And I could have
been a contender but for your mama’s ass. Science, math, philosophy and
religion can’t figure your mama. Your little sister came unto me, and I sent
her home. I told her to send back your mama. And like Prufrock, I wept and
fasted, fasted and prayed. Yet the dragon set the church on fire, burning the
ass off of your mama’s red dress. What a full-hipped mama, what an image of
virtue, as she places the seed of whoredom into her Betty Crocker cookies.
When I read this
piece to Doctor Alswanger, he only shrugged and answered, “It is not a sin to
go to the whorehouse; the sin is not wanting to come out.” And no one ever
told me, not one wise man, not even Alswanger, that the knowledge of today
becomes the prison of tomorrow, the cell-block of your brain, and that this so
called knowledge eventually distills down to a series of reflexive knee-jerk
reactions, one’s repertoire so to speak. And the only constant, the only thing
that I had been certain of in my life, was my dick, the anxious dragon between
my legs. And death today is a minimalist proposition, very black and white,
stripped of all glamour and color, the sparse stage-set of a starving
playwright. This emptiness breeds fear in men, and enables drug companies to
sell a lot of I want to live forever pills. But for men of antiquity,
classical men, men of imagination, death was in Technicolor. It was quite a
drama with breathtaking scenic vistas. Heavens and Hells were exploding
cornucopias of orgiastic colors, hypnotic purple-haze mandalas. Spirit guides
sported plumage, wore armor, rode noble steeds, like the world of Spenser’s The
Faerie Queene. So how I ended up with a spirit guide like Doctor Alswanger
(or Professor Alswanger) an ancient and wrinkled old gentleman who referred to
himself as a philo-theologian, Alswanger the Cabalist, a man who some in the
cafeteria referred to as a “prick,” and still others as “the professor of
shit,” and who Lucy Butarovska, a Polish enchantress and the love of my life,
adored as a deep, enlightened spiritual visionary, I will never know.
My death was rather
symbolic: an enraged, jealous son blew my brains out when he caught me fucking
his mom. The blast was like fireworks, very surprising, and immediately
transported me into a state of warm floating rapture, like an orgasm. And death
is anything but black and white. Almost immediately, female forms began rising
up out of the darkness, bodies adorned, aglow in neon like Time’s Square
advertisements. It was a panorama of your mama’s ass in all its rich and vast
variety. And I remembered Alswanger’s teachings, which said that these were
phantom images, illusions from my own mind, that lure men back into eternal
existence, like Odysseus lured by the Sirens to his near fatal destruction.
Yet even in death I
am self-conscious, self-conscious about the hole in my head and its leaking
contents. Collective thoughts and personal memories are passing through my
disembodied consciousness like food passing through the bowels of a fleshy body,
my final mental crap. I am the sum total, the aggregate of all things that I
have read. I can only give you pre-packaged, regurgitated, literary digestion. I
truly doubt the possibility of original thought (or sin) on my part. My sole
source of creativity is my penis. And because my thoughts and ideas were never
indigenous to me, they are fragmenting, swirling, departing my blasted skull. So
it is quite possible that what Shakespeare wrote I may attribute to Sartre, and
what Sartre wrote I may attribute to whomever.
Some call this death
chamber the Bardo, some Limbo, some might even call it Hell, whatever. All you
can do here is hang around, head pounding, hands wringing, waiting for a movie,
and the film department is right in your own head, but you never know when your
projectionist is ready to run the clip—the schedule is erratic and impromptu.
And that’s all you get, a clip, and the following parts are always out of
order. Then there’s the rising and falling action, tumult following quiet,
panic following tumult, then finally the swirling-twirling vertigo. I enjoy the
porno clips, exciting film shorts about your mama’s ass. My favorite is Your
Mama’s Anal Anxiety: Part Two. If only you knew what a whore she was. But
Alswanger frustrates everything, interrupts every movie with his irritating
sing-song Jewish voice, warning me that these are only bodies of illusion, bad
habits remaining from my life on Earth, that I should raise my sights, aspire to
beatific visions—on and on he goes. Hoping to inspire me, the ridiculous man
quotes Schopenhauer. What a fool. Here, your books cannot save you.
