Sleeping, he dreams tropical dreams, full of talkative parrots and red-haired women.
And if, by chance, some distant night sound disturbs him and he wakes, It will step out on his tiny balcony, wipe his glasses and peer upward, marvelling at the innumerable pinpricks of light which spangle the firmament. At such moments, he feels the deepest peace. For in his heart, he knows that what he sees is nothing but the ceiling of yet another vast and mysterious box.
Edward Note
Calle Borracho
Ococingo, Chiapas
A GUIDE TO ANIMAL BEHAVIOUR
I am in bed with a woman who looks like a movie star, and I have lost my memory.
The movie star woman is asleep, which is lucky and gives me a chance to try to remember who I am and how I got here. She is evidently a person of low virtue. I can see she is shamelessly naked, as I am myself, I might add. And she is snoring. I find the combination of her beauty, her shamelessness and her snores moving in strange and delightful ways.
When she wakes up, she is almost as suspicious of me as I of her, though she has the advantage of knowing who she is.
“How did this happen?” I say.
“You were cute,” she says. “When I asked you your name, you looked at your watch and said, ‘Seiko Quartz.’”
Her name is Tracy Mondesire — used to be Tracy Gittles from Boogie Ridge, Levy County (the only county in the U.S.A. named for a Jewish person), Florida. Her family were Flat-Out Baptists, but died young, and she was brought up by Grammy and Grampy Gittles in a car-part heaven outside Ocala.
Grammy and Grampy Gittles were fat and blind and stood four square for the Bible and segregation. Grampy Gittles swore he’d die before they had a “coloured” TV in the house. He wrote verses for the local paper and communed with the dead with the aid of a hollow cow horn.
Several strange men interfered with her while she was growing up, but it was nothing she minded.
Glitter is the only life she ever wanted.
They tell me we are living in Bel Air. Does Washington know about this place?
Our swimming pool has an undertow.
I have set off the burglar alarm eighty-two times since moving in.
She sells real estate to Arabs, nothing under a mil and a half.
She can suck air into her hole and blow pussy farts. It is the damnedest thing to see.
She reads pornographic books to raise her spirits and sometimes will sit home of an evening with a stack of filthy cassettes as high as your elbow. I am not much for seeing it on the screen myself.
Wherever you go in this house, there is odour of muff.
One morning, I tackle Juanita, the maid, out of pure aggression. Evidently, Juanita has had her eye on me as well. We do it in a chair until there is nothing left of me but a little pool of sweat. I wake up on the living room floor, with Tracy trying to get my thing between the blades of the garden shears.
She fires Juanita without notice, then hires her back a week later because she cannot bear to be cruel to anyone who makes less than two hundred thousand a year.
After a year or so, we get married. It is a clamouring and tasteless affair with eight hundred guests and house ads in the toilets.
“Eat me,” she says, lying on the bed with her legs in the air. This is an inviting subject for the Old Masters, let me tell you. I am not certain it is the manly thing to do, but I love to mumble her pussy, and it drives her wild.
I read in the ENQUIRER that I once flew DC-3s up from Colombia, but turned for the state after crash-landing three tons of high-grade in a peanut field surrounded by federal agents. I fingered Richard Estramadura, arch-international crime kingpin, before he went into hiding. He has taken out a million-dollar contract on my life.
I ask Tracy is this is true. “He made it up,” she says, pointing to Don, her publicist. I do not know if I should be upset that this over-sedated weeny is inventing my life.
To keep in shape, I do daily workouts with an S&W .357. Nights, I do speed and sneak up on coyotes in the backyard.
I drive a pink Fleetwood with zebra-skin seatcovers and an oog-gah horn. She gave it to me for my birthday. How do I know when my birthday is? I don’t. But she says I must have had one some time.
Ten years have passed. I have learned to walk sideways in the street to cut down wind resistance. I have only strayed five or six times, that Tracy knows about.
I don’t know how this happened, but we are having one hell of a time together.
