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A Sibling Rivalry
Weird fiction piece by Clark Humphrey
4/8/94
Jack always had a rivalry going with his two-years-older sister Janine. They didn’t do a thing without calculating its effect on the other’s overwrought sense of pride. Their parents encouraged this rivalry, and even encouraged it up to a point. They wanted Jack and Janine to vie for the highest grade point averages, the most friends, the most school activity trophies.
At some pre-teen point, Janine found she could usually get her way by sucking up to her parents. She could start a fight, claim to mom and dad that Jack had started it, and would always be believed. That only spurred Jack to find new ways to humiliate or otherwise get Janine, ways that usually backfired on him. If he tried to trash her room, he’d get caught. If he tried to upstage her in the sports at church picnics, the adults told him to be a gentleman and let her win; he’d cry that she was beating him anyway, but that didn’t help his position.
When adolescence reared its ugly head, Janine found a new weapon that Jack could not match for several years. She cultivated a powerful, jealousy-inducing beauty with the aid of the best clothes and make-up available to her; she carefully arranged friendships with older girls with cars who could take her into town on Saturdays to get the hottest looks unavailable to the mall-bound other girls in school.
By age 15 and a half, Janine had perfected a particular kind of drop-dead appearance that made other girls jealous and submissive, but was not overtly sexual and didn’t cause trouble from boys. The boys indeed noticed that Janine looked different from any other girl in school, that she gave more care to her face and her clothes, but she was still just one of the kids to them. Janine initially treated the boys with respect/indifference, while she schemed to become the girl invited to every party, chosen for every intramural sports squad, named to every honor roll.
Jack, meanwhile, did what he could to maintain his popularity among the other boys. He learned to smoke and drink and cuss and tell racist jokes and crash cars and collect copies of Hustler and fight and rob vending machines and get bad grades and go to dentention, all to prove he was the king of the real men.
But as he turned 15, just before Janine turned 17, he faced a crisis. He’d gone into a ditch on a suburban road in a “borrowed” car without a license, and spent a night in juvenile hall; there, he’d met plenty of kids who were far tougher than he, and who were also fated to turn that toughness into a lifetime of visits in and out of the criminal justice system. Jack spent his hours there reassuring himself that this unpleasant misadventure would at least increase his standing among the guys. But once he was back, he found the guys in school were suddenly cold toward him; he’d apparently crossed some unmarked line between being a creative rebel and being just a common criminal.
Within weeks of that incident, Jack’s carefully assembled entourage of buddies started to disband; many of the guys were getting involved with girls and had better things to do than hang with him. He berated each of them with individual variations on one rant, avowing that guys who liked to be friends with girls were “faggots.” He asserted that he would never get trapped by any girl, and the girls in school were quite willing to let him keep that promise.
By the Christmas break of his sophomore year, alone, a below-average student with no after-school activities, no A-list friends, and no apparent hopes of curing his virginity. At that year’s family Christmas dinner, all the relatives patronized Jack with the formal “friendliness” people give to family members they don’t really admire. Janine, however, drew admiring stares and gracious remarks from all the grandmothers, aunts, nieces, and sisters-in-law. She was resplendent in her formal dress (tight but not lewd), flowing dark hair and perfectly-accented eyelids. She knew she was a superior creature, enjoying her status as the new center of the family, bowing and gently smiling back at the other relatives, showing off her new straight-A-student boyfriend — the leader of a clique in the school of mama’s boys that Jack had long despised.
As the second semester of school got underway, Jack started noticing who his ex-buddies’ girlfriends were. They all hung out together in the halls, in the mall, and at the girls’ basketball games. Jack had been so blind to the world outside his own ego, he hadn’t noticed until now that his clique of buddies hadn’t really disbanded, they’d merged with a girls’ clique and tossed him out without him noticing it.
Jack decided to start paying attention to things he hadn’t been noticing, like how Janine prowled her way into higher and higher levels of popularity. He’d spent his first year and a half of high school avoiding her wherever possible during school hours. He couldn’t stand it when the teachers compared his grades to her superior achievements, when the counselors kept telling him how he should learn from her how to make friendships the right way. Now he decided to get a locker near hers, to take classes with or near her, to see just how she gathered more and more admiration.
He mentally catalogued her every word and motion. The way she demured coyly to male teachers and made instant girlfriends with female teachers. The way she gathered other girls wherever she went, telling them just enough to improve their looks without upstaging hers. The way she turned down invites for dates with civility and charm, making boys feel appreciated to have even been in the range of her deep green eyes.
While Janine was popular among all the girls, Jack gradually noticed a pattern. Janine turned on her friendliness spigot harder among people who could do things for her: teachers from she especially needed a good grade, coaches who could put her in the starting line-ups for basketball, girls who could get her into the good parties. He also noticed that there were certain classmates to whom Janine was more formally amiable. These included the girlfriends of Jack’s former clique. Jack thought to himself that Janine’s snubbing (or the closest thing to snubbing that Janine ever did) the girls who’d destroyed Jack’s social life was a sign of sincere family unity. For the first time in his life, Jack felt that Janine actually cared about him. Of course, he never told her how he’d been investigating her behavior. He never told her he appreciated her acts of solidarity with him. That would be acquiescing to her superiority as a human being.
Then, as his discreet Janine-watching continued, he started to notice another pattern. Certain girls were more regularly at her cafeteria table and around her locker than others, even though she acted comparatively cool and aloof toward them. And as often as not, these hangers-on included several of the girls Jack hated, the girls who’d stolen his buddies away from him. Jack wondered if they were perhaps trying desperately to get back in Janine’s good graces after they destroyed her brother’s life.
It was only on the day after Janine’s team won the district girls’ basketball title that Jack found out what was really going on. During this time Jack had slightly cleaned up his act, got a better haircut, began studying a little harder, and was rewarded with an invite to a party. Not one of the most exclusive parties in the school, but a good one nonetheless. There, he overheard a sequence of conversations that collectively told him what Janine had so cleverly kept from him. It seemed that there was a group of girls with a special relationship to Janine. Girls who weren’t in Janine’s inner circle but who came to her privately for advice. She told them how to dress, how to look at people, how to hold themselves in public. She even told them how to attract, control and seduce boys, without the boys’ noticing what’s happening to them and without losing their reputations among other girls. In return, the girls were expected to keep their proper distance from Janine in public but to privately keep her informed about every aspect of their love lives.
The next week, Jack kept track of which girls appeared to belong in this outer circle of Janine’s. He began to discern that the girls to whom Janine showed the most outer warmth were the ones with whom she had the most superficial, log-rolling friendships, the girls she used to get popularity points. The girls with whom she was iciest in public included the girls with whom she had her secret deals.
They included each of the girls Jack hated.
Having grown up with Janine’s schemes and manipulations, it didn’t take Jack long to realize what his sister had done to him. Without sleeping with anyone herself, his sister had deliberately and indirectly seduced each of his friends. The clique that had surrounded Jack now was part of Janine’s social empire.
There was nothing for Jack to do but plan patiently for his junior year, when Janine would be safely away at college. He applied his collected awareness of Janine’s system to give himself a makeover. As he paid more attention to his clothes, his poise and his social graces, he declined Janine’s kindly offers to take him shopping. He wanted to defeat her, not to submit to her power.
By September he was ready with a new wardrobe and a new attitude. He got back into at least an outer-circle relationship with most of his former clique. Without Janine’s constant advice, some of the girls she’d coached began to lose the undivided loyalty of their boyfriends, so several of Jack’s old buddies were single or seeing other girls now. Jack made his first moves on one of those ex-protoges of Janine who’d been left lonely by Janine’s graduation and abandoned by one of Jack’s old friends. He positioned himself to her as the closest thing she could have to Janine’s companionship. Once he decided to be a ladykiller, he found the skills easy to develop. All he had to do was imitate some of Janine’s charm, and Janine’s girls fell for him one by one. By the end of the school year he had slept with all but one of the ex-girlfriends of his ex-guy friends, and had carried on public relationships with two of them. He had finally beaten Janine at something; she had had only one public boyfriend by the time she’d graduated, and to the best of Jack’s knowledge was still a virgin.