Sometimes I think
that Alswanger is the mythical Wandering Jew, sentenced to witness eternity.
Where he came from—some say Poland—and what he really is, no one is quite
sure. I met him years ago at Manny’s Cafeteria. I was still in my late
thirties. Even then he was old, thin and brittle, with perpetually tearing eyes.
He enjoyed throwing the idea of God into peoples faces, as would any good devil’s
advocate. He wanted to test and challenge you, see how you handled abstract
reasoning. He asserted that “God-thinking” was the original bedrock, the
referent, of all ensuing philosophical, scientific and imaginative thought, and
that every writer on these subjects, from the Renaissance on, especially the
Existentialists, were plagiarists who refused to accept and take into account
this fact. Therefore, no plausible truth could ever be arrived at. “I am not
selling you God,” he once said, “I am only stating that they were and are
full of shit!”
To understand
Alswanger, and me for that matter, you have to understand cafeteria life. The
closest comparison today would be coffee-house culture, the difference being
that with cafeteria life you had arrived and didn’t want to be anywhere else.
Whereas, a coffee-house is a place where one sits and contemplates an ultimate
transition, a future successful life. At that time, around 1980, there was still
a remnant literary life outside of universities. The cafeteria was that place.
For me, it was a refuge from my string of bars, a place I could live out my
secret book life, a place to read and hide, a place to overhear and sometimes
join interesting conversations. There I met Alswanger and his group, Lucy
Butarovska was part if it, and I knew that I had arrived. I didn’t want to be
anywhere else. Day and night, for years, I was in that cafeteria. We were
growing old together. Then the kid blew my brains out, right when I had it in
his mom’s ass. In my opinion, he was too old for such jealousy, about
twenty-two. Dead and disoriented, I went directly to the cafeteria, and no one
could see me. I was just in time to hear Alswanger recite an appropriate eulogy
for me before I slipped into the death chamber. He regarded my case as an
unfortunate truth, one that he was unwilling to accept, and his eulogy was the
symbolic nail in my coffin.
I am speaking of his
anti-rationalist philosophy. This philosophy is the big problem, the big
trouble. It is a sad truth that will not take no for an answer. We are speaking
of an extreme hedonism which sees in eroticism The Thing in Itself. So
that in his way of thinking, reason was seen as the lowest form of being. All
things from a grain of sand to the Godhead itself are copulation and union. So
now you must see that his suffering was nothing more than a negative expression
of eroticism. And that Frank, through error, was forever searching for sexual
salvation through his perversions.
“The love song of
J. Frank Prufrock”
My name is Pancho, I
work on a rancho
I make thirty pesos
a day,
I go to Lucy to get
some pussy
She takes all my
pesos away.
I do not know
whether it is day or night. My head-projectionist has chosen a rather obscure
film clip from the past, when I was just a child. I was raised with my aunt and
uncle and their nine kids, like the army. Our neighbor, Lucy Lopez, was an
attractive, full-figured Mexican woman, maybe in her early thirties. Her
boyfriend’s name was Hector, Hector Lopez, no relation. I see him now outside
her window, like in the past, crying, drunk, crooning a very melodic and very
dramatic love song. He stretches her name out, Lucy, into a lyrical
expression, into an incantation, intoning over and over again, until the name
and attending words become mesmeric, enrapturing: Luuuuuuuuu-cy, give me some
Puuuuuuuuus-sy Lucy, over and over again, through tears, Lucy Lucy, give
me some pussy Lucy. It was and is the most genuine display of erotic emotion
that I have ever witnessed. The Gods should have taken pity on Hector, as they
so often do, by transforming his sorrow into a constellation, the constellation
of Hector Lopez.
The idea comes to me
from Lucy Butarovska. She said so many interesting things. That love was a limbo
of sorts, a compromise between heaven and hell, an autism. That the Coleridge
poem “Kubla Khan” was a metaphor for violent creation, the
fertilization-life with the blood-death of others. But her most inspiring idea
was her constellation idea. She made a poster of Marcello Mastroianni, an old
Italian film star, with an essay-poem attached. It was titled:
“In Perpetuity, The Eternal moment of
Marcello”
Marcello’s car rides the vista del Roma, the party ride, the club scene,
Always on the way but never arriving, because the event of arriving
Would consummate and thus end the scene. It happens. To continue
Marcello must step back, stand outside of himself, like a motion picture
Camera, and imagine himself driving and riding, almost ready to
Arrive, which in actuality perpetuates, for all time, his riding the vista del
Roma. Like Hamlet, Marcello is now a literary model, rather a literary
Constellation. Love exists in this context and cannot in any other. As
Marcello must never arrive, love must never consummate.
