My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist

10. psychotechnologies of the somber workaholics

i presume that you're there the weight of your invisible body straining the leather seat of my director's chair that strange fart wafting past me like the mildew of old books inhaled cigarette smoke assuming the shape of a trachea and two lungs you are a vivid impasto of vanishing cream you are the negative aggregate of a lifetime's ablations this is you after your gastrectomy and your laryngectomy and pancreatectomy and craniectomy but chйrie, you insult me by offering to buy me a drink in my own home — drinks here are gratis and i do the offering what's more, you have the audacity to try and pick me up while my wife is asleep in our connubial bed not fifteen yards from here! such bold incorporeal lust! most american men want to fuck something hairy — either a vagina or an asshole, but all you offer is a circle — a bald circumference well, maybe i will, just to keep the night alive go ahead, muse, bend over and tell me i'm the greatest thing after being chased across the pampa all day by a bola-swinging centaur with wine cooler on his breath and sodomy in his eyes…

the doorbell rings…

— hello, we're selling ourselves to raise money for the gestapo we're like peppers — we come in two colors, red and green if you buy one of us, me for example, you can bring me as your date to the gestapo club and then when you take me home you can split me open and lay me out across a hot cheese steak and eat me

— what if i want to buy both of you, i asked

— tant mieux, said the cop-cum-pepper, gently drawing the tip of his nightstick across his partner's crisscrossed bandoliers of bullets and tranquilizer darts

— well, i still don't understand… what are you? are you like transsexuals or what? i don't get it

— no, man, essentially we're cops, but we were bred to be like peppers it's like we're hybrids mengele developed in his garden in paraguay so we're cops, we're gestapo — but essentially you can eat us and if you open us up, we're essentially like peppers — fleshy-walled, many-seeded, etc. etc. etc.

thick white smoke billows from the factory smokestack

and forms an undulating somatic shape

but, like a sung dynasty poet, i am too drunk to

assume gigantic proportions and embrace the industrial genie,

too drunk to lick the white soot from her big molecules with my

tongue

i'm playing with a hair in my ear — and i tug the hair and there's a very strange, slightly painful sensation deep in my head, followed by a flood of memories — the hair turns out to be connected to the mnemonic section of the brain (the hippocampus) — it's like pulling chatty cathy's string — instead of talk though, memories ensue:

shaving cream gurgles up from a plaster of paris volcano

in miss cosgrove's social studies class

oh man, i wanted to kiss the harsh authoritarian words of miss cosgrove

i wanted to find the source of her voice with my tongue

i wanted to strum the taut, cold, acrid strings of her vocal cords with my tongue

but like you, su tung-p'o, i was too drunk

jill is teaching tess how to speak in a flat tone of voice

you have to sound like this, jill says flatly

jill, i just can't speak with that flat affect! says tess

with fierce gesticulation, her voice cresting with emotion

male hormone oozes from every fucking pore in my body i sweat male hormone i drool male hormone my tears are pure male hormone when i exert myself i stink of testosterone my balls are like giant planets engulfed in chaotic storms of toxic gases i'm like some beast who marks off his territory with his reeking yellow urine my sperm is like a virulent milkshake of recombinant worms my penis smells like an uncorked decanter of fermented smegma geysers of purple molten shit explode from my asshole, destroying villages in its path i'm all man 100 % man

there's a bar on the highway which caters almost exclusively to authority figures and the only drink it serves is lite beer and the only food it serves is surf and turf and one night the place is filled with cops and state troopers and gym teachers and green berets and toll attendants and game wardens and crossing guards and umpires

each man loves his wife so very much sometimes he hugs her with such ardor that it leaves her gasping for breath he feels as if he wants to literally get inside her skin with her, to draw her flesh over them both as if it were a sheet or a quilt, to feel the palpitations and quivers of her internal organs warm and slick with their secretions against his nakedness when she eats, he puts his ear to her cheek as she chews to better savor the music of her mandibles he puts an ear to her stomach and enjoys the churning and gurgles of her digestion and an ear to her lower abdomen to note the sibilant rush of gas as it winds through her intestines, to the small of her back to hear each crack of her vertebrae, between her shoulder blades for the soft expansion and contraction of her lungs at night, while she sleeps, he puts his ear against her scalp and listens for the almost inaudible rustling of her hair as it grows

in the old days they'd just throw you in a big iron caldron and boil you now they put you in a teflon no-stick saucepan and they saute you for a while in walnut oil i knew one guy who was poached i know one guy who was fricaseed i know one guy who was diced benihana style and stir-fried i knew one guy — he was only in the steamer for three minutes and they said, take him out we'll eat him al dente and they give these people varsity letters my father took me to an endocrinologist and the endocrinologist said, he'll always be eine kleine mensch, don't send him to no state school 'cause see he's bite-size… he'll make a perfect hors пoeuvre that night my mother came up to my bedroom and she said, if you ever see one of them in a letter sweater or letter jacket you run as fast as you can unless you wanna end up with a frilly toothpick through your back or unless you wanna end up between two slices of wonder bread 'cause ain't no deus ex machina gonna swoop through the skylight and save your white ass i never suspected you though, baby you were so nice to me i took you back to your apartment you poured me a nice cold heineken i said, baby, i've been lonely for too long i got six years of pent-up rhapsodies in me then i saw that fuckin' varsity ankle bracelet i said, uh-uh, no way, and i tried to escape but you squirted me with bug spray and my legs went numb

