THIS IS A 2 AND A HALF CHAPTER EXCERPT FROM
OEDIPUS COOKIE
DOUGH
A NOVEL IN PROGRESS
OEDIPUS COOKIE
DOUGH
A NOVEL IN PROGRESS
00:25
1 O CLOCK
I awoke lying on small mound of things flaccid and rancid, everything that would have rendered you and your consummate middle class ideals into something broken, impotent and threatening.
Hygiene, aesthetics, ambience… all the major illusions inverted to the point of paroxysm.
Dead fish. Salmon. Shrimp. Banana peels. Banana Leaves. Ants and rice. I smelt like cat piss.
It was unpleasant, but I was comfortable.
I could hear two people, one male, one female, arguing behind the wall next to the garbage heap.
2 O CLOCK
The only memories I have of my mother’s features are a collection of lines enshrouded by crisscrosses of darkness, the afterimage of microbes on the surface of the thin layer of fluid around my eyeballs dancing around her blurry contours like an aura.
After I was born my parents taught me how to talk and write in 3 weeks, with the prolonged and excessive usage of brain jacks, literally installing information into a hard drive that was my brain through the circuitry manipulation of my neurons.
My nursery was the Pink Room, where everything was plastic and smelt of disinfectant. After my mind was wired up to do what it was meant to do, I was locked up in it for 17 years. The brain jacks made me autistic so it wasn’t like I was capable of much socializing anyhow.
Every morning at precisely 6.45 a.m., after untying the strap that held the mint-flavored oral placebo (on weekends it was strawberry flavored) firmly at the back of my throat, mother would go out of the room, shut the door, and the lights would go on.
Come to think of it I’m not even sure that was my mother. Could have been a very dedicated nursemaid.
“Mother” would slide a pen and pad underneath the door, and I would pick them up, go to the pink desk by the pink nightstand, and write.
I would spend exactly 8 hours writing about meat cleavers, second chances, true love, and dogs copulating in the alley outside of… whatever the hell I was confined in, were it a maze or a desert.
I was never sure if the universe outside was finite or infinite. Come to think of it, how could I even be sure if there were a universe outside? At the mean time, life goes on.
Mother fed me based on what I wrote.
3 O CLOCK
I constructed my first sentence when I was 4 months old.
It was a semi-coherent blue scrawl with a faded blue sharpie:
I AM
The lights went out, and Mother came in. I heard the sound of a plate rattling against a metal tray, and Mother went out.
The lights came back on, and I saw that she had left me a slice of bread. I ate it.
Six minutes later, I wrote my second sentence:
I AM NOT
The lights went out again, and mother entered and exited just as abruptly as before. Lights on. She had brought me a plate with small lumps of peanut butter smeared all over it.
Very well:
ADAM I AM NOT
Lights out. Mother left me a slice of bread with peanut butter on both sides, which I consumed when the lights went on.
I AM NOT
Mother fed me oatmeal,
I AM A BEAR
prawns and rice,
I AM A TRAIL
- Wantan Noodles as trail.
COME FOLLOW ME
- Whipped cream as clouds.
COME PLAY WITH ME
- Popcorn
LET’S PLAY
- Play dough made from flour and bread crumbs
WITH MY SYNESTHESIA
- A plate of Baked Oysters!
Oh, how I feasted. They left me a bottle of Tabasco sauce and a bottle of vinegar. I ate greedily, teeth gnashing greedily against oyster shells radiating like exhaust fumes on puddles.
I burped, and smiled, and burped again.
And vomited across my bed sheets.
Putting my hands around my wet, enlarged belly and smiling contentedly, I reached for the pen and paper, and wrote them a new story:
IN 4-D
- T.V. Dinners.
4 O CLOCK
During my first 2 years, writing was a matter of illustrating things that I had learned about from the brain jacks, simple lines such as THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG. Mother left me a bowl of rice and peas for this.
I went on to experiment with descriptive writing. THE SENTENCE THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG HAS ALL OF THE LETTERS OF THE ALPHABETS IN IT got me a bowl of chicken and vegetable soup.
When I was three I started getting bored of bread, oatmeal, rice and soups so I started cutting up the concepts I had learnt from the brain jacks and mixing them around. By doing this, I accumulated more pieces of the nutritional pyramid:
THERE IS NO DICHONOMY BETWEEN THE EXTERNAL AND THE INTERNAL.- Chicken liver.
THERE IS NO DICHONOMY BETWEEN THE INTERNAL AND THE ETERNAL. - Flavorless Gelatin cubes.
THERE IS NO DICHONOMY BETWEEN THE EXTERNAL AND THE ETERNAL. - A ham sandwich and a cup of warm milk.
MA, COULD YOU POSSIBLY GET SOME KIT KATS IN HERE. - A can of coke.
OR SOME COOKIES. – A tic-tac.
Withholding. Just ma’s way of telling me I had a lot more to learn.
5 O CLOCK
Faz said that he didn’t approve of the mammoth-sized metal rods sticking out of Stacey’s breasts.
“Those nips are going to waste, darling.” Faz told Stacey. “Assuming there are any left after what that S&M plastic surgeon did to you.”
“You’re being utterly prejudiced.” Stacey snapped. “Chuck is NOT an S&M plastic surgeon. He’s a proper plastic surgeon who, on his free time, chooses to participate in sadomasochistic activities as a past time among consenting adults at the Bound Muscle Bar at the mall.”
“Methinks Daniel was mixing business with pleasure when he operated on you, girl. You look like a Robert Williams drawing. However are you gonna get nipple stimulation?”
“Ha-ha... It’s not just a piercing, genius. It’s a remote control vibrator. It’s wired to receptors in my nervous system. All I have to do to get an orgasm is to get those metal plates in contact with these things…”
6 O CLOCK
BUFFALO BUFFALO BUFFALO BUFFALO BUFFALO BUFFALO BUFFALO BUFFALO.
- Spam and fried eggs sunny side up with Worcestershire sauce and salt.
JAMES WHILE JOHN HAD HAD HAD HAD HAD HAD HAD HAD HAD HAD HAD A BETTER EFFECT ON THE TEACHER.
- Spam and mash with tomato ketchup and salt.
石室詩士施氏，嗜獅，誓食十獅。氏時時適市視獅。十時，適十獅適市。是時，適施氏適市。
氏視是十獅，恃矢勢，使是十獅逝世。氏拾是十獅屍，適石室。石室濕，氏使侍拭石室。石室拭，氏始試食是十獅。食時，始識是十獅，實十石獅屍。試釋是事。
Brown Sugar Water
7 O CLOCK
The actress reached into her pink purse (wasn’t it a prop?) and pulled out a little metal rod with a small pink handle at the tip. She waved in front of the cinematographer, as if to ward off a vampire with a cross.
Nonplussed. The cinematographer drew a gun with a slight showman’s flourish, then aims it coldly and precisely in the middle of the actress’s face.
The actress made a choking noise and dropped the rod from her manicured fingers. The cinematographer sprang to action. He moved with a combination of speed and artistry, catching the rod mid air before it hit the ground. Just as quickly as he had whipped it out, he squirted pink paint in her face with the watergun, and slid the gun back into his holster. This happened so instantaneously that he looked like a juggler doing this.
The cinematographer set a camera up on a tripod, ignoring an angry flurry of the actress’s questions. He switched on the camera, and put on a mask shaped like a pixel mosaic. He started dancing around the actress, jabbing the blue metal sphere protruding halfway out of the surface of her breasts.
The actress made ugly, squealing noises.
8 O CLOCK
I was peeking from behind the wall watching a monkey dancing around a pig, when burly arms grabbed my shoulders, and flung me back onto the trash heap.
9 O CLOCK
Somewhere along the age of 6 I decided that if I wasn’t going to see the world outside the Pink Room, I was going to taste as much of it that I could instead. So I started writing stories.
