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It was the fourth of July, just after noon. Already, Billy Evans could hear the pops and whistles of distant fireworks exploding across the neighborhood.

     “Billy!” his mother called from the house. “Come get lunch!”

     Billy turned. “Okay, mom!” He suddenly realized it was Tuesday! His mother always served maggots on Tuesday!

     “Don’t run in the house!” she warned him. “And wash your hands. I’m putting food on the table right now.”

     “Okay, mom!” Billy bounded into the living room. His Grandpa, Emil “Pops” Winfield was dozing in his calico recliner, yesterday’s newspaper unfolded on his lap. “Slow down, kiddo. Where’s the fire?”

     “Mom’s making maggots for lunch!”

     Emil winked at his grandson. “Well, why didn’t you say so. Nothin’ better than your mom’s home-cooked maggots!”

     “Boy, I’ll say!”

     Once the men had cleaned up, they wandered into the kitchen. Billy’s little sister Mona was sitting in her high-chair, already eating from a plate of mashed maggots dusted with brown sugar and cinnamon. 

     Billy and Pops sat down. They all bowed their heads. “Dear Lord,” he began. “We thank you for all our blessings, and for bestowing this gift of nourishment to us in the form of these wonderful maggots. Please keep us safe and happy and may we roll in maggots all our lives, at your Divine discretion. Amen.”

     The others said, “Amen.”

     Billy’s mom began to serve. She plopped big yellow gobs of macaroni and cheese (with maggots replacing the pasta) onto their plates. “Mmm, I love the smell of freshly baked maggots,” said Pops. “You feel that way too, Billy?”

     “You bet I do! Nothing beats mom’s maggots,” Billy enthused, filling his mouth with maggots and cheese.

     “Oh, you two. You’re going to give me a swelled head.”

     “You are swell! And so are these delicious maggots!” Billy said and they all shared in a hearty laugh. Also on the menu that day: fried breaded maggots, a maggot and blueberry smoothie, a salad with bacon bits, croutons and maggots. And bread.

     “What’s for dessert?” Billy wanted to know.

     “Crème maggot brulee,'” Billy’s mom said.

     “Oh boy! Thanks mom. You’re the greatest!”

     “Well, now Billy, I can’t take all the credit. Because I get my maggots from Wertham’s Worms. Every maggot is flash frozen at the peak of freshness. All Wertham’s maggots are farm-raised, so never touch icky decomposing bodies, fecal matter, or rotted garbage. Wertham’s Worms does this, so you can feel better about giving maggots to your family.”

Jingle:

Wertham’s Worms

Is the place to get

Wriggling maggots

For the gourmet set!

 

Time Share

“Auf den Mereen! Aud den Mereen!”

     “Sciffe?”                

     “Nein!”

     I opened my eyes. German words dropped on me from above, slamming into my hangover headache like pounding in a foundry. I rolled over on my back. Two sets of eyes were peering down at me between wooden planks. I was lying under a porch. I could hear the crash and pull of the surf nearby, seagulls screeching, children screaming. I was still at the fucking beach. The time share in Aware, Rhode Island.

     I wondered what the hell happened. I couldn’t remember a thing. Usually, no matter how fucked up I got, at least I retained a few hazy images or impressions in my booze-damaged memory. I’d had blackouts before, but nothing like this. This was just a blank. As if I hadn’t existed for a brief period.

     My skin felt sticky and gritty, sunburned. I slowly sat up, groaning. Getting my head upright took effort and strain and pain. I blinked like a wounded animal at the bleached, burning glare of sand and sky. I was stiff to my bones, my elbows and knees were scraped raw and I noticed my stomach was covered with a red rash. Great, I probably had poison ivy to boot. A bottle of cheap Schitkov vodka sat planted in the sand beside me. I lifted it and drained the last remaining sips. It was at that point that, oh shit, I realized I was naked. The Germans giggled above me as I started frantically lathing sand over myself, burying my genitals.

     More German jeers and laughter.

     I looked around and thank God found my clothes, sand-covered and crumpled into a pile behind me. My makeshift pillow.

     I dressed slowly and achingly. The vodka had helped alleviate the painful pressure in my head (a bit) but I felt battered, exhausted. I wondered if I’d gotten into a fight last night or, more realistically, beaten up.

     I stood up, wobbling.

     “Hey mister!” one of the Germans cried out. “Vatchoo doink down zere?”

