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RoboBug
A three-part comic book story of tragic fantasy
by Clark Humphrey
(Based upon an idea by Kathleen Skeels)
3/21/91
CHAPTER ONE
PAGES 1-2 (2-page splash): A detailed image of the mature giant robot with its body bio-engineered from chritin (the substance that makes up a real insect’s exoskeleton), its six retractable hydraulic legs, its computer brain, its satellite dish tail, its flying mechanism, the turbine power generator in its torso that can use any combustible material as fuel, its giant eyes, the sensors in its snout. Perhaps these details can be noted as in a technical drawing. The entire robot has a complicated but elegant look (imagine how elegant the Lunar Module looked). Most of its components are either black or steel-grey (it will be all black on the b&w pages).
Narration: “Please sit down and allow ourselves to become better acquainted. Please do not be alarmed by my appearance; I visit you with the most humble of purposes. I am the world’s first fully sentient robotic device. I am also the most intelligent being of any type in the history of the world, and the only machine capable of growing and adding to itself. I am also the most tragic creature ever doomed to exist, for I have inadvertantly caused the end of all civilization on Earth — TWICE. My name: I have several. My initial project name was “Experimental Research Robot.” My device name was “ERR 7-Y.” But the name by which I am best known is the nickname given by one of my human monitors — ROBOBUG.”
PAGES 3-5: Multi-panel pages with the origin of RoboBug. A team of university laboratory scientists in Edmonton, Alberta invents the first “living” mechanism. Unlike the cheesy movies where bioengineered life takes full human form from the start, these scientists are satisfied with having created a mechanical insect — or, more precisely, a self-portable, self-modifying research unit with a built-in computer unit and microbiology lab. Its microchip “brain” knows how to make its chritin body fly and maneuver around, without any human-operated remote controls. Pressured to provide a practical purpose for the creature in order to maintain funding, the scientists equip Robo with an amazing array of sensors and the ability to send the information it gathers and analyzes back to home basis via a two-way satellite relay. In one other innovation, they bio-engineer into Robo the ability to learn from his data and observations, as well as to maintain its energy support by ingesting leaves and other readily available raw materials.
PAGES 6-7: With a rousing send-off, Robo is sent flying off to a very remote area of the Canadian wilderness at the northern limit of naturally-growing vegetation. His missions: to explore how plant and insect life in the wilderness is affected by far-away industry and pollution; to study how all life in an ecosystem is inter-related; to unlock the secrets of growth and life among these creatures; and to help the scientists on the other end of the satellite link determine whether there really is such a thing as a collective intelligence among “lower” life forms.
PAGES 8-10: After having been there a while, Robo learns the growth patterns of biological life. Jealous of their ability to become more than what they were born as, Robo taps in long-distance to the university’s entire computer network and programs his own way to grow, to become stronger, larger and more intelligent. He wills the mineral materials in his body into a state of mitosis. He also learns more and more about the ways of the biological world and becomes more enamored of the collective ways of nature than of the competitve ways of man, whose bulldozing and pollution are, he discerns, already threatening his adopted bioregion’s fragile way of life.
PAGES 11-12: Robo meets a dying swarm of bees, starved for lack of pollen and menaced by ticks. He gladly learns to communicate with their collective intelligence (mistaken by man for “instinct”) and offers to rearrange their genetic code so they could become stronger, larger, capable of flying farther and surviving harsher conditions.
PAGE 13: Since bees are biological, not mechanical, creatures, Robo could only cause them to produce mutated offspring who in turn would have even more powerful grandchildren, and so on. He lovingly takes the beautiful but sickly queen bee in his mechanical arms and makes the proper alterations in the chromosomes that will result in her eggs.
PAGE 14: Thus, every annual mating season brought a more powerful strain of bees in the wilderness. While remembering that queen bee ever since, Robo heads off in a different direction, becoming ever larger and stronger and more aware of the world around him; and becoming more peculiar in the reports he sends back to the lab.