A woman stopped me in the street the other day. I was wearing aviator shades, eight gold chains, a button that said “Drugs Saved My Life” and expensive white shoes made by poor people in Brazil. She said she was my wife. She said she had married my brother Daken after I left like that. She and Daken had just flown in from Kentucky to be on Wheel of Fortune. We have three children, all brought up Christian.
I, A YOUNG MAN CALLED EARLY TO THE WARS
First Years
Everyone seemed bigger than me. Mother, Father, even my little brother. We had a pet Alsatian called Norris who kept knocking me over, especially when there was mud on the ground. We also had cows and horses which, like the dog, had four legs. I don’t believe I saw the top of a horse until my fifth year, they were so huge. I was always worried about keeping out of the way of their feet.
Another little brother. Where did they come from? I worried about being overrun, but at least they were getting smaller. Mother told me I came out of her stomach through a trap door during a snow storm. This seemed incredible even then. One day Norris came limping home, covered with blood and dust. Father said Norris and some other boy dogs had been fighting over a girl dog in heat. What was a girl dog? How hot did they get?
I noticed that although I was getting bigger, everyone else was getting bigger, too. For example, the neighbours’ boy Petey. Petey would walk over to our house anytime he wanted and punch me out and take my toys. He was unstoppable. I lay awake nights worrying about whether Petey was going to come over the next day and punch me out. Finally I learned to deal with this problem by punching my little brothers and taking their toys. This worked well until Mother caught me. She said I was a bad boy, a trial and a burden, and that she didn’t know what had gotten into me. I had to be punished. Father smacked me. It hurt amazingly. Next to horses, Father was the biggest thing in the world.
Chaos. There are boy people and girl people! I had to have Mother point out which was which until I got the hang of it myself. Even then, I lay awake nights worrying about making a mistake. And for a long time, I avoided girls because of the heat problem. One day I mentioned this to Father. He laughed and told Mother, and she laughed. Apparently girls were somehow different from dogs in regard to temperature. Relieved of my anxiety on this point, I went over to Petey’s place and asked his sister Diane, a girl about my size, to marry me. Diane’s mother overheard this unfortunate proposal, called me a fresh little snot and telephoned my parents. I expected a smack when I reached home, but Mother merely took me aside and solemnly told me I was too young to think of marriage. Unaccountably, I felt humiliated by my ignorance on this topic. Who made up the rules?
Petey played with his wee-wee. He told me he had put his hand down Diane’s underpants, and she didn’t have one. This piece of intelligence filled me with unease. He led me out to the barn and into the calf pen. It was like that, he said, pointing at the hind end of the nearest bawling beast. I wanted to be sick. He took his wee-wee out and started to play with it. I had never seen anything so strange in my whole life. It occurred to me that this was how Diane had lost hers, and I ran home in a panic.
Later I experimented with my brother’s to see if the thing was in fact detachable. I was informed on and duly smacked. Mother said I was a monster and nothing but trouble to her. Even at birth, she said, I had tried to come out the wrong way, causing her to be cut open like a bowling bag. I tol
d her I would gladly have gone back if I could, for I had never intended to cause such ruin and shame. Perhaps, I suggested, I had been born too young and needed a bit more time before breaking into the world. That night I dreamed I was a horse, with Mother and Father and my little brothers running in and out among my hooves like rabbits.
Kindergarten
I lasted one day only. Had I failed? Later it occurred to me that Mother had withdrawn me from classes for sentimental reasons — she wanted to keep her firstborn by her side an extra year. She wept during the long drive into town. I steeled myself for some dreadful catastrophe. Perhaps they would never let me go home again. She led me down a dark corridor, with doors going off on either side like a hospital, and into a room of strangers. We were both crying by then, and I wouldn’t let go of the hem of her skirt. The teacher smiled with a mouth full of teeth, making me wail even louder, for she looked just like the old crone who ate children in my picture book. She pulled my mother and me apart, and sent the light of my life reeling on her way. I expected the chop at any moment and spent the day skulking wherever the other children were thickest, hoping she would take someone else first. And when it was over, I ran screaming from the building in terror to where Mother stood, waiting bravely by the open car door. It took us months to get over the experience.