     I didn’t answer. I walked, hunched-over like Groucho Marx, out from under the porch.

     “Did you sleep okay, Hanky?” a woman’s voice said and my nervous system zapped into panic. “I’m sorry?” I turned.

     “Sleep. How did you. It’s in that vein.” She was a short, plump young woman with glasses and colorful, Polynesian-looking tattoos (a lot of flowers and parrots and hula girls) covering most of her body. She was wearing a black bikini.

Automatic Hospital Experiment

 Automatic writing while thinking about a recent hospital stay...

Expedition One: Atrophied arms behind locked gates. He hates boats, more specifically he hates drowning. Or the idea of it anyway. “How are you feeling?” I hate ocean voyages. I’ve done all the research. Your qualifications outclass every other anthropologist in this choking weed of an institution. The billowy, albino pockets of throbbing jelly seemed directionless, content to flow and bobble in the calm gangrenous water. The afterglow morning of Thorazine and Seroquel. Nodding into his breakfast. “We detected no head or fins or appendages of any note. It was not preposterous anymore. Then the Captain went blitzkrieg and beat his wife to death. She never saw it organized or heard the Captain’s gasp. The speakeasies, the Charleston, Herbert Hoover. Rafts and submarines. They found the Captain scratching at his face with bloody, studied fingernails while his wife was a crumpled hump in the clean, unfair corner - sweet and thick with the perfumed invitation of assigned putrefaction. Amid crackling thunder and screaming seas the First Mate, Luke, heard a torrent of voices at his lonely door. “I’ve checked and re-checked the data.” I’d have saved myself a modicum of trouble if only I’d realized that the shawls were made of flames.

The old man burst into the pub, his haggard face twisted with truncated dreams like a worm cut in two. His voice had perished, stolen by grim ordeal. He used dyslexic telepathy to tell the others, “Down was I Porter’s Cove was me. A box netted I. A wooden box long. Rusted was the lock shut and barnacles to wood clung the soft waterlogged. Right at it real close looked I and lettering seen I across the top. It said, 

Violet's Visitors

SPINCHBURG, NEW JERSEY, 1976

     “Coming!” Violet yelled, finishing her vodka, pulling her ratty bathrobe tight as she stomped to the front door. She knew it wasn’t the landlord, he was still out of town (and thank Fnerk for that; Violet had been out of work for two months now and was on the tenuous edge of eviction). She drew the curtain aside.

     The Doctor’s face, pale and shiny with sweat, leered on the other side of the window, rabid breath fogging the glass. She stepped back, startled. He banged on the door again; an urgent pounding.

     She twisted the lock free, opened the door. The Doctor stepped into the apartment without saying a word. Joni Nobody was behind him, bringing dark madness into Violet’s home. “Hi,” she said, lighting a cigarette, floating into the room. Violet hadn’t seen Joni Nobody in over five years. Not since they’d all lived together at the Briarpatch commune. The change in her appearance was shocking. She’d dropped a lot of weight. Black circles hung below her sad, swollen eyes. Her hair was filthy and matted. She was wearing a stained red tank top and a short black skirt that revealed bruises, scratches and scabs on her long, pale legs.

     Two young kids straggled in behind her. Violet recognized Benny at once, even though the last time she’d seen him he’d been a mere toddler, barely speaking yet. He had to be around eleven now but was already taller than all of them. His black hair was long, covering most of his face. He was all long limbs, his arms and legs stick-thin. His skin was almost translucent, showing blue veins and the outlines of his bones. If he pulled open his shirt, she was sure, she’d see the purple shadow of his heart pulsing against his ribcage.

     A little girl followed him. She looked like a younger, prettier version of Joni. She was startlingly beautiful but moved like a girl ashamed of being human. Of having a body. She was bent over, almost folded in half. She held her arms tight against her chest, eyes down, seemingly filled with fear. She took little hesitant steps, like a cat in a new room. The girl’s body-language revealed a disturbing ordeal in her recent past.

     Violet said, “Well, hello there,” in her best nursery school voice but all the girl did was flinch in response. No eye contact. No sign that she’d even understood Violet.

     “Nice place,” said the Doctor with his usual sarcasm, pretending to admire the coffee table covered with empty bottles, beer cans and ashtrays filled with cigarette butts and roaches. He raised an eyebrow at the kitchenette which was overflowing with dirty dishes and trash, stinking of rotting garbage. A haze of fruit flies hovered over everything.

