Wild Ducks Flying Backward

TRIPLETS

I went to Satan’s house.

His mailbox was painted black.

A fleet of bonecrushers was parked in his driveway.

The thorns on his rosebushes were longer than shivs.

And sixty-six roosters scratched in his front yard, their spurs smoldering like cheap cigars.

I went to Satan’s house.

It was supposed to be an Amway party.

I wanted one of those hard as hell steak knives.

The ones that can’t tell the difference between mama’s sponge cake and a chunk of rock cocaine.

I went to Satan’s house.

I felt a little out of place.

But Satan’s twin daughters soon put me at ease.

They tried on funny hats for me, showed me jewels, danced around my chair.

They read my fortune in a bowl of ashes, let me pet their Dobermans, and watch while they rinsed out their pink underthings.

I stopped by Satan’s house,

I just happened to be in the neighborhood.

Satan came downstairs in a Raiders jacket.

His aura was like burnt rubber, but his grin could paint a sunrise on a coal shed wall.

“I see you’ve met Desire and Fulfillment,” he said, polishing his monocle with a blood-flecked rag.

“Regret is in the kitchen making coffee.”

DREAM OF THE LANGUAGE WHEEL

Ancient elf bones stewing in the rain,

Angels the size of fruitflies circling a buddha turd,

Star maps drawn in lipstick on the mud walls of opium towns.

Images like those,

scenes such as these—

The red midgets of hell challenge Suzy’s friends to a snowball fight

Or

In the cave behind the waterfall

the ant king licks the clitoris

of the sleeping anthropologist. —

existing only on paper

are yet more important

than flags, bibles, gold,

guns and reputations.

So

throw off your armor of acronyms,

your layers of numerical padding and

come bathe with me,

come slide beside me naked

into the world’s steamy honeycomb

of words.

CATCH 28

The phantom arrived in a neon speedboat

ferrying a cargo

of coconuts and diamonds.

From the veranda of the malaria hotel

we saw it coming:

a kabuki magazine published by a hurricane.

Its clown-head prow sawed the surf in half

causing Crayola buddhas to run

over the hill with sacks of tadpoles on their backs.

A fat old tropical radio

interrupted the news to announce

that it was now king of the waterbugs.

Watching it turn wine into mink milk,

bedsheets into sandwiches of snow,

we imagined it must be a wind-up toy

designed by a mad scientist

to brighten the long frown of time.

But…

in the end

it was just my old mistress

and your new boss,

the moon.

THREE HAIKU

Brown spider dangling

from a single strand.

Up down, up down:

Zen yo-yo.

They’ve built their nests

in the chimneys of my heart,

those swallows that you lost.

Everywhere she walks,

that ghost is right behind her:

Ah, panty outline!

Moonlight Whoopee Cushion Sonata

I

The witch-girl who lives by the bend in the river is said to keep a fart in a bottle.

It’s a poisonous fart, green as cabbage, loud as a shotgun; and after moonset or before moonrise, her hut is illuminated by its pale mephitic glow. For a time, passersby thought she had television.

Of course, no antenna sprouts from her thatched roof, no satellite dish dwarfs her woodpile, and can you imagine the cable company stringing wires across the marsh and through the forest so that a witch-girl could watch the Occult Channel? Anyway, how would she pay for it? With the contents of her mushroom basket, the black candles she makes from hornet fat, her belladonna wine? With that cello she saws with a human bone?

It’s conceivable that she could pay for it with her body: her body’s been admired by many a fisherman who’s chanced upon her wading the rapids in loonskin drawers. But no man’s ever bought her body, and only one has had the courage to take it for free.

That fellow’s gone away now. It’s said he fled back to South America and left her in the lurch. Oh, but she still has a hold on him, you can bet on that. Our witch-girl’s got a definite hook in that fly-by-night romeo. She’s woven his mustache hairs into a tiny noose. She’s got his careless fart in a bottle by the stove.

II

Turn a mountain upside down, you have a woman. Turn a woman upside down, you have a valley. Turn a valley upside down, you get folk music.

In the old days, the men in our village played trombone. Some better than others, obviously, but most of the men could play. Only the males, sad to say. The women danced. It was the local custom. The practice has all but died out, though to this day, grizzled geezers are known to hide trombones under their beds at the nursing home. It’s strictly forbidden, but late on summer nights, you can sometimes hear nostalgic if short-winded trombone riffs drifting out of the third-story windows, see silhouettes of old women on the second floor, dancing on swollen feet in fuzzy slippers or spinning in rhythmic circles in their wheelchairs.

As noted, however, our musical traditions have virtually vanished. Nowadays, people get their music from compact discs or FM radio. Who has time anymore to learn an instrument? Only the witch-girl by the bend in the river, sawing her cello with a human tibia, producing sounds like Stephen King’s nervous system caught in a mousetrap.

When milk sours before it leaves the udder or grain starts to stink in the fields; when workers go out on strike at the sauerkraut factory, the missile base, or the new microchip plant down the road; when basements flood, lusty young wives get bedtime migraines, dogs wake up howling in the middle of the night, or the interference on TV is like a fight in hot grease between corn flakes and a speedboat, people around here will say, “The witch-girl’s playing her cello again.”

