Chapter 6: With Regards to Doppler Olney's friends had another reason to be wary of his intentions. Before coming into their lives he'd sizzled over the hot coals of a few decades without much of that Due Regard for Consequences. In particular, the death-defying sport of playing fish to the bronze-knuckled, rod-reeling fingers of certain wives whose potent sex magic was undiluted by husbands who took them for granted. Excitement never seemed to find these women, except through fantasies or unless it dropped by for a visit. Enter Mr. Passing Through for a few days repose on the couch. With the breadwinner at work and Olney lounging around, the wives were in for a little breathlessness and guttural joy. They could set aside their life-sustaining pots of coffee and chain-smoked cigarettes, break out of their trancelike puttering around house and garden, and skip a few fixed outings to citywide malls with baby-makes-three. Not that Olney was a hunk. His cock would never have made the centerfold of Playgirl magazine. Compared with those flaccid cudgels, his little dinkus barely proved adequate (though his lovers affirmed its wagging exuberance held a winning personality). Did Olney have a manly chest? If so, his sweaters had never noticed. His neck would surely have thrilled Modigliani had the painter been a turkey farmer, while the two pale twigs representing his legs supported a torso that, were it a few inches longer, would have made him a dead-ringer for Toulouse-Lautrec. Despite these handicaps, Olney often found himself in the role of surrogate Don Juan. What could he do, the poor devil, he was so agreeable. If married women wanted him as a sex-object for their frustrated romantic lust, who was he to be unkind? Morning after morning his fried eggs were burnt to replicas of crisp caviar, or at lunch his toothsome peanut butter with mayonnaise and onion sandwiches went unbitten, while the wives of his hardworking buddies cornered him for the naughty kitchen moments of their dreams. His favorite reason for staying with people--the contents of their refrigerators--was inevitably subverted by amorous hyperventilations preceding fervid driveway-watching quickies against the sink. Trouble was, Olney blew in from a world without routine, on perpetual holiday. He breathed excitement and adventure, and when the beauties helplessly bared their salty licks, he hookied on over in a hurry; a real reeler's pet was he. He never seemed to learn. Indeed, his tendency to rash romanticism, developing over the years like an operetta of love-thee's countless ways, was in danger of transposing itself into a requiem up in Lulu's room, with Olney playing Lulu to a hundred husbands posing as Jack. He'd left more than one household flailing and gnashing in his wake. Unsuspecting hubbies had openly welcomed him into their households, never dreaming the six foot scarecrow would seduce their wives. And in fact he never did. Not outright, anyway. Well, to be honest, every move he made was calculated to inflame. And the horny housewives ignited every time. Olney was a champ at passively disarming faithfulness. He planted the seed the minute he stepped in the door, and within twenty-four hours he was harvesting hot unions and zesty ravishes in their secret gardens. One of their spouses, a former good friend, told him one last night at the kitchen table that he was analogous to a boy-buggering priest, a shit-eating Madonna, a born-again chainsaw murderer, a nun-cleaving pope, a fascist philosopher king and a fly-swatting God; in short: a two-faced asshole! They'd been smoking dope and Olney was too stoned to wince, but did so at his first opportunity, which came a couple of days and a thousand miles later, in the Greyhound Bus Station of Toledo, Ohio. As the bus pulled in from hell, a bad case of the whirlies changed to a maelstrom of regret. Olney just loved to fuck, was all. Even if it meant submitting to the fear of a blood-vomiting death. Not knowing the exact whereabouts of Husband X often nagged at his tumescence. His enthusiasm for the thrills associated with unlatching back screen doors often changed to stunned paralysis when his rakish, "Romeo's here," was answered by the surprised grunt of a male brachiator. Or, when hammering away in the safest place in the house, the shed out back, any sound within two square acres resembling sentient movement would seize him with terror. He had to admit that sneaky fornication was not the key to longevity. But what could he do? Those married geese were a craven lot. And every one of them looked good, in that wan, troubled, Saturn-return way. Besides, their ganders, always busy unfolding creative or trade-school natures, had no time for ill-fitting domesticity. It provoked in them vestigial fears and a patriarchal fumbling of interpretation. They didn't know it was the women who ruled the Earth. Olney, never staying anywhere for long, learned about the anguish of puppet royalty with regards to Doppler. §§§ With the few women he'd actually lived with, Olney was always on guard: humble hunchbacks with leprosy never fooled him. He vacillated between uneasiness and murder when other predators came around, and when they actually got some, he was down to snarling on all fours. Olney had always been the first to leave, partly because he was always leaving for somewhere anyway, and partly because (because of this) he condensed love affairs from years down to months. He was in no way attached to the swelling clutter of household objects that turned living together into a comforting convenience long after the thrill was gone. Since he was invariably alone in this discerning idiosyncrasy, the task of dealing with tears and curses, and especially of fending off a warehouse of hurled objects, made departure time all the more difficult. But once out the door, the international anthem started to play and the old ball game was under way once again, with the whole world as its diamond. He had suspected for a long time that God was a woman, if not all women, and religiously chased them all over the world. On a few occasions (oddly enough following successful seductions of SHE-category scorchers), he found himself not only buried under their piles of house-beautifying junk, but unmanned by the sheer strength of their feminine power. Searching through his copy-protected file of innate sorcerer's remedies, he chose the solution marked "for use when all else fails." In accordance with directions, and armed with one or another silly pretext should he be discovered, Olney Garkle snuck out the door while they slept. With his freedom-loving thumb prominently displayed to the safety of many miles down the road, he decided that women were definitely not God, and with borrowed money from the nearest responsible friend (who knew that giving it was only way to get rid of him), he ran off to join exotic dissolution sects in faraway lands. In Nepal, Olney and several other Westerners took religious instruction with Tibetan Buddhists. The Tibetan method of attaining inner stillness and cosmic identity was to visualize the Buddha of compassion seated under every star in the universe. Unfortunately, Olney's attempts at visualization repeatedly found the Buddha perched atop the clitoris of the French girl meditating nearby. Forced to look for the diamond in the lotus of his infinite mind, he squirmed and shrank, broke out in boils and whimpered for smokes. His desperation to achieve nirvana without really trying wreaked havoc on the intended integration of his body, mind and spirit: his body wanted none of it, his mind was adrift, and his spirit was as moot as ever. The goal became so confused that he reverted to his belief in God as a woman, and tried to put the make on the French girl. One morning, as she stepped into the shit-ridden latrines of the Mahayana compound in which the seekers had incarcerated themselves, Olney stepped in behind her. His breathless hands had just found her breasts when she turned on him like Maya herself. Her silky, hennaed-hair whipped indignantly across the creamy beauty of her face as she slapped him and yelled blue murder. Held up to ridicule by the earnest members of the sangha, he snuck out that evening with the chaiwallah and sped pell mell down the mountain and into the plains, where the tabernacle was soft and yielding and penetrable. Why else the body? he'd reasoned, descending on eggbeater legs. Was this craving, animated slab of meat only good for denial? If so, whose crazy, yes, clearly insane idea was it, if not that Cosmic Behaviorist, none other than Lloyd Schadenfreude, Goon God of Galactical Jokery, once again jarring the heavens with mirth, like Rex Ingram and a planetful of Sabus: "Work that one out, my little Muridae! Nyah-ha-ha-ha ..." §§§ Chapter 7: A Jigsaw Puzzle of The Void |