Chapter 3: Secrets of the American Dream

When reason began to collect the aimless neurons dancing in his brain into cells of self-awareness, Olney Garkle naturally came to feel at odds with home and community. His culture's moneytheistic value system, based on self-starting self-interest at the service of short-term wealth creation, offended the wreckage of his longing for immortality. At the time he couldn't have expressed it quite that way, nor could he have voiced the sadness he felt in having no one but his ever excited wee-wee to teach him about real life.

Indeed, it was that game little throbber who taught him an important facet of the time and place to which he was born: whatever felt good was bad, and even the thought could produce a lifetime of guilt. He understood that to be loved by adults he must hide from them. He must hide not only his high-ecstasy thingamabob, but also his true self. People just didn't care for wishy-washy concepts like someone's "true self." What they were interested in had more to do with its very opposite, with the grinning, fake personas they projected in order to hide their unperceived insecurities. As Olney grew up, he wondered if they wouldn't rather blow up the world than admit to a craven need for warm slobbery sex.

He learned early on that the human race consisted of Olney Garkle and The Other. He also knew that all the billions of people who comprised The Other felt the same about themselves and every other Other. It was a lonely revelation whose simple remedy was encouraged by social convention: a few lessons in superficial conformity covered the pit for a lifetime.

He studied the parents of his peers: fragments all. They didn't seem to care whether they were animal, mineral or vegetable. As long as they owned things and could shop for more, a certain contentment enriched their tepid lives. They seemed a kindly, cheerful lot, but behind their goodnatured contentment he sensed a protectionist mentality that would annihilate to maintain the status quo. It made him uneasy. Olney didn't like the idea of owning things; yet if he thought about it, he probably wanted everything. Not to keep in physical form, but as essence, to be kept inside as virtual memory and ready for use whenever needed. Alas, the era to which he was born knew nothing of such exotic sentiments, save for an occasional leftfield acquaintance who knew of someone who, it usually turned out, had converted spiritual longing to a mania for vegetables.

By nature, Olney was more fixed than innovative; once obsessed by something he would take the begun wildly beyond. O.'s three pillars of obsession: creativity as the process through which life was given meaning, the battle against injustice (especially at the hands of the self-made millionaire turned politician), and the pursuit of twinkling pussy kept him busy throughout his life. His creative nature was strong and instinctive, but he expressed it in binges, between bouts of survival. Influenced as he was by a culture that encouraged ingenuity as a means to financial gain, he often created more trouble than art.

Injustice he found everywhere. Someone, usually in a high place, was always trying to shove a half-baked ideology down the all-too-willing throats of the people. Americans were taught that the awful things that happen to the rest of the world "can't happen here," but in fact they had been happening for generations. The fight against communism (or socialism or liberalism or any other system based on sharing the wealth) had become dogma and turned them into an insular and paranoid people. In their manic denial of belonging to the same species that produced foreigners and foreign beliefs, Americans kept trying to rewrite history to suit themselves. Everyone was in on it. Nationalistic pride swelled their crew-cut chests as they turned themselves into the world's saviour, a collective Jesus Christ determined to bring the deprived and uncivilised billions the freedoms inherent in the American Way. Yet, despite the American majority's wish to homogenise the planet according to rules layed down by the Dick and Jane version of the Bible, cultural differences remained. And despite periodic grass roots efforts to have the Universe stricken from classroom study for its suspected indifference to the American Crusade, the Universe also remained.

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Heedless Olney applied himself to the mysteries of the Universe as often as he could. Especially the sensation of its nearly exploding every time he played with himself. Olney came to regard his uber-weanie with awe. When wasn't it stiff. From that fateful day in the crib it had him turning his back on mom and dad. On behalf of their Protestant revulsions and incessantly patrolling eyes, he kept it well hidden, sheltering it in the cosseting softness of his littleboy hands.

Olney delighted in the secrecy of sex to which his parents had unwittingly initiated him. By grade three he was tutoring other boys and girls in the art of playing Secrets, and by grade six had a reputation as the school's Casanova. In Olney's order, the novice was supposed to have a secret place on his or her person that he, Olney (or a favoured disciple or disciplette), would have to find by the trial and error method. As the newcomer's body was systematically probed for its glabrous secret, the article of clothing covering that part would be slowly removed. Our young guru was the model of patience as he gently touched or kissed or licked here and there, asking, "Is this the place?" By the time he finally reached Down There, no one had enough breath left to say "Yes-s-s!"

