Back to Blood: A Novel

by Tom Wolfe

  “But, Norman! Ike Walsh—”

  “Fuck him, too. He’s a textbook case of the Pissing Monkey syndrome.” Whereupon he turned to enter his office.

  Fuck them… And Them was merely the highest-rated news show on television. And fuck him… And Him, Ike Walsh, was merely the biggest star in television news. “The Grand Inquisitor,” they called him. Magdalena was fascinated but frightened when she watched Ike Walsh on television. He was a bully. His specialty was going after people until they became flustered and broke down emotionally. ::::::But my Norman writes him off as a poor devil suffering from the “Pissing Monkey syndrome.” What in the world is the Pissing Monkey syndrome?:::::: She had never heard him mention that before… Pissing Monkey syndrome…

  She knew he was in a hurry, but she couldn’t resist asking. “Norm!” she yelled after him. “What’s the Pissing Monkey syndrome?”

  Dr. Lewis stopped in the doorway to his office and turned around again. He sighed in a way that said, “I can’t believe you don’t know what the Pissing Monkey syndrome is.” In a tone of put-upon patience, he said, “I assume you know that monkeys make terrible house pets. Okay?”

  Magdalena had never heard anyone say anything about pet monkeys, but she nodded yes rather than risk exasperating him any further.

  “But let’s say a man gets one anyway, a small monkey, a cute monkey, like a spider monkey, okay?”

  Magdalena obliged with another nod.

  “Well, that monkey, if it’s a male—as soon as he can get up high enough—and they can climb anything—he’ll start urinating on your head. Okay?”

  “Urinating on your head?” said Magdalena.

  “Right. Urinating on the man’s head. The man’s head. He’s not interested in women. He’ll urinate on the man’s head and then he’ll grin and go, ‘EE EE EE EE EE.’ ” He’s laughing at you, he’s mocking you, he’s telling you what a pussy you are. He’ll piss on your head night and day… while you’re in bed fast asleep, when you get up to go to the bathroom, when you’re getting dressed to go to work or whatever—all the time… And it’s no use trying to make friends with the little bastard, no use trying to pet him or coo sweet nothings over him, no use trying to get in his good graces by serving him fabulous monkey feasts, apples and raisins and celery and hazelnuts, Brazil nuts, all that stuff monkeys love. Any way you try to please him is only going to make it worse. He’ll play you for a hopeless pushover. Okay? The only thing that works is, you grab the little bastard while he’s at his bowl gorging himself, and you throw him in the toilet, and while he’s flailing about in the water and he’s disoriented and he can’t get any traction on the toilet bowl, it’s so slick, you piss on him. You deluge him with every ounce you’ve got. That fucking monkey’s going to think he’s trapped in a piss monsoon. The whole sky, the whole world is pissing on him. There’s no more air to breathe, only piss fumes. At first he’ll be going, ‘EE EE EE EE’—he’s mad as hell—and then the tone will change, and it starts sounding like a cry for mercy… and then it slows down to ‘EE… EE… EE… EE,’ and then the decibel level sinks, and nothing’s left but a pathetic little whimper, ‘ee… ee… ee… ee,’ and the next day he’ll be curled up on your lap like a little pussycat and practically begging you to pet him and coo your sweet nothings. You’ve shown him who’s boss around here. You’ve shown him you’re the alpha male, not him. And there’s your Ike Walsh of 60 Minutes… He’s a little pissing monkey.”

  Whereupon he disappeared into his office.

  ::::::Ike Walsh is a little pissing monkey! And he’s about to be interviewed by Ike Walsh!:::::: Magdalena had never heard Norm say anything quite that contemptuous before, although many times she had heard him refer to TV people in general as suggestible and inflammable children “innocent of any conceptual thinking whatsoever.”

  Right now the operative word was inflammable. The TV news shows were all hot to exploit the results of a National Institutes of Health study showing that an astounding 65 percent of all “hits” on the internet were at pornographic sites. The NIH—the US government!—was warning of a pandemic of pornography addiction. It had risen from naughty to a national health crisis. “They’re critically nil,” Norman liked to say, referring to the tiny inflamed brains of the TV people. On the other hand, he didn’t mind appearing on their shows. “They exploit so-called pornography addiction,” he’d say—he always threw in the “so-called”—“and I exploit them.” He was great at it! Magdalena knew she was more than a bit biased, but Norman was wonderful on television… so calm, so well-spoken, so all-knowing… and yet good-humored… and the way he looked—but now he thinks he’s going to treat the fiercest man on television as a tiny pissing monkey?

