Chapter 9: From There to Iniquity Entropy in Transmogrification Mode is the jocularity best describing Moon Food frequentees. Like oil and water they swirl around one another, entering and exiting the door that never jingles to alert. It's a passing show of shorted circuits, gibbered quicks and random grins: those fruits-from-the-loom-of-the-salts-of-the-Earth on parade. The polyesters have left, going separate ways to do the same things. They're at home now, watching soaps and old sitcoms. Absorbed in acrylic-wool knitting projects which seek to blend such tasteful colors as tangerine, aquamarine and fuchsia, each smiles, and each smile quakes across its own impression of Mars in anticipation of that after-dinner smash in a jam glass smeared with face cream. The shoe salesman--for whom the Shoe, having always fit, has always been worn--is back on the job, puzzling yet again over what to do with that shipment of powder-blue chukka boots delivered when Betty White was still hosting Handy Hints. The double-knit Hari Krishna's are back at the mall, befisted with a new supply of Bible tracts and longing for the end of the world; the car salesman is volting off in his cubicle of despair; the Good Buddy has sent his punk to fetch Younger; the hoon is off shooting pool or smack; and the others are all out there somewhere, chasing hazy outlines of themselves. Olney Garkle is still around, though. Growing weary as the day marches on, his thoughts flee the Moon Food and return to Paris, so recently and traumatically lived in with that...that Margaret P. Bebette. Well, isn't he brave to let float to the surface the episode that nearly drove him to maturity? He's tried to keep those few months deeply buried in the undifferentiated blob of his unconscious. Bringing them up has meant asking himself embarrassing questions, like: was he now and would he always be immature? Others managed to grow up, why not him? They behaved responsibly toward themselves and their loved ones, but, too bad for Olney, his knockabouts with maturity always left him in the dust. He just didn't get it. What was missing in his character? On the other hand, what difference did it make? What was the big deal about growing up, anyway? Sounded like something a charwoman would do, drudgery without hope of the slightest transgression, a sad line-toeing downhill to a grey death. Hideous idea. In short, what on this Earth of limited life spans could possibly be gained from growing up? Peace of mind? Living in Paris had been a defeat. Olney's adolescent nervous system and Maggie's unformed innocence had loosed disaster upon them. She wasn't strong like the other women he'd known. Her childlike quality had thrilled him at first; he would corrupt and make her into the sex slave of his wildest dreams! Alas, she was a stubborn innocent. Unless her hormones were flooded with pre-menstrual lust, she would not budge beyond a certain point of decency. Oh, he'd managed to push her over the line a few times, but she always made him feel like a heel afterward. With her he always felt like a heel. Too bad. A part of him slavered at the idea of using women for the sole purpose of ravishing their fragrant flesh and then discarding them...intact, of course. But they would have to agree, was the trouble. How could tumescent expectation be maintained under such circumstances? Talk about off the wall. And immature? It made him wiggle his toes. As for Olney's romantic inclinations, they were bundled up and taking the cure these days. From the sun-drenched balcony of his heart's sanatorium he could feel wistfully romantic about no longer feeling romantic. More satisfying than outright cynicism, it allowed him a step back from the void-flirting follies--not those of the all-encompassing void, but the goony excesses of that blind, dumb one, just below the open manhole. He could enjoy his tender and passionate feelings from a distance, with a little more time to choose suitable reactions. For Olney, the idea of direct action on any level has become something wondrous, a feat of superhuman proportions. Shielded from the responsibility of making decisions by his retreat within the confines of "King's X," he has come to feel like the kind of guy most people look at sideways, in a hurry to look elsewhere, their cursory glances having balefully perceived a lack of even the most fundamental similarities to themselves. The trouble, he grumbled, foiled and unslaked, was that for him the chances for peace of mind (or was it just homeostasis?) lay not only in maturity or, better yet, world-adulating wealth, but rested, finally, in finding a She. How he hated admitting it. Then he would have to go and become a He. Because He's and She's, like nobility or lepers, only consorted among themselves. To think that he was unable to sail into the starlit All-Of-It because he so loved women. Especially their moist parts. He must prove that the love of lust would eventually bring him to Buddhahood. In the meantime his button on the leaping lift to material elevation was being pushed by females who were only shopping for a bargain abasement. Olney was far from being a monk (although he'd taken the Bodhisattva Vows--alone and under his breath in a quiet, isolated place, to be sure), but if he could only attract women who wished to experience poverty and the sexual shame of giving themselves to a loser, well, he'd just have to cope with it. He didn't hear his cock complaining. It loved more than ever to get inside those slishy penetralia while the rest of him went crazy over soft skin, tiny ears, fragrant hair, elegant throats and mystic tits. A problem: moderately attractive loser-lovers so often lacked discrimination. A woman bent on humiliating herself might go home with anyone, hoping to awaken next morning to her worst fears, the poor slob snoring out his beer and baseball dreams, having been used to express her "Fuck you" to the world. It disgruntled Olney to think he might have slept in the same crumb-infested bed as some crud far below his lofty crevice in the Loser's Hall of Fame. Still, among all those dozens of beauties he saw every day while making the rounds, each in some way knocking the oxygen right out of his blood stream and stunning him into eye-glazing fantasies of fucking them in department store fitting rooms, there ought to be one, just one he could go home to heaven with. Couldn't other tasks then be undertaken (the old plan for Paris, was it?), tasks undreamed of in the cycle-wasting struggle for love. Or was he doomed to "glorious