Olney's sect gathered in unfrequented corners of the school--the janitor's closet was a favourite--to supervise the debut of the newest member. Giggling and gawking they took turns searching for the unnamed treasure, and when it was found they shared the secretive liquefactions and tumescences with toy-larynxed squeals of delight.

An unforeseen deviation in Olney's childhood sexual exploits occurred when he was twelve years old. It happened one day in church. In accordance with dad's precepts concerning the moral supremacy of America, Mom had been forcing Olney to take Bible lessons after school. He hated being cooped up in the smelly church. The lessons bored him, and worse, they interfered with his after school romps. He'd only recently discovered the uncharted territory behind the city dump, and what a great place it was. Beyond the big hole where people threw their pre-plastic era junk lay hills and valleys and hidden pathways good for weeks of exploration. Studying the Bible seemed a sin: it interfered with those sacred afternoons.

He often squirmed under the stare of the moist-eyed minister. Mom thought the spirit of Christ wet the man's eyes, but Olney had him figured for a pansy. Besides, the man had freckles. Olney scoffed at the idea of grown ups with freckles.

There were only four other kids in the class; evidently most dads didn't give a poop for America. Olney hated them too. The only boy wore Sunday school attendance pins on his mama's-boy vest, and the girls were snooty or fat or ugly-skinned; an affront, in Olney's opinion, to delicate femininity, of which he was already a connoisseur.

On this particular day Olney was the only one in attendance. He figured the other kids were probably home puking up the sissy food they always ate. He was sure the minister would cancel the class--a free day, after all. He put his coat back on, ready to beat it.

But no, the weird churchman's eyes were drippier than usual. He was lamenting over the smallness of his class as he sat next to Olney. Putting his hand on the boy's knee, he began to speak of bad women from the Bible. He spoke at length and in detail while his hand gradually moved higher. Olney was about to leap to his feet when the man's fingers gently touched his crotch. The feeling was electric. Olney's feet stayed riveted to the spot while his loins did the leaping, right back to his spine. No one had ever done it like that before, not even Olney, himself. He couldn't move, nor could he look at the miracle-fingered creep of God. Instead, Olney chose to look at a painting on the wall, a voluptuous depiction of Mary holding the infant Jesus. Her eyes were large and provocative and God only knew what was happening to her below the frame.

Olney's twelve-year-old psyche was now called upon to receive an additional thunderbolt, not from Heaven, but from the church minister himself. In a fit of flaming possession, the good father took unto his--the lips of God's breathless go-between--Olney's oft-suckled yet spew-virgin tool for a generous and holy anointing. The washer of sins knew well those degrees of holiness and the boy's rosy cock was a full-blown Ten. Olney's eyes were fixed on the mother of God's milky-white throat as the hot padre worked away.

A sudden and never-before-felt surge of mystical ecstasy was just beginning to rise in the young acolyte's now deeply religious parts when God or Murphy saw fit to dash the new Christian's passion, as well as the good Father's, by arranging a loud knock at the door. Zipping up and sprinting for the emergency exit, Olney noticed the preacher's stricken face squinching up for an unholy howl of forsaken frustration. As the door swung open to admit a group of dapper though troubled men--the town's Purveyors in Mania Pacifications--the preacher's face instantly changed to the pious expression it knew best. Olney listened from the slype as the grim PiMPs stated their business. It seemed that increasing demands from local pressure groups--notably the Women Against Their Own and Other Fun-loving Organs--were depressing the market. The point was, the well-dressed procurers growled, that unless the good and benevolent pastor, in whose parish this potential disaster was taking place, could find a way to call off those uppity bitches and their do-gooder crusade, the high tithes were over.

On the way home, Olney passed a couple of girls he recognized. Their widening eyes, blushy cheeks, and readymade giggles clearly showed they were wise to the rise in his Levis. He tried coaxing them with a seething stare, but they scampered away. Olney walked and walked, covering several square areas of town in a daze, thigh slippery, heart pounding, face zomboid. Still inflamed, he returned home. But that was no good; the heat had to be turned off in the same way it was turned on. Olney needed help.

His robot trembled like an earthquake in a hurricane as he rang the doorbell of the new girl down the street; a thin-wristed nymphet named Courtney Faire. He'd already tested her on the tetherball pole at school and knew it would be only a matter of time. Well, here it was. She would take over where the Church had left off.

