Fair warning: This will likely disturb you.
“You’ve got to grab it at the base and deep-throat, it, Johnny,” Ms. Dennis authoritatively croaked, demonstrating with the hand holding her cigarette. The cherry singed her eyebrow a slight bit as she made the universal movements to indicate the act she wanted me to perform.
On life, that is.
“You’ve got to lick it, swallow it, regurgitate it and flicker the tip ever so seductively with your tongue until it’s choked you and filled your starving gut with its juices, Johnny.”
I smiled, nodded and jotted “Fellate life” on my canary legal pad.
“Johnny. Listen to me, Johnny. You’ve got to tug on the tippety-tip of that skin flap until life breaks into convulsions, screams back at you and begs you to finish it off, Johnny.”
“My name is not Johnny,” I scrawl one line down, still attentive and nodding.
“That bit I had about life being the buffet and most suckers starving to death, and so forth? I was a bit off,” she said as the last drag from her Virginia Slim came out in larynx-punctuated puffs. “They’re all eating. Literally and figuratively. Every last one of them. They’re fucking eating themselves to death. They’re filling their sad, greedy guts with empty calories and grease. Soon there will be a machine to do that for you too. Six months after that, they’ll be installing them in motorcars!”
She paused to take a drag.
“Eeeempty caaloriieeesss aaand greeeeeease,” she droned, her eyelids narrowing and the smoke filtering through her eerily white, clenched teeth. “Bleached wheat flour, margarine, and skin-free potato strips deep-fried in week-old vegetable shortening. High fructose corn syrup, artificial cheese, air-filled, pastel-colored corn puffs in miniature vats saturated with growth hormone-contaminated cow extracts, Johnny. Expeller-pressed, carbonated ham juice with monosodium glutamate and brominated vegetable oil mixed in, Johnny.”
Her hands began to tremble and her eyes moved towards the back of her head a slight bit on that last one. I think part of her was fighting the urge to say it, but she and I both knew that it could one day be a reality.
“Fried dough coated in semi-congealed grease-sugar, Johnny. Air-puffed corn logs coated with semi-dairy salt powder.”
I nodded politely and waited for her to continue, my voice recorder still running.
“Damn right we shit on society,” she snapped out of nowhere. “We deep-throat, eat, swallow and shit out life at such a rapid pace most of you sad sacks can’t keep up. You’re stuck shovelin’ the shit because we’re too busy fellatin’ and shittin’ rainbows… and shit… to bother with the garden tools of those who have let themselves be so encumbered! We eat like kings and queens and other assorted members of royalty and/or heirs to fortunes built on your misery and shortcomings from the Garden of Eden, chugging life’s thirty-ingredient, psyllium husk-enriched daiquiris directly from the blenders inside God Almighty’s blue, bulging, turbo-charged testes, Johnny!”
Then, for effect (and/or because she couldn’t think of anything better to say or do at that precise moment) she extended her leg (one that indeed refused to quit) across the coffee table and used her stiletto heel to kick the legal pad out of my hand. Then she reached into a nearby candy dish and tossed a handful of Andes mints at my face. Conveniently, one came out of the wrapper and landed in my black coffee.
“I’m stuck watching rows of sad faces shovel my rainbow shit and eat themselves to death on diets of artificially pigmented grape colas and ham-pressed high fructose expeller dough,” she went on, “because they’re so deliriously stupid from acute constipation that they don’t notice God’s own sixteen-inch love missile slapping their droopy cheeks with such force that the capillaries burst and their retinas explode in kaleidoscopes desperate to be seen, Johnny.”
Speechless, I simply swiveled my head down to watch the little red light on the voice recorder blink, not only to assure me that it was recording this, but to let me know that I wasn’t completely alone.
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
“Johnny,” she barked at me. “Johnny. Look at me, Johnny. Empty, sad hearts and impacted bowels, Johnny. Rows and rows of them, everywhere you turn. Cheeks aplenty, struck with little purple lightning bolts, Johnny.”
“Little purple lightning bolts,” I nervously and illegibly scribbled on the palm of my left hand, trying in vain to protect myself from the words I was hearing.
Without warning, she broke into tears and grabbed a large tasseled pillow.
“Oh, Johnny,” her billowing sobs echoing through her cavernous living room. “I’m tired of fucking trying, Johnny.”
She squeezed and kneaded the pillow as if trying desperately to extract something out of it.
“I’m so alone, Johnny. I’m so tired of–”
–She buried her face in the now hourglass-shaped pillow, overtaken by uncontrollable sobs and screaming incomprehensible speech into the fibers.
I wanted to console her. I wanted to rub her hand, to give her a hug, to do anything… but I feared that without reinforcements I’d be engulfed and absorbed completely.
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I want to say that i get it, but i’d be lying. No matter, the imagery is enough…and, um, stunning. It sounds like something that Tom Robbins would write.
I do not like your cartoons – well one or two, perhaps.
But when you write you bend language to your will, insert pictures into the mind and very quickly I have to decide whether what I have read was worth reading.
It is.
Yeah. I have to say that I don’t get it either. But it’s powerful — and really interesting. I just feel stupid that there’s some cultural reference or allusion I’m missing.
I’m not sure if it’s fiction, non-fiction or something in between. But it hits with a resounding impact. I’ve always liked characters who straddled the border between genius and madness, and I think we have one of those here.