Meanwhile, she took it upon herself to give me the education I was missing. Numbers. Lord! When I got to fifty, I thought my brains would burst, and yet there didn’t seem to be any end to them. I lay awake at night going over them in my head, always worried that the next day I would find out someone had changed the order on me. On the literary side, she taught me phonetics and printing, which I took to quickly enough, though I pretended to be slow so they would not send me away. School loomed on the horizon like a final separation. What was school? Petey said they gave you the strap at school, which was much worse than a smack. What for? Talking!
Elementary School
Two-room country schoolhouse. I had my eye out for the strap right away, but on not discovering its location, concluded it was kept in the senior room where the bigger children were no better than wild animals. At recess, I trailed after the student body as it spilled into the yard like a swarm of locusts. Petey raced by shouting, “Don’t go near Ted Binker. He stinks.” I followed the direction indicated by his pointing finger and spied a lone boy standing in a corner, talking to himself. Out of curiosity, I went over and stood beside him. He did stink. He had wet his pants. I ran after Petey, and someone knocked me down. A little girl in a frilly dress lifted its hem to show me her brown legs and underpants. I went back inside and sat at the wrong desk by mistake. Later I went to the washroom, but couldn’t wee-wee because another boy was combing his hair in the mirror. That was my first day.
Miss Barton, my teacher, was young and pretty. I started to play with my wee-wee the way Petey had shown me, imagining that I had accidentally walked in on her in the bathroom. The senior-room teacher was Mr. Kennedy, a giant man with bristly red hair growing out of his ears and nose and on top of his hands. Whenever I saw his hands, I wanted to be sick. Mr. Kennedy gave people the strap. Some of the bigger boys he just walloped with his fist. Once Petey punched Brenda Blandford, and she came to class with thick blood streaming down her chin. Mr. Kennedy picked Petey up and threw him against the art supplies cupboard. Ted Binker wet the floor, but did not get the strap. Petey got the strap twice in one day, once for coming to school with dirty fingernails and once for failing addition. I forgot to do up my pants after going to the bathroom, and Miss Barton asked me if I could feel a draft. I said, no, I felt all right. Then she came over and zipped me up in front of the entire class.
Whaaaa! I failed printing! I connected the letters up the way I had seen Mother do. Mr. Kennedy made me lean against the blackboard on my fingertips for half an hour after school. The next day Mother had a talk with Miss Barton, and they moved me up a grade. In the new grade, everyone was bigger than me. Petey threw my Roy Rogers lunch box under a truck. Every evening after school, while my brothers played in the yard and Father slept in front of the TV, Mother helped me with my homework. I lay awake nights worrying about failing. I started to pray. I asked God not to let me die while I was asleep and to help me pass addition and bless my dog.
At Christmas, I played Tiny Tim in the school pageant. Father made me a crutch and a leg brace out of tomato soup cans and an old belt. Johnny Malchak carried me on his shoulder, and everyone clapped. Afterwards I tried to wear my leg brace to school so that Mr. Kennedy wouldn’t give me the strap. When Mother stopped me wearing the leg brace, I limped.
I noticed that Norris had a shiny wee-wee that came out sometimes. When it did, Mother would hit it with a rolled up newspaper and call Norris a dirty animal. The horse had a giant wee-wee that hung almost to the ground. In my mother’s LIFE MAGAZINE, I discovered large numbers of photographs of women dressed only in their underwear. I clipped several out with my scissors and showed them to Petey at school. He said that was nothing. In his parents’ dresser drawer, he had found the picture of a nude woman, only her stomach was covered by a safe, I knew that a safe was an iron box where you kept money. I asked Petey why a woman would have a safe on her stomach. Petey said a rubber safe. A rubber safe!
