Posted by nigel1 on July 16, 2002 at 12:30:04:
"Shit stew! Aye! We was so poor, we used to save UP our shit! And we eaten it too, in soups and stews, stew for stewel, an' they were still the best damn soups and stews I ever ate! God's truth on it!"
When he grew up, he left behind that life of poverty, the cockroaches and the shit stews, and moved on to glitter, money, and sex. The first thing he did upon receiving his native endowment (in the form of an annuity) from the National Trust, was to buy a good inflatable love doll and a bicycle pump. An endowment, or grant, of money, from the National Trust, made it possible to lay away his old Mom and Dad, kill the roaches, buy a toilet brush, and swab out the flush. Then he wallowed in several pounds of Xmas decorations. When he wanted a good time, he would pump up his love doll and have a VERY good time. One of the most moving things he'd heard, he heard from the man who came and killed the roaches-- that man was squirting poison into cracks and crannies in the walls, when he turned around and looked him in the eye and said, yuh know, uh, yuh might say it all goes by so damn fast, uh, well, something about life and a rose. The man shook his head, then, grinned, and squirted some more poison. Not another word from the bugman. He sort of understood, though, with his recent Endowment, what the principle was. Since life was short, you might as well enjoy it. You don't get another chance. Wasn't that true! When the bugman left, he stretched out on his back on the cold and crinkling Xmas decorations, listening to the throb of his pulse in his ears, thankful for his recent Endowment. The roach killing poisonous fumes made him dizzy. It felt good. He felt lanquorous and sexy. Ah! He stroked his cock for a while, because it felt so good when he stopped, but it was really time for the love doll!
When he woke up, it was because of the pain in his eyes. The fucking bugman squirted him! Shit! I'm blind! He wasn't blind though. By holding his head under the lavatory pump and letting cold, green, well water sluice over his eyes, he was able to restore his sight and relieve the pain. While doing that, he remembered what had happened-- the bugman had just suddenly turned and said, hey, yuh wanna see how I do this? Just for the sake of politeness he'd looked closely at the nozzle of the sprayer the bugman held, and by the time he saw the face behind the nozzle contort into an evil grin, it was too late, for he'd gotten a charge of parathion right in the face. My eyes! My eyes, he screamed. The bugman laughed like a loon and swung his spray tank in a roundhouse arc, smacking him soundly on his head. Then everything went black. Then came the strange dreams, in which he seemed to lay contentedly on his back, in a mound of tinsel. It was more than tinsel. It was all part of his endowment, part of which was paid in shiny, crinkly, things. And so it would be for the rest of his life, natural or unnatural, monthly checks and monthly boxes of shiny, crinkly, things, paving his pathway into the future. The truly wild and wonderful thing was that, for the first time, he could actually see that there was a future for him, that there was a pathway and there would now always be a pathway. Was it envy? He wondered if the bugman had squirted him because he was fortunate enough to have an annuity and the bugman did not. He'd not reckoned on human malice. Maybe they would all envy him now, and go out of their way to wreck his little pleasures. Were they all such swine? He was sick with rage, and with humiliation, because he had naively imagined that everyone he met would be equally delighted with his good fortune. He knew little about human nature!
Food! After the endowment, and after the age of shit stew was passed, still, his desires were simple. Just as an inflatable sex object satisfied his need for a sex object, a few bags of dry beans from a beanbag toss toy satisfied his craving for food. He crunched the beans slowly, chewing every bite twenty-nine times after ripping open a bag with his teeth. The older you got the more you needed to chew, he reasoned, so he chewed once for each year of his life. And he was mindful of the poisons that would numb his tongue, so that he would stop eating before he chewed his tongue to rags. Then came the hallucinations, the BEAN DREAMS, sleep. The very best beans for his purposes and his favorite dry beans, were red beans, though ordinary pintos were commonest in his beanbags. For some reason, all of the beans in all of the bean bags he'd ever opened and eaten seemed to have been treated with arsenic, plus other toxic chemcals whose combined effects made them hard to identify. Whoever made bean bag toys must have hated children with deadly passion. But that was allright with him. Children hated him. They threw rocks at his head when he walked to town. If somebody wanted to poison the little swine, that was A-OK by HIM. Eating rice, red beans, greens, yams, bugs, rats, cats, bark, roots, berries, was not so bad, supplemented by the occasional plate of "earth". The plate of "earth" had been his father's idea, a frugal man. Now look at him, popping down beans like salted peanuts, waiting for his tongue to go numb. He thought to himself: eatin' muh beans-- sittin' an' eattin' muh beans.
