This latter sort of wind was the atmosphere that settled over New Orleans—a defiant exaltation dancing in the shadow of a miserable geopolitical landscape of terrorism, wars, earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, tsunamis, gross political corruption, collapsing economies, thermonuclear explosions, and sundry other clichés of impending apocalypse. For there in these days of war and of woe, an improbable wind inspired all who gasped upon it to believe in their own magnificence.
The thermonuclear bomb test in the Rub’ al-Khali, and the consequent emergence of the Great White Spot, these were just the latest in a series of international incidents, the details of which will not be here belabored. There was a big bang here, a big bang there, cockswagger posturing, brinksmanship and brutality, garish patriotism and moral righteousness all around, the same old con of war. Perhaps the geopolitically curious are here disappointed at the dearth of detail, but in the words of world-renounced political scientist Barefoot Barry, “The machinations of government distract us from the aspirations of humanity.”
Besides, nobody really cared about anything anymore. Apocalyptic apathy. That’s what self-impressed experts were calling it, how they were accounting for the cultural exodus into New Orleans, and the French Quarter in particular. Ravaged by the collapsing economy, desolated by consumerism, exhausted by fear, beaten into indifference, people of all ages were, very simply, shrugging a big fuck-it. Barefoot Barry liked to describe the attitude as “the wisdom of whatever,” and the wisdom of whatever was seen nowhere as sharply as it was seen in the streets of the French Quarter. It was trendy around town to fly a white flag from your car’s antenna, signifying one’s total surrender into life and the relentless death it implied. Strangers were friendly, smiles were frequent, and life had a thrill of adventure to it. Such a rowdy nowadays might have been an unremarkable state of affairs; that it was an experience rare in the lives of so many was a sad circumstance indeed. It was not so sad, however, that people could not see what they were starving for once they tasted it, and this is precisely what they saw in New Orleans under the spell of Laughing Jim.
At least, this is what Elizabeth Wildhack saw. Elizabeth Wildhack was the only child of Dave Wildhack and our dearly deceased Bridget Snapdragon. Originally, Elizabeth had fled Normal, Illinois, to attend Tulane, but she dropped out by the middle of the first semester. The way she saw things, college diplomas were working papers, and since she didn’t aspire to be a worker, why should she strangle her alleged future with debt just to get working papers for a job she didn’t really want but would by then need in order to pay off the debt? At the same time, she held no disdain for education, so she continued to take classes. She just didn’t register or pay for them. What kind of a society places something as essential as the education of its young below the signature line of a promissory note, anyway? That’s what the hell she wanted to know.
In an Econ 101 class she wasn’t paying for, she learned that student loans weren’t even widely available until 1978. Before 1978, it seemed, tuition rose at 2 percent below the inflation rate. Since 1978, tuition has risen at twice the inflation rate. According to her professor, because the federal government guarantees student loans, banks earn a return on their money no matter what. Essentially, all market controls on the cost of tuition were removed, and more and more students have graduated into more and more debt every year since.
Elizabeth heard this and furrowed her brow. The whole arrangement, it seemed to her, sounded like a scam. Before student loans, the young graduated from college educated and free. Too free, it turned out, once the atomic generation threatened to slap the silver platter of their consumer futures aside. After all, you can’t have kids abandoning the past and building a relevant future of their own design. So now, it appeared to Elizabeth, in order to perpetuate itself, an obsolete social system uses debt to enslave its young; an education tax, turning generations into indentured servants, and smothering the rebellion of their youth with the wet blanket of debt. (Then, when Elizabeth heard that if you were caught smoking marijuana you would lose your student loans, your education, and your ostensible future, she immediately located some of this forbidden herb to investigate. The intoxication impressed her.)
And so, with Laughing Jim eventually providing the background for her journey of self-discovery, Elizabeth Wildhack took innumerable classes at several local universities and colleges over the next few years. Thrilled with her freedom—and determined to keep it—she devised a plan, a plan to outwit any possibility that some future version of herself might somehow compromise her freedom. She would never submit to the ordinary. She would make herself a pariah to every human resources manager. She would get a tattoo on her face.
It was a bold move, and an even bolder tattoo. On her forehead, directly on her third eye, she tattooed a nine-pointed star with a backward number nine within its center. Whenever she was asked why she tattooed a backward number nine, Elizabeth explained that it was so she would see the number nine whenever she looked in the mirror. The tattoo, in other words, was for her, and for no one else. Elizabeth enjoyed explaining this to people, and it amused her that no one ever thought to ask the further question: Why number nine?
Truth be told, Elizabeth had no particular reason for creating this design other than that number nine was her favorite number, but it nevertheless benefited her in a manner she had not anticipated. For though she had long and lustrous bronze hair; shining green eyes; strong, lithe limbs; and a smile that could flummox a Minotaur, all these features went unnoticed behind the irrepressible grandeur of her breasts, arcing before the rest of her body like sails swollen on the sighs of Mother Earth. But that is not a descriptive that Elizabeth would have chosen. Grotesque slabs of flab, that was how Elizabeth thought of her breasts. Her tattoo at last gave her a feature more commanding, and the backward number nine made that feature hers and hers alone.