Janine didn’t come home from college that summer; instead, she invited him to spend a week or two in a spare room at the shared rental house where she was living. Before he could gloat to her about his love life, he saw her field a solid hour of dinnertime phone calls. She made dates with at least three guys, broke up with another, and told yet another that he ought to do something about his snoring. During the late dinner, Jack once again didn’t have the guts to boast of anything to Janine. She complimented him on his rosy complexion and his newly-found confidence. He shrugged a thank-you. She asked him what some of her old girlfriends from school were doing; he lied and said he didn’t know.
The following year, Jack moved into town right after graduating from high school. He barely got into college and barely stayed there. His rivalry with Janine evolved into a more mature, more playful-serious game, with mutually-agreed-upon rules. They took points for the number of lovers they collected, the degree of difficulty in getting them (extra points for grabbing someone in a previously-exclusive relationship, etc.), and the novelty and creativity of the consummation scene (in a moving vehicle, in a basement with the target’s spouse upstairs unaware, in the target’s office during lunch hour, etc.).
For two years the game continued, with Janine usually ahead in the point rankings. But neither Janine nor Jack had achieved the ultimate bonus-point item in their rule book, breaking up a marriage. Janine carefully planned the move that would end the game once and for all. She steadily developed a deep abiding friendship with a grad student in her department at school. She invited the grad student and her husband of one year, a junior instructor in the same department, to a skiing weekend. Before she left, Janine promised Jack that she would return in the husband’s arms, with the wife filing the divorce papers that next Monday.
Jack had to act fast. He rented a room at the same lodge late Friday night, arriving just two hours after Janine and the unsuspecting couple checked in. That Saturday, thw wife went up on the chairlifts while Janine took the husband out on the X-C track, from there straight to the sauna, and from there along a circuitous route to the couple’s room. Once the wife was back alone in the lodge restaurant, Jack made his move on her.
Exactly an hour after the junior instructor unhooked Janine’s bra strap, his wife entered on schedule. Instead of shrieking and shouting and ordering Janine and/or her husband to get out, the wife calmly put her ski equipment away, undressed and got into bed with them. The grad student explained that she’d just run into an “old friend” of Janine’s who’d made a persuasive argument for the new institution of open marriages. During a long talk in the lodge restaurant, this nice man had helped her see that what she needed in her life was intimate friendships with a man and a woman, even if she might be sexually attracted only to men. The grad student invited Janine to move in with her and her husband, so the three of them could live as one big happy family.
Not a Prostitute
3/12/94
“I am NOT a prostitute,” she kept insisting to her sister, her best friends, and everyone else in her life who seemed to have found out about her new means of fiscal self-support. “I just have a few boyfriends who like to be generous.”
If she were willing to admit so, the truth is that she said this as much to convince herself as to convince anybody else.
By her definition, a prostitute was someone who sold herself on the street to any and all strangers willing to pay. She was not like that. She would never be like that.
She was just a long-term unemployed college graduate (art history) who one night found herself with a maxed-out credit card, a yearning for the nose candy she’d come to crave in school, and a nice dress. She found herself at a hotel cocktail lounge. She allowed herself to be picked up by a circuit-riding dental-supply salesman who mistook her for a “professional.” She needed the money anyway, so she went along with the mistake. She gave him her phone number, for reasons she thought she knew at the time but can’t remember now.
On his next trip through the area, he called her. This time, she gave him permission to recommend some friends of his to her.
Within two months, she had what she euphemistically called a “gentleman caller” on the average of once a day. Sometimes she went to their houses or hotel rooms. Some days she could just lie around the house, go to galleries, try to get her own art works started, or hang out in nice bars. Other days she had to work around three or even four appointments. Each gentleman caller was required to supply her with a “gift” of at least $100; some were willing to go as high as $150.
She spaced the hour to hour-and-a-half appointments far enough apart so she could bathe thoroughly between each session; she soon found she couldn’t stand to have the scent of her “boyfriends” lingering on her, even though she still insisted to herself that she really liked each of them. She especially appreciated the “boyfriend” who owned a legal-secretarial service; he maintained a phony payroll listing for her, so she could fool the IRS about her source of income.
She found herself gradually adopting the tastes of her clients. Her wardrobe evolved from faded jeans and sweats to muted-color dresses, scarves and high heels. She started getting perms. She added “nicer” vases, curtains and objets d’art to her apartment. She also came to sense her clients’ taste in art, not from any direct statements by them but from learning how their particular eyes perceived the world, how their confidence in their own “sophistication,” despite their limited aesthetic training, led them to prefer upscale versions of the craft works they’d enjoyed in college.
Then she found herself falling in love for real with a recent addition to her clientele. He didn’t mind going down on her for almost half their time together. He had a nice smile, brought her flowers, and knew about contemporary art (he thought most of it was just a commercial scam, and could give detailed rationales for his points). By their fourth session in her apartment, she agreed to go out with him on a not-exclusively-sexual basis.
She could still not support herself without her other “callers.” He could not support her current lifestyle on his job managing a chain video store, particularly if he left his wife for her. And during a recent date with the secretarial-service owner, he hinted “jokingly” that if she stopped seeing him, he just might have to tell his friends at the City Attorney’s office about her line of work.
All she could see herself doing at this point was to refuse to accept new clients, and let her current clients fade away from getting married and/or divorced, getting transferred out of town, et al.
Three months into this frustrating compromise, an opportunity opened up. Her true love applied to manage a new store the chain was opening in Walla Walla. His wife refused to move with him, since she was in the midst of grad school. With the lower cost of living in eastern Washington, he could support his girlfriend until she got an art school and rental studio underway. Within three years she’d developed that business into a lucrative line of upscale craft works, which her representatives sold at high prices to Seattle executives and attorneys. She became quite unpopular among other craftspeople, who sometimes harped that she’d betrayed the original counterculture spirit of the movement. In an oft-quoted statement to Art in America, she insisted, “I am NOT a sell-out.”
The Family Interview
1/29/94
A middle-aged couple is being interviewed in their modest but well-kept living room. They had apparently married young. Neither had played the field much; they imply but don’t out-and-out state that the wife had been a virgin on her wedding night. While they have remained satisfied with their marriage, they both wondered ever since what it would have been like to have sowed their respective wild oats when they’d had the chance.
They decided early on they they would give their only child, a daughter, the upbringing they wished they’d had. They encouraged her to be frank and open about any questions she had regarding sexuality. The mother gave her more advice than she wanted to hear about looking pretty, poise, smiling, and the psychological importance of wearing pretty underwear at all times.
In the short run all this doting attention hurt the girl. Always dressed in the most attractive clothes her folks could afford, she went through grade school and junior high as as object of jealousy and scorn among the other girls. Her parents now admit they may have overstressed the importance of feeling beautiful at too early a stage, but insist their parentage has been nothing but sincere and well-wishing.
When she turned 15 they sent her to a co-ed church summer camp, with the unspoken understanding that she would contrive to lure a boy into the woods to cure her virginity. That scheme didn’t work out: she got her period the first day she had an unsupervised hour, on the next-to-last day of the camp. She came home disappointed and dejected. Her parents sat her down for a long talk. She told them she wanted this one boy so much, but couldn’t get alone with him to even ask him. Her mother smiled and reassured her that other opportunities would occur soon enough. Her father quietly announced that he needed to go on a business trip the next weekend and wanted to take her mother along.
That weekend the girl invited the boy from camp over. She did most everything that a girl with a boy and his dad’s car could do out on a Friday night in Burien. When that was over (about 45 mins.), she invited him into her house. Awkwardly and nervously, she brought him to the couch to watch videos, then at one point sat there looking at him for what seemed like several lifetimes waiting for him to kiss her. At several stages in the making-out process, she felt alternately like she was coming to life for the first time and like she was going to die. She abruptly got up to go to the bathroom. Five minutes later he got up to see what was keeping her. He found her waiting for him in her parents’ bed. When that was over (about 25 mins.), she fell asleep dreaming of his exquisite face and smooth chest, and devising how she could politely dump him.