     Violet shut the door. “Thanks,” she said, hoping (and failing) to match the Doctor’s sarcasm. The place was a toilet, she knew that. The walls were crumbling, water-stained roadmaps, the ceiling an upside-down plain of chipped, peeling paint that snowed onto the faded, threadbare carpet. A carpet that retained the smell of urine and puke no matter how many times she shampooed it and seemed held together only by stains.

     It’s a shitty cesspool, she thought. And I still can’t even afford it.       

     “I didn’t expect to see you guys again. What brings you here for this impromptu reunion?” she asked, trying to keep her annoyance out of her voice.

The Cotton Candy Gas Attack

The Great War

Red Collins opened his eyes just before dawn. It was still raining but at least the downpour had diminished to a fine drizzle. The thunder had ceased and Red was grateful for that. The sky-bursting crashes and flashes of bright lightning had become enemy shells in his fractured, fearful dreams. Even in sleep he couldn’t escape The War and the fatigued fear it brought. Red felt as if he’d been both nervous and exhausted for months. It was no way to live, even if all one wanted to do was live. The war inhabited his aching head so thoroughly that Red worried it would continue to rage there - howling and flashing - even after the last battle had been fought, even after he was safe at home.

     If he even made it home. He was no longer as confident about surviving the ordeal as he had been at the start. How stupid he had been! How helplessly, hopelessly naive. He wanted to stab the horseshit romanticism of war in its black heart. Kill the evil lie.

     He pushed himself to his feet. His comrades were still sleeping in that shallow, intermittent manner that they’d all mastered. Another habit he’d be bringing home with him after The War. How different would he seem to Mary and their daughter, Celeste? Celeste had been only 18 months old when he enlisted. Would she even remember him? The thought of walking back into his daughter’s life a complete stranger broke his heart. He hated the War, and he hated that the War was stealing so many of life’s little gifts from him. Gifts he’d never get back; fleeting little moments that fade and pass like steam from a teapot, often too quickly to seize.  

     He walked slowly along the length of the trench, the mud sucking at his boots.

     He climbed a short set of sandbag stairs, and then four rungs of a wooden ladder. He looked out over the edge of the trench, at the dark flat expanse of puddles and mud. A silent burst of lightning flared in the distance, illuminating the scorched, bare-limbed trees of the Polygon Wood.

     Red stood on the ladder and waited for this dismal, broken landscape to fill with light.

     Grey fog arrived with the grey light of dawn. Red remained perched on the ladder, surveying the muddy plain. The only sound in the world was the crackle and churn in his head.

     Then he heard a distant explosion. A last blast of thunder from the retreating storm perhaps? He waited, listening.

     Then he saw the horizon move.

     Like a soundless, breaking wave of slow ocean foam, it rushed at him, roiling and tumbling upon itself. A heavy, low-hanging cloud of pink smoke.

     Gas! It was a gas attack! He turned and yelled, “Gas! Put on your P-helmets! It’s a gas attack!”

     He turned back to the onrushing chemical cloud as it swept into the trench and he felt it fill his lungs. He coughed and clambered up the ladder.

     Cotton candy. It tasted like cotton candy.

Vorpid Crystalline Binge

    

 I came to with a good hangover.

     No, wait. Scratch that.

     I woke up with a glorious, glistening goddamn miracle of a hangover.

     It happened like that sometimes.      

     Hangovers could either be generous or cruel and they were impossible to predict.

     The pleasure centers of my brain were sweeping with a warm tropical wash and shining, euphoric anesthesia. Pure uncut pleasure.

     I sat up in bed, reveling in the way my spine worked, feeling each vertebrae stretch and pop with smooth languorous release. I thought of a line of dominoes falling in slow-motion.     

      Light was bursting through my window, illuminating a corkscrew strand of hair on my collar (I’d passed out fully dressed – even my sneakers were still on). It wasn’t my hair. Or any of my friend's. In fact, I didn’t know anyone with curly hair. I pinched it from my shirt and held it up. It was black. I pulled it taut, then relaxed it and it tensed back into a coil. I tried to think back but my dim memories of the night were vaporous and full of gaps. I looked at the hair again and conjured a beautiful black woman. Had I met someone? Had I...maybe... 

