Just about everyone was petrified. But there was one person in the room who witnessed no pagan theophany, who saw no mutilated body parts exposed, who heard no mouths clamming up any tighter than usual, who hadn't even noticed my sidekick follow me in and start building an interpersonal relationship with the famous novelist—because this person was busy grasping the opportunity of the resumed silence to assert her ample presentation self.
She was called LurLeen, and she made frequent unannounced visitations upon various high-level humanities seminars, today being her first appearance in our workshop. She could seriously talk, this LurLeen, on the phone as well as in the flesh, and had thereby achieved everyone else's dream: a New York literary agent had recently signed her on as a client. That lent her an air of real authority, which opened doors for her—even ones that would've been better off nailed shut and sealed up with bricks and forgotten for several generations.
But LurLeen wasn't all brass bands and ticker tape parades and gleaming galley proofs and not-so-secretive long distance phone calls to and from the communal TA's office. There was an artistic side to LurLeen as well—her better half, in fact.
She had a lifetime-sharing partner who was quite a remarkable poetess in her own right. This woman's numbers were dredged raw from so deep in her very abdomen that they could only be written in her menstrual blood, by means of a genuine Japanese horse-hair shuji brush which she'd learned to hold just like a real Oriental. Many of her fellow soul-hemophiliacs found it deeply affecting, this literal self-expression. So she kept that shuji brush as a badge of her vocation, poking from the right breast pocket of her woolen plaid logger's shirt, business end bristling out to flick and splatter against you if you ever got close enough by accident. It usually seemed rinsed off well enough.
Billing herself as the "menstrual minstrel," Lurleen's lifetime-sharing partner had already applied for her first NEA grant, and it looked like it was about to go through. This high success, and the physically felt profundity of her verse, couldn't have contrasted more piquantly with her personal mannerisms, which were those of a basically nice little boy trying to compensate for shyness and genital meagerness with poorly feigned toughness.
And, of course, at the same time, the menstrual minstrel positively exuded that earnest inarticulateness requisite for masculine creatures in these parts. Laconism is all we have to offer, our regional identity, if you will. How many subordinate clauses have you heard from the Marlborough Man lately? Or from Streckfuss, for that matter? Unlike the toughness, the far-western inability to employ language was unfeigned in the menstrual minstrel's case, paradoxically enough for a poetess.
Our teacher, for reasons he did not care to specify (some said they were religious in nature), had not granted her admission to the workshop. But today she'd somehow been smuggled in, obviously as a claqueur in the service of LurLeen—who was by this point in our workshop session well launched into an extended LurLeenian soliloquy.
The menstrual minstrel had Lurleen's speechifying mannerisms well memorized, the "tee-hee" and the eyebrow archings, and so on. So she knew when something impended which required for its full effect an audience response (rarely forthcoming from the proper sector), and she laughed uproariously just before the punch lines. Being a physical as well as literary artist (sometimes her creations were brought into this world by means of performance art in one of the few coffee houses that remained straggling among the newly constructed Ziggy Stardust boutiques in the student part of town), she would gesticulate her appreciation broadly, and often enough jostle and brush up against any people in the vicinity, causing them to spill their drinks and drop whatever snack foods they might be consuming, and sometimes spill stuff on their clothes.
So Streckfuss wasn't the only "audit" in the room. And, of course, terrestrial life being what it is, when he finally did allow himself to be lowered, by me, gingerly, into a chair, it was next to the menstrual minstrel he wound up sitting. On her right side.
Looking back, I can now plainly see that I should have interposed myself between this brace of high-potential troublemakers. But I was reluctant to do so, despite many forebodings, physically felt, such as one of my buttocks involuntarily scooting and squinching in the opposite direction, dragging its puzzled mate along the particleboard surface of my seminar chair. If he had been seated on her left, instead of her right, I feel sure that I would have mustered the intestinal wherewithal to wedge both uncooperative halves of my ass between the pair of them, buffer-wise. I have always had the highest confidence in my built-in belly ballast, but not quite that much. I was sure I saw her horse-hair tampon poking out of that logger shirt pocket. Let the hospital dishwasher, the ungloved scrubber of coughed-up tumor sauce from soup tureens, sit next to her.