Turn folk music upside down, you get mythology. Turn mythology upside down, you get history. Turn history upside down, you get religion, journalism, hysteria, and indecision.

III

The setting sun turned the river into a little red schoolhouse. Thus motivated, the frogs got to work conjugating their verbs. The witch-girl handled the arithmetic.

She divided a woodpecker by the square root of a telephone pole.

Multiplied the light in a fox’s eyes by the number of umlauts on a Häagen-Dazs bar.

Added a kingfisher’s nest to the Gross National Product.

Calculated the ratio of duende to pathos in the death song of a lamp-singed moth.

Subtracted a mallow from a marsh, an ant from an anthem, a buddha from a peach can shot full of holes.

IV

A white plastic bucket in a snowy field. A jackknife of geese scratching God’s dark name in the sky. A wind that throbs but is silent. Candy wrappers silent against fence wire. Stags silent under their fright-wig menorahs. Bees silent in their science-fiction wax. A silent fiddle bow of blue smoke bobbing in the crooked chimney atop the witch-girl’s shack.

It is on a cold, quiet Sunday afternoon past Christmas that the television crew arrives in our village. By suppertime, everybody but the hard cases at the nursing home knows it’s in town. At the Chamber of Commerce breakfast Monday morning, hastily arranged to introduce the videopersons to the citizenry, the banquet room is overflowing. Understandably, we villagers assume the crew is here to film the new industries of which we are rightly proud. The director is diplomatic when he explains that missile bases and microchip plants are a dime a dozen.

“We are making a documentary on flatus,” the director explains. The audience is spellbound.

“A normal human being expels flatus an average of fourteen times per day,” he goes on to say. There is general muttering. Few would have thought the figure that high.

“We are speaking of all human beings, from babies in diapers to lawyers in three-piece suits. The mechanic billows the seat of his greasy coveralls, the glamorous movie actress poots through silk— and blames it on the maid or the Irish wolfhound. ‘Naughty dog!’

“You people can do your math. That’s eighty-four billion expulsions of flatus daily, worldwide, year after year. And that’s just humans. Animals break wind, as well, so that wolfhound is not above suspicion. Anyway. We can explain reasonably well what flatus is: a gas composed primarily of hydrogen sulfide and varying amounts of methane. And whence it comes: generated in the alimentary canal by bacterial food waste, and vented through the anus. But where does it end up?”

Villagers look at one another, shake their heads.

“I won’t trouble you today with environmental considerations, though I’m certain you can conceive of an upper atmospheric flatus layer, eating away at the ozone. This will be covered in our film. What I want to share with you is the difficulties we have encountered in trying to photograph the elusive trouser ghost, a genie as invisible as it is mischievous.”

The director (a handsome man who wears a denim jacket and smokes a pipe) explains that attempts at spectrographic photography, while scientifically interesting, failed to produce an image with enough definition or optic impact to hold the attention of a lay viewer. And computer-generated animation seemed silly and fake. He goes on to explain how he and his staff fed a live model on popcorn, beer, and navy beans, then lowered her buttocks into a vat of syrup. Those of us who have just eaten pancakes for breakfast smile uneasily. “We got some marvelous bubbles,” the director says, “but a gas bubble per se is not a fart.

“On Saturday, we heard from a reliable source that a resident of this community, or someone who lives nearby, has succeeded in actually netting a rectal comet and maintaining it intact. We were skeptical naturally, and on deadline, but also excited and a trifle desperate, so we impulsively dropped everything and traveled here at once. Now we are asking for your help. Does this person— and this preserved effluvium — exist? We were told only that the captor in question is some rich girl…”

“Witch-girl!” the audience cries out as one. Then, in gleeful unison—“Witch-girl”—they sing it out again.

As for what happens next, the village is of two minds. The village, in fact, has split into a pair of warring camps. We have come to refer to the opposing factions as “Channel A” and “Channel B.” Here are their respective versions.

CHANNEL A

A week passes. The television crew fails to return from the river. Suspecting foul play, the sheriff and his deputies tramp through the leafless forest and across the frozen bogs.

The witch-girl has disappeared. So have the director and his camerawoman. The audio technician is found sitting on a stump, a depraved glaze coating his eyes. When asked about the whereabouts of the others, the soundman mumbles, “The hole in the cheese.” Over and over, “Hole in cheese. Hole in cheese.” Until they take him away to a sanatorium. (Some joker at the feed store said they hoped it was a Swiss sanatorium.)

Eight months later, on Crooked Angle Island, a prospector stumbles across three skeletons, strangely intertwined. Inside the skull of each of them, rattling like a translucent jade acorn, is a perfectly crystallized fart.

CHANNEL B

The witch-girl is a big hit on PBS. Millions see her play the cello beside a bonfire, an owl perched on her shoulder. This has nothing to do with the subject of flatulence, but the director is obviously in her thrall.

She has a second fart-bottle on her nightstand now.

And throughout our township, television reception has significantly improved.