  At that moment Norman emerged from his office, beaming, gleaming with enthusiasm. God, he was good-looking! Her americano prince! Blue eyes… wavy brownish hair—she preferred to think of it as blond… tall, a little fleshy, maybe, but not really… fat. He was forty-two, but he had a strong face, and the energy of a thirty-year-old… make that a twenty-five-year-old. Her friends were forever clucking and fuming and warning her that he was almost twice her age… but they had no conception of Norman’s vigor and strength and joy of living. When the two of them got up in the morning, both of them naked—she had never slept that way with anybody before—she could tell that underneath the good healthy… padding… he had a really good build. blip Nestor was only five-seven and bulging with muscles here there everywhere… bulging!… so grotesque!… Norman’s hair, so thick and wavy and blond… blond! she insisted… made all that “jacked,” “ripped” stuff Nestor talked about irrelevant. She was living with the americano ideal! If there was anyone who was more thoroughly not Hialeah, more completely above Hialeah, on a higher, more intellectual plane, she couldn’t imagine who. The whole world was opening up to her. Oh sure, people in Hialeah liked to make their americano jokes. But in their hearts they knew that outside of Miami, it was the americanos who ran things… ran everything.

  Now Norman stood beside her desk. He put a photograph down in front of her. “Take a look at that, and you’ll see what I’m talking about. ‘Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, and I will be repaid.’ That’s the epigraph to Anna Karenina, by the way. Anyway, our big bear’s sin is onanism, and he shall pay for it.”

  Remarks like that, so offhand and natural to Norman, intimidated Magdalena terribly. She had no idea what an epigraph was. She had a vague notion of Anna Karenina… somebody in a book? On onanism, she drew a complete blank. A sixth sense told her not to touch epigraph and Anna Karenina. Anything that had to do with writing, with literature, intimidated her most of all. It hit her sorest point, her lack of education in the books you were supposed to have read, the artists whose paintings you were supposed to be familiar with, the great composers—she knew nothing—about any composer. She had heard of one name, Mozart, but knew absolutely zero about anything he might have composed… So somehow… onanism was safer.

  “Onanism?”

  “Masturbation,” said Dr. Lewis.

  He moved around behind Magdalena, as she sat at the desk, in order to see the photograph from her vantage point. He put his hands on her shoulders, then lowered his head until his chin rested on her shoulder and his cheek was touching hers. She breathed in his cologne, which was called Resolute for Men. Norman’s condo in Aventura had a huge bathroom with a vast marble countertop beneath a tremendous wall of mirrors, and when she went to her sink in the morning, there would be Norman’s stout, manly can of Resolute for Men by his sink. The can was designed to resemble a hand grenade… a very masculine device, of course, for spraying sweet perfume on a man’s sweet, freshly shaven face and neck blip poor Nestor’s bathroom in the casita in Hialeah… the poor little windowless hall bathroom he had to share with his parents. It wasn’t much more than a closet with a toilet bowl, a tub, and a midget sink squeezed together. Rust had eaten through the enamel around the sink’s hot and cold water handles. An unfortunate shade of green
paint was peeling off the walls. She and Nestor had been alone in the casita only twice in the three years they had been together, for all of thirty minutes each time. More than once they had scampered half nude or totally nude from his room to that miserable bathroom, terrified that someone might pop into the house suddenly, his mother, his father, a relative, a neighbor, and discover their wickedness. Oh, God, it had been so wicked—and so inexpressibly exciting.

  And oh, God!—it was so awful what she was doing to Nestor now! She could see his contorted face screaming, “¡Concha!” But she couldn’t bring herself to even regard it as an insult. It was just the wounded cry of a Latin man with a broken heart. No man, no real Latin man, would just walk away, numb and dumb, after a relationship like theirs. But how could it have been avoided? One way or another she had had to tell him it was over. She was leaving him and Hialeah.

  Would she have “stood by him” that day if she had known he was in big trouble for arresting that Cuban underground leader and practically handing him over to the Cuban government? Well, thank God that was a decision she never had to make. She had no idea what was going on with Nestor’s “career.” For weeks she had been able to think about only one thing: finally making a complete escape from Hialeah and its “big Cuban belly,” as she thought of it… which meant, above all, leaving home and leaving Nestor. Thank God she had done both while she still had the nerve!

