I was a sort of freshman at the non-Mormon university, a barely matriculated back-of-the-classroom lurker, a mere arriviste teeny-bopper, with an undeclared major yet, halfheartedly feeling about for my birthright, my faculty-brat career opportunity as my dad's successor among the tenure-track commies and alcoholics. And I can't imagine how, but I had found myself suddenly a made-member of this glamorous seminar, this symposium, otherwise reserved for Ph.D. and MFA candidates in the English department.
My classmates (if I'm not presumptuous in using the term) were the future Creative Writing Industrialists of the Intermountain West, and they were working on fictional dissertations and metafictional theses, sans footnotes. These people were right on the verge of finding literary agents, for Christ's sake, and I can only assume that I'd been cast among them, like an earthworm among rainbow trout, through some simple clerical error.
Our registrar still used those computer cards with the rectangular perforations, the sort you were never supposed to fold, spindle or mutilate with straight pins and ink. God knows what miscarriages of enrollment they perpetuated. I'm not sure what levels of technological sophistication had already been achieved by the grand educational institutions back east, where the teacher of our high-tone workshop came from. But it is hard to credit in retrospect that such primitive paper products remained in use, even in our hopelessly remote and benighted part of the country. Sometimes at night I wonder if I actually did bullshit my way through to a baccalaureate degree, or if it was conferred upon me at random. I suppose it hardly matters in the long run.
Streckfuss looked very excited and flattered at the prospect of going among the intelligentsia. But he hesitated. "In this shop, do they tell you the way to do these kind of novel-books?" He gestured through the darkness with the stolen property. The spine was cracked in many places.
"Syllabus says we'll cover that procedure first thing tomorrow."
I looked to the eastern brink, which seemed to be brightening with rosy fingers and vast dove's wings—but then, so did every other quadrant of the sky I tried to focus my swirling eyes on. So I revised my comment tentatively: "...first thing today?"
Streckfuss, too, was unsure. "Already?" he murmured. "Is it the next day?"
Since it was impossible to go to sleep under the influence of this alkaloid, I figured it would be best if we forewent bed and ate a lot more of the Shivwit people's holy sacrament. I was only eighteen, and green in judgment, as the man says. In fact I was a sort of dusty spineless cactus green in judgment. But spineless in the best sense of the word.
So we spent all night skulking around the wrong parts of town, and trying to empty a big paper bag of peyote into our disparate metabolisms. They were like Swinburne's "green grapes of Proserpine," only smaller, with a hoary topknot, and they tended to banish rather than induce unconsciousness.
During the course of this ordeal of indulgence, Streckfuss allowed himself to be provisionally persuaded to join the "shop," for, in fact, he was an author, too. He unzipped his habitual one-shoulder backpack and fished out imaginative works, one after another. Squatting on his heels in a lurid alley, ranging the papers between scarlet puddles of transmission fluid from some long-gone truck, he acted as though no particular sequence was required. Streckfuss was simply putting the pages in the order that pleased him most at the moment. He had arrived at an ultra-current, found-poetic technique. It approached Burroughsian paste-ups in sophistication, and was all the more impressive for having been achieved purely by instinct—for my companion that night was virginal of theory, let there be no doubt. Some talent, maybe even some academic potential, was indicated. I found myself already envying his fellowship stipend.
When the real sun actually did come up, Streckfuss began to wonder aloud whether it might not be a shrewd financial move to report to work and punch in, so he could draw his pay while absent. Like many places of employment in our semi-civilized outpost of Christendom, Streckfuss' hospital kitchen was so chaotic, with fruit compote and soap suds flipping in wild arcs all around, that it would be no problem to sneak back out and have his kindly co-workers cover for him.
We approached the greasy loading dock in back and came upon his fellow dish-jockeys having a one last smoke before hitting the sinks. They were gay African-Americans, a downright gaggle of them, all mothery and fluttery and protective of my little friend, whom they had correctly diagnosed as borderline non compos mentis. Streckfuss' work-mates were the gentle, helpless sort of homosexual, but he jumped on their chests no more frequently than he jumped on mine. Maybe he figured there was no way creatures exotic as they could have the answers to his childhood questions.
He swaggered among them like a bantam rooster and crowed the big news. Today was his big break, his debut. Their honky mascot was about to burst, finally, into the national awareness. There were squeals of congratulations, even tears, as they closed around him like breasts on a wet nurse.
These men were accustomed to painting the black part of town red immediately after punching out, so they maintained lockers full of nice things on the hospital premises. They ushered my friend into the employees' locker room and commenced dolling him up, each pitching in from his own gorgeous wardrobe.