PAGES 15-18: Within six short years, Robo senses that the closest source of air pollution has ceased. The mutations cause a change in the frequency of the bees’ communications, so Robo is not on a communications “wavelength” with this or subsequent generations. News reports tell of mysterious human deaths around the edges of the wilderness, where developers had been clearing the land for future industry. The scientists ask Robo to investigate; he gives flowery reports of the comeback of plant and animal life and concludes that no threat to or from humans exists at this time.
PAGE 19: Unknown to Robobug, the bees have mutated to the size of footballs and are mercilessly attacking the land developers and their crews. The Phylum War has begun.
CHAPTER TWO
PAGES 1-2: Robobug in his beloved wilderness home. Narration: revised version of the first issue’s opening, incorporating a brief summary of his origin.
PAGE 3: Brief summary of the first issue.
PAGES 4-6: Robo knows something is wrong back home when he can no longer properly send his data back to the home-base computer system. It fails to properly receive his messages, as if routine maintenance had been ignored. What messages he does receive from the university lab where he was created are patchy and incomplete, but they do reveal a sense of panic that Robo cannot explain away as the scientists’ constant fear of losing funding. Weeks later, the relay link goes dead. Robo is alone in the world.
PAGES 7-8: By this time, he has become fully capable of reasoning without the need of the university computers, so he continues his quest for the secrets of life. While smoke and pollutants had been gone from his wilderness for a few years, they now returned with what he could sense were far more distant origins. Then he senses large fires, intense destruction, coming from the general direction of his original home town.
PAGES 9-11: He flies out of the wilderness to see abandoned construction sites, then abandoned highway projects, then abandoned towns and cities in ruins. His sensors fail to pick up any air traffic control radar signals and only a few automated radio broadcasts, chiefly pre-recorded distress signals and automated beautiful-music stations (which offend his increasingly sophisticated aural sensibilities).
PAGES 12-13: Finally back at the remains of Edmonton, he sees the university lab destroyed, the town deserted. No living human is in sight and only a few dead ones.
PAGES 14-15: Not yet knowing what is happening to himself in response, he seeks to understand the feelings he is feeling but cannot identify. He seeks solace in the university libraries, where he absorbs all recorded human knowledge available to him and learns the good side of the destructive creature that had created him. He absorbs all the human cultural achievements which have now been abandoned — poetry, music, art. He becomes a depressed-romantic poet and searches for love in a world where love has been removed.
PAGES 16-17: Emerging from his historical research as a changed robot, a more philosophical and less coldly analytical machine, he soon learns the full scope of the tragedy surrounding him. In the news reports he uncovers (including the last recorded words of mankind), he learns that bees have become mammoth creatures who have set up a society of their own and enslaved those humans they have not killed. The bees have learned to communicate by human means, thanks to computer-translation devices. The human construction squads are pressed into building an ordered, choiceless, completely structured society for the bees.
PAGES 18-19: Paralyzed by remorse, Robo wanders around in total depression (expressed most romantically) until he flies into the outskirts of a newly-constructed bee city and sees enslaved humans finishing a giant artistic likeness of the current queen bee, the ten-foot-long descendent of that tragic queen he rescued so few decades ago. At the sight of her stately image, he realizes the full culmination of his work at gaining the emotions and drives of a true biological creature. He immediately and totally falls in love.
CHAPTER THREE
PAGES 1-2: Robo amidst the landscape of a bee city, one of thousands of immense projects being built by enslaved worker humans to service the now-dominant species, the giant bees. Everything is hexagonal, including the street system. Narration: Revision of previous introductions, with Robo welcoming the reader back for a third visit and the conclusion of his tragic tale.
PAGES 3-4: Recap in narration and flashback of the previous chapter, while Robo is walking and flying through the suburbs of the new bee civilization. Because bees have a collective intelligence and concentrate their efforts in short but energetic lifespans, the progress of bee cities has been amazingly quick. Each city has two main artworks: a memorial to the first mutant bees to give their lives stinging the first human casualties of the Phylum War, and a reverent image of the Queen.
PAGE 5: Robo finds human slaves in every bee town he sees. They are in factories making honey products for bee luxury foods. They are constructing giant hexagonal hives for the next generation of bees to be born into. He discovers the last survivor of the lab where he was created, a woman now hard at work developing new systems for pollen processing. She does not recognize Robo.