But let us not dawdle and gawk insensitive and rude. Elizabeth had big breasts, yes, yes indeed. But for everyone she had known since grade school, she didn’t just have big breasts. She was big breasts, only big breasts, all object and no subject, her boobs riling every restricted impulse and blinding all to anything but their own lust and lechery.
Let us not be so cruel as that.
36 MOST PEOPLE don’t know what a cremaster is. Elizabeth Wildhack does. Elizabeth learned all about the cremaster in a biology class she once attended. There are two definitions: one having to do with butterflies and the other having to do with testicles. In entomology, the cremaster refers to the little hook by which a chrysalis attaches to a twig. In anatomy, the cremaster refers to the muscle from which the testicles dangle.
“A muscle is defined as a tissue that produces movement in the body.” Elizabeth was explaining all of this to her best friend and fellow dancer, Diana, backstage at Red’s Cabaret, the high-class gentleman’s club where they both worked. “So do you know how the cremaster moves?”
“No,” Diana dutifully replied, carefully rolling a joint. “But I’m really not sure I want to find out.”
“Well, you’re about to anyway, and there’s really no way to put it delicately, so here it is uncensored: When the cremaster contracts, men wag their balls.”
‘Diana stopped rolling her joint and wrinkled her nose. “What?”
“I know!” Elizabeth laughed. “I was surprised when I heard about this too, but I learned about it in a biology class. They call it testicular pendulation, and it exists as a sort of secondary sexual response, like nipple erections.”
“Testicular pendulation?” Diana repeated thoughtfully as she lit her joint.
“In fact,” Elizabeth continued, “the word scrotum originally derives from the Latin scrautum, for quiver. Imagine that, a quivering scrotum.”
“I’d really rather not,” Diana interrupted, passing the joint to Elizabeth. “I hate the word scrotum.”
“I know, it’s yucko. But most men are so repressed in their sexuality that they’ve suppressed their quivering scr
otums without even realizing it. Studies even suggest that this pent-up resistance to their own testicular pendulation is a factor both in impotence and premature ejaculation.” Elizabeth nodded and took a drag off the joint, then grinned enormously. “I’m just kidding,” she confessed, exhaling.
Diana’s eyes went wide. “You little fucker! I can’t believe I believed you.”
Elizabeth shrugged and passed the joint back to Diana. “Don’t feel bad. Doctors used to say that the intravaginal insufflation of tobacco smoke was a cure for hysteria. People believe anything if it’s stated with confidence, no matter how absurd. Is testicular pendulation more absurd than intravaginal insufflation? Not hardly.”
“Intravaginal insufflation?” Diana repeated and sucked pensively on the joint. “Is that what it sounds like it is?” she asked.
Elizabeth nodded. “Yeah, blowing smoke up a woman’s cooch. They also used to believe that blowing tobacco smoke into the anus of a drowned person would revive them. In fact, that’s where we get the phrase, blowing smoke up your ass.” Elizabeth hit the joint a second time, then extinguished it against the side of a random beer bottle. “Good thing doctors are so much wiser nowadays, eh?”
“How do I know you’re not still blowing smoke up my ass?”
“Well,” Elizabeth replied. “For posterity’s sake, the word scrotum does derive from the Latin scrautum for quiver. But it’s the noun quiver, not the verb. Quiver like a sack of arrows. And that’s weird, too, since it implies the sperm as the arrows and the penis as the bow. It’s a disturbingly martial metaphor for lovemaking, and it obviously says a lot about what kind of men created this culture. It’s the same men, after all, who believed that the sperm was a homunculus, a fully formed but miniature human that simply grows inside the fertile woman, like planting a seed in the ground. How’s that for procreative reversal?”
“That I have heard of.” Diana shook her head. “So stupid.”
“Have you ever heard of homunculating?”
“I don’t know, is this more bullshit?”
“Unfortunately, no. To homunculate is to try ineffectively to have intercourse with a small penis.” At that, they both cackled like schoolgirls, and it was clear to both that they shared unfortunate carnal knowledge of the homunculatory act.
“What about the cremaster muscle?” Diana asked. “Did you make that up?”
“Uh-uh.” Elizabeth shook her head. “The cremaster is real. It draws the scrotum closer to the body as a result of cold, fear, or scratching the inner thigh. But aside from the scattered freaks who can wiggle their ears or raise one eyebrow, only tantric yogis can do so voluntarily. For most men, the cremaster contracts as a simple protective reflex.”
“So men don’t wag their balls?”
“Men do not wag their balls,” Elizabeth confirmed with mock sobriety. “Please, Diana, let’s not start any rumors.”
