THE BERKELEY LESBIANS By Laurence Lasky To Maya, knight of impossible faith CHAPTERS Introduction Knight Lady 3 1. Summer Nocturne 6 2. The Pacific Northwest 14 3. Dog Days 24 4. Letter to a Mistress 29 5. The Age of Amphibians 35 6. The Berkeley Lesbians 43 7. Love Commando 59 8. The Return of M. 73 9. Home Alone 83 10. Sicily 101 11. Return of the Fighting Woman 103 12. The Feeling of Thought 109 13. Prolongation 125 14. North Beach Cinema 135 15. Letter to the Readers of the Spectator 142 16. Wank 148 Introduction Knight Lady My first sexual experience occurred when I was twelve, after a hot afternoon at the swimming pool. There was a teenage lifeguard wearing a black bikini who stalked about, ever vigilant, like a panther. I was reading Ivanhoe later that evening in bed when a storm blew up. I had loved the great adventure novels-- D'artagnan, Hornblower, Captain Peter Blood. She was blond and compact--so sleek and alert, ready to pounce--and sometimes carried a long aluminum pole, for rescue. Suddenly the temperature dropped, and the breeze and ozone drew me to the window. Ivanhoe having jousted the evil Norman Templars was now turning to face the lifeguard. And the fresh, scented breeze, like a soft shock of poignancy, entered, as she stood her ground and knocked him off his horse--with her pole. But the Saxon knight clattering to his feet and drawing his sword. While I had to lie back down. And now the lifeguard her own spiked mace--from what appeared a low-slung, warrior girdle--like Saladin. The battle ensuing in the hot sun. The lifeguard's action-packed arms and legs as smooth as the sky. Clubbing and clanging Wilfred of Ivanhoe to his knees. Golden sweat glistening in the vales of her shoulders. Ivanhoe cooking in his bashed up, borrowed armor. Low down now inches away from the lifeguard's taut navel, just a bit stinky from the heat. Clutching at her solid girl butt. The lifeguard gazing down and smiling--her rueful, blue eyes--ripping off his plumed helmet, stepping back, whirling, and catching him flush on the jaw with a thunderous Kung Fu round kick. And I started to squirt this astonishing, thin pre-come, right through the lining of my swim trunks, hardly doing a thing, just lying there. An innocent bystander, or wait--quickly now the lifeguard's trailing squire, as she rightfully ascends the festooned victory stand, to accept the Chaplet of Honor from fair Lady Rowena, tourney Queen of Love and Beauty. Cuming for the first time, peeing in my fucking pants, while never more than a simple, innocent page, even. At the time I had taken great pride in reading the unabridged classics. Never having imagined anything remotely like this before. Appearing out of thin air, taking full control-- vanquishing my heroes--clearly an evil muse. My parents were both normal liberals, total pacifists. Downstairs preparing dinner, equally, blamelessly watching the news. Right below the squeaky bed springs. My parents are kind, tolerant people. There's only one thing they can't accept: violence. It's a cultural, an American, sickness. There were no guns, toy guns, or rubber knives in our household. And of course Gay people were fine, splendid. But man what was this. The unspeakable. I was like that guy in the hockey mask. Like Ibsen. And right after, it started to rain so hard, and the rain poured through the window screen, so I shut the window, for an important quiet time, of the defining new secret: that bad was actually good, low was high, shame the best, and sex was violence. As confirmed by the hardest, fastest truth: cum itself. Ridiculing all they had ever told me, or ever would. This was bad alright--thank God I wasn't religious. I was badly flawed--how girls were now the coolest cold-blooded killers. So shivery. And sure enough, the next day it happened again, just as violently, with the same winner and loser, except now as Roman gladiators. Thumbs down. How I loved America! Girls had taken on a whole new usage. They were infinite--like what the buffalo meant to the Indians. Though how could I ever look a real one in the eye. I was peculiar, secretive. No longer a strong swimmer and aspiring scholar. Rather some kind of freak--a bookish young pervert. Exiled, me and my berserk imagination. I wasn't homo, a queer, like at school, and that was a relief. But whatever I was, it was pretty bad, you never saw it on television or in the news. You couldn't tell your pals. That tits were actually a diversion, a trick, yet clarions of a new age. Or never your smiling parents. Sitting there like holographs. I knew the word "pervert" all right--those pedofiles parents and teachers warned about. And at night I swore never to become one. SUMMER NOCTURNE Piglet stirred in his sleep. The first time ever after a fight he had managed to fall right off to sleep. But M. would simply not abide it, and so what was this blow job in progress, anyway, but stealth. That Piglet couldn't consciously realize at first because his awakening thoughts precluded the fight. Piglet's first thought was that dreams were the imperfections of sleep. And then came his recognition of the blow job, and what an honor it was. Men are honored by blow jobs. It would be really rude not to pretend to enjoy it. Also, one of her ways of avoiding sex was by complaining that he didn't appreciate her blow jobs. Even though she knew he was practically appalled by them, the very act itself. Reasoning churned along like this forever--the obverse side of ceaseless biochemistry. He began to softly groan, pretending to enjoy the blow job. Then he remembered the fight, with fear heightened by adrenalin, with the excitement of knowing he had fallen dead asleep. It was a clean win--he had slept, and now a victory blow job! Although he'd never get back to sleep in the midst of this adrenalin. It hadn't occurred to him that M. would grab the first available pretext to resume fighting as soon as he was wide awake. M., she could fall asleep on cue, like a medium. Preternaturally--at Yoga class. She was just waiting for him to grow slightly limp and to softly, sadly say: "You don't like it." Just in time he managed to stay hard by fantasizing going down on her. She had about the sweetest pussy on earth. All his life, all he had ever really cared about, his very incorruptibility, was pussy. Sometimes at work he'd just think of M. and feel great joy. Or lying in bed at night, listening to her hum in the shower. The thing is, he loved M., and her lazy, distracted pussy. Some women's clits were way too wet. Or by god talced, powdered. But Piglet loved M.'s sturdy thighs that buckled when he slipped on down there. Sometimes so slowly and gently for so long on a quiet, rainy afternoon. A gradual gathering within the walls--of trust. After all, this wasn't going to be very pretty. Not exactly feminine, when she grabbed him by the hair and adjusted him--his adjustable neck--and used him like a thing. A trusty rudder, upon a flat smooth abdominal sea, now rising. As she started to rock, licking her lips and tossing her head, and he'd try to keep up, or then slow down, although after a while it didn't seem to matter. She be gone. You think of women--they throw a ball funny, they run with their tits bouncing up and down. They can't run, they can't jump, because they're full of sex. Such an upheaval. And how he loved getting her off, more than anything, getting laid, even. Was that bad? As Piglet's thoughts turned more from the fantasy of going down on her to reflections upon the fantasy, he got just a tad soft, and sure enough she said, "You don't like it." When you do get a little soft, it's some awful truth for them--when in fact you could merely be reflecting on how wonderful it all was. "You don't like it," she repeated. The blow job itself was kind of pointless, true, but fine, spread out like a blanket, for a nocturne. When didn't she slow down all the time when he was doing it to her. But she was better, because she didn't much enjoy doing this. This motivated blow job was more altruistic, intent on mending a quarrel, for the common good. Unlike his pussy-eating circus act. "I love it," he said weakly, as just then Piglet realized her trick of keeping him up for the night. He struggled with this feeling--paranoia. But paranoia was an excellent starting point, here in the dark. "No you don't," she said. He hated blow jobs, lying there, accepting this award. He sat up and looked at her and said, "Yes, it's true-- and you know--you knew." M. portrayed her profile drained. "Good night," she said and turned her back, and there he was--wide awake, excited, alone, ready, paranoid. The fight--it hadn't really been a fight--they never had actual fights, over real things--money, drinking, affairs. What was the fight about. Piglet took a blanket into the living room. They fought about stuff involving M.'s feelings. Piglet lay on the couch and tried to reconstruct the fight. He started jiggling his leg. You had to capture, surround, her impressions, like butterflies, at their very moment, before they fluttered away. It was so unfair to have awakened him--and not even finish the blow job! He'd never get to sleep now. It was nearly midnight. So unfair. He stewed. He walked back to the bedroom. Her refined little ideas--why, they were weak and ephemeral-- petty, bourgeois. He decided to wake her up and prove it. Show her the fallacies of each one of her reasons for wanting to leave, one by one, were she to kindly restate them, for the sake of accuracy, the record. But at the bedroom door he saw her lying on her side, face to the wall--her frisky legs sleeping gently curled together. The covers were gone--she slept in her animal heat. In those slightly elastic, powder-blue, cotton panties only. Her wonderful weight lying atop the bright new sheets she had picked out covering his dirty old cum-stained bed. She was a sexually cunning woman who kept herself young-enough always. Piglet stopped dead in his tracks. Whoa. It was like a bedroom diorama, the light sprinkling in from the living room. Her solid little butt, in those savage, little panties. Ever flexed, ready for action day or night, plugged into her spine, cabled to her fathomless brain. Don't you dare fuck with this. Leave well enough alone. How many other men in their 40s had this. Most women M.'s age--their butts had just collapsed, expired, as if someone had let the sexuality out. While M. spent hours churning along in the pulpit of the Stairmaster. Don't fuck with this. Ho, Ho--everything would be fine, so long as Piglet didn't blow it and wake her up. After all, he had proven himself worthy--he had fallen asleep! Her last resort had been to suck him off, like pulling a knife during a fist fight. She wouldn't leave, he just knew it, so long as Piglet let her sleep! He slowly advanced into the bedroom, as if camouflaged as a tree. Not to get too close--she had a beastly sense of smell. Piglet sat down cross-legged on the rug about four feet from the bed, like the front row at the movies. She was lying here on his bed, in his bedroom, the bed clearly sagging a little in the middle. Wasn't that eternally enough! M. turned over on her back and growled in her sleep. Piglet flinched. She was on top, even asleep, and they both knew it. He carefully withdrew. Maybe he couldn't keep track of her tiny impressions. But he never questioned her thinking. She was a great abstractionist--superb--he just didn't believe the ideas themselves were of any importance. The main thing was to test them for quality. Boy, she was really going to leave him. He was a cad. His first wife had done it. Piglet decided to get drunk. In San Francisco you can buy a bottle of booze on almost any corner day or night. Outside the night was clear and the ocean breeze had died. No more M, quite possibly, this time. Alone, once more, at 42. Although what was love, desire, by now, anyway, but an alloy of memory. Piglet recalled those Junior High days, peaking cautiously around his open locker, as Sue Lane's juggernaut butt swiveled by, so simply ruinous, in the waxy neon musk, the butt that had made him permanently sneaky. Yearning lived on, is true, but diabetically, shot up with memory and desperation. Outside the market a homeless young man asked Piglet for a little help on the way out. How homelessness broke your train of thought. Piglet bought a 1.75 liter bottle of Absolut for over $30.00. He swaggered from the store and held up the vodka bottle, as a great silver trophy, of this win over M. August 24, 1996. "I'll give you a blow job for a right hit of that." It was the homeless youth. He produced a mug. "For one single solitary cup." Piglet stopped. The blow job--an inescapable fact of life. Although dogs didn't do them. "I don't need one, right now, but thank you," said Piglet. The frail lad was possibly yet a teenager, sitting collapsed against the wall of the store, like a marionette. "Rarely does one need a blow job, sir. Often it comes as a complete surprise. Like after a failed hand job." He smiled, pleasingly and pleased--unmarred, not a bit slummy. A blond head bobbing about irrepressibly atop a slumbering body. He was asleep wide awake--like a shark. One of those runaways, thought Piglet. On a San Francisco Satyricon. "Well, in truth, I dislike them--blow jobs," said Piglet. "I was just trying to be polite. You being a street person and all." Piglet tried to leave but the boy arose and bravely answered, "I don't think you can dislike them, either, sir. Disdain, dread, fear, perhaps--but no more dislike a blow job, than say, a shoulder rub." "You know," said Piglet, "you step off the Greyhound, suck off a few queers, and that somehow makes you an expert--" "Please, I just need some of that, pretty bad." The boy slid back down the wall into a slump on the sidewalk. "Of that big old jug of liquor, sir." And sat there all wound down. "I'm sorry," said Piglet. Piglet hesitated, then twisted open the cap of the bottle. He continued: "But all my life, I've never really enjoyed, ever much wanted, the standard blow job. I politely decline, apologize, even, right from the start. I tell them, point blank--they know it! "But keep right on ablowing, only harder." "I didn't know, honest," said the boy. "I really dislike blow jobs," said Piglet. "That's fine," said the boy, summoning a funny little cheerfulness. "As if you'll start to like it, if they only try harder, blow with greater feeling. And you have to respect that- -and not disappoint them. And now she's blowing like crazy, while you're lying there helpless, embarrassed--wandering off, for Christsake--basically inattentive." "How true, sir," said the boy. "Uncaring, and getting a tad angry--as she consolidates her gains," said Piglet. Piglet filled his mug with vodka and sat down next to him, against the wall. "This doesn't mean, in no way, that I want a blow job, understand?" "Certainly not, sir," said the boy. "And then you can just see it coming--at work: 'Oh, no, and now for the blow job.' Their $50.00 promotion. A new business card, faster computer. So you can get more done. When who cares? "'Tis so," said the boy, drinking from the mug with both hands, like a bowl of soup. Piglet glubbed from the bottle itself. "But try to turn it down. Go ahead, reject it--along with all their greedy little dreams, that you're trapped in, inhabiting, substantiating. Their carpeted sports vehicles. See what happens--turn it down, at work. Graciously decline: 'Certainly there's a bigger, finer dick than mine, in our highly capable office.' "Go ahead, refuse to be held accountable--for their dreams. Just see what happens--if you think this is bad." "Fuck 'em," said the boy. "They can suck themselves off. "But look at the sky, sir. It's so huge, right? An inconceivable astronomy. Separation, loneliness, on an hilarious scale--a ludicrous proportion. When maybe that deja vu feeling-- you know, of something repeating itself--is simply being aware for a second, of what you're feeling all the time." 2 The Pacific Northwest After M.'s departure, Piglet almost never left San Francisco. There were Lesbian bull-whip societies. Mixed wrestling clubs. Piglet could network. Although try to find one good woman wrestler. You'd think they'd learn a few basic moves. Piglet had wrestled varsity in high school. You'd think a wrestling woman might apply some science to compensate for her lack of upper body strength. But right off she throws the half and you spike her into the next county. And she's either too petite or a gorilla. And even find a trim athlete, a smiling Amazon strong and eager, you might still just as well let sit on your face. Because there's no technique, no licensing. Piglet rented a car and drove to Seattle to visit a friend, for a brief vacation. He drove up along the coast. The weather was fine. Retired government workers aiming video cams out over the ocean. Taking brisk walks through the national parks and supporting the highway economy. At sunset the pink glow from snowy Mount Shasta was everywhere. A splashing river followed him the next day. And then a great nuclear power plant. Astonishing hillsides of trees mowed down like a shaving commercial. Piglet stopped to play golf. The day sparkled. The air smelled like fresh cut timber. His golf shoes gripped the moist grassy earth. He swung, the tee flipped over. The ball rode a rising crest up the fairway to a peak way out in mid-air. When Piglet was a boy, there were woods instead of parks. Once Piglet and a pal came within a yard of stepping on a giant hornet's nest. A perfect paper lantern that they then crunched with a great rock. You could hear the hornets trapped inside, furious. After golf Piglet sipping a drink on the clubhouse veranda in the Sylvan evening. Staying the night at the Thunderbird Motel for $24.00 with Cable, HBO, and remote control. Eating pistachios in bed. Watching Perry Mason late night. Those 50's guys were so massive. While the women were kind of adorable, and totally tricky in their prim suits. Piglet fell asleep. He woke up some time in the morning, and went out to buy a Sunday paper and cup of coffee. He read the paper in a steaming bath. No way would O.J. testify. Not against himself. Nor the Blast Suspects. While The Motorist had testified. And the Unibomber sure as hell would. And the President would testify, but only by video, with the right background. Then Piglet saw a small story down in the corner that made him sick. Teenage girl proves her right to wrestle Candy Jones, Staff Writer. As the last spectators of the wrestling match leave the Edna Hill High School parking lot, Jim Arnold sits alone on the sidewalk waiting for his ride. He is the picture of depression. Jim just got beaten by a girl. Sally Dickson, the only girl on Edna Hill's wrestling team and the first ever in the league, trounced Jim in the third round of their match at the Maplewood School. . ." It was all coming true. Starting to actually happen. Beaten by a girl. With Candy Jones looking on. Smiling an admixture of sympathy and sadism. Candy Jones! Not defeated--but beaten--by a girl. Trounced. Dragged across the mat. Whiff the glandular girl armpit that's pinning you. Her other hand jacking up your crotch. Pinned by a girl! The referee holds up her victorious, nail-polished hand. The Edna Hill cheerleaders bursting out on the gym floor, clapping between their kicking legs. Geeze, their panties. Jim's father looking on. Mr. Arnold is a decent, simple man who doesn't understand this. He drives off. And later there's Jim alone on the sidewalk, dazed. Candy watching from the shadows. Sally Dickson emerges with her friends, the cheerleaders. It takes her a little longer to shower and dress. Her friends are amused. So they all walk over. Good match, Jim, it was close, until the third round. When I rode you with that double arm bar. Broke you down and slipped the half and turned you like a steer. How you almost managed to bridge-out the period. But then you started to tire, your bucking started to weaken-- Writhing on his back, beneath Sally's proud new breasts. And then the moment of final, complete humiliation, when the referee's hand comes down with a terrible shudder. Piglet felt rubbery. A great erection bobbed above the water. It was way too real. It wasn't meant to be, or just barely real. It was meant to be secret, not out there. The whole thing was just a fun secret! He felt poisoned, overdosed, systemically sexual. Reality compounding everything. All borders had dissolved. He levitated in the dense water. His stomach knotted, intestines fissured, legs shook. What he needed was a nice round of golf. Piglet made it outside. And realized that he didn't even know where he was. What town, or state, for that matter, he was in. Washington or Oregon, or maybe even California still. California was endless. Cars whizzed by. What time was it. The air was sticky. There was a highway, motels and restaurants, and lots of telephone poles and wires. Bulky people wearing colorful windbreakers, non San Franciscans, going in and out of restaurants. There was no wind. The sun was hot. Piglet felt like Camus, Sartre. San Francisco hundreds of miles away. Maybe a thousand. As Jim Arnold sits alone head bowed by the curb. Candy the Cruel steps out, kneels down and says, "How does it feel, Jim. You can talk to me." She opens her notepad. If Piglet can barely take it, what about Jim. Piglet's been at this for years. But you can't expect a staff reporter to back off. He entered a restaurant, the Silver Cleaver. Everyone was eating omelets. Dripping strands of cheese from their mouth. And those mounds of wormy hash browns. "Ready to order," said Piglet's waitress. "What time is it," said Piglet. The waitress pointed to a burl clock on the wall with brass hands. It was IV past XI. "I'd like a small bowl of brown rice," said Piglet. "You mean the chili rice." "I'd like a small bowl of white rice," said Piglet. In a few minutes the waitress returned with the rice. The rice made him better. Than the rest of these pigs. Wearing their cool windbreakers. The blue postal workers. Yellow ATF agents. Alcohol, Tobacco, and Fornication. Adultery, Tobacco, and Mortification. He ate to live. They lived to eat. He started to feel okay and remembered why he had felt sick. Oh no. Jim stands up. Darkness has fallen. Where's dad. His dad came to all his matches. Dad, I'll get bigger, stronger--but she won't--or not as much. He says alone in the dark. Give me a year. Six months. I can take her. It was just a stamina thing--we were even through round two. I'll train. Please. The way she jacked his inner thigh. He starts to tingle a little in the dark. A pre-puberty tenth grader. While she was a junior! And girls mature so much faster--he could have taken her in a year. But the fact is, she had trounced him. Piglet began to feel dizzy again. But women were your friend. They're so totally different, all you could do was trust them, lying with them, listening to the rain. Piglet had never known a woman who wasn't really good. Even the Lesbians. He ate some more rice. What he needed was a good jolt of real pornography to get past this, and then back on the golf course in no time. Enjoying his vacation. The rice and coffee cost $5.00. Outside cars whizzed by in the glare. Everyone was gone. They were all at the golf course by now, in their cool windbreakers and saddle golf shoes. Fine. By the time Piglet arrived, the first tee would be wide open. He shielded his eyes and scanned the highway looking for the word "Adult." And it dawned on Piglet that here, roadside, was a true pornographic desert. Not even a newstand, a 7/11. Piglet despaired. Maybe a deck of dirty playing cards somewhere. If he searched the bottom drawers of motel dressers. While the maids were airing the rooms. While San Francisco was a pornographic wetlands. San Francisco was unbelievable. Piglet entered the gas station store where he had bought his morning newspaper. Behind the counter were Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler. Maybe okay for poor beaten Jim, but useless for Piglet, who had acquired an extremely high porn tolerance level. Piglet was 39. By now he needed pictures of naked women drilling guys right through the head with long thick drill bits. Next to the candy was a small magazine rack. Maybe a woman's bodybuilding mag! thought Piglet-- Women's Physique World, or at least a Strong and Shapely. Something synergistic. The idea of a "Woman's Physique World" was a total turn-on. But here, along the road, there was nothing, not even a New Body, or Self. In San Francisco, at least half the stand was devoted to various forms of body magazines. Piglet began to fret. Could Jim ever return to school. What would his girlfriend say. There was no way to ever fix this. They wouldn't wrestle Edna High again until next year and by then Sally Dickson might be in a completely different weight category. Her breasts would be larger. He searched the magazines in desperation until he found one called Wrestling Eye. A weird, hieroglyphic eye peered out above a grimacing, clenched-up Hulk Hogan. These bloated, jokey professional wrestlers--everyone knows they're fake. But were there lithe, little lady wrestlers. Piglet picked it up. Let me see. And flipping through the pages Piglet discovered a rich new vein of exciting perversity. Pages of advertisements for videos of amateur wrestling babes! That's what that creepy eye was all about! Piglet felt a little sick. But it was okay: TIGRA THE CONQUERESS THE QUEEN OF SUBMISSION WRESTLING "Vacationing in sunny Southern California, world champion TIGRA (in her best shape ever--5' 9" 140 lbs.) can't pass up the opportunity to demonstrate her overpowering wrestling prowess on a hapless male photographer." And there she was, flexing in one picture, applying the sleeper to the hapless Paparazzo in another, and her legs squeezing his brains out in a third. What a butt. Strong and shapely. Piglet took the magazine to the counter. He could tell the boy at the register took him for a homo. He hurried back to his room at the Thunderbird. There were undefeated Deena, 5'9" brown belt Karen, and Linda the kickboxer. And the world famous German Mat Club. Bikini Athletes. Some of the pictures were too dark, but it was great. Piglet felt much better. Than hapless Jim. Some day Sally Dickson would end up on these pages, possibly a world champ. Serve her right. Maybe even Candy Jones--she could be a Bikini Athlete--or Shapely Pro. And Jim, too, if he just let go of that silly ego thing. Perusing the dim ads shunted down in dark page corners, Piglet suddenly felt ashamed. At least in their own funny way they attempted to get at something real. Pictured were actual apartments, with modest carpets, and fitted rec rooms. The girls took pride in their fitness. The truth always arrived unsanctioned, wobbly, alone. Wrestling priestesses of the too hard pretend. Piglet arrived at the golf course in the early evening, still time for nine holes. He had the course to himself. The government workers had finished and were drinking on the clubhouse veranda. They waved to Piglet. One mixed drink and they were drunk. Piglet teed off. The evening air was so alive you could blend right into it. Piglet disappeared into the wooded course. Long black shadows, the spirits of tired, buffeted trees, lay down on the soft green fairways in the golden sunlight. The ocean glimmered in the distance. Piglet was alone. No more M. He remembered when he was Jim's age, he'd play golf by himself in the evenings. He went to Europe by himself when he graduated college. Boy, he had been so alone, alone in Europe, wanting so much to share it with someone. This is what happened when he left San Francisco. He missed M., funny sweet M. How she ran into so much trouble with herself. All tangled up, laughing and crying. Piglet started wandering around hitting the ball with a five iron. The hurt radiated through Piglet like a comet in deep space. He sat down in the fairway, alone in the grass and trees. Missing M. so bad. It got dark. Back at the T-Bird, he decided to return to San Francisco the next day. It had been a golfing vacation in the Pacific Northwest. Piglet slept badly. He awakened early and watched the end of Body by Jake, an aerobics show. "Let's bring it home, girls," said Jake. He visited the gas station store for a newspaper and cup of coffee. It was raining. Piglet lounged in the bathtub and read the paper. He carefully screened it for surprises. Women were good and liked unphoney goodness the most. If the globe warmed up, wouldn't fewer animals freeze. Those crystals they grew in the Space Shuttle. Do vacuum cleaners work in outerspace. Cult leaders, the Texas Billionaire. Was this shampoo ruining his hair. Kind of gloppy. Should he use that rainwater stuff. M. used a special green dandruff shampoo that cost about $20.00. Piglet had tried it secretly once, and it set his scalp on fire. She had warned him not to. He flipped through the sports section. Quite a lot he had to hide from M. So as to present his highest person. When what was wrong with that. When there it was, on page D5 of the sports section, right above the baseball box scores. Wrestling Coach Disallows Victorious Girl Grappler Candy Jones, Staff Writer. . . . It had been a hard-won victory for the ninth grader. [Sally's trouncing of Jim Arnold] Sally, 16, has faced major opposition to her choice to wrestle. Boys on other teams hate to wrestle her and react badly no matter who wins. But perhaps the greatest obstacle she has faced has been the East Avenue School coach who feels girls shouldn't wrestle. Coach Gene Anderson refused to match Sally with any of his wrestlers. "I did not think it was correct for a girl to wrestle," Anderson said, of the March 19 match. "You've got wrestling and volleyball. It's always been boys' wrestling and girls' volleyball. . . ." Where all the real men would see it. Piglet could barely read on as Candy Jones made mincemeat of the hapless coach--Excuse me, sir, but isn't that kind of begging the question. Because shouldn't you be your very best, especially for M. I don't beg, young lady--I told you--boys' wrestling, girls' volleyball. Even if it meant being a sneak. Please don't react badly, coach Anderson, I'm just doing my job. Piglet rose from the water, like a green monster. Quickly he dressed, packed, and paid his bill. He drove out of the parking lot and into a long slow line of departing government workers, pulling their boats and off-road vehicles. The rain was steady, but not hard. Although up here the rain continued like this for weeks. In San Francisco, storms were over in a day. What about that boy, Coach Anderson. Piglet searched for something on the radio. Surely you're not afraid of matching him against Sally. The traffic was stop and go. Orange cones and yellow signs appeared. It was just a bitter, bitter pill that Coach Anderson would have to learn to swallow. Women could wrestle. What was Sally's record, anyway, and she's only a junior. It was time to stop being a bad sport and face up to it. 3 DOG DAYS At his day job, Piglet sorted information. By name, date, by code. Every kind of computer report. Except unsorted. Because, delete the sorts and the data came out ordered as originally entered. "Piglet, this wife--did you love her?" His mistress stood at the bathroom mirror wearing powder-blue