He was still there in the morning, fixing breakfast and planning their day together. She went along with him to the Boat Show, then to Denny’s, then back to her house for a slightly more relaxed session of sex (about 40 mins.), before he said his mom would be waiting for him and he left. She curled up with a bad-movie night on cable, while pondering the significance to the course of the universe of her past 24 hours. At one point in history, an unmarried girl having sex was always potentially important, because it subverted the rules of society and could lead to a socially unacceptable pregnancy. But in her day and age, with her careful adherence to the physical and emotional precautions her mother had insisted upon, her brief ascendence into heaven (albeit a sloppy, sticky heaven) meant nothing to the world outside her house and the boy’s house. He didn’t even go to her school, so none of her classmates would know about it if she didn’t tell them.
She did tell it all to her mother, and knew her mother would tell it all to her father. The three had a long heart-to-heart about the responsibilities of womanhood and why the heart and the body can have different cravings at different times and how to tell them apart.
In the five years since then, her parents now report, she has had a succession of fascinating adventures with some of the nicest and/or prettiest guys in town. She’s learned how to request and receive full pleasure. She knows how to start and end an affair with minimal hurt or embarrassment. They hope she’ll settle down and marry, but they understand that the demands of college, to be followed by the demands of starting a career, might set that back a few years.
The grownup daughter now enters camera range and sits between her parents. She is just as pretty as they claimed. She’s got a vivacious face and a perfectly-shaped smile.
She sits up straight and peers into the camera with her perfectly made-up eyes. She says only that she has had a good life so far, that she’s not in love at the moment, but she believes, and her parents agree, that not being in love shouldn’t prevent a woman from having a good life, including a good sex life.
Seattle Scene Chess Set
Stranger cover ad parody proposal by Clark Humphrey
1/9/94
Who rules? Who sucks? Re-create those classic coffeehouse arguments
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The Punks (Black Team)
The Rockers (White Team)
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Each set comes with an authentic Seagram Crown Royal sack for easy carrying.
The perfect accompaniment to those long evenings in a bar waiting for the good band to come on!
Once you’ve ordered your Basic Set, you can continue your collection with these fabulous Additional Sets:
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The Artistes
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Don’t be a Loser! Order your Seattle Scene Chess Set today!
Special Ordering Information:
This is a joke. Do not send in any money.
Do you honestly think we could afford the likeness rights to all these celebrities?
Confession of a Woman Who Likes Men
1/1/94
I admit it. I like men. A lot. I wish I’d belonged to the generations of women who didn’t have to work for a living (I’m guessing sometime between the rise of urban living and the decline of middle-class prosperity), so I could spend my entire days as well as nights cuddled up in muscular arms and musky-smelling chests. That’s all I want out of life, and it’s a shame that I have to spend so much of my life cooped up in an office. It’s an office full to the brim with women supervisors in every direction, so I can’t use my only true skill, the skill of making men like me, to advance my station. Instead, I’m on a floor full of women who think I’m a “slut,” not worthy of their respect nor of their friendship.
Just because I’m in tune with my physical and spiritual needs, and do what it takes to fulfill those needs, women hate me. I only want to spread more love in the world, and half of my world hates me. I haven’t gone after the husbands or boyfriends of the women in the office, at least not knowingly. I have tasted many married men, but they’ve all confessed to me that their marriages had become arrangements of convenience for the sake of the children or the inheritance; or that they were otherwise frustrated at home and needed some release to make their living arrangments work. I like to think that, instead of breaking up other people’s relationships, I’ve made them stronger.
Perhaps if my sex life had developed with less jealousy and competition from other women, I would have learned to like women more. I might even have developed a physical attraction to women. I tried a menage a trois once. I couldn’t get into it. The other woman smelled of stale perfume, aloe vera lotion and Nair. Her skin felt weird to me. After years of the only soft supple flesh in my life being my own, it felt like I was giving myself an out-of-body experience.
No, give me the sharper angles and variety of textures of male flesh. Give me hairy legs and beard stubble. Give me boxy buns and leathery earlobes. Give me penises that blossom into life at my command, that reach into me. Give me love handles and beer guts for pillows on rainy lonely nights, complete with the purr-like sounds of growling tummies. Give me testicles that look like spongy peach pits, those symbols of toughness that are so delicate. Give me the wondrous, boyish expression of a normally-jaded adult man looking so amazed and grateful to be in my arms.
I will love my men all night and even on subsequent nights, until my eye returns to wandering or the inevitable “relationship” issues pop up.
Other women try incessantly to tell me how dangerously I’m behaving, picking up men in bars and going back to their houses. It isn’t when you’re prepared for it. I don’t have inhibitions that I’d have to lose with drugs or excess alcohol, and I watch the intake of my lovers; so we’re in control of our emotions, and I’m usually in control of his. It’s easy to find men who need me more than I need them, men who will agree to anything you say. I never look to men for power. It’s the women who gravitate toward lovers with flashy cars and aggressive talk who get fed a line of bullshit, then get fed a line of coke, and then get beaten up.
That’s my theory anyway. I told this theory to a woman and she said I was just making up excuses for myself. Maybe I am, but I’ve had a lot of great nights thanks to this excuse. Because I stay away from the guys who look like trouble, I get the guys the other women don’t bother with. I get the lonely divorcees, the pre-med majors, the insurance agents, the temp workers, the laid-off assembly workers. All the men who are extremely eager to please me. The men who look like they don’t have a woman picking out their clothes. The men who’ve been told all their lives that they’re not rich enough or not cute enough. They’re mine for the mining. I take good care of them, I train them to take good care of me, and I send them back into the world stronger and more confident.
Don’t ask me how many men I’ve had. I remember all of them, but I haven’t counted. Maybe one or two a week, every week, when I’m not in a “relationship,” which usually happens once or twice a year and lasts about a month or two. I’ve been in this basic pattern since I was 19 or 20, about ten years. God, that is a lot! No wonder I have this reputation. I live in a town of 500,000 people. If half of them are men, and half of those are of fuckable age, then maybe one out of every 150 or 200 men in this town have been inside me. Except that a lot of them have moved away, or were students or otherwise were just passing through. Still, it’s reassuring to think that no matter where I am in my town, there’s somebody who’s been nice to me. If I get a heart attack in a store or a truck sideswipes me on the road and I run into a light pole, chances are there’s going to be a former lover there on the streets ready to come to my rescue.
New Identity
7/19/93
I’m under some sort of house arrest, for some sort of crime against the official culture, in a city that is a recursive maze, in a house whose main entrance is a sort of basement garage ramp. At first, I accept it, and am allowed to stay in the house unguarded. Then one day I rebel against my fate, try for the ramp/door, and am stopped by an invisible barrier/force field kind of device. “You should have gotten out while you could,” a disembodied voice sneers.
Then, one day a careless food supplier leaves a side door unlocked. I run out easily. I run down streets and climb on top of buses, looking for a way out of town. Only there isn’t any, at least not any that I can use without getting caught. Every road I run toward what I think is the countryside really lands at just some park with tall buildings clearly visible from behind.
Finally, I get to a relatively safe spot and desperately try to think. I’ve got to live here, so I’ll have to have a fake identity. I practice voices, stances, walks, postures, names, past histories, until I come up with one I think will work. I rehearse it to death, then discreetly acquire a new wardrobe. As a would-be musician just arrived in town, I will live in a subculture where no one will expect me to have a job or a family, where I can live anonymously.
It doesn’t work out that way. I’m somehow cajoled into a performance somewhere. I accept the gig, needing the money for a fake Social Security number. I try to stumble through it, claiming my real guitar was back home or something. The club owner says he wants me back. I feel I have to accept.
