Chapter 14: A Hootable Enclave

The cafe is bustling with all the merriment of Thanksgiving Day in a cancer ward. Isometric with things to do, Helga stands gaping at the fictive din, a dishrag in each hand. Her wandering gaze is just passing inert counter potato, Olney Garkle, when, as if wakened from a deep trance by her restorative glance, he suddenly springs to life. The poor waitress was just thinking what a strange duck he seems to be, but now she's barely able to restrain a gasp of certainty. She watches in dismay as his left hand leaps across the counter to throttle what appears to be a madman's claw bent on raking his face. With an award-winning array of theatrical grimaces contorting his face, his left hand wrestles the claw--in reality, his right hand--to the counter. Thus subdued, the tamed appendage is swiftly put in service with its vanquisher as a muffling device for the ensuing scream that would have concluded with the screamer begging someone, anyone, for a cigarette.

Helga shakes her sensible head and moves on to the reassuring mundanities of endless Moon Food tidying.

For several minutes Olney has been aware of unusual activity in his left lung. As one who bypasses rational diagnoses whenever possible, he's convinced a tiny mouse has somehow moved in. Furthermore, he is certain the mouse is hobbling around on crutches owing to a broken leg. In keeping with his inclination to conclusions meant to defy the heartbreak of reality, Olney hasn't bothered to ask how the mouse got there in the first place, but rather, how he's going to get rid of it. For sooner or later he will find something to smoke, and the last thing he needs is a dead mouse in his lungs. He can well imagine the furor caused by an autopsy. Newsletter headlines from Animal Rights Groups and Anti-Smoking Coalitions throughout the land would zealously proclaim: Passive smoking cause of mouse death. Vagrant held for murder.

But mainly, it tickles. Every time the mouse takes to moseying around with its crutches it sends a frisson of ticklishness through Olney's chest, for which there is no apparent remedy. He's tried coughing, sneezing and clearing his throat. He's even tried to exhale the little critter, to no avail. "Bah!" sez O. aloud, punching his chest. He punches his chest a few more times; the mouse stops moving at last. "Well and good," mutters puncher, for he hasn't time to listen to his mind and body and their warnings against the glorious impedimenta bound to prevent a useful destiny. Especially when not so much as one foul tasting, even menthol, impedimentum has come his way in what seems like hours.

As if to relieve its host of the tensions caused by resisting yet another tiresome dictate of conscience, the squeaky harbinger scurries to the parallel world from whence it came, its little crutch clicking across random deposits of asbesticized alveoli en route.

Meanwhile, Olney's bloodstream takes up the call, keening with desperation for tobacco smoke to foul its raceways. Dozing watchmen in outpost hutboats are swept away by a flood of addictocytes screaming for relief. They're turning his life canals into an outboard regatta, zooming down his legs and back up his sides, rounding the far turn of his brain and into the stretch toward his heart.

Sensing disaster, Helga scurries over. "How 'bout moah coffee," she yells.

"Gosh, thanks," says O. The coffee is useless without a cigarette, but at least his heart has been saved from becoming a pin cushion for speedboats.

"Tha' ok," mutters the waitress, rolling her eyes.

Well, it looks like cold turkey in the mainline. After paying Helga, he'll have that three cents left over and, let's face it, in the case of a five cent cigarette, you can't ask for two cents credit. Especially from the Levantine brothers who recently bought Slobodan's Fine Wines. They came from Beirut to the Land of Good 'n' Plenty, hoping to find a little peace and profit. Arriving in the slim state's capital city, they bought a liquor store not three blocks from the government buildings. Unfortunately for the sibling Beiruti's, the three blocks they chose were on the wrong side of Gibber Park, and it's been surly service ever since. Meagre sales in pints of cheap sherry and nickel cigarettes drier than the sands of neighboring Syria have made the two maliks yearn for the shell-strewn craters of home.

"What to do," moans O., sipping, then gagging on the coffee. For getting down a mouthful of Moon Food coffee without tobacco smoke to smooth the way is about as easy as trying to stick up the corner store Chinaman with a coiled copy of Assault Weapon Weekly. "All your butts, Chinky-poo, and make it snappy." But Chinky-poo doesn't even look up. Delicately tapping the floor alarm with his slippered toe while continuing to scan the inventory sheet of girlie magazines, he alerts the back room from where sixteen of his children emerge, all armed with blazing Uzi automatics that cut our sweating addict into pieces the size of Fearless Fosdick holes.

Well, whatcha gonna do, Plick?

