One of the young women in the motivational group said that she’d seen one or two of the brightly colored biloxis in what she called “the better shops,” but her suddenly recovered memories put the kibosh on that assertion. In addition, the lost items of clothing obscured the logic, so to speak, of the biloxis’ arrangement. After one of the most beautifully delicate of the random crystals disintegrated, every puta bag in the area was seized by security, even though such bags had never been used for anything other than extramarital sexual powwows, or, as the bitch of an editor put it, “adventures.” “Security must consider puta bags vectors of blazing darkness, rather than the simple, filthy things they really are,” a lissome assistant remarked, her beautifully shod feet nonchalantly “parked” on the desk.
A few of the younger women, the “troops,” as they were jocularly called, suggested that a harmonics inspissator might reveal the true nature of the symmetrical devices, but they were, predictably, patronized, insulted, mocked, ogled, and ruthlessly complimented on their looks and attire by executive officers. A week later, beneath an economy-size Mammoth Nut Bar, the shipping-room mascot found yet another shocking photograph of the boss.
Amid the confusion and grumbling over the newly appointed Creative Person, another problem arose when Nan Hacktree, the author of tales based on her own warm yet mentally deranged family, stubbornly held that Wallace Wally’s novel, Over My Dead Body, had to be judged as something more, much more, than a book. “And I do not feature the word ‘deranged’ to describe my relatives,” Mrs. Hacktree liked to repeat. At this point, odds and ends as diverse as torn panties, obscure freak cartoons, and an aluminum soap dish were discovered in a collapsed family room. With this, the senior writers’ clique that championed redemptive dialogue became emboldened enough to denigrate such malign yet seductive imagery as garden walls, gnomons, Nazi moms in sheer nylons, and stardust. Other corrupt figures, e.g., battered work boots, crusted, sour pipes, and 1956 Chevrolets fared badly as well, especially during the waspish and misogynist lunches that were cynically thought of, by the clerical staff, as postmortems.
Within weeks, lipsticks, especially the shades Red Rider, Black Cloche, Glorious Bimbo, and Sunburn, became the preferred tools with which the more avid tyros surreptitiously polluted themselves during the demanding Creative Writing examinations. Mysteriously, the graffiti in the employees’ lounge read, in part, LES GRANDS JETS D’EAU SVELTES PARMI LES CHOSES. It may have been written by the staff comedian, whose most celebrated routine had to do with Philadelphia lawyers, silver bugles, and stupid waitresses — of course! The Collectors Association, already on the defensive because of a smutty joke told in mixed company by its Curator, pretended not to know anything about its holdings of pornographic bar mitzvah music and its recent purchase of the revolutionary artwork, “Money Talks.” It wasn’t long before the Meat Czar arrived at the Association offices with steaks, shoes, books, wind-up tin pigs, white ribs, cheese maps, nostalgia bastors, celebrity indices, etc., etc., more things, in fact, than you can shake a stick at.
As the weather worsened, the more serious sex workers — many of them fresh from the famous porches of the Deep South — spoke of their dreams of empty patios, cold twilights, distant voices, California sunshine, good-time Johnnies, and other crass selections too vile to enumerate. A crude wag was arrested and held overnight by the Sensitivity Committee for opining that what the ladies of the evening did “beats working.” Many psychologists attributed the young man’s cruel remark to his belief that heterosexuals are, when all is said and done, really homosexuals underneath.
At about the same time, the Board of Directors, with the assistance of the Bureau of Culture, ascertained that Wallace Wally’s sweeping saga of a man who lost his way on the prairies, Carnal Jitters, had discouraged twenty-two young writers from sending gifts to casual friends, although the latter were leading simple yet zesty lives! Many of these same writers had learned their manners from the old frauds who pretended an interest in inexpensive yet robust wines, translucent spheroids, pitiful tennis afternoons, The Journal of Virginia Woolf Journal Studies, aerobic mania, and movie stars with really good and, like, humanistic beliefs. The Stupefatto Poll, to everyone’s amazement, discovered that the “things” that had made these young people writers in the first place — blue uniforms, lovelorn fantasies, trees hard by the handball courts, girlish laughter from a small, wooded island, etc., etc., — were metonymic substitutes for the zeppelin, or, in Lacanian terms, the path of the zeppelin. “Who knew?” Rory Stupefatto mused.
And yet, the rigid instructors stubbornly refused to designate as Actual Things the Red Ball Express, the ill-fitting cap, the perfumed and ice-cold Persian lamb coat, the Jodie suit, and the good read. Apprised of this, one of the women, a Catholic Romantic, mentioned, blushingly, that a “baloney” seemed to be “in the feverish grip of dreamlike fingers,” an exercise in incoherence that had even Father O’Flaherty holding on to his Rosary for dear life. Others were unanimous in their opinion that secondhand cigarette smoke causes sexual harassment — including unwanted compliments! — and automobile exhaust. A certain Babs, who yearned to wear small black hats with dotted veils, sheer off-black stockings, black suede pumps, and flattering accessories, had to deny herself this pleasure since her husband was seeking tenure and that was that for couture. She wished that she might get up the nerve to roll the razor-edged mileage calculator back and forth over her husband’s multicolored overview notes which, as he had often told her, had to be judged, as more, much more, than just notes. Where had she heard such bullshit before? Or had she read it somewhere — under an umbrella, perhaps, amid coffee, cigars, and good ruby port? The sun is often hotter than it seems, or so Babs had learned in the awesome stillness of the mountains.
With the advent of the long winter nights, the black crayons and other gritty things in the Crakkerjax Factory began to look “mighty good” to the personnel of Wonderful Colleagues, Inc. Still, winter or not, Mrs. Hacktree swore that wrong-thinking applicants would be admitted to the snugly idyllic cottages “over [her] dead body” and, by implication, her dead mind as well. Given her ideas, certain of the more daring interlocutors thought it useful to save such models of the mundane life as Worcestershire-sauce constructs, salad-dressing displays, and lipstick multiliths, while others wanted to throw hot spinach at the iconic snowman, at the blinds, the victuals, at, really, every motherfucking thing in sight. They were, it was clear, wholly unimpressed by the fact that the “Beechwood Cabin” had once housed Sarah Orne Jewett’s mother-in-law, the author of “Fling My Snood to the Winds.”
Outside of the closed world of the motivational offices and research laboratories, private parks and the proscription of urination by the wrong sort of citizens were part of Palo Alto’s “Figures of White” program. City Council members, agog with the restoration of historic beer barns and other tasteful edifices, were anxious for the perfect jewel of a town to “Say No!” to poor taste. In the midst of its opening meeting on the subject of punishment for the transient, one member made it embarrassingly clear that he believed that the color of decay, disease, shit, piss, vomit, paralysis, and death is a color that one can’t help but see each and every day, right on the quiet, but rather sticky streets. The very idea was appropriated by the Council, and a local artiste was commissioned to paint, to actual scale, the mural “Pendejos de Oro,” which was already painted to actual scale. The original had, unfortunately, been vandalized by homoerotically inclined athletes, whom all the neighbors really related to.