Six months later, I’m being toasted at a party honoring my new record contract and my new engagement. I feel sick and wary. I’ve lived this new identity on a full-time basis, even while alone. Sure enough, in the corner of the room is a woman from my previous identity, either a wife, an ex-wife or a fiancée. I run out the building and down the streets. But I can’t run like I used to. I’m out of training for it. My tight clothes don’t let me jump. I’m out of wind, and I’m about to be cornered in an alley. They’re two autograph hounds, chanting that I can’t get away from them that easily. I sign my new name, with my right hand (my previous self was a leftie). As soon as I smile at them and they leave, I try to remember why I was running. My new self can’t imagine why. I walk back to the party, walking like my new persona thinks he’s always walked.
Back at the party, I’m met by my new fiancée, who smiles, apologizes for being late, and asks motherly about why I look like I’ve been sweating. I can’t remember; all I can say is that I love her. We tell the press about our honeymoon plans.
In a small powerboat, my new wife and I land in a secluded country getaway. I remark that it’s the kind of place one could just live in forever. At the cabin, there’s a spread of old newspaper pages, including one with my old picture. I don’t recognize the guy; my wife says he looks like me sort of, but obviously shorter.
SadElf in the Land of the GladElves
A slightly curved children’s story by Clark Humphrey
6/27/93
Beyond the mystic sea, between the Magic Islands and the Enchanted Dictatorship, there is a secret land, a very special land, the Land of the GladElves.
Here, the GladElves work in long shifts, all on their own happy jobs to make the world a happier place. There’s GiddyElf, and PerkyElf, and ProudElf, and SillyElf, and PsychoElf, and RomanticElf, and HuggyElf, and MellowElf, and SpacedOutElf, and CuteElf, and CherubicElf, and WiredElf, and RadiantElf, and LuckyElf, and BrightElf, and CheeryElf, and ExuberantElf, and FestiveElf, and MirthyElf, and NerdyElf, and FunkyElf.
Some GladElves harvest the magic reeds for Happy Toothbrushes.
Some GladElves use their Magic Glad-O-Phone to scan the world’s private phone calls, listening in for unhappy people who need the GladElves’ help.
Some GladElves prepare the Magic Happiness Potions that keep the GladElves so glad.
But the most revered GladElves work in the Mystic Ponds, raising baby whales to spread joy to the children of the world.
Every Saturday, all the GladElves love to gather at the Glad Land Theme Park. They love to sing the Glad Songs and drink the Happiness Potion together. They love to watch the baby whales swim and dive and perform all the tricks the GladElf trainers have taught them. They love to watch the baby whales dart about, playfully looking all around the pool.
But there was one GladElf who didn’t like to look at the whales having their fun. He didn’t like to drink the Magic Happiness Potion. He didn’t like to sing Glad Songs. He didn’t even like to spread happiness into the world, because he had no happiness within him.
The other GladElves called him SadElf.
He hated the name. He didn’t think he was sad, just realistic.
He thought being a GladElf was the stupidest thing in the world. He hated being short. He hated his big ears. He hated having a head that was almost as big as his body.
He hated the job assigned to him at birth by the GladElf Queen, to fix broken roof beams on all the houses in GladElf village.
He kept trying to tell the Queen that if they’d just build the houses with the proper supports, the roofs wouldn’t keep caving in. Nobody listened to him. “Our Glad Houses have always looked this way,” said his mother GiddyElf and his father ChuckleElf, “and they always will.”
He worked alone, with huge equipment. The other GladElves always told him how much they loved his work, and how happy he should be to do it. He said nothing back.
The other GladElves always tried to get him to stop being sad. Whenever he passed the GladElf Queen, she ordered him to smile. He tried, but couldn’t. The most he could do was a painful grin.
That wasn’t good enough. He was supposed to be a GladElf. He was supposed to be deliriously happy, all the time, just like all the other GladElves.
They gave him double doses of the Magic Happiness Potion. It didn’t change him. They gave him triple doses of the potion, then added more of the potion to all his food. It just made him sick.
They put him at the center of the group singalongs, where he had to sing all the GladElf Songs: “We’re Glad We’re Glad,” “Spread A Little Magic To A Lonely Soul,” even “We Love To Love To Love To Love…” SadElf couldn’t take it. He thought he was surely going to die amidst what he saw as all this phony “happiness.” But as he listened, he found he could make up his own harmonies to the songs, his own way of singing them that wasn’t so stupid. As soon as he tried to sing a song his own way, the other GladElves heard his harsh, abrasive music and made him stop. At least he got kicked out of the singalongs and didn’t have to go back.
Next, they put him through GladElf Therapy. They sat him in the middle of a room, with other GladElves sitting all around him. They asked him, over and over, why he was sad. He said he didn’t know; he just always was. They asked him why he didn’t just start being glad; he said he didn’t know how. They said to just do it. He said again that he didn’t know how.
They asked him what he thought about all the time. He said he thought about how the elves could build better houses according to common stress-support princples. How he wished he could start an army to overthrow the Enchanted Dictatorship across the stream from GladElf Village. How he wondered what made the stars shine at night, and don’t anybody try to give him a phony answer like magic stardust. How he wondered what the Baby Whales thought about. How he liked the Baby Whales because they were the only creatures in GladElf Village who didn’t try to force him to be happy. The GladElf Queen didn’t want to hear any more of this, and told SadElf he should stop talking.
After the session broke up, GiddyElf (his arranged fiancée since birth) came up to him and told him he should also try to stop thinking so much. She told him he had to think of her needs. How could they ever get married and have a family if he refused to be glad? He told her he never refused to be a stupid happy GladElf, he just couldn’t be one.
Occasionally, SadElf finished his day’s work early. He spent those afternoons by himself, far from the village, far from the Glad Baby Elves playing their Glad Games. He wrote his own SadElf Poems, that nobody else ever wanted to read. He practiced his Sad Guitar deep in Lonely Valley, the only place the other elves let him play it, where no sound ever came in or got out.
One afternoon, SadElf wandered down to the place where the Baby Whales were kept. He saw the GladElf trainers forcing them to play their Baby Whale games and tricks. He saw the whales darting their eyes about the ponds.
Suddenly, SadElf saw something. The Baby Whales weren’t moving about having fun. They were searching the ponds. They were searching every little corner of the ponds, above and below the surface of the water. Why, he wondered?
Then he saw it. Far from the trainers, one Baby Whale spotted something, and called on her brothers and sisters to come look. SadElf figured it had to be the one thing the Baby Whales were looking for all this time. SadElf ran to that side of the pond to see what it was.
It was a hole in the fence surrounding the pond. It was just big enough for a Baby Whale to jump through. He saw the first Baby Whale swim around and around, building up speed, then leap into the air, and miss the hole. The Baby Whale fell back into the pond, crying a Baby Whale cry. To the other GladElves, a Baby Whale’s cry sounded just like laughing. To SadElf, it sounded like the saddest thing he’d ever heard. He watched the Baby Whales try and try to jump through the hole in the fence, to the stream beyond that would take them far away from GladElf Village, far from their appointed destiny playing games for human children.
SadElf heard the GladElf trainers, DizzyElf and PeripateticElf, running to the side of the pond where the hole was. SadElf hid in a clump of Toothbrush Reeds as the trainers found and fixed the hole.
Susie’s Complaint
6/14/93
I’m not a babe.
I’m not a broad.
I’m not a hon’.
I’m not a bitch.
I’m not a gal.
I’m not a femme.
I’m not a dude.
I’m a dudette.
The Sisterhood of Philip
6/10/93
“Ya Gotta Meet This Guy!” was the first thing Julie told Bonita as they sat at the college cafeteria. “No, better yet — Ya Gotta Fuck This Guy! I just spent the most amazing 11 hours with him. Trust me: he’s the best that ever was.”
Julie, you must understand, was not into promiscuity under normal circumstances. She was certainly not into that catch phrase from 1986 talk shows, “man sharing.” But, as she told Bonita, “this is something special. And when you get something really, really special in your life, well my mommy always told me to share with my friends. You are my friend, aren’t you?” Bonita nodded silently, not knowing what to make of her friends aberrant behavior, both the behavior she’s displaying now and that she’s describing from the previous night.
“You know how some men smell like warmed-over antipersperant, and some smell like the carcass of a dead game animal? This guy, I mean THIS GUY smells like heaven. A dark, mysterious, cinnamon- and ginger-tinted heaven.