PAGE 6: But there is a flaw in the bee civilization. While they have grown physically, the bees have not progressed beyond an “instinctual” level of thinking. Unable to be creative, they are now more mechanical than Robo-Insect.
PAGES 7-8: Robo believes he can solve this by bringing love into the heart of the current queen, whose image is artistically rendered everywhere. The gracious and all-powerful queen, Robo knows, is the only other creature currently living who might possess enough individual intelligence to understand his love for her and his concern for her world, the world he considers himself to have fathered.
PAGES 9-11: Robo overcomes many obstacles (including human and bee bodyguards, some of whom he directly but apologetically kills, having determined no other way to get past them) in his way to access to the queen, who is nearing her mating time, enthroned in her incubation chamber at the heart of the bee capital city, surrounded by honey supplies and chambers for her thousands of eggs.
PAGES 12-13: Eventually, his mad love overcomes them both. Unfortunately, Robo’s passion temporarily cancels out his memory banks.
PAGES 14-16: It is only after they have mated that Robo allows himself to remember a key facet of bee biology: that the queen can only mate once in her life. With that mating “wasted” on him, she cannot produce offspring, and the tribe will die off. Because this particular queen is the most purebred offspring of the queen created by Robo thirty generations ago, only her offspring could keep the mutation going. The queens of the other bee cities have too much regular-bee DNA in them, and their children and grandchildren turn out to be sickly things, incapable of keeping the advanced infrastructure of mutant-bee society functioning.
PAGE 17: The queen is the last to die, in Robo’s arms. His sorrow is compounded by the knowledge that no living creature can comprehend it.
PAGES 18-19: The ending reveals that Robo has been telling his sad tale in the town square of the crumbling bee capital city, to a gathering of humans who have been somehow bee-lined out of any memory of their own past, and who don’t understand what he’s saying. He has settled down to his last and greatest duty –before his material construction rusts or decays away, to teach humans how to be human again. Robo is giving poetry appreciation lessons to humans, trying to help them overcome their worker-bee “instincts.”
It’s Elliot Gould Week on the Late Movie!
Weird fiction piece by Clark Humphrey
12/3/90
The year is 1971. No longer is style reserved for the elite or the effete. No longer is the female the only gender permitted to dress with flair and individuality. Men have been freed from the constraints of boring fashions. Now everyone can look singular and provocative, thanks to miracle fabrics and a sophisticated fashion distribution system. Todd Phillips is one of the men who are making this revolution in popular style possible.
By night, Todd is just another struggling writer in Manhattan, but by day he’s the overworked assistant (and brother-in-law) to Joey Newgarden, the president of a new, NOW company, organizing deals between America’s hottest new clothing designers and the efficient textile factories of the Far East. Every morning Todd dresses in wide-legged trousers and Qiana print shirts, brushes his caucasian Afro, and heads to the bustling midtown offices of Today Casuals. Just as he leaves the elevator, he puts away his END THE WAR badge; his brother-in-law still, for all his hipness, supports the war, giving frequent, unsolicited sermons on Vietnam’s potential as a source of low-cost labor. In this morning’s lecture to Todd, Joey also mentions the consulting team hired to put together names for all the bright new colors Today Casuals is using. Too many of them still had names associated with women’s clothes, Joey barks. Todd reads aloud from a list of potential masculine-sounding names for teal and fuscia. Joey sucks on his cigar for a while, then stops Todd in between “Ox-blood” and “Flame Red.” Joey has a new assignment for Todd. He is to go out and do research on the street, in the hippest discotechques, wherever today’s people are gathered. Todd is to find out two things: what clothes men want to put on, and what clothes women want men to take off.
Todd goes home to his sweet but perhaps too square wife Alicia (Lauren Hutton in an orange-brown sweaters). It is she who has had to live with her brother Joey all these years, and gives her husband Todd tips on placating the geezer, which he follows too literally, leading to wacky hijinx. Todd tells her about his new assignment. Alicia sensibly says that she has never judged anybody by the clothes they wore. After some more bantying about, they do something really daring. They head for the bedroom without putting the dinner dishes away. The scene ends in the bedroom as Todd, in colorful boxer shorts and socks, carefully folds and hangs up his clothes.