Occasionally, his bean hallucinations were really fiendish. He chewed on his dry food and before he knew it he felt something funny on his chin. It was blood, which he learned as soon as he wiped his chin with the back of his hand. His tongue! Somehow, his tongue had gone numb, but he hadn't noticed, and by God it was still numb, but look at all that bright red blood! Chewed the sucker up! Guck! Guck! Was it swallowed, down the hatch? Parts of it were gone! Gone for good, the little ones! Such thoughts paniced him, and he headed for the bathroom, where he could check himself in the mirror over the lavatory. His family was unique in the neighborhood for having an indoor toilet. They were among Arkansas's progressives, yes, indeed! Now, thank God, with the advent of his Endowment, he could replace the two holer with a flush toilet and maybe end the perpetual stink. Although he wasn't quite sure how that would work. Maybe the ceramic convolutions of the shiny procelain appliance would somehow trap the odors. There was not a person in the state of Arkansas who could advise him on such arcane matters, and he feared to speak to anybody out-of-state for fear of encountering a godless atheistic communist, or worse. But in the mirror he saw that there was not a thing wrong with his tongue. It was all unreal! The interior walls of the indoor outhouse weaving around him made it obvious all of a sudden, that he'd begun to experience those bean toxins. There had never been any blood. But he saw bean fragments adhering to his teeth and tongue and chin. Time to stop eating, then, and start leaving the ripped bags at table, having had the first vivid hallucination of the evening.
The first time he stabbed his inflatable love doll was the best. He was hallucinating freely and horny as a stoat. Take that, bitch, and the sharp knife jabbed into the pretty pink doll's stomach area. The whoosh of air escaping suggested flatulence, and it was like a fantasy he'd had for years, of taking a big fat girl out for a night on the town and feeding her plate after plate of beans, and plying her with beer, to pump her up, pump up her bowels with froth and gas, and then taking her back with him to his little place and without even removing her shortshorts and halter top, stabbing her in her guts, over and over, and hearing the gas fizz out, not just from the holes his knife would make, but from her butt as well. PHOOOO! FIZZZZZ! But he was too civilized ever to do such a thing. But when he stabbed his love doll, something happened he should have foreseen-- the Latex Lolly deflated! It became a kind of loose skin, and in the stew of his bean hallucinations, that boneless fabric in the rough outline of a girl drove him to a passionate frenzy! Ever since then he loved to consummate the act of love with something flat under him. And now that he had his wonderful endowment, he could afford fresh love dolls, which was good, because eventually the bicycle patch kits ruined the effect of the doll's smooth pink skin. After a few stabbings the old love dolls began to look like cheap whores with diseased skin, or leprosy, which was not very arousing.