I started my journey a McDonalds across the street where we lived. To get a Big Mac and fries, I wrote short contemporary horror stories. For a side of milkshakes, I wrote them in third person. For Sprite, I wrote it in first person. I wrote erotic fiction for pasta and Science Fiction for TV Dinners. If I wanted sushi with egg rolls I wrote existential fiction disguised in western genre conventions. If I wanted fruit I wrote colloquiums. If I craved yogurt I used symbolism. If I wanted mustard and sausages I used deconstruction and metonymy.
I had analyzed all the recipes.
Writing stories based on plot structures from Chinese fables got me sponge cake.
Reinterpreting Greek mythology got me pizza with anchovies.
Dada got me gefilte fish.
Objectivism got me shellfish.
Eastern mythology got me chocolate bunnies.
And I learnt how to get Kit Kats, too. All I had to do was write teenage romance novels.
By the time I was 9, father was a multimillionaire. He was an agent for 42 nonexistent authors ghostwritten by me. He also secured all the film rights.
10 O CLOCK
“Nosey little cocksucker.” said the director. He was holding an electronic clapper board and wearing nothing but a pair of yellow boots and a body hair oat. One boot pressed down on my ribs as I struggled.
The director lifted his foot and I rose from the mound of trash.
The director kicked me hard on my behind. I scampered off down the alley, towards a street light that temporarily blinded me. For the next 15 seconds I saw nothing but whiteness and all I could hear was my own footsteps making crunching sounds in the gravel underneath me.
I heard the director’s footsteps in huge, unruly strides behind me. Our combined footsteps created an atypical tempo. It was very disorienting. It made my legs feel wobbly. I felt like I was going to fall over.
I’d have recurring nightmares like this, of me running away from a predatory force creeping up behind me while having pins and needles over both my legs.
“Yeah, run back to your mama, little boy! Tell her we need extras for the sodomy scene.” The director yelled behind me. “I’m playing the FUCKER, and GUESS WHAT…”
Suddenly, the only footsteps I could hear was my own.
“…IT’S NON-STIMULATED, YOU LITTLE FUCK!”
Something hit the back of my head, and shattered.
I fell onto shards of green glass on the floor. They punctured my plastic suit and ripped into tight flesh.
I closed my eyes.
A split second before the pain registered, I felt calm, at peace with the world. I was born from the gravel, now the gravel was absorbing my life back in.
The pain seeped into me as soon as I unclenched my muscles. My wounds came loose. I felt the warmth and wetness of my blood seeping out from under me and into the gravel. The gravel wasn’t a part of any nature order, the gravel was a puddle of vampire quicksand sucking out my blood with its hundreds of green teeth pierced through my flesh.
I made the connection in my head at the exact same moment I registered 3 colors, green, sharp, and red.
The fragments came together in my brain and danced in circles, creating a palindrome that made perfect sense in the severity of my condition. The director had thrown a Heineken bottle at my head. I had seen them littered around the set.
“…little bastard doesn’t know how to go about minding his own god damn business…”
the director’s voice faded into distance and lingered on, melding into the grunting, animalistic noises the cinematographer and the actress were fully engaged in making. The director’s annoyed proclamations were much softer than the other two’s, but his was frighteningly audible because it was of a more consistent pitch:
“… god damn kids ought to be locked up at night.”
I crawled out of the puddle of blood and glass into the light. While I crawled I smelt my blood and bacon grease in the air.
Bacon was the taste of churned-out plot boilers and generic mystery novels. Instantly, I knew what was happening behind me.
Faz, Stacey and the director were performing a sordid Ménage à trios scene on an American flag, while flames consumed a Charcoal Grill off camera. I didn’t see any of this, but I already knew the scene by heart.
I wrote the book the screenplay was based on.
I knew better than to turn my head back to watch what I had written being re-enacted. Lot’s wife had turned into a pillar of salt when she sneaked a final longing glance back at the city of Sodom. Sodium Nitrate may taste good on steaks but it gives you colon cancer.
11 O CLOCK
Dirty limericks usually got me a Twinkie.
“There was a young lady from Brussels
who exercised her virile corpuscles
with dynamite sticks in bed
head to ass and ashes to match head
whenever she got orgasms with fire marshalls”
I wrote this on a yellowing legal pad and put it in the dumbwaiter. 30 seconds later, I heard a motor humming, chains rattling against pulleys. 15 seconds later I opened the dumbwaiter. In it was a fork, knife, and a blue porcelain rice bowl containing a sizzling, deep fried Mars Bar, a nutritionally dubious Scottish delicacy.
Oh well. Beggars couldn’t be choosers. My limerick didn’t scan anyway.
I cut off a piece of the mars bar and bit into the oily, fried dough coating the melted chocolate.
I was instantly rendered a spluttering, coughing mess. I had scalded my tongue. I spit oil and chocolate phlegm all over the floor. The Mars Bar was soaked in oil. Hadn’t anyone used a paper napkin to absorb the gunk?
The aftertaste was overwhelming. I vomited on the pink floor boards.
It was just Ma’s way of telling me not to write shit if I didn’t want to eat it.
THE CLOCK STRUCK 12,
And I crawled out into the illuminated pavement, a tolerable distance away from the stench of burning wood and squealing noises.
The streets were empty. The houses were patchwork architectures made out of cardboard held together by yellow industrial adhesive that dripped from the sides and looked like molten honey. The tiles on the street were shaped like little hexagonal cells.
Suddenly I felt very tired, like an old bear crawling around during wintertime. I just had to hibernate.
I crawled over a manhole shaped like a pentagon to fall asleep or die, whichever came first.
In my sleep, I heard a bicycle bell ringing faintly in the distance, and another odd sound: Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click Click. Click. Click.
A man peddling a rickshaw stopped right nest to me. He stopped his rickshaw and got on his knees, and crawled slowly towards me. Under the streetlights, I saw that he was wearing a mask. It was extremely peculiar. It resembled a kabuki water buffalo, but it had no eyeholes, just a slit where the rickshaw peddler’s tongue poked out.
“I’m afraid I’ve cut myself,” I tell him.
The peddler sniffs and makes clicking noises with his tongue at me, like a dolphin ‘seeing’ with echolocation.
“You’re just a kid.”
I nod and he makes more clicking sounds.
“Have a name?”
“I don’t know. Bears don’t have names” I say, closing my eyes.
“Sure they do.” said the peddler. “Just off the top of my head, I know a bear called Yogi and another call Baloo. Then there’s Rupert, Paddington, Gummi, Pooh… why, my mother in law owns a bear called Scott. It was the quaintest thing ever. It would salivate every time we pressed a button.”
“I honestly don’t know,” I yawned.
The peddler sneezes twice and rubs his nose. “I smell roast pork.” He says. “Are the Albinis hosting a barbeque party?”
“I don’t know.” I said, and fell asleep.
0.5
And so I wrote:
Adam, Eve and One More walked around
a spiral staircase
up the tower of Babel
The Empire State Building
One More rode upwards in either
a cradle or a coffin
A he or a she,
One More of
Adam and Eve’s
sons,
or
daughters,
or
lovers.
Eve had incest with her two sons
And the sons had incest with the daughters
Adam occasionally helped out with the procreation
Soon Adam had three favorite fuckees,
Li and Lo and Ta
Adam and Eve had two favorite fuckers,
Humbert and Humbert
But Humbert was slain
by his brother, Humbert
The family of four
walked around the North Pole on Sundays
Running in circles around the world
Now a family of three, they walked in a straight line
with Adam in front of Eve, in front of One More.
As they walked, their brains played scenes in fast motion
Scenes of happy endings
Scenes in which they reached the end of the infinite line,
Because once they’d stopped walking they’d reach a rock,
Which would either dribble water
Even when struck without acknowledging God
Or would just burst into flames
How happily they would gathered around a rock
in fast motion
Like in a Benny Hill Sketch
“Can god create a rock
so heavy He can’t lift it?”
asked the man.
