I left the shrink's office with the same feeling I'd had after my previous 37 visits: constipated, unable to shit: ashamed, ridiculous, ripped off. Another eighty dollars gone. I walked out into the mothersucking sunlight and squinted and looked up and down the street. The office was in an ivy-covered brick building in Burbank. Three Armenian men smoked cigarettes on the corner- not men, but boys posing as men. They spoke, but not to each other: they wore identical triangular devices on the right ear, ridiculous, carrying on conversations. Their voices shot out into the firmament and back down again, probably into Glendale. I looked at the Armenian youth and decided it would be in my best interests to never get better, never be cured. I could end up like that: Buck Rogers ear, flashy jewelry, polo shirt. Smoking under that sun. Remember that Camus character? The sun convinced him to kill without feeling because the sun didn't give a shit. I understood. The day was hot, unbelievably hot for December. I walked past the Armenian boys and across the street where I’d left the Pacer parked.
Ahhh...the shrink. I’d wanted a female shrink but the court knew about me and they gave me a man. The most repulsive man imaginable. His eyes were dark-ringed, hollowed out, the sure sign of a failing liver, internal organs turning to mush, nascent rot...and his teeth: huge spaces like caverns yawned between yellowed, nicotine-coated stones. And just like the Armenian boys on the corner, he smoked. He ate breathmints like candy. When he talked a sickening odor would wash over me in waves as I sat in his musty leather recliner, an odor like tepid nyquil in an ashtray. As I talked he tapped away on a laptop and I watched his face. The laptop really bothered me.
"How do I know you’re not on there looking at porn or checking your stocks?" I said.
"Why do you feel that way?" he replied. He was very reasonable. He wondered why I talked about porn. And this. And that. But he didn't bring up asscrack. And I didn't either. Not willingly.I paid my money and smelled his breath and left pissed off, every time... but he'd never take the asscrack from me.
I got into the Pacer and turned up the radio. News radio. I let the smooth drone wash over me. the human voice can be quite soothing when it's anonymous, directed at the whole world... for truck drivers, nuns, baggers, carpenters, paralegals, serial killers...and asscrack huffers.
I sat and pushed the scan button on the radio. I rolled up the windows and felt the temperature rise as the sun mocked me up there in the sky... in twenty minutes, if I could hold on, I could be dead...I smiled and felt a little better and looked for a radio station.
And then it happened. A song spoke to me. Sweet positivity, like Bach. But the voice was Negro.
I sat, transfixed, rolled down the window, listened to the lyrics.
I believe I can fly
I believe I can touch the sky
I think about it every night and day
Spread my wings and fly away...
"That was R. Kelly," the DJ said.
That hit me in the gut, hit me hard. R. Kelly had been accused of pissing on a 13 year old girl! Was he being forced by the courts to see a shrink? No! Instead, he wrote a song embracing his perversions, the perversions of the world. Yeh, I like pissing on little girls, he seemed to say. And I will piss again.
But me, with my harmless diversion...staring at the lovely butt clefts of adult women(most of them), taking the occasional photograph...
I was a reject in the eyes of society! Me!
I decided, once and for all, to celebrate my uniqueness. To embrace diversity by being myself. That’s what I saw all around: diversity: the gays want to suck cock and get married; the Mexicans want to sire large families and drive them around in big trucks with chrome women on the mudflaps; the Armenians want to drive around in Mercedes and smoke Winstons and remind us to not forget their genocide; the Irish want to drink beer and bitch about the potato famine; the white people want the right to be ironic, sip lattes, and work as graphic designers. But what of myself? My desires? My need to be accepted by society? The shrink took a cold view of my forays into the back alleys, the barrooms, the libraries, the churches, the post offices, the gyms, the coffeeshops. He took a dim view of the female asscrack. Don’t you want to love, to be loved, to have children, to feel the glorious unification of man and woman? He plied me with these things, imploring me with his small hollowed-out eyes. I viewed him as subhuman. His worldview repulsed me and I'd considered killing him. But no: I was so over that. The time for other action had come.