Courtney answered the door. To Olney's chest-heaving relief, her parents were out. "Great," he said, grabbing her hand, "where's your bedroom?" and hauled her into its messy, cluttered sanctum. "Hey, what's going on?" she yelled as they sailed through the air to land with several bounces on the bed. "I love you," he cried, and covered her angel-buttery skin with kisses. When she protested, he tickled her and made her laugh. Then he started kissing her again; she protested no more.

Courtney's long delicate neck and fathomless Madonna eyes scared most boys into a divine paralysis, but Olney was an expert in religious ecstasy now and embodied with one helluva host to boot. Courtney would have shrieked if time she'd had before Olney pushed his holy sacrament between her lips and sharp untutored teeth. Truth was, she didn't at all mind her new caveboy's forceful attentions, especially with his tongue going bananas down there ... ummm ... in that warm little nest she liked to touch so much ... ooh-hoo-hoo ... ever since last week when he made her shinny up the tetherball pole to untangle the ball ... oh, weepers ... and she'd fallen off half way down, her whole body a shooting star, and now ... hey, jeez ... it was delirium time again ... what's that stuff coming out of his ... eeeeuuw ... as Olney felt the meaning of life ripple through his body and leave it for the mouth of Courtney Faire, herself transformed into a warm chalice of love, though choking a little as she squealed with her own rapture. Side by side they rolled back and forth across the bed, two divine beings generously lubricating each other's half of the cosmos.

Olney and Courtney fell madly in love with that first taste of love's creamy body--his inaugural orgasm and hers too. They became inseparable at school, went to movies together, studied together, and finally went all the way together

Alas, she moved a year later. Her father's company transferred him to another state, but Olney suspected he just wanted to get her away from the boy who was making her grow up too fast. They wrote letters for awhile, sealed with passionate and tearful kisses, and then ... well, the world was so full of new interests, new boyfriends and girlfriends ... they lost contact, forever.

Her loss left a permanent ache in Olney's heart. It was impossible to stop loving her. They were together for such a short time they'd never even had a fight. And were never allowed to grow apart, as all kids in love must eventually do.

The girl who took the Virgin Mary's place and cured him of potential freckled-padre syndrome was a constant source of longing for Olney. In time, he came to regret this romantic yearning, for it was Courtney's loving eyes and slender, pre-pubescent body who greeted him whenever he blew into that stelliferous zero with another woman. The vision never interfered with his sexual gusto or his capacity to love, but he knew it was a problem when he started paying too much attention to his lovers' daughters ....

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In grade eight, during the decline of Secrets, when the kids were growing up, getting too wise, too embarrassed, Olney's satyrical ways finally caught up with him. He made the fatal mistake of initiating the mayor's daughter.

The mayor was a powerful figure in county politics, as was his brother, the city's chief of police. The mayor's daughter had deeply enjoyed Olney's passionate "tongue tickling," as she called it, but that evening at the dinner table an afternoon's worth of guilt and certain damnation forced her to return her mother's dinner back to the plate, substituting the once pleasing meal with a puree of same. While her mother was in the kitchen puking in sympathy, the girl confessed all to her father. Tears of penitence garnished the mess before her as she supplied Olney's name and the names of other girls the fiend had taken advantage of. While his baby blubbered, the girl's father leapt to the phone and called his brother and a few friends.

Public Enemy Number One had just finished eating dad's favourite dinner of macaroni and cheese. Mom was absorbed with clearing off the dishes and removing the TV trays while dad was in the kitchen getting another bottle of Acme beer, when Olney heard several cars pull up in front of the house. Car doors slammed, one after another, like mortars going off in that new movie about Korea, The Steel Helmet. He parted the curtains for a looksee and instantly lost his skeletal support. He knew what was happening. But Martin Kane, Private Eye, was on TV! Briefly, he weighed up the pros of hanging around to find out whodunit with the cons of imminent knocks at the door. As his parents returned to the living room, he excused himself and slipped out the back door. He and Kilroy the cowboy's sidekick pushed their trusty Schwinn through the back gate into the alley and rode like the wind to their secret hideout in the hills. There they made plans never to be seen again, or at least not until the loose-broken all-hell had finally frozen over.

The case against him was airtight. And within its lifeless vacuum lay the remnants of nearly a dozen once-thrilled little souls. Looming boom-voiced fathers wrung confessions from each whimpering child. Threatened with tortures favoured in concentration camps of the recent past, the girls one by one pointed the accusing finger at their former hero.

Olney Garkle was ruined. And so were they.

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Electing reform school over the wishes of mom and dad, who felt God and Country would best be served by the infanticide of their only begotten son, Olney entered adolescence as a pimple-popping isolate whose extra-libidinal drive promised front-page kudos in the annals of sex crime.