“He’s got muscle definition, but not so bulging that it’s self indulgent. He’s got smooth legs with just the right wisps of hair. His butt: to die for! He’s not long, but he is thick and he knows how to steer.
“His eyes are like wading pools, refreshing and inviting but not too deep. His smile is small and subtle, but completely unfaked. Without saying much of anything, he makes you feel totally welcome without being pushy about it at all. He never forces anything on you, not even a joke. He makes YOU want HIM. And believe me, you will.
“He just came here from some out of state college. He says he was kicked out of there, but he won’t say exactly why. He mumbled something about a scandal with a couple of female department heads that put a wrench into the office politics over there, or something like that. I didn’t want to ask any more about it. Hell, girlfriend, I didn’t want any more talking to go on.
“So we did it a few times slowly, on the bed, just to warm up. Then came the main course: on the wall, in the shower, on the kitchen counter — ever had a blow job with strawberry jam on it? Two great tastes that taste great together, hon! And on the couch, and on the Soloflex — there are some positions that that’s the exact right height for — I tell you there’s nothing he didn’t do for me. He lapped me up like a cat at one point, just like a cat.
“So, you’re not doing anything tonight, are you? Didn’t think so. Meet me at the College Inn at 7, then I’ll walk you to his apartment. And get a catnap beforehand if you can; you won’t be sleeping tonight, friend!”
Bonita usually deferred to Julie’s crackpot ideas, out of a lack of anything better to do. It was Bonita who went along on Julie’s leafleting drive to protest the cancellation of a minor elective class. It was Bonita who club-hopped beside Julie on her quest for the ultimate good time.
Now, Bonita was being led by Julie into a man’s arms. They rang the apartment doorbell at precisely the appointed hour. Philip answered the door in a modest sweater and black jeans. Julie embraced him passionately. Before Bonita could note any words being spoken, Julie nudged her into the embrace. Philip took turns kissing and caressing each woman. Fifteen minutes later she volunteered to undress herself before him, to the tune of the Cocteau Twins in the CD player. Bonita found it unusually easy to suppress the voice of sensibility in her head, the voice that usually stopped her from doing anything too stupid. She mentally ordered her inner voice to shut up and think of England.
When she searched her head for her inner voice sometime the next morning, it had apparently decided to take a permanent vacation. She was alone with herself, and with Philip and Julie. With no alcohol in her system, she clearly rememberd every act she’d submitted to, every act she later initiated. She now felt as if a different set of muscles had just been painlessly strung onto her bones. She was stronger, more self-assured. She breathed differently. She walked differently. She smelled like Philip; Julie was right, he did smell like heaven. She even seemed to have lost her far-sightedness; she could read the coffeemaker instructions without her contacts, wherever the hell they were now.
Most mornings before this, she stared out at an uncertain world with uncertain goals. Today, as her brain zeroed in while her body cried for rest, her agenda was simple: attend her morning classes, rest, do as little homework as she could get away with, rest some more, bring a change of clothes and makeup kit back here.
After several nights of this, a regular schedule emerged. Bonita took three two-hour naps a day: after her morning classes, after her afternoon classes, and after her study time. Study time quickly turned from “how much can I accomplish?” to “what do I have to do to pass?” Weekends were made for laundry, shopping, more sleep, and more sex. She stopped drinking. She adopted an athlete’s diet: low fat, hi carbs, quick energy. Movies and concerts meant nothing to her anymore. Recorded music was something you played to accompany sex (and Bonita never deluded herself that this was love or intimacy or anything but sex).
Gossip spreads quickly on campus, and soon everybody knew that Bonita and Julie were screwing the same guy. Bonita’s lesbian friends encouraged her to just shack up with Julie, to literally “cut out the middleman.” Bonita liked Julie but didn’t see a reason to stop being opposite poles, transmitting energy through the conduit that was Philip.
After three or four weeks of this, Bonita developed a thirst for novelty. Julie was still the better saleswoman, so Bonita asked Julie to recruit more members for their sisterhood. Two nights later, a poli-sci major named Charlotte arrived in a slight disguise (wig, different clothes and purse than her normal wardrobe); she said there must be absolutely no gossip about what she was about to do, in case it came back to jeopardize her run for the U.S. Senate in 2008. By her third night sharing Philip, Charlotte dropped all such secrecy. By her ninth night, she was starting to reconsider whether staying in school was worth the bother.
Julie and Charlotte recruited more sisters, while Bonita spent her non-class days tending to Philip and the apartment. Philip, cute nonthreatening guy that he was, agreed to every condition of the arrangement as drawn up by Bonita. She coached and spotted him in 45 minutes of weight training and Soloflex exercises daily, to maintain his muscle tone within his newly-housebound lifestyle. She forbade him from drinking, smoking or fraternizing with women not brought into the apartment by Bonita or Julie. Bonita watched over his diet, bought his clothes and CDs.
By the end of the quarter there were nine members in the sisterhood with a tenth woman seriously thinking about it. They took turns with Philip, one to three at a time, according to a schedule Bonita drew up at the beginning of each week. The sisters maintained their own disciplines. They gave up pot, booze and junk food. They never wore perfume or any makeup other than lipstick (Philip could smell really weird after several women). Condoms and contraceptives were, of course, mandatory, and were handled as sacred objects. The sisters dropped their boyfriends and all extracurricular activities. Those who could afford to quit after-school jobs did. Some quit school; the others rushed through their work in between Philip appointments.
Philip dropped out of school and stopped going to his afternoon job. The sisters pitched in to pay his rent and living expenses.
Charlotte found a large rundown house out in Ballard that the sisters could rent together. The sisterhood was officially divided into two classes: the five core members who moved into the house with Philip, and the (by now) seven junior members who stayed there several nights a week but maintained their own homes. The junior members accused the core members of scheduling most of the time with Philip for themselves. The core members accused the junior members of being insufficiently committed to the arrangement. Each camp accused the other of not doing their fair share of household upkeep.
Philip, who never had a say in anything, wisely stayed out of the arguments. He told every woman who straddled him that he loved all of them equally, and that they should resolve their differences among themselves. He just stayed in the house and gratefully serviced the women who were brought to him. If he had any had any clue about how to keep his charmed situation from collapsing, he didn’t show it.
By the second month in the house, it became clear that the sisterhood was falling apart. The arrangements were still too informal. Bonita drew up a charter to incorporate the sisterhood as a nonprofit organization “devoted to promoting the self-fulfillment of women.” The eleven members (Charlotte dropped out) were charged dues according to a complex formula based on their resident/nonresident status and their degree of Philip access (time per week, alone vs. sharing). To avoid any potential legal problems, Philip was forbidden to receive cash from any sister; food for the household was bought collectively, and his other personal expenses were paid out of a checking account controlled by Bonita.
The junior members found themselved drawn further and further into the group. Campus gossip and their sisterhood duties kept them from developing outside friendships, despite Julie’s admonitions at weekly board meetings that new recruitments had to continue and that the junior members, who spent more time outside the house, should do most of that recruiting.
At one particularly chilly house meeting with everyone present except Philip, the core members proclaimed that with household expenses rising and the sisters’ incomes falling, additional junior members were needed. The junior members were instructed to each bring a new woman to a party to be held at the house that Friday night. Jackie, Carolyn, Susan and Teri played telemarketer with their estranged girlfriends until they each snagged one. Evelyn found two ex-housemates for what she promised would be an all-girl soirée, making up for Pat’s failure to get anybody.
In deference to the six party guests, wine and beer were brought into the house for the first time. The guests were even allowed to smoke inside. The atmosphere was pure Girls’ Night Out: the art of high-energy conversation, jealousy-inspiring attire, familiar soft music. Julie steered the conversation toward her proposition that a girl who prefers friendship with other girls should still be able to get great sex from a great guy.
Promptly at 11:45 p.m., a freshly groomed and dressed Philip was brought downstairs, in the arms of Julie and Evelyn.