cotton panties that's all. Combing back her long brown hair, a leaf of grass. Her sharp shoulder blade pulled the smooth handle. Her solid girl butt and round flat heels balanced. Her trim spread legs, as he cleaned the toilet on his knees, were as a Colossus. "Sorted." "How can a love be 'sort a', Pigala? A love between women, my love for Jade, could never be 'sort of'." "Sorted." "Nor could it ever be 'sordid.'" "S-O-R, T-E-D." She pushed his head into the toilet. "Drink, like a dog, lap it up," she said. "Like the hairy mutt you are." A roach was hiding under the seat. Piglet saw it on the way down. A Hindu roach. Wayfaring. Her slender fingers attached to his scalp like a plunger. So strong for such a little girl! The toilet water tasted like spring water. Minerally. "With your tongue, you idiot." She unzipped her makeup kit. Visualize castration. She had so many things, everywhere, in little silky kits and colored glass boxes. Files, vials, tweezers and threads. Silver and gold compacts, and by god a scalpel. Ancient cuneiforms--she was so advanced! Mysterious instruments and applicators in fuzzy velvet cases with scents that could stop and confuse an army. Piglet still had his childhood, Al Kaline-autographed baseball glove. M. had a few strange pins handed down by her grandmother. And a tin box stuffed with old letters and faded pictures of friends and relatives. It was a tin box full of smiles. The pictures were slotted in vertically along the sides while the letters lay flat. M.'s smile was warm and kind and welcoming. She mimicked animals perfectly--a croaking frog, a barking seal. The first time they met she welcomed him right in and they talked and lightly petted. Later he learned how to gently tug just her nipple and not to stop. When at some point he should have twisted them like knobs, and called, "Rangoon, Rangoon, come in Rangoon!" if only to preserve the lightness. "Piglet, what do you mean 'sorted'?" Mandalay! Mandalay! So as not to use up all the lightness. To hold some in reserve, as a place of return, the first place--as a swirling cove. Instead it became an exhibit. You can never believe a single word they say about anything. It was just one place. "Piglet--" He realized he was coming up short, once again. He'd reach a critical point and then it would all go away. Into concluding thoughts like little caps upon and thus assurances of further introductions. While hereabouts was a place of snow. When his mistress told him what to do. When her steady words quietly, like a night snow, fell through the void left by his hibernating will. Words like crystals of snow landing on his soul, blowing over his soul, facets tumbling over the snowy expanse. In fact this coldy coldy place was no place for toasty M., who was gone now, anyway, since he had lost M. Piglet remembered just a glimpse of his Mistress' turreting tits as she grabbed him by the hair and slammed her knee into his chin. Then he was on all fours watching the blood from his mouth splat upon the linoleum floor. These red crowns. God was it a tooth. He felt queezy, nausea. Red checkers--on a linoleum checkerboard. King me. His tongue surveyed his teeth. What a knee. It was a geyser, in his lip. Just a good old fat lip. How you can't lose someone who hated you. And what a relief not to be hated anymore. He imagined what his mistress' hamstring must have looked like at impact. The problem with reality was that you couldn't really see it. She stuck out a wad of tissue and said, "I am not a therapist--understand?" Hated your cautious lightness, your tiptoe fear. She kicked him in the ribs and cried, "Answer me, Goddamnit!" "Yes, mistress." "Your self-pity makes me sick. If only this wife could see her dumped, pining houseboy--licking up every drop of blood." She pointed to the floor. The blood tasted like tomato juice. "She'd laugh--and kick you herself." The doorbell rang. Oh dear it was Jade. So young and impressionable. New to these moments, and to dates with a girl. "Stop bleeding," hissed his Mistress. Her blue eyes were enamel. "Wait here while I get the door. Stop bleeding. No, you get the door. Try this wash cloth. You get the door. I swear, though, if you blow it, I'll never have you back." He got the door. There stood the willowy Jade. Young strippling Jade. "My god what happened to you?" Your girlfriend decked me. Your sweety kicked me in the face. Quite a diesel, that girl. Like your admirers--those brutes down at the Palladium--Jade was an exotic dancer. "Oh it's this sore, it festers. Now and then." Be nice, tactful, and they hate you. Stupid cunts. "Are you okay, Piglet." Jade was so sweet and concerned, dressed up all punky, for nightclubing, bracelets dangling, and Piglet was quickly dazzled. "I'm okay, I'm fine." His mistress appeared, in a toasty red bathrobe. "Go make Jade a drink, Piglet." Jade grinned. He made her a weak vodka-cranberry. Booze made Jade kind of drowsy. He made the drink but paused before reentering the living room and peeked in. They were standing together in the middle of the living room. Four of the longest legs, a copse of legs in a clearing in the living room. Jade was weeping. "It's so horrible. Waving their dollar bills, their sweaty grins--drunk--those creepy little Japanese tourists, pawing at me." His mistress fluffed up Jade's hair and wiped her cheek. "Yes, dear," she said. "But then, that's how they are." "So horrible. Is this really how Sammy Davis, Jr. got his start?" Jade had zero work skills. "All the great entertainers began in vaudeville." Piglet entered the room with Jade's drink. Before they left for the evening, his mistress turned to Piglet and said: "You know, I could hire some refugee maid, some illegal alien, to clean once a week, for practically nothing. And I'm sure he'd jump at the sound of my voice--'Si! Si senorita!'--even not understanding what. You know--" Come on, let's go," said Jade. "Don't be here when we get back. And leave your check by the phone." They left. Good riddance. A hooker and a stripper. Where was that vodka bottle. He turned on the TV in the living room. It was time to play Double Jeopardy. Christine, the law student from Tulane, was back. History for 600 and what do you know the Daily Double. She was so smart, and kind of adorable with that drawl. Using the color on the remote, he began experimenting with her makeup, as the vodka burned a little on his swelling lip. 4 Letter to a Mistress Dear Mistress, 74 days have now passed since I last heard from you. Every day I diminish, down to nothing. I awake in the night, a tingling speck, acutely in touch with all that tingles. I have disappeared into pre-feeling that tingles undefined. Dear Mistress I'm way, way inside here. I have diminished down to a state of pre-sensitivity. It's okay, though, I have shrunk right through whatever sickness there used to be. Feeling all that is about to happen. But wondering: can you get me out of here? I'm not complaining, there are worse conditions for sure, but just to hear your voice again, like the webbing of all the stars and their clusters. Although I know this is right, I believe in this penance, I have faith that you haven't forgotten, Mistress. Although sometimes it's so hard to take this, Mistress, I rebel, like all creatures, like drones and ants everywhere, with orders to march. I know you've reduced me to down to nothing and what more can I ask of you, and why won't I give you any rest, but please bring me back. Or maybe you've simply forgotten. Allow me to explain. The violations I mean. Every day I do as you have ordered, everyday between 1:00 and 1:15, I go somewhere private to receive you. I still do, even though you never come anymore. I still open every pore to you every day at 1:00 even though you never come. I make sure I'm in my office and I draw the curtains and lock the door and lie on the carpet. Mistress, every day, even now, I fast until 1:15. I lie on the floor and pray you'll come as you once did, the way you did at first, all wet hair and drenched in power. Your divine pussiness coursing over me, and I could see your friends unknown watching amused as you pressed me down and fucked me into a woman, until we were clit against clit, cunt brushing cunt, and my breasts had risen in your supple hands. And when you were through I felt as dreamy and sleepy as a little girl. A dreaminess that I never feel otherwise. For at night I tumble off to sleep immediately. And startle awake intermittently throughout the night. But every day at 1:15 after your romp, and the laughter of your wood nymph friends, I would arise from the floor pastorally refreshed and ever grateful. But the violations--I can explain. The first occurred during the partners luncheon seven Thursdays ago. You know I'm not a partner, and if I were of course I wouldn't go. But I have to go-- because I'm not a partner--otherwise they'd suspect. Mistress, you know that I'd much prefer to eat dog food from a bowl at your feet than all their fried filet of yak put together at these luncheons. But if you don't eat, they wonder why. You have to at least nibble. Anyway, they're serving some broiled abomination and 1:00 rolls around. Mr. McCormick, a great big senior partner, is feasting. He's sure to take his wife along, on his golfing trips, for the desert air--she has allergies. "Excuse me," I say, standing. It's okay, you've yet to arrive, I can still get outside to receive you in the sunshine. Mr. McCormick is describing his jewel-encrusted driver, when suddenly there you are, in all your cruel innocence. "Excuse me," I say, standing, and then--"I can see this wife!" as you start to come over me. I see her breathing beatifically like a swami in the desert before a golfing oasis, as clear as a postcard. Anyway, I managed to struggle to the men's room and started throwing up, as you grabbed me by the hair and shoved my face into the toilet. I am so sorry. What did I think--why didn't I step away at 12:50--or 12:55, even. You know why, and you know it was deliberate. You know my purpose on earth is to experience your total, systematic obliteration. Like a man, as it gradually gets worse and worse. As I adapt manfully every day to the worsening conditions you impose. You know I'm insatiable for you, I need you in the most intense way possible, until you pour the gasoline on me and flick the match. And I can't think of anything on earth more intense than your soft, beautiful implacable iron-willed hatred. Next to hatred love is a feather. Hatred is so powerful it's unusable. It's as if we haven't evolved far enough to deal with it, so we stick to the real feathery stuff, which we elevate to ludicrous prominence in order to avoid dealing with the rest. You can pretend all you want that something like love will do, but it just leads to rebellion. Me I'm in a state of chronic rebellion. You must rip my arms right out of their sockets. You must compact me piece by piece down to my essential sorrow. And keep me there forever with your profound unwavering disgust. Anyway, you didn't return for the next one week and two days. But every day I lay down in my office because I had faith that you would. And on the tenth day of lying ever still I saw a lone tree on a hillside beneath a showery March sky of great thunderheads. And I was the Spring warmth clinging to the tree against a cold breeze, as the tree itself clung to the hillside. I was the warmth in the tree. On the eleventh and twelfth days I was the warmth in the buds of the tree. On the thirteenth day you appeared naked over the hill and the breeze stopped. Your breasts were soft and triumphant. You approached the tree, and you began cutting off the buds. But that was okay, there were hundreds of them, and every time you cut one off I felt a paroxym of pain and pleasure. First you'd gently hold one in your hands and then surgically snip it off. This continued through the eighteenth day after the partners luncheon. You were determined to cut off every last bud. And as the number of remaining buds diminished in number down to less than a hundred the pain increased a lot with each new cut so that on the seventeenth day after the partners luncheon I stuck one of those office tension balls they always throw around in my mouth at 12:58 so that no one in the hall would hear my cries of pain so muffled. Biting down hard when you cut. By the eighteenth day I swear you had reduced the number of buds to less than 30, and you took longer now to snip them, you fondled them in your hands, and it felt so good before the snip, the ever decisive snip, that sent me writhing across the floor into my computer. On the eighteenth day you were holding, gently squeezing, it must have been about bud 25, when the phone rang before the snip and I reached up and answered it. Otherwise I'm certain this would have gone on through at least the 23rd day following the partners luncheon because you were taking so long now between snips, enjoying them so much more, and even coaxing me through them. It was Neil, a friend. "Well, are you drinking her piss out of a shoe?" he began. He doesn't like you, Mistress. "Can you blame M.? You know, you're the one who's got to look at that mug in the mirror every morning, pal, and--" My muffled cry interrupted him as you snipped. "What was that? Has she nailed your tongue to the floor? What's going on in there?" This time there was simply no excuse. For not unjacking the phone--at 12:50, or 12:55. And then the way I jumped to answer it. Again, it was an act of pure rebellion. I simply could not take the pain. You have paths of pain, underground streams, down which I cannot follow. My arm shot up to answer the phone--like a shocked frog. My masochism failed you. I was unable to bear up. I'm a groveling submissive masquerading as a masochist. I see your blue, enamel eyes. I see all your tender cruelty staring at me. I see your perfect breasts. It is your right to do anything to me you please, and I answered the fucking phone. You had even begun to coax me. On the eighteenth day you said, "Today we're going to strive for four. Four cuts only. Do you think we can make it through four? "I know how it hurts," you said, fondling the first fuzzy bud, "but think of only four, little boy, and we can make it through, if you keep that goal in mind." The pain exploded with the first cut and I started to cry and you stroked my hair and you were nature calling me back to the wind and the rain. "Only three more to go," you said, caressing the second bud, and I could sense your quiet delight, when the phone rang and I sprang and answered it. There were at least 20 buds remaining, all told--I didn't make it anywhere near the last one, which was at least five days off. I didn't make it anywhere near the final cut, and exposed myself as the rank submissive that I am. I can only imagine the final cut. I can only imagine the denuded tree so weak by the time of the final cut that the last bud simply drops off and lands between your toes. A timeless miasma of female ascendancy, a sickness of spirit and limbs, tinged with orgasm, followed. You hold me at will, and reveal the signs of ascendancy wherever I turned: Lesbian couples on the subway, advertisements for workout centers, the newspaper estrogen studies. I took long pointless walks up and down the hills of the city, feeling sickened and yet pleasured that the tide had turned so inexorably. And that's when the tingling began, at first in my legs. That was the time of the start of the tingling, I believe, although it was barely perceptible then, mixed as it was with sickness and orgasm. How all the hookers in the Tenderloin were really posturing she- males. How men had these pitiful little mustaches while women did such wonderful things to their faces. Women everywhere just seemed so subtle and advanced that I became mired in pornography or else their very wonder would have driven me crazy. Pornography became the anchor of my sanity. There was a woman walking down the street, about 5' tall, but her butt simply deserved the entire Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. Heap all the trophies, plaques, mounted footballs, and retired jerseys in the dumpster out front. I could feel you Mistress, but ever so obliquely then. I don't know. Maybe you were gone by then. It's just that, sometimes, the sickness felt like a drop of femininity, of poison, mixing in and spreading over and nullifying me. While at other times I was aware of the faintest suggestion of you, moving through me, as if I were being used as some kind of relay, a relay tower, as part of the ascendancy, and as your thoughts and feelings swept by me so fast that I could only begin to acknowledge, much less understand them, and thus that this feeling of you, at times, was like a vapor trail. Then one day while on another pointless walk I saw M. getting into the car. I hadn't shaved in a few days--there was the restraining order. The car was dirty as usual. M. shrugged, as she did when we were together. She has this way of shrugging her face, Mistress. To let me know that everything's okay, somehow okay again. But toward the end, she'd shrug only because she knew I was waiting for it, and then for a while there her face would shrug and shrug as if my face were a broken cigarette lighter. She drove off. And that's when you stopped altogether and the tingling grew and grew and I got smaller and smaller. I tell you, it's not much fun in here. There's not a lot to do. If you could just call, or perhaps answer this letter, maybe I could start coming back a bit. I know, the return envelop must make you furious. Plus the stamp. But what can I do. You're probably so tired of all this. Truly yours, piglet 5 THE AGE OF AMPHIBIANS Piglet could slip into the ascendancy at any time, anywhere, like a panic attack. He was sent to fix a computer problem at a branch office. Airports were the worst for Piglet, a hedonistic nightmare. A bright, dawning realization of the ascendancy like a future civilization, where the men were seedy little cab drivers and docile porters and official servants in blue and red blazers who waited on women hand and foot. Where the women dressed in triumph as their husbands trundled behind with the luggage. Great splendid halls of debuting cowgirls, courtesans, commandants--United Transworld. Airports were the ascendancy. Women can wear anything they want and do anything they want to their faces. While a man might experiment with those Ozark sideburns. Women are smooth and hairless. Men are hairy like apes. Women wear precious stone that goes right through the luggage x-ray. While a guy has to pile his crude heavy alloys onto the tray. That big brass watch like a manacle. The airport staggered Piglet. Robotic he arrived at the office. It was a wiring problem--the band width--the wires were too narrow-- an incurable network deformity. What could he ever possibly do. His only hope was a work-around--the modem. The modem sat there, off to the side, a puzzle box, its cryptic lights smirking. Terra incognito. Suddenly, though, as a robot of the ascendancy, Piglet began to function. On the back of the modem it said "Intel." He dialed 800 information and then Intel. The Intel engineer was Dave. Well, what's the other modem, said Dave. On the modem in the San Francisco office Piglet remembered it said Hayes 28800. 28800 was the baud rate. There was a string command--a redirection--Piglet entered it as Dave dictated. And sure enough, the modem sprang to life--dialing, gurgling, connecting--to San Francisco, the Internet--to information everywhere. Piglet and Dave rejoiced. Back at the airport it was early afternoon, the most sickening glandular airport time, a staging platform for the new primacy. At the one o'clock airport convene the most leisurely perfect midriffs, a galaxy of smooth flat bare tummies and one with an ascendant, latent appearance of muscle these days framing a swirl of sickening navel. A mademoiselle Apache wearing a tied off white Oxford shirt that once belonged to a guy who's now probably scalped containing breasts. A woman can get as hard as she wants and yet always have perfect, or pleasant, breasts and you can see their full shape within a plundered male shirt. As the scalped man lying there in the ditch watches her tightly tie off his former shirt above her pierced navel and then wipe the Bowie knife on her jean leg and stick it back in the sheath on her belt. And pouch his scalp, smiling down ruefully, her face as soft as a cloud, shaded in the silkiest black hair. Once again, Piglet felt hormonally contaminated. How women can wear anything they want but a man puts on a dress and it's a joke or he's a transvestite. How a woman is hard and soft and can get harder and harder and stay just as soft while a guy gets harder and harder until he blows up into an abomination, goes to seed. And a man can never be soft--even if you're Gay--never a softy. And if he could, they'd have to create some new category--Soft Male--or some subcategory--Soft She Male. How all the taxonomy pertained to men. While women were totally free. Drive-free, circumspect, completely bi. Women had been strapping on dildoes without a fuss for years. Then sleeping together like sisters. And what attracted women to men was far more attractive as expressed by women assuming roles in male domains. Donning plain brown UPS uniforms, beautifully loading dollies. And how a woman's trim, agile, hardening muscles were designed for the ascendancy while a guy's were for ripping out tree trunks. Already women were the best golfers and tennis players. So women were hard and soft while men were hard at best. And you could just see that some day women would be just as soft as they currently were while at the same time harder than guys as well. Already there were great women Kung Fu fighters who could beat the shit out of most men. And notice how dildoes were now made of plastic and no longer resembled real pricks, and came in a choice of colors, shamedly large. Stylized purple dildoes--so great and so shocking. Think about it, thought Piglet: the idea that a dildo had to look like a true prick had become a joke, as part of the ascendancy. And how Lesbians were a total turn-on--take Penthouse, Hustler, for truckers, even. Who were too blissfully thick-headed to understand that, lovemaking was woman's work. That the Lesbians had burst right through those pathetic notions of "Women's Lib" and then "Feminism" like lines in the sand, a Nazi tank brigade. That indeed the war was already over, and lost. Piglet made it to the gate and collapsed in a black plastic chair. Outside a plane trotted down the runway, like an ostrich, and took off. He felt as if bitten or stung by a venal insect. Or injected, some serum of the ascendancy, that rendered him docile, yet quivery, a resonating antenna of the ascendancy--a relay tower. He could also act as a cargo handler. Soon all the great cultural centers would be Lesbian. Men would have to fan out, roam the countryside, into small Baptist communities, to ever get laid. A male diaspora. You never heard of strap-on vaginas. You never saw a man addressing a plastic pussy. Again, a woman could buy her own dick over the counter for $10.00 in any true city in the country while a man needed $100,000 worth of surgery at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland to acquire a vagina. Women could have dicks but guys can't have cunts, it was that simple. And what was there to understand about a dick, anyway, while a vagina was like a modem: a mysterious black box, like a bomb at the airport. Even women can't explain them. A man sat down in the chair next to Piglet and opened a book. All the seats at the airport were connected and it made Piglet uncomfortable when someone sat next to him. Encroaching on his revelations. Plus, the man was bearded. When women had begun the process of complete hair removal back in the Plethozene Era. He looked familiar--maybe 50--professorial, wearing a black turtleneck that stretched over a large, distinguished gut. But bleary, and clearly no excuse for facial hair. How a well groomed beard was just a flimsy corset. Like some erudite ape--as if that were the goal--80 hand signals. And certainly no one's going anywhere with a body covered with hairs. Hair removal was in fact the first step toward invisibility. A no-brainer. Some men, bodybuilders mostly, were current with hair removal, modern electrolysis, literally tens of thousands of years behind the women. However appalling, bodybuilders were the most advanced males, posing, groping about, attempting to ascend through ritualistic flexing. And the true bodybuilder could in fact succeed, in a fashion, as a perfect example of aberration, with massive doses of steroids, and as a robot of the ascendancy Piglet could sickly approve of this amphibian beginning. It was at least a starting point for when women turned invisible. Piglet could only make out the author of the man's book--E.M. Forster. Piglet liked Henry James. Henry James' women were so cool. The Bostonians. Outside a plane had started its descent in the distance. You could see it drop down before getting a sense of its approach. Piglet's plane boarded. The runway was crowded. Finally, it took off--Piglet reclined his seat, relieved, as it climbed. By flight level all was peaceful. Fluffy white clouds and deep blue sky. Piglet nodded off. Then snacks arrived in flat little packages and weightless plastic glasses. He drowsily listened in on conversations that resembled pleasant language book dialogues, against the droning engines. He suddenly felt silly--non-corporeal, two- dimensional. The flight attendants passed by like the sliding targets in a shooting gallery, like smiling pictures in a children's book. As the airplane magazine depicted life below as the Koran portrays Paradise. Although the plastic windows were actually impenetrable. Outside the still blue sky above took note of the passing white clouds below, and Piglet realized the first idea, the a priori, of a perceiving blue perceiving a perceived white--the main thing going on--the broader abstraction. Another plane whizzed by the other way, like a bullet, providing scale. He rose, and stretched, as a cat does in the morning outdoors. Piglet looked down the rows and perceived an ark of attestors, notary publics, deed records--demographers, census takers, auditors--reading and jotting down notes, taking note. Seismologists. Active listeners, percipient witnesses, the Self Aware. The self contained. And how you couldn't get out. Couldn't step on back and out--no matter how breathtaking the purvey--the ascendancy, even. Then he had to watch his breathing. Because once you sensed the outer idea, your brain might pop--it couldn't withdraw that far, even at this speed and altitude--couldn't separate from matter--transcend. They'd check his pulse and call it an aneurism, a blood clot. Piglet swayed down the aisle. Why was he breathing with his mouth open. Why not turn the oxygen down a notch, the way it was hissing in here. The plane itself could pop--from too much cabin pressure--explode, like a baked potato. That could happen--a mystery wreckage. Piglet lurched through a brief turbulence and came upon the man from the terminal and realized he was reading Ian Fleming, not E.M. Forster, The Complete Stories, and that the man himself was Sean Connery. Piglet focused. He bent down and whispered, "Bond, James Bond." The man said, "Excuse me." Piglet said, "You're Sean Connery, aren't you." "What?" "You're Sean Connery." The man smiled, cautiously, and said, "I'm not Sean Connery. I'm flattered--but no." Piglet said, "Well I guess you get mistaken a lot for Sean Connery." "Never, until now." Sean Connery was one of Piglet's favorite actors. Those James Bond movies in his room as a teenager Sunday nights on ABC. The ever dangerous Bond babes--Ursula Andress in her white bikini with the knife--she could have flayed Bond if she had wanted to. "Look," said Piglet, "It's cool. Hold the autographs--just tell me, who was the best Bond babe." "Look you, I'm not Sean Connery," said the man. He hit the switch for the flight attendant. "Perhaps you can show me some identification, then," said Piglet. "He's not Sean Connery," said a voice. The flight attendant was Dave. He wore a blue name tag. Just smiling, wincing "Dave." Downsized. How males were adapting to new roles of total servility. Piglet moved along. Why weren't there women Hostage Negotiators. It occurred to Piglet that Sean Connery had to be at least 65, way older than this one. Furthermore, the real Sean Connery probably had tons of fake ID. And Piglet was not aware of any short stories written by Ian Fleming. E.M. Forster, however, had written dozens of lousy short stories. Piglet was tempted, for a moment, to go back to apologize, but decided a followup was pointless. It was unbelievable how long these planes were. He could barely see the lavatory off in the distance. 