And so he was caused to do. At first he hardly noticed his new neighbor. He kept his chopper gunner's sights fixed instead on the guy at the head of the table who wouldn't stop cold-shouldering Streckfuss, in the very climax of his debut, so soon after America's armed forces had saved this stuck-up snob's pudgy butt from communism.
"Shit," said Streckfuss, "he probably is a communist."
"Well," I whispered, "sort of... I guess. Depends on whether you read his books or observe his actions."
"What actions? He's a rich communist."
The only time those eyes unfastened themselves from the balding spot on the author's pricey head was when the menstrual minstrel guffawed at something LurLeen said and jostled Streckfuss. It didn't break his concentration so much as bodily disengage his line of sight. She was a wiry little poetess and capable of some seismic nudges with those unpumiced elbows. She only served to stoke whatever source of combustion fired his eyes up. I could feel the heat they radiated, and so, evidently, could our teacher, the rich communist—for new strings of sweat pearls shimmered among the photogenic furrows on that brow each time the searchlights of the Streckfussian chopper re-focused.
As a shoe-in for an NEA grant, Streckfuss' unquiet neighbor was most emphatically in the government hireling camp. And that couldn't have contrasted her more dramatically with her lifetime-sharing partner, her more prosaic opposite, the talkative client of an actual Manhattan-based author's representative, LurLeen. You see, not every reveller at this party wanted to overthrow the Johnsonian ideal. I wasn't the only one motivated by greed. There were very special incentives to remain faithful to the old post-Augustans and their credo about blockheads writing for no money.
In that epoch of American literary history, for serious writers willing to engage the Great Cham's "common reader," there were opportunities to earn good money, such as two million dollars as an advance against royalties on copies sold. Such splendid figures often constituted the cornerstone of the publisher's entire ad campaign, which might even, in circumstances of extreme good fortune, include national television spots. Plus these novelists, having been translated whole, like Elijah, to such heights, were guaranteed the chance to see their creations interpreted cinematically by skilled screenwriters and talented directors in the employ of major motion picture studios. It was a flowering of literature.
That "two million" (sufficient, if they were sesterces, to purchase two seats in the Roman Senate) happened to be the magic figure associated famously with our teacher. It had become proverbially part of his name. You could almost see that many zeroes when you looked in his dark brown eyes. At any rate, I could, that day, see a multiplicity of ciphers, green, like artichoke-flavored doughnuts, strung from his lashes. I even saw the digital read-out on his corneas increase a quantum when he stole a tremulous glance at the sticky mass-market paperback which Streckfuss, in his fidgeting anxiety to shine today, had wrapped even tighter around his cheese dog as a kind of protective sheath, if not outright armor, against the assaults of the unnaturally boisterous woman on his left.
I feared the novelist might be offended to see the result of his earnest lucubration, the product of his soul, of his very blood, so misused as a holder for snack food. But I saw nothing—except maybe another shift upward on his corneal display.
"Another price-unit will have to be vended," he seemed to be thinking (in my deranged imagination at any rate). "That copy will be unreadable when the cheddary-looking stuff starts to curdle and rot. We can send that one to the Chinks."
I heard golden chimes clanging in those ears, such as would appetize the least erected spirit that fell from heaven. Or maybe I just heard the tin dingalings of a cash register. For a few seconds I was transported back in time and space to Seven-Eleven. I was standing before the cardboard shrine to his talent, one of several hundred thousand identical promotional setups, from sea to shining sea. If they'd bothered to fold one up and mail it all the way out here, the things must be half-assedly assembled and lopsidedly displayed in every seedy inbred trailer-trash fuck-hole clear across the Home of the Brave. It was a downright continental blitzkrieg of quality paperbacks.
Theretofore in American literary history, such all-out, hell-bent promotion campaigns had been reserved for what is known in the trade as "formulaic" fiction. But the famous writer's book was not about flying saucers or spies or natural disasters or geishas or vampires or husbands duly outgrown. It was an historical novel, that's true—and, as such, factually edified while it entertained, which appealed to the vast majority of potential customers with only a narrow slot set aside for reading in their busy workaday schedules. This, in fact, was the falsified nonfiction he had invented and backed up with volumes of spurious documentation, because people were paying for such these days.