Like Cleola behind him, Olney wants to know just how his very own "Chick"--in this case, "Slick"--is going to handle the pickle he's in. He runs his fingers through the pomaded hair of the old adviser within, a shadowy character on call every so often to help him deal with those "Ching moments".

So, it's Unca Slick to the rescue, is it? Got any ideas, I don't suppose?

I think a bus ride with the Cruzers is in order, replies the avuncular adviser.

Olney rabbit punches a lickerish surge from his animal brain. This is serious business, Unc. We've got decisions to make here.

If you insist, says the Unc within.

I insist. You've been called on for help, you're the adviser, so advise. And wisely, if you don't mind, Olney adds with menace.

All right, don't blow a gasket. The Unc clears his throat. Well, what are your alternatives? You can always join the folks guzzling their own snot over at welfare. Spend more time than you ever believed possible just sitting around waiting for some civil service satrap to grant you despising interviews while monitoring every mistake and dollar you make. Yep, you can sure do that. Me, I think we should hustle on down to the bus stop and--

Unc!

Yeah, yeah. Let's see, you can keep looking for that job at a dollar-above-minimum wage. Plenty of interviews to be had. Though it's embarrassing when you put on that shiteating grin and sound like a disc jockey. Why do you have to be so phony?

Hey, you would be too. Everyone's phony on the job market. Trying to sell abilities they don't have or--how demeaning--abilities they do have. The guy behind the desk is always intimidating.

And then you haul out that résumé of lies and practically beg for impoundment by employers who--shame, shame on you--always reject your offer of slavery. Is that what you want, Plick? To die of cancer by throwing your life away for a paycheck? Hey, get an office job. Sort papers, type invoices, meet unworthy deadlines, put the make on secretaries, drink with the other clerks after hours, develop an interest in sports, read the newspaper on Sunday, watch TV. Getting body snatched at the Brain Eraser after a hard day at the office will surely coax your cells into going berserk.

Thanks, Unca Downer, but I don't want to work in an office. Any other options?

Sure. Try factory work. Thinking, sensitive types like yourself have always been fascinated by the mystique of assembly lines. You know the type. "Listen, tell mom I love her and tell my girl I'll write that poem for her some day, but now I'm going to The Factory and I'll probably die. But hey, it's the hero's life for me." And there you go, fragile young poetaster crossing little bridges above molten rivers of steel, while your fellow workers down below jeer and throw red hot rivets, "Yah, ya fuckin' sissy!"

Come on, nobody works in factories any more.

Tell that to the proles.

Well, obviously I'm not about to work in a sweathouse.

Most people are glad to take any job they can get.

Yeah, well not me. Next?

Why not enjoy the peace and quiet of country life as an artisan, carving and potting in the rustic beauty of an isolated, idealistic community?

Don't be so out of it. You're supposed to have grown up with me, you know I've been there, done that. Or did you get stuck? You sound like a Sixties hippie, for Christ's sake.

Why not return to yesteryear, that's what most people in your panicky state would do. It's cuddly. Listen: you might even live to be an old man, known and respected for miles around as one humbly dedicated to craftsmanship and simple, good values. Of course, if one night you happened to see, in the seething white light of your kiln, a vision of the world's dusty window displays glutted with the product of your inconsequence, well, heh-heh, you might just become metastatic ooze before dawn.

Say, Jean-Paul, couldn't you suggest something a little less nauseating?

Try sales, then. You're gregarious enough. All that travelling, can't say people scare you. Be a salesman, you're life's asshole sticky from steak sandwiches, your soul bloated by a charge account at Sears for cheap suits and budget cologne, your body and mind rotting from a screened in back porch littered with bourbon empties and old TV Guides. You could choose one of the several hair styles advertised on sun-faded posters in barbershop windows, and with it be intensely desirable to the waitresses serving those steak sandwiches in bowling alley cafes. You could ridicule the people who don't buy the things you sell and despise the ones who do. And if you persevere in selling as many defective products as possible, you might even be honored one day with membership in the Beelzebub Club. And when cancer finally renders your body to a grey jelly, you would have the assurance of a cut rate burial by your old friends at Far Elect.

No!

Then pay the bill and let's head for the bus stop for a ride home with those honeydrippers. Let's have some fun.

But Unc, we're broke.

Well, get a job, then!

The Unc Within curses his nether duty, dinkless as he is and unable really to participate in things forbidden. Still... Maybe they're hanging out at Kresge's or Woolworths. If we hurry we can ... you know ... we don't need money.

Forget it, Unc. Take off, I'll be calling you.