6 THE BERKELEY LESBIANS Piglet's home, Berkeley, California, is a sunny place, of happy Lesbians. Was Piglet himself a Lesbian. Tendencies, maybe, but not. Piglet was actually the best male, beaten by yet a better woman. Defeated in hard, even combat by one of the best Lesbians. He was clearly the best man, and not at all a fem Lesbian. He wrote, made okay money, and worked out, at a gym, four days a week. In the center of the gym was a large cage where the free weights and benches were kept and where mostly men worked out. The Stairmasters and bright blue Nautilus equipment, favored by the Lesbians, surrounded the cage outside. It was an old-time gym, plus a modern one. Step in and clang the cage door shut for some heavy bench pressing. Guys will help you with a spot, push you even harder. Although Piglet didn't need a spot. Men, they work the chest so much, it swallows their shoulders and they lose their "V". Although Piglet could tell that some of the bodybuilders took him for a wimp. Piglet looking out the cage meshing to the 20 or so "V"- shaped Lesbians, strictly working scientific apparatus. He knew he wasn't supposed to. Occasionally one would catch his eye and frown. But how could he not look. Never before in history had women been built like this. The men didn't like it either, you could feel a discomfort in the cage mount when a guy got caught up looking. At the girl with the floppy ponytail, in the modest red leotard, working the shoulder press. At the slender strippling deltoids rolling out along the back of her shoulders never before seen. A new, adorably strong, feminine totality. That men had resisted, fought, under one guise or another, for centuries. Now turning after the final rep, smiling, intent. Sitting, resting, arm on knee. Strapping on a dildo and a line out the door come to suck. Or before the bedroom mirror, trying on different colored dildos, any one that pleased. Let me see. What could be more natural, and perspicacious, than this. Piglet was the first to admit. We send radio signals off into barren space. Overlooking, having forgotten, however conveniently, the next step: a difficult one, a major holdup, waiting there as ever to be dealt with. But the ponytail girl was getting closer, you could tell, from all the curious and unflinching, taking up her smile. A critical interior voice had long suffered Piglet, from early childhood. But now, the Lesbians, justly bestriding the planet, in lissome warrior girdles, had enlisted such fine critics to take up their retinue and fanfare. And what a thrill it was for Piglet, of shame mixed with relief, dismissed, just to see and bear witness. At last, the glory of years of skills training in tiger pup self-hatred--like the funnest lariat. The frequent leopard woman, all rugged and faux weathered, a serious elder, adjusting the leg press--to work her mighty spotted butt. A totally new gluteus grandeur--hard, yet full blown. While men work their chests, women work their butts--their most susceptible part, variously. The butts of the early Lesbians were laughably large. But Piglet gave them credit for coming first. The ridiculed forerunners of now this tremendous, profoundly developed buttock that could outsquat any man. Nestling in under a leg sled loaded down with 800 pounds of rubber plates. The front end of a Honda Civic. A man could never have an okay butt that prominent. The first of its kind, bespeaking a higher, more powerful sexuality. While other women had totally charming complimentary little butts. While a man can only have one good average butt. Sometimes Piglet saw a pretty, trim fem holding hands with some big-butted diesel and wondered why. It was this wholely new sexual superimposition, that only a few chameleon males, like Piglet, could freely and fairly acknowledge. The grunting and clanging in the cage amplified when someone stopped to look. There was dignity to uphold, always, at some level. Piglet knew, but sometimes yearned to give up, give in, to the harsh, unremitting rule of Lesbians. To a complete capitulation that your sickened psyche staves off outside now every minute. Who were loathe to rule, anyway, the Lesbians, savoring, as they were, the irresistible revelation of each serial instant. Time embodied, backed-up, by the taunt of a ponytail's bounce, eliciting Piglet's ever sullied male resistance. And so you lift, lift, heavier and heavier weights, enlarge, swell, although dignity is always difficult, concurrent but separate--slipping, eroding. Impressive gains stand, however, as the crumbling model, the illuminated Parthenon itself, aloft on the clear night. As awakening Lesbians unlocked their ancient inchoate, so troublesome and endless, brand new yet complete, free of gain. While the twin seraphs, Good and Evil, traverse the fading trails of Time's negative unity. Piglet's reverie was interrupted by a tap on the shoulder. No, he would not provide a spot. Nor did he desire one himself. "We need to talk. In my office." Piglet followed the gym manager. They sat down separated by a vast metal desk. "I'm Dante," said the manager, smiling. "Sorry to pull you away from your workout. But we've noticed, the last few times, you've been looking a little hard at the ladies. You know they don't like that. How would you." "I guess I wouldn't," said Piglet. Dante was a great blond weightlifter with a sweetly lecherous smile. "Wouldn't you feel a little uncomfortable, possibly even intimidated?" "Yes." "And maybe some of the girls might just be a little self- conscious to begin with, here at a gym, for the first time?" "Yes--especially in Spandex," said Piglet. "That's right," said Dante. He suddenly leaned in, huge and hairless. "And don't you think they're tired of it. I mean the staring. Whistling, catcalls. Late night phone hangups. Stalkers. Wouldn't you be fed up?" "Yes." "I don't know what your story is, but you come here, you don't lift very hard, and you do a lot of looking around." "I'm sorry. I know--I get carried away." Dante sat back. They both were silent as Piglet reflected upon his misdeeds. While Dante was big, good, smooth, and inductive. Then Dante said, "You know, this is a very special gym." "Yes." "And what makes it so special," asked Dante, thoughtfully, "so different from the other gyms and fitness centers." "It's got a huge cage right in the middle." Dante was surprised by the alacrity of Piglet's answer. Expressions formed on his soft thick face like play dough. "And why do you think we built that cage," he asked. How was Piglet supposed to know. Piglet accepted things as they were and went on from there, from what he considered the highest existing point. "I don't know--I'm not Margaret Meade," he said. "Maybe you're a little creep." "I'm sorry," said Piglet, quickly. Dante leaned in again. "Maybe that cage was built when we all got tired of creeps the likes of you. Staring, objectifying, humoring, harassing. And then the rapists. Domestic abuse, the flashing lights, swat teams deploying in the bushes. Slain prostitutes, dumped out of cars. Tawny body parts strewn along the highway. "Maybe we just got sick and tired of it ourselves, as men." "I'm sorry." "And maybe we hand built that cage for a woman to know that here at last was a safe place where she can come to tighten her body, where men are committed to her total integrity: strong, decent men who have respected, appreciated--honored--women all our lives. "And maybe, when a man steps inside that cage, he's saying, essentially, I get it." "When some pervert like you shows up and threatens to wreck everything." Dante sat back, shaken. "I'm sorry." Piglet inspected the desk. Then Dante stuck out his chest and smiled, lecherously. "Say, what's your name, anyway." "Laurence Cloud," said Piglet. "Cloud, let's go back in there and I give you a spot." Dante put his weighty arm around Piglet's shoulder and they reentered the cage. Piglet was careful not to look at the Lesbians. He lay down on the bench press. Dante put on two 45 lb. plates. Then he added two 35s. "Too much," Piglet protested. "I'll spot you," said Dante. "Just the 45s." "You can do it," said another voice. It was almost twice as much as Piglet normally benched, crazy. Several bodybuilders gathered around Dante, the spotter. Piglet looked up at them, helpless, supine, like a surgical team. "Breathe," said Dante, "breathe, then lift." "We're right here," said one of the bodybuilders. Dante removed the bar, let go, and Piglet struggled for control. "You got it, pal." "All yours." The bar descended toward his chest, way heavier than anything Piglet had ever attempted before--crazy. Piglet was about to quit but suddenly caught the weight as it brushed his teeshirt. Dante's steady hands were poised right below the bar, just in case. With a mighty groan Piglet attempted the press. "Do it." "Take it." "All yours." Piglet battled the bar. It wavered, then rose, barely an inch on the right, and then the left. It didn't hurt, it was just phenomenally heavy, as Dante gazed down, fraternally. For once this time Piglet wasn't going to lie there and quit. He arched his back and fought the bar tooth and nail, one single inch at a time. And then amazingly Piglet felt a heat in his shocked arms that he had never felt before, and knew that this was it, what the bodybuilders meant by, "going for the burn." He extended the bar, arms straight, elbows locked. Dante looked down, smiling lecherously, as he removed the bar. Piglet found himself accepting congratulations and not looking at the Lesbians. How did he know they were Lesbian anyway--wasn't that a rather homophobic assumption, on his part. One of the guys, on the slender side, like Piglet, but of a strangely burnt tan, approached and said, "That was great, man. Feel like working tri's?" Piglet joined him at the universal. When suddenly a commotion at the front of the cage attracted everyone's attention. It was time for High Aerobics, and the leopard Lesbian, of the tremendously muscled buttock, had come over to padlock the cage door. A few of the bodybuilders were objecting. As the dyke elder pointed to a notice posted on the cage next to the door. Arms folded, she smiled indulgently, yet unbudgeable. That leotard--was it velour, or actual animal hide. Padlocking was the compromise solution, an accord recently struck, between women and men, to remedy the problem of men reacting badly, creating disturbances, during the High Aerobics class. Now you had a choice: either leave before the class began, or remain caged for the 30-minute duration. "Come on, you all know the deal," said Dante, strolling over, "It's either in, or out." About half the men, 10 or so, left the cage, with some grumbles, and the door was locked. The women took up their step platforms and dispersed about the gym. The spotted Lesbian turned on the tape and tapped at the mike. The lights dimmed and the music came on. It was the heavily synthesized, Euro-industrial sound of the mid-80s--late Joy Division, early New Order, Piglet figured. The marching bass track reverberated throughout-- Bom-bom-bom-bom Bom-bom-bom-bom Bom! Bom! Bom! Against a backdrop of sheer synthesizer, punctuated by swaths of crisp, staccato drum machines. Piglet had never witnessed one of these, a High Aerobics class. The very reason, no doubt, for the many magnificent, marching Lesbians on hand. He marveled. There was just a little girl, practically, dressed in sniffable grey sweat pants, and pink training bra, with the tiniest, tautest tummy--neither muscle nor fat-- something purely sexual--prancing about her platform, as instructed by her marine sergeant, in leopard fatigues. "Lift, now back--one, two, three--kick, return--now straddle!" What could it all mean. The pounding march of pastel tennis shoes. Just her pixie, cat-like nose. "Cloud, now quit it," whispered Dante. "You promised--don't let us down." Piglet remembered. He vigorously worked triceps with his new- found friend. Who was impeccably hairless, as the other men, and in lean, boxing shape, but of a peculiar chemo--orange--color. Smiling eagerly, like Al Jolson. When wasn't there a single, inescapable conclusion. Through the back door screen, the Virginia cicadas of evening, and a cooling delta pussy, set deep within forest thighs. And a strict diet of liquid methamphetamine. Piglet could do that, that Lou Reed heroin thing. Put the spike right through my vein. Piglet was down, entirely, with wasting. But on speed, and orally, thank you, all twitchy. All predawn shivery, cleaning the bathroom floor of a professional Lesbian couple with a hard bristle toothbruth. How you can't find those anymore. In the silence of his grinding teeth. Very, very dry, and so coldy, his dry sweat stuck in his pores. Panting, on hands and knees, for a breakfast glass of enveloping methedrine, and a swift slender kick to the stomach. Stepping out entirely of what goes on. The thought process. And into the arterial process. Be blood--sentient lava. Speed, the anoretic drug of choice. Thickening, quickening. While aging isn't getting you anywhere. So let the Lesbian lead, by the hand. And take you, out, back, into the lining of your brain cells. But you lift, lift. The meager wasted Piglet wearing a plain old red dress. Of Depression gaberdine. Of faith. He half-heartedly took up the tricep bar again when suddenly the lights went off altogether and a green and red strobe clicked on. The music switched to a militant hip hop, rap itself. The women spun away from their steps and collided in the flashing light, bumping and grinding, shrieking, as a male rapper railed on about the hood, the police, the "bitches," 'ho's'"--God knows what. Give it a rest. Piglet focused on an African American Lesbian, about six feet tall, built like a halfback, the way they did that jiggle thing with their dancing shoulders. "Whow, look at that," he commented. Uneasily, of two minds, Piglet's new friend began to look on as well. As Dante, like Odysseus strapped to the mast, paced about and warned against looking--more than, say, a glance, or so, at a time. "The weights--get back to your routines. Stay grounded." It was hard, all right, not to notice the flashing, sweaty, pelvic females: strutting, pounding, clapping to the beat, hands high overhead, and their savage cries, in the flashing dark. Some had formed a Conga line. Piglet discerned that a few of the Lesbians had actually strapped on brightly colored, electric dildos, like fireflies. "Hey, I need a spot over here," said Dante, preparing to squat. Like signals at sea. Not a minute too soon the lights and aerobic music clicked back on. The Lesbians returned to their pedestal steps. "That was close--unbelievable," said Piglet's orange pal. He wasn't that young. He explained to Piglet that the padlock was necessary because recently, during difficult moments of the program, the men would drift loudly among the Nautilus equipment, like foraging bears. The music blasted on, implacably, as the Lesbians marched lock- step about their platforms. Bom bom bom bom Bom bom bom bom Bom! Bom! Bom! How does it feel To treat me like you do To put your hands upon me And show me who you are "Does it matter, anyway," said Piglet's new pal, slumping on a bench, beneath his suddenly falling ebullience. "Who are we kidding. They're gone, they've turned the page on us." His bright tan concealed his age. Closeup he was actually kind of haggard. Ploughing fretful fingers through his wispy blond hair. Piglet sat down, too. Piglet was a kind person, astonished by sorrow. "Yes, I think it's true," said Piglet. "These particular Lesbians do seem to be advancing, I'm afraid. But wait, this is just the top half of 1%." "Who are we kidding," continued Piglet's friend. "I'm going broke, anyway. I mean, the electrolysis appointments--500-watt tanning lamp. Not to mention the night classes. Oh yes, the Active Listening seminars. Regression techniques, Meditation, Massage Therapy. Foreplay training." "Well at least that one must be fun," said Piglet, cheerfully. "You would think," said the highly tanned one. Taught by a $300-an-hour professional sex surrogate. But, you can't even touch her--you have to practice on the other men in the class." "Gee, isn't that kind of embarrassing," said Piglet. "Of course it is! But that's precisely why she makes us do it. So we'll see that men and women have practically the same erogenous zones. Especially the nipple. "And it can be kind of fun, once you relax." "Well, what about pussy-eating," said Piglet, alarmed, "surely you can't practice that on a guy." "Well, she says that cunnilingus isn't really foreplay since it mostly happens after intercourse. "But what's the use, anyway. I still don't get laid--ever." "Well, getting laid is always difficult," said Piglet. "And perhaps a tad overrated? I mean, why at our age, there are plenty of that cheerful, good-companion type to choose from. Hefty, capable women, who can pitch a tent, who you can bring along to Yellowstone, or the Grand Canyon, for example. The Grand Tetons. Only not on a cruise line. "And many others with mastectomies, but good otherwise." "Dante, why don't we have an aerobics routine," said one of the bodybuilders. "We don't do anything cardiovascular," said another. All eyes turned to Dante. He looked around. "Well, first, there's not a lot of room in here," he said. He thought for a moment. "Men have a higher incident of heart disease," said the orange person. "My blood pressure's up." Suddenly the lights went off, altogether this time. It was pitch black. What now. There was a stirring from among the Lesbians. A bustle, and a few playful shrieks. Then the lights of a half-dozen or so strapped-on dildos flicked back on. Swaying slowly the dildos approached the cage, from different directions, strategically. Bom bom bom bom Bom bom bom bom Bom! Bom! Bom! Oh no, thought Piglet. The raiders poked the plastic dildos through the cage and rattled them against the filigree. They were red, green, orange, and blue. Wait a minute, the cage belonged to the men, said Dante. This wasn't allowed-- "Come and get it," whispered the Lesbian nearest Piglet. Piglet instinctively put his lips to the softly glowing blue dildo. "You know--don't you--that this is what you get," she said. Piglet's esteemed childhood friend, now worldly, returning for a visit. "Time for slut-boy training. Here, how does it feel." She reached through the cage, grabbed the back of Piglet's head and rammed the dildo against his throat, again and again, smashing and tearing his face against the cold steel cage. It felt like such a relief, to be sure, such an urgent relief, a passage. "And when it's time to suck real cock, you will. Because we can make you, and you'll learn to like it, love it, the queer little slut-boy faggot you are." After all, attempts at reform had failed, and so what was left but hard, corporeal punishment. No more of the weeney, picky stuff. She was so much higher, and heavier, and lower. "Oomph, Oomph," said the Lesbian. Piglet reached through the filigree and managed to grab onto her flexed, concave butt as she pounded away. Man, the Rock of Gilbraltar. As she grabbed him by the hair and knocked his forehead against the cage. It made him kind of dizzy. Thankfully he didn't have to suck, just keep his mouth wide open. Or otherwise the blue thing would so peaceably knock his teeth out. How you can't fight progress, the inevitable. The advent of a simple biotech procedure: that illumined, plastic blue instrument coming at him, cross-eyed, permanently implanting the national Gay chip deep inside his cerebellum. So peaceful, and yet so urgent and necessary, like a yearning that had managed to stay attached and secretly grow. And maybe all that was so bitter was simply the pang of missing this dark sheltered urgency. "That's right, suck it, suck my cock. And you best get used to it." Remanded, as he was. By all the power fully vested, in the County of Sex. State of Super-Ego, country of Secret Narcissism. Swear this girl in. But it can't be fun, you sick asshole. Well, who said so, clearly the other incessant method had failed. And no way was he homo. How that came up. No way--she was the active ingredient. So strong--just her hands--and no doubt so beautiful. Men were strong, women were beautiful. But beauty was higher, having made herself strong. Beauty was stronger, having wrested strength away. But she's built like a man, you queer. Oh, no, rather something brand new--the highest Lesbian ever! So high--turning strong, courteous men, all around him, into wussy faggots! Wow! Chivalrous men--but it was more trenchant than mere sorcery--more-- The Lesbian removed the dildo, slapped it a few times across his face, and pranced back to her step. The lights returned and the music switched over to a light, elegant Mozart. It was now time for freestyle cool down. Some of the women spread out their mats and did hundreds of tummy crunches. Others performed Yoga or Tai Chi compulsories. The girl in the red leotard pirouetted way up on the tips of her toes. A compact butch shadow boxed. Her pleasant little breasts punching right along, beneath her sweats, like precious remnants. The class ended. The girls clapped happily, and took up their steps and workout bags, exchanging numbers and business cards. The leopard woman approached the cage with the key to the padlock. "Do something, Dante," whispered one of the bodybuilders. "Say, that was great," said Dante. "Thanks," said the Lesbian. Emboldened, Dante flashed a wide lecherous smile. "It's no secret to us that you're a radical Lesbian separatist. But, hey, I think we can deal with it." He offered his hand. The Lesbian laughed. "You mean those asinine Cybele worshippers? No way!" Hands on hips, a ruddy smile, she surmised the men. Her long, relaxed lines and wrinkles were of the sea. She took Dante's hand in both of hers and said, "Look, the girls and I, we can't explain, exactly, what's happening--whether we're separating or joining, for that matter. Only that it is a very exciting time for us. And while we may not show it, we do appreciate the total forbearance you've provided us here, so graciously." 7 LOVE COMMANDO Alone and divorced again, Piglet pulled up at the all- night Safeway. The two security guards let him pass, a harmless night creature. He selected a six-pack of beer and pint of vanilla ice cream, as she had told. The deserted supermarket sparkled, like a radiation accident. He drove off. Through quiet, comely neighborhoods, of happily married men and women. Of blessed, lunar connubial. While he was a roach, served and filed. But go figure the beer and ice cream. His mistress was in fact a national fitness competitor, her physique a shrine to the Goddess. While Jade hardly ate at all. Yes, licensed procreators out there, cuming at the same time for a perfect score. Piglet thought of his mistress' body and began to shake, at the wheel. With the bars about to close, and the highway patrol now out in force. He turned onto her block. He drove up the driveway. He rang the bell. A cold dry wind rattled the trees. His mistress opened the door. "Piglet. Well there you are, aren't you." He looked up, cautiously, and ran smack into her rueful blue eyes, and pretty blond mockery. She laughed, holding closed a toasty red bathrobe. "Do come in." Inside the foyer, she whispered, "Pigala, do you mind if I call you 'Gus'? It's Jade's birthday. She was 23, just one hour ago! I've arranged something special. So go into the bathroom and slip this on." The bathroom was cleaner than ever. Inside the package his mistress had traded for the groceries was a dildo. There was something going on. It wasn't one of those heavy rubber dick dildoes--rather, this upward-curved, smooth, green plastic thing. Some stylized piece with a strap-on. "Gus, Gus--we're waiting." What to do. Piglet stayed dressed but strapped the dildo on over his jeans. He looked in the mirror. The green thing stuck out about a foot, rising cheerfully with holiday spirit. He loved it here. He trundled into the living room. A silver pantheon of posing Amazon trophies sparkled atop the mantle. Jade was bound and gagged nude on the sofa. Lying bowed on her stomach, hog tied, thick white rope coiling about her wrists and ankles. Burnished by the soft red glow of an end table lamp. Jade was a slim girl, but not this skin and bones. A little sack of loose skin swung freely, drained of a tricep. Her long, pretty legs weren't as bad, but, still, were spotted with surface bruises--from vitamin deficiencies, thought Piglet. Jade wasn't eating again. Every so often, Jade stopped eating. She rocked a little--creaked--a perfect ghost ship of bones, bowed ribs, and rigging, covered by a mist of bluish, see- through skin. A rubber ball harness was strapped across her mouth. She had always been nice to Piglet. They had shared secret giggly times together. His heart ached. His mistress looked on. His heart ached. But he was still a bad person. So warm in here, she said. She let slip the bathrobe. Lordy. Ms. Nude Fit Your Highness. Totally naked, perfectly medium, breasts, nestling down upon the softest, hardest muscle, way beyond purvey. Jaguar sleekest. Amused, folded golden arms--a shaft of light! Here in the soft fiery glow with Jade quietly shivering and sweating some on the couch. Piglet reached down to pick up the bathrobe. "Oh get up Piglet--Gus. Be a man, Gus." Her excruciating butt, sweetly wrapped in red silk panties. Jade trembled. The irony of the word "panties" itself alone was devastating. His mistress lit a cigarette and said, "Comfy, dear?" Jade rocked and nodded yes. And Piglet knew exactly what she felt--that shivery sexual call to order, of being beatened, bound, and tortured to death by a beautiful warrior Lesbian. Although Jade could take it even further, awfully far. His mistress exhaled and said, "Piglet. Have I ever humiliated you?" Piglet thought for a moment. The plural of "pant." He had once licked a spot of her stuck shit off the bathroom bowl. But how could anything she ordered him to do be humiliating. "No." "Exactly. And how could anything I order Jade to do ever be humiliating. I can go but so far--pillage, torture. And you see how insatiable she is! You, however, anything you were to do would be thoroughly degrading--now wouldn't it, Piglet. And it's Jade's birthday and she misses you. Don't you, Jade?" "Anyway, Piggy--Gus--here's the plan: it's been three days on the road, and you're going to make it home tonight. You're tired, hungry--hemorrhoidal. You've been dodging those interstate scales. Up there in your big rig. Teamsters make good money, Gus. You, have a big fancy belt buckle. And don't have to take any shit off your woman, Jade, here, Gus. You're one of Country Western's new breed. Tonight, all you want is beer, some grub, a football game, and quite possibly a blow job. Just a basic, good old-fashioned, American blow job. "There had better be beer in the refrigerator. Go for it, Gus." She pointed majestically toward the kitchen and there were veins like lightning bolts between her breast and shoulder. Piglet went on back and opened the refrigerator. A great red roast full of iron sat in a platter like a turkey. Piglet popped a Bud and made a roast beef sandwich with plenty of ketchup on white. He returned to the living room. Jade had been moved to the rug. The TV was on--a repeat of a college bowl game aired earlier on ESPN. USC versus Syracuse. The Trojans against the Orangemen. His mistress motioned for him to sit on the couch. "Relax, put your feet up, Gus," she said, pointing at Jade. Piglet hesitated, then carefully placed his shoes atop the ropes, so as not to disturb anything. It was some secret suburban ceremony. Piglet took a swig of beer, then a defiant bite from his sandwich. His mistress stared. Telekinetically. What to do now. Unlike men, women have breasts, tummies, and hips. Her navel was a vortex, a secret peephole. A magic casement. The dildo waited, patiently. It was bendable--hard, yet remarkably light. Fiberglass, perhaps. Piglet let go--the dildo sprang back and reverberated against his belt. Graphite-- Titanium? "Well, you've had your fill of beer and meat." Three bites, to be exact. And maybe he wasn't in the mood just yet. What with her chaperoning, for Christsake, ablaze, hands on hips. Then she said, "Piglet. I give you the starring role, the best part, in Jade's very birthday pageant, and there you sit--pouting. "Why don't I just frog march you, right now, back to your pals at the sports bar." All right. Piglet responded well to threats. He stood up. He knew what to do. He had seen a porn flick, or two, in his time--the frat and stag parties. He pointed the dildo directly at Jade. "Suck on this, bitch," he mumbled. "The ball, you imbecile." Piglet nervously unhooked the ball from Jade's mouth. She smacked her lips. He had seen it done--the intro dick slaps--the endless oral closeup--and then, finally, the spurting cum facial. Why anyone would want to do that, though, to a tremendous woman--like Jade. "Wait a second." Piglet produced an old condom from his wallet. His mistress watched, perplexed, as he tried to stretch it out over the great green dildo. He tried to roll it out, unfurl it--but Lesbian cock was just too large! While even normal dogs didn't do blow jobs. He yanked--violently--the condom snapped. He shrugged. He sank back into the sofa. A man had to be what he was. "Fuck it," he said. Then, "Go ahead, kick me out. Why don't you. File for divorce--both of you. Every last one of you. Hi, Jade." "Hello, Piglet." "Go ahead, kill me." Things had quieted down. "She can kill herself, if marriage was so 'stifling.' Leave the world a note. 'I was Virginia Wolfe.'" He was ruining everything. He'd resort to anything. "I just had simply wanted for things to be okay--what's so wrong about that?" "Get a grip, Gus. Real men don't use condoms, anyway. Real men--" "No, it's fine, Piglet," said Jade, "Go on." He sat up. "They're the ones with the great important troubles. Wives. Oh, the terrible secrets, of our muddy origins, too horrible to endure alone. So you listen, until things return to normal. "Like catching my older brother's fucking curveball, every sweltering afternoon. Or protecting your clueless parents, with ease. "Achieving normalcy. At which it's fair to say, "now go piss off. "But we went to Europe. Divided hits of acid. Had weird sex. Got close, this time, in every way--I did! Right up next to her recalcitrance, its very base, a base camp." "You see what happens, Piglet. You hated her," said his mistress. She knelt and kissed Jade on the cheek. "Happy birthday, sweetie." She left for the bedroom. Emphatically. Jade lay on her stomach all bound and breathing, licking her lips. She looked up out of one eye, one big sad eye, aimed right at him. "You loved her, Piglet, as best you could, all anyone could ask. Please untie me now." Even ghastly she was pretty, her gentle profile, lank helmet hair, like a precious coin. Where were they, what page was this. All this decision-making was exhausting. He took a trucker's-size bite from the sandwich. He looked around. What was going on. Maybe divorce wasn't so bad. "Wait a second," he whispered. He stood up and said, loudly, "Guess I'll get another brew," and ordered Jade not to move. Piglet returned to the kitchen, turned on the light and popped another beer. Then he tiptoed back to outside his mistress' bedroom. He peeked in. Was she pissed. It was just like one of those horror movies when a hatchet comes flying out. Instead, an arm reached from around the door and pulled him into the dark. His mistress jacked him up against the wall and whispered, "What do I do--what do I do anymore." She kept shoving him against the wall, by his shirt collars, not very hard, but persistently. "Therapy, spas, steroids..." Then as Piglet started to dilate, he saw that she was crying--big round tears, deploying, one after the next. "If you ask me--she needs to be hospitalized," he said. She let go, stepped back, and whispered, "It's that bad-- isn't it? You don't eat--you starve! That singer--Karen Carpenter--the Mormons, even." "Well, the Mormons eat their dead," said Piglet. She lifted him again, right off the floor. Then she let go and started pacing. "Yes, the hospital, of course! An I.V.