The next day, Todd has several short wacky scenes with the hip young people of today. His first hilarious encounter is with a few protest marchers outside a bank building. The kids fail to convince Todd that wearing an END THE WAR badge isn’t enough; Todd fails to convince the kids that their shabby-looking clothes went out of style two years ago. He then appears in a record store in the East Village, where he has a funny argument with a bemused clerk who tries to tell Todd that it’s Led Zeppelin, not The Lead Zeppelins. The smart-alecky young customers tease Todd by claiming they only wear wide jeans because of peer pressure, that they’d all rather be strutting around the Village in grey flannel suits.
Outside, Todd takes a wrong turn by trying to start up a full interview with a dope dealer trying to lay low. The dealer mistakes Todd for an undercover cop (“You’re looking and talking like a guy who wants to blend in but you really haven’t got a clue”). Threateningly, he tells Todd to get out of his life.
Todd quickly backs off, turns backwards around a corner and bumps into a young woman in the brightest orange hot pants ever made. Todd apologizes to the woman and says that she is obviously a young person who believes in herself and in the way she looks. Before he can get far into his interview, the woman asks if he wants a date or what, or else he can just stop bugging her. He continues asking what she thinks about men’s dress shirts in “pumped-up purple.” Her pimp shows up, mumbles something about “that new undercover pig on the street,” and gives him a prompt punch in the stomach. They leave Todd there to lie on the sidewalk as sunset approaches.
Finally getting up at the start of a rainstorm, Todd somehow stumbles into a swinging discotecheque. Lost amidst the blaring guitar-and-trumpet music, the flashing blue and pink lights, and the intensely fun-loving young singles drinking their pink and blue drinks, a dazed Todd stumbles to and fro across the dance floor and inadvertantly invents a wild new dance step. All eyes in the room are on him as he realizes that after years of trying, he is hip, he is in. He revives, becomes energetic. He attempts a major leap and rips the seat of his cheap Today Casuals pants. Everyone either laughs or turns away — except for one dangerously stunning brunette with eyebrows out to here and knees to just die for. Her huge eyes show an honest pity for this fool. She offers to sew up his pants back at her place.
In the next scene, she is in her studio apartment, still in her blue top, red short skirt and huge belt, sewing his pants. Todd comes out of the bathroom with his leisure suit jacket tied up around his waist. After some cute embarrassing jokes, she tells him that what she wants him to be wearing right now is nothing. She takes her clothes off in two smooth motions. Carefully folding and hanging up his clothes, he strips to his oversize boxer shorts. The seduction of Todd Phillips is completed in her swinging single’s pad, amongst the bedroom mirrors, the bright pink cocktails, and the loud folk/rock/trumpet soundtrack. She takes him (during the commercials), then spurns him when he reveals what a square he really is underneath his hip clothes.
He learns from her that the clothes women want to take off the most are the ones that say to them, “I’m a tasteless guy who’s rich and stuipd. You can take me for all I’ve got.” To her, Todd represents a good time, a nice one-night stand and nothing more. Disillisioned by her attitude, he becomes depressed, turning her completely off.
The next day, he quits his job to save his marriage. That evening, he has a good shouting match with the wife, ending on a surprise note of reconciliation and a bathtub scene, the two dressed as God had originally intended, their clothes strewn about the floor, uncared for.
The Male Feminist Convention
12/2/90
From dozens of study groups and coffeehouses across the U.S. and Canada, they came to the Male Feminist Convention. They argued over which of them bore the greatest amount of personalized guilt over crimes which they had not, as individuals, committed, but of which, as members of the male gender, they were still guilty.
On the first night a collective meal was prepared in the hotel banquet room. Instead, the men of the convention shared in cooking, serving, and cleaning up after the dinner. Every convention goer who volunteered in the process received a badge of honor reading, “I did my share!”, and was encouraged to wear the badge throughout the remainder of the convention. The hotel staff had nothing to do with making the meal, but was still paid in full for the work they would have performed, according to what hotel management said was an obscure union bylaw.