However, the book made up for this generic concession by conscientiously eschewing the self-indulgent prettiments of rhetorical adornment that deform so many bodice-rippers and period-pieces and other such tawdry lower middle-class romances. It hewed instead with great discipline to the Hemingwayesque line and the simple-declarative monosyllables of the much-esteemed "transparent style," which traces its roots, of course, to the old "Puritan plain style" of our author's native eastern seaboard: the method of those staunch colonials who, though Christians, can be identified as his artistic forbears.
This utter readability, in combination with the author's expertly modulated, leftward-leaning politics (again uncharacteristic of a faux-aristocratic tradition, and calculated to please the upper echelons of the New York book reviewing apparatus), made for an unbeatable package. Therefore, unlike most novels of that particular formulaic sub-category, the thing Streckfuss stole the night before and had wrapped around his cheese dog, our teacher's best-selling chef-d'oeuvre, had achieved high critical acclaim. It had won the National Book Award or something equally indicative of literary value.
But, in spite of these and so many other educational opportunities which this college course offered the degree-seeker, Streckfuss was unimpressed. He seemed to hold in utter disregard the hefty curriculum vita of the headliner who had just ignored him so summarily. Perhaps I had been a bit hasty, or maybe just naive, in thinking such disparate social classes could mix, even in America, the classless society.
After about twenty minutes of life among the intelligentsia, my sidekick was already getting fidgety. Quite methodically, with rodent nibbles all around, he chewed the wax off the rim of his Big Gulp cup. Terrified as I felt, off and on, I could have sworn that part of me was strangely proud to have brought him in, ill-advised though the bringing had probably been.
Through his hardened eyes, I saw my own half-habituated world as for the first time. And I was forced to admit that watching somebody read silently, meanwhile being impinged upon by a poetess as her missus effused in your ear, must be the sort of thing that can get irritating pretty quickly for someone used to a life of headlong action, such as a former car thief and chopper gunner. In fact, this session of our glamorous Creative Writing workshop would have been in danger of flopping altogether for Streckfuss, just as the other sessions had flopped for everybody else, if we hadn't been lucky enough to count the talky LurLeen among our number.
As he never said much more than our surnames and "Um," and remained otherwise inscrutable, I was unable to determine whether the famous writer had asked LurLeen to swoop her large buttery presence down and fill up today's class with sound as a personal favor to him, so he wouldn't be expected to do anything for yet another period, or whether she'd volunteered, in hopes of return favors of the Manhattan kind. She already had an agent. What other sort of favors might she have expected?
I sincerely doubt there was any exchange of the fucking and sucking category of favors going on—and not just because of LurLeen's less than nubile physique and her obvious predilections, and the teacher's equally obvious, and very peculiar, lack thereof. (He never exhibited the slightest enthusiasm in either direction—or at least none that a crude and inexperienced clodhopper such as I was able to detect through my underdeveloped sense organs.) Rather, I got the sense, from watching LurLeen perform, that she held forth for holding forth's own sake, and that she probably did it even in elective courses taught by those tenured relics who inhabit the more cobwebby reaches of any humanities department, whose favor or disfavor couldn't be less pertinent to the furtherance of anyone's career. I suspect she went on almost verbatim, regardless of academic context, proceeding on sheer nervous energy and the evident bounty of her plush spirit.
I didn't know whether the renowned novelist expected and appreciated, or was surprised and irritated, by the wall of contralto sound. Personally, I found it numbing, in an oddly pleasant way. But then, I was living in a state of habitual and near total nervous exhaustion, like any teenager worth his salt.
This was, after all, a chaotic period of American history, no less than any other, notwithstanding the recent fizzling-out of the sixties, and it was difficult to find a room where you could sit that was not rumbling and rattling. LurLeen's sebaceous syllables coaxed me toward narcosis, a puffy-cheeked stupor of some duration, and I didn't notice whose xerox she was "critiquing" (a transitive verb which had recently become permissible within the walls of the academy).