By profession, Lucy
was a cleaning lady, a scrub-woman, a literary office cleaner. For a woman in
her forties, she was a knockout. Full hips, small waist, full thighs, and a full
solid ass, plump and buoyant. She was very dark with short black hair. She had
the high oriental cheekbones of a Tartar woman and the black eyes of a Sephardic
Jew. She had a thick Polish accent. Imagine, a cleaning lady with literary
aspirations. Yet this is what she was. The very idea that she was a scrub-woman
excited me beyond belief. I’d pay her to clean my apartment. It was our
private little lust game. She’d show up with rollers in her hair, wearing a
ragged floral scrub-woman’s dress. I bought her expensive, sparkling spiked
heels, pedestals of delight. I’d watch her clean, bend, and stretch reaching,
showing pieces of ass and thigh. Eventually I’d say that I suspected that she
wasn’t a cleaning lady at all, because only a whore wore shoes like she wore;
and because of the rips that she had in her dress, the peeks of exposed flesh,
she had to be a cheap whore at that. They say that Napoleon didn’t want
Josephine to wash, and the same was true for me. The more she would stink, then
the more she was even a cheaper whore. I can see Lucy now in her apartment with
her son. And now I am Hector Lopez, crying, as he cried, tears streaming down my
cheeks, and intoning, as he intoned, my love song to Lucy Butarovska. I do not
want to die. I do not want to go away. I want to stay locked up with Lucy in
some love constellation, forever and for all time. I understand why her son was
so crazy for her, and can even forgive him for blowing my brains out. I can see
him now, sharing her bed, submerged, as a song-writer put it, in her warm black
hair. The sight of them together, in fact, turns me on.
Alswanger is pissed!
He’s read my thoughts. He’s on a rant, shouting that there will be no
eternal moments, no such constellations, that everything, all illusion will one
day be erased from the Book of Life, that time eats everything. He’s
preposterous, a magician of sorts, opening a portal and revealing a scene. It’s
the dust bowl, Kansas, during the depression. There’s a bunch of hicks
standing around, guys come up off the farm to see the carnie show, the circus
acts and the hoochy-coochy girls, just like in old Rome. These hicks are
fascinated, mesmerized, hypnotized, drooling their asses off, backslapping,
blushing, chanting golly golly golly, golly golly golly. The can’t get enough
golly. They keep wanting the circus man to do it again— to play it again, Sam!
I’m getting a show like Scrooge got, but it’s not Christmas.
“And how then, my
friend,” he says turning to me, “are you any different? I will tell you now,
unequivocally and un-categorically, that from the beginning of time until your
last syllable of recorded time, that man, call him cave-man, classical-man,
Renaissance-man, mass-man, computer-man, artist-man,
and finally you, ass-man, was, is, and always will be, a HICK! nothing
more, nothing less. HICK! MESHUGAH! Who is not captured by, and a prisoner
before, his own phenomenon? Does not the artist golly before his work? Does not
the stock market man golly before his profit sheets? Does not computer man golly
before his computer screen? How about the soldier at his war? One is transfixed,
like you, and would golly for all of eternity. This you call a life? Your
eternal moment is the idea of a HICK! And who then is this mama you are seeking
anyway, and how big must these buttocks be? MESHUGAH!”
I have always sought
comfort in your mama’s ass. True, I was an orphan of sorts. I never saw my
mother’s face, not even a photo. She up and went. Marriage was not for her.
The issue of a father unresolved. I was passed around the family. My grandmother
took me in and then an aunt. Both were kind, caring loving people. I was sent to
school, educated. In fact, I never had a shortage of sympathetic women. I was
the poor abandoned child. Women would squeeze me into their breasts. Yet you
know what any Psych 101 student would say. But this answer is too easy. Perhaps,
ultimately, this student’s judgment might be correct. But there’s another
part to the story.
