Chapter 5: The Eighth Dwarf

His plan for reentry was simple. Olney went straight to the city containing the greatest number of old friends. He entertained them with the wonders of his own peculiar Arabian, Hindu and Buddhist Nights. Following the verbal slide show, he moved swiftly and with great energy to a sincere promotion of his new-found initiative in the form of a five-year plan based on the loan of money the friend across the table was privileged to give. One by one, they gave in from the sheer force of his enthusiasm. Within a week he'd run through the checklist of donors. Wallets blazed from hips like benign six-shooters, eager to outdraw the others on behalf of Olney's long awaited maturity, now apparently arrived. It was a good week for the prodigal son, full of merriment and booze and good meals served up by his friends' wives--who usually reminded their husbands, in the post-festive wee hours, of Olney's penchant for penurious default.

He went to live with Denzil Hent and his wife, Daisy, settling in with good habits and the best intentions. He tried his darnedest ... for a week or two. Yes, Olney was the kind who usually gave up if at first he didn't succeed. What was the use? The United States of America wasn't going to hire Olney Garkle to be a wine salesman or a Kelly Girl or a waiter at Denny's. Moreover, he didn't want the United States of America to hire him for those or any other stupid jobs. Well, he did and he didn't. To begin with he did, but it didn't take him long to get nowhere, and then he didn't.

And now those six-gun Buxton's were being smelted into leathery dead bolts. On but rare occasions were they reconstituted, and then to withdraw only the most hum-drum of founding fathers. His friends began regarding him with the vague, eye-darting look of the porn shop customer whose lust for contact bypasses the living and the dead alike for their once-removed glossy replicas. Was Olney just killing time before another sudden flight? He had a way of packing his bags one or two days before being asked. Things would be going along poorly, the wives mumbling that perhaps he'd overstolen his welcome, and then one fine morning: splitamos! Olney would take his melee of selves and flee. Several months down the line, all but his good points forgotten, postcards would start coming in from all over the windmill world and everyone would be relieved, even glad, that the Garkle in them was alive and well.

But now they were leery. His intentions were squirming, no doubt about it. More effort went into arranging the daily timetable to fit a leisurely lunch at Maria's Jalisco Cafe than in finding a job. Maria's tostadas, calorifically dosed with her homemade salsa, were the best in town. It made his mouth water to think of them; perhaps they were the best reason of all to stay and settle down. And Maria's strong black coffee was the best antidote to her chopped jalapenos en escabeche, soothing the carbonadoed tongue with its neutralizing liquid heat. After so life-affirming a feast there was nothing like a Turkish cigarette (borrowed money always bought the best, it seemed) and a relaxing perusal of the newspaper, especially the in-depth reportage of statewide sexual atrocities (section B, page two), for which the rag was the Delta's number one seller.

No lunch today, though. Maria's cafe is deep in the barrio, not so much as a taco chip on credit. The Moon Food will have to do. Olney tries to think of some new ideas to get out of his predicament, maybe with that newfangled lateral method everyone is talking about, but his mind only manages to scuttle the length of the beam before it slips off. Avoiding admirably, he enjoys an innerstellar romance on the origins of the Moon Food's ghastly coffee, so unlike Maria's. Made from barrel-bottom robusta beans the institutional suppliers won't even touch, the coffee sits in a gigantic urn on the back counter. The glass tube gauge has never, to Olney's knowledge, registered anything but full. He is sure it's been brewing since the days when coolies were laying rails from here to the rest of the world, when the cafe might have been called the Frontier Pagoda or the New Universe, just built and spotless, perhaps frequented by bearded noteworthies who drank the same coffee (fresh, then) as they discussed the unprecedented future of this crackpot state.

Perhaps Olney himself sat here in the sunlit mornings of a former life. (If only he had the money for an appointment with that ex-life therapist from Hollywood.) If so, the progression of his lives was deteriorating, for now it's the Moon Food Cafe, filling station of derelicts; one of so many scattered all over the rapidly disintegrating country.

On a shelf high above the coffee machine, Olney's desultory attention is suddenly arrested (and charged with suspicion of being under the influence of manic disorientation) by plaster of Paris replicas of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. He makes a mental note to react with appropriate histrionics as soon as he can reach the threshold of thought concerning of the random probability of their being here in the first place. But lo and faced with behold can Olney do naught but join hands with awe to stare at the kitschy icons. "Mercy," he murmurs aloud. But there they stand, one step from the dump, enshrined manufactured totems keeping watch over America from their vantage point at the Moon Food Cafe. The young Virgin of the Occident with her malformed sidekicks, immortalized by Walt Disney and a few kilo's of calcined gypsum. But, really! To Olney Garkle, a "dwarf" has other connotations than the cuddly antics of Happy and Dopey, et al. Midgets, he would say, can be cute, are well-shaped little critters given to snappy hi-jinx, can sit on your knee swinging their little legs with glee. But dwarves were true anomalies. They have--have they not?--big heads, twelve year old chests, weird Grimmsian legs. While their nervous systems and brains put them among the billions who can lay claim to a more or less perfect human rebirth, they are nonetheless an otherworldly lot; a weird folk calling up Cathars and the shifting meridians of medieval apprehension.