I could not recall closing my peyotist's eyes in the past seventy-two hours or more, except very briefly, if repeatedly, in shrill terror. So I found myself looking forward an hour and a half of humming oblivion, Mommy reading Tommy a bedtime story, something milky from Milne, my brain switched off—well enough aware, at one level, of the untenable admixture of personalities on my left, but still so frazzled as to be soothed by—
Oh Timothy Tim
Has one red head.
And one red head
Has Timothy Tim.
It sleeps with him
In Timothy's bed.
Sleep well red head
Of Timothy Tim.
It vaguely occurred to me, as my heart and respiration rates began to settle down for the first time in about three weeks, that LurLeen wasn't really reciting from "Now We are Six," and that she must be soliloquizing on someone or other's work, and I dimly wondered whose it might be. But I was lulled, up here in my bourgeois enclave near the head of the table, despite perilous rumblings from the other side of the tracks in the "audit" slums.
"Your imagination," LurLeen was saying, "seems to work well enough for the current marketplace, but you use too many adjectives and adverbs! You should try counting them sometime and see how many you use. And restrain yourself, because, after all, writing is a pure act, and not just wallowing in pleasure like a medieval mass or a gothic cathedral or something like that. Plus you need much, much, much shorter sentences and just a whole lot more dialogue, especially in the part where you throw basketballs at the interracial children from the end gate of your father's car."
I sat up straight.
"My agent always tells me that contemporary fiction has to be written in 'real time.' What does that mean, this crazy book-biz term? Well, I'll tell you. Real time means it takes the same number of minutes to read the story as it would to perform the actions depicted in the story. And that means it's best to just show every-day experiences with every-day people chatting about whatever plops into their minds, and let your modest sincerity, not your invention, hold the reader's interest. Plot only makes people think you're showing off, and we all resent a show-off, right? Being manipulated and led around by the nose into places you wouldn't otherwise go, don't you just hate it? Well, literary agents do, too!"
My little friend sustained a boyish guffaw and a pointy poetess elbow jammed into the floating ribs on his left side. Internal injuries were indicated: tears of blood traced the hollows of his cheeks.
"This above all: my literary agent said you have to create characters that you, and your reader, aren't intimidated by. As a matter of fact, to be on the safe side, you should only write about people that you can condescend to. I mean, not feel contempt for, but gently patronize. Then, for sure, you'll never put any literary agents off, because everybody likes to feel superior, right? Except not too superior, or else your readers will start feeling snooty and stuck-up, and they'll stop reading.
"I guess it all boils down to morality, doesn't it? If you steer clear of any notions like that, and avoid telling stories where those questions pop up, then nobody will feel like you expect them to feel uncomfortable with life. Make your story like a warm cup of cocoa in a clean, comfortable kitchen, with a few of your calmest friends sitting around and just chatting and being happy about their gentle, easy lifestyles. You have to like your characters, and that means they shouldn't do anything you're not prepared to do yourself, like take psychedelic drugs and gun down women in cold blood, just to mention just a few of the more obvious examples."
As the ancient Hindu texts relate again and again, one physical symptom of horror that cannot be faked or deliberately induced, not even by the most skilled yogin, is bristling hair follicles.
"It's a kind of balance, my literary agent said, and she's the expert in the art of fiction. You ought to see the house she lives in! On the cool, crisp shores of Montauk Point! My literary agent knows a whole lot more about art than you or I can ever hope to know! And she said that most white males, like you, who try to communicate with something other than their you-know-whats (tee-hee!)—"
The menstrual minstrel reacted with a preemptive squeal, and almost deprived Streckfuss of his grip on his cheese dog. Both of my buttocks were cooperating now in their flight impulse. I tried to anchor myself to the table. I could see my fingernails leaving ten trails of curly shavings as they scraped along the surface—and it was formica veneer, to the best of my recollection.
"—should just forget some of your macho self-importance and try to feel, and you should learn about relationships, and also buy and study the novels of—"
LurLeen cited a lot of names which I didn't hear because Streckfuss chose that moment to place something in my bleeding hand.
"Take this cup from me," he whispered.
"—and try, really, really, really try, to pay attention to what these women are filling your American sisters' hearts with, year by year, day by day, and, um—what's this say? This isn't your name, is it? Hey, that rhymes with breakfast! And I can see you've brought yours. My lifetime-sharing partner's been looking for a word that rhymes with breakfast!"