CODA

Perhaps it should be noted that sometime during this period, on an Argentine Independence Day, a notorious playboy fell to his death from one of the numerous gilded balconies of his Buenos Aires apartment. According to his mistress of the moment, he lost his balance while trying to capture with a gaucho hat a particularly volatile green spark that had escaped from a fireworks display in the plaza. “Es mío!” he cried as he went over the side. It’s mine.

After Yesterday’s Crash: The Avant-Pop Anthology, Penguin Books, 1995.

THE ORIGIN OF CIGARS

On the morning after the lunar eclipse,

she awoke with a funny feeling,

massaged her belly with hurricane drops,

rubbed barbecue sauce on her eyelids,

donned a necklace of alligator bones

and walked down to the Caribbee

where, asquat in a spice canoe,

she gave birth to a green banana.

“Not mine!” growled her husband,

pitching the new baby overboard

into the path of a barracuda,

who seized it like bait

just as lightning’s alchemical zippo

ignited the infant’s nib.

Transformed into a pufferfish,

the ’cuda was soon upstaging cookfires

as it puffed past the strand

in luxurious loopy-doops,

languid, masculine,

respiring like some kind of don

— waiting for a cognac rain.

STICK INDIANS

You’ll never really see them

and there’s nothing left behind

to identify them in the labs of DNA.

And that footprint beneath your window

where in the night you saw the shadow

of a shadow of a shadow on the pane?

Just a heron with a gimpy

leg or some scarecrow run away to look for love.

When the owl suddenly freezes

on its perch atop the fir,

little ears cocked like nacho chips waiting for the cheese,

you yourself will listen hard

but only hear a scratching,

a clawing and a rasping

of the wind that wants to jimmy your locked door.

It’s said they’re a tribe of hermits

(whoever heard of such a thing?),

professors from the university of mud.

On paths of old mischief

they steal down from the hills,

bird nests for moccasins,

roadkill for their totem,

broken twigs like broken vowels spelling out their name.

While anthropology prays for day

to break and bring an end to nights it can’t explain,

you have to ask “Where are they,

then, and are they any different from the rain?”

Well, they seem to have an interest

in all those things you do

when you suspect that no one is around.

And somehow you know they’re out there

beyond the porch light’s reach,

in the brambles,

in the hedge,

or out behind the woodpile

where they certainly appear to feel at home.

You imagine them raw and willowy,

you imagine them splintered and dry,

you imagine them witch brooms come to life.

But no matter how you picture them

or joke that they’re your friends,

you can’t begin to grasp the shtik of stick.

The Stick Indian casino

is in your skull

— and you’ve already lost.

HOME MEDICINE

Last night

we attempted

a lint

transplant

but

her navel

rejected

it.

Clair de Lune

The old wolf trotted over the hill with a little pink heart in its teeth. A pattern appeared in the snow — a trail made by paws and tail and drops of candy-colored blood — and that pattern could be read as if it were a fairy tale, although the night was much too cold for fairies.

From behind a surf of clouds, the moon skitted into view like a boogie board. Cautiously, glancing left to right, the wolf set its treasure down on a fallen tree trunk, raised its muzzle toward the sky, and through dandelion parachutes of its own frozen breath, issued a long wail that sounded like the siren on a 6000-year-old ambulance.

Suddenly, the moon howled back.

For a long moment, the wolf held itself so still it might have been a cardboard cutout in a theater lobby (a sequel to Dances with Wolves, told from the animal’s POV). The hairs of its mangy pelt were as erect as toy soldiers. Its eyes turned radioactive. Its breath was no longer visible. Its lame leg ached. Involuntarily, it pissed in the snow, affixing a new and perhaps not-so-happy ending to the fairy story previously written there. The old wolf waited.

As for the moon, it too was still, at rest on a cloudtop like some buttered skillet in which Vincent van Gogh was frying an egg.

Gradually, the lunar silence reassured the wolf, for while it, like its ancestors before it, had spent its life addressing each full moon without fail, it had never once, not even when a cub, expected or desired a reply. If there was a response, it resounded in the blood, in the spinal fluid, in the wolf juice, not the ears. Wolves did the vocalizing. Among beasts, as among men, the moon was understood to be mute.

But was it? Had the moon merely been biding its time all these years, patiently waiting for the right moment to make itself heard?

The wolf was straining so hard to learn what might have finally loosened the moon’s tongue that it very nearly missed the small, squeaky voice that piped up only a few inches from its nose.

“Well,” said the little heart, which had unobtrusively begun to beat again, puffing itself out like self-blowing bubblegum, “now that you’ve gotten the news, don’t you think you ought to return me to the breast from which I was ripped?”

Although hungry and perplexed, and despite the fact that its conscience was as clean of guilt as a nun’s bratwurst of mustard, the old wolf wearily complied, limping down the mountainside, squirming under the locked gate of the village, clambering atop a snowdrift, and stealing for the second time that night through a half-open nursery window.

And the next morning, my christening took place as scheduled.

ALOHA NUI

Drawn by the bloomy lights

of Honolulu,

the giant passenger moth

flies for a thousand miles,

through typhoon spray and volcano smoke,

sailors firing at it for sport,

barracuda snapping at its ass;

until, at last,

frazzled of antenna, salty of wing,

it wobbles into brief climactic orbit

around the 500-watt

coconut:

bachelor at a wedding

the bride never knew.

