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- but as soon as she vanishes my spirit immediately sags because the ambiance is so malevolent.
- Everyone's favorite waitress is Kikugoro. She wears a pale-blue silk kimono and a brocade obi of gold and silver chrysanthemums with a small fan tucked into its folds, her face is painted and powdered to a porcelain white.
- and for the first time since 1956, I cheese on the shoulder of the beautiful day. Oh beautiful day, wash e in your lake of cloudless azure. I have overdosed on television, I am unresponsive and cyanotic, revive me in your shower of gelid light and walk me through your piazza which is made of elegant slabs of time. Oh beautiful day, kiss me. Your mouth is like Columbus Day. You are the menthol of autumn. My lungs cannot quench their thirst for you. Resuscitate me -- I will never exhale your tonic gasses. Inflate me so that I may rise into the sky and mourn the monotonous topography of my life. Oh beautiful day, my sister, wipe my nose and adorn me in your finery.
- I was an infinitely hot and dense dot. So begins the autobiography of a feral child who was raised by huge and lurid puppets. (5)
- Inside, two acephalic sardines in mustard sauce are asleep in the rank darkness of their tin container. (5)
- I chugalug a glass of tap water milky with contaminants, I realize that my mind is being drained of its contents and refilled with the beliefs of the most mission-oriented, can-do feral child ever raised by huge and lurid puppets. I am the voice... the voice from beyond and the voice from within -- can you hear me? Yes. I speak to you and you only -- is that clear? Yes, master. To whom do I speak? To me and me only. Is "happy" the appropriate epithet for someone who experiences each moment as if he were being alternately flayed alive and tickled to death? No answer. (6)
- So I went on a TV game show in the hopes of raising cash. This was my question, for $250,000 in cash and prizes: If the Pacific Ocean were filled with gin, what would be, in terms of proportionate volume, the proper lake of vermouth necessary to achieve a dry martini? I said Lake Ontario -- but the answer was the Caspian Sea which is called a sea but is a lake by definition. I had failed. I had humiliated my family and disgraced the kung fu masters of the Shaolin temple. (6)
- I'm in my car. I'm high on Sinutab. And I'm driving anywhere. (6)
- We're all larval psychotics and have been since the age of two, I say, spitting an ice cube back into my glass. At this range, the downy cilia-like hairs that trickle from her navel remind me of the fractal ferns produced by injecting dyed water into an aqueous polymer solution, and I tell her so. She looks into my eyes: You have the glibness, superficial charm, grandiosity, lack of guilt, shallow feelings, impulsiveness, and lack of realistic long-term plans that excite me right now, she says, moving even closer. We feed on the same prey species, I growl. My lips are now one angstrom unit from her lips, which is one ten-billionth of a meter. (7)
- I got it for Christmas.... Do you have any last words before I scramble your chromosomes, I say, taking aim. Yes, she says, you first. I put the barrel to my heart. These are my last words: When I emerged from my mother's uterus I was the size of a chicken bouillon cube and Father said to the obstetrician: I realize that at this stage it's difficult to prognosticate his chances for a productive future, but if he's going to remain six-sided and 0.4 grams for the rest of his life, then euthanasia's our best bet. But Mother, who only milliseconds before was in the very throes of labor, had already slipped on her muumuu and espadrilles and was puffing on a Marlboro: No pimple-faced simp two months out of Guadalajara is going to dissolve the helpless little hexahedron in a mug of boiling water, she said... (7-8)
- ...I received their derision, their sneering laughter. But now look at me! I am a terrible god. When I enter the forest the mightiest oaks blanch and tremble. All rustling, chirping, growling, and buzzing cease, purling books become still. This is all because of my tremendous muscularity... which is the result of the hours of hard work that I put in at the gym and the strict dietary regimen to which I adhere. When I enter the forest the birds become incontinent with fear so there's this torrential downpour of shit from the trees. And I stride through -- my whistle is like an earsplitting fife being played by a lunatic with a bloody bandage around his head. And the sunlight, rent into an incoherence of blazing vectors, illuminates me: a shimmering, serrated monster! (8)
- I was reading an article that contained the words "vineyards, orchards, and fields bountiful with fruits and vegetables; sheeps and goats graze on hillsides of lush greenery" and I realized that in five months none of these things would exist and I realized that as the last sheep on earth is skinned, boned, filleted, and flash-frozen, Arleen and I would probably be making love for the last time, mingling -- for the last time -- the sweet smell of her flesh which is like hyacinths and narcissus with the virile tang of my own which is like pond scum and headcheese and then I realized that the only thing that would distinguish me in the eyes of posterity from -- for instance -- those three sullen Chinese yuppies slumped over in their bentwood chairs at the most elegant McDonald's in the world is that I wrote the ads that go: "Suddenly There's Vancouver!" (11)
- When we look back at our childhoods, how terribly painful it can be. The people whom we loved seem to float across our hearts (like those entoptic specks that drift across our eyeballs), tantalizing us with the proximity of their impossibility. (16)
- When Elvis Presley, in the song "Jailhouse Rock," sang the lyrics "If you can't find a partner, grab a wooden chair," he freed a generation of young people to love furniture and, by extension, to love any inanimate object in a way that heretofore would have been strictly verboten. (17)
- Soon psychopathology replaced ethnicity as the critical demographic determinant. There were no longer Italian neighborhoods, or Cuban neighborhoods, or Irish or Greek neighborhoods. There were Anorexic neighborhoods, and Narcissistic neighborhoods, and Manic and Compulsive neighborhoods. There was no longer a Columbus Day parade or a Puerto Rico Day parade; there was an Agoraphobics Day parade. 5th Avenue lined with police barricades, traffic diverted. But, of course, the designated route was empty, utterly desolate, because the paraders, the spectators, even the Grand Marshal himself -- agoraphobics each and every one -- had all stayed away, each locked within the "safety" of his or her own home. (17)
- When I first met Olivia, I was a bit stilted in the way I expressed myself. I'd say things like: "Would you care for a cookie and a glass of the fluid secretions of the bovine mammary gland?" -- But Olivia taught me to be insouciant. (18)
- And soon after we met, we made a pact that if we were on a plane that was crashing, we'd grab the Walkman off someone's head, we'd grab three or four little bottles of Scotch, and we'd fuck -- so that we'd die in our kind of glory -- in that ecstatic maelstrom of booze and rock 'n roll and orgasm. But remember that time when we ripped the Walkman off a Hasidic boy's head, plundered the cocktail cart and slugged down the booze, tore each other's clothes off, and then started going at it right in the aisle, and the stewardess came up to us and said: "It's only turbulence"? (19)