His father had had trouble finding anyone who would hire him, after the war, because of his disability. One of his foxhole buddies in the humid Asian Theater accidentaly fired a grenade launcher into his head because he'd never learned how to use the weapon properly. The man had been an utter moron, who pointed loaded M-16's at friend and foe alike, going yatatatatata gotcha gotcha. Once he did this with a grenade loaded into his grenade launcher, and an exploding mortar round nearby blew him apart. Good riddance. But, the concussion also blasted the grenade off the end of his rifle and into the skull of his foxhole buddy, who happened to be his father. No proper names, please. At that time his father had been a much younger man than he became later, with a reputation for necrophilia. Yes there were whorehouses for such tastes, where girls sacrificed themselves for the sake of their families, to feed starving children and the like. One could buy such a girl and kill her, any old way you pleased, and fuck the body if you liked, or fuck her and kill her, or any variation you could imagine, for a month's GI paycheck, of which the girl in question, or her dependents, or her beneficiaries, got the twentieth part, the rest going to "the house". And his father had been known to hang out at such joints. Although it was also known that he exercised his fetish with other men of his persuasion, with village girls who were not in it for the money, but just sort of innocent bystanders. But in war, who among us is innocent? The whole concept of innocence was laughable, and that was the unofficial line in command circles. "A sojer who is innocent is larst"-- anonymous. He never dreamed in a thousand years such a thing could happen to him, or that he would someday father a son who would suffer because he, (his father) happened to have a live grenade embedded inoperably in his skull. Surviving such a wound was a geat miracle. Neurosurgeons looked at him through several layers of leaded glass and scratched their heads. At first it was thought that maybe the grenade had been a dud but no one was willing to take any chances. Then a series of X-Rays taken with an industrial machine disclosed that the grenade was indeed armed and could go off at any time! And so it had been, for the next thirty years.
Incredible things happen to people in war, that nobody can possibly understand. When his father understood, finally, that he had to live the rest of his life with a live grenade plugged into his frontal lobes, that he might explode the next time he picked his nose or sneezed, he realized that he too had had one of those ineffable wartime experiences, more potent than any mere social ritual, like a prom, or even a rite of passage, like one's first date rape, to change one's life forever and stamp it: THIS IS THE PROPERTY OF MISTER DEATH. When death came, it might be instantaneous, for him. But the prior warning would drag on and on, over years maybe. He felt unfairly singled out. Six months of camping out all alone and umolested in an abandoned ammunition bunker convinced no one, not himself, surely, that the danger had diminished one iota. And yet, he had failed to explode. One day he simply wandered off, still wearing his fatigues, hiding his horribly disfigured head under a large boonie hat. He became for a time something of a legend in those parts, where he was known as The Spook, The Ghost, The Walking Bomb. Orders existed to take him in, since he was AWOL at the least and a deserter at worst, but who would have the guts to do it? And if someone brought him in, who the fuck would want him? Who would put him in their stockade? Who would try him? Another example of dumbfuck numbnuts orders, and they were ignored. Sometimes he'd walk into a bar, zombie like in filthy fatigues, and a tomb-like hush would fall. Brave men grabbed their whores and left, foolish men grinned shit-eating grins and kept a respectful distance. The natives looked on inscrutably. Maybe they saw an ancient warrior god in that bedraggled yank. Invariably, at the bar, he'd pull the cap off his head, causing gasps, screams, murmers, and order a drink. His drinks were always on the house. He was in pain. Alcohol helped him, somewhat. A fifth of Everclear appeared before him. His vision blurred. He saw five fifths and began to scratch at his head, where it pained him, but two guys in special forces were on him instantly, holding his arms. One stuffed the bottle into one of his pockets, and then they hustled him out, through the streets, until they had him safely away. When they let him go, gently, they turned and ran for their lives. Let the poor bastard blow himself up somewhere else. But there was really no danger. He'd scratched himself often enough, scratched until he had a nice infection, and he had not blown up yet. He moaned with the injustice of it.
He was thinking about his father when the second wave of hallucinations hit him. He was just pushing himself away from his little kitchen table when the man came with his Mom and Dad. Sickness and dizziness made it hard for him to get to the door, and the doorknob kept slithering away, but he managed to get it open. In the doorway, framed by the hostile glare of the sun, stood the smiling taxidermist, and behind him on a hospital gurney, were his parents, neatly stuffed and mounted in their favorite coital postion. No one could ever accuse him of not being a good son to them, by God! This tribute had cost him a lot, to say the least. Put it anywhere, he said, I don't care. I'm sick. He fell flat on his back, and the ceiling whirled like a whirlpool. The taxidermist's cart had very squeaky wheels. They said: sicksicksick-sicksicksick. I'm having delusions of reference, he thought. Eddddd! The taxidermist did something funny with his tongue, making a noise, and his parents landed on the floor with a moderate thump. Motes of dust swirled up around them. EDDDDD, the taxidermist said again, louder this time. They sure going at it, huh! WOOOOOO! Nasty!