Are You Ready for the New Urban Fragrances?

(Headline in an Italian fashion magazine)

Yeah, I guess I’m ready, but listen:

Perfume is a disguise. Since the middle ages, we have worn masks of fruit and flower in order to conceal from ourselves the meaty essence of our humanity. We appreciate the sexual attractant of the rose, the ripeness of the orange, more than we honor our own ripe carnality.

Now, today, we want to perfume our cities, as well; to replace their stinging fumes of disturbed fossils’ sleep with the scent of gardens and orchards. Yet, humans are not bees any more than they are blossoms. If we must pull an olfactory hood over our urban environment, let it be of a different nature.

I want to travel on a train that smells like snowflakes.

I want to sip in cafés that smell like comets.

I want to sleep in hotels that smell like the pheromones of sixteen-year-old girls.

Under the pressure of my step, I want the streets to emit the precise odor of a diamond necklace.

I want the newspapers I read to smell like the violins left in pawnshops by weeping hobos on Christmas Eve.

I want to carry luggage that reeks of the neurons in Einstein’s brain.

I want a city’s gases to smell like the golden belly hairs of the gods.

And when I gaze at a televised picture of the moon, I want to detect, from a distance of 239,000 miles, the aroma of fresh mozzarella.

HONKY-TONK ASTRONAUT

(Country song)

My wife up and left me a long time ago,

it’s just as well that she’s gone.

I’ve smoked out my windpipe with cheap cigarettes,

I can barely sing you this song.

But last night I saw more strange lights in the sky,

got so excited I thought I would die,

and it gave me the strength to go on.

I got a car with no brakes or transmission,

I usually travel by thumb.

Since I walked out on that job laying carpet

I’ve felt a bit like a bum.

But when I think of that great whirling saucer

and all the things it surely will offer,

my heart starts to beat like a drum.

Some people think I’m a leftover hippie, a loser, a drifter, or worse.

But I’m just a loner from Sedona, Arizona,

the center of the known universe.

I met a blonde in a bar up near Phoenix,

thought I’d found someone to love.

But when she laughed at me I climbed on a bridge,

hoping whiskey’d give me a shove—

— cause a cowboy with no job and no money

can’t expect to convince any honey

that his friends rule the earth from above.

(SPOKEN)

The whole world’s howling like a Tijuana dog,

everthing’s a little bit insane.

Them spaceships had better hurry on down and get me,

before I drown in this hard-hearted rain.

But, hey, I just got the message that they’re a-gonna,

they’re a-gonna land right here in Sedona, Arizona,

And we can say adios to our pain.

Now some people think I’m a leftover hippie, a loser, a drifter, or worse.

But I’m just a loner from Sedona, Arizona,

The center of the known universe.

CREOLE DEBUTANTE

She went to the School of Miss Crocodile,

learned to walk backwards,

skin a black cat with her teeth.

Soon, she could dance with dead pirates,

cook perfect gumbo,

telephone the moon collect.

But it took 23 doctors to fix her

after she kissed that Snake.

MASTER BO LING

Sinking his fingers

like rat fangs

into the round black cheese

(O moon that orbits Milwaukee!)

he heaves it onto

the path

the Tao

the waxy way

at whose end there awaits

amidst thunder

the ten buddhas.

R.S.V.P

The invitation to

Tarzan’s bar mitzvah,

written in nut juice

and wrapped in a leaf

Arrived in my mailbox

with an organic rustle,

smelling of chimp dung

but promising a feast

And evoking immediate

hot hoppy visions:

The hair of the cannibal

and the sweet of the beast

MY HEART IS NOT A POODLE

(Country song)

My love looks in the window and watches you sleep,

can’t you hear it scratching at your door?

My love howls at the full moon down by the creek,

it ain’t for sale in any store.

My love is a wild thing and it can’t be trained

to do tricks to entertain your group

so put away that leash and that hoop:

my heart is not a poodle.

My love is wild, hog wild,

it ain’t for a sissy or a child,

it’s the hot stuff, not the mild,

don’t treat it like a poodle.

You can housebreak your puppy, you can housebreak your cat

you can even housebreak some bunny rabbits.

You can teach some old boys to wipe their boots on a mat,

but love holds on to its bad habits.

Passion hides in the shadows where it’s damp and it’s dark

to sneak out and bite you on the leg.

No, it won’t sit up and beg:

My heart is not a poodle.

My love is wild, hog wild,

it ain’t for a sissy or a child,

it’s sweet but it’s also vile,

don’t mistake it for no poodle.

Real love likes to run free like a fox or a cur,

it ain’t looking for no master,

so don’t be tying no fancy ribbons ’round its neck

or it’s gonna run all the faster.

I like the way you look, baby, I love how you smell

I long to be your very own,

but don’t toss me no old bone;

my heart is not a poodle.

My love is wild, hog wild,

it ain’t for a sissy or a child,

it’s the hot stuff, not the mild,

don’t treat it like a poodle.

(SPOKEN)

It ain’t nobody’s lapdog.