It Sure ain't 60 Minutes...

Everybody's got something to hide...

1.) A brilliant seedpod about to burst! An apocalyptic splash of brown foam! The badger blood hiding under dirty fingernails! These are all concerns of one Raymond Geoffreys. And Raymond Geoffreys has only one thought, “I feel like moving my eyes across letters!”

     So, if YOU feel like moving your eyes across letters, like Raymond Geoffreys (and like you’re doing RIGHT NOW! ), then move them across the letters in Bleak Holiday!

     If you don’t feel like doing that, then I really can’t help you, man. But read this goofy interview anyway... 

I get my brain medicine from the Medicaid!

Cancer Fragments

 I hope you never have to go through this shit. It's boring as hell.

 Prelude

I didn’t write very much during my recent medical odyssey (which I’m still sort of navigating anyway). I wish I had (my memory is like a battered old movie – full of splices and jump-cuts and missing frames and  the soundtrack fades in and out). I wrote a couple of vignettes, and scribbled some notes. If you’ve been following me closely, you may have read some of this already. This will all end up in my autobiographical novel (Anosognosia), eventually.

Vacation

I’m sitting in a recliner, drinking alkylating agents through my arm and my nurse says, “So, I won’t be here next week.”

     “No? How come?”

     “I’m on vacation.”

     “Really? That’s great.”

     “Yeah, I haven’t had a vacation in a long time. I’m looking forward to it.”

     “I consider this my vacation,” I tell her.

     She laughs but I’m not kidding.

     “You need a new travel agent,” she tells me.

     “Yeah, I guess.”

     “Okay, time for your Etoposide.”

Wait

The hospital waiting area. Opposite me stands a rack displaying an assortment of sad cancer hats. They are all fuzzy little bonnets. I don’t think I’d look good in one. And why do hospitals offer such wretched magazines? Wouldn’t it be cool to find a Fangoria or Playboy on the table? Instead, they give you Golf Balls Quarterly. Trout Fishing with Diabetes. Pinecone Crafts Illustrated. I flip through a Ladies Home Journal. There’s an article telling me how to get in touch with my “inner Beyonce’”. I don’t think I should try that. Not now. Not while I’m taking steroids.

     They offer plain donuts cut in half. All the beverages in the fridge are 8oz and lukewarm. The worst thing about chemotherapy is the food.   

The Money Shot

They offered to freeze my sperm. I guess chemotherapy is an almost inevitable micro-holocaust for the persistent little swimmers. I told them not to bother. I sort of regret that decision now. It might have been interesting to see what kind of porn the hospital stocked. Did they have softcore or hardcore or both? Did their collection cater to various sexual persuasions?  They probably had gay porn, I’d assume. But what if your thing was sploshing or plushies or crush? Did they have any of that really gross Swedish enema porn? What about S&M? B&D? What if your toolkit only responds to stimuli of the Asian persuasion? Or Pygmies or Eskimos. The elderly. Amputees. Elderly amputees. I knew a guy who could only get aroused with his wife if his dog was in the room. We have an unlimited supply of very specific fetishes in our vast nation.  It's what makes us great.

     Or maybe all they offered were soft, gauzy Guccione-type pictures. Stuff with class. In which case it wouldn’t have done me any good anyway.

     Oh well, this is all empty ejaculation speculation since I chose not to turn my tadpoles into protozoan popsicles.  

Rash

During the second week of chemotherapy I somehow contract poison ivy. My oncologist sends me to a dermatologist. Dr. Kean Puce. He takes a quick, cursory glance look at me and declares, “Yep, that definitely poison ivy!” It spreads quickly and itches like hell. In fact now I realize that Hell doesn’t burn. It itches.

     The rash covers my face, making me look a bit like Rondo Hatton with zits. My right hand starts to swell until it resembles a Mickey Mouse glove. Little sacks of pus develop that I puncture and drain, only to watch them bloat-up again with a constant trickle of warm clear sap. I endure both the chemotherapy and the hellish rash for two more weeks. That’s when they finally for fuck’s sake figure out I don’t have poison ivy. The dermatologist had been wrong. WRONG, PUCE! I'm allergic to chemotherapy. More specifically, this poison called Bleomycin that they’ve been pumping into my veins. So, they discontinue the bleomycin (after a trip to Boston where a specialist takes a gander and says, “Oh yeah, that’s a text book reaction to Bleomycin.” Text book, Puce! You really earned that medical degree there, Doctor. Twit. Anyway, the rash finally clears and I’m given an early release from Hell. At least this particular hell.