He slow-danced with each guest, not taking no for an answer and not talking much. His gentle demeanor and baby-blue eyes were in top form. After the CD was over, he disappeared upstairs. Individually and discreetly, Julie and Bonita told each guest that Philip would be available for a test drive. Three of the guests agreed to take turns in his room.
Philip’s bedroom looked nothing like a guy’s room. It was painted and furnished as a girl’s room that had a guy in it: sunny wallpaper, lacey windowshades, a pink featherbed with designer sheets. Its only masculine presence, other than Philip and his clothes, was his exercise equipment tucked away in one corner.
Susan’s guest Ingrid was the third and last guest to have a turn with Philip. As with all his lovers, the sex was great and she always felt in control. But something else happened. She reached him on a personal level none of the other women had ever neared. To her, Philip was no mere hunk. She talked to him like a person. She felt his loneliness in the midst of company. She actually made him laugh.
Bonita heared the laughter from the bathroom next door, and knew the arrangement was going to die. Even if this liaison proved to be a one-hour stand, Philip would never again treat every sister equally. If Ingrid asked to become a sister, Bonita and/or Julie would have to lead a request to reject the application, sparking a fight with the junior members that would surely break the group apart. Or Ingrid wouldn’t ask into the group, but would just take Philip all for herself; the spineless boy wouldn’t think but to follow Ingrid out and away from the best life a guy could ever want. Maybe she and the other core sisters could go out and recruit a new sex toy; there must be plenty of cute boys who know to shut up and fuck when they’re told to. In any event, it would be a lot of fun to find and train him. Bonita got up and flushed her recent life away.
Odd Shaped Breasts
6/1/93
There was a girl who spent most of her childhood afraid of getting large breasts. She expected it as early as age eight; the women of her mother’s family were all cursed by ungraceful bustlines stuck like clay onto short torsos.
But as she grew into her curse, she was dismayed to find herself even further cursed than she’d ever feared. Her breasts grew not only large but odd-shaped. The left pointed up like a sideways Dairy Queen cone. The right was round, or more ovoid; it was looser than the left, and bounced sideways when she ran forward. She showered and dressed in gym class as quickly as she could; she tried to keep her back to the other girls as much as she could, which wasn’t much. She always wore thick support bras that just made her breasts look even larger.
The good boys, i.e. the boys who let their gossipy sisters influence their dating choices, avoided her religiously.
The bad boys welcomed her; they loved any large breasts no matter how odd-shaped. She gained a slut label, but didn’t make out with anyone until after she’d become fully accepted into the bad-boy community.
The bad girls were jealous of her; partly because she eventually became adept at stealing their boyfriends, partly because they were in awe of a deformity so peculiarly feminine, so peculiarly permanent; a true scar of life, far more authentic than any tattoo.
The good girls hated her, naturally. They hated anybody who was different; her deformity was so OUT THERE, up front, unhidable from a gym class of the 100 snootiest girls in school, that the good girls naturally had to hate her even more than they hated other different people. With no peer-group support for academic or extracurricular work, she became disenchanted with school. The bad boys graciously entered her into the alternate reality of Southern Comfort and Winstons for lunch, which further hurt her chances of faculty support.
With her college and career prospects dim indeed, her main opportunity for upward mobility was marriage. Her family took her into the city for a makeover consultation. They spent hundreds on a new wardrobe, new hair and new color scheme for her. To keep her away from the bad boys, her parents shunted her off to afternoon charm and bearing classes; these only put her in further close contact with, and harassment by, the good girls.
On the day she graduated from high school, she moved in with a 22-year-old who still hung out one of the bad boys. He got a job driving a truck for his dad’s company; she got a job as a fill-in dispatcher for the company, and finally became its office manager.
After a few years of hearty drinking, her doctor warned her to take up a sport. Still self-conscious about her breasts, she wouldn’t go to a health club or jog or swim in public. She might have died without a home exercise machine that she would use in the living room on her days off with all the curtains drawn. She never had a massage, never took her bra off in a fitting room, never wore a two-piece swimsuit, never skinny-dipped, never breast-fed her only child (a son). To the end of her days, no woman saw her odd-shaped breasts except her doctor and nurse.
The only men who ever saw them were her husband and the several affairs she had over the years. Whenever she began an affair with a new lover, she undressed in the dark and would only make love under the sheets. She always told her lovers she preferred to keep a sense of mystery about her.
Naked Women, What They Do
3/11/93
THINGS NAKED WOMEN ARE SHOWN DOING
THINGS I’D LIKE TO SEE NAKED WOMEN DOING
THINGS NAKED WOMEN SHOULDN’T DO
(at least wear shoes; you could break your foot making a sudden stop)
Baseball Song
6/24/92
A struggling songwriter comes up with a great idea, from a career standpoint. He will write an upbeat, wholesome pop song about baseball, one that every team will want to play in the stadium between innings, a song that could get used in commercials or in movies. A song that could earn royalties for 10, 15 years or more. A song that would provide him with a modest but steady income – at least enough to tie him over during the really lean times. The problem is that he can’t break out of his established songwriting style: morose dirges about the underside of life.
His first lyric talks about enjoying a ball game as an escape from a miserable job and a girlfriend who left him when he refused to subsidize her coke habit. The song’s signature theme is the “Charge” fanfare, transposed to a minor key. Nobody buys it.
His second draft asks the listener to glory in the antics on the field and not to worry about the fate of the Hatians in the baseball factory or about one player and all his pregnant mistresses in each American League city or about all the former players who wasted their best years between AA teams and injuries. His manager tells him to keep trying.
He manages to mention the game a little more in his third lyric, where he wishes he could soar away like a home run instead of living the life of a ball at batting practice. Every record company turns it down, even Homestead.
Finally, he comes up with a song mentioning nothing of his own job or his ex-wife. He creates a stunning, rousing melody line, playable by r&b bar bands and stadium organists alike. He comes up with a suitable title, “You’ll See Me In the Stands.” Fighting every impulse, every learned behavior, he succeeds in writing only positive statements about the fantasy world in the ballpark, the great sights, sounds, and smells, where winning is heaven and even losing isn’t that bad. But his most sincere praise came for the images other baseball songwriters ignore: the spitting, the cup adjustments, the fights in the stands, the chance to lip-read managers’ obscenities on the big scoreboard screen, the pleasant burps with each king-size hot dog, the chance to get drunk in the sunshine in a crowd, until even a White Sox-Indians double-header seems lively. At the pleadings of his aghast agent, he does one more rewrite, trying to be simple and heartfelt about grand slams, no-hitters and double plays. Yet even in this whitebread version, he ends up praising the underpublicized joys of ground rule doubles and pop-up flies to the shortstop. The guy’s agent is in the process of signing the song over to a major record producer when the agent gets in trouble with his coke supplier and gets sold something that puts him out of commission for a long time. The song eventually does get recorded, by the songwriter himself, but does not go far.
Planet Susan
6/17/92
Planet Susan is still called Planet Susan, years after the Susan it was named after left the man who named it. In her sixth year as co-colonizer, she conspired with the crew of the planet’s only regular supply ship to stow away, leaving behind a stack of used oxygen tanks equal to her weight and a note that is still famous today:
“I’ve had it with this godforsaken rock. I’ve had it with one-and-a-half gravity – and don’t you DARE say ‘one-point-four-seven-six to be precise’. I’ve had it with breathing synthesized oxygen and with drinking my own recycled and refiltered fluids. I’ve had it with having to wear this stupid temperature-controlled body suit any time I just want to get out of this high-tech trailer of a house they call a ‘controlled environment module.’ I’ve had it with the quote-unquote ‘special status’ of being the Only Woman on the Planet; all that means is that I have to ‘service’ your crew and the crews of the supply ships – though if you want to know the truth, there were the times I was glad I didn’t depend on you for sex. That would’ve been even more maddening. But you know what I’ve had it with the most? Do you? I’ve had it with you. With your crusading-explorer-boy attitude.”
Unfortunately for the man she left behind, once a planet, asteroid or natural satellite has been colonized and christened, its name is on the records and cannot be changed. This proved an insurmountable challenge to two of his next three wives, who left out of frustration. The third wife changed her own name to Susan and outlived him.