Unca Slick recedes to the cellular shadows while our main man hunkers on an outcrop overlooking the ooze-choked valleys of the twentieth century's cross-cultural scourges: Cancer, AIDS and the New Plagues, Capitalism, and that ever-lovin' cross-millennial evolution-stopper: Wilful Ignorance.

Cancer needs little to get cooking, thinks O., but what starts it? Aside from genocidal pollutants provided by industrial greed and plain old heredity, does it really come from too many corn flakes? too much electrocuted beef? the dust from budgie feathers? Or does the mind in despair trigger it off, the kind of mind that keeps quiet and takes a passive role.

Running through a mental checklist of patterns in cancer victims* he's recently read, Olney notes that number one is the "Loss of raison d'être." Hmmm. No problem there. He hasn't come up with one yet. Number two suggests an inability to express anger or resentment. Hah. Cancer would never survive the K.O.'s from Olney's frequent temper tantrums. Number three: "Marked amount of self-dislike and self-distrust." Nah. Olney still likes himself ... but does he trust himself? And what about Unca Slick? Hey, no sweat, he's just a figment of the imagination, heh-heh. Next: "Suffers unrelenting despair but continues to work." A problem for paycheck folks, but not for Olney. He's walked off the job for a lot less than despair. But others ... people cling to their jobs, not only to pay for the right to live, but to take their minds off the horrors befalling themselves and their loved ones. Who could blame them? At least they had taken on the responsibility of having loved ones, a burden Olney has yet to know. Hell, he's farther from it than ever.

Well, it looks like our boy is off the hook. Only a few more to get through in the usual scot-free way. "Feels hopelessness; no future." Uh-oh. Serious thought required here. Hmmm. Olney's natural optimism has always been founded on hopelessness. But his conception of hopelessness has had more to do with freeing himself from spiritual bondage than in rising to the top of the materialist heap. The future, as a consequence, has always been invitingly open. For he knows that spiritual freedom can be won by a simple revision of attitude, of world-interpretation. Never mind that this "simple revision" might take lifetimes to achieve. On the other hand, being a big player on the grasping achiever market required a negative drive, narrow perceptions, an adjustable index of moral precepts, and a blinkered interpretation of one's place in the cosmos. It fit the Christian Capitalist profile, though. People were relieved of responsibility to themselves and their fellow humans with the underlying message: "You've only got one life folks, so grab what you can. You can always say you're sorry at the end."

Number six: "Has more emotional energy than can be expressed; hence: bottled up." With chummy identification, Olney recalls a recent newspaper item about a man who was refused service at a liquor store for alleged intoxication. The man left the store, started his pickup truck, hit the accelerator and drove right through the front window clear to the back wall, scattering counters of booze in his wake. Huh-uh, no probs there, either.

Number seven: "Sets goals so high they are impossible to live up to." Heck, didn't having goals mean you never had to accomplish them? So you could skip around the world and play and be like a boy all your life? Olney could have sworn that's what goals meant. His were always off-screen, out of range; so far out, in fact, he could never remember what they were. My, my. No tangible goals and no reason to be. Did that mean he would never get cancer? Die in his sleep, an elderly baby? Morosely, like a goalless second-hand book seller, he turns the page in his mind to number eight: "Possesses more inner fire than normal." Olney's pallid darkshop eyes suddenly pop out of peeling parchment sockets: his inner fire was more like an ever-immanent spontaneous combustion.

Nope. Cancer is repulsed by life's extremes: on the one extreme by people whose vistas are about as vast as an MBA's thumbnail, and on the other by people whose great energy and will matches their heroic commitment. It searches, instead, for the millions who agonize in the endless in-between, responding to life with a guilt that says "Heaven's, no," when they mean "Hell, yes!" It feeds on the cowardly in their lifetimes-spanning migration from ignorance to nirvana. The last disease Olney Garkle will get is cancer.

He rotates 90 degrees on his outcrop to look at the second valley, the one filling quickly with the dying whimpers of Auto Immune Deficiency Syndrome and other plagues. According to authorities, AIDS could incubate in your body for ten years! Who is safe? Especially since those African mosquitoes are carrying it; a virus, not like cancer at all. You could be as healthy minded as the Buddha. Oh, yeah, they say it would take a thousand mosquitoes hitting you all at once to have any effect. Of course, they'd have to say that. Christ, you don't even have to fuck. All it has to do is get into your blood, a little pinprick on the skin in the wrong company and that's all she wrote. And the wrong company could be your own brother: no more blood brothers. Everyone suspicious of each other. And, oh, all those rapturous quickies in strange places, gone forever. Centuries of wantonness down the tubes. Then again, maybe the lesser perversities will take over. Hey, that's not so bad. Men and women exposing themselves in busses and malls, masturbating in front of each other on the train home after a hard day's work. Rampant hands-off promiscuity. Instead of going to jail for flashing and the like, people will be arrested for normal intercourse. Yikes! How did this get started? What sickness of mind could have thought it up?