- Perhaps it was the extraordinarily mirthful outpouring of song from a wake-up chorus of XYY-chromosome gladiator-drones outside our door that first morning at the hotel that inspired me to reach across the bed and gently place my hand on the slightly convex belly of sleeping Olivia and then put my lips to hers -- her breath still pungent with the previous night's escargot, snake and eggs, aduki beans all'aglio, and midnight snack of onion bagel with cream cheese, chives, and slivered scungilli -- and kiss her with unbridled ardor. Or perhaps it was just because I was absolutely crazy about her. (19)
- That night we were standing on the balcony overlooking the mercury moat and the balcony collapsed and as we fell we were insouciant, we continued to nurse our Harvey Wallbangers and say things like: "You look simply radiant tonight." (-) When we returned from the asteroid, we purchased a home. (19)
- Gary appeared crestfallen. (-) "No," he said, "it's only $4,500." (-) "Gary, that's exactly why I didn't want to guess. I'd make some wild guess and it would be higher than the actual figure so that when you told me the real amount you spend on prostitutes and cocaine every week it would seem diminished and anticlimactic compared to the higher guess and you'd be disappointed and embarrassed... it's precisely why I didn't want to guess." (22)
- As time passed, I became obsessed with death, dismemberment, mutilation, and torture, and -- more specifically -- with death or serious injury as a result of violent crime, plane or auto crash. This obsession with violence was well-founded. The incidence of brutality and accidental trauma had reached a level that appalled even the most pessimistic Malthusians. According to the Bureau of Violent Crime Statistics, the chances of being killed in one's own bedroom by a member of one's own family on any given night were 3 in 5. The chances of having an arm or leg slashed off while using public transportation were now 7 in 10! The chances of the criminal absconding with the severed limb and hiding it somewhere so that surgeons couldn't reattach it were a chilling 4 in 7! (22)
- ...such irregularities persisted: "May 20. A young commodities trader in business suit and sneakers walked into a deli and purchased his daily V-8 juice which, customarily, he'd put in his briefcase and drink at the office later in the morning. But inexplicably, the man took the 24-oz. can of vegetable juice out of the brown paper bag and -- as the deli owner and his wife looked on in horror -- drank it down on the spot, draining the can's contents with what Antoinette Orbach, a career counselor who'd come in for her usual fried egg and Gorgonzola on a hard roll, described as 'a gurgling sound -- a sound I don't think I'll ever forget.' The man then proceeded to purchase one 59 cent can of V-8 after another and, standing in front of the register, gulp each one down, until in the middle of his fifth can, he came ill and stumbled outside where he was shot and killed instantly by the single bullet of a police sniper. (23)
- The diary entry continues: "I'm chain-chewing stick after stick of sugarless bubble gum. It's the hottest day of the year and I'm in my wrestling leotard and I can't find anyone to wrestle with." (23)
- I go to the Korean fruit and vegetable stand because I always see my pal Ivan there, Ivan the Realtor. There's Ivan. His short-sleeved button-down shirt is sopping wet with perspiration, his breathing is labored, his eyes unfocused -- he's clearly having difficulty coping with the 100-plus degrees. 'Hey, Ivan!' I slap him on the back -- sweat flies everywhere. 'Hey, watch it,' snaps a Korean guy. 'You knocked that guy's sweat into the nice salad bar.' 'Sorry,' I say. I usher wet Ivan out onto the sidewalk. 'Hey, Ivan, do you want to wrestle, I've got an extra wrestling leotard that would fit you.' 'No,' says Ivan, 'I've got to go finish a letter to my sister Gretel. I'm trying to describe to her how beautiful the sunlight is when it strikes a particular skyscraper in the late afternoon, but without using the words beautiful, sunlight, skyscraper, or late afternoon.' 'All right!' I say, throwing myself to the ground and pounding my fist on the gooey macadam. 'I give up... I give up!' (24-25)
- Joey D. had a tumor on his pineal gland that caused him to sexually mature at the age of four and a half. (24)
- Takeo and his assistant, Yukio Yamamoto, found it hysterically funny that I'd actually taken a taxicab dressed in deep-sea diving gear. (25)
- Yamamoto nodded, the trace of his smirk still lingering about his lips, or so it seemed. (25)
- Needless to say, the shrimp and I became inseparable... (26)
- I didn't expect the Queen's hand to be so sweaty, so soggy. I was also surprised that her accent was Southern and not British. I expected lockjawed noblesse oblige, but I got "Y'all come back and visit Buckingham Palace real soon, y'hear." (27)
- The day with all its glamour, pomp, and fanfare was exhilarating and exhausting. (27)
- I calmly hung up the phone. My cocktail was evaporating to the ceiling, condensing, and drizzling back down into my highball glass. (29)
- I had dinner at a local Chinese restaurant. My fortune cookie read: You will develop a pilonidal cyst. So I tried to see Dr Pons back at the hotel... (29)
- ...apparently unaware of his lifelong obsession with the kamikazes -- the suicide fliers of the "Divine Wind," the self-immolating archangels of the Rising Sun... (29)
- Scientists now believe that each person's "expiration date" is encoded within his or her DNA. (...) In other words, scientists are now convinced that it's possible to perform a DNA scan -- something that will be as easy to do as a laser scan of the universal product code at the supermarket -- and determine the exact date and time of day of an individual's death. The potential for abuse is enormous, of course. I remember speaking to a librarian who said that if a DNA scan shows that a person will die, say, on August 15th, and he or she wants to take out a book that's due on the 16th, then "we're just going to have to turn that person down." Well, I'd never had a DNA life-span scan, but it was obvious that my time had come. (31)
- As the warden attached the electrodes to my body, I asked him if I could read a magazine. He gave me that week's issue of Newsweek, which had a photo of the president of the International Mensa Society on the cover. She was reaching up to her skull with both her hands, bending over, and spreading her cerebral hemispheres for the photographer. (32)
- Well, here I am, sir. The most unwanted hair on the face of the earth. (32)
- perhaps already i've said too much / on this lugubrious new year's eve, the goblets and demitasse cups piled so high as to obscure the faucet which drips methodically like a knuckle rapping methodically / he draws a line but the line is like a single hair which he can never brush from the page / drinking pineapple liquor and smoking marijuana with the khmer rouge in the jungles of kampuchea, he felt... suddenly neurotic / he was rarely seen in public without a chic demoiselle on his arm, but that didn't stop him from feeling like... something grown in a petri dish! (35-36)
- ...lolling in a hammock that squeaked as it swayed back and forth on kitty's porch... he knocked his hat back at a rakish tilt and swigged on the fiery hooch (36)
- i lack vitality emotion or warmth tonight admitted kitty but i am free from pathogenic microorganisms
- the extraordinary rococo preciousness of big earl's needlepoint style created great excitement at the crafts fair and his piece the dallas cowboys in israel garnered the coveted prix de gauguin (36)
- ...for the king and queen of thighland hyperpituitary giants who as custom decrees eschew toothpaste and speak only in the french passe simple / all restaurants in thighland offer ballet parking lanky black youths in fuchsia tutus glissading into automobiles and gracefully backing into rows that stretch elegantly to the sea / i've acquired a taste for baboon meat sometimes i lie in bed all afternoon like colette eating it straight from the can he said wanly / she measured his penis with a shoe salesman's metal slide / you're about a 7 zelda said (36)