The hemorrhaging Sappho outdid herself this time. She knocked Streckfuss' cheese dog right out of his swastikaed hand and splatted it into his chest. It slid down and came to rest on the rolled-up waistband of his borrowed trousers.
"Cute!" LurLeen was saying. "Breakfast with—"
My friend rose up from his chair in such a way that even LurLeen took a breather. He dragged the Webster's on its podium from the corner, wedged it in front of the door, and set fire to it. The parched artifact exploded at the first flick of a match, discouraging escape attempts.
Streckfuss hovered in the thickening grayness like a pollinator. He persuaded everyone to remain seated with loud gnashing sounds from the front of his face. Intent on producing an even abrasion pattern on each psyche in the "shop," he harangued the creative writers one by one, and punctuated his criticisms with sharp knees to sides of heads. Lexical smoke filled the room, but if anyone coughed or allowed a tear to slip from under an eyelid, it was as though that person had nodded off in a Zen temple: whacks were dealt, along with judicious karate kicks to vertebrae. Streckfuss was a stern tutor.
I have proof that my friend did indeed climb onto the seminar table and stomp and prance around, contrary to the ameliorating revisionism of the legends that, during the Reagan years, "spontaneously" sprang up in the fern lounges and varsity boutiques of my sedated alma mater. I retain a page from a certain MFA candidate's hermeneutic vignette, bearing the imprint of an African American platform shoe from that period in fashion history, and I'm sure nobody else in the room boasted such footwear that day. I keep this page even still as a souvenir of the passion, as Veronica kept her veil.
The departmental dictionary crackled and raged like a far-western hillside of sagebrush thunderstruck during a mid-August drought. Less than a foot of precipitation per year: you could tell how grotesque the great novelist found this essential fact of our existence. Our air was not good enough for our guest, whose nostrils, even in his current paralytic seizure, sneered with each acrid breath.
As he waited his turn to undergo the Streckfussian saturation treatment, even while wincing at the hollow sounds the little monster's hobnailed boot made against scholarly thoraxes, the famous writer snouted and rooted ever deeper into his mysterious book—or, rather into the "Basket Balls" memoir that had been spat upon that book by the young man who had once saved him from communism. Soldierly saliva was soaked into the xerox, and it helped filter out airborne toxins, preserving our novelist from asphyxiation, even as he curled back his nostrils once again and sneered at that very smoke.
He looked as though the only thing he wanted in the whole world was to go back to his humid home on the northeast coast of the United States of America. He seemed so little and exposed there at the head of the table, so full of unfathomable suffering, so eastern, and out of his element. I could almost see—no, I did see gills gasping on his neck. He looked a little green around them. I'd never felt sorry for someone quite that well-to-do. It was a fresh experience for me.
After all, he was new to our remote region, a guest, something like Oscar Wilde deep in the mineshaft, but without the ability to hold the local rot-gut so well, and with more than a touch of claustrophobia. (Were his erotic leanings also divergent from that other great conversationalist's? His extreme reluctance to be disciplined by Streckfuss did not necessarily rule out sadomasochistic urges.)
Considering the limited number of times he had looked up and met people's eyes during the course of the semester theretofore, and how few of our half-hatched visages, male or female, he'd bothered to glance at, for all he knew, the maniac now squatting between LurLeen's ample bosoms and vocalizing like a badger could be a downright mainstream gold-star Teaching Fellow, student body president, and chairman of the Headliner's Welcoming Committee. Palpable disappointment drenched the entire being of our fabulously wealthy National Book Award recipient. He had been hoping for a more collegial reception from our university's Department of English and Creative Writing. (But, honestly, can you expect anything better from these bush-league diploma mills?)
So I scooted next to the unhappy man and attempted to deliver him succor. I felt like the wretch in "Attic Nights" approaching the lion, as I prepared to murmur certain soothing notions into his ear. I can't explain where I came up with the effrontery to essay such a thing. I suppose the general headlong excitement of my surroundings at that moment must have been contagious: the sense of simply unbuttoning oneself, just letting go, hurting people and burning things, and flinging out one's bosoms and "throwing caution to the wind," as the ladies say in historical novels.
