Posted by Emily on August 11, 2005 at 19:25:22:
The Mad-Dicks
(Where truth and bananas are one and the same thing)
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My name is Trinity. I know the truth. It sucks.
Truth is hard to find. It’s like those specific locations in any Harry Potter story which are though indeed identified, you just go and try to find them.
I started my quest to find the truth the night I left my home right after I’ve wrote out the phrase 'It was a dark and stormy night' exactly sixty-one times, which was the same number of times I’ve stabbed my now quickly-rotting boy friend, and the same number of pages I ripped out of 'He's Just Not That Into You' by Greg Behrendt to scatter around the room -- not because I was obsessive compulsive, or had any sentimental attachment to the number sixty-one, but because I'd always wanted to give those quacks at CSI a hard time.
And just to make their lives that much harder I burned the house down.
I clearly remember the moment when I looked at my burning home for the last time, my eyes heavy-lidded with misery, lamenting the loss of my small haven with its malodorous, rot-ridden swamp of a garden, it’s moss cloaking brooding, gloomy cypresses, tree trunks like decayed teeth rising from stagnant ponds, creatures with mildewed fur and demonic shrieks-who were my nine pet Persian cats burning in flames-and whom the meanest roadside zoo would have rejected anyway-and hoped the antidepressants would kick in soon.
I was a criminal, a lost soul, shouting my pain and anguish at the night which resembled nothing so much as the nose of a giant Labrador in excellent health: cold, black, and wet.
As I rode my bicycle I didn’t know where to go. Then I thought of the only friend who was considerate, humane and reckless enough to let me spend the night at his place in such circumstances. He was my teacher, my way and my light, the one who indirectly -and rather not knowingly-inspired me to do what I did.
He was - of course- my great psychedelic guru “Morphinos”.
Morphinos was a big guy. He had the sort of body that instantly reminds you of a 16` fridge and no matter how fit his suits were they always looked a size or two smaller than they should be. When he smiled the muscles in his face held an uncanny resemblance to a crowded parking lot full of Volkswagens struggling to find an empty space. His tough, yet rather weathered complexion oozed with character though it resembled nothing more than improperly cured leather that wouldn't even be used to make a coat or something. He was so glad to see me.
I walked towards him with shaken soul and hesitant steps, my dress was billowing in the wind , not a calm and predictable billows like the sea , but more like the billowing of a mildewed shower curtain in a cheap motel where one has to dance around to avoid touching it while trying to rinse off soap. I was choking my tears the way my brother used to choke those poor turkeys my grandma used to raise and upon which he used to ride as if he was major Lee straddling his horse before he had grown up enough to discover the utter ridiculousnes of using poultry for transportation .
Morphinos held me in his massive arms , and after a bitter struggle with my emotions during which I tried to pent-up my agony like a caffeine-addict trying to kick the habit, I finally let the tears come, at first dripping sporadically like an old clogged percolator, then increasing slowly like a 10-cup coffeemaker with an automatic drip, and eventually pouring out and noisily wailing like a cappuccino maker complete with slurping froth.
“What’s wrong bun . . errr hun . .errr honey bun?” asked Morphinos who was apparently stoned as usual. He was always proud of his addiction and made it clear to any one-concerned or not- that Clinton used to smoke marijuana, and that Dubya spent half his youth drunk and that any one who was apt to make history has to be dead-stoned first, which was why he always referred to the future as “the stoned age”, or rather ”the 2nd stoned age” if you wish to count the sixties..
As we drank the first bottle of booze he kept asking me what’s wrong, and as we snorted our first gram of cocaine he kept repeating the question. I hated to tell him about what happened right away, partly because he was a nice guy and God how I hated to disturb him, and partly because he seemed to be having such a nice trip which usually held the promise of amazingly good sex and God how I hated to spoil that, but mainly because telling someone you just killed a man and probably had half of the state cops after you was not the best way to start a friendly conversation, so I told him about other things that troubled me instead.
I told him about India, which hangs like a wet washcloth from the towel rack of Asia, and how it presented itself to my father as he landed in Delhi (or was it Bombay?), as if it mattered because dad finally had an idea to make his mark and fortune and that idea was a chain of steak houses to serve the millions and he wondered, as he deplaned down the steep, shiny, steel steps, why no one had thought of it before. Only to discover much later that-save for the 20 or 30 guys who were mostly rich foreign businessmen who just couldn’t dig junk food - the whole 800 million Indians were vegetarians, and so he spent the few remaining days of his bankrupt life making pointless cynical remarks about the educational system back home, especially those business courses which though told you a lot about how to sell things to people , didn’t tell you anything about how and why those people just wouldn’t buy it.