Some nights I didn’t sleep at all. There were so many things to worry about. One of the things I worried about was not sleeping. I would get up four or five times to pee, then stand outside my parents’ bedroom door until they asked me what was wrong. “I can’t sleep,” I would say. After I got up to pee and stand outside their door enough times, Mother would come to my room and lie on the bed while I went to sleep. She would be very angry. She said I was neurotic and should see a psychiatrist. She said sometimes she thought there was no hope I would turn out all right. I worried so much about having to see a psychiatrist that I pulled off all my eyelashes. Mother went to see Miss Barton. I expected them to put me back, but Miss Barton gave me a test, and they moved me up another grade. I didn’t even know if I passed the test. All the children in the new grade were huge. Petey sat way on the opposite side of the room now. One more grade and I would be in the senior room with Mr. Kennedy.
Wab-in-hapi
They sent me to summer camp. Camp Wab-in-hapi. I had to learn new words for everything. The toilet was outside, and it was called the kaibo. If you didn’t use the right word, they wouldn’t let you go. There were eleven other boys in my cabin, none of whom I had ever met before. We all told jokes the first night. A man and a woman are naked together in a bathtub. The man points to the woman’s chest and asks, “What are those?” “Mountains,” she says. She points to the hair on his chest and asks, “What’s that?” “Clouds,” he says. He points to her stomach and asks, “What’s that?” “My cave,” she says. She points to his wee-wee and asks, “What’s that?” “A little man,” he says. And that night the clouds go over the mountains, and the little man enters the cave. I did not get this joke, but laughed so that no one would think I was stupid. New words for wee-wee were cock, pecker, prick, bone, dink and dingus. Fuck and hard-on I didn’t understand, but I found I could get by all right by laughing whenever anyone used them. I lay awake most of the first night memorizing words and phrases, so that the next day I could nonchalantly ask if I might go take a whiz in the kaibo.
Mornings, at Camp Wab-in-hapi, we lined up for breakfast and sang the camp song. No one told me the words, so I could only pretend I was singing. I was worried there might be some rule about not getting to eat if you didn’t sing. Afternoons, the whole camp played War. One side had to capture the other side’s flag. Flags were generally hidden deep in the woods atop rock outcrops with steep, dangerous faces. I found the best way to play War was to hide out somewhere until it was over. The third day somebody hit me over the eye with a rock. I found my cabin counsellor and told him I was too young for War. That night the counsellor told my cabin mates I had severe group adjustment problems. One morning I woke up to f
ind that the boy in the bunk above had vomited all over me while I slept. At the end of the week, all the boys in the camp were ordered to swim naked and wash their wee-wees with soap. I have never seen so many naked people in my life.
On Parents’ Day, Mother, Father and my brothers visited me. I told them all the jokes I could recall and about the nice counsellor who wrapped me in his blanket at campfire and nuzzled my ear. Father said nothing. Mother said nothing. “In foreign lands,” I sang, “the women wear no pants, and the men wear glasses to see their asses.” Mother said those were filthy, smutty words. She said I should have my mouth washed out with soap. Father waited till I packed my clothes and we were alone in the car, then he smacked me. “Don’t ever let anyone touch you like that again. It’s nothing but dirty monkey business.”
I told Petey my Wab-in-hapi jokes, and for a while we were friends again. He had taken down Diane’s underpants. It was like a pocket, he said. My head whirled. He drew me a diagram which made no sense whatever, though I didn’t tell Petey. I memorized the diagram and filed it away with the verbal description pocket in that immense portion of my brain set aside for sexual arcana.
At the same time, it occurred to me that many boys of my acquaintance had knowledge far in advance of my own, which they gleaned, more or less scientifically, from their sisters. I began to feel cruelly deprived. I mentioned this casually to Mother, saying how pleasant I imagined it would be when we had a baby girl for me to play with. Mother began to weep. It had been a true wish of her own, she said, to have a daughter, but after my little brothers were born, the doctors had tied her tubes so she would have no more children. The effort of bearing three boys, it seemed, had been highly injurious. I ran out of the house and sat for an hour in the melon patch, till the mosquitoes drove me indoors again. The world was a welter of ignorance, strife and decay.
Guide to Animal Behaviour Page 12