The Freewayfayers' Book of the Dead

by John Okas

  Besides, there’s another reason, one that Harry does not like to think about, and has never told anyone. When the playboy was in his thirties, he wondered why, with all the furrows he was plowing, and given the fact that he liked to shake his seed on unprotected virgin ground whenever possible, did not one little Harry or Harriet ever sprout. Out of curiosity he went to a doctor, sported with a test tube and got results that confirmed him in his bachelorhood. His procreative swimmers were found torpid, the majority casualties, drowned in the viscid pool of their own medium. Thus, with such solid grounds to believe he is sterile, the deal he made with Sarah never to demand children suited him as much as it did her.

  “Why, Cupcake, I always thought another child was the last thing you wanted. It takes me by complete surprise that you suggest it.”

  “It’s a woman’s prerogative to change her mind.” she reminds him.

  “And a man’s to stay set in his ways,” he argues, “I’m almost fifty years old and reasonably content. Call me selfish, I don’t care. For me sex is just fun and games, not something to change the world with. I’m set to be the end of the line, to waste what my father earned. Let’s face it, the Swan seed is going downhill. It really would be best to spare the world my good-for-nothing traits, wouldn’t it? Ha, ha.” Jovial Harry jokes. Humor is a funny thing, he thinks, it makes telling the truth sound like something to laugh about.

  For their entire marriage Sarah has been the only one who thought about protection. A gold disc, inserted intra-uterinely by a Bay Area doctor as a precaution of her trade, has, so she thinks, thus far served its purpose, preserving Gloria’s position as an only child, the sole and undisputed heiress of Harry’s share of Thorco and Lightning Hammer Industries. Now, without telling her husband, she has the coin in the neck of her uterus removed and spends all winter and spring coaxing him to shoot millions upon millions of replicas of himself into her. Each time Harry launches an amphibious assault on her isle she holds in her mind the image of a hearty one reaching the other shore, where the egg is waiting. All to no avail. What a pity! In time she comes to suspect that if her little canal is too long a swim for the playboy’s issue they must be mostly dead or lame. She tries to put a spark in his germs by feeding him foods she hears are love crutches for the crippled. She has chef Shepp working overtime making egg omelets, shucking oysters, roasting game birds, shishing ke-bab. Moreover, since displays of her breaking her own taboos stir up his desire, she routinely goes into her sepulcher wardrobe, her private collection of books and dead beasts, and dons an accessory or two with the animal touch, a mink hat, a snakeskin belt, or rabbit fur mittens. While these foods, tokens, and rituals of fertility do give Harry more raw material to work up seminal fluid with, they do nothing to improve the swimming of the listless spirits within it.

  If anything, he seems to become more of a baby himself. He grows edgy when he’s left alone too long, and when she holds him he quickly tires of that too. He sucks up to her, releases himself with a shudder, burps, yawns, and wants to sleep, to dream of green pastures himself. Perhaps it is his age: the old stud will not serve his purpose forever. Being unsatisfied gives Sarah every reason to offer herself to the dogs, let come what may, but still she refrains. Stalling the call she knows one day to be inevitable, she nags her husband doggedly, “Come on, Harry, be a man. Make a little extra effort for the war.”

  Harry Peters Out

  It is written in the philosophy of playboys that too much of a good thing is even better, but after a year of having Sarah on him until all hours, long after the music’s over, it begins to dawn on Harry that less might mean more, that having a young wife who fucks like a bunny is not all it’s cracked up to be!

  Heartbreaker Harry used to blow his own horn about his talent for keeping up with any passing jill rabbit. Now fifty-one years old, he begins to feel he’s crawling at a tortoise pace behind the cotton tail every playboy dreams of.

  Forgoing her suicidal pleasure mission with the Sage increases Sarah’s desire. In the end nothing less than infinity will satisfy her lust. But for the time being her yen to get the most out of life includes milking Harry’s sex glands for all they’re worth. His desire however is all too measurable, three and three-quarter times is all. Late in the fourth lap, long since turned from soft and sweet to sweaty and salty, Sarah heaves her seaworthy hips, parts her brimming wet lips, and bares her clenched teeth, wolfish, ravenous, dauntless in her urge to reach the peak of the mountain of love one more time, but Harry peters out. He’s bushed, ready to roll over and play dead. Combat fatigue.