the next thing i know i'm in the emergency room at the hospital and the doctor looks at me and says, "mah man, you dead" he says, "i gotta help get your soul out of your body but it's gonna cost you a little extra" "feel around in my pocket," says my eerie disembodied voice, "you can take my visa card" "i'm gonna have to squeeze the soul out of your body by rolling you up like a tube of toothpaste…"

now, i am the sound of a playing card

ticking the spokes of a bicycle wheel

that is not a sky, it is a grid it is a grid of thin black lines superimposed over a bleached ceiling the stars and planets and moons and satellites are bleached out the constellations which once seemed indelible have been expunged by sweaty grim-faced charwomen who came to the beach at night with scouring pads and long poles the logos, graffiti, toponyms, and exhortations to "love and be loved" were soon replaced by the glaucous swaths of industrial stripping machines the technicians did not polish the sky with their lamb's wool pads because the artists and designers had decided that the sky would be more beautiful and more numinous with a matte finish as opposed to a high sheen and when the black grid was installed even the most mawkish elegiac poets could not mourn the demise of the old sky because the black grid which stretched endlessly in all directions was so unspeakably lovely, because language was made superfluous by the black grid's perfect representation of the godliness of the human imagination today, beneath the black grid, teenagers disport themselves on the beach they move with one will from their blankets to the surf and then, as if motivated by a single atavistic instinct, they move back to their blankets en masse they eat hot dogs and then suddenly en masse they drink pepsi and when nightfall comes and the lymphatic teenagers (the gawky, squat, sinewy, and nubile) fall asleep en masse and their tucked recumbent bodies litter the beach, it is perfectly quiet and perfectly dark except, suddenly, for the white headlights of a sports car careening down the corniche

when i first met trudy she was wearing a t-shirt that said SMITH COLLEGE SQUASH TEAM i asked her if she went to smith yeah, she said are you on the squash team? yeah, but i hang out with a bunch of animals, she said, pointing to a group of clean-cut all-american kids in turtleneck sweaters and white loafers sitting on a three-foot-high chocolate-covered vanilla ice cream bar in the shape of a valentine's day heart

the hippopotamus feeds on soft vegetation,

his excrement feeds the fish,

his pajamas dance convulsively from the clothesline

the sperm whale feeds on cuttlefish

and secretes ambergris to protect his intestines from the sharp bones,

his silk negligee is whipped by the wind

the swordsmith hammers a sandwich of iron and steel

and gives it a bath of fire and water,

his wife is 19 inches diagonally

turkish women abhor body hair

hello, mark this is elizabeth hurlick i'm one of trudy's friends from school trudy asked me to call and tell you that when she gets home from work she's going to want to make love tout de suite and then eat 'cause she's got an early squash practice so she wants you to season the chicken with some basil and oregano and garlic and onion powder and paprika and put it in the oven at about 350° and then she wants you to run a hot bath and add some of the bayberry rum and spice bath beads which she says are in a silver crabtree and evelyn tin on the blue shelf next to the hair dryer and q-tips and she wants you to soak in the tub for a while she says there's already a washcloth in there or you can use her loofah and she said that while you're in the tub you should masturbate almost to the point of orgasm and stop and that way you'll have a more copious ejaculation later when you have sex with trudy because trudy says you have to propitiate the squash god and she says that the squash god is in the mood for a really super-copious ejaculation and she said to tell you that when you get out of the tub you can daub some of your chanel pour homme cologne on your chest and in the hair on your belly and near your navel but she doesn't want you to use any deodorant under your arms because when you're having sex she wants your armpits to smell kind of macho sort of raunchy kind of ruggedly homo sapien kind of rural and she wants you to wait for her wearing either the red or the white-and-gold kimono danny and kristen brought you from japan, whichever one you prefer and you should wait by the window in the study, sort of voluptuously languidly posed like oscar wilde in the photograph by sarony, she said you'll know which one she means — it's in the montgomery hyde biography — and when she comes in through the door she wants you to say, i'm extremely utterly enervated from having spent all afternoon watching sparrows caper about the fire escape and then you should nonchalantly let your kimono fall open so your meat sort of pokes out and then she wants you to lift her skirt up and take her underpants off and she wants you to rub your knuckles up and down her perineum if you're writing this down that's spelled p-e-r-i-n-e-u-m it's the area between her anus and her genitals and she said to tell you that while you're fucking you should try to keep an eye on the clock so the chicken doesn't burn i hope you don't mind me leaving this sort of intimate personal message on your answering machine but i'm a really really good friend of trudy's and trudy's told me all about you and i hope we can all get together sometime maybe for burritos and a video on the vcr or something trudy says you're creepy in a sort of attractive way and that sounds fun