I wasn't allowed to follow them in and advise on the makeover because I hadn't been TB-screened, nor had I defecated in a paper cup and submitted my creation to the critical appraisal of the state health department. Streckfuss always swore to god that he knew a transvestite too delicate to do something quite so distasteful with his anus, who had smuggled in a dog turd instead, and was given a job in administration. But there were no dogs around that I was able to see, and no paper cups, at least none in the state of sterility required for lab analysis of the contents. So I loitered on the dock and nervously tried to propitiate with falsetto ditties the aquamarine pumas and coyotes that kept consolidating from deliverymen's cigarette smoke and nipping at my Achilles tendons.
After what seemed like six or seven months, Streckfuss came out, shy as a bride in a not incomparable amount of white silk and satin, all primped and preened and ready for his real life finally to begin. Their finery, he promised his dusky godmothers, would be returned by the hands of someone with a literary agent. Origins transcended at last, the skin on those hands would finally have the chance to slough off the purple pot stainer; and the ink, for once, would be supercutaneous. Streckfuss' comrades were giggling with sympathetic nervous delight as they flicked him kisses from the lip of the dock, and "saw li'l ole Streckums off to the varsity ball like Cinderella in his special matrickle-ation suit."
As we headed off down the driveway, he said, "I think they work there because they like to wear aprons."
Streckfuss had on a white silk shirt with puffy Ricky Ricardo sleeves, shiny black hip-hugger bell-bottoms, rolled up at the waist to accommodate some surplus in-seam, and a pair of spit-polished square-toe disco shoes with five-inch platform soles. It was obvious, somehow, that he could never have afforded such an outfit, not with a facial expression like that. Even now, at certainly the happiest moment of his whole life, his very demeanor militated against anything but deep penury and failure. Besides, the various elements in his ensemble didn't fit his reptilian form, each in a different way. To eyes that knew no better, indiscriminate filching might seem indicated. My classmates, my elder brothers and sisters in the craft, were going to assume I'd picked up a shoplifter from some unimaginable haberdashery in a neighborhood that none of them would ever drive through, not even with windows rolled up tight.
He wanted to take a cab and arrive at the English Department in a style befitting his costume. But I pointed out that buying him a fresh pair of gastric crutches would constitute a wiser allocation of resources. It would be best not to have to deal with a psychomimetic reflux of peptic enzymes while having one's life's work subjected to the magnifying glass of informed critical attention. The constant rhythmic cranial shudders so characteristic of excessive peyotism are distracting enough without rumblings from the basement. So we took a bus instead of a cab. With the saved funds we planned to raid the Seven-Eleven near the university bus stop, and also to xerox his Creative Writing.
Streckfuss made a big deal of scraping some anonymous clumps of kleenex off the bus seat. "I can't get any crap on these pants," he said. He fluffed his collar and sleeves in the window, and looked as though he'd rather lose a finger than a fiber of that lugubrious blouse. I had never seen anything like it within twenty blocks of the university. This guy was going to cause the collegiate sensation I had tried and failed to cause on my own.
Sometimes it occurred to me to wonder where Streckie-the-Trekkie could've gotten so incongruous. Our native town was a diseased and inchoate place, it's true, but not some alien planet. But then I recalled his being a vet. So, the recent sensitive movies notwithstanding, I asked him, as we rode uphill to the place of enlightenment, what they'd made him do in the war.
"Helicopter gunner. They had me hanging out the side in a chair and I had a big machine gun and they flew me down next to the ground so I could waste Veecee."
"You wasted a whole bunch of 'em?"
"Yeah. We were eating a lot of Clear Light. I was sort of getting into it. I'm gonna show this one to the shop today."
I was expecting a combat story: The Red Badge of Courage with civilian decapitations and lieutenant fraggings. But I was surprised to find something quite different: a peacetime reminiscence of an even earlier period of his immaturity. Streckfuss was following the pattern of a good many writers at the beginning of their careers, who exploit their personal histories like strip mines for narrative material, and proceed chronologically, commencing with infancy narratives, as it were. Later, as my friend ripened artistically, he could be expected to cover the chopper raids on windowpane LSD. But for now it was boyhood. Huck Finn rolling on the asphalt river, if not lake.
He composed in the same Big Daddy Roth script that could be seen under his epidermis, with tiny stylized skulls grinning over the i's and j's. At the feet of the pages were precognitive catchwords, such as those found in incunabular liturgies and medieval Satanist recipe books.
The text read in part as follows:
"To celebrate me on Sunday my old dad put me up inside the window. In the end gate of our Rambler station wagon window. And my butt was on the edge of the window and my arms rest across the auto-top. And the back is full of Basket Balls my old dad, he stealed from his church. The other kids racing on foot all around me. Eggplants, polaks, guinea bastards like myself, rice-negroes, zipper-heads, chinks, harps, papooses, and also young persons of the Jewish purse suasion. All one the same together, Americans. And I bounced them Basket Balls off top their head. My old dad chases a kid down like on TV, he squeals the tires, I bean him with my Basket Balls. My old dad says we are feeling power-full and political. The kids soon had their own ammo of Basket Balls and they some times hit me on the back or my sides. The kids on feet they were less uncordennated than myself. Because they wasn't saddled down with their old dad's Rambler station wagon. Which was faster than them though. Once I fell out, I landed on my side. I had to crawl for cover because both my legs was asleep. Because my butt it was always pressed down on the edge of that Rambler end gate window. The kids they buried me by Basket Balls that time. I was only one big old bruise that time. It was a pleasant uprising. Or so my old dad told it later."