“Did you know
that god
is an anagram of cat?”
purred the woman
And One More, playing the narrator, recited:
“…did you know, that Roast Pork
is a spoonerism
of Post Rock said the child…”
“Cut.” answered the voice of whoever had said “Action”
and they did one more take of the scene
in which Humbert tries to grab the apple from Lolita
adapted from chapter
Thirteen.
Benetton is perhaps best known for its controversial "United Colors" publicity campaign. Oliviero Toscani, the photographer commissioned by Benetton, was given complete creative freedom. Under his art direction, ads were created that contained striking visual non-sequiturs containing no literal relation to Benetton Products.
These graphic, billboard sized ads included depictions of a variety of subjects such as
Fourteen.
'Giusy', photo: Oliviero Toscani © Benetton, 1990
"Dil" Pickles is the younger brother of Tommy Pickles. He is also the cousin of Angelica Pickles, on the show Rugrats and its spin-off, All Grown Up! Named for Didi Pickles' cousin, Dylan Prescott, he was born in the first Rugrats movie. His name is a pun of dill pickles.
Fifteen.
'Portraits', photo: Oliviero Toscani © Benetton, 1993
The regular cast of the Brady Bunch appeared in an opening title sequence in which video head shots were arranged in a grid, with each cast member appearing to look at the other cast members.
Sixteen going on seventeen.
'Giusy', photo: Oliviero Toscani © Benetton, 1990
Maria lives in a convent, where she is a postulant preparing to enter an unidentified order of nuns. Some of the senior nuns find her to be a troublesome presence, and they get together and sing a song about how to solve her). To test her vocation, Maria is sent out to be a governess to the seven children of Captain Georg Ritter Van Tramp, a widower and a decorated World War I captain of the Austro-Hungarian Navy. Maria finds herself falling in love with the stern Captain but tries to suppress her feelings. He too finds himself warming to the unconventional governess but remains quiet about his feelings.
...seventeen going on eighteen.
The company's logo served as the only text accompanying the images in most of these advertisements.
Flavio Briatore, Luciano Benetton’s business partner explains:
"We decided to do something very controversial that people would pick up on - 50% of people thought it was great and 50% thought it was awful, but in the meantime everyone was talking about Benetton."
00:75
“You?”
“You?”
September 8, 2041
1.15 am
I watched as more people gathered around the man’s body, face down in what appeared to be blood. Not pretty. I heard Peggy and Shane’s voices getting closer and closer behind me.
Their daughter was my girlfriend and step-sister, Hitomi.
12.00 am
We had been celebrating her 16th birthday in my backyard. Hitomi and I had lived together alone when Peggy got Mr. Sun to stopped paying for a babysitter to spoon feed, sponge bath, and keep her company while she sat firmly on top of a release-activated land mine buried in the backyard of the house dad and I lived in. Because of the land mine, Hitomi, became dad’s responsibility despite the fact that Hitomi’s real parents, Mr Shane and his ex-wife Peggy, could have easily moved in to take care of her.
Mr Shane didn’t want to live in the slums, and Peggy didn’t want to go back. It was a gentrified area for crack dealers and loonies like my dad.
The whole Shane clan was present and seemed intent on being party poopers. Mr Shane was making a fuss about all the contraband in the house… bongs, poorly discarded contraceptives and junk food all over the floor, incriminating remnants from the trial party that had took place during the afternoon.
Mr Shane had brought his nephews. He assumed it was going to be a family event.
One of the kids was blowing up a lubed condom. My stepmother Peggy burst it with her manicures.
Peggy was playing the good cop. She had taken off her shoes and danced when son of a preacher man started playing.
“Peggy, you look like a dehydrated, diseased ostrich mimicking Uma Thurman.” I told her. (Alcohol made me braver.)
“Get a job, Josh.” Peggy said coldly, and I went outside to play with my BB Gun.
In her hut in our backyard, Hitomi giggled.
“How’re those binoculars working out for you, Hitomi?” I ask. Mr. Shane was yelling something about “You breaka the law” and everybody was trying to calm him down inside.
“This is so voyeuristic!” Hitomi squealed. “Thanks, Josh. This is the best present ever... just awesome.”
I chuckled and started setting up old vintage ice cream cans for target practice.
1.10 am
Lime Jello
Green aliens
Ease-play, Ee-may.
All this is estimated
We were having real fun, when I heard a shot from a real gun.
1.15 am
Hitomi was in her room crying. The most coherent sentence Hitomi had managed to string together after it happened was that she ‘saw it happen’. I had locked the doors and latched the windows in her hut, but you could still hear her wailing through the walls, all the way across the Street.
Mr. Shane didn’t look at her in the eye throughout her party. He didn’t even step into the room when Peggy and I were consoling Hitomi, red-eyed and traumatized by what she saw.
Bastard won’t even talk to his own flesh-and-blood daughter.
Mr. Shane (known as Sun Takagawa to his parents) was a Japan-born industrialist turned mogul. He was a prominent member of the Republican Party, and wore traditional Hamaka pants to functions. He had a strange put-on accent that was both bullish and officious. In university, his peers called him the ‘Princeton Yakuza’.
He was a bastion of bullheaded disingenuousness who fed Peggy’s simpleminded bourgeoisie delusions just like she fed his.
12.15 am
“I have to take on two part time jobs just to break even.” I told Peggy and Shane during the party, while they ate cake on the Sofa. “I’m working for two. I barely sleep, you know.”
“That’s your problem, Darling.” Peggy told me. “We’re still getting our monthly installment. I told you time and time again that it’s just another… ah… bureaucratic mix-up at the State Office.”
“What?” I said. Peggy didn’t know what she was talking about half the time.
“Ah… You’d get your monthly fee reinitiated again if you’d just get your lazy ass off the couch and do a little paperwork! I told you to fax them a copy of Papa Bear’s income taxes so that they could start paying you again.”
“You bad at paperwork Josh!” Mr. Shane agreed, even though he was rolling his eyes when Peggy used the word ‘bureaucratic’. It was on of first new English word he learned upon his arrival at Princeton as a freshman.
“I can let you bullshit me that you’re having a headache when I want you in bed but you can’t bullshit me on ‘bureaucratic’, Pegs,” Shane thought, “You snotty little deer, you. Inside, he smirked like a mute, yet trumpeting elephant.
Despite the fact that Peggy did know what the word bureaucratic meant, she wasn’t quite as stupid as her husband seemed to think she was.
Mr Sun’s arm was lying idly in the corner, and when he had heard Peggy misuse one of his Princeton words, he raised his arm,
She may have not known the exact Reader’s Digest’s WORD POWER definitions, but at least she knew the meaning of bureaucratic collectivism.
What a delightful couple.
Okay. So maybe she pronounced it “Burroughs-crack-tick”, but she and the word became acquainted back when she was a little deer in the forests of Johor.
And to think that half of them used to be my stepmother.
Peggy read about in the graffiti when she was a teenager. Later, when she attended the university of San Francisco, her girlfriend Jade told her what it meant.
Mr. Shane used to be nice to me, when Hitomi was just a kid, even though I hated him, the fucking right-wing Christian fundamentalist.
Princeton Yakuza… ha! He wouldn’t make it as a character in a Quentin Tarantino movie, not even as Charlie Brown alongside Uma Thurman. Charlie Brown was a kid who talked like and adult, Mr. Shane was an adult who talked like a kid.
While Peggy was making up shit about bureaucracy, this guy, who was even more of a man child than my Dad had ever been, this uptight little kid acted so smug, the back of his fist rubbing gently – almost femininely – against his chin, and my heart filled with hatred when I saw him lift his arm, his arm looked too fucking SMUG, like the flamboyant trunk of a trumpeting elephant, nostrils pursed like an exhibitionist urethra.
O Reilly, Limbaugh, Falwell, Coulter and the rest of the gang… all Cartoon Elephants. Cartoon characters who appeared television on re-runs of that show on TV LAND, that show starring an elephant who had had a fetid, red penis instead of a trunk.