--hook her right up--check her in, first thing in the morning. Some complete amino fluid. Yes, forced feeding, around the clock. She'll like that. "Strapped down, lost in the Gulag, intravenously. Some huge Ruskie nurse. Jotting down the valve readings. Of course. I knew I could count on you, Piglet. Now get back in there--she shouldn't see me like this. I swear it, though--tomorrow, the hospital--St. Mary's--9:00." "You had better." "What?" He returned to the living room with a glass of milk for Jade and tried to untie her. If she'd only hold still. Jade sprang free and jumped into the red bathrobe. "Aren't you hungry?" he asked. "No," said Jade. "C'mon," said Piglet. "You must be hungry, for something." Jade shook her head. Piglet remembered that Jade loved ice cream. "How 'bout some ice cream?" he asked, brightening. "Milk and ice cream." "What kind of ice cream?" said Jade. "Dryer's Light Vanilla," said Piglet. She considered it, then agreed. They watched the game. An "intersectional" matchup. Jade gobbled some ice cream. It was 2:00. Piglet hit the remote. Again and again--his mistress had about 50 stations-- until he found what appeared to be a game show, "L'Amore," hosted by Luca. Luca came bounding out of nowhere. He looked like a healthy Julio Inglesias, thoroughly continental, in a square suit. Steve and Julie were the first couple. Julie's complaint was that when they were engaged, Steve would take her out for dinner and a movie before they did "it." But now that they were married, Steve just wanted to stay home and do it. And Steve was ticked because now when they did it, Julie required total darkness, a blackout. Thus, they couldn't do it in the morning or afternoon, unless they were in a closet or something. Jade was absorbed and ate steadily. He insisted she drink her milk. Steve called Julie a whore. Piglet felt very happy. The audience sided with Julie. Then Luca got about three inches from Steve's face and told him about the time Luca himself had had a woman with a similar nudity problem. What Luca had done was actually hand make for her, her own soap. From all natural ingredients, that you could get right from stores, at least in Europe. Then he'd do stuff like draw her bath water and later lotion her down. It had worked for Luca, but he wasn't saying that it would necessarily work for Steve. The show ended and Piglet turned off the T.V. Well maybe it was worth a shot. Jade started to babble. After she had lost her dancing gig at the Palladium, Samantha had said that's it and made her move in here. And Samantha confiscated all her amphetamines except a secret bottle, of crank, and made her eat like a pig. And Erica, the Nazi housekeeper, kept the key to the bathroom so that Jade could only go with Erica watching, even to take a dump. Or floss. She'd never get her job back because she was already too fat. But Samantha said don't worry they'd begin training soon. At night Samantha held her in bed and stroked her hair and sang lullabies in her ear and Sam's body made her tingle. She had really a surprisingly pretty voice and the most beautiful body didn't she Piglet. Was it bad just to want to lick her feet and always be Sam's plaything and end up in a pile of discarded toys. It would be fine with her to just lie around with Samantha's old toys. She felt so safe during the day watching tv with Samantha at the gym and on days Erica wasn't there sometimes Sam tied her up before she left. Her favorite show was Lassie. Lassie had puppies in the woods. Jade babbled off to sleep. Piglet tiptoed back to the bedroom. His mistress had passed out spreadeagled on the bed. All was quiet. Piglet felt like a commando, a love commando. His mistress sleeping soundly in the bedroom, Jade sleeping dreamily on the couch. He drove off. Geeze, it was just like old times. His mistress, Jade, and now this Erica. Who ever needed a wife. Maybe he could be Erica's assistant. She'd need a lot of help when Jade returned from the hospital. First Assistant. Assistant housecleaner. Maybe Erica could leave him a list of things to do in the evenings, after work. Night maid. Who knew the possibilities. Parlor maid. Whenever he thought of what was possible, it turned out entirely different. Chambermaid. Up ahead someone was waving him over with a flashlight. Just when you think God is great you get carjacked. The road was partially blocked, by a highway patrol car. Some San Quentin escapee, thought Piglet. Then he realized it was one of those Christmas sobriety checkpoints. No problem, he had sipped maybe two sips of beer. .2 on the meter. He touched his finger perfectly to his nose. The patrolman was polite and professional. In shape--one of country western's new breed. Piglet stepped out of the car and cooperated. The officer shined a pocket flashlight in Piglet's eyes. Piglet looked right, looked left. "What the fuck is that," said the officer. Piglet looked down and saw he was still wearing the green dildo. The officer shined the flashlight on it. The dildo glared back. The officer reached for his gun. "I don't think that's relevant," said Piglet. "It's undecent exposure," said the officer. "What am I exposing," said Piglet. "I know what that is. It's a dildo." "Uh, a common mistake, officer, it's actually a penile symbol," said Piglet. "But isn't this about drunk driving." The officer shined the flashlight on Piglet's face. He relaxed. "You like wearing that, don't you," he said. "Look, officer," said Piglet. "I just forgot to take it off. I'm really sorry." "I could hold you for 48 hours." "Look, officer, I forgot that I was wearing it. It was a pageant--yes--a Christmas fertility ritual. My girlfriend's a Cherokee Indian. Well part." "You mean 'your boyfriend', don't you?" "Well, yes, my boyfriend. Boyfriend, girlfriend." Piglet smiled cheerfully. "You know," said the officer, "it's guys like you why I moved my family to Pleasanton." The officer continued to shine the flashlight first on Piglet, and then the dildo. Piglet hastily unstrapped it. "What do you have to say for yourself." Piglet rushed to apologize again, but stopped. Instead, he said, "That someday, I'm going to take a drive on out there, to Pleasanton. With my symbol sitting right next to me, on the passenger seat. And I'm going to drive right up to the Safeway, right at midday. High noon. Park, strap on old Mr. Green, here, open the car door--" The officer punched Piglet in the stomach with the flashlight. A short, hard jab. Piglet doubled over. He grabbed for the car door and tried to gasp. This was how Houdini bought it. This hadn't happened, his wind knocked out, since he was a kid. "Have a pleasant evening, sir," said the officer. He turned and walked away. Piglet climbed back inside the car and lay down along the front seat. His breath returned in fits. There he was, in the parking lot of the Pleasanton Safeway, dildo strapped on, wives and children screaming, fleeing his advance. Spilling and dropping their grocery bags in flight. The guards opening fire. Bullets clanging off the dildo and ricocheting into windshields. Piglet by directing the Cryptonite dildo making the gun barrels bend straight up. Earthlings, put down your guns, I come in peace. Food has been achieved. Wives, I understand your feelings. Very amusing. He felt exhaustion settling in. Ha, ha, ha. Too tired to figure out what was expected of him. What was the word for that. Put down your weapons of destruction. Why couldn't he move. The patrolman would return and Piglet was too tired to say anything more for himself. Sometimes he felt empty, afraid--a lot even--but, as he got older, he almost couldn't recall what loneliness felt like anymore. 8 The Return of M. M. returns, from New York, subdued, at the front doorstep, with two large suitcases. I carry them in and she goes right to sleep, like a migratory bird. I peek in while she sleeps. It's so exciting. M.'s back! She sleeps in her pj's facing the wall. Actually in this funny blue mechanic's smock. Snoring sometimes--like the Indy 500. She loves our mattress--it's a king-size McCroskey Airflex. Made of genuine goose feathers, as well as all the good modern stuff. It's a South Sea island--Tahiti. M. removing her shoes and flopping on each different showroom bed at the McCroskey Brass Bed and Mattress Center. Founded in 1897. Bouncing, fainting, hand to brow--basking, spreadeagled. She walked right past me through the door. Sometimes I do her shoulders as she falls asleep face to the wall. But not now--I leave her alone, totally. Stay back, give her space. Give the lady room. But, what, she's disgraced to be back. What, I'm chopped liver, am I. She's not really sleeping--she's faking it. It's a test, a space test, right off the bat. I deal with my anger. Just be glad she's back! M. has trouble doing things, completing them, that's all. She's read Middlemarch three times but never finishes it--she loves it so much. Each time she comes 50 pages closer. Stay out of there--she's wired to go off. She carefully constructs a fine, detailed plan, pictures it perfectly, and at peace goes forth into wonder. And then returns flat out defeated. And then it's too hard to talk. That's all. It has nothing to do with you. The fact that she's back. Leave her alone, be a grownup. Be patient--she writes, draws, dances. Plays classical guitar--loves to cook, like a serious chemist. Reads me the Sunday want ads: "Here's one, 'machinist.'" I withdraw from the bedroom without a peep. Mr. Secret Pig. Her face to the wall is mixed. Her mother is white, her father black. That's your first defeat. Just her hair--neither black nor white--this defiant structural thing--Bozo--the Divine Comedy. Trips to the stylist like cutting a hedge. And then, it goes boing the next morning, like Napoleon's Hat. The first time it happened I burst out laughing. How was I to know that she never forgives. She understands hatred and revenge, as well as the next man, but never my spontaneous acts of cruelty. She'll never forgive. When she bravely knits together just a little cautious hope that you smash to bits, accidentally, for no good reason. Because maybe it's simply too fucking hard to keep her happy all the time. You see, it's a trap. She's going to kill me. She follows her despondency, out the door, without goodbye. Out of her life and into the world, where each new panel has its own peculiar interest. From one to the next. Diversion is your only hope. She likes it out there. Keep her occupied. When what's wrong with a little good clean malice, now and then. When she's a waitress, for Christsake. A lowly waitress, you wimp. But at Chez Panisse, and she makes more money than you do. And she's adored, by staff and patrons, alike. She's charming--she's informative. As opposed to "Sales," or "Bookkeeper," "Executive Secretary." And the food is interesting, and has nothing to do with her. She can well explain it--her French is good. And it's nice at the restaurant when she gets depressed, very fancy. And they're always glad to take her back. Her parents are also very fancy, and lowly. M.'s father is an artist, her mother an anthropologist. My dad's a pharmacist. A few of her father's paintings are stored as part of the permanent collection of the Baltimore Museum of Art. He's an intense little scowling drunk. He drinks Port, Sherry, the worst. A notable Black painter--furious. His paintings are often hung during Black History month. He was friends with the Waugh brothers, Matisse's son, and Langston Hughes. No lie--just to name a few. He lived in Spain, a lot, although he was raised the son of a tobacco sharecropper, in North Carolina. He has lots of stories. And read Brier Rabbit to toddler M., with the sleepiest drawl. M. adores him. I don't. M.'s mother has long silver hair like an Indian headdress. In college she dated Philip K. Dick, the science fiction writer. And dumped him. I thrill to M.'s stories of her famous parents. M.'s mother was a Fullbright scholar who graduated with a masters degree in physical anthropology from the University of California, in the 50's. And then raised M. and her younger sister mostly on her own in Big Sur, off in the woods, on welfare. Without complaining--silently, in fact. She's tall with the granite gaze of an Indian chief. I like her, but M. doesn't. She's nice to me. I sit down at the kitchen table, to read. I'm not going to wake her up. Sleep is sacred. You fall asleep, you win, those are the rules. M. is six years older than her sister Geneva and grew up alone in the woods after her father finally left for good. Back then there were woods instead of parks. Her face is mixed--a mystery--people think she's Hindi, or Cajun. There's a soft, round Negro modeling that blends quite sweetly with the high, noble quality of her mother. But then it cracks apart, under stress, like a rashy penitent. She stares at you, cubistically, a work of art. But then, there are other times, quiet, unguarded moments, when nature so gently adores her. This is not to say that a black person can't have high, serene lines. Or is less likely to than a white person. Her father just doesn't, that's all. It's really easy to piss M. off--you have to watch it, constantly. Although broke, both her parents are totally, absurdly noblesse. But M. is an articulate Negro we can work with. Unamused, sometimes, is true, but charming. Staring a tad impolitely, incredulously, in fact, on occasion, just when you relax a bit. A touch of that attitude thing. Reliable, all right, but tough, startling. She's had tons of boyfriends and you're no different. Returning home and now barricaded in the bedroom totally defeated. Don't pour gasoline on this. I will patiently await the All Clear sign--it could take days--the shrug and then her sucking monkey face. When she comes out in her blue mechanic's smock to phone her sister. Catching up with Geneva, laughing over the telephone, at home, at peace--exquisite. M.'s like an older brother to Geneva, although they both speak French fluently. They grew up with those Esselin people down there, at Big Sur. Who were so pleased to find in M. a nearly comprehending Negro. With a frightening stare of incredulity. Big Sur is a thicket, the heath, a no-man's land back then. These were the people who chose to live in the woods during the 50's. Mountain men, deserters, war criminals. Alan Watts, Eustacia Vye. M.'s family were friends with Henry Miller's family. There were murders that went without arrest, and you knew who the killer was. M. would hunt with her dad, for food, for rabbit. There were in-breds living in the woods with shotguns. Her dad left for good after a bad incident when M. was twelve. M. has seen cougars and wildcats in the wild--not from some nature path. Is it any wonder her mom sometimes kept them back. I try to read my Matthew. I want to do what's right, that's all. My Gospel study amuses her. She's back! My boyfriend's back and you're gonna be in trouble. I pray to Jesus--please, please cast her down here with me, among me and the demons. You know she's as bad as they come. She makes fun of you--and your father! But of course never the Holy Ghost. But don't go in there. In your patience know ye your soul. She smokes four cigarettes a day, incredulously: why, why was it so surprising when she wasn't a pinhead? Okay, because she's Negro--fair enough. But didn't they know her mom and dad, Ferdinand and Isabella. Everybody knew everybody down there. Okay, Othello and Desdemona. But, was Desdemona black. Days-da-mona. And why did she feel adopted when her mother's Berkeley friends visited down there--or even that sneaky Est crowd? Later in high school with her girl gang you could chase them off by squawking "what!" "what!" And was her mother not really a mom--but, rather, an unstinting anthropologist. Raising her two little black girls in the deep protective forest. The pristine control, of books and no T.V. A cabin fairy tale, for honored guests and criminals alike, to behold. They read fairy tales by Tolstoy, and Indian fables. California Indians. They were poor, so she taught them French. M. learned to distinguish the mammoth's cranium from a mammal's. How to cook beef stroganoff like the French. But when her mom left on a dig, for days and nights at a time, when the neighbors appeared checking in on them, with their gooey casseroles, with every sort of Big Sur weirdo lurking about! As M. did all the laundry by herself in the stream! It was so creepy down there! While mother of course was high above that, that element. M. was the first in her family to obtain a driver's license. But why was her hair so dopey? Life so abnormally hopeless? Why was nigger Jim traveling down the river when his family are in the North? Do you know what it's like being the only nigger family in a hick school room down there? Reading that? Go take your Huckleberry Finn and eat it. I just like the pretty river parts. What a trap that had been. And why are black people, passerbys, complete strangers, so venomous when she's dating a white boy? You see it--you've seen it! Excuse me--her mom is white! As if that had to matter anyway! And why do white boys love to eat her pussy, while black boys never do! But why do black boys fuck her so much harder? It's true--it's true--she says--I can see her bouncing insanely on the airflex, laughing straight at me. How could such a total stereotype be so totally true! She knows I'm bulletproof. I've always been a very slow fucker, I fuck at a retarded, gooey pace. I make love like a smiley woman. She laughs at me. She loves to get fucked real hard. I love to make her laugh. I can make her laugh real hard. She stops everything, gets on top, and fucks me real hard, slapping my face for going so slow. I myself like to get fucked real hard--doesn't everybody. Maybe black cock is what I really need. When I go down on her, she stings my back with a riding crop the second my attention starts to wander. It can be a long hard journey. She's quite a gal. Kinda big, and awful strong--and she's back--hey la, hey la. Once she pinned me against the wall and her pussy knocked my two front teeth loose, for days. She's fucking crazy. She's high quality all the way. It's quite a feat to emulate a perversion the likes of mine. It takes some time, a languid quiet time, a little wander off, to that dark, nameless ground, of black ultraviolet, where basic anger cloaks itself, from the stark cold, in a clear flame of sexual volition. Like the most intrinsic Yogi, liver-contorting swami. She could force me to suck cock. Would I do it if she stood there and demanded it. And then learn to love it, with her standing there directing, hands on hips, seeing it all through, to the bitter finish. I can't tell when I'm a self-parody or not, anymore. It amuses her no end. I actually do know, but she loves her father irresolvably a thousand times more than me, anyway, more than anything. But why he had to do that one icky thing. And we're off, groping: when it was probably her own fault, in a way. Maya, you were twelve. But was she a flirt, old enough to know how to flirt. Maya, you were twelve! Was she instinctively learning how to flirt--practicing at the time--Christ, like some bear cub, out there in the woods. And where was mom, as they tussled--suddenly in the cabin--what, off observing behind a tree, in the drenching rain that day, like Margaret Meade? Jane Goodall? Carefully not interfering? Like a totem pole? Getting soaked? She loved the smell of her dad's paints. She would sit in his lap and apply a few strokes, as he directed her hand. She was 5'3" when it happened and never grew another inch. She could have been an international spokes-model, like on Star Search. His whino breath in her ear--stay still. Maya--stay still, girl--what--like a haircut? A tick in her scalp? Jiggers in her butt? When she could have easily squirmed on out of there--he was so drunk, and frail. But he was her daddy, so she stayed still, on her stomach, incredibly still. And it was all over in barely a minute--for being a good girl--her daddy's girl! It would have been so easy to get away. Maya--M.'s imitation of an ape is the funniest thing I've ever seen. Looking up at me from Middlemarch, sucking her cheeks, rotating her dusky little foot. I just love her so much. I can't help it. I suck her toes. Like coca cola. He was her daddy--who then ran off to Spain! After she had been so good. If she had just run out of there, he probably would have stayed! Maya--and what about Geneva, who was six at the time, when it only happened once, it was okay and technically didn't even happen! But she'll tell you it was all his sorry excuse, anyway, to go off and paint, by himself, in Spain--on the plains--what he had to do--totally for himself, anyway, the plan, all along--that pathetic little drunk--for the greater glory of Baltimore--while leaving her behind as their sad little secret-- just the two of them--the sorry little excuse--Thimbelena. I hear something. He's Judas Iscariat. The house creaks, as afraid of M. as I am. Also, M. snores. I'm Judas M. Scare-di-cat. But no, wait, it's clearly a summons, from the bedroom, a beckoning--I tremble--the dauphin calls, wishes to see me. Oh thank you, Jesus. I won't blow it, Jesus. See, she was faking it--I win! In I go. "Do my shoulders, please," she says, face to the wall. Mr. Piggy eagerly climbs aboard the Airflex snout first. Why can't one single part of her life just be normal for a change, she sobs. It's so sad! While I grew up normally in the suburbs. She knows that. I can feel her silently crying, and I rub her back and shoulders--but not too weird, or low. It's a blessing to take care of M. An honor, again, now that she's back. For me to care for, some more. My very best funny care I promise to always lightly give. Please, Jesus. Forever, although how much more. And pretty creepy--I think I give her the creeps. I know I give myself the creeps. When she could leave again tomorrow. For good. Leaving me free at last to take the cure--turn gay. Change into a self- respecting faggot. A normal submissive, the esteemed catamite, ear ring on the left. On my knees getting ploughed with her picture in front of my face. 9 Home Alone Piglet lying around in bed with M. Super Bowl Sunday morning. The 49ers had made it again! While M. had zero interest in sports. Except for Olympic ice-skating--the twirling little girls. She was spending the day with her friend Elaine in Sebastopol. Reading the paper--Piglet the Sports, M. the funnies. Coffee, bagels--Piglet acting as non-solicitous as possible. Calm, like Joe Montana. Idly massaging her foot. Do my calf, she says. It was still early, not even time for the pre-game analysis. Although maybe Senior Skins golf was on--with Arnie and Jack. An entire day could slip by lying around with M. like this. She had missed plane flights. Her shower alone would take an hour. "What time is Elaine expecting you," asked Piglet. M. withdraws her foot. Now he had done it--raised the responsibility issue. Sometimes he assumed she was a tad irresponsible--although he could swear that she baited his assumptions. M. was devoted to Elaine. Elaine had been assaulted, also. Well, raped. And Elaine was a therapist, and perhaps the highest of M.'s many honored friends. She leaves without saying a word, not even a kiss goodbye. Damn. While Piglet was the only one she was mean to. He turned on the golf. Arnie was fat now, fatter than Jack. Why he had to open his stupid mouth. He could have been useful--had gathered the things she would need for the trip--as she showered--bottled water, oranges, Motrin, brown pantyhose. He could have quietly gone out and done good--instead of insulting her. Damn. Pantyhose was sold everywhere. Although wasn't it her solemn duty to ruin his Super Bowl Sunday without saying a word. A dominance ritual--like on those nature shows. Did he actually think he could watch football all day, get drunk--listen to his old rock albums at full blast--and then maybe beat off-- without paying the price? She knew there was stashed porn. He couldn't be trusted. He was in fact below reproach. As old Arnie and Jack eagerly sized up their Hawaiian putts. Life without M. Oh no not that again please Jesus. But wait, she returns, the slamming door, and takes out the Centurion CR 39 Locking Penis Sheath. "Put it on," she demands. She throws it at me. She says that masturbation robs me of incentive, initiative. She works out, alternating upper and lower body, and then fasts on oranges and grapes. "Look," I say, "sakes alive, do you think I'll need this thing today, Super Bowl Sunday!" "Put it on," she demands. The CR 39 Locking Penis Restraint is made of black patent leather. Mine is 3" long. First, your testicles go into the pouch on the bottom. Then, in goes your penis and you zip shut the actual sheath itself along the top. Then, there are two locking roller buckle straps, one in front of and one behind the testicles. I cinch the straps, and buckle, and then M. applies the steel locks. We're a team. They look like ordinary Silag locks, except in miniature. Once locked in, it's impossible to remove the sheath without also removing your testicles. Inside the sheath around its base is a ring of little burrs, prickly spikes, that don't hurt really, unless your penis tries to enlarge. But any true erection of course is impossible. Although it can get highly uncomfortable-- inadvertently--the interior cock ring. You can go potty, but you can't masturbate. It's a 24-hour chastity. "Is this really necessary, today, our national day of football--" She drops the tiny key into her cavernous purse. It sinks to the bottom. She's so serene, so impassive, a mask of beauty. Aloft on the night, Platonically, her dark clear eyes the very heavens. Strength, a centurion, kneels before beauty, his superior. She interrupts my energy, snips it. The complexity of her sway--all I'm confused, nullified. I suddenly feel a dozen little stings down there. Geeze--I wince. A glimmer of satisfaction seeps in around her mouth, then recedes. She leaves again amidst my protest. Her impervious butt is final, out the door. Man, what a butt, Uranium 237. She's got me by the balls, her digging fingernails. Piglet limped over to the couch. He had to think cleanly, clean thoughts, or this could get worse, even, seriously bad. He felt like Pinocchio. But man, what a woman! Oh no. He was totally whipped--her chattel. Oh no--it felt like baby hornets. Was he bleeding--he could start to bleed--how could you tell. He tried to concentrate on the golf. Lee Trevino was the biggest of all. He could slowly bleed to death, like the tentacles of that killer jellyfish. Nonplussed M. in a naked homicide lineup with Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, and Gary Player. Oow. The way she took his best Oxford shirt and tied it off above her navel, Apache style. Oow. Her taut, glossy tummy--no, don't--perfect, like a contact lens. A skate rink--he found himself musing, adapting--to his own overactive imagination, that's all. You could adapt to so much. The ring was just extremely uncomfortable at times, was all. Just like M. He made it to the refrigerator and popped a beer. The San Francisco Forty Fucking Niners. Gunning for an unprecedented 4th Super Bowl championship. The Steelers were the only other team with as many as two. Joe Montana at the helm, of the West Coast offense, picking apart the Denver Broncos. Jerry Rice, Ronnie Lott, and elephant back Charles Haley. You knew it when Ronnie Lott hit you. The team of the 80's, the 90's, the century. Of nomenclature. He sat back down on the couch. He felt fine again. It felt kind of good, in fact, down there, now, kind of wussy good. The soft tight leather. Although you couldn't get Joe Montana into one of these things. It wouldn't fit--even if you slipped him a Mickey. And even if you could--Joe's erection would smash it to bits. Just try to get any current San Francisco 49er into a male chastity. There was no need, anyway--the team didn't masturbate. Piglet got out some chips and salsa, and it was time for the first pre-game show. He felt great. And could still get plenty drunk. The restraint--it was in fact an honor--M.'s way of trusting him, exactly, to tend her anger. While she remorsed, of rape, with dear little Elaine. Weeping over their herbal tea. T'was so sad! Their tiny, perplexing insights--the stupdifying arrays. Piglet kicked on back. How M. could be in two places at the same time. He hit the remote to Senior golf again. To the shady greens and aloha beaches. But once, he came in upon M. brushing Elaine's long silky hair. That had kind of stuck with him. Did they get so sad, so abstracted, that they needed to cuddle? To soothingly cuddle? M. had the most precious little breasts. Oow. Piglet swilled back some more beer. While the 49ers were 12-point favorites. And would cover, for sure. And it was okay if M. cuddled Elaine. There was nothing wrong with that. Two commiserating friends, was all. Two intimate women, lightly kissing and caressing. Elaine cuddling M.'s Oxford breast. Piglet swelling with love, a love supreme, transcending hurt and pain. A love supreme, a love supreme. While M. never cuddled with him--he was too hairy, and smelled. How today, men practically never got laid. Except for pro football players, the last of the great specimens--a football refuge. After all, lovemaking was women's work--the glory, all along, the very wonder. And as painful as that was--be perfect. In an age of cloning--with masturbation more sophisticated now--on the Internet. Clearly, all the great urban centers, of western culture, were turning Lesbian. Lesbians were artistically higher than queers, even. You had to fan out, into rural communities--small Baptist towns--a male diaspora--to even think about getting laid. Lesbians were the final step, unto the next new stage. The Anoxeric Uber Lesbian Piglet was out of control. He decided to watch the game at a bar. Anoxeria is the sign of the Uber Lesbian. "Anoxeria" comes from the Greek "oregein," meaning literally, to "reach up for." John the Baptist and Jesus were the first historical anoxerics. According to the Gospel of St. Matthew, John the Baptist lived on a diet of locusts and wild honey. While Jesus ate bread. In fact the total culinary Jesus consists of bread, wine, and an occasional fish. He's criticized for the wine, but it was necessary to prevent scurvy, gum bleeding. The tragic death of Karen Carpenter, the first recognized modern Uber Lesbian, was caused by a subsistence on lemon water and thyroid pills. Karen Carpenter was light, sweet--pure. The songs of the Carpenters, Richard and Karen, are sweet, soft--ethereal: On the day that you were born the angels got together and decided to create a dream come true so they sprinkled moondust in your hair of gold and starlight in your eyes of blue Jesus was a carpenter. The Last Supper wasn't your traditional, cultural Passover--it consisted of bread and wine. Closely examine the badly damaged mural--or the black velvet fresco, whichever may be readier: in front of each disciple is placed a lone, paltry break of bread, itself the body of Christ. Leonardo's accuracy is indisputable. Water is Baptismal-- purifying. Food is disgusting. Chow mein, refried beans. Is lemon water better, or a blackened t-bone? Or, okay, a salad covered with ranch dressing? Look at the leftovers. Purity is light. Light is spirit. Light is weightless, colorless, odorless--the visible invisible. Jesus is the light of the world. The anoxeric uber Lesbian seeketh light. Consciousness is the feeling of light, of the moment, what you feel right now. The Carpenters are light rock, the lightest ever, its inventors. Our feeling of light invented culture. Culture is an analog of nature, created of Self. Karen was a very nice person, angelic. A light that shineth in darkness. But the darkness comprehended it not. The past and future are dark. Only the present is lit. The present is light and new, the future dark and old. Be light and new, like Karen's smile. Be not choked with cares and riches and pleasures of this life. Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin. Be your spirit self. Nature is the analog of time, Jesus the son of man, what follows. Karen invented light rock. Light rock is the moondust, starlight, of Karen Carpenter. A sweetness all her own. But they condemned her--the rock world, the entrenched feminists--and their big old healthy butts--pathologizing anorexia-- feasting off the endorphins. Extinguishing Pharisees, they, leading us through the darkness to their shrines--the new retro baseball stadiums. Baseball is their mysticism. So be the analog of an analog. When what would have been so difficult about stirring a little protein powder into Karen's lemon water? An eye-drop of liquid creatine? Of course she was all mixed up! But her decline was obvious for years--when why didn't anyone step in to save her! We failed. We watched her die, and blamed her for it. We shun the light, like vampires. And thus the historical need for the Messenger Uber Lesbian, the bodybuilder, who must be there to guard the coming of the anoxeric uber Lesbian. The Messenger Uber Lesbian ("Mul") is a cultural crucible-- the obelisk, if you will. The coming analog of gender. The Mul (Messenger Uber Lesbian) is the obdurate tri-athlete, the champion of the anoxeric uber Lesbian. The flashing shield, the shining obelisk, of flashing female might. Women bodybuilders are perfectly proportionate, the classical ideal. It's Donatello's sleek dark David--not Michalangelo's beefy queer boy--that presages the Messenger Uber Lesbian. Fuck, am I gay. Regardless, the Mul must be there first, in position, the protectress, or the anorexic uber Lesbian will perish, succumb to the vast, dense jealously and fear--of group think pathology. The Mul is the shining fusion, of woman and man, of beauty and strength--a new renegade culture, of unity, the savage her-self, in which the anorexic uber Lesbian may rest and luxuriate, at last, with another unique other. The Mul presages the rise of the anorexic uber Lesbian, the coming of light, as John the Baptist foretold the coming of Christ. The thing about the Messenger Uber Lesbian is, while rock solid, she's not gross--there's no grossness about her--or at least the very minimum. Even her austere fart is somehow admirable. She's classical, hairless, luminous. A bright new Porsche. Pulling up at the front steps of the anoxeric uber Lesbian. There's no horrible, hairy, non-aerodynamic dick sticking out. She's at once soft and hard, a femininity harnessing the masculine. Glowing, analogic angelflesh. The Mul treasures, sequesters, the anoxeric uber Lesbian. With nourishing love and chromium tablets. Adores her ever softly, with a glass of bright red carbo drink, like Cool Aid. And in the morning, fresh carrot juice, and granulated egg white. Whey is the first principle. On a silver tray, with a formal napkin, and tented elegy. And so the Mul renews the anoxeric uber Lesbian, restores her quest, for light. Which is indeed a formal, structural one-- purely structural. Totally non-annihilative--you silly goose. It's in bed that the Mul annihilates the anoxeric uber Lesbian. Or so we assume, although their lovemaking is yet a mystery, like the Cult of Orpheus. Imagination runs wild--when they just could be whispering and cuddling, non-grossly. Then it's off to the gym, to the wearisome task of erecting the anoxeric's precious frame, for the infusion of light. Lunges, squats, curls, pulldowns, and of course thousands of tummy crunches. Endless repetitions with the lightest of weights--paper weights. The anoxeric responding to this tearing down process like Sea Biscuit in the stretch. Sometimes the Mul must in fact make her stop. Must sometimes, carry her, in fact, all spent and limp, out of the gym, clearing a path through the male bodybuilders. And thus the cared-for, highly adored anoxeric uber Lesbian remains ever thin, but boldly, defiantly so. Sturdy, snapped together. With the slightest, gentlest, Christ-like muscularity--a lighthouse, of spirit. LOVING EYES CAN NEVER SEE On the way to the bar Piglet died and went up to heaven. He looked back on parts of personas, chunks of thoughts and feelings, dropping away, into space. Signaling to each other, for cohesion. Leaving barren spirit, swept and garnished, to dock with God. God was a gentle vibrancy. The realization of which was Piglet's triumph over death. Reduced, streamlined, as he now was, to Pigless, a sober point of view, aware of God's acceptance. An unfettered sobriety now conscious of a feeling too exciting to grasp, that thus gave way to itself, before the uptake of its very impulse. It was a state of self-actualizing. Of Pigless aware of himself, a relational spirit, perceiving God. As opposed to Asian awareness, because Pigless was in fact an active self, wholly separate, and fully distinguishable, from God. And thus immediately he decided to enhance his recognition. He was, after all, humbled by, and most grateful for, eternal life. And so he characterized himself as such--turning modestly, thankfully, to acknowledge the Vibrancy. The Vibrancy itself wasn't anything new. Pigless had known it intrinsically during his lifetime, as being. So that now it wasn't so much God he was coming to know, but Pigless, this very spirit, that in life had been a relation between vibrancy and all of finitude. Something noble and chaste that Piglet had pretty much chosen to ignore, in favor of finitude, or by wrongly attributing it to Vibrancy itself, as would a transcendental meditator. But now, beyond death, Pigless knew himself as this spirit, a relation, connecting infinitude--Vibrancy--with finitude-- specifically at this point humility and gratitude. God's countenance was constant, omnipresent. While humility and gratitude existed only during the time it took to create them. Vibrancy was on the right, Pigless in the middle, and humble gratitude on the left. A trinity: the Father, the Holy Ghost, and all the fun. So that first, Pigless turned to his left and created humility and gratitude; second, he became aware of himself doing so, in God's light; and third, turning right he acknowledged Vibrancy, most appreciatively. God loves his spirits and lets them do whatever they please. He doesn't care what you think of Him. His is an unconditional love that expects nothing in return. Spirits can come and go freely, relating to Him, or not relating to Him, however they please. One day, in the midst of a modest thankyou, Pigless realized how exceptional this celestial gentleness really was--in fact, worthy of so much more than mere recognition or thankful awareness. Pigless realized that he could do better, much better--he could love his lord, his God. And thus gratitude bloomed, into love. Most meek and yet abundantly grateful love--the fulsome work of a noble relational spirit. Indeed, love is a wonderful feeling, and maybe you want to rest and dwell in that place a while, longer than you would want to stay with simple humility, for example. Maybe even stop to admire your work a bit. Because you're so good. You, who love the lord your God with all your heart and soul. Pigless became Piglove. He had seen Paris. He loved love. It became him. In fact, his love for God was so strong that it transcended his very perception of Him. As Pigless substituted faith for recognition and stopped turning to the right altogether. After all, a love based on faith was stronger, worthier, than one based on simple recognition. In fact, by definition, faith vanquished his perception of the Vibrancy. Pigless ditched his very recognition of God, in order to strengthen his love for Him. It was a love that surpassed being-- it was absurd. And thus the great teleological shift took place: as Pigless turned into Piglove, his spirit itself took on the role of God. Because, accepting his spirit as true self--Pigless--he must relinquish the identity of Piglove. And return to his relational self, which wasn't worthy enough. Love was better, love was cool. So, instead, having set aside awareness of God, Piglove decided to pray to his spirit, the great spirit, to trust in him, for flashes of foreign divinity, instead of returning through that spirit for the real thing. Having laid off his Spirit, Piglove now worshipped it, as compensation, knowing that spirit was somehow closely connected with God. In fact, weren't spirit and God one in the same--and wasn't he their high priest, Piglove. He had totally tilted. Love, however, is finite--only God is constant--Vibrancy. Humility, gratitude, faith, and even love--they all disappeared when Piglove wasn't busy working on them. And so that brought up a problem: if these feelings, these characterizations, weren't permanent, how could they be real? And how real was Piglove, their apotheosis? Having lost awareness of what was constant, he didn't quite know where to turn. He prayed--the great spirit would help. Then he created time and space. And fixed himself firmly right in the middle, of time and space. They were real! Time/space never changed--they were constant, ineffably. Piglove strapped himself in. Still, there was doubt. He looked around and saw nothing. Time and space were constant, but never happened. Should not time/space occur? Although he no longer recognized God, God was still there with him, intrinsically--God doesn't go anywhere--no matter how you relate or don't relate with him. And Piglove knew, a priori, that God--Vibrancy--had been something, not nothing. God was a constant all right, but one that took place--He was a happening deity. Piglove prayed hard to his spirit for an answer, a solution--to this continuing quandary, this threat to his very identity. But his love was strong, the strongest. His faith would withstand this test. Was he indeed Piglove--that was the question. He stopped fretting and prayed some more. And, then, in a flash, Piglove conceived of matter, which instantly occupied every inch of time and space, swirling all around him. Piglove looked out onto a whirlwind of happenstance. Chaos was something, alright! And so was he: he had his constant--time/space--and his happening--chaos. He thanked the great spirit, profoundly. He was real, Piglove was real--he told himself--to resume questioning would be an infidelity. A serious, in fact a nullifying, ingratitude--it would undermine his very faith. Look at all that his spirit had provided--time, space, matter--wasn't that enough? So Piglove disabled his own ontology. The question, "well, maybe you're really not Piglove," was the enemy of faith, a new concept: sin. He forbade anything that dared question his manifestation as God-love. Even though his current reality still had a troubling, dialectical, quality. Neither time/space nor chaos could actually exist by itself: time and space were constant, alright, but nothing, while chaos was definite, but completely variable. The question, "well, perhaps I'm on the wrong track," was forbidden, a sin. And so he rolled up his sleeves and went to work. Piglove created nature. While as Pigless he had related freely between ontology and teleology, now as Piglove he was stuck in the latter. As time/space had been the harbinger of chaos, nature would be their synthesis, the great corroboration, of God-love--the final goal. So Piglove gathered up all of chaos, stuffed it into a great dark hole, and flung it out into space, into billions of stars, into a vast coherent universe, into galaxies and solar systems-- solids, liquids and gases, lands and waters, flowers and trees. Change continued, but now according to constant, predictable principles. Nature happened, as had chaos, but now constantly. It was real. Piglove was pleased. It was the perfect place for worship, the perfect temple of Piglove. Nature was God's most perfect metaphor. Look what his spirit had done! Piglove was real, alright, as real as all the forests and animals around him. In fact other animated spirits, other Pigloves, just like himself, had discovered this place! Together they were God's children, constant somethings, living in a beautiful new world of constant somethings happening. Was not this the final reward of having bravely sacrificed perception of God, for the strongest, most obdurate, love of Him? But what is love without faith--and faith without challenge? Love must be put to the test, always. And here, in Eden, Piglove discovered the greatest challenge yet to his self-integrity: death. Nothing had died up 'till now, before or during the void of time/space, or chaos. Death--man, what was that about! The Vibrancy had been singularly constant, but nature consisted of infinite constancies, one of which was inevitably constant death. Piglove's faith waivered. He had come so far--for what--to die. Having journeyed so far, through so many evolutions, for what-- non-existence altogether. Nature was in fact a cruel trick, a trap, a huge mistake. And, finally, love of God an illusion. All the Pigloves commiserated in the cold. They remembered the imperfectly happy days of chaos, of simple time and space. But nature with its infinite constants was too real to escape--as was death--inescapably real. They slipped into sin. They wrote books, painted--beat their wives. Accumulated vast fortunes, killed each other. Assumed a thousand new identities, a thousand new constants, attempting to escape the one that had given rise to them all--love of God, discredited. But then they repented--disavowed their sinful ways. As if they could go back and correct things, through a fresh perspective, from the vantage of sin itself. They begged for forgiveness, eating like pigs. They renewed their faith. They vowed that God-love would resume after death, alright--along with a few other favorite new identities--by way of their intense God-loving in the finite. It would carry over! They would transcend death through God-love itself--it now became the means to its own end. As God Himself became their coach. He rooted them on--like a strict but loving parent--they endowed Him with the many admirable qualities that they also wished to keep for themselves. Is not that the real sin? Does God really care what you do--or say about Him--isn't His unconditional acceptance ever enough? Still, they died--in droves. But kept returning. They built villages, cities, countries. They hated each other, loved each other. They went to war--had lots of sex. They attributed their failures to a lack of God-love, even while struggling to forget that the concept of God-love itself was the source of their failure. They tried to go back, they tried to go forward--to wriggle out of nature, transcend it, or at least destroy it. But continued to die, anyway. They realized it was futile, and a few of them quit. Some monks were commissioned to try the other way--the ontological route. The opposite direction. After all, God, Vibrancy, never goes away-- it's omnipresent--the gentle glow of consciousness. So the monks sought to become it. They meditated, hummed--the universal twang. They merged with the one real thing, as serene spirit-Gods themselves, and were pleased--with their results. And then with great industry, and high value, aspired to abnegate their sense of personal self--through secret tricks. The monks were honored at large as the finest examples of God-love. When in fact they all desperately needed to die, to drop everything, awake from the nightmare, and return to God as relational selves, spirit selves, having wandered so far astray. To just give it up, and accept death, and return to what they really were, to rest with God for a while, before inexorably starting out on their own again, according to their wishes. But, no, instead, in time, they cracked the genetic code and broke free of nature. They finally managed to shed it, like a skin--and died no more. * * * Piglet loved the 49ers. The name of the bar was Bulls--steak fajitas and vodka. He loved Jesus, Kafka, M. It made him feel good when the 49ers won, especially the Super Bowls, which they always did, through the worst of times. While other times, during the off-season, he didn't assume anything, strangely unperturbed and wide awake, just to see what that felt like, that independence. 10 SICILY Sicily is a volcanic isle, of seas of separated blues and greens, and steep, verdant valleys, where your cares and fears may at last run free, like pets, down to the Roman ruins. If you can't enjoy Sicily, all hope is lost. As Lisa the Silent stands like a column amid rubble of enduring futility. While finally even the food is cheap. She walks back to the hotel, and you roam the sunset temples and basilicas alone, without guide, like desolated divorce chambers, assembled scenery. The thing is, these huge feelings are nothing, undefined, barren craters, with sulfurous veins that could be anything, the meanest meanness. You give her half the travellers' checks and take off. You return to the excavation at Pompeii, alone. The ancient little man cries, curled up in suffocating ash. Taking comfort of his very frailty. The Roman houses, the domi, open onto inner courtyards, and turn a blind, unbroken wall to the streets, forming a city of narrow little limestone passageways. The entire city has been dug up, as such, for miles, like an ant farm. You could have lived and worked within these walls, gently, on a human scale. Instead, you have abandoned your wife in Sicily--to the mafia, slavers out of Tangier. You carry on disputes worldwide. You're huge and childish, like an orphaned humanity, that now must occupy everything, from Rome to DNA, that now must unify existence on its own. 11 Return of the Fighting Woman Along with secular knowledge, vast sexual imagery disappeared with the fall of Rome and rise of Christendom. For example, long missing has been the classical, pagan idea of beautiful women as great fighters--fleet, lustrous, axe-wielding Amazons. Until recently, that is. In classical mythology any woman worth her salt could fight. A few of the most renown: Atalanta, daughter of Schoeneus of Boeotia, who refuses to marry any man who can't beat her in a footrace. After giving the naked suitor a headstart, armed with an axe, she catches up and slays him. Hippomenes finally wins her, but only by dropping golden apples along the race route, slowing down Atalanta as she stoops to collect them. The couple are later turned into lions for violating a shrine to Aphrodite with their lust. Penthesilea, who, with her Amazon army, briefly liberates Troy from the Greeks. Daughter of Ares, she slays many heroes (not just simple men) outside the walls of Troy, including Achilles himself! Achilles, the greatest Greek warrior of them all, bar none, cut down and slain by a girl! Zeus himself must resuscitate the beaten hero of the Iliad, and Penthesilea is defeated only when she has to unfairly fight him again. Then Achilles, so overcome by lust seeing the beautiful Amazon dead at his feet, rapes her corpse. Asteria, one of the Amazon braves slain by Heracles during his ninth labor (to retrieve the girdle of the Amazon queen Andromache). Even while knowing Heracles is half-god, a demigod, and thus blessed with Olympian invincibility, the Amazons, led by Asteria, for honor's sake insist on challenging him one by one. Then when the real fighting breaks out, although Heracles and his men carry the day outside the walls of the Amazonian capital (because it's rigged--he's a God), his other detachment is defeated, flat out beaten, by the Amazons in a second simultaneous battle at the shore, amidst much blood and death. My favorite Amazon though is Camilla, who appears in Virgil's Aeneid. The Aeneid is the epic poem of ancient Rome, as The Iliad and The Odyssey were the epics of ancient Greece, and the Arthurian legend that of modern England. Camilla wades into battle looking for the biggest adversary she can find--poor young Ornithus the Hunter, who wears an ox hide thrown over his broad back and a wolf's head for a helmet, its gaping jaws covering his cheeks. What a stud. But Camilla slays him with ease, and stands over his dying body and taunts--"A woman warrior was too strong for thee"--and fathoms the shame he'll feel when the ghosts of the underworld demand to know his conqueror's name. When a great hero is beatened by a beautiful warrioress, and stripped of his weapons, along with his masculinity, heroic shame arises. It's no simple thing, like some tawdry S & M act of today. Bigger and stronger, built for warfare, dedicated to it from childhood, our celebrated hero tries mightily to win, but the obscure Amazon is quicker, more resourceful, and of greater skill and endurance. And imagine the glory, as, finally, she looks down, smiling ruefully, savagely beautiful, cold foot on throat, and drives the spear right through your guts. Who cares if you never fucked. There was a Platonic greatness to lust back then--born out of storied combat among mythology's boldest and most bellicose. An epic, animal libido, unleashed by way of fierce combat between the sexes, for the right of gender dominance itself--at once so simple and profound. All the great goddesses were warriors--Hera, Athena, Artemis--even Aphrodite, who fights at Troy and is wounded by Diomedes. But when Rome fell, this sexual form was lost to the West, for nearly 1,600 years. * * * Despite the Renaissance, and all the various revolutions, the sexual dark age continued well into the 20th century. If it weren't for straight fucking, sex would have died out altogether. Even up through the 60's--even today we aren't as sexually advanced as the Greeks and Romans. They understood how to harness violent sexual instincts through fantastic narrative, through myth. There's the appeal of mythology--it's fun--forget that Joseph Campbell crap. But St. Paul killed off everything. Luckily, however, sex and violence sell, and so a modern mythology, featuring the return of the fighting woman, has developed with the rise of "hot" visual media. With the rise of martial arts cinema. Take the early Ninja movies. Based as they all are on Enter the Dragon--the Homer of combat cinema--there's an evil Kung Fu master who has brainwashed a senator's daughter like the Moonies imprisoned on his island of trained Ninja killers, where he decides to host a martial arts tournament, to which the heroes--usually two or more men and always one woman--receive an invitation. The island is a modern Mount Olympus, the characters epic--Promethean-- heroes repelling evil minion by the hundreds--total myth. A promising start. However, the fights tends to be highly stylized. And the fighting woman herself wears long white Ninja robes--practically Islamic--and, in some of the films, fights only a specially designated female antagonist. Ugh. Things improve somewhat with the second generation of fighting movie: the Sword and Sorcery epic. Always, alongside Conan the Barbarian, Kronos the Deathstalker, Ator the Beastmaster, in the forest primeval, rides a half-naked chick, dressed in a furry, brown two-piece, not very warm, but with a long sword somehow lodged through a slit in there, through the pelt. Her fighting sequences, however, are subliminally brief, and her sword play clumsy--without any wrist action--the sword's too heavy, for Christsake. It's back to the drawing board. So next, we're fast- forwarded to a time well into the future, after the atomic wars-- the barbaric, post-apocalyptic world, of the Road Warrior movies. Gladiator types roam the streets, along with various mutants and funny cars. There's precious little gasoline, or even water, a serum that has to be protected, blah, blah, blah. This gothic Kung Fu middle period isn't clearly epic at all. The sets are glaring deserts and dark steel undergrounds. Life sucks. The hero existential. The fighting more vicious and real. The hero can take on two mutants at a time, tops. In fact, early on he's beaten up and left for dead. But this scenario did deliver up exciting female fighting cameos--toughened-up future babes, retro mercenaries, wearing warpaint and hot pants, cruising along on rollerblades, armed with knives, brass knuckles, and hockey sticks. Unclassically aberrant, but amoral--pagan! Today, we live in an elevated world, as fashioned by the higher perception and finer judgment of our superiors. Who may be right, may be wrong--it doesn't matter. What's important is, that we acknowledge their purvey as finer and more precious than life itself. They are seers, our benefactors, lifting us--right out of nature itself. Along with this special gift of insight, they possess knowledge, talent, wealth, goodness, and beautiful homes and families. Glittering tabernacles of conclusive corroboration. They have taken away our guns, cherry bombs, our sparklers, drugs, cigarettes, liquor, and are busily cleaning the environment. Nature is a park, their protected space. They preserve it for us--we will always have it to look back on--to show our children. They have of course noticed our hopeless propensity for violent sex. And that some day, we just might turn around and kill them. So they now provide carefully cordoned-off exhibitions of violence for its own sake: the Ring movie. In every city in America, in the here and now, there's a secret ring, set up in some warehouse or hanger, where the world's most vicious kickboxers convene to fight to the death, for the amusement of howling, smoking, drinking drug lords and their courtesans: Deathsport, Bloodsport, Blood Match, Ring of Death, Death Ring, The Octagon, etc. Not a happy picture. We aren't very pretty--it's all pretty shameful. Violence itself, of course, is the real enemy. Just throw a single honest punch today. See what happens. Although you enter that ring of your own volition--it's 100% voluntary. And by invitation only. You receive a wonderful woodcut invitation, hand-delivered by a midget, along with plane tickets, and swank hotel reservations. And so what if someone in the audience lights a joint. Dope isn't second-hand smoke. And the leash laws. There was a time when dogs roamed freely, all across this land. This land was your land, this land was mine. No one got bit. More people are bitten today, because dogs are so pissed, tied up all the time. And how would you like to be followed around by someone you just know is going to pick up your shit. It's a wonder dogs can still shit at all. And maybe we just want to take the fall, along with nature. Maybe it's time to go back from where we came. Anyway, two undercover officers, both black belts, infiltrate the tournament to clean up this mess. One gets killed in the ring, in his very first match (ha, ha), but his buddy fights on, eventually defeating--maiming in revenge--one by one, the entire international cast. Kind of a house divided against itself. Violence is a terrible thing, particularly at this level, and it's tough to find women fighters in these movies. You won't at Blockbuster. Often you have to make several stops at little video stores, around town, in the poorer, gang infested, neighborhoods, before making a score. Your search could take an entire evening. They don't accept credit cards at these places-- you have to leave a cash deposit, $50.00. You could get mugged. And the female lead more times than not still ends up being a little fem journalist--it's impossible to tell, sometimes, even from the closest scrutiny of the video box. The whole process can be very discouraging. But every now and then you'll make a score: one of the contestants--the Thai fighter--will be a girl. Or, even better, one of the undercover cops will be a woman. Or better still, the surviving cop, the one who fights on, will be the woman. Or, both cops are Lesbian, and one of the kickboxers turned bad is a dumped, ex-boyfriend--of one of the Lesbian cops, the Fem one. Plus, he's a real poor sport, who needs to be taught a lesson, in the ring. But the point is this: whenever a man steps into that ring to take on a woman, it's transformative. Suddenly indicative of a life so mundane, so normally ego-driven, that carefully roped- off exhibitions of true unsublimated Id may now be staged. Not some simple strip show, or basic copulation, but a bloody psychosexual showing. Because now we can handle it, at this point of our cultural advance, precisely because everything is so carefully monitored and mitigated. We've evolved to a state in which public demonstrations of full-blown, unsublimated libido are now perfectly absorbable. We're moving right along. In conclusion, then, ancient mixed combat was high, heroic and outdoors, while the modern is deeply internalized and fated. Each has its own, opposite, visionary quality. So, how does the modern female fighter stack up against the ancient model? The ancient is light and mythic, the modern deeply libidinous. The classical fight heroine is amoral, and slaughters with joy and abandon, while her modern counterpart is serious and scientific. The ancient kills with axe, sword, and spear, while the modern uses her bare hands and feet usually to maim only. The ancient is aloof and abusive, and won't hesitate to dismember and castrate before killing. While the modern is surgical and precise and will dispatch her foe with a single blow, right to the diaphragm, if possible. The ancient dresses like Artemis, for the hunt; the modern wears pastel Lesbian suits. The mythic woman is faster, the modern more explosive. The modern woman is more muscular due to well equipped fitness centers. Stalking the wild boar and deer for woodland feasts, the ancient likewise stays trim, and well trained in her instruments of death. Nor will she hesitate to surprise, slay, and strip unsuspecting patricians journeying through the woods, while the modern woman is, or at some time was, a member of the law enforcement community. The modern female fighter is likely Lesbian, while the ancient is chaste. However, the ancient frequently bathes naked in rivers and streams along with her companion nymphs. 