- i suffer from necropheliaphobia -- a fear of having sex with dead people he says wanly / who are the new intellectuals who are the new aesthetes now that the old new intellectuals and the old new aesthetes have been decimated by the self-decimating ramifications of their old new ideas? she asks wanly (37)
- wayne newton calls mother's womb single-occupancy garden of eden (37)
- when a mosquito bites your prick that's called a hoboken blow job / in august the mosquitos of hoboken fall deliriously in love with men's pricks / drunk with the miasmic froth that floats across the hudson like creme friache the lovesick mosquitos choose their mates haphazardly like the bleary-eyed anomic patrons of a west side singles bar with conversational gambits like i just finished playing two hours of racketball in a poorly ventilated un-airconditioned building wearing a pair of shetland wool panties and you have the same kind of vestal physicality that makes the sears roebuck catalog, with its artless spread of... (27)
- heck / you know me / my name's billy / my father runs the vomitorium over on oakhurst and elm street / you must have seen me a zillion times 'cause i cut through your backyard on the way to school every day / heck / you must know my mom too / y'ever see that commercial for the kung fu institute of london where jean shrimpton and lord snowden fend off a gang of skinheads with nunchakus? well that's my mom doing the voice-over at the end / in new jersey call 201-795-3384 / like freud, my dad referred affectionately to his children as fratzen and wormen -- brats and worms / one sunday evening he pointed to a couple seated on the sofa and said these are your godparents and in the event of a midair collision or an outbreak of malaria that kills your poor mother and myself you'll be remanded into the custody of these two dear devoted friends who'll provide all the creature comforts a creature like you deserves / i hated these two with a fervor that very nearly imperiled my health / equally i loathed their son who's cankerous smirk i can barely contemplate without retching / here's a kid who decided between attending yale or harvard by killing the family's irish wolfhound and reading its entrails (38)
- his head was a vegematic / he put a cabbage in one ear and shook out coleslaw from the other / i wanted to tell you something he said sullenly (38)
- she says sullenly / i can't talk now i'm at the kentucky derby (39)
- she says sullenly / perhaps already i've said too much, she says suddenly (39)
- it was the night before the night before christmas (39)
- we are all watching how do you spell a jew? a new program produced by tennessee public television station wkpt (39)
- what are video games? spinoza asks / as we leave rijnsburg its inhabitants are sitting down to their customarily modest dinners of fish cakes and room-temperature fresca and as the sun sets chattering black-billed magpies lurch ungracefully into the cool tulip-scentd evening air / it is impossible to adequately describe my feelings of utter resignation and pessimism as i scanned bubbles' apartment and catalogued the moldering dishes of half-eaten food, the psychotic mascara-caked mannequins, the album covers and magazines tossed in a wild miscellany of intoxicated carelessness, the moaning emaciated cats inhaling and exhaling like bony accordions, the scampering raches and silverfish, the welch's grape juice bottle containing four ounces of liquid pcp / but i like bubbles, she has a tiny naked smurf tattooed between her breasts (40)
- he's got three potentially dangerous ukulele fragments lodged in his brain the doctor says jabbing at an x-ray with his pointer (40)
- there is my beautiful mute sister wheeling about the schoolyard like the last bright leaf of autumn (41)
- oh gaudy kitschy iridescent electrocephalogram of the insomniac brain how i love you how i love you (41)
- he clears his throat ah-hem ah-hem peels off awful smelly socks rolls them up and tosses them into a crystal wassail bowl 2 points she's likes a little girl pulling at the leg of his trousers mister? mister? he's like camus preoccupied with finding a good station on his car radio and driving into a tree huh? where am i? he wakes up with a start it's too dark to distinguish animal from vegetable they've converted edison's black maria into a duplex come in i just moved so all i can offer you is a cushion on the floor frozen stolichnaya? decaffeinated tea? come sit over here so i can whisper in your ear (41)
- ...and peggy lee called and said i'm frantic they're showing the final scene of knishing for keeps where peter minuit the ghost of wall street decrees that those who labor with their minds shall rule those who grovel with their hands and my tv's on the fritz so get over here right now so i got in the car and burned up the interstate and i stopped at a stuckey's and bought this red plastic dagger you can feel it for a buck (41)
- if maria theresa could give birth to marie antoinette in an armchair... (42)
- if you're going to take me to bed you have to tell me a bedtime story / ok there was a nauseating rotten-egg odor in the air and mr. and mrs. becker walked to the jewelry store with clothespins on their noses / we'd like a lovely pendant for our daughter judith / judith is a very brilliant girl they boasted / a very sweet girl an honest girl an attractive girl / later while mrs. becker was prostrate on the floor as flat as a pancake as if she'd been run over by a steamroller the jeweler psychoanalyzed mr. becker / why do you fear sexual intercourse so mr. becker... (42)
- i want you to start loving me now but please do me one favor i want you to refer to my vagina as the jack teagarden pavilion in other words when the time comes and it's appropriate you'll say for instance i like the feel of your jack teagarden pavilion i like the smell of your jack teagarden pavilion / this is the moment of ecstasy? / oh yes this is the moment of ecstasy / the ornamental tin rooster with large beady eyes of amber glass exploding in the jack teagarden pavilion (43)
- what is the peculiar sound of our coitus / the sound of arriving in sainte-anne de beaupre the land of lonesome pines where every night is moo shu pork night via dog sled / the sound of three elderly spinster sisters whispering in a movie theatre in pointe-au-pie a small resort along the north shore of the saint lawrence river frequented by the 300-lb. president william taft / yes / the sound of sabbatai zevi sinking his scepter into the gooey terra firma of seventh-century turkey / the folk music of flu season recorded by the ethnomusicologist with no name / the concerto for comb and tinfoil based upon the moment i was conceived in my mother's womb the shrill dissonance of a korean lullaby the ludicrous billing and cooing of an uxurious husband the yodeling shanties of marat in his tab / you are my teething ring / my birdbath / my litter box / my abominable snowmobile / my sizzling electric chair / my not-so-sweet donkey kong! / they pant in a crescendo of inflammatory climactic epithets / once upon a time there was a man and a woman who had just finished making love she whispers already entwining her fingers in the slack webbing of his lacross stick and they felt as if they were floating, like cafeteria trays in a space capsule, like secretaries in a pool / the sex had mad him feel strong and rugged like harry morgan in hemingway's to have and have not and he went to his typewriter and wrote... (43)