For as long as I can
remember, a woman had to be married or have children in order for me to have an
interest in her. Somewhere in time I had gotten it into my head that giving
birth was a woman’s initiation into the mysteries, that a woman with children,
a married woman, could take you into a world that an uninitiated female couldn’t
dream of. Thus I became a predator for your mama. I went so far as to take a job
as a staff writer for a small newspaper, The Home Journal, circulation 20,000,
just so I could cover neighborhood PTA meetings and The Woman’s Rotary. I was
twenty-two and hot, at the peak of my form. I did my job well, showed concern,
did up-close personal interviews. Went out to the house to get the story, an
in-depth look at your mama’s social concerns. God did I score. I was the fox
in the chicken coop.
And here’s
something I never understood. It was so very important to me that your mama
cross a line, that she consciously violate some sacred trust, some secret
understanding that she shared with you, be it as a son, husband or daughter. It
was essential that she be duplicitous. I was at a wedding. Your mama was crying,
giving away her only son, cleaning her lipstick off of your cheek. The scene
made me almost explode with lust. For I knew that in a few hours your mama would
be running in front of me in sparkling spiked heels, pedestals of delight,
naked, ass jiggling in the wind, screaming, “Monster, you monster!” And if
you are thinking that I disrespected her, you are wrong. Even as I aged and she
aged, I was true and was never distracted by younger woman. I needed her, loved
her, but in the context of the comfort of her evil. And one thing that you must
know: Your Mama swallowed; she did not spit.
Alswanger’s here.
I can tell by his expression that it’s time to buy a ticket, make choices,
time to move. We walk together, solemnly, towards the summit to witness an event
he calls The Great Work. How strange that in life this man inspired me but here
he’s a pain in the ass.
“You witness
today, my friend, the erection of man’s salvation,” he says beaming.
We are elevated, a
vast panorama is spread out before us in black and white. Below there is a
tremendous rift, a very deep division in the Earth. At its center there is a
large cleft, cunt-like in shape. Beyond it, there is another elevated summit
like ours. Butarovska is there, all the women gathered round her. She sits in
their midst, with her sparkling spiked heels, crowned in laurel, their queen.
They show no emotion, have cold, hard expressions. On our side, directly
opposite the women, are all the noted philosophers, mathematicians and
scientists of history. They are to construct a bridge of reason to cross this
cunt-like cleft to Lucy and her horde. And in so doing, for once and always,
reconcile the penis with mathematics. I think this means that they want to teach
my dick to use reason. This then is The Great Work, and has all the makings, I
suspect, of a great dime show. This is nothing like the Devil taking Christ to
the summit.
Indeed, the field of
brainpower is impressive. I swear to you, they are all here: Newton, Kepler,
Euclid; Hegel, Descartes, Kant; Einstein, Oppenheimer, Fermi and more. Corporate
interests are also in attendance. The major drug companies are consultants to
the project because all sexual fear, guilt and anxiety are to be gulfed by this
bridge. They will add medication to the equation that Einstein works on, smooth
over any rough edges. How fast they work, cranes, booms, gigantic machines, man’s
total historic mental and industrial capacity being put to the test. Einstein
and Euclid merrily clicking away on calculators. Oppenheimer and Newton, the
blueprint men. What a strange structure. It resembles a giant, distorted cock.
The whole Goddamned thing is creaking and trembling. It moans. A group of Arabic
engineers are getting nervous. “Too much stress, too much stress!” they
warn. Guess what, Freud has shown up. He’s pissed. “Why was I not consulted?”
He’s going to kick the shit out of Oedipus. Kant is on a rant, “Fucking
loafers, harder work harder!” he shouts. Alswanger, too, is getting edgy,
sticks his two cents in, “There is much here, at stake, do not falter.” The
drug company guys are offering pills, “Calm calm remain calm.” Fucking
assholes. The metal support crossbeams, under what would be the testicle section
of this bridge, are too heavy, are coming loose. The lost weight, the
counterbalance, is driving the bridge higher up into the air, like a raging
hard-on, instead of across the cunt-like cleft. The whole structure is
vibrating, violently. Butarovska and her crowd are having a hoot, laughing,
shouting, mocking. “Hey Einstein!” she shouts, “do some great work on
this!” She’s exposes her cunt, lewdly squeezing and fondling it. “Oy oy oy!”