They read poems personally apologizing for the witch-burnings and the suppression of women in Iran. They cheered at films of dominant women serviced by submissive men. They held panel discussions about what mainstream books, movies and TV shows these men would like to ban for being “offensive to women.” They held a heated debate over whether to condemn Margaret Thatcher as a “man in a woman’s body.” They complained that the convention’s hotel didn’t employ more men in subservient jobs (waitress, maid). They held an art show featuring paintings and sculptures of goddesses with female faces and torsos but male musculature and expressions. The final day ended in discord; all eight speakers boasted of being more truly feminist than the other speakers. They all called each other closet misogynists. A fist fight broke out.
My Past Lives
11/21/90
In my past lives, I was:
Battle of the Stereotypes
11/20/90
It’s time for America’s newest and greatest game show: BATTLE OF THE STEREOTYPES!Two three-person teams battle it out to determine which side best lives up to the other’s expectations.
On my left: the MALE FANTASY LESBIANS! They’re tall! They’re thin! They wear high heels and expensive, fashionable clothes! They French-kiss each other and fondle each other’s tender shoulders at every opportunity. Their lipstick: Tourquoise. Their voices: Soft, yet assured. Their words: romantic little gems of wisdom. Their attitude: Total confidence in their beauty and in their love.
On my right: the LESBIAN FANTASY MALES! They’re short! They have Marine Corps haircuts! They wear soiled T-shirts and saggy jeans! Between their beer burps, they give each other long ideological arguments about the best ways to objectify women and to preserve The Patriarchy. Each of their hunting caps sports a patch: NRA, I (heart) Rape, and Death Penalty for Abortion.
Now you know the rules. I will ask questions of each team. Teams collect points for correctly guessing how the other team will answer. The team with the most points at the end of the game will win a fabulous trip to sunny Ecuador! But if, during the final cross-fire round, any member of a team starts to act like a human being, the other team automatically wins. You ready to play:
LFM Captain: We are in mastery of our desires and yours. We will always be on top!
MFL Captain: It is time. Goddess will guide us to the fulfillment of our goal.
LFM Team, in unison: Objectify! Objectify! Objectify!
MFL Team, in unison: Our love will prevail. Our love will triumph.
Fiction Fragments
Weird fiction pieces by Clark Humphrey
4/7/90-11/15/90
Cartoon: Three middle aged women, nude, in a suburban kitchen sipping coffee.
A Swing World magazine is on the table before them.
#1: I’d say four men per party is a good range for a beginning swinger. How about you?
#2: Of course we all use condoms these days, but I’m still on the pill. It’s so I’m not flowing during the same week as a BIG party…
#3: I just remembered where I first saw the woman my husband’s with right now! I set her hair just last week!…
him: your voice, your eyes, your lips, your breasts, your skin…
her: my voice, my eyes, my lips, my breasts, my skin…
Old-fashioned story of a loving nuclear family, including the young sensitive writer trying to write what she knows, as her teacher always advised. Only thing is, the autobio is not “nice” like Waltons or I Remember Mama, it mentions what really goes on in the family, the father beating up on and/or raping the kids, the mother ignoring or patronizing away the kids’ pain while she stays busy forming committees of prominent respectable ladies to keep Negroes out of the neighborhood, the crusty grandfather can’t stop telling obscene stories, the “failing” grandmother rattles on about radio soap opera characters as if they were real, nobody’s talking about the older sister who moved into a “hotel” in the next town. As for the writer, her manuscript pages are found, read, and burned by the parents and never gets anywhere in literature, settling down to a nice job in secretarial work, eventually getting her boss to leave his wife for her. The older sister becomes a madam, then a “legit” bar owner and finally a motel owner who retires comfortably after selling her land for a freeway. The younger brother, who at the end turns out to have been the real narrator, marries a local factory heiress, squanders the money in an investment scheme, and now lives in an adults-only mobile-home park.