The Factor, a horror themed reality show came before the Adams family on Tuesdays and the Munsters on Thursdays.
Every night on his cartoon show his nose would stand erect, ejaculating anger into the air and on his guests.
Peggy watched the Adams Family religiously. When she was still married to Papa Bear, the three of us would watch the Factor while waiting for the show family to come on.
Slowly, I became more and more of a Munsters fan, which aired on Thursdays instead. I would still watch The Adams family on Tuesdays, even though the show had lost its mystique in my 3 year old eyes... It wasn’t until I was older when I realized what was wrong with the Adams family.
The Adams were blatantly elitist, with their sadomasochistic, gothic excess. They were rich and beautiful people who alienated themselves from the rest of the world with their morbid tastes (with their kind of repellent fashion sense, they might as well have worn “God hates Fags” T-Shirts and hung Nazi emblems all around their mansion.)
The Adams seemed to enjoy getting hurt, having spikes poked into their chests and eating shit out of the Marquis de Sade’s asshole every Sunday when they invited him over for tea. They were amoral and anti-social, and seemed to derive pleasure in scaring the shit out of guests. The Munsters were much friendlier, they didn’t seem to revel in ugliness and fling shit around like the Adams did.
The Adams Family were humans that enjoyed being monsters inside, while the Munsters were sympathetic middle-class anti-heroes who just looked like monsters and were brave for trying to assimilate in America even though they looked different.
Bill O Reilly was an Adams pretending to be a Munster. “I’m an independent thinker,” he assured his viewers, even though he flung shit his guests on a constant basis.
On Tuesday nights, Peggy, Papa Pear and I were guests on the factor, set to argue about issues of imaginary significance to prove O Reilly’s point... that we were suckers and kooks for indulging him... he was getting paid to do his thing, what were we getting agitated for?
“Acceptance was just a euphemism for Tolerance to evil left wing activists”, said the elephant as he extended his phallic nose which grew sharper and sharper, goading us as we sat humbly in our living room, eating breakfast cereal without milk for dinner on the dirt floor.
O Reilly’s sharp nose became so erect it turned into a pink steel sword that poked a hole in our television screen.
The nose, which shot out of the surface of my TV screen, across messy living conditions like a huge pink tentacle. 8 spider legs shot out of the tentacle and buried themselves into the flesh of my forehead, into the depths of my 3-year old mind.
"Josh, you shouldn't watch this," said Peggy.
“Bill is the president?” I asked.
“He was a very bad president” said Peggy. “Mommy was a student when he was in the White House.”
Bill the elephant’s intentions were propaganda and ratings, thus he as an American believed that he should be honest and present himself on television as a propagandist and a showman:
“Why the hell should I TOLERATE anything? We don’t have to TOLERATE people who don’t believe in American Democracy. Damn it, we have a nation to run! Fuck Iraq! Fuck their traditions and beliefs, they must be TAUGHT how to run a goddamn nation, just like I was TAUGHT how to be a MAN when O Reilly Senior raped my emotions with the Bible when I was fucking 7 years old!”
The elephant’s penis nose went limp and wilted slowly before my eyes.
“7 god damn years old.” It said. “Can you believe It? How the fuck was I supposed to react to imagery like that? Violence and torture and a god of vengeance with a flesh-and-blood son that had been torn the fuck up and crucified because I had been born bad. And even though he was a great Christian warrior King David had to spend time in hell because there was no such thing as purgatory, it was just a Catholic conspiracy to devalue Jesus’s act of sacrifice, according to good old pa… David didn’t spend time in no goddamn purgatory waiting for Godot, he had to go to hell because Jesus hadn’t been born to forgive his sins yet.”
“The Bible was like an premature education to faux-journalism in the mass-media… the story of stories about King David and Bathsheba the media coverage Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky in Biblical times. Think about it… Bill was like King David… a great man, but he would have had went out of the office with a clean slate if it weren’t for Bathsheba… Women ruin everything.”
Peggy said that his analogy was juvenile and inane, for Bathsheba hasn’t seduced David, it was David who seduced Bathsheba, and he had sent her husband Uriah to die just so he could get in her pants. And what does being King have to do with anything, Mr. O Reilly?
Hissed the elephant’s trunk like a snake: “You have no say in this, you god damned impudent immigrant woman. Being King has to do with EVERYTHING”
The elephant’s nose reeled slowly back into the hole it had made on the television. The elephant put on a crown. It now looked like Barbar the elephant with a phallic trunk. Puddles of molten television static now dripped from the broken, rounded edges of glass.
The image on the screen changed and we saw a naked Jesus, castrated with red, white and blue paint over open wounds all around his body. His legs were blue and his upper torso was red, and someone had painted a white star over his ribcage which stuck out from a big chunk of missing flesh under his right nipple. I covered my eyes, horrified.
“Don’t be afraid Josh, that’s not the real Jesus. Bill the elephant isn't talking about the real Jesus, he’s just using him as a symbol,” said my mom.
“Simple Symbolton!” sang my father, as he stared into the abyss that was our TV screen.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about, shut the fuck up! This is MY show, you’re here under MY hospitality, and I will not let you spread filthy lies about our Savior. Jesus wasn’t a symbol, Jesus was a FLESH AND BLOOD MAN who fought a VERY REAL WAR amongst Pharisees and Philistines like you!” Bill the elephant shouted.
“What a load of garbage,” Peggy rolled her eyes. "I'm changing the channel - "
“Whoa! Whoa! Hold on there, don't do anything rash, girl."
Peggy put down the remote.
"Look, give me a break, will you? I’m just trying to entertain. You people claim to preach tolerance. Well TOLERATE the fact that I’m a bitter, hateful old man, and I exercise my right to talk like a bitter old man for you entertainment. Shit, you think the Adams Family is funny? How about the fact that there used to be people who took me seriously enough to vote me into office, how's that for black comedy?”
“I can tolerate him, he’s funny.” Said papa bear. “Can you tolerate him, Josh?”
“I don’t like him!” I sried.
“I don’t have to tolerate him.” Said Peggy. “But we do have to accept him.” Peggy sighed.
Peggy knew a thing or two about acceptance. She had grown to accept a lot of things, silly incompetent things that children as men and men as children did.
Peggy Shanes was a Sino-Malaysian who had fled from her parents to San Francisco with my dad, Fred. Peggy called him ‘Papa Bear’. I can’t for the life of me remember what my real mom looks like... I was just 5 months old when Peggy met Papa Bear.
Dad told me that my mother was an outer space alien that manifested herself in the form of a gigantic Queen Bee. I think he did a lot of drugs when he was younger. I suppose that would explain a lot.
Interrupts the Ghost Papa Bear: “I did look like a bear… a very big hairy, one”
That’s right. And what did you call Peggy again…?
"Little deer."
That sounds just about right. Peggy does look like a deer in the headlights, around her eyes, just under those mascara-stained wrinkled. She’s even begun to look like the aftermath, already… roadkill.
"You hush. Back then she looked like a cross between a swan and a panda."
Papa Bear and the Little Deer had met in the enchanted forests next to the University San Francisco shortly after I was born. After Peggy dropped out, Peggy, for some crazy reason, brought dad and I back to Malaysia with her.
They met with her mother's disapproval. She was a practicing Catholic, and was shocked that I was born out of wedlock. "The fact that Papa Bear had a mental disability did not seem to strike her as much as the fact that we had brought you along with us," recalled Peggy.
"I never told mother that you weren't mine. I know how it looked, but I had my reasons."
"Show's starting!" I asked, sipping hot chocolate from a mug.
"...It was all my idea, you know I really loved your father... I thought he was a psychic!" Peggy giggled.
"What's sigh-kick?" I asked Peggy.
"But he turned out to be just really confused, like the rest of us, after all." Peggy said, distant. I shidted my eyes uncomfortably towards the own-shaped cuckoo clock that hung over the kitchen door. I didn't like it when Peggy got all weird like that.