After the taxidermist left, whooping and hollering and going EDDDDD! EDDDDD! with his tongue all the way to his van, he thought to himself how natural it seemed, for his Mom and Dad to be screwing on the floor. Maybe he'd just leave them there, instead of building a good strong shelf up on the wall. But thinking made his head hurt. He closed his eyes, to blot out the vortex. Then he remembered his father's wartime injury, and he was going to roll over to look and see how the taxidermist handled it, but when he opened his eyes again he heard the swoosh of the door closing, and, observing it, he saw that it indeed was just then closing. It must have moved a millimeter, but he was so acute with bean toxins that the movement seemed enormous. The taxidermist whooped and hollered down the walk, going EDDDDDD! to beat the band. The man must have something wrong with his tongue. Wow! It all seemed to have happened before! His parents were home with him again, and he ought to feel good because of that. And because of their healing presence, the horror seemed much diminished. It was unclear, at that moment, where the wound would be located, though he had grown up staring at it, staring at the flesh filmed metal, and the massive scars. Yes, he'd spent most of his childhood staring at that wound, or so it seemed. Or was it something else entirely? It seemed, in memory, to be something like a cleft, with coarse hair sprouting around it. Or was he thinking of something else? No! That was his father's wound, right in the top of his head, with the stem of the grenade sticking out. The grenade had two little pods on the stem, full of propellant, and these had stopped the thing from going any deeper. God grant the family mercy, if that device had ever gone off! But it never had. The man who came to kill his father and mother, who had taken them off in his van to the taxidermist's, had had more guts than any of the army's best surgeons. His Dad had been old and feeble, unable to fight. The two of them wept. No goodbyes. Two silenced rounds, fired into their old, old hearts, and they were dead at last, the noble struggle done.
The problem with his drug consumption was that it tended to deprive moments of their due poignance. You couldn't be sure whether you stabbed your love doll to death or just imagined it. For all he knew anymore, he was the one with the war wound. After all, he was nearly thirty. Where had he been all those years? There had been ample time for war and civil disorder. But he did have a father, and logically that man had to be even older, and what was the point of all those tedious war stories (you'd think he had the time of his life over there) if he wasn't the wounded one? The story of that fucking wound went through so many versions and inversions over the years, it was hard to be sure what really did happen. Maybe there was a sort of battle hell never never land, like a really crappy British war movie with a lot of half-wit limeys drinking tea out of buckets. How about a group of white knights riding white horses through the fog? Through a minefield, yet. Sounds like the fucking Ku Klux Klan. At least, after all that suffering, never mind the precise nature, he had finally done something for him, and his mother, too. He was sure they liked to screw, and now they would screw for eternity in their favorite position, just as he'd seen it, so many many times during his boyhood, peeping in at them. His mother lay on her belly, and his father lay on top of her, sticking it into her asshole, where they both seemed to like it best. It made him weep to see them so happy, but the thought that he might be one of those "asshole babies" threw him into a murderous rage, curable only by brutally stabbing his love doll and hearing the GAAAAS come out, and wrestling the lifeless skin into submission and fucking it mercilessly. His mother's hair was "up", just as she had worn it in life, with a little ribbon of blue yarn in front. She was smiling faintly. His father's eyes were squinched shut and his head was down like a charging bull. He had his teeth sunk into his mate's shoulder. There was even a glossy smear of something that looked to be slobber, but it was only an applique of glossy plastic, for realism. It seemed that his father's hard and calloused hands were mashed tightly over his mother's boobs, and that she had her own hands, cupped over his. There they were, frozen in time, doing what they most liked to do. No wonder he had no brothers or sisters. The likelyhood of being conceived by such a couple had to be vanishingly small. A fiercesome rage filled him. If he wasn't so fucking fucked up he'd pump up his love doll and stab it to death, again, but he'd have to patch the damned hole from the last time.