12 The Feeling of Thought His mistress pulled out and examined the gnawed bean shoot. "No, not beer, Piglet," she said, now turning to the pie tins. "Salt, beer, all they do, is attract snails and slugs. Tomorrow morning, we'll be overrun with every bug in the neighborhood. And look at this." She held the shoot up out of focus in front of her bikini breasts. "See right here in the middle. A slug can't get out there. Certainly not a snail. An earwig did that. Or a sow bug. Who knows what's in this soil. Maybe those horned tomato monsters. "Insecticide of course is out of the question. Here's what you need to do, Piglet. Wait 'til nightfall. All creatures, great and small, will be here by 9:30. Then, take a flashlight and dump each one into a bucket of ammonia solution. There are gloves in the shed. Three evenings of conscientious bug picking and they should all be gone. "Jade and I are spending Memorial Day in Mendicino. Through Tuesday. Tuesday evening I wish to inspect a well weeded, watered, bug-free garden." She returned to the patio recliner. Piglet returned to the garden that night. The squash was okay, squash was indestructible. Although who eats it. Piglet shined the flashlight on the pepper plants. A baby slug clung curled to the edge of a lower leaf. A large oozy snail yanked one down. A commando team of earwigs scaling the stalk. The snails screamed when they hit the smoking water. The young plants were being eaten alive, a silent horror. Piglet illuminated a silver sow bug perched on a leaf. Ever still. The awareness of bugs. Of food as ground fabric. Of the blistering Sun God--hiding under crusty earth--and then cool night air. When most of the time Piglet just wandered about. While bugs took great bites right out of life itself and then burrowed into it. Acting on, acted upon. Even just crawling, shaping themselves to the earth. Compared to Piglet. Walking through air, through nothing at all. Sucking M.'s asshole in the dark. How she hummed! Somehow he needed the very worst of the best, only that would do. Until the day that love made violent love with hatred. There's a lost, nearby wholeness for which we yearn. But make no mistake: a woman's asshole was a dry, rocky canyon. How your wrists would tire holding it open. But boy sometimes he missed M. He could just cry losing her. M.'s awareness skewered her feelings and gave her headaches. Piglet's first wife was soft and diffused, as was M. all right, but M. was also hard and clear. A trove of scepters, daggers, doubloons. She could hunt and fish--her daddy had taught her. Even her hurt was unwavering. His dismal attempts at suggesting the irrelevancy of her feelings. Which she directed like a rail system. He was in fact the very culprit, of the moment, and a brazen coward. Lying there at a loss stark naked in the bathtub. She gave to him her highest, harshest love. And then curled into his complete care. He cared for her like a geni. She gave to him her breast, with precise instructions. He could just see her, staring at him all puffy-faced, sometimes, like a mean mutt. Piglet heard a noise behind him and turned around. It was M., a cameo of brilliant anger, in the glow of the flashlight! He froze. Her D'artagnan hair. She clubbed him on the shoulder with the shovel. Piglet felt a bone crack. He fell to his knees. One more hit on the head and he'd be dead. A final resonating dong. Accepting execution bowed on his knees, eye-level with her hips in tight jeans. She was the best. "Look at you--you grub!" she said. "How could I have ever trusted--can't I ever get away!" It was true, so true--he was the ickiest. "Look, two more weeks and the divorce is final," said Piglet. "Yes it is," she said. And down came the shovel, again. Piglet lunged forward and grabbed it and they tumbled over into the tomatoes. "Help! Help!" she shouted. Piglet cupped his hand over her mouth. M.'s surging eyes. His mistress deplored domestic violence, lectured on the subject. At the JC. He had to sit on top of her, pinning her arms, and clamping both hands over her screaming, biting mouth. Her breathing was ferocious. The tomatoes were absolutely crushed. Her head imbedded in the raised top soil like the living dead. And suddenly Piglet felt just sick and tired. All he wanted, was a life of purity. Pure purity. He was incapable of intricacy. He was a simple, humble gardener, like Mendel. The tomatoes were flattened. "I'm going to let you up," said Piglet. "But try one more thing, and I swear I'll call the police. They're quite serious about spousal-abuse these days. They will put you in jail. You have broken my shoulder. A holding cell, with six other women, heroin addicts. Now, I'm going to let you up." Piglet stood. M. did a startling situp. "Can't I ever get away!" She grabbed the shovel again and furiously hoisted herself up. Piglet didn't wait. He threw the bucket of soapy, buggy water right in her face. A direct hit. Just as she was turning, shovel in hand. She gasped--soaked--sank to her knees, and covered her eyes. Then, dripping wet, she started blinking, wide-eyed, like a devil doll. Frozen in shock--like a Baptism gone terribly wrong. "Are you okay," said Piglet. "I trusted you," she said, in disbelief. "I'm sorry." "When you know how hard that is for me." It was the perfect eye of the hurricane. And in the calm Piglet realized that a person of M.'s greatness had found something fine and good in him. "I'm sorry." He reached over to hug her, and she socked him in the face with a tomato. The juice exploded in his eye. He staggered back, into a back peddle, and then took off for the house. "You little shit--you cockroach!" Another tomato splattered against his back, as he ran, full clip. "Coming, mistress," she hollered, "most sublime Goddess-- right away! You maggot!" He made it inside and locked the door. A yammering devil doll. He threw open the kitchen window. "I'm calling 911," he lied. "Try to explain what you're doing here. Stalking me. You should leave--I'm pressing charges--I swear it--they'll arrest you." "You little goo-boy--you squid--I just hate your smiley face! Hate your stupid goo-love, all over me--oowey, yuk! Your stinky hairy tenacles, all over me-- "Oooww, oooww, aah-oooww!" The neighbor's lights went on. "Slimed--your gooey squid eye--" "But your dad will bail you out," yelled Piglet. Suddenly all was silent. That was mean. Then she sobbed, started sobbing, in the dark, still slumped on her knees in the garden. Piglet shut the window. Pretty mean, all right. But necessary. You grub, said his shoulder, stabbing at him. But no way feel sorry for her. She was what she was before they ever met. It was all a setup, anyway. When wasn't love made of goo--sweet, niceness--anyway. She had a problem with love--that much was clear. She did everything, herself, on her own, anyway. He went into the living room and lay down on his blue air mattress. But now this mixup, this had never happened before. He got up, returned to the kitchen, and peaked out the window at her. There had been his Mistress before M., then M., divorce, and then back to his Mistress. A natural progression. So what if he hadn't told her--M. was a revelation, his best behavior required. His most kind and nicest. Was that bad. Non-icky, good goo. See, be nice and they hate you. Meanwhile, there she was, sitting right in his Mistress' garden, in the middle of his black, fecund psyche, same as it ever was. What a mistake! Still crying. Piglet felt like going back out again, but it might be a trick, probably so. He suddenly felt like kissing her like crazy, but she'd stab him through the diaphragm, with a hunting knife. Like apologizing, submitting a long list of apologies--a codicil to the divorce. Give her everything except his baseball glove. If there was anything he could do without really changing himself he would do it. Climb the Matahorn. But don't go back out there. It was total flux. Who knew what all this stuff was in his Mistress' medicine cabinet. He took two Motrin and went to bed. Terrible things had happened to M., as a child, even. Terrible things happened to lots of women, that they had to live with everyday. Just horrible, inconceivable crimes that never went away. At last a comforting thought--his most comforting excuse. The next morning through the kitchen window she had while he had slept ripped out every plant, each stalk, except the squash, and coated the entire garden with three cans of grey paint, from the garage, from head to toe. She had left the lids and cans right there in the soil like a dump. Piglet could only walk leaning to the right. He made it to the bathroom. His left eye had blackened. What a woman. He had to get to the hospital. His body might set like this permanently, like an oaf. He made it outside. The garden was Pompeii. You could see the bugs stuck to the leaves in mid-bite covered with paint. A few sow bugs paddled furiously in place in the muck. The snails and slugs had just sunk. Piglet could see the tops of shells sticking out. Already the sun was turning the paint into an inferno for the surviving beatles and earwigs stuck to the surface. Jade and his Mistress exploring Mendicino in their Birkenstocks. Well the bugs were goners. Paint had worked. A little turpentine for the squash. Hand in hand--their Achilles heels separating from their sandals as they walked. How his Mistress went on about domestic violence. This just won't do, Piglet. His mistress was serene. Silent, on a peak in Darien. Piglet went back inside and took another Motrin. But wasn't it M. who rolled him on his stomach asleep dead at night and humped his mannequin tailbone, as he smelled her hissing orders in his ear. Nothing gooey about that. Hard as a rock. He lay down on the blue air mattress. And she had every right to be icky. On the mantle a picture of his Mistress and Jade hamming it up at a restaurant. They'd return all happy with some great pottery to show him and then see it, the garden of domestic violence. M. had probably signed it in one of the corners. Piglet lay still. This was how women felt pre-period. Depressed, doomed. Why had she cried like that. She's the one who had wanted the divorce, not Piglet. Maybe the divorce had been going too well. He was 44. Well, maybe this was it, no more women. No more Mistress, Jade, M. It took years to get a woman like M., with M.'s spunk. Maybe he could get a pretty much non-gender wife, one of those good companion types, or one with a mastectomy, but good otherwise. Meanwhile he had to get to the hospital. The shoulder was clearly symptomatic. He hadn't hit upon a single honest feeling, about himself, about M. His mistress sealed him off from that, that aspect. As did M., as well, but more like a magic act. There were lost alcoves of troubled feelings. But at the hospital there'd be some clinical psychologist, a woman preferably, wise to his nonsense. In a lab coat. Who'd teach Piglet how to intricate, get in touch. Piglet had no idea of what he was thinking, feeling. Projecting, sublimating. The problem was, he didn't know how to sublimate. He just blurted things out. "Your Dad will bail you out." He had no idea what anyone was thinking, feeling. M. was like a visitor from another planet. With powers far beyond those of mortal men. Boy, he hated to see her cry like that, but he was a rat because what he had really felt was helplessness, not sympathy. Never in his life had he cried like that. Where your whole chest heaved up and down. You see--she sublimated, sublimated, and then boom! While all Piglet needed was sex, and nothing ever happened with him. He was normal--his childhood perfectly normal, without incident. So maybe he didn't have to--get intricated. Maybe they'd just give him Prozac, for a slight boost. Everyone he knew who took that stuff felt great. Then he could do things, like learn how to cook, golf, manage his money, get a credit card. Visit Mendicino. Have opinions. Function. Get distended, age. Be kind, walk through air. Piglet rose. There was still plenty of time, of hope, all of a sudden. There was today, Monday and Tuesday. He could get back out there. Clear the painted soil. Then he could replant Monday. A bigger, better garden, even! No squash this time--the squash took up half the plot. There were lawn bags in the kitchen, work to be done. Outside he grabbed the shovel, dug down, but couldn't lift, due to his stinging left shoulder. He tried a trowel. The spade was okay--it was easy enough to dig out the raised top soil one-handed. Slow, but doable. He was tired, had slept badly, in pain, but he would work hard, and today and tomorrow would pass, and everything would be fine again. His shoulder would gradually feel better. He scooped the painted earth into a lawn bag. The sun beat down on his back. It was like cutting out sections of a chocolate cake. The imbedded bugs were like fossil M & Ms. It was hot. His wrist started to ache, but a good ache. He would spend the weekend gardening in the garden, working up a good sweat, cooling down with lemonade. Listening to the game on the radio, while the next door neighbor gardened and listened to the game on his radio. When Piglet saw what was really happening. With each scoop, paint seeped into the remaining hole and painted the level below. A splattered worm looked up at him. He was killing off the friendly predators. It might take two or three levels of digging before all the paint was removed. Maybe six. It was pointless, Sisiphian. Piglet went back inside, took two more Motrin and lay back down on the air mattress. Okay, doomed. But no time to panic. Time was on his side. And there were tons of things that didn't involve pussy, anyway. Sports bars. Windsurfing. He could play golf, on a different golf course, in all 50 states. In a single year, breaking the American record. Cruising in his Winnebago, his companion wife driving, non-icky, while he rested. And she could play, too! In 40 states--for a new women's record. What he needed to do, was simply wait for the paint to dry. And then he could peel it right off. He turned on the air conditioner and moved the air mattress next to it. The Motrin made him dopey. He repeated the word "Motrin" in a deep, slow-speed mantra lying in the breeze of the air conditioner. "Mo-trin." This was it, when you got down to it, no matter who you were. Although why couldn't he make things work for him, like normal people. He struggled back up and opened the Yellow Pages and turned to Rentals. "Lars Rentals," no apostrophe, "TOOL AND EQUIPMENT RENTAL." And there was the answer, right there, in the picture! The thing with the big scoop in the front and little one in back. Not forklift, you dummy. He couldn't remember anything, anymore--but it was all alphabetical, he'd find it: "Acoustic Machine; Aerators & Thatchers; Airless Sprayers; Animal Cages & Traps; Asphalt Rollers; Auto Tools; Backhoe/Excavators. . ." A backhoe! A good old backhoe, a total misnomer! Those farmers! "Band saw; Barricades/Flashers; Bike Trailers; Blind Nailers; Bobcat Loaders; Builders Level; Buffers & Vacuums. . ." Piglet was mesmerized. "Fish Tape. Heat Guns . . . Orbital Floor Machines. Power Augers. Stump Grinders." Open 7 days. Delivery available! Piglet quickly dialed the number. "Is Lars there?" he said. Then he quickly hung up. Maybe he was jumping the gun. Maybe what he really needed was a Buffer or a Pressure Washer. That's what they used for those oil spills. He needed advice. "Welders & Much More." Maybe he should drive on out there and examine the full selection before deciding. It probably cost a lot of money to rent a backhoe. Maybe the mini-excavator made more sense. He drove on out. He looked over the equipment, along with some other deliberative, middle-aged guys, like himself. It was an equipment gallery. The backhoe had a complex array of handles and levers, impossible to operate with a bum arm. The mini excavator, on the other hand, had one single lever that went up and down. Lars' son would deliver it himself. What would take days with the trowel would take a few minutes with this thing. Piglet got in some important practice. The machine rumbled beneath him. Men like Lars and his son had demystified things. Confronted those Norwegian nights. Piglet's big problem was a simple task in Lars' world. Lars' son looked on without malice. He was a quiet round man who felt okay. Patient. All he needed now was a major credit card. Piglet didn't have a minor credit card. Well, then he needed a cash deposit. He looked at Piglet and said, "$1,000." Piglet missed his freeway exit on the way back, and drove down The Camino Real, stoplight after blazing stoplight. No more Jade, no more Mistress. Sometimes he peeked in and saw them kissing. Had he really thought that a man like the son of Lars would sign a construction contract with a bad apple like Piglet. Who believes a man without credit. What could he possibly say to his Mistress. An explanation wouldn't even be necessary. Piglet, Mr. Cloud, gather your things. Piglet felt dizzy. It was 2:00 and he'd eaten three Motrin all day. He pulled into a dark place called Lounge where men drank beer and watched different games on several mounted tvs, like prison monitors. Those big yellow pitchers of beer. Piglet sat next to a beefy man who was rooting for the Bulls. "I grew up in Chicago," he explained to Piglet. He did a quick double-take on Piglet's shiner. "What, your wife slug you," he laughed. Michael Jordan drove to the basket. The man rose and shook his fist in the air. What happens. You spend your life compensating. His Mistress went on about the fat middle-aged white man. Go to them now, they call you, you can't refuse. Pro basketball players were really incredible though, just physically, their frames. Michael Jordan could beat his mistress 30-0, one-on- one. She'd be lucky to get off a shot. He could air in, scoop up Jade, fly out. Piglet had once spent a summer in Chicago. He drank a beer. With the other white men--him and his black eye. Sure, Piglet loved a good fight. As much as anyone. He was a stand-up guy. Lars' fat little son could go fuck himself. He looked around. In fact the only guy in the whole bar with a current black eye. Although, in truth, he was a battered husband. Actually, a battered ex-husband. When how low was that. He looked around--at the men without women, like Piglet. Hunched. He hated beer. The tvs looked like portholes, of colorful fish and fauna, illusions of air and sea. The Chicagoan nibbled eagerly on a cheesey nacho like a bald rat. He drove back to his Mistress', in a beery sweat. The entire day had passed, and he had accomplished nothing. Just a horrible visage. He returned to the garden. The paint had begun to solidify and Piglet peeled up a strip, right up. You could remove it now with just about anything--a spatula. He could vigorously depaint the garden by dinner time. But Piglet felt abject. The thing is, he really missed M. Take away his Mistress, for a morning, an afternoon, and he was defenseless. M. was clearly the one good thing. Who stoically vacated herself just to have sex with him. Leaving this unrelated huntress in charge. Someone who gave you as much as M. deserved your total care forever, married or divorced, what you did. Piglet was a grub. Maybe you get intricated when your jokester dad accidentally, but actually, dry humps your eighth grade butt. Just harmlessly horsing around but then pressing you down on your stomach for a few quick minutes. But with her jeans still on, and it never happened again, she said, as if it never silently happened at all. Just a practice run, a dry run, that's all, simulated incest. Not the real, modern thing. And was she a flirt, even back then. So why did it have to keep on sticking--like the semen stuck to her hair. Your daddy--who taught her how to hit and throw--tomato fastballs. Who was ten times the man Piglet could ever be. It was all a fucking setup. Although couldn't he just not do those things. That her sentient skin so keenly enjoined, that he eagerly needed to do, with M. off bravely levitating. Leaving in place something she had found out about, hissing at him in tongues. Still, he could make her laugh, always. She laughed and called him the most evil man on earth. He felt redeemed, completely, when she laughed. Sometimes something comes along so good for you that you convince all of nature to take up your cause, and promise to go wherever this revelation ends up taking you. For better or for worse. He had really tried to get up to M., even past her. The heat was retreating now. The sun spread out across the sky. The paint hardened smoothly, with just a few expressive cracks. More reflective now, a rosey gray aftermath, of devastation. Ceramically dead bugs, maniacal chards of broken plants. A pastel mosaic of M.'s terrible things stuck to her will, like the ever advancing sky. The will itself entangled in its own experience. What am I doing in here--a nightmare. Not Piglet, though. He was an onlooker. The soft rosey hue heightened as the sun set. Piglet produced a picture of M., glowering, from his wallet. M. distrusted cameras, like a savage. He placed the picture in the paint, and there she was--trapped, along with the earwigs and sow bugs. The big trick was that awareness felt like absolute nothing. He went inside. What was he feeling now, this very moment. Salt that had lost its saltness. And how you couldn't step out of it to see what it was. Jade collected marbles, shells, geodes, smooth green stones. Outside, there was M. again, glowering in the paint. She hadn't lost her salt! Piglet had to laugh. He apologized, audibly. He framed M.'s picture with a circle of brightly reflecting marbles, one by one. Coolness pervaded the air. It was very pleasant. One thing was, his shoulder felt better. And there'd be no more lifting. The marbles were very pretty. M. looked like a famous Indian yogi. In a state of perfect malcontent. After enshrining M., Piglet decorated the rest of the garden with stones and sand dollars. Jade wouldn't mind her stones. He went back inside and poured a nice long vodka, his Mistress' Absolut, and dragged his air mattress back out. He lay down next to the garden and took some cool sips of pure, clear vodka in the cool darkening evening. In the limpid clarity. Then he took off his clothes just to feel the air. Maybe it was just nothing. And how you couldn't fight the way things were. Although maybe fighting the way things were, was eternally what was. Fueling expansion. So what if he never told her. He had fought it, in fact--the good fight--not to be like that with her. To be a higher person. He may have been gooey, all right, over-gooey as the result, compensating, but no never icky. All right, he may have responded to her ickiness likewise, but imagine the hell to pay had he responded gooily--to her ickiness. Piglet hadn't slept nor eaten. But unlike goo, icky was incurable. He passed out. He awakened later with a blinding light in his eyes. He struggled with sleep and fear--shielding his eyes--curling up--oh no, M. again, marauding M., Attila the M.! "No! No!" cried Piglet, attempting to rise, but collapsing on his arm. Then covering up as best he could--bracing for the knife, the blow of the hammer, the burning acid. "Don't, it's Piglet!" The flashlight moved away, and he saw his Mistress, barely, within the corona of his blinded eyes. She lowered the pepper spray canister. Jade appeared over her shoulder. "Piglet, you're naked," said his Mistress. The flashlight was drawn to the garden. It surveyed the garden, back and forth. "Geeze," said Jade. "Piglet--" said his Mistress. "We leave for one day. One day. Mendicino is overrun with tourists--" Piglet started to apologize. Then he started to cry. He burst into tears, tears sucked into the vacuum of a terrible loss, hovering in the dark all around him. He cried and cried. He tried to explain, sniffling. It was M., M. had actually been there! He was sorry, so sorry, about the garden--but would deliver a full selection of vegetables every week--from licensed organic grocers! Free of charge--a sort of new feudalism. He would never ever step foot inside the house again--like a doorman, a groundskeeper, growing older kindly--just a garden caretaker! The Morton's Salt man! Yes, a garden memorial, with a pretty little fence and gate. Were flowers okay? While there'd be plenty of real vegetables, he promised, every week, you bet! His mistress knelt down and put her finger to his lips. "Stop," she whispered. Piglet sniffled on. "Shut up," she whispered. "I hate vegetables," said Jade. His mistress frowned. "Piglet, let's go inside. We'll start your bath, a bubble bath. Donald Duck--Jade's favorite. Then tuck you in. And we'll talk about this more in the morning." 13 Prolongation After M. had left, again, they put me on Prozac. I have a 60's drug sensibility. There are four categories: pot, psychedelics, speed, and barbiturates--or quaaludes. Once I snorted heroin. Prozac is speed. I know, the ingredients are completely different, but the feeling was close, the same delusive optimism, and it kept me awake all night. But not as bodily as speed, more like staring at that replicate crab meat in the gourmet section of the supermarket. What Prozac does, is substantially increase the count of Serotonin amines discharged by the brain, amines that sustain sympathetic synaptic connection. Before the uptake of the impulse itself. How do they know this stuff. So when M. left, before Prozac, I could feel the amines surging by--I just couldn't deal with her leaving--without stopping, and on down the drain. But with Prozac, M.'s Gone! Dating a girl! Not coming back! Not ever! slows as if encountering a delta of Serotonin, at the synapse, and traverses as...to decide what's wrong, anymore, (on the phone bill, to all her nosey family)...such as her depressed, sagging butt...instead of falling right off a cliff. Prozac is sexually transformative, as well, accustomed as I was to desperate, amine-depleted desire, to being used by pretty, amused women, as a test of their authority, and having to deal with it, until the last frail, sickly neurotransmissions specified precious fetish artifact. Then the bind, and the uptake. But with Prozac, the sexual amines congregate in the delta, until you're pussy-brained yourself, feeling the intensely feminine abjuration, along with a trailing, sullied male resistance, that feed off each other. And so I played Sega Genesis Mortal Kombat night on end until three, four in the morning, sustaining a flickering sexual strain. There's Liu Kang, seeking to return Shang Tsung's evil martial arts tournament to its rightful hosts, the Shaolin Temples, after 500 years of deadly displacement. Liu Kang, strong and Stoic, formerly of the White Lotus, facing first, in the packed house of the Temple Courtyard--Special Forces Captain Sonya Blade. Humiliated right off by buffed, nimble Sonya, dressed in tight jungle green, and her yummy ab's. His flying kick--Toward, Toward, "C"--just a tad too slow--whoa, as he's snapped up right out of the sky by handstanding Sonya's scissor thighs. Helpless and flailing, for a second, captured in the vice of her flexing butt, and then dashed--catapulted head first--upon the courtyard stone. But not done yet, Liu, by any means--he's up and grabbing her for a throw, overhead, by the neck and cunt--Toward, Down, "A". Seeking to restore the pride and respect of the Shaolin Temples and this once great tournament, but just a little too slow. Because she's back, her breast right in your eyes, landing three sinewy jumping punches. Just a little dazed as this girl with the headband keeps punching you in the nose. Your control tapping growing slower. While Dumped! For another woman! M's doing a girl! as whatever it is they do as Sidhhartha himself needed to experience the river of life...with his big Buddhist butt. Then the bind, and the uptake. Embarrassed by a girl, for Christsake, whose western karate is stronger, more punishing and direct, than Shaolin Kung Fu. A special forces babe. Who has you reeling before the crowd of courtyard monks, silently feeling your shame, bearing your shame, here at square one. She's preparing to finish you. The bitch. You never even made it inside, beyond the courtyard. Her perfect leg extension--crouch kick, roundhouse, knee. And then the straight up fistic head blows. You're being finished. All your good intents. 500 years, come to this. No more M., sitting in the car. Staring mutely straight ahead. Finally, nothing you can do as, at last, she blows the taunting fire kiss (Toward, Toward, Away, Away, and Start). They took me off Prozac and put me on Iproniazid, an MAOI. Iproniazid inhibits monoamine oxidase, the agent that burns off, oxidizes, amines in the brain. And so an MAOI prolongs the life of amines, rather than increasing their count, as Prozac does with Serotonin. I turned into a zombie--the medicated, mental out-patient that I was. Sluggish, sedated, desiccated. Distinctly low-browed. A quiet drone at work, running on stale, over-cooked amines. Again, I left a message with Dr. Wright, my shrink, at the psychiatric center. I had only actually seen her once, in tears. She had prescribed Prozac at our first and only session, having waved me off the moment I began, inappropriately, bringing up intimacies with M. This time she prescribed Doxipin, a tricyclic antidepressant. Tricyclics increase the neurotransmissions of Norepinephrine, while not affecting Serotonin levels. In a few weeks I was feeling okay again. Not those droll Prozac beams of well-being anymore, but just generally pretty smooth, all the time, yet largely unsedated. There wasn't that Prozac fertile crescent, but a synaptic bottleneck, to be sure, so that Your wife is gone! Fucking a girl! was observed, in passing, along with while you do what you need to--it's time to work on yourself. Then the bind, and the uptake. I was newly fortified, all right, but on my own, with a higher mission, albeit undefined. No more hanging with Serotonin--this smoothness stood for a new order. And once I started squaring things away, I'd learn what it was. As well, I became a eunuch. And may I say, what a relief. All my life I've been driven and dragged about by sex, a constant, oppressive theatric, in which the woman must take up the dildo, and reluctantly strap it on, like Shane, yet again, once more. Some interminable magic lantern, of lacquered, modeling women: from charioteer to sword fighter, gunslinger, Kung Fu queen, cavewoman, commandant, Hun, Cossack, Nazi. What a relief for that ever heinous chimera to finally just pop. From Gorgon to Hydra. Not so much a simple hard-on, ever--a total eunuch. In the evening I'd drop three Doxipin, prepare a double vodka over one cube, climb into bed and listen to Sports Talk radio, and get smooth, before launching into a 10-hour sleep. It was a trade--sex for sleep, and well worth it. No sexual interest whatsoever, not even straight fucking. The whole idea was totally vile and unserene. The whole notion that human sexuality was somehow beautiful--well, were fucking dogs beautiful? Humping bears? Or, okay, swan. Those flapping swan skidding across the water? If that's what they were doing? Or that genitalia was somehow erotic--even in my most craven days, you had to ram my face into a pussy. True, I loved it, but so close up I didn't have to look at it. I remembered once asking my first wife, if I had the biggest dick she'd ever seen, and she thought for a moment and said, no, but the prettiest. And I went away actually believing that I had somehow, an aesthetic cock! A Vermeer prick! You know, someday, everyone will fasten on prosthetic genitalia--safe, stylized, and appropriate. No more sex. I'd lie there in bed, sipping vodka, waiting on the Doxipin, listening to Sports Talk radio. There's a lot going on that you may not be aware. The sports talk host is a pretty cool guy, a former Junior Class Treasurer, or so, who auditioned the bands for dances, went steady, and easily moved among all the cliques--the jocks, the brains, the facemen. Who now has landed this coveted radio job, although his future rise to the networks depends, ironically, on how well he appeases the nerds who call up, the schoolyard outcasts. And I could also see the guys, clustered about the telephone, with their Cokes and Domino pizzas, asking their nerdy questions, all the while secretly hysterical--rolling on the floor--as they forced this host to acknowledge, and even accept them. And listening I'd start to chuckle myself-- "Steve, Field of Dreams gets my vote..." "Steve, Mays had to hit to right." "True--but Bonds hits to all fields." "Steve, you telling me that Bonds is better than Mays?" "No--of course not, but--" And then the ringing in my ears would amplify, the sound of hushed synapses, background for pleasant sports talk, and then all of sleep itself. With the help of Doxipin I was able to put my work in order. I have always been the type of employee who requires a lot of supervision. I would let things slide until the last possible moment. But suddenly no more. I set goals, prioritized, promptly attended to each and every detail, one by one, and stopped blaming those around me. I received my best evaluation in years. As well, I discovered what everyone else takes for granted: leisure time. Before, my free hours were spent foraging for useful pornography, or trying to please M. in hopes of gaining some minor sexual favor in return. But now what. I got out my old golf clubs and pretty soon I was in a regular foursome. Sundays I'd drop by Starbuck's, with the