  Hialeah—that little Cuban capsule was Nestor’s whole life. Oh, that day, he said he was going to leave Hialeah, too, but all he was, was temporarily hurt. The whole thing would blow over in no time and be forgotten. All he would ever be was a cop serving his twenty years, after which—what? His nice big pension? His life would be over fifteen years from now, and he would only be forty. It was sad… but at least she didn’t have to lie to him any longer… and pretend nothing had changed. She really would have to de-Friend him on Facebook. It wouldn’t be right if she let him stare at her face every day, every hour, and moon over it and pine away over something he would never have again. That would be cruel…

  ::::::But come on, Magdalena, be honest with yourself! That isn’t what you’re really concerned about, is it… One picture of you and Norm wound up on your page, unbeknownst to you, and you were so afraid of upsetting Nestor that you took it off as soon as you knew it was there. From now on let’s face facts. You want everybody to know that Dr. Norman Lewis is your boyfriend! Admit it! In fact, you want his picture all over the page by the time the 60 Minutes thing with the famous Ike Walsh is on. Right? You want them to know you possess that gorgeous blond, blue-eyed americano, that glamorous, famous Older Man!::::: But this happy thought set off another surge of Nestor guilt. The whole thing had been bound to end up the way it had… and better sooner than later. She hadn’t been able to think of any way to let him know… not any painless way… Better this way, a sudden, clean cut. Oh, Nestor would soon be back in the bosom of Hialeah, as if nothing had ever happened—

  “Come on!” said Norman. “You’re not even looking at the picture!” And that was true. He slid his hands down from her shoulders over her prim white nurse’s uniform. “Well?”

  So she looked at the picture, and… uhnghhh, it was so gross! It was a color photograph of the bare crotch of a man… There were eruptions all over his groin and his penis, which was badly inflamed.

  Magdalena said, “That’s so”—she wanted to say “disgusting,” but Norman seemed to be so proud of his picture for some reason—“that’s such a horrible picture.”

  “That’s not so,” said Dr. Lewis. “What our very rich and influential Maurice Fleischmann has done to himself may be horrible, but it’s not a horrible picture. To my mind it’s an important picture, the sort of documentation that’s very valuable for our profession.”

  “That’s Mr. Fleischmann?”

  “The very one,” said Dr. Lewis. “Look at those long skinny legs.”

  “Where did it come from?”

  “I took it myself about half an hour ago and downloaded it onto the computer.”

  “But why is he naked?” said Magdalena.

  Dr. Lewis chuckled. “Because I told him to take his clothes off. I told him we needed to create a ‘visible timeline’ of his progress. ‘A visible timeline,’ I told him.” He chuckled up to the edge of open laughter. “I also said I wanted him to take that picture with him and look at it every time he feels like yielding to his so-called addiction. I’m halfway serious about that part. But mainly I took that picture for my monograph.”

  “Your monograph?” said Magdalena. “What monograph?” She hesitated. She didn’t know if she should expose more of her ignorance—but she went ahead anyway. “Norman… I don’t even know what a monograph is.”

  “A monograph is a treatise—you know what a treatise is?”

  “In a general way,” said Magdalena. She didn’t have a clue, but Norman had said it in a tone that presumed every literate person knew the word.

  “Well, a monograph is what you call a highly detailed, very scholarly treatise that tells you a lot more than you really want to know about a very specific subject, in this case the role of masturbation in so-called pornography addiction. I want this monograph to be so detailed, so dense, so packed… in fact, swollen… with documentation, including photographs like Mr. Miami’s crotch, you’ll get a migraine just trying to read it. I want this thing to be so… dense that any scientist who reads the whole thing—any scientist, any physician, any psychiatrist, any medical school academic—I want that sonofabitch to scream with pain from the burden and the meticulous clinical detail, dried and compacted into bricks, that Dr. Norman Lewis has laid on him.”

  “But why would you want to do that?” said Magdalena.

  “Because I happen to know these jealous shitheads are starting to call me a ‘schlocktor.’ ”

  Magdalena just stared. She didn’t want to ask another question that indicated all the things she didn’t know.