Because I, even I, even someone like me, hailing as I did from a state where the elevation of the settlements exceeds the population by at least three digits; a part of the world infested with white trash who couldn't even claim the distinction of being former slave owners; a mintless urinal of a birthplace located on a wadded-up bit of toilet tissue depending from a smutched hemorrhoid on the anus mundi, where the only parties to go to were the wrong ones, and where your chance of being invited to, or even crashing, the right one, was less than that of a fart offending the nostrils in colostomy ward; yes, I, the scatological rustic, the undeclared freshman, with my hard R's and my obscure name that couldn't reek more ludicrously of peaked-out bloodlines, and the exhausted and trite ethnicity which my very frame and coloration so galumphingly exemplified (this was the period of literary history before the Celtic Fringe became a hot item); I, me, cursed at birth with the red hair, white face, and blue-veined tickle-gizzard of Thomas Jefferson and Paul Bunyan and other such scabrous cancers on the continent; I, that is to say, me, teeny-bop Tommy, the bumpkin Br-r-r-r-radley-boy, the product and embodiment of a rainless region of inbred Neanderthals, hayseeds, the very notion of whose ever, even by accident, getting a literary agent put one sneeringly in mind of Cinderella in a region-wide failure of the pumpkin crop: I somehow managed, in spite of my own undeniable self, to muster the megalomaniacal presumption, the unmitigated cheek, the fathomless gall, to approach the great man.
But first I took pause, in the mayhem. (Streckfuss was knocking chairs out from under people now, and stomping on fingers as they skittered about the floor trying to rescue their typescripts from his flung matches.) I decided to experience fully the above-mentioned ear.
This was such a far-famed organ, with a well-clipped tuft of just-graying and tamed shagginess disposed over it, the then-fashionable fringe skirting the top. I underwent a brief instant of absolute clarity, right then, just there, in the midst of a Streckfussian chaos that might any second penetrate the charmed circle I shared with the owner of this glitzy skull handle. It drew me in so, this ear.
I put my hand on the widely familiar shoulder (he jumped several inches out of the special teacher's chair which the English Department had thoughtfully supplied), and I peered awhile deep into that orifice in the side of his head. In its dilated vulnerability, it was like the auditory meatus of the sweet prince's father.
I took the liberty of reaching out and sliding the "Basket Balls" memoir aside, and prying up the top edge of the mysterious book from the indentation it had dug into his lap during these many weeks. His wrists and fingers seemed taken with a monumental case of rigor mortis, but an insistent, yet gentle, pressure overcame that.
So, it turned out to be Gilgamesh that kept the internationally revered author hypnotized for the entirety of my personal association with him. I let the cuneiform epic snap back down flat on his thighs, and read some Babylonian verses over his shoulder, hoping he wouldn't find it irritating, if he even noticed. He was turned to a bit about Enkidu—
Father, there is a man who has come down from the hills.
In all the land he is the most powerful; power belongs to him.
Like a shooting star of the god Anu, he has awesome strength.
He ranges endlessly over the hills,
endlessly feeds on grass with the animals,
endlessly sets his feet in the direction of the watering place.
For terror I cannot go near him.
He fills up the pits I dig;
he tears out the traps I set;
he allows the beasts to slip through my hands,
the hurrying creatures of abandon.
In the wilderness he does not let me work.
Speaking of coming down from the hills, this was one hillbilly's big chance to do just that. It was my break, my whole life's first and only opportunity to have a significant Manhattanite hear my voice—albeit via the half-truth serum of peyote. I would raise that voice over the general discord, and make it glare like the sun bouncing off gritted teeth, greenish. I aimed sky-colored eyeballs into the man's sound-hole a while longer, and elected to remain wordless for a time in the havoc all around. Eventually, I would decant my decoction into Daddy's dark ear.
In the meantime, perhaps a tad impulsively, I ripped the book from his rigid grasp and tossed it to Streckfuss for pulping. Our author's gaze remained unbudgeably downcast, cataleptic, fixed on the vacancy between his legs.