Memories of their intercourse came to him, through his sleepy nausea. The wind blew through the chinks of their little tin shack, which resembled, inside, the interior of Flash Gordon's spaceship as it appeared on TV. It was all corrugated tin with odds and ends hung on the walls. He could not sleep in his pallet on the floor because of the noise, bouncing the squeaky mattress, giggling, and, as it seemed to him then, farting. But that was only air trapped between slabs of flab, as he had experienced himself once, raping a girl down the street. He'd strangled her, he thought, as best he could recall, and had hidden the body so well, no one ever did know what had become of her. Before they started, if he was still awake, his mother would tell him harshly to go to sleep. If he could not sleep, then he'd at least better not look or his eyes would fall out of his head. But he always looked, and once they had caught him looking, and his mother loomed over his pallet, naked, vast boobs dangling over him like a pair of fat dead rabbits, freshly skinned, her hair "up", molded into a mound by sticky spray but mashed and mishapen and pushed this way and that. She gazed at him, and he gazed at her, for what seemed to be a long time, and then, WHAM, her fist came out of nowhere and he was out like a light. It had hardly ever been worth the pain, or the risk of pain. Not much to see except humping shadows, an occasional gleam of bare flesh if there was a moon.
Sleep. In sleep, things were becoming much clearer than they had been. His endowment from the National Trust had been problematic from the beginning. Why should anyone give him anything? He wasn't a leftist, and wasn't some crap artist. In sleep, he could see, that his wealth was only a dream. He was poor, by Christ, and sick, but not sick because he was stuffed with the contents of several dozen bean bag toss toys from the Goodwill Store-- NO! He was sick from swill, from a great sodden bowl-- bowel rather-- of shit stew! It weighed so heavily on his belly, it felt like a truck ran over him and parked right on top of his stomach. Oh my Gawd, he groaned. Don't let me wake up. Say it ain't so. It was all too, oh, too, too true! He had no Endowment! And he knew when he woke up, that he'd find his mother and father dead together on the floor, where they'd been since the night before, when they'd decided to fuck there. He had not been able to stand it any longer. While they wiggled and giggled in the dark, he'd slithered snake-like off his pallet and tip-toed to his father's foot locker. With the loaded revolver he found there, he'd killed them. He remembered pointing it with both hands, at those dim, humping, grunting shapes, and pulling the trigger. He pulled it until it wouldn't go off anymore, just clicking on empty cylinders like the family Ford. Then he remembered how the blood reached his bare feet.
He was awake. His head and his belly hurt. What was wrong? Ugh! Heaving up on the floor before he got out of bed was, for him, a routine performance. It was all part of a pattern, and he hated patterns! His hatred of patterns had gotten him tossed out of art school! How much vomit was already on the floor? No wonder he was vomiting-- the room stank. This offends my nostrils, he thought, sitting up uneasily on the edge of the bed, both feet in a pool of stomach flop. There was a cockroach mashed on his pillow, where he must have crushed it with his cheek. How romantic. He brushed it onto the floor. Just like I treat my girls-- my whores! He felt remorseless. His girl was at the hotplate, cooking up a batch of cracked wheat and oatmeal. He liked to call it shit stew. Shit stew for breakfast, lunch, dinner, what the hell was it anyway? Too fucking cloudy out to tell. At least it was sometime during the day. He almost had an appetite. His girl was moderately retarded and had a speech impediment that caused her much shame. Nice ass, though. There were blobs of "stew" in her hair, and dry "stew" mix spilled across her feet. She was humming to herself, happily, happy to have a man in her life, he knew, happy to have a home. The sight of her skinny butt, naked, because he always wanted her to be naked when they were together in the apartment, gave him mixed feelings. Something seemed to have happened to his state of mind, always delicate, while he slept off his hangover.
Come here, Shirley, he said, feeling a wave of something like warmth go through him. She turned to him, startled and confused and maybe a little fearful, then saw him smiling gently, and came to him, so happy to be his, to be someone's. He held her to him, kissed her gently, felt her smooth flesh under his hands. It made him very sad. She began to speak in her halting way but he put a finger to her lips and silenced her. He was going to stab her to death. After that, he wasn't really sure what he'd do. He hated to make too many decisions at any one time.