  “Please don’t fizzle on me now, man. What’s the matter, don’t you like it?” She whispers while she splints his flagging mast with her fingers, whipping it between the sheet and her inner thigh, trying to get it to stand up straight and slide right.

  “What you want tonight is bigger than the both of us, Cupcake. I’m afraid I’m finished!”

  The Monkey Sage’s mistress just won’t take “no more” for an answer. “That settles it. Next Friday you’re going to come to the meeting and sit with us. Believe me, if you’d just listen, the Lord would put a little extra spice in your love life.”

  “Oh, no thank you! Religions, or any facsimile thereof, are definitely not my cup of tea.”

  “Not all religions are for puritans, Harry. Anyway this is the spiritual life, not religion. The way we Bharanis look at things fits right in with your playboy philosophy. It just extends the same privileges to everyone, so that women can enjoy fooling around on the wild sides of their minds too.”

  Harry nods. On record as a freethinker, he believes a single moral standard should apply to all, theoretically. With the wisdom of age he understands that a man’s power is different from a woman’s. A man must do something to gain his strength, but if a woman has beauty, she need nothing more.

  “I’m not supposed to tell you this,” says soft Sarah, rubbing her sweaty breasts against him, “but Lord Z’s tales lead us to believe that we can have anything we want. Imagine sex in the six realms. I’ve done it with animals, vegetables, minerals, demons, angels, and gods!”

  These admissions and the way she blurts them out always make Harry uncomfortable. He liked it better when she never spoke about what went on at meetings. Now he doesn’t have to go down the back stairs to hear. The bunch of bananas in the bedroom can be heard all over the house and, extra nutty, she tells him all about how now old Keinar is carrying a secret agent named Double F Fife, and, of all absurd things, a Mother named Goose.

  “Lord Z says that overindulging in sex can help the Brutish defeat the Nastis and end this war before it starts. Come on, one more time for peace.”

  The playboy fails to see how orgasms on the homefront can have an effect on the outcome of a conflict thousands of miles away. As it excites him that she can’t tell the difference between fact and fantasy in the bedroom, it perplexes him that she doesn’t give a fig for logic or reason when she talks about the world situation. It infuriates him that his wife would bring up these ridiculous fantasies about the Battle of Brutten in an attempt to stimulate him. Metaphysics, bah! Snakeoil! Why does she insist on going to those damned meetings, consorting with those raggedy women?

  Indeed Harry has an open mind. Only he is so oversatisfied that jealousy begins to haunt him. “I’m well aware that I’m not the man of your dreams. You tell me everytime we screw that you love your own projection more than you love me. How do you think it makes me feel when you say that when we’re together your mind’s on all those different planes and planets and then you press me to do what I physically can’t do?”

  The annoyance is worse than if she had a fleshy lover, one whom under the pressures of his father’s will he could at least legally and practically disallow her.

  “But if you’d listen to the Sage—he’s as seasoned, as wise, and as cocksure a stud as they come—”

  “—Oh boy!” he raves on. “A regular rooster of the supernatural barnyard, is he? An invisible super st
unt man? Cupcake, nothing could be more outlandish than this story of yours. Nothing we do or don’t do has any effect on the war overseas. There is no such thing as the Purple Sage, or Double F Fife, or Mother Goose. They are all only figments of your imagination. You and your weird sisters sit together and support one another’s madness. I’m tired of having these nobodies shoved down my throat. First I have to compete with some Corny Duke character who may or may not have existed. Now you want me to admit that I’m bettered by a man who is no man at all.”

  “Z is Lord, Harry, darling.”

  “He’s not my Lord, Cupcake, I promise you that.”

  “If you’re into me,” she whispers, pulling him close to her, softly kneading his droopy masculinity, “you’re into Z, like it or not. And in the war if you’re not with us, you’re against us. Maybe if you got on top this time?”