Olney doesn't believe in grand conspiracy theories. He may be paranoid, but not to the extent that he's willing to admit to blockishness by giving credibility to "conspirators." Work together toward a common goal? They'd blow it from simple greed long before the treachery could bilk or destroy its victims.

Then what has the human race done to deserve retribution in this precise way? The punishment doesn't seem to fit the crime. Or does it? Humanity's crimes against itself are already punished by reincarnation; what could be worse than having to endure merciless life again and again? But to take away the delight in sexuality ... what despicable meanness.

Come to think of it, who could be meaner than those Right wing fascists in the CIA? Playing around with germ warfare to kill commies, the fools. Probably started it all. No doubt also behind the emergence of those plagues waiting in jungle hideaways, content for centuries to kill bush rats and monkeys, now suddenly awakened by insatiable developers encouraged by the--you guessed it--CIA. Clearing vast tracts of rain forest and bushland to build roads to jerry-built cities, laying waste to hectares of previously undisturbed ecosystems, they are unwittingly bringing forth virus-carrying insects and animals that could wipe out the human race within months. The greatest fear of mankind is not nuclear catastrophe, but the unleashing of a virus that would kill like Ebola and spread like influenza.

God knows what will happen now. They run the U.S. government and the people love it. The early stages of Nazification. The next president may well be the new Führer, with an SS of gun-toting Bubbas, all members of the Republican Party and the National Rifle Association.

And now, with Communism dead, the next valley, the one where Mammon incubates and breeds mass destruction: the host to Capitalism, the last remaining overseer of greed and torment. As the only emperor left, its nakedness is alone and repugnant. Indeed, the New Führer will be neither an insane individual, nor any longer the Church or the old Aristocracies, but Business: Globalisation as enforced by the Multinationals, the World Bank, the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund, the Bilderberg Club, the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations and God knows who else. No country on Earth, no society, no remote village is safe from the anal-retentive worship of market forces by boardroom dictators who control every move of civilizations once in harmony.

Another rotation, the last valley, this one layered with the obscuring fog of ignorance, the wilful death knell of evolution. Here is the seat of crimes and retribution, where the miracles of the mind and the intelligence of the heart are traded for the chocolate bars of cowering subservience, the voluntary concentration camp of humanity, the blind, corpse-colored and naked mass of men and women who have thought only of themselves, refusing to take responsibility for each other, and by so doing have sold their souls to the usurpers, the sniggering masters in whose hands they dangle like emaciated marionettes. They are the human cattle who blindly support the whims of the least of men who, simply through cunning, have risen to rule with utter impunity.

Giddiness sets in, threatening to topple Olney Garkle off his hunkering feet and into the valleys of darkness. In truth, a cigarette would send all his fears home in a hurry. Failing that short-term solution, a good solid crystallization would do just fine. Much needed today to keep plagues and jobs away. So make a commitment, Olney. And watch you don't sell yourself short. You'll be wide open then; unconscious short-changing kills. Ah, but it's not so easy. In the old days no one had time to think about existence. People spent their lives working to eat and sleeping to work. The few good times were great explosions of hell-bent debauchery. Unless of course you were the kind who stayed home and read the Scriptures, with cancer (or other soul-cell diseases) waiting in the shadows, hoping for that precious moment when you finally understood the impossibility of combining the task given you by Jesus with that of getting ahead: when you realized that you cannot love your neighbor and compete with him at the same time, and hope dropped out of your heart and the killer entered triumphant.

Talk about setting goals too high! How can you compete with and love the small businessman next door if he's employing scab labor at reduced wages and no benefits? Or the tribe over the boarder who wants your land and women? Or the leader who wants to nuke the world in order to get his name in the incinerated history books? And just how are you going to love all the religious fanatics who keep trying to stuff their intolerance down your throat?

