-covered vanilla ice cream bar in the shape of a valentine's day heart
the hippopotamus feeds on soft vegetation,
his excrement feeds the fish,
his pajamas dance convulsively from the clothesline
the sperm whale feeds on cuttlefish
and secretes ambergris to protect his intestines from the sharp bones,
his silk negligee is whipped by the wind
the swordsmith hammers a sandwich of iron and steel
and gives it a bath of fire and water,
his wife is 19 inches diagonally
turkish women abhor body hair
hello, mark this is elizabeth hurlick i'm one of trudy's friends from school trudy asked me to call and tell you that when she gets home from work she's going to want to make love tout de suite and then eat 'cause she's got an early squash practice so she wants you to season the chicken with some basil and oregano and garlic and onion powder and paprika and put it in the oven at about 350° and then she wants you to run a hot bath and add some of the bayberry rum and spice bath beads which she says are in a silver crabtree and evelyn tin on the blue shelf next to the hair dryer and q-tips and she wants you to soak in the tub for a while she says there's already a washcloth in there or you can use her loofah and she said that while you're in the tub you should masturbate almost to the point of orgasm and stop and that way you'll have a more copious ejaculation later when you have sex with trudy because trudy says you have to propitiate the squash god and she says that the squash god is in the mood for a really super-copious ejaculation and she said to tell you that when you get out of the tub you can daub some of your chanel pour homme cologne on your chest and in the hair on your belly and near your navel but she doesn't want you to use any deodorant under your arms because when you're having sex she wants your armpits to smell kind of macho sort of raunchy kind of ruggedly homo sapien kind of rural and she wants you to wait for her wearing either the red or the white-and-gold kimono danny and kristen brought you from japan, whichever one you prefer and you should wait by the window in the study, sort of voluptuously languidly posed like oscar wilde in the photograph by sarony, she said you'll know which one she means — it's in the montgomery hyde biography — and when she comes in through the door she wants you to say, i'm extremely utterly enervated from having spent all afternoon watching sparrows caper about the fire escape and then you should nonchalantly let your kimono fall open so your meat sort of pokes out and then she wants you to lift her skirt up and take her underpants off and she wants you to rub your knuckles up and down her perineum if you're writing this down that's spelled p-e-r-i-n-e-u-m it's the area between her anus and her genitals and she said to tell you that while you're fucking you should try to keep an eye on the clock so the chicken doesn't burn i hope you don't mind me leaving this sort of intimate personal message on your answering machine but i'm a really really good friend of trudy's and trudy's told me all about you and i hope we can all get together sometime maybe for burritos and a video on the vcr or something trudy says you're creepy in a sort of attractive way and that sounds fun
11. yoo hoo! buzz called out. y'all got any crиme de cacao?
Yoo-hoo! Buzz called out. Y'all got any crиme de cacao? Muriel, skinny, sweating, fanning herself with a copy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, observed Buzz through the screen door. Come inside, Buzz, she said, it's too hot to holler. She was wearing a pair of faded madras shorts and one of her father's white button-down shirts — its tails knotted just above her navel, her bare midriff a taut circumference of translucent flesh glazed with perspiration. If you came to murder me, you're too late — I'm already dead from heat prostration.
Buzz loped in, doffed his baseball cap, stanched his wet brow with a sleeve, replaced the cap on his head, and grinned at Muriel.
But Grandma told Buzz to leave the room. When Grandma told Buzz to leave the room he fell to the floor and kissed her feet, begging her to let him stay. Buzz, you'd slobber over an old woman's varicose veins just so she'd let you stay in the room, wouldn't you? Grandma asked contemptuously.
Yes, Buzz whimpered.
Grandma rolled up a magazine and hit Buzz on the side of the head… Buzz's mask was knocked loose. There was no skin beneath that mask. There were two white eyeballs protruding on stems from a mass of oozing blood-red musculature.
Grandma smoothed her hair back with spit and the palm of her hand. Honey, she said to me, go to my vanity table and fetch me my jar of cold cream and catfish slime… I'm old, children, my wooden leg's sequoia and you can count its rings. Child, she said to Muriel, fetch the TV Guide and read me what's on.
Muriel got the TV Guide, flipped to Tuesday 8 P.M., and read aloud: "The Making of Jeanne d'Arc II" chronicles the abortive attempt by a pair of Israeli sleaze merchants to produce a sequel to the 1431 original which catapulted the amenorrheic daughter of a Domrйmy farmer into international superstardom.
Nah, said Grandma, I think I've seen that one.
Muriel read on: "Daddy Promised Us Salami and Eggs, the Cunning Pragmatist" — a guy who's out one day innocently having a chicken chimichanga all by himself at a restaurant politely excuses himself from the table and goes to the men's room and someone sidles up to him at the urinal and injects him in the right buttock with a powerful designer drug that leaves him cataleptic but fully sentient and sells him for $100,000 to the Museum of Natural History where he's dressed as a Netsilik Eskimo and imprisoned in a glass-encased exhibit with a paraffin Netsilik woman and six paraffin huskies who are harnessed to a low-rider sled with hydraulic runners and a scrimshaw steering wheel and to ensure that he does not waste away, he's given intravenous nutrients every night by a horrible man with rotten teeth who reeks of cheap schnapps, and his son and his daughter-in-law do absolutely nothing to notify either the police or the media, which confirms his original suspicion that they are accessories to his abduction and partook of a portion of the $100,000, and the greedy amoral bastards have the temerity to bring his sweet grandson Douglas to the museum to gawk and gesticulate at him — starring Brian Keith, Buddy Ebsen, Nipsey Russell, and Lesley Ann Warren.