Nah, said Grandma, what else is on?
There's a show called "A Tumult of Pubic Hair and Bobbing Flaccid Penises as Sweaty Naked Chubby Men Run from the Sauna Screaming: Snake! Snake!"
What's that about?
It's pretty much like the title says — there's a snake in a sauna and it scares a group of chubby men who run naked and screaming and they show a lot of pubic hair and bobbing penises that are really really flaccid.
And who's in it!
It also stars Brian Keith, Buddy Ebsen, Nipsey Russell, and Lesley Ann Warren.
Nah, said Grandma, I'm just gonna go up and hit the sack. Child, send Buzz up to read me my bedtime story.
By the time Buzz got upstairs to Grandma's bedroom she was already under the covers.
Buzz, she said, fetch me my bedtime book.
Buzz went to the bookcase and fetched Grandma's beautiful leather-bound edition of Nocturnal Narratives for Retirees.
What would you like to hear tonight, Grandma?
I'd like to hear "The Medicine-Chest Killers."
Buzz scanned the table of contents, flipped to the appropriate page, cleared his throat, and began: "The deformation bomb was the most insidious bomb ever developed by the Pentagon. It was a bomb that changed the shape of things. A bomb that warped the line. A bomb that corrugated the smooth. Its impact coursed across the land like the wind which row by row bends the field of ripe corn and it gnarls and buckles every shape in its path and it does not distinguish between the animate and the inanimate. Two men known as the medicine-chest killers were riding in a car. They saw the flash. They heard its dampened pop. They saw the wave of distortion sweep towards them like the wind which row by row bends the field of ripe corn. They felt it pass over their car. Laughing roguishly, they drove on — their car misshapen and pleated, their spines wildly zigzagged, their fingers veering off at the knuckles in a welter of oblique angles, their cigarettes dangling from their lips like smoldering corkscrews. They arrived at an isolated farmhouse. They snuck upstairs. As usual, they headed straight for the medicine chest and they popped all the pills: the Excedrin, the estrogen, Pamprin, Percodan, Ex-Lax, Zantac, they knocked back the last two tetracyclines with swigs of Halley's M.O. Downstairs they tied their victims' hands behind their backs with dental floss, they blindfolded them with surgical gauze…"
Just skip to the end, boy, I'm too sleepy to follow that plot, Grandma interrupted groggily.
Buzz flipped to the final page: "And the one thousand begin entering heaven: Ozzy Osbourne, Cynthia Ozick, Tommy John, etc. etc., each with the solitary clang of a coin falling into an empty bank."
Buzz glanced over the book towards Grandma. Sure enough, she was fast asleep. He quietly returned the volume to the bookshelf, turned off the light, and tiptoed out of the room.
He went downstairs, he put his mask back over his hideous face, and he went to see if Muriel had found any crиme de cacao.
12. the serenity of objects
I was doing curls with a barbell and I became so sweaty and muscular that I couldn't stop fondling myself and thinking to myself, What a little savage you're becoming, and I ran into the kitchen to get the olive oil because I wanted to coat myself with it and somewhere in the back of my mind I wanted to be blinded and then pull the pillars of the temple down… and you were sleeping… and I remember lying down next to you and the almost inaudible splash of a gnat diving into the pool of perspiration that had formed in my navel must have frightened you because you jumped up in the bed and began screaming something about how two of America's most beloved screen stars, Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, had been killed in a tragic accident. While filming Dino de Laurentiis's production of T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," directed by John Landis who's known for his spectacular special effects, the huge metal robotic women who come and go talking of Michelangelo collapsed — crushing the aging Oscar winners.
13. gone with the mind
gather the 10,000 americans in irreversible comas and book them into rooms at the sheraton center in midtown
when clouds in the night sky resemble the x-ray of chrisќs cheekbone shattered by the split-fingered fastball of the devil
the exact date of the atomic armageddon will be written in the cursive script of hairs on a bar of soap
and each smirking bellhop will be a baby elvis
and hot urine will cascade down the sides of sugar mountain
if you find one of my eyelashes on the street, please return it to me… or one of the hairs from my legs — please — take it to a police station, there's a reward particularly the right leg, the leg that used to kick field goals for pocahontas high in mahwah don't you remember? our silly adolescent pact we each pledged to eat whichever one of us died first we didn't even know the meaning of the word necrophagia then we were just real american kids with real american ids ever since then i've been swallowing garlic capsules and giving myself daily injections of basil and oregano so that i'll be properly seasoned for you each shred of dead skin that i peel from my neck and deposit furtively into an ashtray at a cocktail party is a metonymic precis of my severe instability
do you know me? my american express card says simply: perishable vertebrate — don't fuck after date stamped on bottom
i had fifteen fatal diseases induced by pesticides, exhaust fumes, cosmetics, charcoal-broiled and fatty foods and they were all cured instantly by a sugar-coated placebo called a milk dud, but then they recrudesced exponentially so that i had 225 mortal illnesses my doctor painted a grim picture of each disease he did my leukemia in acrylic on canvas, he did my mercury poisoning in watercolor on composition board, my asbestosis in day-glo enamel on wood, and my emphysema in synthetic polymer on plexiglas a listener called in to say that my broadcast signals were becoming weaker and weaker i said, i'm still on the air despite 225 diseases, but i decided to go up to the roof and examine the colinear beam antenna when the elevator got stuck, a woman in a taupe leather blazer and suede necktie kissed me, she let me put my hand in her shirt and feel her breasts, she let me put my hand down her trousers and hold her hard-on, she said: i'm the angel of death where've you been all my life? i asked, flushed with love at first sight i've been compiling a dossier on your psychopathology, she said, as the elevator launched through the roof and exploded in midair like the space shuttle challenger we checked into a montmartre hotel frequented by thieves, prostitutes, and drug addicts but the room didn't have a television set so we checked out in palermo, we installed ourselves at the grand albergo e delle palme, where wagner had written much of parsifal—our room had a 25-inch color TV with random access remote control i took a milk dud and felt increasingly spiritualized, dematerialized… i felt an abrupt separation from my body i traveled through a dark tunnel, over a field of glockenspiels and pompoms i sang the song of the extremely subtle energy-wind-mind i slept in a sandwich, enveloped in sheets of fatty smoked meats on the 6 o'clock news the police commissioner was issuing a statement concerning a woman who'd detonated her libido in a bowling alley, injuring two off-duty cops: "officers russo and mendoza of the 3rd precinct were engaged in off-duty recreational activities at the roosevelt bowling lanes when at approximately 1500 hours an explosion occurred immediately subsequent to the explosion, russo and mendoza observed the suspect — a Caucasian female approximately 18 to 20 years of age— levitating above the lanes, discharging a powerful libidinal bioluminescence officer russo and officer mendoza, as a result of exposure to heavy doses of the suspect's radioactive libido, have regressed to the anal-sadistic stage and are presently barricaded inside the bowling alley where they are whining and manipulating their bowel movements" i turned the television off, got dressed, and we had dinner with a group of moderate Iranians