Was it Jesus, His disciples, or the Church who forgot to mention that the only way to love your fellow man is to transcend being human, to step out of the game altogether. In which case no one really knows you're there anyway. So, not being "human" any more, you run around invisible to all but those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. And then where are you? Up the creek with another ever-changing, never-changing clique of disciples. Like the airheads who walked and talked with the Lord day after day, unable to convince themselves of His truth even when it hit them in the face. Partly because they were airheads, but also because He (or they or the Church) kept confusing the issue by bringing in untouchable, non-entity God. Faced with famines, floods, upheavals and wars, in short, with incarnations on a planet of hard knocks, people then, as well as now, needed to know that they were God, or could be, with ardent applications of compassion flowing from committed introspection which could have been easily taught without mythologising God as a vengeful, paranoid, neurotic Patriarch who was more often than not threatening them with extinction for no better reason than maybe he had a bowel complaint? They could have improved the lot of their children by resonating genetically to a teaching which might have exhorted them, while working zealously for a well-deserved material paradise in the here and now, to stand on their feet with dignity and some sense of eventual release from the Wheel ... instead of plodding through life with the dullard's fear of never really knowing if the Big Stellar Fatso was around to approve or not.

Let's face it, self-knowledge has never been good for business.

And so was cancer seeded upon the Earth.

And so was free enterprise born to devastate man.

Olney is writhing on his stool, a pea-under-the-Naugahyde from recognition. He's sure compassion is the solution, the only sensible way to deal with life and put an end to suffering. But how to make the commitment? Sure of the goal but still uncommitted, he is paralyzed to act, his mind pacing up and down in its self-created cell, the kind cancer loves to invade.

"The whole planet is nothing but a hootable enclave!" Olney announces to Helga, who gives him a side-eye on her way by. Oops. Slipped at the border, there. Slipping everywhere. Giddy Garkle's elbows clutch the counter with leather heels. Tough creepers of flesh grunt in the effort to ground the organism, striving hopelessly to adhere before it lifts off like a helium balloon. But the arborite is laughing, as Olney, stunt goon for All Things, blurts the question uppermost in his sagging mind, "Whaa...?" just as Helga soughs by on the return trip. Giving him the other side-eye, she asks, "Wha' you wan'?" without stopping to find out.

The two questions, 'Whaa...?' and 'Wha' you wan'?' rumble through Olney's skull, gathering echoes until they become a dinning multitude of voices all heading for the grand ball in his ears. Indeed, the band is making its way up the tunnels of Corti right now for a gig at La Scala. Headlining tonight's gala, along with our hastily assembling Raucous Rhythm Boys, is none other than the immortal Carmina Piranha. The curtain rises--the audience goes wild--and there she is, wearing a stunning bouffant of green bananas, and look! With her is surprise guest Miss Martha Raye, both vivacious ladies dressed as dazzling five foot, red-lipped, dancing teeth. The band is all ballroom smiles, sporting cream and ruby silks, last minute adjustments to which are just being made as bandleader, Xippy LePinché, walks on stage to signal the downbeat for a saucy south of the border rhythm. The reigning queens of that Latin Certain Something break into song, rolling their saucer eyes with great verve. Now the music swings into a ravishing conga, BLAM-BLAM-Blam-Blam-BLAM-Blam, Carmina and Martha gnashing it out, nearby dancers sprayed by the collective spit from two enormous smiles and loving it. Polished maracas reflect the glitter of overhead revolving lights, mirroring in a million images the coconut-oiled dancers below: everyone with hands on hips in a conga line fit for the end of all time, and here's the end now as bandleader LePinché signals a break in tempo and the Rumbustious Rhythm Boys sizzle into a demonic da capo marked with indices of such magnitude it might go on for hours, days, years even, pullulating without mercy until the sixteenth rest at Point Paroxysm is finally reached, when silence suddenly descends and everything disappears into a void more empty than a life whose wellsprings are instant coffee, imitation ice cream and late night TV.

Thorough throughout the universe.

No movement, nor memory of movement. And no movers. No sound, nor memory of sound. And no listeners. No light. No acceleration. No stasis. And certainly no one around with a loudhailer to explain...

"Hey, bub!" Helga, wondering why she ever left dear old Kowloon, asks: "Moah coffee?"

"More salsa!" shouts Olney, foaming at the meatus in the vestibule.

Despite, or because of, the above round of arcane hoopla, Olney is convinced that anything is better than a job. He'd rather be a bum--active in his occupation of scuffling--than a passive worker. On a planet where millions are routinely forced into starvation year in and year out, a good old-fashioned bum has more contact with life (albeit dissociated) than those being pinioned in slavery by the church-state flesh eaters ruling the world. To hell with jobs. To hell with cancer, the profit cult, and the collective drain.

* Patterns in Cancer Victims, Lawrence LeShan, out of print

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Chapter 15: Hejira Time

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