Won’t wear no rhinestone collar.

Don’t even think about calling it “Fifi.”

WEST TO SATORI

The meditation mat

is the yogi’s horse:

Git along little yoga,

gotta reach

El Snuffing Out Candle

afore sundown

own

own

own

own.

WILD CARD

Between the ace and the trey

between the raise and the fold

between the hat and the wand

down and dirty in Vegas

or up a magician’s silky sleeve,

the red deuce bides its time.

Born under the sign of Gemini

on Groundhog Day in Baden Baden,

bipolar double agent

too wild for just one world:

two hearts beating in one pale breast,

diamonds the color of rubies dangling from the Devil’s lobes,

Euclidean tomatoes,

jigsaw pasties,

Rasputin and his clone

in velvet suits scheming to topple a royal house,

Saint Valentine’s testicles swaying

imperceptibly to the fickle rhythms of chance:

the sagacious player understands

that these are no mere figures of speech.

If some night a pair

of bloodshot eyes

stare unblinking into yours,

remember:

no hand is a winning hand

’til you dare to lay it down,

and He who made the red deuce wild

knows both your secret names.

OPEN WIDE

Jacking the molar free

of its purchase in the bark-blackened gums,

the mission dentist made to toss it

into a pail of slops—

but the shaman seized it,

licked it lovingly clean of his own blood,

used a baby monkey to buff it,

built a wooden cage for it

and set it next to the dream pole

in the center of the village.

At sunrise the next morning

the tooth commenced to sing

in a sweet little Gloria Estefan voice,

awakening the missionary

who, chronically dazed by everything around him

for a hundred miles,

turned to the first page in his stiff hymnal

and tried to join in.

TWO FOR MY YOUNG SON

I

If Frankenstein grows tomatoes

And Dracula farms beans,

If the Wolfman plants the croutons

That Kong puts on his greens,

If the Creature From the Black Lagoon

Loves carrots, peas, and hash,

If Godzilla peels the potatoes

Used in the Monster Mash,

If Vego the Giant Cauliflower

Eats people like a fiend,

Then what is keeping you, my son,

From licking your plate clean?

II

The Abominable Snowman

Lives far from any city

Up in the Himalayas

Where snow falls like confetti.

Men climb far to look for him

Their ropes coiled like spaghetti

But though they’ve looked for years and years

They haven’t found him, yeti.

The Towers of St. Ignatz

A script treatment for a feature film

Freddie Manhattan is a rock star of moderate magnitude — he has an asteroid talent but a supernova ego. He has just been informed by his manager that he’ll be cutting his new album in N.Y. right after the Christmas holidays (late autumn lies like a frosty leaf upon America). Freddie’s in a snit. N.Y. January is colder than penguin toejam. Okay, okay, L.A., then. No! Freddie wants the Caribbean. Elton John records in the Caribbean, Sting records in the Caribbean, the Caribbean is good enough for Mick Jagger, it ought to be good enough for Freddie Manhattan. Exasperated, the manager says he’ll see what he can do.

In Minneapolis, meanwhile, Howard, a high-school history teacher, is visiting a former colleague, one Newton Beck. A biology teacher, Newton, thirty-one, got one of his students pregnant. Even though he married the girl, he was fired. Young Mrs. Beck gave birth to twin sons, now about six months old. The twins are fraternal (non-identical) and Newton is explaining to Howard the ways in which they differ, one from the other. Heidi Beck seems uninterested in the Beck twins, her husband, or his guest. She is dancing alone to a Freddie Manhattan album.

Freddie, back in N.Y., is watching the weather on TV. “It’s already fuckin’ snowing in Minneapolis,” he observes sourly.

As dawn breaks the next day, the twins begin to fret. Newton gets up and heats their formula. It’s still early when they are fed so he slides back in bed with his teenaged bride and instigates some industrial strength foreplay. Heidi claims she’s too sleepy. Newton rolls over and peeks through the blinds. A light snow, the first of the season, has fallen during the night. “At least I’ll have something new to do at work today,” he says.

Newton now works as a guide at the Twin Cities Museum of Natural History. On a day like today, as a part of the Wonders of the Universe tour, he will collect fresh snowflakes and project them upon a screen to demonstrate both the intricate beauty of crystal structure and the infinite variety of nature: “Of all the trillions upon trillions of snowflakes that have fallen upon the earth, no two have ever been alike.”

Freddie’s manager is on the phone to the Caribbean recording studio, arguing about rental time. “Freddie can’t pay what Elton pays. He doesn’t move as much product as Elton moves. Only don’t tell him that.”

Just before the final guided tour of the day, Newton calls Heidi. She complains that the twins are not taking their nap. “How can they sleep with that music up so loud?” he asks, referring to the blare of one of Freddie Manhattan’s recent CDs. Once more, he collects and projects some snowflakes. “Of all the trillions and trillions…” The visitors laugh. They think it’s a joke. It takes Newton a while to really focus on the fact that two of the projected snowflakes are absolutely identical! He almost faints from astonishment.