"Duh-duh, duh-duh, The Adams Family!" cried my father from the living room, flapping his arms around like rubber strips peeling off a tire, and Peggy and I brought the from a mug out of the kitchen. As per routine. Such was life with Peggy and Papa bear.
We must have drove the poor woman crazy, some to think of it. She had no one to talk to but a 3 year old and his retarded father.
Peggy and moved back to her aunt's place in Chicago, Christmas 2019, after a sordid debacle her Peggy's parents, though I don't remember any of this. All this happened such a long time ago.
Peggy married Fred when I was 2, and left Fred when I was 4. Fred was never quite the same after that... he still spoke like a child but he somehow sounded more cynical... sometimes he'd say things that made you suspect that he was just acting all along, an evil genius pretending to have Downs Syndrome.
He was really creepy around Hitomi, too... but I won't go into that,
When I was 18... Papa Bear disappeared.
I have nothing but fond memories for my man-child father, but the poor fool’s life was a string of fuck-ups. If there was a purgatory he'd probably be there reminiscing fondly about swans and pandas... Pa, it doesn’t matter whether the thing you 'married' was a giraffe or a fucking tyrannosaurus… because she never loved you.
You were oblivious when she left. You didn't show any emotion. I remember her as a babysitter more than a stepmother.
She moved on and let the bones of her little dancing feet get crushed into one compact package, crushed by a combination between a foot binding device and a bear trap set by that big bulging yellow elephant, Mr. Sun, who married and domesticated her. She now walked around dressed like the ghost of Yoko Ono dressed up as the ghost of Tammy Faye Baker, or maybe she was the ghost of Tammy dressed up as the ghost of Yoko… you just couldn’t fucking tell, yeah? She still talked like a flower girl, except she had this mock-Dolly Parton accent now.
What a phony.
The elephant man made her step mother of previous fruits of his loins and bore him Hitomi, whom was disowned herself after she stepped into a land mine in our back yard.
1.16 am
The body in the middle of the road was illuminated by the bat signal.
A senile old man named Chip Kidd who lived in the house across the street had turned on the “batman searchlight replica” he had purchased on ebay in 2038. To his disappointment, all he received was a vintage analog projector and a folder full of transparency with the Batman logo crudely scrawled on with markers. It was the damndest thing… the projector had the words “MANOS TURBO LOTTERY INC.” stenciled on with red spray paint. It was some sort of weird prank.
Now Mr. Kidd could use his batman projector.
Mr. Shane pushed me aside, stepping into the bat signal. “Goddamn boy can’t handle no goddamn thing…” he muttered, glaring at me.
As Mr. Shane stepped into the perimeter encapsulated by the oval bat-shaped insignia, he looked like a sumo wrestler getting ready for a match. It looked like a screen shot from those classic “D.C. Comics Universe” vs. “SEGA franchise characters” fighting games I used to play at the arcade back when I was a kid.
“Why don’t you just sit on him, monsieur sumo-babar.” I muttered. Mr Shane heard the word sumo and glared back at me.
“Urusei! Baka Yaroo. You watcheh ya mouth, punk.” Mr Shane said, trying to sound like a cowboy.
“You fucking prick,” I whispered, as Mr. Shane knelt down beside the body to check for a pulse.
“Is he wounded?” asked Peggy as Tammy Faye.
Mr. Shane flipped him over. Everyone gasped. His face was fucked up. The lower part of his face sunk into a deep wound, a black hole gushing flesh and blood and gunpowder. Dude looked like Flukeman.
“彼は死んでいる!” cried Mr Shane.
“Where is his jaw?” Peggy gasped. She pronounced this “Where his Jo-hor.”
Everyone in town knew the dead man too, they recognized him from his earrings.
Oh, and we now recognized that coat as well.
When we realized who he was, it was travesty.
It was devastating.
Peggy passed out.
I. Instant Replay, Loud Sounds/ Bright Colors/ Lots of Space
I realized something before I passed out, but I don’t remember what it is.
Something happened in my neighborhood, back in the year 2041. Something that left two bodies and a video camera full of secrets during its aftermath, found in an abandoned old warehouse filled with pop art from the 21st century.
The camera is now stored away, probably in a bigger warehouse, in an airport, amongst other baggage.
This baggage held both physical and psychological significance, mostly in regards to the American Government.
The psychological baggage was locked up in the pink room, but the physical baggage was stored in the warehouse, occasionally paraded around in a top secret CIA room in the airport for the president’s amusement.
Ellen Lee DeGeneres was the new president of the United States. Ellen had just beat Bill O Reilly, who was gunning for a second term. She was crowned first place on Democratic Candidate Idol.
Second place went to Rosie O Donnell. The Bizarro runner up title was awarded to third party candidate Scarlett Johansson. Oprah didn’t even make it to the finals. The Idol judges said that she didn’t have a strong enough ‘angle’.
II. Karaoke for the Disabled
Mom started binding my feet when I was seven. She did this when I still had webbed ducking feet, before I developed an arch on my foot big enough to fit into a glass slipper.
Cinderella knew that the Prince had a shoe fetish.
But I wasn’t Cinderella, mom told me.
I was a Barbie girl.
“You’re a Barbie Girl, in a Barbie World. Life is plastic, it’s fantastic,” sang my mama as she took my feet out the pail.
Before she attended to my feet she’d put it in a bucket of ice to numb it, so the pain wouldn’t be as extreme.
Then she’d pour acid over my feet and carve the necrotized flesh off the bones with a knife.
My toenails were pulled out from my roots with pliers, to prevent ingrowth.
Ma then proceeded to snap the bones in each of my toes. She wrapped them in wet bandages that which would constrict when dry. The bandages were then pulled back and wrapped around my ankle.
This ritual would be repeated every Sunday morning.
Every time the bandages were pulled tighter and tighter, and as the days passed they smelt more like rotten fish.
My toes dropped off when I hit puberty. On the very same night, mom read me a poem by Edward Lear:
The Pobble who has no toes
Had once as many as we;
When they said "Some day you may lose them all;"
He replied "Fish, fiddle-de-dee!"
And his Aunt Jobiska made him drink
Lavender water tinged with pink,
For she said "The World in general knows
There's nothing so good for a Pobble's toes!"
The Pobble who has no toes
Swam across the Bristol Channel;
But before he set out he wrapped his nose
In a piece of scarlet flannel.
For his Aunt Jobiska said "No harm
Can come to his toes if his nose is warm;
And it's perfectly known that a Pobble's toes
Are safe, -- provided he minds his nose!"
The Pobble swam fast and well,
And when boats or ships came near him,
He tinkledy-blinkledy-winkled a bell,
So that all the world could hear him.
And all the Sailors and Admirals cried,
When they saw him nearing the further side -
"He has gone to fish for his Aunt Jobiska's
Runcible Cat with crimson whiskers!"
But before he touched the shore,
The shore of the Bristol Channel,
A sea-green porpoise carried away
His wrapper of scarlet flannel.
And when he came to observe his feet,
Formerly garnished with toes so neat,
His face at once became forlorn,
On perceiving that all his toes were gone!
And nobody ever knew,
From that dark day to the present,
Whoso had taken the Pobble's toes,
In a manner so far from pleasant.
Whether the shrimps, or crawfish grey,
Or crafty Mermaids stole them away -
Nobody knew: and nobody knows
How the Pobble was robbed of his twice five toes!
The Pobble who has no toes
Was placed in a friendly Bark,
And they rowed him back, and carried him up
To his Aunt Jobiska's Park.
And she made him a feast at his earnest wish
Of eggs and buttercups fried with fish, -
And she said "It's a fact the whole world knows,
That Pobbles are happier without their toes!"
III. Her Vocals Disparaging and Discordant
The conveyor belt passed through Ellen’s Private room in the Futurist Jazz Club where she was celebrating. Through a one-way mirror positioned in front of her spot on the sofa, Ellen saw suitcases passing by her.