I also told him about that half Italian archeologist, the great Giovanni Battista de Rossi with whom my mother “Kitty” worked after my father was slain by devout Hindus cow worshipers in Bombay ( or was it Madras?) and ended up marrying him on the same day on which he broke through the centuries of choking rubble and rock in the abandoned catacombs under Rome , and held his blazing torch high as he picked up a flat, dirt-encrusted object with a row of teeth, examined it with his educated eye, and exclaimed, "By the saints, I do believe I've discovered another ancient kitty comb."
I even told him about my unfortunate uncle ,known -only to his closest friends- as Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End who right after he had announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday, his children packed his bags and drove him to Golden Pastures Asylum just off Interstate 95.
I finally found the courage to tell him about my boy friend, and how terrible it was to discover that the man I had fallen in love with was my long lost twin brother and that we had to break up immediately, and how we shared one last kiss that left a bitter yet sweet taste in my mouth-kind of like throwing up after eating a junior mint- and how he bade me farewell by saying “good-bye Trinity, good-bye my sweet Tintin”, and how I was furious at anyone calling my tintin, which was why I ended up stabbing him after all.
Then with some hesitation, I asked Morphinos about that rather suspicious smell, which seemed to come from that sexy, though quite purple young lady who was swaying from the ceiling with a thick rope around her once ivory throat . That was when he looked straight into my eyes, which was rather tricky regarding how much cocaine was running through both of our systems at the moment , and said the words that changed my life once and for all.
“Youdowanna tow the nruth? . . errr-” then he paused to make some necessary articulation before he repeated the question ” Do you wanna know the truth?”
I thought about the question for a few moments, during which I snorted some more stuff and tried to concentrate. It was very pure cocaine and concentration was not the thing it was made for, so I gradually drifted to my childhood days in Kansas, remembering how the golden-haired dawn of each day seemed to curl back the fading face of night in a perpetual coiffure, like an Ace comb in God's hand, parting the day and making pompadours of mountains, crew cuts of Kansas wheat fields, and trendy cuts of the oceans' rolling waves. I didn’t come out of my reveries until I realized he was shaking me by the throat and asking me again” Do you wanna know the truth?”
I wanted to tell him “what truth?” but “Urrk?” was what I actually uttered.
“Alright, I will tell you anyway” he said, then continued as he slightly eased his grip “You think this is Thursday evening , the eleventh of August 2005 right?” he asked , rather angrily.
“Errr” I quibbled, trying not to give a direct answer to what seemed to be a very tricky question.
“Well you are wrong” he said
“Ackk-According to my wrist watch it is indeed Thursday the elevnth of Aug-”I hissed
“No it isn’t” he insisted as he tightened his grip once more.
“Ughhrr?”I wondered
“It is actually Friday the 11th of August 2005” he said with a triumphant smile as he released me.
I tried to explain to him that it was impossible, but he didn’t listen. I tried to show him the calendar, tell him about leap years, time zones, planetary motions and the theory of gravity but he stubbornly stuck to his opinion . I made my best to explain , rather briefly, the evolution of the Gregorian system and how it developed from an earlier Roman model . And though I clearly sensed his annoyance with my eager attempts to pontificate with my ample knowledge of history I went on telling him about my opinions regarding each of the six volumes of Gibbons “Decline and fall of the Roman empire”, and just to tease him a bit more, I recited the full names of the whole 360 Roman Caesars and their wives and favorite concubins, and even snatched a pen and a piece of paper upon which I hurriedly sketched a column of five hundred Roman foot soldiers attacking a bunch of rebellious slaves , pointing out how while the Romans marched they looked as if they were held together by the plaster of courage while the teeming sea of rebellious slaves looked as if they were ecstatic local teenagers celebrating the last day at school- slaves who had, ironically, built most of Rome's columns, although they actually used lime and not plaster to cement the structures, and though it is perhaps more historically precise to describe the soldiers' column as bound by the lime of courage, that doesn't really have the same adventurous ring to it. Still Morphinos insisted that I’ve got today’s date wrong.
“How could that be Morphinos?!!!” I wondered, rather defeated.