"What are you looking at now?" I said to the stiff. "That's linoleum, not trodden gold. Lift up your eyes for once, like a man. And look at Streckfuss. That's his name: Streckfuss. Do you think somebody falsified Streckfuss? Do you think Streckfuss is a spurious metafiction? Do you suppose there are, or are not, volumes of ersatz documentation to back up his tormented little existence? Does Streckfuss look eager to be up there on that woman's shoulders, whooping like a contemptibly western bronco buster? I suspect that somebody, shall we say, created Streckfuss, and got him all riled up and put him here to do just this, now. So, old man, if people are paying for nonfiction these days, do you think they'll buy my Streckfuss? What, um, advice can you give me, um, Teacher?"
Such was not the succor I had planned to deliver. But such he got. In return for my act of human consideration, I received no recommendation to his literary agent. Not even a phone number. But I feel certain this is only because the man was in such emotional turmoil at that juncture in his personal life, and was unable to unflex his jaw muscles to produce intelligible sounds. His previous languor had caused the same tetanal effect. This artist was paradoxically disinclined to self-expression under any circumstances.
"Damn," observed Streckfuss as he whirled past in mid-atrocity like a desert dust devil. "The old guy must of suffered a stroke."
On the other hand, he might not even have heard me demand a 212 number, any 212 number, depending on how loudly my partner was screaming, and pounding the pastel enameled cinder-brick with his own or someone else's forehead, and sickening everybody with the melony sound it made.
Alternatively, his agent's phone number might not have been forthcoming for a much simpler reason. It doesn't seem possible in retrospect, but the flow of communication from that mythical pair of lips was even more constipated than usual. I can only hope that the image in my memory of the final resting place of Streckfuss' cheese dog, along with what remained of its gluey extra cheese, has been distorted by the holy communion of the Great Southwestern Desert.
The Big Gulp root beer cup, drained of its contents, sugary brown residue employed like glue, was affixed, mouth down, to the famous novelist's forehead, like a unicorn horn, or a pink and white suction device, or some other sort of outré apparatus. Somebody primped and preened this dolly.
Some campus cops, too short and fat to realize their pitiable ambition to be real lawmen, finally got to draw their huge revolvers. The forearm-sized barrels twitched in such broad ecstasy that they could have plugged anyone entitled to a seat around that big faculty-meeting table. Unfortunately, most of the future Creative Writing Industrialists of the Intermountain Region were cowering underneath, apostrophizing their mothers, and burying their heads in the spilled contents of scholarly backpacks: pencils, pens, erasers, and charred papers like oversized confetti (an unsettling number of them scalloped with teeth marks).
I'm pretty sure I was the one who caused our Enkidu to become more or less manageable. I said, "You got cheese on your co-workers' clothes, but that can be fixed. I lifted his wallet, and it'll cover the cleaners, but not your bail. I'll pawn his wristwatch for that. It's up to you, in the meantime, to see those threads don't get hurt like you've been. Let Caiaphas' servants load you with chains and take you away, and be meek as a lamb. These would-be police can't dress nearly as well as you, Streckfuss, and they'd love an excuse to yank your Afro-sleeves from your shoulders. You cried 'Havoc' and let yourself slip, and God bless your soul for that. Now it's time to calm down."
But still the campus cops manacled him. They wanted a chance to use that equipment, too, for the first time.
As they dragged him out, the bony intruder used both cuffed hands to fluff up the collar of his ludicrous, but silken shirt, lent him by an even more exotic breed of oracular outcast. I tried to fake a proud smile—not very successfully. But nobody was watching anyway.
I caught my last glimpse of Streckfuss as he was driven away in a real cop car. He was not breathing peculiarly, and his skin hadn't turned corpse-gray. He wasn't sulky or pouty at all, and his eyes stared right at me through the mesh of the back seat cage. I heard the little author's voice, very loud, ending on an R hard enough to knock a hole through heaven's pavement: "What they did to me as a child—now I remember."
"Breakfast with Streckfuss" is excerpted from Fission Among the Fanatics, a collection of anecdote-based essays from Spuyten Duyvil. Tom Bradley's new book is Lemur, out soon from Raw Dog Screaming Press. Check him out at TomBradley.org.