- ...but i'm not interested in that gary gilmore hit-me-with-your-best-shot stuff anymore, fish are my central motif, goldfish, clams on the half shell, dolphin kinship structures, sole almondine, i'm trying to write a piece called the aesthetics of surface for an israeli semiotics journal for 500 israeli pounds, but i'm under the deadline gun, jack / i'm putting lines of 99% pure bogota cocaine up my nose, i'm filling my enema bag with tequila / i'm trying to get at the shimmering patina on the filmy superstratum of the surface, but i'm having wrenchingly vivid flashbacks of my mother flaying my thighs with an antenna / i had to fight my way through workingclass polish neighborhoods every day on the way to the kidney dialysis unit / it's rough, man, but i'm a rough super-macho motherfucker, jack / i swagger around saying fuck you man, kiss my white ass, suck my hickory-smoked dick! / i'm saying things like chacun a son gout oedipus rex, you schmuck / but the sex had made her feel hostile and resentful that she had been cajoled and manipulated into losing control and exposing her passion to a virtual stranger / men aren't worth the paper they're printed on she said and she grabbed his penis with both her hands and swung him over her head like an olympic hammer thrower and flung him through the living room window into a slow elliptical orbit around the earth and the russians thought he was american and the americans thought he was russian but we all knew that he was just a hapless naked man tumbling through space whose orbit once every year would bring him close enough to dayton ohio for schoolchildren there to discern his wistful fleeting hello good-bye, hello good-bye, hello good-bye (44)
- And my brother-in-law is a movie star -- y'know that Japanese film In the Realm of the Senses where the woman cuts off her lover's penis and walks around Tokyo for four days with it in her pocket -- well, my brother-in-law played the penis. (48)
- Yogi Vithaldas assumes the graceful lotus pose. (48)
- What is your answer? Big Squirrel stares mystically into his Pepsi. I hear the twang of a chest hair being plucked, he says. (49)
- I'm dialing numbers frantically, fingers flying over push buttons in a blur, in my ear a crazy cacophany of electric beeps. I'm getting places like Wales, Sterling Colorado, Vladivostok, Altamont Speedway, Barnes & Noble Annex, Nuremberg, Braintree Mass, and Biafra. I'm stirring a pitcher of Tanqueray martinis with one hand and sliding a tray of frozen clams oreganata into the oven with my foot. I've got a dozen cigarettes going simultaneously in ashtrays all over the apartment. God, these Methedrine suppositories that Yogi Vithaldas gave me are good! As I iron a pair of tennis shorts I dictate a haiku into the tape recorder and then dash off to snake a clogged drain in the bathroom sink and then do three minutes on the speedbag before making an origami praying mantis and then reading an article in High Fidelity magazine as I stir the coq au vin. These Methedrine suppositories are fantastic! I'm spinning through the apartment like a whirling dervish, finishing things I'd put off for months, cleaning the venetian blinds, defrosting the freezer, translating The Ring of the Nebelung into Black English, gluing a model aircraft carrier together for my little son. I'm writing to my congressman, doing push-ups, changing a light bulb as I floss my teeth and feed my fish with one hand, balance my checkbook with the other and scratch my borzoi's silky stomach with my big toe. The stimulatory effect of the suppositories is convulsive. I'm an exploding skeleton of kinetic vectors. I stand upon a peak in Darien like stout Cortez shouting I write the songs! I rupture into afterimages like the nude descending a staircase. Holographic clones of myself appear all over the apartment smoking cigarettes and drinking martinis. (49050)
- The omens are inauspicious. In my haunted closet, mothballs mysteriously assemble into a triangle like a rack of billiard balls, my pants wriggle from their hangers and dance the cancan. Each night I have the same dream... (50)
- Each morning I wake up on the ledge of a tall building gripping the concrete with white fingernails. In kindergartens and pediatric waiting rooms, young children greet each other with handshakes and eerily formal salutations. Whales throw themselves on the decks of whaling ships with interminable Schopenhauerian suicide notes pinned to their dorsal fins. (50)
- My mother wanders around the house like a member of the Manson family, saying "Maalox is groovy" and when I ask her to explain she says that the mucilaginous remains of history's cannibalized explorers from Magellan to David Rockefeller have collected in her stomach like wads of undigested chewing gum, giving her terrific heartburn, she says that she has a huge hair ball in her stomach made of the exquisitely flaxen underarm hair of Amelia Earhart. Cupping my ear to a bowl of Rice Krispies I hear German V-2 rockets falling on London Bridge. Unemployed laboratory mice laid off after cuts in federal research funding huddle in skid row alleyways guzzling miniature bottles of airline whiskey. When the president finds out that the astronauts left a new popularized version of the Bible on the moon instead of leaving the King James he is outraged. He calls an emergency meeting(...) In that Bible, he fumes, Delilah uses Nair on Samson's head and Jesus Christ is crucified with Phillips-head screws and Krazy Glue. He makes the astronauts go back to the moon switch Bibles. But there is another snafu and this time instead of leaving the King James Bible on the moon they leave Cecil Brown's novel, The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger. (50-51)
- Don't flirt with the workmen! bellows a stentorian voice that rattles the china. Who is that? demands Wali Assam. This is your kitchen drain speaking! Don't flirt with the workmen! An enormous Caucasian fat man in plaid Bermuda shorts spraying Windex on the front windshield of a Datsun 280-Z with a Playboy rabbit dangling from the rearview mirror gets a cramp and calls out, Grandma! Grandma! Vultures circle above. (51)
- Later by the campfire Huck reclines with his ukulele and sings love songs to his girlfriend in Hannibal. When ten-story radiation-spawned mutant leviathans rise from the bubbling slime of toxic cesspools, tossing their ophidian manes of napalm-spouting lymph tubes, the U.S. Air Force will shower them with hydrogen cloud clears we'll be eating cream of mushroom soup in Monte Carlo, where the manhole covers are embossed with champagne glasses & bubbles and the gendarmes are armed with party favors, croons Huck. Huck is heavily into a Bertolt Brecht/Barbra Streisand thing. Later we go to the Thalia and sit through a double feature of Mother Courage and Yentl. During the climactic scene in Yentl where Barbra Streisand eats 300 salted herrings to prove to the other rabbinical students that she is macho, Huck weeps uncontrollably and vomits. (52)
- That night Walid Jumblatt's Druse Militiamen roll into town, gunning the engines of their Harley-Davidson 1200s, firing celebratory bursts from their Kalishnikob assault rifles into the sky, their flamboyant phosphorescent nylon djellabas streaming behind them like the wind-whipped ensigns of a buccaneer raiding ship as teenage girls, roused from their slumber by the pungent pheromones that waft from the armpits of the hell-bent Moslems on wheels... (52)
- ...garnish their faces with cherry-red lipstick and lavender eye shadow, slip into tight capri pants, flimsy halter tops, and gem-studded slave bracelets, and flock somnambulantly to the local bar as if bitten by vampires. (53)
- Big Squirrel executed a reverse aerial somersault onto the coffee table, scissoring my head between his knees. I involuntarily spit a hot stream of decaffeinated espresso into his lap. Our eyes met. It was a moment of intense spiritual communion. I want you to promise that if anything happens to me... (53)