Newton’s life is dramatically transformed. He quickly becomes obsessed with the implications of the identical flakes (which he managed to photograph just as they began to melt). While Heidi practices on her guitar, Newton studies the flake pictures, examines thousands of new flakes, meditates on the meaning of it all— does this mean that certain previously inviolable laws of nature are now in question, or is it simply an amazing coincidence without planetary or cosmic significance? — and broods because neither the scientific community nor the public is as excited about it as he is. Minneapolis TV stations give him a few minutes of exposure, but interest quickly fades, and serious scientists treat the photos as if they’re some kind of hoax.

Due to his obsession, Newton’s in trouble at work. And in more trouble than usual at home. Heidi now thinks he’s crazy as well as old. Then, a telegram arrives from the editor-publisher at the Weekly World Enquirer, offering to pay $300 for exclusive rights to the flake pix. Heidi says ask for $500. Howard (the history teacher) advises against it altogether. Newton decides to hand carry the picture to W.W.E. offices in Miami, so that he might convince the editor to publish a lengthy article. Sleazy publicity is better than no publicity at all. He dumps baby clothes out of Heidi’s guitar case, throws in a change of underwear and the pictures. He buys a bus ticket to Miami.

On the island of St. Ignatz, Freddie is cutting his album. At about four A.M., there’s a break at the studio and Freddie walks outside in the moonlight to have a smoke. Two wild-looking Rastaesque black men come out of the jungle, subdue him, and carry him off.

Early the next morning, Freighter and his common-law wife, Cookie, are awakened by a terrible racket. Freighter is a middle-aged white American, a burly, bald giant with sailor tattoos and a red beard. Cookie is a cute, young black woman. Bleary-eyed, Freighter stumbles out of his picturesque shack to see what the hell is going on. Across the clearing, at the equally quaint shack of Zumba, Zumba’s wife, Leroyette, and his brother, Brutha (the location is far back in the hills and nobody else lives within five or six miles), Freddie has been chained to a post in the dirt yard. He has been given a cheap, tinny electric guitar (wired to a car battery), and ordered to perform.

Freddie is bitching and moaning, not so much at the command performance, as at the quality of the guitar. Freighter stares dumbfounded at the scene. Zumba wears a fiercely triumphant grin.

Each of the two shacks has an unusually tall, makeshift, eccentric antenna attached to it. The antennae appear to have been built in stages, out of whatever material (mostly junk) that happened to be available at the time of each addition. These twin towers are maybe forty feet high and rather bizarre. Cookie looks from Freighter to the towers to Freddie and back to Freighter again. She is apprehensive about something.

Arriving at the Weekly World Enquirer office in Miami, Newton catches the publishing tycoon who had wired him, Desmond Hinkley Jr., on his way out the door. Hinkley Jr. (he insists on the Jr. — if you call him Mr. Hinkley, he corrects you: “Mr. Hinkley Junior”) has received a tip that something has happened to Freddie Manhattan down on St. Ignatz Island, and he’s on his way there in hopes of a scoop. Newton refuses to hand over the snowflake pictures without an interview. Hinkley Jr., in a rush, offers to hear him out aboard his Lear jet, so Newton tags along to the Caribbean.

High above the ground, Freighter is adding to the height of his antenna tower. He keeps glancing down at Zumba, but Zumba is ignoring him. Zumba stands with his arms smugly folded, enjoying Freddie’s forced concert. Freighter yells down to Cookie to turn up the music on his shortwave, but it’s already at full volume and it can’t compete with Freddie’s live performance. Freighter fumes and Cookie looks worried.

In his hotel room, Hinkley Jr. is on the phone dictating his scoop on the Freddie Manhattan kidnapping. He instructs his subordinates that once they’ve broken the story, they are to announce that Hinkley Jr. is personally organizing and leading a rescue mission. He’ll leave at first light. Meanwhile, that snowflake freak, Newton Beck, is keeping a watch on the recording studio and will alert the paper immediately should a ransom demand be made.

At the secret clearing, Cookie’s fears have materialized. During the night, Freighter has gone off in the dune buggy. Now he squeals up in front of the shack — and discharges his prize: Newton. His triumph quickly turns into humiliation when Newton backs up his insistence that he’s not a rock star by opening his guitar case.

“It’s snow,” Newton says. “You know what snow is?” At first, they believe he’s talking about cocaine and start to rough him up. When it’s demonstrated that he possesses neither an instrument nor drugs, but merely some boring photographs, Zumba and Brutha have a great, long laugh at Freighter’s expense. Freighter stalks away to sulk, and Newton tells the story to the rest of them, including Freddie. (It’s here that we learn the details of Newton’s affair with Heidi.) Cookie is the most attentive. Her eyes light up when she hears about the twins. After the rest of them have wandered off, she stays.

Cookie tells Newton about the obsessive competition between Freighter and Zumba. It is mostly manifest in the radio towers: every time Zumba makes an addition, Freighter adds to his tower (originally, they were trying to see who could get the best reception of Miami rock stations but they have moved well beyond function into pure form). Recently, Leroyette has become pregnant, so Freighter, competitively, is trying desperately to impregnate Cookie.