Alswanger’s laments. Lucy unleashes her forces, a surprise attack. They flash
their asses, showing off their cracks, farting, snarling, grinding and humping.
The scientists, seeing this, lose it; engineers go haywire; Freud’s all fucked
up. The work force is masturbating, whacking off, shouting in anger, “Whores
fucking whores!” Then suddenly, from the cleft, the dragon rises up, shooting
fire flame passion! You can see that he’s piping hot. The women blow kisses,
“Hey, hot stuff—over here!” And with one giant roar, one tremendous breath
of flame, the dragon brings down The Great Work, and the feminine horde cheers.
Human reason has collapsed under the weight of its own balls. Screw it. I cross
the moist, wet cleft below to check out those ass-cracks. I will climb up unto
the other summit to the heights of unreason. “Lucy Lucy,” I call. Alswanger’s
trying to stop me. I tell him to fuck off but he won’t. He’s still on his
salvation kick, urging me to higher vistas and visions of myself. Lucy’s
getting away, her massive ass jiggling, in her sparkling high heels, her
pedestals of delight. Alswanger’s got me by the cuff. He’s fucking things
up. I turn and crack his skull with a stone. It will be his last “Oy oy oy!”
I’ve got this incredible urge to serve Lucy, literally serve her as if she
were deity.
Disembodied
consciousness is no fun. It is too volatile, erratic, like unstable chemical
substances, like floating in the ether. It’s an acid trip, at first good and
then bad. And then there’s the fragmentation. Each part of yourself that
breaks off is accompanied by tears, loneliness, a traumatic sense of loss. I
believe now that all mental qualities are extraneous, peripheral to The Thing in
Itself, and The Thing in Itself is most certainly the cock. And death then is
nothing more than a distillation, a shedding, part by part, of mental qualities,
until you arrive at your prime substance, sex, the fire breathing dragon.
The Yiddish writer,
Isaac Bashevis Singer, Alswanger’s favorite, once said that “The Messiah
will not come until all Earthly passions have been consummated.” So how long
do you think this will take. Surely some mathematician worth his salt should be
able to come up with an estimated arrival time. Go figure, Mister Math, how much
cunt, cock and ass will satisfy the reasonable human being. The variables would
be those with sexual eating disorders, large and voracious dragons, but still a
date can be figured. The same wise man who postulated the Messiah Theory also
said that we are always seeking shortcuts, that somewhere in time the reason and
purpose of existence will be revealed. Thus the man and woman who chant Om Om
and Om are seeking a shortcut, an easy way out. They are terrified by
what’s between their legs. Like Saint Marcos of Leon, they want to avoid the
disgrace of the dragon.
Alswanger’s right,
this eternal moment concept, is just a subterfuge, a hideout, a progress halting
autism. Hamlet and Marcello can go and fuck themselves. They can stay frozen in
time and imagination for as long as they want. I’ve had enough. I’m going
for the brass ring. I’m going to get out of this mess. I’m no longer going
to put off the inevitable. I’m going to finally burn your mama’s ass out of
my system, the hard way, the only way. Maybe I can knock a couple of million
years off of my eternity sentence.
In this final
denouement, here in this death chamber, this beautiful but sparse Bardo plane, I’m
waiting to cross the Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, there to be embraced by
Morpheus, the god of dreams. I can see my future life. I am experiencing a
barbaric rapture of sorts. I am to undergo an archetypal journey to the heart of
creation—to a realm that Goethe called the Realm of the Mothers, a journey
both terrifying and mystical. There to melt into a sea of warm milky numbness,
to be reabsorbed into a womb. It will be a chthonian epiphany. There is a blonde
bombshell standing on the opposite bank. She is to be my mother. Her name is
Lucy. And when she was young, the men called her Juicy Lucy. I’ll tell you
this: when I reach the age of thirteen, my father is a dead man, and my public
name will be Oedipus.
Om Om Om and Om,
creeps in this petty pace ...
Om Om Om and Om,
and I want to live forever.