Front Line Caller
6/12/92
She worked for a year as a front line caller at a membership-warehouse store. All day long, she stood at the checkout line and read the inventory code numbers of purchases aloud to the cashier standing next to her.
Until she failed a surprise drug test, and was promptly fired with no references. It was the day after she’d smoked an anniversary joint to celebrate one year of divorce (precisely twice as long as the marriage had lasted). He’d left her and town after a stormy relationship that stopped short of fisticuffs several times. After it was over she decided that a two-party marriage might have worked but not their menage a trois with a bottle as the most beloved partner. She cleaned up, dried out, and went to work. For a year she accurately read one six-digit number after another, placing the often-heavy products up from one shopping cart and sticking them in another cart.
She got by with as little ass-kissing as she could get away with. She never memorized the chain’s Mission Statement. She never participated in nor contributed to company-wide fund drives for the officially sanctioned charity, an outfit that hired ex-sports stars to tell kids to get high on sports not drugs. She got away with her nonconformity because of her unique qualification for the job of front line caller. As a half-Hispanic woman, she was good for management to keep up front as a symbol of the company’s open-minded attitude, even if she never got close to the promotion to cashier that she kept petitioning for. She made an effort to be nice to the older couples who came there to stock up a year’s supply of nonperishable foods. She did not make an effort to be nice to the Bill Blass-suited businessmen leading their underlings to pick out only the cheapest coffee for the office break room.
But that was over now. She was now unemployed, tenuously holding on to the only cat-friendly apartment in the neighborhood in her price range. She was left with no job, no marriage, a renewed taste for moderately priced white wine, and a growing stack of responses to a personal ad she’d placed a week before she was fired. She’d worked to write an ad that would emphasize her likes and dislikes (she liked long walks by the beach and disliked anybody who reminded her of her ex-husband). She got over 200 replies, some of whom sounded more plausible than others. On a lark, she decided to call the least plausible of them all.
He was, in his own estimation, the modern day successor to Jack Kerouac and the Merry Pranksters. He was the new incarnation of uncompromising rebellion against the square society and all its petty rules and regulations. To him, all religion was a sick joke. He watched the fundamentalist cable channel just to laugh at it. Speed limits and auto-emission controls were part of a puritan conspiracy to deprive Americans of speed, the second- or third-greatest sensation life can offer. He lived his life to the fullest and had no patience for anybody who didn’t.
He called talk radio stations from his car phone at least once a week. He loved to get in a good long tirade against anything governmental. He loved to shout about how welfare recipients should get a 60-day notice to get a job or go to jail. Once, the host asked him if he knew where all these ungrateful cheats could get work; he hung up. He wanted to say that he personally employed more minority youth than that whitebread radio station ever would, but at the last second chose not to reveal that.
He provided work to several dozen otherwise-unemployed young men. They served him as wholesale and retail distributors of a popular, highly profitable, illegal product. The retail staff members were trained to stand out in the sidewalk in high-traffic locations, dressed in easily-identifiable garb, making their sales out in the open all afternoon and evening. He realized that this was not the most discreet way to conduct illegal transactions, but he also knew that his workers were highly replaceable. For every one that was jailed, four more were anxiously being groomed by his wholesalers. None of his retailers knew who he was; few had even met him.
In order to appease the Internal Revenue Service with the image of a legitimate wealth source, he also ran several other entrepreneurial endeavors. He owned a printing company that serviced several regional religious magazines. He owned a mail order company that sold megavitamins and weight-gain drink powders. He held a variety of interlocking real estate investments into which virtually any profit or loss figure could be plugged.
Yet for all of the successes in his life, he fully knew that something was missing. He needed a woman. The problem was, most of the women in his income group in this radical-chic town were irritatingly addicted to self-importance. They were ready in an instant to catalog everything that they believed was wrong about him, his money, his way of life. One even told him that she wouldn’t sleep with him unless he donated money to her favorite animal rights charity. He’d have accepted the offer if she was going to have kept the money, but Miss Goody Goody insisted that he had to prove his selflessness. Why couldn’t he find a good old fashioned golddigger? At least somebody who wanted his money for herself was somebody he could understand.
He sent the same photocopied response to every woman’s personal ad in the Weekly every week. The form letter made no attempt to respond to anything mentioned in the woman’s ad. Instead, it listed his personal wealth (“I own a Mercedes Benz 320E, a 28′ sailboat, a waterfront house in Medina, land in the San Juans…”).
She was going to throw away his Xeroxed reply, but on a lark decided that there were worse things in life than a free meal at a good restaurant.
He was glad to see a reply to his reply. Not only was it the first in the last 100 ads he’d answered, but from her phone call she seemed to be his perfect mark: young, seemingly naive, easily seduced by wealth.
During their initial phone call, she declined several requests to give him her home address. Instead, he met her at a bar near her West Seattle apartment. He told her how he was unaccustomed to the tavern’s dusky atmosphere and unsophisticated clientele. He was going to tell a biting joke about the stringy-looking young men at the back pool table, until she turned around and waved to them as longtime friends. He bought her two glasses of wine before it was time to go.
She rode in his personal luxury car to a stand-up comedy club that was one of his investments. He knew he was stuck with another do-gooder when she complained about his using a disabled-only parking space. He resolved out loud that he was going to have a good time anyway, and would make her have one whether she knew she wanted it yet or not.
It was Marathon Night, when 30 struggling young comedians (all working only for the “exposure”) took brief turns providing continuous entertainment. They weren’t slick with experience, but they maintained the highly assertive attitude that the businessman got off on. He clapped and shouted his approval at two comics who specialized in snide remarks against women, blacks and gays. He pounded his shot glass on the table and roared with the best of them, especially after the joke advocating mass deportations against those who refuse to speak English in public. He even applauded at the female comedian who delivered nothing but anti-male insults; he loved to think of himself as someone with the power to make people miserable. He couldn’t have responded more approvingly at a joke advocating mass castrations.
His date, the former front line caller, found nothing amusing about any of these comedians. She told him she was glad she didn’t have to listen to a whole routine by any one of them. He ordered her to lighten up, and ordered her a double. The dinner and drinks were OK, she thought, nothing all that special. But they were free, and the comedians couldn’t go on forever.
They did go on forever; at least it seemed like that after three and a half hours and ten rounds of drinks. She heard at least four comedians who listed the differences between New York and Los Angeles. Six people delivered very similar jokes about the vice president’s most recent speech. Two people joked about the comparative half-lives of nuclear waste and Hostess Twinkies. There was one accordion player (female), two banjo players (male), and one pan flute player (male, bearded). The male comedians variously described women as bitches, lying bitches, whores, sluts, cunts, babes, broads, pussy, twat, poontang, bouncing balls, milking machines, and (from the only black performer) ladies. The female comedians described men as jerks, creeps, dicks, pricks, cases of testosterone poisoning, warmongers, fascists, and penis life-support systems. The comedians of both genders tended to agree that love sucked; all that really mattered was getting yours and getting out. With each round of drinks, the businessman became louder and cruder, while the front line caller became quieter and queasier. He paid little attention to her after the start of hour four; she was a party pooper, just one more square woman who couldn’t take a joke. He refused to let her spoil his good time. When one particularly dogmatic comedian told a joke advocating the resumption of atomic warfare against Japan, he hooted and raised his fist into the air. She lowered her head to the table. On stage, the comedian spotted her and asked what she was, a brown-eyed Mata Hari? Didn’t she love her country? Wasn’t she even alive? Hey you, I know you’re out there. Earth to bitch, earth to bitch.
She sank in her chair, trying to avoid the follow-spot light now aimed on her. Her date forcibly stood her up. She stared hard at the comedian, with the icy heat of focused anger. She refused to speak, no matter how insistently the comedian ordered her to. Hey bitch, don’t you got a tongue? Don’t you got a brain? Don’t you even got ears under that helmet of hair spray? Se habla espanol? Sprechen sie deutsch, bitch? Me talk-ee to you-ee!