The light and heat in the Pacer suddenly waned as R. Kelly's song ended. I looked up into the sky: a single cloud, one cloud in the entire thankless sky, had flown over the sun. A sign if there ever was one. I looked to my left and saw the Armenian boys driving away in an SUV, still talking on their Buck Rogers devices, still smoking. I watched them drive away, down Olive Ave., to Glendale, away. I watched until I couldn't see the SUV any more.
Things were looking up.
My spine tingled: the world suddenly seemed full of magic and beauty: I would come out of the closet. I would tell the world of my love for crack. Asscrack. Ass. Crack.
I drove to the nearest library. It was just up the street. I almost ran over a bum and his shopping cart as I roared into the parking lot. He cursed me and as I ran past him I flung a dollar in his direction. "YOU CHEAP MOTHERFUCKER!" he screamed. My hands were trembling. I walked quickly into the library, took a seat next to a guy who looked just like Adam Morrison and smelled like weed, scanned around quickly for asscrack, saw only old women, logged onto a computer, and quickly typed in my destination: www.greatflutterykrishna.com.
I'd been logging onto this site for a while. It was a fansite for a great forgotten polish comedian, Bill Hendrowski, a travelling ventriloquist. Truly a great man. His dummy was named Buddy and was supposed to be a subnormal, a mongloid. Hendrowski spent the first minutes of his act arguing with the dummy, calling him a retard, insulting him. The dummy would say very stupid things and Hendrowski would play the straight man. Then the dummy would turn the tables: he'd start insulting Hendrowski, would turn the whole thing on its ear: the crowd was astounded by the dummy's wit: and when the dummy thought Hendrowski had said something particularly stupid, he'd exclaim: "GREAT FLUTTERY KRISHNA"! The crowd waited for this, they paid tickets for this, and when they got what they paid for they'd stomp and hoot and scream.
I'd seen Hendrowski at the Lancaster Fair in 1989, as a child, and had followed him and Buddy forever after. Hendowski had problems making the rent with his act, though: the internet era killed ventriloquism for good, the county fair crowds thinned to nothing, and Hendrowski moved to Hollywood. After a few years of shit parts on bad shows he landed a role as an overweight bus driver on the hit comedy Short Bus. The show featured a young retarded child named Buddy who rode the bus and said clever, insulting things. The show ran for five seasons and went into syndication. Hendrowski retired to the Hollywood Hills. He even got a star on the walk, right near the liquor store on the southeast corner of Hollywood and Vine.
But there were people, just a few, who remembered the ventriloquist. Somehow these few people had found each other online. I had a username: Slim Elliot. I didn't comment much, just read everyone else's conversations. I was scared of most of the subnormal, obssesive personalities lurking about. Many of them were clustered in Chatanooga, Tennesee. It was a puzzling fact. Slowly, though, I figured it out: In 1976 Hendrowki had recorded his seminal album there, the double LP Buddy Comes Alive!. Thirty years later the place had evolved into his defacto Graceland: a population out-of- work housepainters, klan members, Jehovah's Witnesses, video-game players, tweakers, boozers, criminals, and shut-in losers had reached critical mass. When Buddy called blacks "the mudpeople" at the Elks Lodge on July 14th, 1976, Hendrowski changed Chatanooga's future generations forever.
It wasn't just Chatanooga. The freaks were everywhere: the Blind Children's Institute in Valrico, FL, had somehow acquired computers, and two strange teenagers there had stumbled onto the site: they were gay lovers, young boys whose embrace had apparently brought warmth to a cold, institutionalized life. One was named Frederick, Username Billfreak. He posted a picture of himself: one eye didn't quite point in the right direction, and his posts were as skewed as his eyeball. The other boy was named St. Billy and he was in love: with Frederick, with wrestling , and with the Iron Sheik. These two seemed to be on the computer 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I tried to avoid them and their suggestive private messages. But now I felt assured: if people as strange as them were accepted on greatflutterykrishna, so might I.
I started a new thread. It was titled: "I HAVE SOMETHING TO TELL ALL OF YOU."
(to be continued)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
0 comments:
Post a Comment