Well and good, but all that interests Newton is solving the mystery of the identical snowflakes, and here he is chained to a post in the isolated interior of a backward island, helpless to act upon his breathtaking discovery. Even were he free in the civilized world, however, he would be at a loss to solve the mystery, since science preferred to ignore his discovery, to deny its implications. Cookie listens attentively. Then, as she gets up to go inside (where Freighter is wailing for her), she says, softly, “I knows somebody who might can hep you.”

Late that night, Cookie slips out and unchains Newton. By moonlight, she leads him into the jungle. After a long trek, they look down upon a shack by a waterfall. “’Fore you go down there you be doin’ something for me, Mr. Twinmaker.” Newton resists, telling her that he knows nothing about making twins, that it was an accident of nature. Cookie seduces him anyway, and there follows a brief but energetic act of coitus beneath a mango tree.

Afterwards, she takes him to the shack, where their knock is answered by a woman wearing heavy beads, gobs of bright red lipstick, and smoking a big cigar. A black rooster is cradled in her arms. She is stroking it.

Cookie leaves Newton with her mother. Mama Lo’s shack is dominated by an ornate shrine, in the center of which are lurid pictures of Jesus and Mary. Mama Lo makes Newton puff her cigar. He gets dizzy. With a short cord, Mama Lo ties the rooster to Newton’s ankle. When he looks up, the pictures of Jesus and Mary are gone and the photo of the identical snowflakes has been pinned up in their place. Once again, Mama Lo passes him the stogy.

Meanwhile, Desmond Hinkley Jr. and his ragtag search party of tourists, rock musicians, and local black policemen have rousted the inhabitants of a mountain village, and, holding aloft Freddie Manhattan albums, are unsuccessfully questioning them. The villagers are sullen. Not a peep. Lionel, the cop who is acting as Hinkley Jr.’s chief aide, announces that clearly it must be Zumba who is responsible for the abduction. According to Lionel, this folk hero, Zumba, and his brother reside — he points to a map — deep in the valley between the twin volcanoes. [NOTE: the island of Montserrat, site of George Martin’s recording studio, is, indeed, dominated by twin volcanoes.] It is only about fifteen miles from the village. “We’ll be there in no time,” Hinkley Jr. encourages his men. But when they return to their two vehicles, they find the tires have been slashed. They’ll have to hike.

“What I want to know,” Newton confides to Mama Lo, “is whether the snowflake phenomenon is a signal that the Earth is about to enter a new phase of evolutionary development, one in which many traditional scientific truisms will become obsolete, or have we simply been wrong all along in our rigid assumptions regarding the structure of reality.” Mama instructs him to shut up and enjoy the cigar. A faint blue glow has begun to emanate from the shrine.

At the clearing, Freighter discovers that Cookie has freed Newton. “What do it matter?” Cookie asks. “He couldn’t play no music no how.” “Zumba has a worthless brother,” Freighter says. “I don’t have no worthless brother. He was gonna be my worthless brother.” “Well,” says Cookie, “he not you brother.” She turns from him, smiles to herself, and places her hands over her womb. “And he not so worthless.”

Freddie, meanwhile, pleads, whines, and threatens. Until Zumba swings a machete a few inches from his nose. Then he sings and plays. Zumba grins contentedly. Brutha joins in on the bongos. This routine is repeated throughout the day.

Hinkley Jr.’s rescue party sweats and pants up the steep jungle road. A bit of bravado has drained from its leader.

The strange blue light has completely enveloped Mama Lo’s shack. Newton writhes on a straw mat on the floor. His eyes are closed. He groans, he writhes.

Several feet of snow blankets Minneapolis. As a Freddie Manhattan album plays on the stereo, a melancholy Heidi stares out the window. In the distance, a small figure hops across the snowy suburban landscape. As it nears, we see the figure is Newton. He is bound with rope, as if to a mast, to a giant chicken leg. No chicken, just the leg. The leg hops through the snow, toward the house. In their crib, the twins begin to cry. Heidi picks them up, wraps them well, and carries them outside. As they stand in the snow, the chicken leg hops around them. Newton blows kisses at the three of them. The twins goo and smile. Heidi mouths halfhearted kisses at Newton. Then, the chicken leg carries him off into the distance. He disappears beyond the pale horizon.

At kiosks all over America, the Weekly World Enquirer reveals the news of Freddie’s abduction. Network TV picks it up. The word “terrorists” is used. Dan Rather, a bit bemused, announces that tabloid publisher Desmond Hinkley Jr. is leading a rescue party in the St. Ignatz interior.

Indeed he is. But not without difficulty. Hinkley Jr. and Lionel, dirty, hot, and tired, look at one another. They agree they must be lost.

Things are quiet at the clearing. Freddie plucks gently at the silly guitar, Brutha beats the bongos ever so softly. Zumba is speaking philosophically. White men, black men seem like twins, he says. Fraternal twins. They look alike, in some ways, but there are many differences. Like the biblical twins, Jacob and Esau, they are separated by inequalities, destined to live apart.

While Zumba speaks, Freighter drives up in the dune buggy. He has been to the recording studio and stolen Freddie’s personal guitar. “My ax!” exclaims Freddie. He hurls the cheap guitar to the ground and embraces his beloved instrument. Zumba ignores all this. He continues his monologue. The twin souls of black and white, rich and poor, socialist and capitalist, can never be joined, Zumba says. He pauses. “Except, maybe, by music.”