A streetwise kid who knows the smarts and knows the ins and outs of everything in his town. He also knows how to do all the cool things. He knows the risks of drugs, and their long-term downer effects; but he also knows the violent hypocrisy behind the conservative lifestyles touted in school as the only alternative to drugs.
Escort services, small-loan companies, 50-cent-on-the-dollar tax refund cashers, plasma centers, hit men, adult bookstores
The Old Bank Cafe, the Old Slaughterhouse Mall, the Old Brothel Bookstore, Old Opium Den Sandwiches ‘n’ Things, the Old Marketplace Industrial Park, Old Courthouse townhomes, the Old Townhouse law offices, etc.
The friendly “Pastor Bob Sez” advertorial column that starts out friendly but ends up a weekly tirade against godless sex education and satanic ultraliberals; the editorial that starts out to be about almost anything but turns out to be a plea to support your local merchants and not to shop in that new discount mall just over the county line; the folksy neighborhood gossip col. that is so incomprehensibly written it could conceivably contain code messages for one of the conspiracy groups “exposed” in lengthy letters to the editor from one old blind man; the hobby corner all about macaroni art, landscape painting, knitted beer-can hats, and knit swimsuits with quite large knit-holes.
It could be a 1974 edition, full of blistering defenses of our hero Nixon.
You’re just like one of those Transformers that looks like an Autobot but it’s really a Decepticon.
ALL I REALLY, REALLY NEEDED TO KNOW
I LEARNED ON THE PLAYGROUND
10/20/90
other boys will call him a faggot.
it does stop him from being punished.
don’t have the most TV commercials for them.
you can get away with almost anything.
They will tell you that ignoring the bullies will make them stop;
when you’ve already learned that it just makes them hit you worse.
in the first week of first grade,
you’ll be the last one left when the teams are chosen
in the last week of high school.
even if you’ve left them alone.
They say, “I’m so good, evil things become good things if it’s me doing them.”
they stop doing it and start saying it was stupid.
are just trying hard to find something to imitate.
the first day you bring it to school.
just because they’ve been told to do it to you.
but all you want to hear about homicide.
For boys, it’s what you do.
can really make you feel worse.
but it doesn’t really work.
I’ll Do Anything!
8/20/90
A young man and a young woman are talking in a loud whisper at the University Bistro. The sax player’s great; the rest of the band is adequate.
Twenty minutes ago, she sat alone at a table for two; the other tables were all occupied. He asked if her other seat was taken. “It is now, if you like.” Her voice is soft but audible even over a sax solo. As she drinks, she places the traces of her thick lipstick on the same spot of the glass with each sip. He fights himself to keep from staring at her pale bare arms, at her strapless black dress, even though she has positioned herself so that he would have to look past her to see the band. By the second break, she’s directing him in small talk, touching his hand or shoulder for emphasis.
Two hours later, they are more or less dressed in their sharp evening clothes, on the large and comfortable sofa of the woman’s tastefully furnished living room. It is sometime after midnight. She is warm and relaxed; her skin is soft; her flowing hair holds the scent of the shampoo the movie stars use. He is achingly young, beautiful and tender, with eyes too blue for any contact lenses to simulate. His clothes are the finest his student budget could afford, befitting his first night of legal club-hopping. His anxious lips and trembling hands betray his inexperience. He bears the scent of stale cologne. She gently instructs him in the rituals of passive-aggressive seduction, keeping his timing slow, encouraging him with words of comfort and compassion. She shows him where to touch her, in what intensity, in what order.
At a pivotal stage in the ritual she pulls his hands off of her and sits up. She coos, “You’re so cute. But before I can go on, I need to know one thing. Do you love me? Really love me?”
“Oh, yes, more than anything in the world.”
“I need to really know. Can you swear to be faithful to me?”
“Yes, yes, forever. I’ll have to give two weeks’ notice to my roommates, but forever after that.”
“One more question: Would you do anything for me?”
“Anything! Anything at all, just to let me stay with you tonight. Name it and it’s yours!”
She whispers something into his ear. He thinks he doesn’t hear it correctly. She repeats it, with a wet kiss to his earlobe. He looks perplexed for a second, but when she turns around to offer the zipper of her dress to him, he accepts.