The reformatory did its best to cool those urges. Besides teaching him the rudiments of a few useful trades (which he was never to use), it taught him to cope sullenly with authority. Revenge against the cretins in charge only whipped them into frenzies of oppression; revolution was possible, but you had to be free to make it. His few friends had gotten there by committing more normal crimes, the kind of offences America loved to quiverlip over when Hollywood went to Boys Town. They were good kids whose caste had denied them fulfilment of the American Dream, especially the Great White Dream of becoming president. They were too poor or black or different in other unacceptable ways. Many had forced the card of fate and been traumatised by its face. Yet they had survived and awakened in ways their law-loving peers would never experience. They perceived life without the veil of sentimental sloganising. A person had to be authentic in his own right; no one got away with uncreative bullshitting for long. But the reformatory was a place of incarceration, and the adults who ruled it rarely looked upon their "students" with compassion.

If not for a chance introduction to European culture and the awakening of a desire to visit and be part of it, Olney might have gone on to the gas chamber, still trying to resolve the conflict between his nature and the vacuum jar it had been sealed in. The closed consumer circuit of the America he knew was a battleground between ice and fire, violent polarities battling for control of an empty centre.

The chance came with a weekend pass for good behaviour, part of which Olney and a friend spent at the nearby university film festival hoping for glimpses of tits and ass. They weren't disappointed. Sylvana Mangano's breasts appeared fleetingly in a riot scene in a grainy Italian movie called Bitter Rice. They sat through three other movies, hoping for more bits of the women's bodies they were going crazy without. The last one went one better. The kid's dad casually squeezed the mom's tits, sending the boys into weeks of fantasy-driven masturbation. That film, The Four Hundred Blows, also changed Olney's life. He suddenly wanted to make movies, to write, to stroll down those enchanting streets in what seemed like a fairy tale world.

It took more than a decade, but Olney eventually made it to the Europe he had fallen in love with. There, he found that the life force seemed to radiate from a centre bordering on sanity, though subject to the same gnashing frustrations. Europeans wept and laughed their way to the same dead end as Olney's self-winding Americans, but more authentically, or so he thought. They might even be worse off than Americans in many ways, but were much less uptight about it. They were an older people, closer to history, closer to a past that had swept over their hopes and best intentions and crushed them time and again. Americans were still children, rich kids with power and no idea of the responsibility it entailed. Olney looked at it this way: Europeans could produce a Nazi who still appreciated Mozart. An American Nazi wouldn't know Mozart from singing pillows of asswipe.

Without this break in cultures, Olney would have fallen into the tarpits of his soul. A great reason to jump, he often surmised, was the sometimes overpowering desire to make immediate love to a feminine deity who just happened to be standing next to him at, say, a bus stop, whether she wanted to or not. Were that thrilling deed ever to be accomplished, the empowerment surging through his transgressor's veins would easily allow him to slip off one or the other of the two stools he'd set on either side of the fence between a rock and a hard place, and thus stride forth as a golem of invincible evil. All he'd have to do was act like a priest, a politician, or even the president, and no one would dare believe that he was split right down the middle. While functioning as good citizen Garkle, his cock could freely terrorise, slaughtering all suspicion of weakness. Functioning amorally with Christian-capitalist platitudes, his inner fiends could rise from their primal bile to rip, hack, and slash. On the one hand: Olney Garkle, model American. On the other: Olney Garkle, potential American.

Brought up in the snake pit of moral fragmentation by a ruling class of bullet-proof philistines, it was no wonder Olney Garkle spent his youth getting more comfortable inside that O. By the time he turned eighteen, it was already home. He didn't know it then, but he was lucky. To prove he didn't know it then, Olney went to work. He tried all sorts of jobs, making up for limited capabilities and lack of interest by being likeable. His bosses were always sorry to see him go, but there he went. Olney was never satisfied. He didn't want a career either.

After a brief stint as a bill-paying householder in a job-with-a-future while living with one of the many women of his dreams, Olney dropped out. He took his share of drugs, returned to the soil with a gene pool he could call his own, only to find that the journey left him with a narrowing mind and dirty fingernails. He wandered the width and breadth of America looking for affirmations of life in its folk wisdom, but instead found a nation ready, willing and able to remain paralysed. Finally, he looked into exotic and esoteric religions and eventually lit out for the rest of the world where they lived, out of the tarpits and into the source.

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Chapter 4: The Pootie

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