     That’s another thing about Hell I learned. There’s more than one.

Buy a book! All proceeds go to a (former) cancer patient. 

Ardent Hearts

I lifted this pic from a law firm...

“What did you say?” She turned from the window with the question in her eyes.

    “I said, how long before... Well, you know...”

       Her eyes were red and they narrowed at him. “How long before I die, Bob? If you can’t say it how are you going to deal with it?”

     He swallowed. “Yes. You’re right. I’m sorry.”

     She took a quick drag on her Virginia Slim and began to pace. “I don’t know. A month. Maybe two. They’re still not sure.”

     “Well, could I maybe, have your blue angora sweater, then?”

      She flicked an ash to the floor and turned back to the window. It was raining. “No, Bob. I want to be buried in that sweater.”

     “Well that’s hardly fair!” said Bob.

     She turned toward him, her eyes suddenly blazing. “Fair? You want to talk about fair? Is it fair that I’m dying? That my vital fucking organs are filled with poison and disease? Is it fair that I’m going to leave behind you and the kids to mourn me? That I’ll never become the bank teller I was born to be? Is it fair that one out of five people will contract gingivitis in their lifetime? Fair, Bob? How dare you!” She began to cry again.

     “No. It’s not fair. I’m sorry Victoria. It’s just that I... Well, shit, I really love that sweater...”

     “I’m leaving you my double-knit skirt, Bob. Isn’t that enough?”

     “I’m grateful, but the sweater would go so nicely with the skirt.”

     Victoria turned and reached out to him. She gently stroked his hair. A tear traveled down her blushing cheek.

      “Take the sweater then,” she said softly.

      “Oh Victoria,” Bob began to sob uncontrollably. They embraced, thoughts of the sweater all but forgotten. Bob looked deeply into Victoria’s moist eyes. “What about your Tyrolean Shetland wool cardigan?”

     Victoria hit Bob in the face with a large wet salmon.

Consume products! 

The secret pornography of cherrystone clams 

Early Development

I'm still waiting for my slides.

     By the time we got to the Fotomat it was just starting to rain. It was Monday. The shopping center was nearly deserted and the little yellow kiosk looked like an island on a calm asphalt sea. We were filming our gladiator epic and needed a couple more cartridges of Super 8 film.

Interview With a Lunatic

Gladys and her parrots. Oh yeah.
Here I discuss reception theory, hermeneutics, semiotics, structuralism, and deconstruction with Justin Bienvenue.

Telepathic Schizophrenic

Sometimes I really believed she was telepathic. We’d hang out together in the summer when we both happened to be outside. She lived nearby. I didn’t have her phone number and knew not to knock on her door (that’s another story), so we only got together by accident. Her name was Claire and she was schizophrenic. I think bipolar too. She seemed so fragile, so softened by her madness that I worried about her. Her dark eyes seemed to be receiving everything all at once. Her nervous system jumped and hissed like a downed power-line. When she was having a particularly bad day, mental-illness wise, she’d talk in a squeaky baby voice. She’d say things like, “I fink I need ta poop. Make poopies, poopies.” “I wike buttersquasht. Do oo have any buttersquasht, Mr. Man?” Sometimes her baby talk would disintegrate into gibberish, “Widdle baby gonna weem. Dricky dela poo-poo weeeeem...” Like that. It was a little unnerving when she did that. She’d growl sometimes too.

     She told me once (on one of her more lucid days) that she wanted to teach a college course in, “Life’s Little Miracles” because most people never noticed them and she thought that was sad. “I see them all the time,” she said. “Like today, this morning. You woke up too early and couldn’t get back to sleep, right? And so you turned on the TV and that movie you always wanted to watch was just coming on. That’s a little miracle right there! Right?”

     She had no possible way of knowing any of that but what she said was true. For years I’d been meaning to see, Last Year at Marienbad and it came on that morning as soon as I’d turned on the TV.

     I don’t know if that qualifies as a miracle.

     But anyway, that’s one of the reasons I suspect she was telepathic.

 I know you want to click this.

Picking up on a vibe? 

Here We Go With Another Ridiculous Interview...

Dirty beatniks

Click here to read my stupid interview!