newspaper, and chat, with new found friends--normal liberals--about books, politics. Very pleasant and undriven. I joined a writers' workshop. And in the evening there was Sports Talk. Well rested, I worked out harder at the gym. I had a good job, a nice place to live. I was in shape. In between wives- -but so. Before you could live with someone else, you had to learn how to live with yourself. I hardly felt the Doxipin anymore, my body had adapted to it. Just at night before bed with an evening cocktail--a slight floating sensation. M. thoughts continued to be wholly, smoothly generous. Asleep wrapped around another woman because you blew it slowing into we just weren't meant for each other and it's good, her new happiness. And the bind and uptake. But then a new set of thoughts--paraphrases--started darting by, almost undetected: but what about getting laid--what about girls--live pussy. Single thoughts, bindless uptakes. I was in my 40's, and the rest of my life could slip away alone. To get back in the hunt I needed a little drive, a semblance of libido. So I decided to experiment: my Prozac prescription was still good for 100. I refilled it, and began taking a 50 milligram in the morning to go with my three Doxipin at night, just for a little bounce, an added push, during the day. I embarked upon a three-week trial period. But on the second day, I received a call from Dr. Wright, my shrink at the hospital: "Mr. Cloud," she said, "I see that you are now prescribing your own medication." My instinct is to lie--I can't place where that started. "What--what are you talking about?" Dr. Wright is plain looking, in the mannered, Lesbian fashion. No makeup, tiny breasts, rail thin. A pointy little probing nose, direct and serious. "The Prozac, Mr. Cloud." Wearing a loose, dark suit of fine cloth, hanging magisterially. "Well, I had a refill left, on your prescription." "But I thought we had settled on the Doxipin," said Dr. Wright. "Well, I'm sorry," I said. "Mr. Cloud, I cannot have patients prescribing their own medication." "I'm sorry--I wasn't sure--I was going to call you." "Perhaps we should take you off everything for a few months, and start over, from a clean slate." "No!" I cried--the flying M. thoughts! "Perhaps we should schedule another appointment--my earliest would be the second week in May--and decide upon a new medication schedule--before prescribing any more refills." "No, please!" "But is the Doxipin no longer achieving a desired effect?" "No, it's great, it's fine--" and I continued to plead until she relented, so long as I promised to return the Prozac capsules. I hung up the phone in a sweat. Whoa, that was close. I had forgotten about Dr. Wright. Our only contact was through her message machine. Geeze, my desperation. I went out for a walk. I'd have dinner by myself and later tune in Sports Talk. In baseball, a big trade rumor swirled. I fell in behind a pretty girl wearing jeans. There was a time a butt like that I'd trade the entire Professional Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. The Heisman Trophy. While in Muslim countries, women walked behind their men. I stopped at the hospital and dropped off the plastic bottle of Prozac with a little note: "Dear Dr. Wright: Here's the Prozac. Sorry. Honestly, I just forgot to call. Best wishes, Mr. Cloud." Nearby was a great little Italian restaurant where I could read the evening newspaper, in subdued red light. I avidly anticipated food. And had taken to chocolate--to candy bars. Sex was mostly for younger women, anyway, these days, what with all the diseases. They were learning so many new things. While I was in my 40's. I had been laid hundreds of times--there was nothing left to prove. It was a pretty San Francisco day. The sun managed to warm pockets of air. Most men my age had humongous wives, anyway, and you saw what was starting to happen to M.'s butt. M., who's kiss kissing another woman. But wait, I had a good job, I was muscular, and pretty well liked now at work and elsewhere. Who must laugh about you in bed, as lovers do, the two of them. Probably Dr. Wright, as well. Rather than talk, she had simply had me fixed. And it worked. But bitter, actually, rather bitter, living neutered, and Lesbian M. But humane, enough, I was doing okay, learning to deal with, and accept, the new conditions, day-by-day. Just an irresolute little struggle--harmless enough-- that you could shrug off, wordlessly--from point to point, each new day. No binding, no ever uptake. Just a tiny open wound, that you could manage okay, simply as it was. As it chose to exist, fixed in your brain. Just daub it a little, nurse it. Keep it clean. Choose--either the Lesbian method, or that violent fretful male condition, that back and forth lack of handles on things. That tragic, final standoff, the swat team deploying in the shrubs. These days of terrible domestic male rage. The Lesbian sniper setting up in the bedroom across the street. And how you never noticed anything before. The sky, Victorians, makes of cars. You got to take him out, girl, when he puts the toddler down, right then. I walked along, hands in pockets, excitedly toward dinner. Now--squeeze. Fettucini Alfredo. Yummy. Begin with a glass of wine, a $3.00 Chianti. Later, in bed, I measured out my vodka and pills, and dropped. Then, radio sports topics, dream vignettes, and a warm sunny morning filtering through the stained glass window above the bath. Big happy prismatic soap bubbles. Prevailing upon a bobbing little penis like a doused Mr. Peanut. I could swear it was shrinking. "Wake up, Peanut." "Help, help--my hat!" Lost his foreskin cap. That gross 60's album cover of naked John and Yoko--his looked like a nozzle, hanging off. Or a call-in Mr. Peanut--"Hello, is that you, Peanut?" 14 NORTH BEACH CINEMA North Beach Cinema is located in a fine old neighborhood of San Francisco. From the name and neighborhood, you'd think it's art, "cinema." When actually it's a sex shop. While other porn stores go by "Frenchy's", or "24-Hour Arcade," or "Adult." North Beach Cinema is different--in several ways. It's the only video store anywhere, porn or otherwise, that doesn't rent videos. You either must buy the tape, at a ridiculous price--$80- $100 for a 30-minute porn tape--or "preview" it in a disgusting little booth for an equally unheard of $20.00. Other porn stores offer magazines, postcards, and sexual aids and curios, in addition to videos. Other porn shops open upon a big bright central room that's kind of cheerful--what with the absurd dildos and penis squirt guns--the life-size inflatable. Tourists enjoy them--it's San Francisco. But North Beach Cinema sells videos, and videos only. Nothing else, not even a Playboy. It's dark and narrow inside, with just the video boxes lining the walls. Tourists peek in and know instinctively not to enter. Other places of porn go to great lengths to organize their films in sections, like a normal video store: "Amateur," "Bi," "Girl/Girl," "Back Door." "Special Interest." But not at North Beach Cinema. There's no organization whatsoever--there's not even a section for "New Releases." You have to search through the entire selection, a thousand videos, each time, to find the new ones--they could be anywhere. But by far the biggest difference is that North Beach Cinema is devoted exclusively to S & M films. Not just "kinky," but really bad hard stuff, from all over the world. It's unique, even to San Francisco. Let's see--how would you organize, arrange the boxes on the walls? By deed--"Rape," "Beatings," "Scat?" By country, by appliances--"Clamping," "Plugs," "frenums." Or, "New Beatings," "New Shit." Hardly. After all, there's a votive, Bosch-like quietude to the pictures mixed together as they are. Like an ancient frieze, or cave paintings, from Hell. Along dark, sewer-like passageways illumed by cones of makeshift track lighting. What pray tell has brought you here. Who will lead you out. I can explain. Let me explain. I'm not into any of this. Honest, what could be more horrible, more disgusting. I have no interest, whatsoever, in "Bitch Boy," or "Rape of the Debutante," or, for that matter, "Brown Bomber." I am not amused in the least by "Single White She-Male." Nothing, nothing could be more vile. In fact, for me, even normal porn tapes are repulsive. The biological "suck/fuck" movie. The sexual man and woman humping away from a variety of positions. As if they're having a problem getting it right. Each new position a desperate parody of the one before. And then the endless, closeup blow jobs--why anyone would want a tremendous woman to do that. Okay, I admit it, I'm a sexual misfit. But don't you love it when the discussion turns to "sexuality"--their "human sexuality." And then "erotica." Even dogs don't do blow jobs. While I maintain the highest sexual standard. So noble and worthy, nice and clean, you can't find it, these days, of wickedness. Of course I'm resentful. So very rare and precious. Others fuck, while I search, endlessly. Mutant hellholes such as this. My human sexuality is simply yet undiscovered. Call me Coronado, John the Baptist. Because the devil doesn't understand, although Jesus does. Jesus knows what you need before you do. I'm too rare, not worth the devil's resources. My standard begins with a concept, a mirage, of Girl. Say "Girl"--and each letter will stretch, magically, like Spandex. Girl like burnished angels, glowing angelflesh. Eve was created of Girl. As a visual, an angel. Heaven, glowing light truth, emanating out of Adam, the vessel, of spirit. Girl Heaven--the way, back, of return, and as such unsurmisable. Attain ye power. Wealth, fine concubine--but Girl the unreachable. Simple heaven physics, arise statutory law. One unclean hand touch Girl destroy heaven--or clean. Grasp light and extinguish. Infinite Girl bite apple. How be ye of heaven? Girl "light" "glow". Also, Girl "light" "ethereal," angelflesh. Slender golden tummy, corporeal shimmer. Mirageful angels play. Infinite Girl play earthly reach. Take on boy force. E=MC2. Assimilate boy. Girl perfect angel, perfect animal. Synthesized delight. Big weight fun. Wear dark boy-pride tiger hide. Heavy Hegelian Miss Hercules. Carry dark axe. Put down axe. Challenge boy fight me. Hide light go seek. Boy trapped in Dialectic. Thai Kickboxing. Okay, straight "N" "C" "2" "A" wrestling. Laughing Girl angel of fun kickboxer. Strangely smooth boy, girl-like. Yikes. Okay, ultimate fighting. Buster you name it laugh weight-drunk Girl. Trim flowing muscles of tiger inside proud Girl angelflesh. Angel fun experiment of slim dense muscle. Heavenly flashing jaguar strong-Girl. Sad, sad beaten boy of earth. Long hair Angel laughter thrown back. Don't get lost--of dark earth play, angel Girl! Shamed boy bowed low ashamed, erect clean athlete Girl smooth laughing dry. Finally, you present a video for preview to the clerk, who sits within a separate, glass-enclosed room in the front: well, consider the customers at this place--the airborne diseases. It's his job--but what brings you here. He calmly looks at the video box you've selected, and then at you. And you know why renting is prohibited--would you trust someone who actually enjoys this stuff, to return it? A tape from as far away as Saudi Arabia, possibly--would you let it leave the store--just consider the liability issues. He carefully places your box on the ledge against the glass so everyone in the room can sneak a peek--and see how deeply disturbed you secretly are. You squirming fuck--as he fastidiously fills out some lengthy receipt linking your name and personal information to this tape--this sex crime--even though it isn't even leaving the store. "$20.00," he says, defiantly. Actually, $20.00 is a bargain for something as horrible as this. It should cost at least $50.00, $100.00, or more, for a glimpse even of this keenly rare aberrant footage. Consider the scientific import. The clerk, however, is disgusted that you're fumbling so to cough up a mere twenty. He sizes you up. At other porn stores, there's a high worker turnover. While this vicious little man has been working here for at least eight years, ever since you started showing up. He's somewhere between 30 and 50. He isn't fat, he isn't skinny--not tall, not short--but of no muscularity, whatsoever--he's built like a mollusk. His face is poxed--not from a childhood illness--but clearly from years of serving up contempt. He's seen it all at North Beach Cinema, but it's still hard for even him to believe how anyone would pay $20.00 for the filth that you've just selected and placed before his eyes. "Booth 7," he says, within his glass habitat, like a serpent. As usual, it's one of the worst booths. Booths 6 and 12 are the best, farthest in the back, where you can turn up the volume some and no one will hear. But Booth 7 is right at the front. Maybe he expects a gratuity for a better booth. In addition to the $20.00. But why does he have to hate you so much. You walk on back. The booth consists of a wooden bench and a tiny screen, the size of one of those campsite TVs--where you take your kids. It's dark inside the booth, starless. Usually in Booth 7 you don't dare turn up the volume--or everyone will hear and shudder. But today it's okay because there's a great, collective yowling of screams, whippings, German, and gurgling sounds coming from the other booths that will suck in the sound from yours. It's okay, but then, just as you wait for the movie to begin, you start missing some cursed ex-wife. You try to fight that off--you deserve 30 minutes of innocent entertainment, for Christsake. You're not hurting anyone. Even though if you had just limited your drinking to not every single night, or not treated her like some trophy, some prized Bengal tiger to your cautionary zoo keeper. At other porn shops, there's a fast forward in the booths. After all, you have a single hour or so for lunch. At work they have come to realize that you require closer supervision. The usual scenario is to quickly eat, go to the video, plunk down $5.00 and forward the tape to its two or three key segments. But not at North Beach Cinema. Here, there is no fast forward. You have to sit through the entire film. You've made this bed, now lie in it. When there may be just one single minute of modest Spandex Girl fight boy fair real in the entire tape. A subliminal second. It's hard enough to tell from the grainy picture on the box what the tape's even about. And who knows what really will happen--after eight rueful years you know the bait and switch tactics of these porn purveyors. Nor can you fast forward how long it will take to get over your departed wife. You remember how long it took the last time, with your first wife. And now you're 45--there may never be a third. This place is okay at 25 or 65, but not 45. Dilating, you notice the prior patron's unknown wank still glistening on the concrete floor. That's why you were put in here--that little bastard up front. You should break his scrawny neck. What are you doing in here. What if they catch you at work. What if your boss walks in--demanding that you come right out of there and get back to work. What if your kids saw you. What if Jesus sees you. Through the darkness in here. Finally, the movie comes on--there's a match, all right-- a battle of the sexes--but totally fake, of course. Those Wrestling Federation airplane lifts. The pulled stomach punches. Or Christ it's mud wrestling. Illegal full nelsons, phoney arm bars. And so vile--the huge flapping tits. Shameless facesitting- -those Warhol closeups. And, finally, oh no, out comes the dildo. Loser boy suck all say win win Girl. Boy gag heavy black strap-on dildo. Bad, bad playgirl angel! Dense thick rubber black cock slap broke-faced slut-boy. Hard deep Girl piston hip thrust once, twice, more and again. So fucking sick. Would a little aikido, or straight taekwondo, be too much to ask? Must everything be sexual! A cool evening romp--of awakening boys and girls--Capture the Flag? Or a brief, solitary, harmless solace. 15 TO THE READERS OF THE SPECTATOR (Northern California's Largest Sex Newspaper) Dear Readers, You may have noticed that I differ some from the other writers of this libertine weekly. I go for years without getting laid. After all, love is a serious business. When a woman dumps me, it's hard. But I don't go haywire, in no way do I stalk or stab or shoot her: I weep, copiously. I take it out on myself, as she wants. It takes me years to rebuild, alone. In short, I'm like you, the readers of this newspaper, numbed by the mere prospect of pleasure, of the teasing, taunting women photographed on these pages, poking their breasts and butts out at us, luridly denigrating our depression, feasting on our misery. Why do we sit here and take it. We can't afford these women. We can't even afford the phone sex. And the Spectator writers--what must they think--that we thrill to their sexual bravura--their glory days of porn stardom--the ringing "sex positive" manifestos--Tantric Lesbo circle jerks--and the nude beaches? Even were we accepted by a nude beach, and knew the way, how would we ever get there? Are there carpools? If we read these writers at all, it's from amazement of how wholly unsympathetic they are, of us, poor us, their very readership. Mistress Kat understood. She treated us like minnows, and we felt accepted. Sex for us will always be an undisclosed horror. We turn away in dread, you and I, silently for years, sometimes, from what we have done. Children alone can save us. All we want, is to talk with the woman we love. To walk with her again, through the fields. To hold her hand, to feel relief again, to rest in the dark of her constellar thoughts. Just to hear her voice, once more, like the webbing of all the stars and their clusters. Until then, we can at least approach masturbation in a mature fashion. Make no mistake: masturbation is a hideous, shamed-face act of abnegation. A filthy little habit. If you can, quit. You're a grown man, you can beat this thing. The danger of masturbation is that it will destroy you as a human being, shrink your behavior down to nothing. Think of the hours in your life--the days, weeks, years--spent foraging for dirty magazines and films to quell this putrid urge. Yes, dirty, why don't you just admit it. How paltry you are, flitting from one porn store to the next, and then after the act itself, how impoverishing it all was. Our life was better, in fact way better, as young innocents, stashing that Victoria's Secret summer catalogue under the furnace down in the basement. In those days we thrived on junk mail. Although you could have burned down your parents. While today, steeped in the finest pornography, from around the world, we're barely functional. The hardest thing, is to break the cycle of behavior. Go ahead, laugh. When you know it's true--that therapy of any kind is useless--we have no ego, or conscience--much less a subconscious-- at best, beatoff fantasies. Cushionless we rub right up against brain cells. In the grip of our ceaseless, deathly being, beating- -breathing--pulsating. At work we perspire beneath our skin. At night we awake with our heart racing in constraint. At rest, in the park, we hyperventilate into a bag. We live in fear. What we need, we need of the moment. Sitting at home alone in silence feeling a twitch in our neck. Waiting for a need to arise. Ordering an extra crispy five pack from Colonel Saunders. We know, someday, she'll return, if only briefly. She's curious, like all women. We can dedicate our lives to a single, chance encounter. She'll return, bemused, and see us like this. The boxes of chicken bones covering the kitchen counters, like dug-up coffins. You know she hates you, anyway. At best, the highest time, her love was a sweet sadness, an evening melancholy. Sympathethic. Women take one look and know you understand their monthly devastation. But how stilted, stifling, that kind of love can get. She's never coming back. She left you, fled--leaving all her stuff behind, even the precious little things. So give it up. Your only hope now lies in the Gospel, the teachings and example of Jesus Christ. Please don't laugh. Rather, just try for a moment to put it aside--the searing pain--how could she leave me, sniffle-- hypothetically, if you will, just for a moment. You can do it, walk away for a few seconds, at least a few minutes. Easy--now consider this obsession as an unclean spirit: When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest, and findeth none. Then he saith, I will return into my house from whence I came out; and when he is come, he findeth it empty, swept, and garnished. Matthew 1:43 That's you--us--isn't it? Here we are. Let's just stay here--why not. For a while. Lightly, for once, a garnishment, like Jesus: Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. Matthew 12:28 As light, a relation, of finite to the infinite, as pure relation relating unto itself: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach de- liverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised. To preach the acceptable year of the Lord. Luke, 4:18 Isn't that the Jesus you would be? Can't we know ourselves as a healing, delivering, recovering Spirit? Liberated, disencumbered. An instrument reading, of the spirit of Jesus upon our own bruised selves. A dead reckoning. Read the Gospels. What Jesus has to say--he will show you. Forego the rest--the Old and New Testaments--they are burdens unto themselves. Just read the words in red--how can you go wrong. Who can blame you. How can that be damning--that monster of blame, St. Paul. The Gospel is the connecting relation between the two testaments--yet a negative unity, reflecting upon the life of true Self--the Holy Ghost! Be between. Stop masturbating. Clean the mess in the kitchen. They both elicit heavy loathing. "Not that which goeth into defileth a man, but that which comes out of, this defileth a man"--the loathing that is. It's as heavy as envy or greed-- denser, even. Your possessions--you walk around them, bump into them at night. They are anchors--give them all away. Be free, buoyant, drink tea. Keep the mattress. For floating, flotation. Be a vessel of Spirit. Don't worry, when the time comes, you'll know what to do, like the Disciples. When she returns, you'll know what to do. You marvel at her beauty, which never seems to fade. Breathtakingly, a thought of pussy may come to mind, but only very briefly. Enchanted, listen to her talk. Excitedly, she'll tell you all that's happened. She'll look around the old house and see a gleaming, spotless emptiness, like Vermeer. Moteless. Having assumed that it was safe to return, by now. But something's strange--you're acting kind of weird. Where's my stuff, she'll start to wonder-- having just dropped by to pick up a few small things. "What do you mean you gave it all to Goodwill. It was my stuff!" You may be truly sorry you did that. Gee, you really shouldn't have given away her things. What possessed you. It was really kind of thoughtless, even for a good cause. You could have stored them. But, okay, so you got carried away, that's all--her things were the same as yours. And, besides, divided against himself, the devil cannot stand. Your reply: "Well, you can have the tax writeoff. Including for my stuff, also--even." You don't crumble. You look directly in her eyes-- unintimidated, generous. Unfazed, as you watch her start to fume. An apology is in order, but only one. Got it? Offer a cup of tea. You love her always, but lightly now, tactically, as thine enemy. 16 Wank There are two different approaches a Lesbian may take for the training of her houseboy. The traditional mistress will at once crush his spirit, snap his will, destroy his character. Emasculate down to a fretful, irresolute little piece of thing puttering quietly about, unseen, like a pet turtle, performing his chores unbeknownst. Taking meals and breaks on a bamboo matt laid down in the laundry room between the washer and dryer. Barely surviving on the cruelest of diets--Piglet's new mistress had known of a houseboy who lived on spaghetti sticks. While other women tossed their boys peanutty candy bars--for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Piglet, on the other hand, was fed a scientific selection of whey powders, liquid creatine and optimized amino shakes, selenium and chromium tablets, and only the most nutritious table scraps. A fully metabolized diet. You see, Piglet's new mistress was a modern Lesbian who believed that the brighter and healthier the houseboy, like a sleek Doberman, the better served and recognized his mistress. And so she also carefully designed Piglet's workout regimen for a lean, productive musculature, stressing toiling repetitions over heavy weight. Two pictures were taped inside his locker in the garage: a Rambo with a felt "X" through it, right over Stallone's bullet-belts, and an anatomical drawing of a human male, with a check next to it. *** Piglet slept in the garage on his blue air mattress next to new his mistress' BMW. For Piglet, days were not divided by sleep, but rather by chores: he found it most productive to perform his indoor tasks at night, and outdoor duties by day. His tiptop physical and mental conditioning required the briefest sleep, just a few little breaks, of stillness, really, well spaced over 24 hours. Sometimes he would lie at night listening to the post-ignition sounds of the BMW--the two of them, side by side--resting, recharging. Silently witnessing their own interworkings. Piglet chaining peptides. Wandering down a little path toward sleep. The blind uptake of inchoate thought--as a sustaining consciousness itself receded--when what was it, exactly, that went away? Drowsy Piglet now conjuring the forms of dream leaping across or falling free through separating space, awkwardly shaping themselves to each other, as a cohesive, unifying feeling of awareness faded, that itself would of course come back around again, after some hours, or minutes, in Piglet's case. But Piglet awoke momentarily, within a flat white plane--a backdrop, or divider, perhaps--and continued right along: startled, rescinded dreams reaching for each other in the dark. Piglet was fixed in a white plane, like a figure on paper, thought in the midst of consciousness. Awake, but not so in the garage. Time to get up, really up--there was so much to do! He tried to shake himself on out of there--blow himself back up-- and return to the garage. It was just a dream, the canvas for a dream, of flypaper. However, if you were awake, but not where you went to sleep, were you still alive? Piglet tried to yell but just couldn't break on out of there. He heard a voice--it was M. "I take, you give--always. I give nothing--you're just storage--a bottle--capped and uncapped. Understand? I continue to know you, while you will never know me. I can keep you right here, forever, if it's so hard for you to let go, and take from you here, when and however much I want." Piglet startled awake panting, in the garage this time, clutching the bumper of the BMW. It was 3:00 a.m. The garage was cool and clammy. What kind of nightmare was that. The BMW grunted. He turned on the light. The bumper sticker read, "Obey Authority." It was M. alright! He had almost forgotten all about her. Mean, old, scary, adorable M. But he was cured, thanks to his new mistress, and time now for his chores! Boy, she sounded really pissed, though. The way she simmered, fumed--in his dreams, his dreams, even. God knows what she was talking about, ever talked about. First a little breakfast--he went inside--a new recipe dangled from the magnet on the kitchen door--his mistress changed up a lot, to prevent his body from catabolizing during sleep. "Dear Piglet-- "Mix 1 cup instant oatmeal with 1-3/4 cups water in glass bowl. "Microwave on high for 2 minutes. "Let stand and cool for 30 seconds. "Stir in two level scoops of Metaform. (Add 1/2 cup of nonfat milk if mixture is too thick). "Optional--1 teaspoon of Sweet 'N Low." Piglet was 5'11", 165 lbs. "Metaform"--what was this stuff. He examined the label. "Specially-engineered whey protein fractions that double the nitrogen in muscles compared to regular whey proteins." Special health Jerseys. Regardless, whey was the first principle--first came the clear membrane. Once she had put him on a diet of egg whites, and a food exchange program with another Lesbian's houseboy, who ate just the hard boiled yokes. Man, that was practically murder. Piglet stirred two heaping scoops into a tall glass of Evian water. Whey and filtered water once mixed were odorless, tasteless, colorless--fractional protein, totally broken down, from the start--the perfect breakfast! In seconds, he could feel complex amino acids chaining. Simply any warm wet sponge would remove the film from the porcelain tiles of the kitchen floor, that Piglet himself had fitted. The white mosaic tiles were embroidered most delicately with light blue loops and twining flourishes, in the style of ancient Pompeii. Piglet attacking the grooves between tiles with a hard bristle toothbrush, and knee pads. The human race chaining itself, from ancient times, running its course, within a creative impulse, of no human identity at all. Simply running out and coming to the end. Or hit by a volcano. As other forms died out also and new ones took over. The same awareness, never more or less, higher or lower, turning to different forms--the Lesbians. Ever restless, never done. But what was inbetween? Since grace was an exchange, a mutual recognition--contact, at last. A dual joy. There must be an intermediary! A perceiving Self. Because, otherwise, how lonely, and uncertain, being God. With all thy heart and soul. Or a tree falling unheard in the forest. While Piglet was capped and uncapped. When what was that dream about. While Piglet was uncapped, a sexual seepage, a drip. A new form, of drip. A steady little current, of devotion, a tiny way of life, of humble sexual living. Work, rest--work, work, rest. An emasculation, in bloom, a Bar Mitzvah. A hut off in the desert. His dick hardly even necessary, at all. He was sure he could be just as sexual gelded. Cleaning the grooves between tiles of his new mistress' bathroom floor with a number two toothbrush at 4:00 in the morning fucking gelded. His dick suddenly arose, in fear. But his new mistress would be reluctant, opposed as she was to enforced male feminization. Although castration in and of itself was hardly feminizing. Just a practical determination--in and out surgery. Disencumbered, his mistress' most demure eunuch. That was about as high as he could possibly take it, the height of what he was, his distillation of being, its penetration, of spirit. Dawn arrived and Piglet returned to his air mattress for a brief rest before the bustle of activity that attended his new mistress' awakening. The garage was either dark or light. His new Mistress had put in a window. Or grey. Lying still he closed his eyes and saw his testicles bobbing in a jar of bleak formaldehyde. On a shelf in the garage. And then himself unmoored and floating through space, tumbling about like an astronaut, laughing within a giddy astronaut helmet, like a baby in bulky astronaut overalls, stretching his stubby arms and legs. Completely free in outerspace when whap he awoke in that flat