That night, he enjoys the greatest experience of his brief life, while she draws energy from his youthful astonishment.
At 9:30 the next morning, he is once again dressed in his black slacks, suspenders, and polished Oxfords. His white shirt is rolled up at the sleeves. She dresses in a practical white top and slacks. After fixing a hot scrambled-egg breakfast, she reminds him of their deal. She searches the kitchen pantry, hands him the materials he will need to fulfill his promise, blows him a kiss and leaves.
A half hour of staring and wondering passes before he gets up from the kitchen table, picking up the Handi-Wipes she left there into his hand, to start washing her living-room windows. As he opens the plush drapery, he peers outside to see a corps of beautiful young men, none older than about 23, all with delicate smiles and trim sideburns. Some of them seemed to be far under 21; she must have found them in coffeehouses or at all-ages concerts. They are watering her lawn, pruning her flower beds, painting her drainpipes, loading her pickup with full trash cans, fixing her car’s engine, etc., etc.
Upon his first awareness of his lover’s less than total devotion to him, he feels like tossing his Handi-Wipes on the freshly waxed floor and leaving. But he remembers that she had not exactly promised to be faithful to him, she had merely asked him to promise to be faithful to her. And he was well aware that she had known lovers before meeting him; her thorough knowledge of the ways of loving, and her willingness to share them to a near-stranger such as himself, were the factors that had brought him in her car to this house.
As he continues to stare out at the eight or nine almost-identical blue-eyed boy-men, all happily serving their cause without speaking to or significantly noticing one another, he senses another kind of bonding, one different from but just as strange as his attraction toward his beloved. He finds in his heart a sense of family with these young gentlemen, who look so much like him that they could almost be his brothers. He has found his real home, to live comfortably among those who remind him of himself. He begins to work happily. He even begins to forget whose house he is cleaning.
God As I Understand Him
12/10/89
GOD IS:
Tip Sheet
10/30/89
When playing the “male” version of the video adventure game Adventure in Davenport, be sure to make love to the second woman who offers to, and then not to any subsequent women until this woman walks out on you. This woman’s mother is the judge you will face in the murder trial after your fight to the death with the evil Andrew, should you make it to that level. This judge must have the best possible opinion of you that you can give her.
When playing the “female” version, there are many ways to avoid the unwanted pregnancy that makes it so hard to traverse the tight passageways of the Underground Storage Zone. Contraceptive devices are available in the medicine cabinets of most (but not all) of the homes and businesses you will visit during the game. But be careful not to take too much time finding these cabinets, particularly if you are being chased by the thugs of Mistress Leona.
When hiding out in the hotel room of the rock group Inventory, do not type THROW TV OUT WINDOW. At least not until one of the band members throws something out the window first. Otherwise, you will have made a major breach of rock-fan etiquette, and the group will turn you over to the police immediately.
Even while playing the “mature” level of the game, graphics will not appear during any sex scenes. According to rumor, the game’s designers did create some terse (but “tasteful”) screens, which were cut at the last minute but still exist as normally-inaccessible data on Version 1.0a cartridges. The same rumors suggest that there is a command that will reveal these screens, a phrase suggested somewhere within the game’s texts. We have tried hundreds of combinations of commands, but nothing seems to work.
No matter how little money you have, at no point during the game should you ever accept a job from Mr. Lathe. No matter what Lathe’s offer (from “running a couple of errands” to “I’ll make you executive vice president”), you will be transferred two moves later, due to “staff efficiency requirements,” to a permanent job washing dishes in Lathe’s executive kitchen. Once there, you will waste move after move, trying to escape the kitchen only to have more dirty dishes shoved into your hands each time. There IS a way out, but it only reveals itself after 35 moves. On the 36th move, your next load of dishes will include a carving knife that can be used as a makeshift screwdriver to dismantle the window above the sink.
Try playing both the female and male versions, to compare notes about which characters are identical in each and which are replaced. This will help you know which opposite-sex characters are potential lovers/allies. For instance, “Sandy Otz” in the male version becomes “Andy Otz” in the female version. In both versions, however, this character will turn on you and lead you straight to the clutches of the Sinister Minister.