bachelorhood," feeling himself already too wacky for most women. Approaching the age of crystallization, he was still dealing with primary needs, for Christ's sake. Olney had spent most of his life trying to inflate the balloon in this rumpus-room-of-the-heart's Top 40 Needs. What could his problem be? He'd gone through an ardor of Juliets only to find himself more frog than ever. But what about the Juliets? Those cunts, the crowning glory of creation, seemed to take it all in stride. While it took him years to get over loving one of them, they seemed able to saunter through local meat markets almost immediately, sizing up the quivering slabs on display. Hey, that was supposed to be his role. And how often did women pine away over losing a man? Not very! Yet men were always going berserk over women, and in really tragic ways too, like knocking bottles off bar tops, kicking the shit out of parked car tires, throwing rocks at smart-ass fenceposts and hurling insults at meddlesome traffic lights. Was Olney Garkle snivelling? Yes, he admitted, he was. Even Christ snivelled at the end. Like Him, Olney felt shafted. He also felt rootless, isolated, unloved, rejected, and just about every other adjective denoting, in his case, a future metapath. He felt Death holding that stick with the dirty end, poised and grinning, a cool Nazi, a shredder of flesh. Then again, maybe Death was merely The Collector, punching time clocks at the Interplanetary Recycling Plant and wistful for other duty. But whether a big shot or just a little guy, Mr. Equalizer got everybody in the end, including those flaky Juliets, George and Martha, Jesus Himself, Hong Kong Helga, and Olney Garkle too. Everything doomed to life was doomed to die, and the greatest rewards were collected by worms. In the end, who knew? The brain was a vast, ever-expanding dig for ontology enthusiasts, revealing reality upon reality within reality, realities so numerous that combining all the Compassionate Buddhas lotused beneath every twinkling star in all the universes upon universes within universes would...well, let's face it, on this planet of apes--no offense to the brachiators--had anyone ever known a truth? Were all the eurekas of the saints, prophets and physicists, all the heroic deeds committed in moments of clarity and precision only so many misinterpretations, always beside the point? Were human beings genetically incapable of sorting through the onslaught of information available to them? Experience said yes. But Olney's nervous system, aspen with quantum surges from his brain, said no. Fuck that shit, it said. §§§ Peering out the smokestained windows, Olney's gaze crosses the street. It takes in part of a Pentecostal storefront church, an appliance repair shop, and the edge of a gun emporium. All three buildings wear crewcuts for roofs. He sighs. Not a Paris rooftop in sight. No eye-gladdening upsweeps to charm the heart and soul into tangos cheek to cheek. No tiles nor chimney pots in dizzy flight to eye-crossing elevations--mon dieu--where tiny air pockets from hair's breadth streets far below suddenly break the clunkety climb--aïe--before all leap to safety and soar once again toward Tile's End and dissolution in the sky of white cloud and blue. Nope, none o' that. Instead, pollution reddens the eye that views with reluctance the desiccated ethic of a bulk-process culture. Looking out the windows, looking directly at the buildings across the street, Olney cannot remember what they look like. "At least we fell in Paris," he murmurs to his half empty cup, taking its turn as ingenue for the gone Maggie. Aware of quizzical stares from the ghoul with the drool two stools away, he continues silently. Went down in the best "Selznick" tradition, we did, fingertips touching as the train bore you from Paradise to the edge of the world. Which edge I now totter on, a thousand miles South. So thankful we didn't have our last romantic moments here, in the ferro-barrens of the Free. Here, in the land where freedom is experienced without wisdom and gives no nourishment. Here, in the land whose bubbas are stricken with fast food disease, bored with masturbation, and just plain wanta kill. Here, in the land of armed diffidence, where imagination finds its highest authorized expression in frenzies of entrepreneurial n'importe quoi; where free enterprise and art join forces to reduce the Holocaust to a mini series on the way to financing teenage slash movies; where the young reject honor and courage to vote for the safety of designer heating pads made in tropical countries that owe their existence to the smug anal whims of fat white boys behind megacorpse desks; where success is profiled by statistical materialism wearing an unscrupulous grin frozen in place by the fear of reprisals from a world choking from its militaristic Christian economics; where the fullness of life is measured by the TV Guide, and the mind has returned to the dark ages. Olney paws at the ironic grimace on his face. He steals a glance at the cafe's customers. Surrounded by free enterprise failures, he would be their king. Crowned at the Moon Food Cafe by virtue of the slightly brighter dull light emanating from his eyes, he would hold dominion over the refuse of America. And when the White House Wannsee Conference was finally held, it would be King Olney who pleaded for their lives. Shit. So, I'm back, is it? Back in that dear old hell hole called home, the country founded by Puritans. Hah! Europe wouldn't have the fundamentalist scum. So they came here, armed with pinch-faced ideals, a pinch-faced God, and plenty of ammo. And then proceeded to serve their trinity of hate by slaughtering the natives, who, sad to say, were too integrated to comprehend the invaders' savagery. Then, what did they do but develop great democratic principles on the backs of imported blacks and imported Chinese and the like, all the while exporting their treacherous doctrines to countries too small to fight back. A couple of centuries of international recklessness have done wonders for a naïve bravado that makes the rest of the world sick. Yep, I'm back all right. Back in the country whose devotion to greed, hubris and ethical ignorance eventually rotted the national soul, culminating in the election of a clinically paranoid, obsessive simpleton to the highest office. And what's worse, insured his successors would be likewise. Poor America. The Puritans are reincarnated and running amuck. And they chose a genial geek to lead them. §§§ Chapter 10: The Consequence of Ignorance |