Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy

LOUSES IN THE SKIDROW DIMEHAUNTS

It is impossible now to suppose that organic life exists only on this planet.

–furbish lousewart v, Unsafe Wherever You Go

Justin Case heard about the louses in the skidrow dime-haunts at one of Epicene Wildeblood's wild, wild parties, on December 23, 1983. Simon Moon, a creature with almost as much hair as Bigfoot, planted the louses in Case's semantic preconscious. The whole evening was rather confusing-too many martinis, too much weed, too many people-and Moon was regarded as somewhat sinister by everybody because he worked for the Beast (or with the Beast, or on the Beast). To make matters even more surrealistic, that intolerable bore Blake Williams was lecturing on the Birth of Cosmic Humanity to anyone who would listen, and several other conversations were going on simultaneously. Nonetheless, Moon had a manuscript with him, and a few listeners, and Case couldn't help absorbing part of what the mad Beastman was reading.

"Thee gauls simper at his tyrant power," Moon was chanting when Case first became conscious of him. What the hell was that? "He is ghoon with this seven-week booths and his mickeyed mausers into mistory. His eyes did seem auld glowery."

"FUCK THEM ALL!" a drunken writer from California said, cymbal-like, in Case's other ear.

"I beg your pardon?" Epicene Wildeblood, gay as three chimps in a circus, seemed to think the drunk was addressing him.

"I said, FUCK THE BLOODY CAPITALISTS!!!" the writer explained, weaving a bit to windward. "The goddamn motherfucking moneygrubbing Philistine lot of them…"

"I see," Wildeblood said dryly. He did not like people throwing scenes at his parties. "I think maybe you've had too much to drink…"

"Yeah??? Well," the drunk decided majestically, "fuck you too. And the horse you rode in on, as they say in Texas."

But that lard-assed bore Blake Williams was droning, "The whole problem, of course, is that we haven't been born yet. In fact, only now, at this point in history, is humanity about to be born." Williams was full of rubbish like that.

"About to be born?" asked Carol Christmas, the most delicious piece of blond femininity in the galaxy. Case thought at once that it would be a splendidly wonderful idea to deposit at least some of his sperm within her-any orifice would do. He thought this was a brilliant decision on his part, and wondered how to begin implementing it. He had no idea that every male hominid, and many other male primates, immediately had that idea when looking at Carol.

"Elverun, past Nova's atoms," the hairy Moon read on to his small circle of admirers, "from mayan baldurs to monads of goo, brings us by a divinely karmic Tao-Jones leverage back past tallchief tactics and aztlantean tooltechs to Louses in the Skidrow Dimehaunts. This way the Humpytheatre."

"I still say fuck 'em all." The drunk was a solitary bassoon against Moon's keening violin. "Capitalism is a rich man's heaven and a poor man's hell."

"Ahm yes," that windy old baritone sax, Blake Williams, bleated to the adorable Carol. "You see terrestrial life is embryonic in the evolutionary sense. In perspective to the cosmos." Old chryselephantine pedant, Case thought.

The shrill fife of Josephine Malik, Case's editor, was heard: "Moon. They say he works for the Beast." She wore jeans, combat boots and a button saying in psychedelic colors, BRING BACK THE SIXTIES. Walking nostalgia.

"Floating you see," the tuba of Williams oompah-oompah-ed onward, "in the amniotic atmosphere at the bottom of a 4,000-mile gravity well. And taking the Euclidean parameters of that gestation as the norm. Totally fetal, if you follow me, and in a very real sense blind because unborn, knowing um the dimensions of the wombplanet but not knowing what lies beyond the gravitational vagina-the whole universe outside."

"A 4,000-mile cunt?" Carol was awed by the concept. Her blond head leaned forward in doubtful inquiry. "That's a very funny metaphor, Professor."

"The only difference between my publishers and the James gang," the drunk went on, monotonous as a bass drum, "is that the James boys had horses."

"… which explains the various rebirth experiences reported by astronauts like Aldrin and Mitchell and the others," Williams trumpeted (gassy old windbag). "Earth is our womb. Leaving Earth is literally rebirth. There's nothing metaphoric about it."

"The James boys hell, my last publisher was more like Attila the Hun," plonkty-plonked Frank Hemeroid in pianissimo.

Case began to feel that he had had perhaps too much hash.

"Right Wingers?" astronomer Bertha Van Ation was trilling. "We've got real Right Wingers out in Orange County. Let me tell you about the Committee to Nuke the Whales…"

But that impossible Williams person was murmuring privately now to Carol the Golden Goddess, and Case tried desperately to catch the words, dreading the thought that a sexual liaison was being formed.

"The mnemonic," Williams was crooning, "is quite easy. Just say, 'Mother Very Easily Made a Jam Sandwich Using No Peanuts, Mayonnaise, or Glue.' See?"

Mnemonic for what, in God's name? But Moon was shrilling like a banshee now:

"Wet with garrison statements, oswilde shores, daily blazers, tochus culbook depositories, middlesexed villains and fumes. Fict! The most unkennedest carp of all. Fogt. Veiny? V. D.? Wacky? His bruttus gypper."

"I was walking on Lexington Avenue one morning around three a.m.," the drunk maundered on, "and I heard this URRRRRP, this horrible eldritch laughter just like in an H. P. Lovecraft story, and do you want to know what I think it was? A publisher and his lawyer had just figured out a new way to screw one of their writers."

"This the lewdest comedy nominator," Moon keened high on the G-string. "This de visions of spirals fur de lewdest comedy nominator. Eerie cries from the scalped nations! This the oval orefice sends the plumbers fur de spills. Lust of the walkregans. Think! White harse devoted. Thank! Wit ars devoided. Dunk!"

"I wish Moon would stop reading that drivel," Fred "Figs" Newton was clearly heard in solo. "I'd like to ask him how much the Beast really knows."

"Oh," the mournful oboe of Benny Benedict sang ominously, "the Beast knows everything. …"

"… by Loop Shore and Dellingersgangers," Moon keened over them, oblivious, "where yippies yip and doves duz nothing, to the hawkfullest convention ever."

At this point Case had to beat a hasty retreat to the John (one martini too many) and he never did get all the conversations sorted out in his memory, but the louses in the skidrow dimehaunts were firmly lodged in the Ambiguous Imagery files of his Myth-and-Metaphor Detector, right next to the Three Stooges and Chinatown.

And Cagliostro the Great.