“Well, because life, you know, is not what it . . well’ you see...all what glitters is not really that much uh..what’s that yellow metal thing called?” he kept gibbering until I stopped him.
“Are you trying to tell me that life is not what it seems?” I asked, interrupting his turbid stream of drugged semi-thoughts.
“Yeah that’s it. It’s all one big great illusion created by THEM” he said.
“Them?” I asked, bewildered
“No, THEM”, he corrected me.
“Ah, I see, and who are they?” I asked .
“Oh,why! The Mad Dicks of course” he said with a grave expression.
“The what?!” I asked
“The Mad Dicks, that’s what THEM are” he said as he stood up, walked around my chair, his hands held behind his back like a legendary admiral giving a briefing to his brave troopers, stumbling a couple of times along the way .
“The Mad Dicks are every where!” he explained ”They are in the soup your drink, especially the instant asparagus soup, they are in the programs you watch on TV, in the grades you get at school.”He said as he finally sat down and snorted some more of the nose candy “ The Mad Dicks are those who make you believe in things, weird things, like how undernourished bulimic insect-like females are actually a higher form of humanity called “super-models”, and how a peculiar assortment of meat and rat droppings known commonly as “junk” can make a “happy meal” , and how a bold old clod called Frasure is supposed to be funny”he concluded.
“Oh, you mean the media?”
“No, my child,” the media is nothing but an illusion created by the Mad Dicks” he said with a bitter smile.
“Then you mean the government? ”I inquired.
“Oh, my silly fruitcake, the government is yet another illusion supported by the Mad Dicks” he said scornfully.
“Then you mean mom and dad?” I said , hoping this was finally the right answer.”
“Oh you utterly confused little bitch, the whole society is just-”
“Damn it” I interrupted ”and blast it” I continued “ then who the hell are those Mad Dicks anyway ? ” I asked impatiently.
“The baboons” he said, stressing on each syllable
“Who? “
“The baboons, they are a type of monkeys who live in -”
“Oh come on, I know what baboons are”, I said and , for a moment, considered taking my time to illustrate the various types of baboons in the world, the morphological and anatomical differences which separated them from Apes and Chimpanzees, and might’ve concluded with a detailed account of their reproductive habits, yet , on another thought I said ”you mean those viscous wild monkeys are controlling the world, right?”
“Yes” Morphinos said, which actually came out like a long satisfied “yeeeeaaaahhhhhs” .He was clearly enjoying having me suspended in .errr...suspense.
“Are you saying that the world we live in is an illusion created by monkeys!” I asked, trying my best to convey the utter rediculousness of his theory”
“Yeeeeaaaahhhhhs” he said “ our world is nothing but a sensory illusion created by baboons. They call it ‘the Mad Dicks’, and that’s exactly what they are trying to turn us into: a bunch of sex crazed citizens who mind their own business , which is of course having sex and the necessary money to have more of it. As for females like you, you live in another sensory illusion called ‘Bad Cunts” which is totally different from our sensory illusion and the two worlds never ever collide except, well, you know when” he said, happy with my bewildered expression.
I was totally at loss as for what he wanted to tell me, yet I could clearly notice that his words were making both of us horny. So I nodded in false comprehension and ran my tongue slowly over my lips.
“There has been a war . . ” he continued to my disappointment “a. terrible devastating war. The monkeys made the first move” he said , totally oblivious of my puffed eager face and his own bulging member.
“Oh, did they” I asked, in what I hoped was a husky seductive tone.
“Yeeeeaaaahhhhhs” he said ”first they infiltrated our zoos, then they freed their kin held in our cages, and together they stole hundreds of our nukes, can you believe that?” he asked
“No” I said, angrily, pulling his face by the chin, trying to twist his attention to where it is most needed.
“Then they nuked every zoo in the whole civilized world, one by one, just like that!” he said snapping his fingers and pissing me off to the extent of almost sobering me up.
“Oh yeah, how did they do that?” I asked, trying to go with the flow and hoping against hope that I can help him to snap out of it.
“I don’t know, they just did it! You don’t expect me to try and understand monkey business do you? it gives me a migraine headache thinking down to their level.” he said banging his large fists against his very large head.
“Well, maybe if we try to RELAX a bit and -”I said and was instantly interrupted.
“But I guess no one was prepared for it, I mean who would’ve expected such a thing?” He went on” Sure not the army , sure not the intelligence! Those people were trained to fight MEN, MEN who had two arms, walked on two feet, had two eyes and could see” he said among futile attempts of taking sips from his now empty dry gin bottle.