- Please repeat the aforementioned, Big Squirrel, the viselike grip of your knees is causing considerable static along my auditory nerve path in addition to cutting off the vital flow of blood to my cerebral cortex and thalamic receptor nodes. Big Squirrel relaxed his hold and reiterated his solemn request. Listen, man, I said... (53)
- The Poznaks are an ingeniously resourceful people who subsist entirely on hot dogs, using the frankfurter skins for clothing, mashing the minced filling along with manioc tubers to make... (53)
- The Poznaks taught me many esoteric and deadly styles of kung fu including the 5 Plum, the Phoenix Eye, and the Jade Claw, and also Deli Style kung fu. Big Squirrel sighed heavily and averted his eyes. When my wife left her people in Ethiopia and returned with me to the U.S.A. she was very homesick and cried for weeks and weeks. She was unable to acclimate herself to this culture. She became irritable and I often had to resort to my most powerful kung fu to subdue her tantrums. (54)
- Her sadness was breaking my heart, it was murdering me. (54)
- I had my wife committed to the Chef Boy-Ar-Dee Institute of Psychiatry. There psychiatrists told me that it was essential that my wife eat tremendous amounts of Italian food if there was to be any hope of her ever leading a normal life. (...) By gradually introducing small amounts of Italian food into the diet of an Ethiopian adult, the psychiatrists are exploiting precisely those crossed wires which are buried deepy in the associate processes of the patient who has a desperate subconscious need to eat & enjoy Italian cuisine, thereby correspondingly revivifying his or her own sense of self-worth. Because of the severity of my wife's condition, doctors recommended a massive infusion of Italian food into her diet. Antipasto, pasta fagioli, and manicotti for breakfast. Ziti, ravioli, and chicken cacciatore for lunch. Fried calamari, stromboli, veal scaloppine, chicken parmigiana, and linguini in white clam sauce for dinner. And tremendous amounts of Chianti, Soave Bolla, espresso coffee, cannoli, and spumoni between meals. (54-55)
- After Big Squirrel's nap we went to a place called the Coal Hole, a restaurant on the Upper West Side located in an old coal mine. You take an elevator car about 300 ft. underground to the dining room. It's pitch dark and everyone wears one of those hard hats with the attached spotlight. Most of the waiters have black lung disease. (55)
- The dining room was extremely warm. I ordered a Tab. Big Squirrel ordered a Pepsi. There was an extraterrestrial serenity in Big Squirrel's face as Dionne Warwick's "Do You Know the Way to San Jose" wafted over the PA system. (55)
- Do you have any parting words of advice for all the kids out there? If you want to be successful in life, he said, everything you do must be an act of patricide. You must always kill the father. Every song you sing, every sentence you write, every leaf you rake must kill the father. Every act from the most august to the most banal must be parricidal if you hope to live freely and unencumbered. Even when shaving -- each whisker you shave off is your father's head. (55)
- The heat in the dining room had become unbearable. My gauzy flesh billowed like loose fabric in the hot drafts. And Big Squirrel's tattoo ran in lurid rivulets down his chest. (55)
- The car explodes, demolishing the gas pumps, the red-and-blue Exxon logo high atop its pole bursting like a balloon on a string. (59)
- he puts a pinch of smokeless tobacco between his cheek and hum and watches a monarch butterfly mince gingerly across the hot hood of his idling chevy malibu / and little lovely winged electric razors hover about his head, gently kissing it until he is bald -- and he dreams of john audubon and his lovely watercolor hummingbirds and his lovely watercolor chrysanthemums -- though, unbeknownst to the human bomb, the ceramic cranium developed for him by japanese high-tech ceramics engineers to protect his brain is beginning to crack, so that really his watercolor dream of john audubon is not a dream at all but an aberrant pattern of electrical discharge generated by moisture seeping through the fissures in his glazed skull... (63)
- it is autumn / and i am remembering autumn nights long ago when we watched those early episodes in which the handsome human bomb was motionlessly posed in the men's department at macy's in a van heusen cream-colored button-down, pierre cardin pin-dot lamb's wool tie, a nut-brown ralph lauren shetland wool sweater, stanley blacker corduroy sport coat, and bass weejun tassel-front brown leather slip-ons regularly $68 now on sale for $54.40 (64)
- you were just a flag twirler at pocahontas high in mahwah / it was homecoming night when i met you / i remember you giggling shyly at the seniors bobbing for veal medallions in a metal basin of marsala sauce / you smelled of lilacs / that night we learned that ecstasy means the collapse of time / past present future perceived in a single instant / you were watching the trajectory of your own words as they left your mouth / words which disappeared into the horizon / words which, due to the curvature of space, returned many years later like murmuring boomerangs to your ear / you looked like an italian starlet -- jet-black hair in a thick braid down your back, sloe-eyes set deeply above high cheekbones, olive complexion, full sensuous lips, the strap of your nightgown fallen langourously off your shoulder, mascara smeared, your eyelids heavy with drowsiness, your hair now spread across the pillow like a trellis of vines, your voice low and husky, your breath still redolent of anisette / and tonight we watch television on the porch / your buckteeth seem shellacked in the cadmium light of the harvest moon (64)
- that's me crouched in the backseat of the human bomb's chevy malibu with his chubby friend ulrike grunebaum / though, without the proper software, ulrike grunebaum is like mrs. potato head -- without eyes, ears, nose, or mouth, featureless and vacant globe of flesh (65)
- we're taste-testing four varieties of lebanese halvah: druse, phalangist, sunni, and shiite / the flecks of shrapnel i the phalangist halvah give it an unusually nutty flavor (65)
- ...strangles it until its head is the brillant red of autumn sumac leaves (65)
- when i put my ear against ulrike's temple, i can glean her thoughts - because her thoughts are transmitted in the morse code of her pulsing arteries (65)
- ...and please don't start singing, because no amount of mouthwash can camouflage the foul breath of hymn-singing christians... (66)
- this is my horrible statement: there's mustard in the bushes / your eyes follow the squiggle of yellow mustard to an any who's about to be squashed beneath a shiny tooled-leather tony lama cowboy boot and the ant looks directly into the camera and says in yiddish with english subtitles, "i want to live as much as you do" -- and this image traumatizes the country in the 1980s as much as the image of my head rolling from the guillotine saying "i'm sorry, mommy, i'll be good" traumatized the country in the 1990s (66)
- you're using the violent vocabulary of the u.s.a., you're violently chewing your cheez doodles and flicking the remote control (66)
- a computer programmer and mother of two from bethesda, maryland, puts her fingers through the holes in my head and bowls me / i'm rolling through roanoke, city of rheumatism and alzheimer's disease; through memphis, city of ulcerated tongues and saliva turned bitter and glutinous; through pine bluff, whose inhabitants store the ashes of their cremated dead in those white cardboard cartons with thin metal handles made for chinese takeout food; through shreveport, whose population lacks the enzyme necessary to break down spaghetti / i appear on the phil donahue show with other children of parents who'd had unsuccessful tubal ligations and vasectomies / my path connects every dot in texas (66)