Suddenly, the conveyor belt stopped.
Behind the one-way mirror was a gigantic birthday Cake.
It was a birthday present for Ellen, from the CIA.
They had arranged for a girl to jump out of a cake. The girl was a Chinese contortionist, escape artist, and a stripper. They had stuffed her into a suitcase, and chained her up. The suitcase was locked and chained once more, and put into a cake, which was placed on a conveyor belt.
The moment the conveyor belt stopped, she had 15 seconds to escape. The DJ played Queen’s I Want to Break Free during the countdown.
15 to
14 bre-ak (Chay-Yeah-Hand)
13 free
12 God
11 knows
10 I
9 got
8 to
7 to
6 bre-ak (Chayehned)
5 free
4 God
3 knows
2 God knows
1 I want (Chained!)
The timer hit zero after 15 seconds.
A disco rendition of “HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU MS. PRESIDENT” started blasting from the speakers, and the girl sprang from within the cake, free from her chains, Eve and the Virgin Mary reincarnate. Her privates were censored with whipped cream
- and cherry, and she moved like jelly. Cheesecake in the center of her navel and Jello Pudding and inverted American pie
which they had administered with adhesive binding.
She stepped out of the cake just as the timer reached 15, and the conveyor belt started moving again.
The girl did an arousing dance on the treadmill, shaking her hips as she moved left and right to avoiding suitcases while walking in the opposite direction that the conveyor belt.
Ellen smiled and clapped. However, deep inside, she sensed that something was wrong with this picture.
It wasn’t until she looked at the girl’s feet through her glass slippers that she realized what it was.
Her feet looked like two small lumps of spam.
The girl was a good escapologist, but at the end of the day, her feet were still bound
- trapped in a maze floating in endless outer space.
The American Space Invader’s son and Little Miss Pac Men now had a ‘thing’ for each other, even though the Space Invader’s clan had dropped bombs over the Pac Men’s daddies, killing them along with their mothers and lovers.
All in all, they had killed 200.000 little Packed Men, little sardine fish balls in compact tin-sized egg boxes. “Sure, in retrospect, that was not a very humanitarian thing to do.” Admitted the Space Invaders. “But really, the Pac men started it first,”
It was a ‘my daddy can be beat up your daddy’ kind of thing,
What happened was that the space invaders were harvesting ghosts of the American dream inside space shuttles, and had no intention of letting anyone devour their livestock.
Several Pac Men astronauts infiltrated these space shuttles and devoured the ghosts. They ended up as Fat Men bloated from the overabundance of Western delusion, and died of digestive disorder.
They Space Invaders were furious. They cut open the carcasses of the Space Invaders and the Ghosts flew out of their bellies, smelling like flatulence.
The Space Invaders were determined to get their revenge. They got together to build a Hot Air Balloon.
Viciously, they flayed the skins of the fat men. They sewed the skins together to make a giant balloon, and created a basket out of their hair and bones.
The Ghosts the Fat Men had eaten were then pumped back into the balloons. The Balloon rose towards the heavens, a proud, buoyant assertion of supremacy.
The hot air balloon drifted around the world for all to gawk at.
It stopped over Hiroshima, and the bottom of the basket opened like a trap door.
A present fell out, human stench wrapped inside a diaper for all the little boys nesting in egg boxes.
IV. Humming Like a Bumble Bee Dying in Mid Flight
- Eventually the Pac Men adopted the Space Invader’s flight schematics. It was much easier to fly around unhindered by straight lines. You could either move only north, east, south, or west in a rectangular maze, but on an aircraft the possibilities are infinite.
The Space Invaders, too, incorporated the Pac Men’s way of thinking and created space stations designed like mazes that scattered throughout outer space like sand, or bacteria spread on a 4-dimensional petri dish.
V. The Nightmare of F. Scott Fitzgerald
If you tried hard enough you might escape from one maze, but once outside you’d find your self trapped in a bigger maze that surrounded the one you had just escaped from.
People like Scott Fitzgerald had nightmares in which that they finally found their way out and themselves in a desert… a maze built out of mirages, with no steep stairways, no locked doors, and no walls to impede them in.
- Fitzgerald had no intention of entering this maze. Sighing, he sat down.
Staring into the horizon, Fitzgerald contemplated his role in the scheme of things.
Perhaps he was meant to guard the exit of the maze. Perhaps he was meant to keep bats and other undesirables from entering.
Or perhaps he was an usher. He was to stay by the exit to welcome those who had took his path, to eviscerate the winding paths of the maze to those braver and a lot more fool hardy than him, less they attempt to get lost in the desert.
Fitzgerald’s ruminations were interrupted by a loud crash. Four bricks flew past his head, just missing his face by an inch.
There was the sound of an engine dying and a blast of sand hit his face spinning tires.
A De Lorean had crashed through a section of the maze next to him.
Incredulous, Fitzgerald approached the De Lorean. The doors flung open and hit him in the jaw and he fell over backwards.
“Did we make it?” yelled the ghost on the driver’s seat. His eyes had been gouged out and he had been navigating the road with empty sockets.
“We sure did, Jacky-boy.” said the ghost on the passenger seat. “We got through. We’re free.”
“What in the hell is going on here?” demanded Fitzgerald, brushing himself off as he stood up, assuming the poise of a hungry vulture hunched over a pile of fresh meat… His beak hurt and there was sand in it.
The passenger scrambled out. You could see him, but you could also see right through him. He appeared to be a young man in his 20s, but his hair was completely white. He seemed shocked to see Fitzgerald, but quickly regained his composure.
“No problem, old timer… Me and my buddy just decided to take a little road trip, that’s all.” He says.
“You crazy kids, what are you doing all the way out here? Look what you did to that wall!”
“Sorry, my chauffeur’s been drinking.” says the passenger “My name’s Jack, by the way. Jack Kerouac.”
“… My name’s Jackson Pollock, and for the last time, I’m your pilot, not your mother fucking chauffeur!” roared the driver, pressing down on his horn to punctuate the word ‘chauffeur.”
“Oh, right... my apologies, captain.” replied Jack, winking at Fitzgerald.
“How long did it take you to find your way out?” Fitzgerald asked Pollock.
“15 seconds. We started of in the center and flew outwards in a straight line. By the way, Jack’s my navigator, not a passenger.”
“Some navigator. Look at the damage you caused to the maze.”
“Hey, a shortcut is a shortcut.” Jack shrugged. “Check this out, old timer”
Jack handed Fitzgerald his name card. It was printed on holographic card stock and read:
JACK K AND JACK P
Private Detectives
“It’s not whether you get there,
but the journey that counts!”
Why, the impudence of their motto!
“How do you like us now?” asked Jack K.
Fitzgerald crumpled the name card in his fist and threw it at the center of his chest. It fell right through him. He was a ghost, after all.
“Fool!,” Fitzgerald spat in Jack’s face. His spit, too, went right through him. He was a ghost, after all.
“Hey old timer save your saliva, water is scarce in the desert.”
“I’m not going into the desert, I was perfectly happy where I was until the both of you came crashing through that wall.”
“Oh. A disbeliever, then?” snorted Jack.
“What’s the point? There’s nothing beyond the desert. The planet is round. If you go straight long enough you’ll end up where you were.”
“That’s where you’re wrong Mister,” said Jackson Pollock. “The earth is flat like a canvas, we’re going to leave trails in it...”
“And fall right off the edge!” cried Jack Kerouac in glee.
“You’re just two drunken SOBs.”
“Hey Jackson, I think we best be leaving. Pretty apparent to me that old timer here don’t like our kind.” said Jack nonchalantly.
“Alright, be prepared to board the plane.” Jackson said. He reached into his right eye socket and extracted a car key. It was all bent out of shape, because Jackson had a temper. When they had started off in the center of the maze, Jackson kept forcefully twisting the key in the wrong direction once he had penetrated the ignition, despite Jack’s protests.