I took of my blouse and started making gestures on how hot the weather was.
”I guess it was the tails that have eluded us” He resumed “ we never expected an enemy with tails! They must have used them to snatch those nukes out of the silos you know?The alarm systems were never designed to handle that” he said shaking the bottle in the air and trying to squeeze the last drops into his gapping mouth.
“Oh! Well, upon mentioning long erect body projections like tails, don’t you think we should-” I said and was interrupted once more.
“And now since I’ve told you the truth about Mad Dicks, it is time for the pill” he said.
“Damn, I forgot to bring my pills but if you could use a double condom then maybe-”
“No not those pills you idiot” he said and took out three small oblong capsules out of his breast pocket, placed them on the table between us “those pills ” he said as he offered them to me.
“What are these for?” I wondered.
“The Blue pill here is a viagra pill, the person who takes it stays locked within the web of Mad Dicks and is free to believe whatever he likes to believe” he said.
“Interesting, is it the lady-viagra type? cause I’ve heard-”
“The Red pill is a .. well... let’s call it the truth pill, you take that one, preferably with a good strong drink, and your mind finally unlocks the truth of the real world and you’ll be able to see all those monkeys” he explained.
“And what’s that third pill then? it looks rather familiar”I said
“Oh that? It’s just one of those morning-after pills, you can use it after we make out”he said, bringing back hope to my throbbing. .err.. heart.
“Well in that case I think I would choose-”
“The red pill?” he said hopefully
“Oh no, I was going to pick up the-”
“The red pill?”He insisted, snatching me by the collar, and since it was quite inadvisable to keep arguing with a some stubborn hunk on cocaine, let alone argue with the legendary Morphinos, I just nodded and didn’t try to resist as he shoved the thing- the pill unfortunately-down my throat.
“There, now you wait and see”he said gladly
Whatever the pill contained, it was strong stuff and acted quickly. Soon I was overwhelmed by a strange excitement, gripped by the clutches of a weird sinful fever. My body was dripping wet with sweat,and my T-shirt clung to my bosom like paint on the nose cone of a jumbo jet. It awakened my lust for feverish sex, and my deepest desires to be beaten, tortured and controlled by an angry master. It even went that deep into my soul to awaken my long forgotten fear of caterpillars, not the fuzzy little brown ones but the colossal green ones that terrorized me while I was playing in my grandmother's garden when I was just five or six years old, which, coincidentally, was also when I discovered that dad’s shaving cream really does not, even slightly, taste like whipped cream. A memory which awakened me from my reveries, and I was shocked at what I saw.
I was suddenly walking along a dark barren wasteland filled with burnt shadows of things that had once were and charred remains of a civilization that had once been. Stifling smells of rot and decay oozed from every corner and I was so freaked out by the ugly ghastliness of the scene and those infernal odors instantly made my eyes water.
“ Oh my god , is this the REAL WORLD?!” I screamed
“No, it’s just my bedroom ” said Morphinos.” it needs a little bit of tidying up I suppose. The pill will work in a minute” he concluded.
And it did! I was suddenly walking in another ugly barren waste wasteland , bigger than Mosphinos’ bed room, had more mud on the floor , almost as many mice, and a queen-size bed in the middle of it, right where any self respecting bed had no reason to be . We sat on it anyway.
I looked up at where the ceiling should be and there were clouds of thick smoke everywhere.
“So THIS is the real world then?” I asked
“Yeeeeaaaahhhhhs” answered Morphinos.
“Hard to tell the difference” I shrugged.
“Ugly isn’t it?” He stated the obvious
“Well, the bed looks OK though” I commented .
“It was a good world once”He said bitterly” There were scary things like income tax and Woobie Goldberg but it was still a good world though” he said almost weeping.
I nodded, not knowing what to say.
“Are you saying that the monkeys won then” I asked with true alarm.
“No” he said as he looked at some invisible point far in the ugly horizon which all in all contained nothing so interesting to look at.
“We won then?” I asked hopefully.
“No” He said, still looking at the same point with intensified concentration until I finally realized that the cocaine was making him a bit cross-eyed and he was actually looking at me.
“Who won then?” I said
“Why, The penguins of course” He said gravely
“That’s it, I’m leaving” I jumped from the bed and looked for the door. Apparently there weren’t any left to open in Morphinos’ real world
.