In the Office Cubicle Maze, it helps to move like a chess knight – two steps forward and one across – until you come to a workstation decorated with a wallet-size photo of Inventory’s lead singer. Typing SEARCH DESK will reveal an assortment of potentially-useful loot: A computer disk labeled THE GOODS, a box of the extremely rare Dietetic Miracle Candy, and a cassette labeled ULTIMATE ALL-TIME PARTY TAPE! in ball point. Go ahead and type TAKE DISK, TAKE CANDY and TAKE TAPE, but then be sure to then type PUT $20 ON DESK.
The Catholic women’s college is the same in both versions. It’s much easier to use it as a hide-out in the female version. Be sure not to act rowdy or let anyone see the tattoos you received from Madame Sucret, and you can pass for a graduate student. If you find yourself in one of the college dorms while playing the male version, DO NOT attempt to steal or wear women’s clothing. It will not work.
Since the game takes place in the year 1974, stealing the Sinister Minister’s clothes will not cause him to be arrested, only to be gawked at as a fun-loving “streaker.”
The Sinister Minister is immune to the effects of the Ultimate All-Time Party Tape, offers of bribes or sexual favors, or even the Mirror of Truth (knowing no shame, he does not fear the reflection of his true spirit). He is not immune, however, to the impact of a falling television set.
Dream Club
10/23/88
Leaving some event at SCCC that lasts way past 2 am. Looking for a bus, i walk uncharacteristically south on B’way. i catch a “special” bus that winds up stopping at an odd building near the Swedish Hospital complex (not quite the strange building next to my new dentist, but close). the bus turns toward the building, climbs a steep rooftop-parking ramp, and then (either the bus or the driver, i don’t recall) jumps off that roof into an open-air nightclub-type room, lunging for a man seated at a table. The driver misses and is carried away, the well-dressed crowd resumes drinking without skipping more than a beat, and I am left to try to figure out the place where I am.
It is called “Playboys” but is not like the old Playboy Clubs. No groups of men customers for one thing; all couples or foursomes, whether dining/drinking at the tables in the main room or making out (fully clothed) while lying on what would otherwise be a dance floor. The lighting and decor are subtle/elegant. Everyone speaks softly; nobody is overtly drunk.
Someone tells me that this is a private club that believes in no-trouble; I could have practically anything I wanted if I didn’t make noise about the incident or even tell anyone about what goes on in the place. The person talking to me about this was a 38-ish woman in a green gown who suggestively whispered the “practically anything” part. Then I looked at the table where the companion of the would-be attack victim said he was “just one rich. Two rich is too rich for here,” stacking coasters like casino chips to represent her point.
I accepted a drink from the green-dressed woman, who told me that the place was something like a swing club but without the suburban tastelessness of those places. Most members were couples, with a few singles permitted to join. Some of the single women joined at regular rates; others were paid under the table to attend, but received no money directly from male customers and were under no sexual obligations. I agreed to a drink from her, and then very hesitantly asked to join her on the make-out floor. It was a fantasy world of lovemaking, not of intercourse. The games these couples (including mine) played were of kissing and petting, of tenderness and comforting.
At this point I regained consciousness, but somehow was able to continue the fantasy in my imagination. I asked if anything more happened here. She led me to a corridor that opened onto a series of small, dark rooms. There we undressed, hung our clothes on a coat rack, and lay down on a large sofa. Boxes of condoms and Kleenex were on a small white nightstand next to the sofa.
As we resumed our activity, she explained to me that discretion was everything here. That, and respect. She repeatedly insisted that I not look upon her as a cheap whore or any kind of whore. I did insist, adding that it was very emotionally brave to do what she was doing, no matter how physically “safe” it was. She didn’t have a “perfect” face or body by media standards (something like Jamie Lee Curtis might look like in a few years). It was an achingly personal sex act, with intercourse the last and most conventional segment of it. The fantasy fades away as she is wiping me off with a tissue afterwards.