By this time, the audience was staring back at her as one unified force. They were waiting for the snappy rejoinder from her, the return insult that would up the level of hostility. Either that, or for her to start crying and run away. Defeat or victory: which would it be?
She glanced at her date in a futile search for support. He slapped her butt, hard. Not like a sexual lecher but like a high school basketball player slapping a buddy. He grabbed her right wrist, to prevent any attempt on her part to flee. He erratically motioned at her to speak up. He loudly whispered at her to stop acting like a girl.
That did it. She knew she had to conquer the moment. But how? If she insulted the comedian back, she’d be doing just what the comedian and everybody else in the room wanted her to do. She’d be descending to their level, just like giving in to the dark side of the force. Through the blinding spotlight, the heckling crowd, her date’s whoop-whoop noises, the comedian’s come-on pose, and her own pre-hangover condition whistling through her ears, she searched for the right thing to do. After the longest ten seconds of her life, a smile suddenly appeared on her lips. From the deepest part of her soul, she began to laugh. Within seconds she was uncontrollably guffawing. She laughed while pointing daintily at the comedian with her left arm. She laughed while she slipped her right arm out from her date’s hold; she looked down at him like a junior high school girl snickering at an immature boy. She grabbed his drink and downed it quickly while smirking all the way, even when she momentarily choked on one swallow. She laughed at the drops of whiskey and spit beading up on her fabric-protected scarf.
The businessman just sat there disturbed and confused; he’d never seen anybody laughing like this in all his evenings at the club. The other audience members sat at their tables stone-faced, except for one couple who tried to heckle her to shut up. Nobody followed their lead. She laughed out loud at them, doubling over. The comedian gave increasingly strident orders for her to shut up and let him continue. He only had five minutes in this lousy pay-to-play club to make an impression, and this cunt here was ruining it! The more seriously he behaved, the funnier she thought he was. After nearly a minute of orgasmic laughter, she took one last look at the comedian while trying to compose herself, gave up and laughed out loud again. She was still laughing as she took her coat and purse and stumbled drunkenly out of the room. Her date made no attempt to follow her. As she walked out, a single male audience member joined in her laughing. The comedian kept trying to resume his routine, but the man’s laughter totally broke his character. The comedian left the stage in defeat. Nobody applauded him except the laughing man, who gave him the full-hand clap of a kindergarten kid.
She finally began to gain her composure as she descended the ramp in the lobby, catching one long breath away from the smoke and the noise. She was stopped by one of the female comedians she’d seen in the early hours of the show. The female comedian demanded to know why she hadn’t attacked him back, why she hadn’t up for herself properly, why she hadn’t told him off or at least given him the finger. You’ve gotta let the pricks know you mean business, she said; that’s the only language they’re ever gonna understand. The ex-front line caller stared in the female comedian’s face until it was in focus through the alcohol blur, shook her head and gave out a quiet laugh. She stumbled past her.
As she continued down the ramp toward the front door, the two middle-aged doormen ended their phone call from the manager backstage. The men stood before her and warned her not to come there again. She darted aside, gave them a wide smile, and trotted out the door.
Outside, she breathed a deep breath of almost-fresh downtown air. She calmed herself down, pulled her coat on, and fumbled through her purse for a cigarette. She walked out into the parking lane and looked up the street for a cab. The pre-hangover noise was still ringing in her ears, but she still heard footsteps slowly approach her from behind. She took another deep breath and prepared herself to confront her date. Instead, she turned around and saw a man from the audience, a nice-looking guy with an open face and a coffee stain on his trenchcoat. He stood just outside of her personal space. They looked at one another briefly. He started laughing. She joined in. They giggled into the next cab together.
Her businessman date strolled out the door in time to see the cab pull off. He was a bit sad that he wouldn’t get to do his patented plea-for-forgiveness routine. Oh well, at least his people were still inside, ready to make him laugh.
Dream Village
5/26/92
There is a man who has worked his entire life at Safeco, supervising the composition of claims-rejection form letters. He conforms precisely to the company dress code and its other rules of behavior. Every evening he patiently sits in the line of cars waiting to drive the four blocks from the parking garage to the freeway on-ramp. As the years have gone by, he’s developed the distinctive look of a lifelong insurance man — the Norelco-shaved double chin, the thinning hair combed over sideways. Only the tape deck in his Accord betrays his double life. It plays his own music, lilting folk ballads and stirring anthems about the good life in a very special place.
He spent his whole non-working life writing, drawing and building documents and objects relating to his ideal society, a community he had been imagining since his childhood in ever-greater detail. A place where everyone is cordial and hardworking, where all laws are thoughtfully obeyed, where intense emotions are kept in check for the good of all through multiple layers of social controls. Where families are kept intact because unnatural lusts are successfully sublimated into good deeds and productivity. His basement has become totally occupied by a sprawling tabletop scale model of his fantasy village, detailed down to the level of which houses belong to which workers at which farms and factories. It’s a quiet little village. All the houses are close to the grassy common, the recreational field, the church, the school, the town hall, the main street of small shopkeepers. There are no cars, only delivery trucks used by the farmers and shopkeepers. Rolling hills at the edges of the scale model imply fertile farmlands off in every direction beyond the town. The only industries are the farm-processing plants at one edge of town and a mystery factory along the road leading out of town. He still hasn’t decided what this factory will make, but it’s something that brings money into the community and supports a healthy, alert workforce.
Every Sunday, he gathers his scale-model people into the church; he dresses in a Protestant minister’s robe and delivers a different sermon each week from a pulpit near his model church building. Every week he types up a one- or two-page “newspaper” for the town, on his old manual typewriter, detailing the community’s marriages, births, deaths, school lunch menus, economic health, and justice system. It’s a pretty dull sheet, since no shocking crimes or scandalous behaviors can ever exist there.
When he’s not working on that, he’s painting artworks that symbolically express the community’s aesthetic beliefs, paintings that tell stories about the heroic founding of the village and the quiet heroines and heroes who live in it today. Some of them are action scenes, showing the rescue of a trapped child, the building of the church, the first town meeting some 50 years ago. One painting shows the women of the town’s most prominent family, one standing in front of another, going back generations to one of the town founders; all are wearing white robes, all are looking directly at the viewer with a noble countenance that could also be interpreted as a maternalistic stare-down. The women towards the back are painted as apparitions, to denote that they are now deceased. All are based on his mother and women from his family, except for a young woman and girl in the front. They represent a divorcée who turned down his offer of sex, and her daughter. Every woman who has rejected him becomes a painting, a character in the town. He creates some of the paintings in his imagination after the women decline his pleas; others are based on live sessions with paid models obtained through the local art schools. The young models invariably love the flowing billowy costumes he gets them to wear. They usually agree to a quiet dinner with him, but have in no instance ever agreed to his nervous but polite after-dinner propositions. They turn him down as respectfully as they can; a few have even agreed to another modeling session for him, but then don’t show up. He paints the women as the spiritual and political leaders of the village, holding council meetings in their white robes, making speeches while simultaneously nursing infants.
There are children in the paintings and the tableaux and the “newspaper,” happy children who play all the time without making too much noise or beating up on each other, who study rigorously, who eagerly help out with the family chores.
The existence of men in the utopia is revealed mostly through implication (the presence of children in the paintings, names mentioned in the newspaper). The figurines on the streets of the scale model include many men, but every scene of work activity outside of the factories is dominated by women and children.
While painting, he plays his tape of the soothing community folk music, recorded by musicians he found at the Folklife Festival. His growing library includes wedding marches, funeral dirges, playful children’s tunes, sweet love songs, upbeat motivational ditties for the workplace, sentimental mother-and-child ballads. He writes every song with a specific person and situation in mind. The factory anthems sing of the glories of hard work without mentioning the product these workers are making. The personal songs are written in the character of one specific townsperson. The most poignant are the love songs he writes for each of his models, none of whom has ever heard their song. And the songs for children, singing of the proud compassion he holds to all of his imagined offspring, the gifts he will give them, the family love they will share.