“You can’t leave, we’re trapped here” he said calmly.
“But..but.. I wanna get back to where we were, I don’t want this stupid reality “ I screamed.
“Come on, you haven’t even heard the good bit yet and you’re breaking up already?” He said, patting me on the shoulder, which in his drugged state was the sort of compassion that was guaranteed to leave bruises the next morning.
“You see, on the same day we attacked Congo to get rid of the monkeys, the Penguins went bananas, those friggin animals always stand together you know, and so the penguins all flied to Africa to fight us There” He explained.
“What? How could they do that? Penguins don’t fly?” I shouted, almost loosing my mind.
“That what’s we thought” he said with a sigh.”We were confident that we’ve learned enough about the baboons to handle all the harm any monkey can deliver, yet amidst all this the treacherous penguins made their move” he said with a red angry face “They couldn’t fly, so said our experts, but it all turned out to be false intelligence information, and they kept flocking into the field .....”
“STOP IT” I shrieked.
“That’s what the whiny animal-rights groups back home kept telling us, but who cares? For we had a leader, a great leader, we followed THE ONE” He said.
“Which one?” I said, trembling from fear and anger.
“The one! The great God fearing, peace loving, golf playing NEON” he said
“Neon?”
“Yeaaaaaaaaaaahssss . . he was brave, he was experienced, he knew all about monkey business. Neon was a man who shone like no other man in history, he shone too brightly in fact that it was hard to see who he was, but he always told us all about the monkeys and the penguins and the viscous little green ninja turtles that wanted to rule the world in the name of , damn I always forgot the name of that Turtle god, he isn’t Bert the muppet is he?”he asked as he rose up and took a couple of steps towards me.
“Neon warned me against you” Said morphinos as he kept approaching, his fists clenching and unclenching like a the jaws of that ugly looking gray fish model that played the leading role in a movie with the same name. “he told us that the monkeys are everywhere even among us and that’s when I started thinking of you. A girl like you Trinity with such thick lustrous, beautiful, drain-clogging hair, more curves than an under-the-sink water trap, and who moves with the ease of a motorized toilet snake through a four-inch sewer line, and wondered what could you see in a simple plumber like me?!We were just the wrong combination!” He hissed as he advanced towards me.
I didn’t need to retreat, for in his confused state of mind, strongly aided by cocaine, he just passed by me and kept moving, with that murderous look on his face towards a nearby small tree.
I was very angry. I had wished that Morphinos would come to sweep me off my feet, make me feel just like Lois Lane with her handsome, masculine Superman who could fly her away from the humdrum of everyday life, but now I saw Morphinos as he really was, a man as bald as Lex Luthor with worse eyesight than Clark Kent and the maturity level of Jimmy Olsen.
Silently, I watched him bump into the tree and knock himself out as a result.
I went back to the world of Mad Dicks, secured in the beauty of my good old world, were monkeys stayed and the zoo and penguins never flied . The insurance company paid for a new house and the CSI teem all followed their forensic leads into a nice beach in canary islands where they all had such a good time. I kept searching for Neon, knowing that if he is really the one then something would click inside of me upon seeing him.
For once I thought it was that guy I met when I was standing weepily at my father's grave in the old family cemetery, where the ancient headstones tipped and tumbled like a flock of spring lambs. I raised my weary eyes to see a shirtless man, his mighty thighs clutching the loins of a raging steed whose breath came hot as a desert wind, but all I did was make a mental note to get my hairdryer repaired.
Then I thought it was Gary, whom the wheel of love had left its trademarks on his chest once too often, like a knobby mud tire on a monster truck, or like a really big ponce wheel, the kind that tailors use to punch little holes in patterns and that would leave lots of nasty little welts if you were to run it up and down your arm.
I was an independent and impetuous girl, and winning my heart would be like capturing lightning in a bottle, not the plastic kind that is prevalent everywhere today but the glass kind that my dad used to buy crème soda in at the service station, when they were actually SERVICE STATIONS, two blocks from his old house back in the 50's and early 60's and he would eagerly return them for two cents deposit which was a quick source of income back then because his allowance was only ten cents a week.
When I finally found him I knew immediately he was the one. A slim hairy guy who moved swiftly, jumped into action whenever nature called, and wore that nice white shirt with the motto “Never trust a baboon” printed in large friendly letters upon it .. He had such a nice white house but that’s another story.