  “Schlock is a Yiddish word that means cheap and poorly made,” said Norman, “especially shoddy stuff that’s being passed off as high-class. So a schlocktor is a doctor who shows what a cheap, shallow, bogus ‘expert’ he is by appearing on television shows like 60 Minutes and dumbing down complicated stuff so millions of idiots will think they understand it. It’s all jealousy, of course. My righteous colleagues like to think of themselves as bearers of exclusive mysteries up on a peak the idiot-millions can never ascend. Any doctor who goes on television and makes it less mysterious is automatically a cheap apostate”—Magdalena just stared her way through Norman’s apostate—“trading the mysteries in for some sort of vulgar celebrity. My monograph will hit them like a sandbag. It… will be above… them. It’ll have a title like ‘The Role of Masturbation in Pornography Addiction’—‘addiction’ in quotes—or maybe ‘The Agency of Masturbation in Pornography Addiction.’ Agency is a very scholarly affectation among bearers of the mysteries these days. Anyway—masturbation. Many physicians, even many psychiatrists, don’t get it. No man gets ‘addicted’ to pornography without it. Otherwise a poor bastard like our distinguished Mr. Miami would quickly get tired of staring at girls with cocks in their mouths. But if he can keep his hand on his little joystick and keep coming to climax, there’s no limit to ‘pornography addiction.’ A jerk—pardon the pun—like Moe the First may not look like much, but he can ejaculate as many as eighteen times in a single day sitting in front of a computer watching this pathetic garbage online. Eighteen! I bet you never knew a man had that much in him! Well, our Maurice Fleischmann does! And he can’t stop, not even when his crotch looks like… that.”

  Magdalena kept staring at the picture, and it was a horrible picture, no matter what Norman said—but meantime he was unbuttoning the button-up front of her modest, demure nurse’s uniform. She’s sitting at her office desk like a professional, a nurse, which makes it all so much more… wicked… 60 Minutes is probably heading for the door—any moment now! Her heart rate is climbing—while Norman keeps
talking in a perfectly normal voice. “… and he tells his assistant he mustn’t be disturbed, no matter who’s calling, his wife, one of his daughters—he is not to be disturbed. Not even by her, his assistant, and he turns the back of this big, rich swivel chair he has, upholstered in the softest, creamiest leather, and rocks back in it as far as it will go and undoes his belt and his zipper and slides the pants and his boxer shorts down below his knees, and his poor ravaged little bloody cock is sticking up in the air, and so he does the only thing he can do. He grits his teeth and eats the pain, raw, and in no time he achieves the little spasm he now lives for—he actually tells me all this!… as if I actually need all these details in order to treat him—meeeahhh!” With that, he broke into another fit of laughter.

  Magdalena said, “You sure you should be telling me all this about him?”

  Not for a moment did Dr. Norman Lewis stop caressing her breasts. 60 Minutes! Any second now!

  “Ahhahaaaaahh I don’t know why not,” said Dr. Lewis, trying to fight back his laughter. “Wee wee weeaahhhhHHH hock hock hock weee’re both licensed professionals working on his case, aren’t we? Hock hock hock hock hock hock ahhhHHH Hock hock hock hock.”

  He was still bent over behind her chair. Now he moved around the chair until he could look into her eyes. He kissed her and sucked each of her lips very delicately, and continued talking, as if nothing else were taking place in this room aside from an elucidation of the behavioral symptoms in the case of Maurice Fleischmann.

  “The moment he achieves climax, the moment any man achieves climax, every last neuron, every last dendrite of the excitement that just a moment ago gorged his generative member with blood… vanishes—vanishes!—just like that, all of that monomaniacal lust is dissipated. It’s as if it never existed. He’s incapable even of desire, our manly Maurice Fleischmann. He’s all business. He pulls his shorts back up and pulls his pants back up and zips them and buckles his belt and stands up and smooths his clothes down against his body… and looks out the window this way and that to see if anyone out there could have possibly seen him, and then he presses a button, and his assistant, out in the anteroom, picks up, and he tells her she can start putting calls through again, and he’s back to work wondering how what just happened… has happened… He’s back to work until his system revives, and those intervals are becoming shorter and shorter, and as soon as he revives, he turns the swivel chair’s back to the door, and he’s riveted to the screen again. It’s so simple, turning on the porn. He doesn’t need to pay anyone anything or supply his name and e-mail address. All he has to do is go to Google and enter www.onehand.com and hit SEARCH and he’s back at Xanadu, and his little blistered Excalibur is vertical and eager again, and he’s got a sex menu on the screen, whatever he wants, anal, fellatio, cunnilingus, coprophilia—oh, you bet!—and his entire existence on this earth is a longing for the spasm. Nothing else is real! And the time between visits to the pleasure dome becomes shorter and shorter, and he isn’t getting anything else done, and people start complaining that they can’t get an appointment to see our distinguished Mr. Maurice Fleischmann any longer. Of course they can’t! He’s busy self-destructing!”