- who are you, sir, and... who are you? / i am not an octopus or a hen / that i can see... nor a crayfish (67)
- things didn't, did they? i mean turn out the way you expected / no, i was incapable of accepting my mother's death and i frantically embraced fundamentalist judaism because i refused to accept a world in which people were so completely vulnerable and so capriciously and arbitrarily victimized, i refused to endorse the purposelessness and the randomness and i rushed into the arms of the paternalistic teleological belief system of my ancestors, of my parents, the very same judaism i'd so contemptuously eschewed my whole life -- but even my newfound jewishness was fugitive (67)
- how tall were you before your mother passed away? / i was five-seven / and the day after your mother passed away? / four-one / and today? / today i am eight inches in diameter / it sounds like you're going to disappear / no, i'm in a perpetual state of contraction and expansion; now i'm contracting and just as i'm about to become smaller than anything, smaller than even the most infinitesimal subatomic particle, i'll begin to expand and i'll expand and expand and expand until there's literally no more room for me in the universe and my head is knocking against the ceiling of the space-time continuum and then i'll start to contract again and so forth (67-68)
- i'm rolling down the pacific coast of south america, but i never make it to tierra del fuego / i'm a gutter ball / i was made in hong kong / i have reached a level of unparalleled ugliness -- revolting bloated oily ugliness which has metastasized across every square inch of my body (68)
- wherever i am at the moment is the remotest frontier of the diaspora (68)
- and diffracted shards of sunlight impale the ornamental carp who carp little bubbles of blood which cluster above the pond's mosaic floor whose tiles of azure and crimson depict an exploding head of ideas / as nearby, at james dean memorial hospital, nurses use cold bottles of milk to cool the perspiring brows of surgeons who are engraving ideas into the smooth tabula rasa brains of fetuses (68)
- that moment is pregnant (69)
- and a new american style is born (69)
- when dawn came it was as if we'd been delivered stillborn from an assembly line / identically curled in our bed / our arms crooked in perfect symmetry beneath our pillows / we were like twin fossils / two tipsy vertebrates who had crawled into a tar pool in the wee hours of the pleistocene and slept through the tumult of history / in our mouths the rich creamy taste and texture of raw sea urchins, our breath was rank and aquatic / i pushed the hair from her forehead and her face was taut and limned in shadow like a death mask (69)
- when the forensic pathologists performed their autopsy on you / they cried, those hardened professionals, / because peeling the skin from your head / was like peeling the skin from an onion (69)
- and the forensic pathologists, those hardened professionals, / shook their fists at the photographs of the 10 most wanted men, / one of whom murdered you, and wept (69)
- i am not roller-skating through piles of brittle autumn leaves / i am roller-skating down the aisles at macy's in narcotic slow motion to the music of john philip sousa / i'm skating past every surveillance camera / i'm skating across every closed-circuit television screen / salesmen come and go, murmuring, "jerry lewis est mort... jerry lewis est mort" / if only i had the software to conjure one macy's salesgirl at the end of this endless corridor into whose arms i'd roller-skate deliriously to the optimistic cornets of john philip sousa / but i don't have the appropriate software / and it would be brainless to continue skating (70)
- Get out, get out, all of you! My little bedroom was filled with pilgrims, militants, hostages, clerics, extremists, dissidents, mediators, ideologues, pragmatists, and militiamen. (73)
- My ultimatum was punctuated by the boom boom boom of BM-13 multiple-rocket launchers & the whistling sound of rising missiles. (73)
- His friends leveled accusatory looks at me, as if I were somehow responsible for his death. I don't care, it was his choice, I don't have the patience for this shit anymore, everybody out! We can't leave, someone said. Why? There's a river between here (he pointed to a spot on the map) and our ancestral homeland, there (he pointed again), and the river is too deep to ford. (74)
- A young Air Force cadet approached me, saluting. Sir, do you know where I can catch a B-1 bomber to New York, sir? (74)
- ...do you comprehend the English language, cadet? Sir, yes, sir. Then why are you still standing here? Sir, a crazy thing happened last night, sir! What kind of crazy thing, cadet? Sir, we were getting ready to go to a party and while I was waiting for Arleen to finish getting dressed I was reading a John Donne poem entitled "Love's Diet," which opens with the lines, "To what a combersome unwieldiness / And burdenous corpulence my love had growne." So Arleen was finally ready, and I put the book down and we left the house, and we got in the car and took the Holland Tunnel into Manhattan, and we're driving up 6th Avenue looking for a space, and plastered to a wall is a series of posters advertising a band that's playing somewhere and what do you think the band is called? Big Fat Love! I couldn't believe it... the eerie synchronicity, sir! (74-75)
- ...and he would strongly suggest that the Incas built a 750-unit parking garage for alien spacecraft in Machu Picchu and I would lay my head on his thigh as big juicy soft dark-purple Soviet submarines clustered in the bay for torpedo-loading practice. (79)
- A hunting accident left me with a 19-inch quadrangular cavity that completely perforates my torso -- I can stand directly in front of your television set without obstructing the picture... (79)
- And in the late afternoon sun, the trellised balcony would throw a grid of shadow across his acne-covered hunchback. They had warned tenants in high-rise buildings to expect some swaying, but we were unprepared for the severity... Our building lurched from side to side like a metronome. (80)
- The hood of my Hyundai is dappled with the morning dew. (80)
- My friend was driving with his friend and his friend's friend and their car went off a bridge and plummeted into the bay. Police dragged the bay and pulled a car up. I recognized it immediately -- the partially decomposed bodies of my three compatriots were still seated in the '69 Oldsmobile. It was an old car but they'd had it customized with a high-efficiency engine using cryogenic liquid propellants and also two strap-on solid-fuel boosters. Can I get in with them for a minute? I asked. I slid next to my pal in the front seat, his hands were still holding the steering wheel, there was seaweed all over him. My pal in the passenger seat was also frozen in position -- switching radio stations. (81)
- The face in the sky has freckles and an oily forehead and braces and expels spearmint breath and tells me the most violent stories in a cracking pubescent voice... and then poking through the clouds comes the nose with blackheads! (81)
- A film is a spooled fuse... Beyond its final frame, flickering emulsion and perforated tags, it explodes into an infinite number of indeterminate trajectories. (82)
- This play is shown over and over and over and over and over and over again, in slow motion, fast motion, isolated camera, pixilated camera, thermographic camera, and finally X-ray vision which shows leaping skeletons in a bluish void surrounded by 75,000 roaring skulls. And while the police sit like Druids in a circle on the ground, their attention riveted to the tiny TV, Bruce Lee and his girlfriend Sondra get up and walk quietly into the distance... (82)