  Harried, he turns his back, punches the pillow, and gets out of bed. “Bad enough your mind’s always on Lord Z,” he says as he puts on his robe, “but that you should suggest mine be too, that’s a bit more than I can take!” And as he makes his way upstairs up to the workshop, he says to himself, loudly enough for the whole house to hear, “Listen to me! Talking as if this absurdity, this phantom, were real!”

  Thus Sarah cannot win the playboy of the western world over to the mysteries of the east. He remains firm in his attachment to science and rationality. If a logical mind means that he has fewer erections, so be it. He will die before he tries such remedies.

  The Age of Reason

  Meanwhile Glory Bee continues to grow in wisdom, knowledge, and grace.

  Of course, she hears all the latest of what’s going on at the meetings. The women talk loudly and openly about their beloved Monkey King, and all the other little voices. They curse Reichmann and boast about how, when they get home, they are going to give their husbands or boyfriends a lesson in how to keep love alive in a world gone mad.

  Sarah even comes up to Gloria’s room and speaks to her directly. “Mummy wants to tell you that the Furor has evil magicians working on his side. But not to worry because we have Mother Goose and Father Fife on ours.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh yes. Maybe the Holy Peter can sit in his Eternal Palace, rock-tight, count his blessings, and do nothing about this Furor, but we hisssers—that’s what Father Fife calls us—are fighting fire with fire. The alliance of the Church of Inkland and the witches is a powerful one. Maybe you would like to come to the meeting next Friday night. Perhaps the Lord will come and tell you how you can help our side win this war.

  “We fight evil with good and evil. When we have good feelings, and experience the joy of friendship, we believe this weakens Reichmann and what he stands for. And when we’re feeling wicked we use that too …”

  As a natural born musician will hear the difference in keys without its being explained to her, the muse is internally knowledgeable about sex. Going on twelve, Gloria has a gut feeling what her mother means by “good feelings.” Never having heard the word “orgasm” doesn’t stop her from imagining women getting a big bang out of their private parts. She is fascinated by her own. Every night when she goes to bed she thinks of nice things, fine clothing, music, and men being madly in love with her. Plugging herself with her long fingers, she experiences a pleasant, full feeling of being warm as toast.

  Gloria listens to her mother and nods, “unh-huh, unh-huh”, smiling non-committally. She considers her mother’s metaphysical beliefs absurd. Not that Gloria doesn’t believe in the power of thought. She knows that force can be marshalled over lighter-than-air waves. But she follows her stepfather’s lead that common sense is the mark of a rational human being, and humors her mother, as one would a child talking about her imaginary friends. She grunts with disbelief when Sarah gets to the bottom of things, describing the group’s use of doggerel as a weapon, and the dirty tricks and mind games they play on the Furor and his rotten nuts.

  As a confirmed, self-centered, only child, an order of one, Gloria has little interest in the potentials of sisterhood. The monist has no girlfriends, and doesn’t want any. She is repelled by the idea of being present at the beer blast in her mother’s bedroom. The sole company she seeks, other than herself, is her stepfather. And with Sarah getting fruitier by the month, more and more the child finds herself assuming the role of a responsible adult in the house. Already well past the age of reason, at the age of twelve her reasons have reasons.

  On the stroke of seven in the morning, dawn of the Eve of All Hollows, Laudette pokes her nose into Gloria’s room in the children’s wing to be the first with the best wishes for her birthday.

  “Happy birthday, dear Gloria, happy birthday to you. How does it feel to be twelve years old, Baby? My, my how the years do fly!”

  Gloria knows what Laudette will tell her next, what she tells her every day of the week, not to ask for whom the alarm rings.

  “And speaking of time, guess what time it is again! School time! That’s right. So get up, get dressed and get out of here! Be a good girl!”

  Gloria draws the covers up and sets in for a battle against other people telling her what to do. “Lawdy, I’m not going to school today. It’s my birthday. Call old Tinkler and tell her I’ve got the bug.”

  “Baby, when you grow up, you give the orders. Now I say where you go and where you don’t. Get out from under there. That’s Mrs Twinkler, and she called me and said you’ve been late for school every day this week.”