Jack got in the car. “So long, old timer. If you’re sleeping outdoors you best watch out for bats.” He said to Fitzgerald.
“Better bats than a couple of clueless ne'er-do-wells.” grumbled Fitzgerald.
“Close the fucking door, Jack” Said Jackson Pollock.
Jack closed the fucking door and Jackson slid the keys in the ignition.
Grunting, he twisted the car keys clockwise.
The De Lorean exploded.
VI. The Mirage
Kerouac’s ghost ended up lost in the desert, and Pollock contorted his body to fit into a little cardboard box which he called a studio. His medium, he said, was now the sand beneath and around him.
Fitzgerald vanished. As last visages of the desert flashed before his eyes, he saw how the universe was constructed.
He saw that it really wasn’t really a desert after all, but an hour glass shaped like a Klien Bottle. A bottle with no inside or outside.
It’s was all so simple. The sands of time ran through the bottle and scattered in outer space. Outer space ran back into the bottle, feeding the sands of time back to the hour glass. All you have to do is follow the path of the sand to realize that no matter which direction you went-
VII. Fitzgerald woke up in cold sweat
In his dream he had saw the Great American Dream.
Unfortunately, he couldn’t remember the ending.
VIII. The End.
The people on the Hunter’s colony started off in a desert. They formed a doomed expedition that tried to make their way back to the center of the maze through an interconnecting web of mazes within mazes. A veritable horror-picture Jungle.
After 15 weeks, everyone on the expedition had died turned into ghosts except for their leader, who wore a yellow trench coat and sunglasses. He ended up lost in the jungle infested with dinosaurs.
“Rather bats in the desert than reptiles in a fucking jungle.” decided the poor Hunter.
15 seconds later, he blew his brains out with his hunting rifle.
July 2028
Too much space.
It seemed as if there was not enough oxygen to go around, not enough air to take up all the space in America. I couldn’t breath. It felt like I was submerged in water.
I was mommy deer to two bears, trying to find my way back to the woods of Johor, but on the way the cab driver got us all lost in the hedge maze of Chicago.
If America was an Amazonian forest, Johor wasn’t the woods… it was an ant farm.
I had shrunk into an ant and the infinity that surrounded us turned my soon-to-be husband’s brains into a pile of salt. He babbled about Space Invaders and Dinosaurs as he had looked back at the burning city of Sodom, though the rear window of the Cab.
The cab driver was Puerto Rican. He didn’t say a word as Fred talked loudly in warped, infantile speech patterns. He probably thought that Fred and I were junkies or something.
Fred was seeing a motion picture in his brain.
Papa bear had waited for the Hollywood ending, and it ended up turning him autistic. Sad but true.
I didn’t see this, though, because I didn’t turn back to watch the show. I was too busy keeping one eye on the meter and another eye on the measuring tape.
“The three of us navigated through the maze in a horse carriage driven by an ant with huge, freakish deer feet,” said Fred.
Outside, giant mirages of measuring tapes hovered around us, creating a maze of measuring tape walls. The units on the measuring tape categorized the fragments of lights, sounds, windows, road signs, and advertisements… and the ghostly blur of people that darted past my eyes.
I rolled up the window to shield my most pupils.
I felt like an ant myself, and ant in a Babylonian jungle maze.
An ant trying to escape from America.
March 2021
When I arrived, I had became completely immersed with the units on the measuring tape that we passed by. The cab driver dropped me off at the hedge maze right next to the University of San Fransisco.
Everything was so much bigger. I felt like a deer shrunk down to ant-size.
An ant left free to roam in the broad paths within the hedge maze, consorting with living people and ghosts, figments from America’s past.
I had slept with many of these ghosts. After we’d frolicked and made love we’d lay back and eat cherries and power pellets, as the CIA watched us from above.
July 2028
For Fred and I, the taste of one nation under President Ellen was short, sweet and bitterly fleeting. Vice President Stephen Colbert’s show took over Billo’s slot on the Presidential channel the night before we left with fake passports.
Things had been tough throughout my university years. I had enrolled when big bad Bill O Reilly was president, and the political climate was incredibly threatening to me, a 19-year old daddy’s girl from Malaysia.
My grandpapa was a mechanic. He had worked hard to get my father an education overseas.
And now, my father said, was time for me to get one for myself.
He told me that an education was worth more than a million certificates. He was intent on sending me on the Road.
I ended up in a 4-year boot camp instead.
Ironically, after things had gotten fucked up beyond all recognition, just before it was time for me to go back to Malaysia and face the music, Struxus came to the rescue. Struxus was a post-political party run by celebrities that signified the beginninf of a new era. Struxus’s agenda was to render binary democracy obsolete by being a neutral party, neither left nor right.
June 2028
“SCORE!” Fred had roared as they tallied the ballots on Faux News on the internet. He was sitting on my packed suitcase, going through muscle spasms as he clapped his hands vigorously.
“Little drummer boy.” I whispered from top bunk. What did it matter? I was breaking up with every one and flunking every subject. We were going back home.
I had gotten what I came here for, hadn’t I?
An “education”.
July 2028
The fake passports June had got us fooled no one. The immigration people were mostly women, and were very nice. They talked to me as if I were a kid who had overextended her vacation, rather than an illegal immigrant… a university drop out with an expired Visa.
They even wore Ellen Degeneres hairdos and badges that read: “Diplomacy first!” in red, white and blue.
Fred and Josh came with me. They didn’t have any identification. Fred wasn’t in their records, and Josh was a nonentity. He wasn’t American as far as they were concerned. He dressed as if he were from a different time period and talked in an odd language.
“He’s speaking plain English,” I told them. “You have to get used to his… weird enunciations.”
“Whatever he’s speaking, His fingerprints aren’t in our database.” shrugged Ellen, before escorting me to the Malaysian Embassy. “Neither are your son’s…”
“He’s not my son.” I said.
We were detained for 2 days, and deported back to Malaysia. Problem solved on Uncle Sam’s side.
I wasn’t relieved. Hell awaited me back in Malaysia.
March 2027
During the great Culture Wars that broke out during the second year of Bill’s tenure, a group of students formed a political discussion group in my college that, occasionally, did a little more than just sit down and talk.
These students were later branded ‘Leftist Radicals’ by the President on the O Rielly Factor, which was still being broadcast live every day on White House TV network, which shared channel space with the Playboy Mansion TV Network.
It was no Radicalist group that broke the windows and sprayed graffiti all over Professor Jason’s car. It was his stepson Richy, and Richy alone, who was responsible for the destruction of property.
Richy was his second wife’s, the sole offspring of her second marriage. He was a spoilt, rich suburban scene kid who dressed up like a 50s Mod and resented his parents.
I called Richy Prince Charming when we were dating. I call him Dorian Gray, in retrospect.
I met Richy in a fraternity party during Halloween. I was dressed up as Cinderella and Richy was dressed up as Henry Hill.
I was majoring in anthropology and he was flunking sociology. He wanted to switch to psychology instead.
We drank and got to know each other more.
Richy told me that he was a huge fan of the movie Goodfellas. His favorite scene from it was the the scene in which Henry Hill hurts a guy in front of his soon-to-be wife, Karen.
In the scene, Karen tells Henry that the guy across the street tried to hit on her.
This prompts Henry to pistol-whip and insult him in public.
After blood is drawn, Henry gives Karen the gun to hide, making her fall for him subsequently:
KAREN (V.O.)
"I know there are women, like my best friends, who would have gotten out of there the minute their boyfriend gave them a gun to hide. But I didn't. I got to admit the truth. It turned me
on."
Professor Tom Kabns was the guy who bore the wrath of Rich’s gangster fantasies. His great big sin was addressing Papa Bear and me as a “Junkie and an immigrant couple” in a lecturer hall filled with young Americans. That probably wasn’t the smartest thing to say in one nation divided by Bill O.