- The thing of it is... the thing of it is... (He finishes pouring drink and hands it to Sondra)... is that you don't know what a shoddy, loathsome, malignant person I really am... because I don't even know yet, I'm just beginning to learn, you see. (83)
- Bruce, I don't know how to say this without sounding a bit precious... but when I drink this sort of very special Scotch, I feel like I've been placed in the bipolar field of the sacred and the profane, the licit and the illicit, the religious and the blasphemous... I feel as if six tungsten carbide blocks have converged on my brain from six directions, compacting it into a dense and perfect cube... Bruce, why don't we take these out onto the patio, it's a terribly lovely evening. (83)
- And as she steps out onto the patio, her Valkyrian bosom undulating with each step like a viscous liquid, a pterodactyl swoops down from the sky, snatches her in its beak, flies her to its nest, and drops her into the shrieking rictus of its offspring. (84)
- ...wafting past me like the mildew of old books / inhaled cigarette smoke assuming the shape of a trachea and two lungs / you are a vivid impasto of vanishing cream / you are the negative aggregate of a lifetime's ablations (87)
- after being chased across the pampa all day by a bola-swinging centaur with wine cooler on his breath and sodomy in his eyes... (88)
- thick white smoke billows from the factory smokestack / and forms an undulating somatic shape / but, like a sung dynasty poet, i am too drunk to / assume gigantic proportions and embrace the industrial genie, / too drunk to lick the white soot from her big molecules with my / tongue (88)
- i'm playing with a hair in my ear -- and i tug the hair and there's a very strange, slightly painful sensation deep in my head, followed by a flood of memories -- the hair turns out to be connected to the mnemonic section of the brain (the hippocampus) -- it's like pulling chatty cathy's string -- instead of talk though, memories ensue: shaving cream gurgles up from a plaster of paris volcano / in miss cosgrove's social studies class (88-89)
- jill is teaching tess how to speak in a flat tone of voice / you have to sound like this, jill says flatly / jill, i just can't speak with that flat affect! says tess / with fierce gesticulation, her voice cresting with emotion (89)
- i'm all man / 100% man (89)
- each man loves his wife so very much / sometimes he hugs her with such ardor that it leaves her gasping for breath / he feels as if he wants to literally get inside her skin with her, to draw her flesh over them both as if it were a sheet or a quilt, to feel the palpitations and quivers of her internal organs warm and slick with their secretions against his nakedness / when she eats, he puts his ear to her cheek as she chews to better savor the music of her mandibles / he puts an ear to her stomach and enjoys the churning and gurgles of her digestion and an ear to her lower abdomen to note the sibilant rush of gas as it winds through her intestines, to the small of her back to hear each crack of her vertebrae, between her shoulder blades for the soft expansion and contraction of her lungs / at night, while she sleeps, he puts his ear against her scalp and listens for the almost inaudible rustling of her hair as it grows (90)
- in the old days they'd just throw you in a big iron caldron and boil you / now they put you in a teflon no-stick saucepan and they saute you for a while in walnut oil / i knew one guy who was poached / i know one guy who was fricassed / i know one guy who was diced benihana style and stir-fried / i know one guy--he was only in the steamer for three minutes and they said, take him out we'll eat him al dente (90)
- that night my mother came up to my bedroom and she said, if you ever see one of them in a letter sweater or letter jacket you run as fast as you can unless you wanna end up with a frilly toothpick through your back or unless you wanna end up between two slices of wonder bread 'cause ain't no deus ex machina gonna swoop through the skylight and save your white ass / i never suspected you though, baby / you were so nice to me (90-91)
- i said, uh-uh, no way, and i tried to escape but you squirted me with bug spray and my legs went numb (91)
- he says, "i gotta help get your soul out of your body but it's gonna cost you a little extra" / "feel around in my pocket," says my eerie disembodied voice, "you can take my visa card" / "i'm gonnna have to squeeze the soul out of your body by rolling you up like a tube of toothpaste..." (91)
- now, i am the sound of a playing card / ticking the spokes of a bicycle wheel (91)
- that is not a sky, it is a grid / it is a grid of thin black lines superimposed over a bleached ceiling / the stars and planets and moons and satellites are bleached out / the constellations which once seemed indelible have been expunged by sweaty grim-faced charwomen who came to the beach at night with scouring pads and long poles / the logos, graffiti, toponyms, and exhortations to "love and be loved" were soon replaced by the glaucous swaths of industrial stripping machines / the technicians did not polish the sky with their lamb's wool pads because the artists and designers had decided that the sky would be more beautiful and more numinous with a matte finish as opposed to a high sheen / and when the black grid was installed even the most mawkish elegiac poets could not mourn the demise of the old sky because the black grid which stretched endlessly in all directions was s unspeakably lovely, because language was made superfluous by the black grid's perfect representation of the godliness of the human imagination / today, beneath the black grid, teenagers disport themselves on the beach / they move with one will from their blankets to the surf and then, as if motivated by a single atavistic instinct, they move back to their blankets / en masse they eat hot dogs / and then suddenly en masse they drink pepsi / and when nightfall comes and the lymphatic teenagers (the gawky, squat, sinewy, and nubile) fall asleep en masse and their tucked recumbent bodies litter the beach, it is perfectly quiet and perfectly dark except, suddenly, for the white headlights of a sports car careening down the corniche (91-92)
- when i first met trudy she was wearing a t-shirt that said SMITH COLLEGE SQUASH TEAM / i asked her if she went to smith / yeah, she said / are you on the squash team? / yeah, but i hang out with a bunch of animals, she said, pointing to a group of clean-cut all-american kids in turtleneck sweaters and white loafers sitting on a three-foot-high chocolate-covered vanilla ice cream bar in the shape of a valentine's day heart (92)
- his silk negligee is whipped by the wind (92)
- turkish women abhor body hair (92)
- ...but she doesn't want you to use any deodorant under your arms because when you're having sex she wants your armpits to smell kind of macho sort of raunchy kind of ruggedly homo sapien kind of rural (93)
- ...and you should wait by the window in the study, sort of voluptuously languidly posed like oscar wilde in the photograph by sarony, she said you'll know which one she means -- it's in the montgomery hyde biography -- and when she comes in through the door she wants you to say, i'm extremely utterly ennervated from having spent all afternoon watching sparrows caper about the fire escape (93)
- ...but i'm a really really good friend of trudy's and trudy's told me all about you and i hope we can all get together sometime maybe for burritos and a video on the vcr or something / trudy says you're creepy in a sort of attractive way and that sounds fun (94)
- Muriel, skinny, sweating, fanning herself with a copy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, observed Buzz through the screen door. (97)