  “That’s because Pearly stops and smokes a cigarette with a funny man in a yellow jacket. They talk and trade newspapers.”

  “None of your lies! I doubt Pearly Gates wants to be seen with the type of bozo who wears yellow jackets.”

  “Well he’s doing it,” the Bee maintains, and tries to come up with some arguments in her own favor. “Lawdy, didn’t you once tell me that good girls go to heaven and bad girls go everywhere?”

  Laudette suffers from the age of reason: the twelve year old is a bug for technicalities. “Yes, Baby,” she sighs, “I said that. But school isn’t everywhere.”

  “Well don’t you always say Emanual said the kingdom of heaven is right here and now, that you don’t go there, either you are there, I mean here, or you’re not?”

  “Yes, Baby, I do say so, but I don’t think that by ‘here’ Emanual meant staying in bed all day.”

  “But didn’t Daddy-o buy me all these fine things to show me that I can lie around and count sheep my whole life if I so choose.”

  The Bee drives the point home that as long as she lives she will never have to win bread and influence people to be comfortable. In fact Laudette happens to know that doting Sir Harry wrote an addition in his will to make doubly sure that Gloria inherits a fortune. She heard the playboy talking to his lawyer, saying that if he dies and the peach gets too fruity, then Gloria, before her mother finds a way of losing it, gets it all. “Yes,” Laudette says, “the day may come when you can have everything you want. Too bad, but it could happen. Sometimes good luck is the toughest of all,” she adds ominously. “It can leave you at a disadvantage.”

  “What sense does that make, Lawdy, if good luck is bad, and bad luck is good, then I’ll just be back to where I started, whatever luck that is. A day off is never going to matter in my life, is it? It surely won’t hurt the school. So why do I have to go today?”

  “Because I say so!” For a moment Laudette loses her patience and tries to evict Gloria from her sleeping den by force. The big sitter pokes at this side and that looking for an opening, but the long agile girl inside all that satin flap and flutter skirts her every time, like a quick young fox easily managing to keep herself from a very old dog.

  The nanny won’t be made the seventh grader’s goat. Once upon a time Laudette would have put her foot down and talked tough. But the professional baby-sitter mellows with age. She knows how to compromise and when to use a bribe. “All right, Baby, I had a surprise planned for this evening but I don’t want to see you spoil
it by acting wise, and forcing me to ground you. You probably don’t remember your uncles Early and Bones. They were the boys I took care of before I started taking care of you. They were in the hottest band in the Bay area. When you were just a little bitsy baby, your Uncle Early used to sit you on his lap at the piano in Kane’s Top Hat Club. Well, last week I got a letter from him. You know what? Tonight they’re both going to be right here in the Empire City. They got jobs playing in Apollo Cotton’s Orchestra, uptown at the Cootie Club, an eighteen-piece band on stage, live! And it just so happens we have some friends in high places willing to let us in the back stage door …”

  “Is this a promise, Lawdy?”

  Laudette promises. “Just don’t give me any more trouble over school, all right?”

  “Why didn’t you just say so in the first place?” The bribed Bee buzzes out of cover in a flash. She washes the midnight blue water color from her hair, chest, and stomach, brushes her teeth, and is impeccably dressed in her SCUBA gear, gone with Pearly before Laudette gets a chance to grab him and say, “Pearly Wheatstraw Gates, what the heck is this I hear about you acting funny, smoking cigarettes and passing newspapers with some joker in a yellow jacket?”

  With all the excitement, the expectation of being reunited with her friends in her thoughts, the next time she sees Pearly that question has slipped her mind entirely.

  At the Cootie Club

  At the Cootie Club, backstage and the store room for the bar are one and the same place. Laudette and Gloria make their entrance between stacked cartons of gin and tonic water.

  “Trick or treat!” Laudette bursts out, coming up behind the thin stick of a horn man and the sallow, sweaty Earl.

  Treat.

  “Laudette!”

  “Laudette Lord, honey, is that really you?”

  Bones Bonet’s head of curly hair, prematurely gray, shines like a halo. He grabs the big baby-sitter, and puts his skinny arms around her.