To be fair, Olney has nothing against post-woodcut dwarfs in their proper place. For example, as harmless Sunday shoppers at the Peoples Drug Mart. But as chaperons to blemish-free blessed-bebuttocked and budding of breast Snow White? How perverse! But, says Walt, everybody loves 'em! They almost replaced teddy bears and anyway, they are major characters in the fairy tale. Are they? snaps Olney. Listen Walt, for your info the Seven Dwarfs were no more than props for Snow White's growing pains. They hardly exist in the story. Read up, for Christ's sake. They couldn't tell her why she didn't dare let the stepmother-hag inside the house. They didn't know why. They were only stunted little men who didn't understand and cared less that girl-women were often beset with c-c-certain kinds of urges that made them p-p-pass out sometimes, and, uh ... Olney checks an impulse to spin on his stool again, takes a deep breath instead. Snow White had always turned him on. If only he'd been there, a slick city cousin dwarf called in by his hick rellies to counsel the pale young thing ... Ah well, let the dwarfs be, subvocalizes he, Bodhisattva to the polarized core.

Story aside, the film, not seen since childhood, had evidently made an impact on Olney. Like so many poorly tutored poltergeists of both sexes, he'd grown up with an ardent mind-heart set which semi-consciously insisted he find the Snow White/Prince somewhere this side of the rainbow in order to have a happy and fulfilled life. Along with those whose pudenda had yet to rumble in the magma of adolescence, he'd been transfixed by the happiness-ever-after syndrome of Snow White and her Prince of Male Fruition. Olney had been one of those little boys and girls who'd come streaming out of Saturday matinees to embark on a lifetime search; swarms of them skipping down sidewalks to their homes on tufted tree blocks where, after dinner and tucked safely in beds, their little blood vessels dilated with excitement as they made up giddy and generous tales of their own, tales of Truth and Beauty which, for the first time, included each other as well as the animals.

Later, of course, they got warped and runted, dwarfed actually, by the wanly smiling defeatism of the grown-ups who counseled, usually while leaving the room: "Well, we'll see ..." What the big folks failed to tell the children was that Walt had perverted the story. He knew Americans had sugar-coated hearts; whatever melted them, however superficial and cute, was good for business and a niche in the Big Baby Hall of Fame. Thus, he turned a poorly written teaching story for girls--concerning responsibility, temptation, adolescent sexuality, and transformation--into a motion picture terminally diseased with morbid sentimentality. A disease that would, in the years to come, fragment Americans right out of reality and into the comforting conventions of the sitcom and worse: a B grade idolatry of incompetent provisional governments! Boy, was Olney irate.

As he and his scabby-kneed peers found themselves sloshing through the blancmange of puberty some years later, they migrated from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to Romeo and Juliet, all the while laboring under the influence of a simpleton ideology which sought to affirm the illusion of security. Love could now become a dreadful, seething bliss, consuming and unrelenting. Teen life's pimple-faced fickleness conspired to frustrate the body's rapturous demand to be clobbered with love, extinguished in love, so that death might be an elevation over those callow deceits. Or so it went until, coming of age, their noble ideals were sacrificed to the dwarfing world of little jobs and mean ends. And all along, the "grown-ups" had been mumbling in the next room that all sugar-plum lovers, if not legends only, or if not dying in childhood from some archetypal error, would grow up to become George and Martha, bitchy and alcoholic in middle age.

It was an awesome problem. Nobody was getting off. Or at least not for long. Olney agreed that time-binding had saved the race from continually regressing to the mindless joys of rooting for tubers, but somehow DNA's most delicious messages had gotten mysteriously scrambled from the start. Aside from the theory of original banishment to the Globe of Stunning Backdrops and Impossible Odds (what talion, for what crime? An entire species ...), the Church, he snarled, was mankind's greatest calamity. It's insidious repression of the human need to be extraordinary through the ever increasing use of native intelligence made trivial the efforts of History's incessant tyrannies to do the same.

Olney looks around for Helga, his inverbal ravings dying for a victim, but she's busy with the Polyesters. He overhears them talking about a recent double date with rival TV repairmen.

Given the choice, Olney would rather be a Hun than a clergyman. Well, no, maybe he'd take that back. Being a Hun hadn't been much fun since civilization'd begun, although, come to think of it, they did seem to enjoy state protection these days. In Olney's view, modern day Huns, the highly placed, that is, were Government thugs paid to promote chaos in a world that would otherwise be content to grow its crops and cash its paychecks. Low caste Huns, or the civic variety, liked to commit the more traditional, indeed modest, atrocities, like truncheoning socially conscious girls in the tits and busting subculture warrens without warrants. Olney wondered if Huns weren't part of an extra-social network (including lawyers and dogs that bark all night) whose involvement in planetary affairs would soon be deleted and filed under "Follies of the Bozozoic." He fervently hoped so.

Clergymen, on the other hand, were ... that is, the difference between coppers and clerics ... er ... well, there were differences. For example, in the choice of lunchmeats. The public protector might prefer bologna on Wonder bread with ketchup and sliced onions, while the Servant of God might attain his lunchtime revelations over pimento loaf on Wonder bread with ketchup and sliced onions. In their allegiance to idols the difference could be immense, a veritable gulf. Huns might worship framed photos of J. Edgar Hoover's fellatristic face, while the clergy might yearn after slender carvings of Weeping Jesus. As for methods of battering women, well, there was nothing like a good wife beating to relax your harassed servant of the state. While for the Man of the Cloth this could initially pose a problem, a good disguise and a hotel room for pummeling hapless prostitutes could always do wonders for the refreshment of his Higher Purpose.

Heck, Olney didn't know, but figured priests kept cleaner fingernails. On yet another hand, some government mercenaries were psychopathically fastidious, earning unguarded-moment reputations in Pentagon washrooms as spasm-faced ablutomaniacs.

It was a gravid subject.

§§§

Chapter 6: With Regards to Doppler

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