"This should do fine," I said.
"I used to kind of worry about not having enough big words in my stuff. But then I saw the teacher's novel-book at Seven-Eleven. No problemmo, you know? I bet he won't mind autographing a stolen copy if I gently tear out the pages with the most cheese on them. Except I need one of those computer cards, like yours, to get through the door. Right?"
"What? Oh, you can borrow mine. I'm friends with the, um, ticket-taker."
I reached into his backpack (that's how beside himself he was with feelings of impending personal excellence: under normal conditions, just touching the thing would earn you a dislocated thumb or shoulder), and I pulled out the paper bag of blessed verdure. I indicated my readiness to clean it out once and for all before reporting to class.
"Us college students take 'em all the time prior to matriculating," I explained. "The teacher won't mind because he's from the east coast, and so he's sophisticated. Whattaya say?"
I held out a handful: skin-like blobs of chlorophyll coolness to smell and sob over with itchy tears.
Streckfuss lovingly blew some red sand away. He looked famished, and sorely tempted. But he said, "I always get paranoidal and, um, combative if I do it too many days in a row without sleeping."
He was plainly dying to be talked into pushing himself between the lips of the abyss. I could see that he was already having some imaginary brain quakes. And he wasn't the only one. Already I felt traces of the sublimity that would descend when we chastised and houseled ourselves further on the immemorial Shivwit soma, scarfing this gunk by the sweaty armload. Digesting spineless tubercles was the sole reason my DNA was ever braided in the womb in the first place.
I said, "That's what college is for, to be paranoiac and combative in. Don't you remember? Didn't you listen to the American Forces Network when you were over there, face down in the mud in Hoo Dun Poo, or wherever? Come on, they're yours, but I'll be glad to share 'em with you, fifty-fifty. What do you say? Huh?"
My very cerebellum salivates as I recall and record the memory: bulbs full of the concentrated essence of everything potent, grave and reverend yet remaining on the face of this poor depleted earth; the final receptacle for the ghosts of coyote- and iguana-deities, plus Phrygian Cybele and multi-dugged Demeter; preserver of the souls of prognosticating eunuchs, theriomorphic virgins, and heinous Beelzebub, all chemically wedded within its darling confines, plump and succulent as the buttocks of rareripe babies under your arm—a desert delicacy, an emphatically frontier treat, no city slickers allowed. In fact, I wonder just how far east of rainless country it can be smuggled, before losing its succulent potency. I notice no mention of peyote in novels about growing up in the Bronx.
So perfectly attuned was I, as I trepanned the tufts of icky strychnine from each bulb with my right thumbnail (allowed to go unclipped to a Chinese aristocratic extent for this very purpose, the quick tinged a permanent green), my tongue gradually loosened from its frenum and went into slippery orbit around my cerebral cortex, where it began teasing and butterfly-kissing the outer gray tegument to the point of intracranial ejaculation.
"There's no need to fret," I mouthed into the ears of my apprentice, "if I miss a few of these lethal angel-hair filaments woven through-and-through the strawberry-like flesh, the fibrous essence of nux vomica, strung in and out, like systems of unpleasant symbols in an edifying vegetable narrative. Let it stain our tootsies, my boy. Fuck that overpriced Manhattan whore."
Before I could close my mouth on further indiscretion, a pencil-beam of saliva gushed from under my tongue, squirting across the aisle. And we were able to wad up the paper bag and throw it, empty, on the floor just as the bus pulled up to our stop.
"But what if I barf on the homo Negro clothes?" cried Streckfuss in a panicky voice. He'd already gagged the emetic down in quantities, and now the thought occurred to him, too late. He hit himself on the forehead in full-body mortification, and tried, fingernails scraping against the walls, to arrest his descent into the salad-colored tunnel. The atmosphere of that whole end of town suddenly got tense.
But I calmed him down. As far as anybody knew, I was the only one who could do this. It didn't seem to matter what I said, but I could usually cause him to stop vibrating and sizzling. Sometimes no words were necessary, and all I needed to do was take his arm or shoulder and lend him direction, as now. Even while remaining terrified to glance down at the pointy crown of his head, for fear his face would suddenly aim up at mine and start hissing, I steered him to the place where further ballast for peyote tummy could be had, along with the good offices of a xerox machine. Settled and reproduced, Streckfuss went to seek for truth in the groves of Academe.