Mama Lo is singing to Newton. All the while, she is swinging before his glazed eyes a corkscrew on the end of a string. Back and forth, pendulum-like. Newton’s gaze moves along the spiral of the corkscrew, following it down, down, down…

With Newton still bound to it, the giant chicken leg hops up the slope of the first volcano. It hops over the edge and down into the crater. Inside the volcano, the music is very loud. Upon a ledge, the Goddess is standing. She is resplendent, beautiful, both funky and ethereal. In her hands are a pair of dice. The Goddess shakes the dice and throws them. The dice are normal size when they leave her hand, but when they hit the volcano floor, they are huge. One large die lands at the foot of the chicken leg. Newton looks down upon it, sees it is a 2. The second die rolls to a stop beside it. This one is a 3.

As Newton stares, the two spots on the first die are replaced with the faces of his twin boys. He turns to the second die, whose three spots are just changing into the faces of three racially mixed baby girls. Each has a different-colored ribbon in her hair. The three primary colors.

Suddenly, the chicken leg hops into an underground passage. As it moves along the lava corridor (the primordial soup is bubbling, spattering Newton; it is red and looks suspiciously like barbecue sauce), we cut to an aerial view of the twin volcanoes. There is a roar, and a puff of smoke and steam erupts from the second volcano. Out of it pops Newton aboard the chicken leg, only now it is a cooked drumstick, dripping barbecue sauce. Newton gets a spectacular view of the island and its twin volcanic peaks.

In front of the shrine, Newton’s head snaps. He “comes to.” With a bewildered expression, he looks at Mama Lo. His attention is directed to the shrine. Where the snowflake picture was is now the face of the Goddess. The Goddess smiles and speaks, directly to Newton. “The dice are always rolling,” is what she says.

As Newton turns to Mama Lo, as if to speak, the shack door is smashed, and in bursts Hinkley Jr. and his posse. “You’re saved!” Hinkley Jr. yells to Newton. To Mama Lo he shouts, “No false moves! In the name of the Weekly World Enquirer and free men everywhere, you’re under arrest!”

A violent tropical thunderstorm has moved in over the clearing. Taking refuge from the downpour, Zumba, Brutha, Leroyette, and Freddie (unchained) are under Zumba’s shack, relaxing and smoking spliffs. Freighter, however, has climbed to the top of his antenna tower, where he is wiring Freddie’s expensive and adored guitar to the tip. When Freddie sees this, he runs out into the storm, jumping up and down and screaming. A distraught Cookie stands in the rain, yelling at Freighter to come down. “I got to beat him,” growls Freighter. “Honey, we is going to beat him,” says Cookie, rubbing her belly.

A bolt of lightning strikes Zumba’s tower. It sparks across the clearing, joining, momentarily, the twin towers with an electric arc. Freighter receives a jolt that knocks him off of his lofty perch.

In Minneapolis, Heidi is watching TV. The newscaster says that Freddie fans are gathering in Miami, keeping a vigil. Heidi says to the twins, “I wish we’d gone to Miami with your weird old daddy.”

When Hinkley Jr.’s party, including Newton, arrives at the clearing, the rain has just stopped. Unconscious, Freighter lies on the wet ground. Zumba and Freddie are working over him. Newton offers to drive to the civilized part of the island and fetch a doctor. He speeds away in the dune buggy. At one point, he can make out in the distance the waterfall and Mama Lo’s shack. He slows down and almost stops, but drives on.

A few days later, a Lear jet lands in Miami and Freddie Manhattan deplanes. The media is there in full force, as well as several hundred cheering fans. Some fans are carrying a huge banner, reading: WELCOME HOME FREDDIE! Among the fans is Heidi. She lays the twins on a baggage cart and moves in to touch Freddie. There is instantly something between them. Freddie looks her over and we can virtually hear the chemical crackle.

Newton, who has deplaned after Freddie (and after Hinkley Jr., now monopolizing the media), picks up the twins and walks slowly away with them. Heidi glances over, sees this, hesitates, then moves back into Freddie’s arms.

Nearly a year passes. It is early winter in Minneapolis. Newton drives through the snow to a day care center, where he deposits the twins. He then drives on to work. At the museum, a letter awaits him. It bears a St. Ignatz postmark. On the way to his station, he tears it open. He removes two photos. Walking, he looks at the first. It’s a picture of Zumba and Leroyette. They have a baby boy.

As Newton lectures, we see the second photo, which he has just taped to his projector. Cookie and Freighter (Freighter has a wooden leg now, and is making a “V” for Victory sign) are holding triplets: three little racially mixed girls, each with a different colored bow in her hair.

“Of all the trillions and trillions of snowflakes that have fallen upon the Earth, scientists claim no two…”

Newton breaks off. He stares at the photo of his triplets. As he projects fresh snowflakes onto a screen, he takes up again. “…scientists claim no two have ever been alike. However, folks, as we know, the dice are always rolling.” Expectantly, he turns to examine the screen.

Ergo! magazine, 1990