white zone again. While remembering, that this was the second time. Once again, he was awake, but not in the garage, although he knew the garage was where he actually was--should be. But stuck here on his way back to there, as if he had missed the reentry trajectory, and run smack into this white wall again. Stuck in the river of life, like a tubeless tire. "I can hold you here, for as long as I have to. I told you--I can force you." It was long-gone, gone-bad M. again. Poor sport M. "I take everything I want, always, from little boys like you." She had cause, alright, there was always cause--a given, a construct. Piglet struggled to make it back to the garage. He could picture the garage perfectly. He woke up--but in his childhood bed--wrong. He began dreaming of waking up in the garage. But realizing it was wrong--seeing his pickled testicles in the jar-- with a yellow smiley-face sticker--turned derisive--and hearing M. repeat--"see, I can hold you right here. So you just better let go." She was right, of course. The entire world was always right. Piglet let go, and fell into a dreamless sleep. He awakened later with a start. It was 10:30. The BMW was gone--his new mistress had long left for work. *** There was a second neatly typed note on the refrigerator door: Dear Piglet: You must have been so tired to have missed my bath and breakfast! But be nice--to yourself. Take the day off. It's a beautiful day for a stroll in the park. And besides, as you know, I will be gone for the week, at the platform committee meeting in Aspen. So rest, sleep, relax. I insist--so order it!" Seven of the most influential west-coast Lesbians were convening in Aspen, Colorado to decide, among other issues, whether to formally endorse male feminization. Piglet's new mistress argued eloquently against. Piglet himself was proof that men had a proper, hygienic place as males, and not some teetering transvestite. Although he had passed out--and completely missed the morning routine! It was M., her influence at work--this could only spell trouble. When what could she possibly want now--at this stage, the end. Divorced, signed, final. She had taken, he had fallen asleep. Missed his chores. That's what had happened. The set of facts. She had taken, simply removed, his consciousness. Lifted it, like a Dr. Frankenstein. But why--what could she possibly want with that, when awareness was all the same, never higher or lower, more or less. His was the exact same as hers! Pure loneliness. But what was lonely? Oh no, it was trouble, for M., once again. Another desperate recourse, on her part, and his fault, as usual, his very consciousness to blame. He could just see her attributing some special quality to it--some transformative houseboy ingredient, a mutant pain-shrinking chromosome--that just might cure her own psychic suffering. When in fact it wasn't awareness, for Christsake, that had changed and shaped Piglet--rather years, decades, of abuse at the hands of women. Oh no, M. was falling into another trap. Because you couldn't enhance, or augment, or substitute for, this singular thing. And the fault was clearly his--yet again something she had seen in him that simply wasn't there! Yet another hurtful disappointment! Quickly he went to the phone and called M. But her number was no longer in service. He went to the phonebook. She wasn't there, either. Thank goodness. But had she moved. Out of state? But he was cured, his new mistress had cured him. No more drugs, booze, or M. Tough love had worked. And maybe he could use a little more sleep. For improvement sake. * * * That afternoon he strolled down foggy Haight Street toward the park. Little shops, like tribal tents, displayed shiny black goods--leather vests, boots, studded jewelry. Bleak, pierced young people arranged their wares inside the dark interiors. Many things Piglet didn't know the names of. His new mistress provided a $10.00 weekly allowance, but more when he had worn out his sneakers, for instance. Twice a week Piglet did a grocery at the Safeway--you could buy almost everything there. He entered a shop with so many different kinds of shoes. A slender sales girl wearing a long peasant dress watched as he admired a pair of the simplest, most basically functional, brown leather shoes. She smiled, a necessary kindness, surrounded by shoes, this gray weekday morning. Like Gulliver. Her sad narrow face and long straight hair drooped down glumly, here in the fog. Piglet knew that he was not an ugly man. Although 42, he was in perfect, textbook shape. He kept his appearance as pleasantly bland as possible, at all times. Hair carefully cut and combed. He could easily pass as a young professional. The girl approached. "Interesting, isn't it," she said, nodding at the shoe in Piglet's hand. Piglet flinched. "Why, yes," he said. "Funny how you picked those," she said. She smiled, kindly, a weirdo. Piglet hurried off. How baffling. While the clerks at the Safeway were always ready to help, even as they stocked. Straightforwardly, and their knowledge of rows and sections was pretty amazing. He strolled on. And the Safeway was never so gloomy. Strangely, though, the girl had reminded him of how pretty his new mistress was. His new mistress was blond and wintry, invigorating, hyper, while the shoe girl was slow, brunette and autumnal. Although sometimes days and nights--a week--would pass without his even seeing his new mistress. Which was probably for the best. In fact, he had stopped even thinking of how pretty she was. How strangely irrelevant that had become. While M. herself was totally beautiful. Sometimes you didn't see it, though, face to face, in straight-on misery. But there were other quiet times, when he looked in, as she played guitar, cradling her burnished, classical guitar, in an amber evening light--her strained, intent profile: succumbing to beauty, and nobility, with each precise note, every single second. Piglet sat down on a bench in Golden Gate Park. Young mothers, and nannies, and a few other houseboys, like himself, passed by. When just a few years before there were no Lesbian houseboys at all. The fog began to lift, and the sun broke through. The sun was slightly warm, the air slightly cold. In San Francisco, the sun never quite manages to warm the air. The rays shine down like an invisible rain on your skin. Piglet leaned back and shut his eyes--just for a few seconds. He heard the voice repeat--"give--give it--give up"--as if it had him in a wrestling hold. The sleeper. Again he passed out, with little resistance. *** With his new mistress away for the week, and with Piglet living in the garage, he noticed there really wasn't that much to do. Why vacuum the guest rooms? Or the window sills. He did, however, decide to clear the bee's nest in the gutter. Risking his life to exterminate harmless honey bees. Good bees--or maybe the South American killers. But he chose not to prune the fruit trees. He found himself catnapping some. Whenever M. said "give," he gave. It wasn't bad--sleep was okay. Although he knew there'd be hell to pay. As she delved his awareness, for some quintessential element, that might freshen, alleviate, enliven, her folded psyche, like a morning glory. While Piglet made do with what he had--the world's leading expert on making due. That's what she needed! Because with M., everything had to be up and running perfectly, like a BMW. The way she respected her feelings like honored guests. Sat them down together somberly in the drawing room. Honoring sadness and horror with sadness and horror. Bestowing meaning. But it was M. doing that, not awareness--it was awareness all the while taking note of the honorable M. But and equal to all the rest. So in the long run this wasn't going to work. Piglet's consciousness wasn't somehow lighter or breezier or any sunnier. Nope, not. And thus her disappointment would eventually surface-- the dreadful long term consequence of Piglet's inexcusable laziness, his crafty acquiescence. As poor M. fell into an ever darkening disappointment. Although what was it--the honorable M.? But Piglet knew full well, in a typically selfish, sidelong fashion, that he was cause, as usual, of M.'s newest demise. Continuing to play along, as he did, to get back at her, while nurturing the evil, longshot hope that her ultimate disappointment would be so great that she'd have to again call on him for help, even against her mighty will. He could just see her frustration mounting--haplessly assessing his bill-of-goods consciousness--pouring acid on it, setting it on fire, stuffing it into the shredder, all to no avail--as it sprang back, exactly as it was, ever the same. Ha, ha. It was perfect. And he was a rat, Mr. perfect rat. Because he could easily find out her new post office address and put a stop to this. Well rested, he added more plates to the bars and lifted longer at the gym. He was getting pretty big. One evening, his mistress still in Aspen, Piglet took another stroll along Haight Street to the park. Goofing off, compared to his normal standards. It was near evening and still foggy, in fact drizzling. There was a hotdog stand. They smelled so good. He was surprised to realize he could afford this. He looked in his wallet, and there was a $10.00 bill, as well as two extras. There was sauerkraut, mustard, ketchup, onions, relish. The swarthy, bent Russian vendor eagerly prepared the hotdog with everything on it. They didn't have hotdogs in Russia. Piglet took one bite and a myriad of tastes exploded inside his mouth. He wolfed it down, and bought a second, that he savored, walking along. He returned to the shoe store. It smelled strongly of brand new shoes. The droopy girl was there again. Piglet absently picked up the exact same shoe as last time. It wasn't a dress shoe, really--more a casual shoe-- although you could wear it to work, and you probably wouldn't wear it to say a barbecue. It was a brown, leather, lace-up shoe with rubber soles. The design of the stitching itself formed a natural shoe-like outline, of a perfectly ordinary, invisible shoe. Piglet suddenly wanted to buy it, but he had spent too much on hot dogs. He deserved a bigger allowance. The girl strolled nearer, more cautiously this time. "I see--that same right shoe," she said. She was just as weird as ever, but this time her eyes were a lustrous abstract grey, eerie--like a kindly dispossession. "I think you're the only one who's ever really noticed," she said. Piglet mused for a moment and said, "How it seems to speak for all shoes." Piglet held up the shoe. They both studied it. "Exactly," she said, "the perfect idea for a shoe--the absolute shoe in itself." In fact she was a neo-Platonist. A shoe docent. But that wasn't it. Nonetheless, he said, "The only shoe sold in the one other, real shoe store." She laughed. They discussed shoes. Whether the others were flawed attempts at the ideal, or perfect embodiments themselves of different shoe prototypes--boots, running shoes, dress shoes. Or intriguing spin offs--accidental inventions--like the phonograph, rugged cadence. "I'm 'Margaret'," said the girl. Piglet almost said, "I'm Piglet," but stopped. She would know instantly he was a houseboy. "I'm Laurence," he lied. Piglet had to go, but it was nice to have met her, Margaret. He returned to the garage and lay down on his air mattress. She was a girl! A little young perhaps, but Piglet himself was practically an adolescent. He could never have looked into his mistress' eyes like that. It was impermissible. There was a Florsheim factory outlet on the way to the supermarket. He had the keys to his mistress' BMW! Pulling up on tribal Haight Street in a BMW! They could drive to a movie, drive to dinner, to where the sun set. Margaret and he. His new mistress wouldn't mind--probably approve--she was very liberal. And then Piglet's heart sank when he realized, at some point, he'd have to tell her everything--of his occupation, status in life, his home--here in this garage. This fumy, fucking garage, on an achy old air mattress, for one. Like camping out in a low security prison. And proudly show her what--his array of cleaning sponges--aprons--colorful rubber gloves. How could he ever even pretend to have a date. He started to cry. Suddenly he hated Lesbians, all Lesbians--even his new mistress! Who did they think they were! Especially the ones with the big, fat butts! Lesbians had the biggest butts on earth. M. said, "Give." Of late Piglet would have passed right out, but all mixed-up and excited, he hung on a little longer. "'Give it,' I said." He yawned. Who did they think they were! Why wouldn't they just leave him alone! He fell asleep. *** In the morning the BMW was gone. His mistress had returned from Aspen and then left again. He had slept right through it. There was a new message dangling from the refrigerator magnate: "Dear Piglet: Your development from muddled slacker to a productive member of society has, of course, pleased me greatly. I guess some regression while I'm away is to be expected, but you do seem unusually tired of late. Perhaps a little Prozac might be in order. Piglet, as you know, I have never been an advocate of enforced male feminization. You and I have shared the belief that hairy men taking on female attributes do not exactly exalt women. However, Lesbians across the country, particularly in the West, have been quite divided on this subject. After all, women have successfully taken on male attributes, uniforms and functions--soldiering, law enforcement, Amateur Athletic wrestling--without being branded transvestite or "he-women." "He-girls." Women have successfully integrated masculine attributes and have moved ahead--as stronger, greater women. Males, on the other hand, fearing feminization have lagged behind. As you know, . . ." And then came the familiar refrain, that men didn't have to wear dresses, or plastic female faces, or bras, or cock-and-ball restraints--but maybe the faintest eye shadow, or two, pendant ear rings, perhaps--to express a feminine quality, a sensibility, solidarity. Or somewhat higher, "mod" heels, maybe, or secret silk panties--who would have to know, even, for gosh sake! Certainly electrolysis, now covered by most health plans, was a no-brainer. Piglet knew the rationales all right--of caucusing Lesbos and their clever sex toys. And their big, butch butts. When they full well knew how men foundered at femininity, and how enforcement of it was in fact enforced inferiority. The final line of the letter directed Piglet's attention to a great, ominous package on the kitchen table. Piglet opened the plain brown wrapping. LADY ATRIA'S COMPLETE KIT OF MALE FEMINIZATION Feminize overnight, or so gradually that your buddies won't even realize! From just a tad softer in the work place, to full-blown transformation YOU decide--how fast, how much! Don't be held back any longer! .Beard Removal Machine .Hosery .Breast Enlargement Device .Complete makeup kit .Breast Hormone Pills .Pumps .Cinch Belt .Vagina gaff & panties .Cocktail dress, leatherskin .2 wigs outfit, & body girdle .Victorian Chemise .Cock n' ball harness .Eyelashes, nails, & falsies .Female face mask F12 Frenum Chastity! And much, much more! And there was Lady Atria herself, flown in from Milano--in full regalia--equestrian knickers, boots, helmet, and crop--surmising the lands of this great Tudor estate, like Washington crossing the Delaware. No way, thought Piglet. A cold day in hell. Revolt consumed his heart and soul. The last straw. He'd feminize her, goddamnit--the bitch. Use that beard machine on her cunt. Geeze, his anger. And then he realized M.'s real ploy as well: she was simply trying to ruin him. It was all a ploy--to turn his new mistress against him. Turn him into some sleepwalking zombie so she'd kick him out! That's all M. wanted! Just to prove she could control and destroy him from anywhere, in absentia, invisibly. Destroying his cherished little notions as well--proving that consciousness was indeed alterable--with just a little rest. Destroying him in every way possible--reaffirming that her capacity to make him miserable was still infinite. And of course it was simply just the dumbest old vanity on his part to think that she actually needed, or would ever want, anything of him, ever again. She simply was trying to ruin him, as usual, but this time experimentally, remotely, as a hobby. It was time to buy a new pair of shoes. His mistress had left a hundred dollar bill in the grocery jar. Piglet snatched it out and slammed the front door behind him. He'd tell Margaret everything. Yes, he was a houseboy, who lived in a garage, earned $10.00 a week, 10 cents an hour, and got off on sexual servitude. But those days were over. In fact, he was an angry, passionate, metaphysical ex-houseboy, in perfect shape--a National Merit Scholar in high school. His ardor and honesty would carry the day. It's not what you do, but who you are. That she worked in a lowly shoe store meant nothing to him. He could care less. He arrived at Haight Street. He bought a hot dog. In fact, he could set up his own hut on this street. A house-cleaning shop. Fuck that--a hardware store--he had all the skills-- plumbing, wiring, tiling, roofing, landscaping--he had learned it all as a houseboy! Why was he putting himself down! His ability as a houseboy was nearly at a contractor's level. He did his mistress' income taxes! He was an ascetic, that's all--practically a Zen monk. If only Margaret could see and understand, for herself, and overcome the prejudicial. He would open a hardware store. He could get the startup loan from his mistress--after three years, she owed him that. He would present the idea as a feminized hardware store--the first of its kind--that sold spices, and products, in addition to lumber and the usual stuff. He would bury these effete Haight Street merchants with the selling strategies and salesmanship he had observed at the Safeway. His own hardware club card. Never once had he even seen the word "sale" in the window of any of these dismal shops. Finally he arrived at the shoe store. He felt the butterflies take off in his stomach. Margaret was there, alone, as usual, reading a book this time, sitting sadly among the shoes, in a long flowing dress, like a sheppardess. She smiled, all droopy, and then brightened when Piglet picked up the Platonic right shoe, yet again, and said, "Could I try on a pair of these, in size 9?" "Of those, we have only one size--in exactly medium," said Margaret. Piglet laughed. And again they went on about the shoe--when finally something had to give. Margaret asked him what he did for a living. "I'm a house--housing contractor," said Piglet. "Oh, wowie," said Margaret. She went on back to find the shoe in size 9. Piglet fretted. The first two things, the only two he had ever told her, were lies--complete lies--his very name and occupation! Man--when what pretty little young transcendentalist would want to date a big old housing contractor! If he had to lie, why not a simple doctor, or musician, or messenger, even--or jaunty houseboy! She returned with the shoes. "Are you ready for a look at the left one, Laurence?" she asked, almost derisively. She looked inside the box, coyly, and then removed the left shoe. Her dress spread out like a quilt as she knelt. She knew how to do this. How to get closer to a disaffected, older contractor. Her soft grey eyes were the sweater of her soul. Piglet tried on the shoes. He stood and immediately realized an extra inch of height, accustomed as he was to sneakers. Suddenly he began marching triumphantly about the store, testing the shoes, as if they had suddenly lifted a damning amnesia. It was spirit--all along! The inbetween thing was spirit! He was a self-realizing spirit! Awareness' scout! Piglet paced about like a complete idiot. Margaret looked on and understood there was something to understand. "Watch this," said Piglet. He sprang into a hand stand. He walked several feet atop his hands, curled like a scorpion. How many housing contractors could do that. He teetered, shouted, "The South shall rise again!" and fell, knocking over a display of elegant pumps. She shrieked, he hastily apologized. Luckily there was no damage done--just a harmless mating ritual. Together they reconstructed the display. "So peaceful here," said Piglet. "I know," said Margaret. "Say," said Piglet, "have you ever felt your spirit?" "What?" said Margaret. "That you have a spirit? Isn't there spirit--you know, what it's called, if someone's 'spirited'"? "Well, 'enthusiastic,' 'lively,'" said Margaret, quizzically. "And you're certainly that!" No, that wasn't it, what he meant--but he was a lively guy alright. When Piglet noticed that her book was entitled, The Golden Age of Drosophila. It turned out she was studying to be a microbiologist. The 'Drosophila' was a fruit fly, the subject of early genetic experimentation. She sold shoes to help put herself through graduate school, at Berkeley. Piglet's reverie veered sharply toward inadequacy. He was still a houseboy--technically nothing had changed. While she was now a geneticist, an embryologist--totally biotech, for whom shoes were like a fine wine. And the strange attention she had shown him was actually, no doubt, a scientific innerpeace, that she probably revealed freely to anyone. Suddenly, he found himself speechless, mute. Although no one said getting a date was ever going to be easy. Life was not one big household--some simple grocery list. You get rejected a lot before something good comes along. And then you get rejected all the time. Although wasn't she worth his very best try. But now, from humble shoe clerk, she was technically above even his new mistress. "So, do you like those?" she asked, referring back to the shoes, in the reconstructed silence. "Yes, very much." "Would you like to buy them?" she asked. How should he know. Fruit fly--what about the evolution of the houseboy. She could perform genetic experiments on him. He felt totally empty. "Laurence?" The conversation was winding down into a simple sales transaction. "Well, the heel--do you think it's sufficiently feminized?" he ventured, attempting to somehow reengage her. He wasn't being sarcastic, necessarily. "That shoe exists beyond gender--as you might guess," she said. But the silence continued. "Well, should I choose a more feminized one?" he asked. What was he doing. "Do you approve of male feminization?" She turned cool. "Laurence, we don't sell feminized male shoes here--as you know, very few stores do." What had he done--bringing up the doomsday subject! What was he trying to show--he simply didn't know enough about normal matters. Now disaster loomed--she could hardly be evasive, the scientist--Darwinist--that she was. "In answer to your second question, Laurence--pretend the women's shoes--over there--are an "X" chromosome. While the male shoes are a "Y" chromosome. Now pretend you are looking in on the store through a powerful electron microscope. Pretend you know nothing about human gender. What do you see?" Oh, no. She made M. and his new mistress look like Tammy Wynette. Piglet looked at the male shoes, and then at the women's. The men's shoes were actually kind of a sorry lot. Just a few different kinds, in black or brown--wingtips, loafers, moccasins, that high, lace-up construction boot. And Piglet's shoe. While there were dozens of different types of women's shoes, in all different shapes and colors. Shoes with long, pointy heels--or big fat ones--shoes with no heels at all. Cowboy boots--all the cowboy boots were on the women's side, having roamed on over there. There were pumps, Birkenstocks, purple shoes, cloth shoes, plastic shoes, flat Turkish slippers, yellow-rain and black Dominatrix boots. As well, Piglet noticed that all the men's shoes were included with the women's, but stated more stylishly over there. The men's side looked kind of retarded. Piglet started feeling like a houseboy--but fought it off. He was spirit! "Well, Laurence--do you think a little male feminization might be a good thing?" "Well, kind of," said Piglet, "but not enforced-- certainly you don't believe in forced feminization!" "Well, no one's saying you have to wear a dress, or wig, or nice little pin, even, for that matter--but you see how knuckle dragging has become a veritable point of honor among so many men these days--whenever the dreaded "f" word comes up--when what exactly is so threatening about the palest little rouge, on a clear, frosty morning?" "But how do you enforce it," asked Piglet, a tad panicky, "What if a guy's wearing panties, or a cock restraint--what if he's secretly complying?" "Laurence--no one's suggesting anything more than a minor little ticket, an infraction, with a first-time warning. But if a guy can't point to a simple bracelet, or stylish watch, or trace of mascara, anything at all--well, we all need to get on through and beyond this." "Oh," said Piglet. He felt like a fruit fly. "I understand, believe me. But try showing up feminized at a construction site--imagine--hammers pounding the plywood frame erection of hundreds of evenly spaced new houses, for as far as the eye can see--you'd get laughed off the lot. No one would ever follow your specs." "Men in the lead have to take that first step, Laurence." She was strong and good--but not pedantic or polemic at all--like the Lesbians. He could take the first step--if anyone could! She was right, and, okay, so were his new mistress and the Lesbians as well, he had to admit--why was it such a huge ordeal! It didn't make you a TV, or a TS. You had to feel like a she-male to actually be one. "Were I to show up, a little feminized, but indubitably, and me for the first time, could I buy you dinner?" "I'd like that, Laurence, a lot." They exchanged telephone numbers. Sadly, Piglet had to give her an incorrect one. *** He bought the shoes, with $100 cash. When he should have maybe saved the money for their date. That night he lay on his air mattress waiting on M., with so many things on his mind. He, Piglet, had obtained a date on his own with a brand new, pretty, sad, funny, scientific girl. It's true he had to lie a little, but clearly he and Margaret were simpatico. Clearly she was impressed by his taste in shoes, knowledge of Plato, physical prowess, and openness of mind--something rare indeed for a successful housing contractor. The next step, and all that followed, however, would be huge. First, he had to tell his new mistress. Who often maintained that the day would arrive when Piglet would be ready for return to the outside world. It being the Lesbian's responsibility to ensure as smooth a transition as possible. And his new mistress truly cared and would help him in every way, he just knew it. The way he saw it, he'd move from the garage to one of the guest rooms. Piglet would then advertise for a new houseboy, and winnow down the resumes and submit to his new mistress a list of 15 or so. He would set up the interviews, after which she would then select a few finalists. A grueling, numbing "boot camp" would follow, Piglet supervising the endless indoor-outdoor, day and night, tasks and chores. He would apprise his new mistress daily. Then finally together they would sit down and decide upon Piglet's replacement. But he really, really didn't want to feminize. Although he knew that knowing how to tastefully feminize would help at job interviews and please both his new mistress and Margaret, the two whom he now relied upon for everything. Would his mistress be forthcoming with help--a loan and contacts--as he hoped? What would Margaret think, when he told her the truth? Piglet was full of worries, he needed to sleep--but where was M.--now that he needed her? True, he wasn't a man's man, but still, for him, feminizing was like telling a dog to be a cat. No one had forced women to wear men's shoes--whoever even asked them to! It wasn't fair--certainly Piglet wasn't a macho jerk--why was he being made to pay? He was a simple guy, no matter how much makeup he put on. There it was, Lady Atria's kit, practically a trunk. He opened it. It was carefully organized, like a hope chest. What his mistress must have paid for this--all the way from England. There were separate compartments for the dresses and undergarments, accessories and jewelry, shoes, and products. The delicate female face mask looked out wearing a silly little smile. He put it on, and looked at himself in his locker mirror. He looked like a devil. He could wear this mask--a totally legit expression of feminization. Straight from Lady Atria. But Margaret and his mistress would know that he had put zero thought into it. It would just be a childish protest, more than anything else. Maybe okay for a houseboy seeking effacement, but he was no longer a houseboy. There was a soft, zippered, silvery makeup kit, that came with a glossy, zip-wrapped manual entitled, Makeup for Boys. The book's cover was a picture of Lady Atria, fully equestrian, but now sitting and beckoning over her shoulder from a Persian boudoir. Piglet felt light-headed, but wide-awake--not the least bit sleepy. It was then that he realized that M. would never return again, in any form, whatsoever. That the voice had been a last ditch delusion, on his part, a final desperate prayer. That in fact it had never even existed. M. was gone, had moved away for good, and was well into a new life apart from him, as well she should be. The whole thing, the ridiculous seances, had been a trick, on his part, to somehow renew, rekindle, his relationship with the forever lost gone M. Get real. A ridiculous dying flicker. But on the positive side Piglet also realized that ultimately he had used the voice as a sort of magic trick, to cure his sexual sickness, to sublimate away, out of existence, his yearning to serve, down to consciousness, nothing itself. Because all along consciousness was nothing, a hole in the ground, a tin bucket--empty space. A wrong assumption. Piglet looked over at his new shoes. They were good, serious, practical shoes for starting his life over--sober, sound, sensible. His brand new adult spirit. His new mistress' name was Katherine. He would appear in the morning, madeup, reservedly, with dignity, and have an adult, person-to-person talk with Katherine. She would see that his day had come. He unzipped the makeup kit and looked in on the candy- colored tubes and brushes, and shiny compact. He felt dizzy. Although of course it was okay to feel a little turned on, stimulated--perfectly natural--everyone agreed--all the experts. Slightly aroused by first-time feelings of forced womanhood. So what if he was--turned on a bit--who cared? It was natural. He wasn't sure, one way or the way. But caution was required, knowing the tricks he was capable of playing on himself. He reminded himself that this was a grounded, sensible decision on his part that a lot of men were making, these days. It was fine to look and feel more attractive. Katherine would help him with it. Margaret would be pleased, come their date. His own perspective would change--he'd see, feel, and experience so much more. That's what they all said. It was the first of many necessary decisions he'd be facing over the coming weeks and months. He felt a hunger for maturity, sobriety, like food and water, after a long sickness. How love flourished during times of personal growth.