Both sides had already regressed from human beings to brainless amoebas. These amoebas were dictated by the philosophy of stimulus response, stimulus response. Having lost their ability for intelligent political discourse, both camps of amoeba resorted to shouting and knee-jerk reactionism. An astronomy major in Texas couldn’t use the word “black hole” and not be prosecuted for hate speech.
Political tension spread in the lecture hall like noxious fumes. You could practically choke on the stench of the words ‘junkie’ and ‘immigrant’.
A huge brouhaha erupted. It was as if the poor Professor had said the words “kike” and “nigger”.
The professor’s words divided the student body into squabbling groups who tried to outdo each other in terms of volume and verbal carnage. It was like half of the student body had banded together in defensive, and the other half banded together to prosecute.
The security breech the defensive squad was banding together against was only a hypothetical one, but they didn’t care. All they wanted to do was get together to silence the opposition, Professor Oreo Cookie.
The prosecutors may have seen through their hysteria, but they weren’t immune to overblown behavior, either. They played their music just as loudly at the defensive squad played theirs, and spray painted GO HOME IMMIGRANT on my dorm room 10 months later.
June 2027
I was never really part of the Angry Young Liberals, a clique who hailed Richy Kabns Jr. their new figurehead after he had tagged his father’s car. Richy looked just like Johnny Depp from cry baby, except instead of leather jackets he wore size S T-Shirts with Jeremy Glick printed on it.
Yes, I had heard the hushed whispers bouncing off the cafeteria walls and I had seen the eyes reflected on my metallic tray… I knew how it looked… first the Professor, then his son?
The truth was, I was feeling like I had trapped myself, somewhat. I was getting sick of mothering Fred and Josh.
“How does one nurture the neutered, anyway?” Jade once joked. 4 months later, we had a short-lived lesbian affair.
I was instable and confused. I wondered if I Josh saw me as a mother.
Fred’s face was marred by acne scars. He had a pot belly and no personal hygiene. He was nothing but a big, bearded baby. I buttoned up his clothes to keep up the pretense that he was a fully functional adult. I washed his socks and underwear. When I had classes I locked him up him in my dorm room with food and a typewriter to keep himself occupied.
As he stuffed his face with crackers and cheese, Fred typed stories from the point of view of a person in a maze:
I WENT TO THE LEFT. I TOOK A RIGHT TURN. STRAIGHT. LEFT. LEFT. STRAIGHT UP THE LADDER. DOWN THE HOLE. STRAIGHT UP THE ELEVATOR. DOWN THE ESCALATOR. UP THE LADDER. DOWN THE STEPS. RIGHT. RIGHT. STRAIGHT. RIGHT. LEFT AND LEFT AGAIN.
They read like chess moves.
“I like the way your chest moves,” said Richy. “You know, when you talk,”
“Stalemate.” I said.
Richy scratched the tip of his freckled nose. A girl could die for those freckles.
A girl’s got to live, give herself time to meet people before decided who she wants to commits to.
Or be committed with.
“…one flew east, one flew west,
One flew over the cuckoo's nest.”
I sang, playing with Richy’s hair.
“My act of protest wasn’t self-contradictory, you know” said Richy Kabns Jr, popping an ecstasy pill into his mouth as I ruffled his hair.
What a cutie. I loved his freckles. I loved his red hair. I loved his ham fisted rationalizing. I loved his general cluelessness.
Richy was a very pretty boy, but he was also a very delusional one.
“Baby, you were advocating fascism when you tagged his car.” I said. “You’re denying Professor Jason the very freedom of speech you claim that everyone has a right to exercise.”
“On the contrary, Peggy,” said Richy, fondling my right breast. “What Professor Oero has got to realize is that…”
“Professor Ero?” I laughed, pressing my body against Richy’s under the bed sheet, snuggling towards the warmth.
“That’s spelt O-E-R-O, pronounced like Arrow, as in the arrow in Xeno’s paradox. ‘Oe’ is pronounced “Eh”, as in ‘Oepidus Rex’, a Ro as in ‘J.K. Rowling’. It’s slang for inside out Oreo Cookie.”
“Inside-out Oreo Cookie?”
“A wankster. Black guy who’s a redneck inside. He’s a redneck who speaks in inverse hip hop slang.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Richy!” I laughed.
“Oreos are sandwich cookies with cream in the…”
“Oh, I know what Oreo Cookies are.”
“I’m pretty sure you told me that they didn’t make Oreos in Malaysia.”
“That was Pop Tarts. We have Oreros. They were my favorite. I’d twist off the biscuits and lick the cream… Dad would chide me for doing that. He told me that there we no shortcuts in life, and that I was meant to bite through crunchy chocolate biscuits as well as the sweet white stuff.”
“Hmph. Anyway… like I was saying, people like Professor Jason are against freedom of speech. They talk in the language of stereotypes. Don’t get me wrong, I support the Professor’s right to express his own ignorance. However, just as he is free to express his views, I am free to publically condemn it. Decorating his car was just a response to his initial message, an extension of the dialogue he initiated. It is an expression of my disagreement of his bigoted worldview. See, we’re really BOTH exercising the first amendment.”
“Richy,” I said, moving his hand away from my breast. “You can trump freedom of speech all you want, but you can’t reduce action and consequence into abstract concepts. You didn’t decorate Professor Jason’s car, you vandalized it. Cars cost money, you know. Your method of expression brought financial loss to Professor Jason.”
“Fuck that. Cars are an overabundance here in America. They’re loud, pollute the air, and cause millions of deaths every year. The less cars the better… you know… exhaust fume… global warming.”
“Now you’re just throwing ecological slogans around arbitrarily. Look. You’re a superpower. The excess inherent in your system fuels your rebellion, rather than its inadequacies. When my dad was in his 20s, he didn’t even own a car, let alone think of vandalizing one. My grandfather was a mechanic…”
“That’s what foreigners don’t get… It’s not excess. It’s freedom. You can never get too much freedom, Peggy.”
The tone of his voice stung me. It was as if he had reverted to talking to an immigrant instead of a lover.
I sulked and turned away from him.
“Peggy, what is your point exactly?” Richy said impatiently, flicking my nipples.
“Stop it Richy. At the end of the day, you’re saying that this material loss, the destruction of something as tangible, is the consequence of something intangible… the Professor’s speech. That negates everything you and your f…first amendment rights stand for!”
“Tangible…?” Richy laughed. “Did you learn that word in your academic writing workshop?”
“Fuck you, Richy.” I said, insulted.
“Oh baby, you know I’m just playing. Trust me, I know what tangible means.” He said in a deep voice, sliding his hand into my underwear.
“Get away from me.”
I moved away from him and he made grabbing, stroking motions at my ass, as if by reflex. I slapped his hands away from me.
“Richy… this isn’t funny!” I said. “Listen to me… you dad is talking about resigning so that the university won’t have to bear the brunt of a controversy. Your actions cost him his job.”
“My actions? What about his actions? The old man cheated on his wife, and lied to his children. I would say he had what was coming to him.”
“You dad really isn’t that bad of a guy, you know...”
“He fucking took advantage of you.” Richy hissed, like a snake. “He used you and left you.”
“He did the right thing. He didn’t want to hurt your family.”
“You don’t think I’m going to hurt you, don’t you?” said Richy, stroking my hair.
“Richy, I…”
“I don’t blame you, you know. I blame my dad completely. You were a freshman in a new environment… you were confused, and he took advantage of that.”
“It’s not that simple, Richy…”
Richy put his slithering lips on mine to shut me up, and curled his left arm around my waist.
“He manipulated you. Poor baby. I’ll take care of you, Pegs.” said Prince Charming.
He pulled me towards him, sliding his right hand down my underwear.
“Richie…” I began, but he started kissing my neck.
That’s wasn’t fair. I had sensitive neck and shoulders.
“I know how to please a woman.”
Richy rubbed his hands over my pubes.
“You…”
Richy slid his middle and index finger inside me.