- But Grandma told Buzz to leave the room. When Grandma told Buzz to leave the room he fell to the floor and kissed her feet, begging her to let him stay. Buzz, you'd slobber over an old woman's varicose veins just so she'd let you stay in the room, wouldn't you? Grandma asked contemptuously. / Yes, Buzz whimpered. (97-98)
- Honey, she said to me, go to my vanity table and fetch me my jar of cold cream and catfish slime... I'm old, children, my wooden leg's sequoia and you can count its rings. (98)
- ...and injects him in the right buttock with a powerful designer drug that leaves him cataleptic but fully sentient and sells him for $100,000 to the Museum of Natural History where he's dressed as a Netsilik Eskimo and imprisoned in a glass-encased exhibit with a paraffin Netsilik woman and six paraffin huskies who are harnessed to a low-rider sled with hydraulic runners and... (98)
- ...roguishly, they drove on -- their car misshapen and pleated, their spines wildly zigzagged, their fingers veering off at the knuckles in a welter of oblique angles, their cigarettes dangling from their lips like smoldering corkscrews. (100)
- ...and he went to see if Muriel had found any creme de cacao. (100)
- ...and somewhere in the back of my mind I wanted to be blinded and then pull the pillars of the temple down... and you were sleeping... and I remember lying down next to you and the almost inaudible splash of a gnat diving into the pool of perspiration that had formed in my navel must have frightened you because you jumped up in the bed... (103)
- when clouds in the night sky resemble the x-ray of christ's cheekbone shattered by the split-fingered fastball of the devil / the exact date of the atomic armageddon will be written in the cursive script of hairs on a bar of soap / and each smirking bellhop will be a baby elvis / and hot urine will cascade down the sides of sugar mountain (107)
- if you find one of my eyelashes on the street, please return it to me... or one of the hairs from my legs -- please return it to a police station, there's a reward / particularly the right leg, the leg that used to kick field goals for pocahontas high in mahwah / don't you remember? / our silly adolescent pact / we each pledged to eat whichever one of us died first / we didn't even know the meaning of the word necrophagia then / we were just real american kids with real american ids / ever since then i've been swallowing garlic capsules and giving myself daily injections of basil and oregano so that i'll be properly seasoned for you / each shred of dead skin that i peel from my neck and deposit furtively into an ashtray at a cocktail party is a metonymic precis of my severe instability (107-08)
- do you know me? / my american express card says simply: perishable vertebrae--don't fuck after date stamped on bottom (108)
- ...and they were all cured instantly by a sugar-coated placebo called a milk dud (108)
- ...i had 225 mortal illnesses / my doctor painted a grim picture of each disease / he did my leukemia in acrylic on canvas, he did my mercury poisoning in watercolor on composition board, my asbestosis in day-glo enamel on wood, and my emphysema in synthetic polymer on plexiglas (108)
- ...but the room didn't have a television set so we checked out 9108)
- i took a milk dud and felt increasingly spiritualized, dematerialized... i felt an abrupt separation from my body / i traveled through a dark tunnel, over a field of glockenspiels and pom-poms / i sang the song of the extremely subtle energy-wind-mind / i slept in a sandwich, enveloped in sheets of fatty smoked meats (109)
- i turned the television off, got dressed, and we had dinner with a group of moderate iranians (109)
- in the blazing headlights of an oncoming subway car, my mother's skin is as translucent as the tissue-thin page of a norton anthology (109)
- my flesh is completely transparent; in 1956 i sat on a bridge chair in the middle of a rodeo and let elizabeth taylor watch my heart pump purple blood through my aorta and the mucous membrane of my stomach secrete gastic juice and my vasa deferentia carry sperm from the testes and i said: i hope you're not turned off by the verfremdunsseffekt of my transparent body (109)
- ..._McCall's_ for "shall i compare thee to loan sharking, gambling, hijacking, extortion, union racketeering, cigarette smuggling, home video pornography, or narcotics?"; cosmopolitan for "have you ever been hit in the head by a cruise missile?"; and ladies' home journal for "have you ever been lying on your back under a viaduct in a tranquil rural area with a blade of grass in your mouth and suddenly you look up as a tractor trailer veers off the road and crashes through the guardrail above and it's plummeting straight down at you and you only have time to catch its license plate 'new hampsire--live free or die' before its two and a half tons crush your helpless body?" (110)
- these spicy, violent, superbly plotted verses are perfect for television (110)
- across the tundra snow did fall / flecked with blue like fab and all (110)
- also against that background you could hear the sound of teenagers opening their cans of coke -- the simultaneous pop and sibilance / throughout the night this special sound occurred / it was incessant, but exhibited no discernible pattern / my father took a sloppy swig of chowder from his thermos and spit a diced clam onto the table (110)
- oh god, he said, coughing up blood and sputum / don't tell it, he said, sing it to me, son / sing it -- you have your grandmother's sweet irish tenor, son -- sing it (111)
- this father is smoothing his hair... he is making half a dozen psychodramatic gestures like tackling the son and giving him a kung fu chop to the throat / this father's nose is so big that it blocks the sunlight, hindering the photosynthesis of green plants and leading to the breakdown of vital food chains (111)
- in the pitch-darkness, i could hear the sound of grandma's guitar / in the early mesozoic era, grandma played a slide guitar solo that lasted for 8 years, causing the universal landmass to break up into continents (111)
- grandma, you are the primordial monster / you are the monster who predates chronology / when the big bang was heard, you were already a fearless businesswoman, throwing back your head and laughing yes! to all of life's challenges / you are grandma, the great bulimic divinity, who roams the moors with a flamethrower and a spray gun filled with barbecue sauce and when you see a lamb you douse it with sauce and you say stand back! and you charbroil it with your flamethrower and then when you've eaten an entire barbecued lamb you go behind a bush and stick your finger down your throat -- and you leave a business card in the jawbone of each carcass that reads... (111-12)
- ...and some people say he's fallen in love with a pink rose in his garden -- they say that each night he creeps out in the dew (...) and he gently bends its long stem and he cradles the rose in his arms and kisses its petals, mumbling--and he snorts the yellow powdery pollen from its stamens... as bees stand on the sidelines waving hi mom! (112)
- the rain is intermixed with tickertape (112)
- i am estranged from most men / my american express card says simply: multicellular animal with specialized digestive cavities -- requires corrective glasses (112)
- will you purge my mortal grossness so / that i shall like an airy spirit go, / i mumbled, writhing (113)
- a guitar chord of incalculable decibels is strummed, rending the earth between my feet (113)
- grandma, let me sleep in your womb (113)
- what fruit can soothe the mind? (115)
- in the sky, a thin crescent of a cloud punctuates the empty azure like a single comma (115)
- and these magic carpets bring me home, to the glory that was greece, and the grandeur that was rome (115)
jul 12 2015 ∞
nov 10 2023 +
nov 10 2023 +