37 DIANA WAS an aquaholic. She drank at least a gallon of reverse-osmosis bottled water—fortified with several key flower essences and remineralized with a magic rock—daily. She would only drink her water out of her most prized possession: a glass gallon jug she carried with her everywhere. This jug was unique in that it had a jagged rock at the bottom, an ostensibly magic rock that was somehow larger than the neck of the bottle. Diana had no explanation for this other than that she had found the jug floating in the Mississippi River one day (she would never discover that this was in fact an artifact from the very same tornado in which Elizabeth was born). In any event, as Diana always explained, since both distillation and reverse osmosis strip water of much of its dissolved mineral content, the magic rock served to remineralize her water. Water is the ultimate solvent, she pointed out, and ultrapurified water can strip the body of minerals, not to mention taking on the resin of the plastic bottles in which it is packaged.
Undoubtedly, Diana was a water radical, and she did not hesitate to preach what she practiced. Water was Diana’s personal front against the toxification of her Mother Earth, the boundary she felt called to push, and polluting the water was her line in the beach sand. “If you were out in the woods and you had to go number two,” she would always ask people who tried to tease her into relaxing her obsession, “would you wade into the middle of the creek to do it?” Of course nobody would do this, and she would then point out that that’s essentially what they were doing every time they used their toilet, shitting in a bowl of fresh water, of which there was perilously little on the planet—and certainly not so plentiful that we can run around crapping in it.
Diana published her insights in a popular pamphlet she littered around town every month called Aquaholics Anonymous. Her latest pamphlet attacked water fluoridation as a strategy by industry to dispose of their toxic waste by transforming it into a public service. She went on to explain that the toxic fluoride collects in the pineal gland, eventually calcifying it, and impacting everything from the onset of puberty to metabolism to the likelihood of depression. Its most reliable effect when added to municipal water supplies, she claimed, is a general stupefaction of the local population.
Not only that, her article sprinted on, but there is every reason to believe that fluoride poisoning results in spiritual retardation as well, corrupting human potential into obese consumerism and hindering the spiritual evolution of the species. The healthy pineal gland, she went on to explain, produces trace quantities of the psychedelic chemical dimethyltryptamine. This endogenous psychedelic—illegal despite its ubiquity in the human brain—facilitates lucid dreaming, near-death experiences, and other mystical states. The pineal, her article claimed, is in fact the third eye, the seat of the soul, the kiss of the kundalini caduceus. It is believed by some to be a dormant gland, one that will eventually be awakened to enable telepathic communication and other forms of mystical experience.
“Life is a spiritual experience in which anything is possible,” Diana was often heard to say in between chugs from her jug. “And anyone who can’t see that should start by paying attention to their water.”
38 BAREFOOT BARRY WAS the reluctant leader of a wandering tribe of don’t-fuck-with-us who called themselves the Synchronicity Circus. Barefoot Barry was a street performer, a barefoot tap dancer. Slap dancing, he called it. Barefoot Barry had been a political science professor at the University of New Orleans with a bad case of apocalyptic apathy, but after witnessing the New Orleans that evolved after Laughing Jim emerged, he showed up one day to his megasection 101 class of five hundred students—barefoot, wearing dungarees rolled halfway up his calves like Huckleberry Finn, and a T-shirt that read GET FREE. Then, he confessed that his Ph.D. actually stood for Phuckin’ Dummy and proceeded to reveal to them everything he’d ever been afraid to explain about the illusions of government: how it had been bought and paid for by anti-democratic social structures called corporations, how it had evolved into little more than a smokescreen serving the interests of transnational capital, and how it was a public relations extravaganza marketing saccharine democracy and artificially flavored freedom.
“Back in 2005,” Barefoot Barry yelled his lecture, “when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and the levees broke and the whole city flooded, this government stationed police troops on the bridge over to the West Bank to prevent the survivors of the worst catastrophe in American history from walking over that bridge onto dry fucking ground! Even if there was a risk of more property damage, for fuck’s sake there was just a goddamn hurricane and flood! Wake up Paul Revere! Neighbors are lost and injured and thirsty and confused and they need help! It doesn’t get much more straightforward than that! And don’t you think it also kind of raises the issue of why exactly there’s a government at all if it’s not providing for the common defense? Imagine being injured and your racket of a government not only not helping you, but also standing in the way of you helping yourself!” He paused long before booming the conclusion of his lecture. “It smells like smeared shit, friends and Romans! They’re rubbing your face in bullshit and telling you it�
�s pumpkin pie! Listen: Each and every one of us gave up degrees of freedom in order to participate in society. We did this for the alleged security that society promises. But there’s a contract at stake here, a social contract, and we give our consent by our continued cooperation. When your society makes a submitrix out of your every impulse and then doesn’t even bother to lend a hand when you’re in need, your society has reneged on the social contract. And that’s good news! Since this social contract is apparently up for renegotiation, it is well within the rights of every one of us to reclaim some forgotten freedoms.” Pausing again, he very deliberately and very mysteriously touched the side of his nose and pointed at them. “So who among you today will sit idly by? Who among you today will permit the rebellious creativity of your youth to be cajoled into this spiritless consumerism? If you are not among the enslaved, then you are invited, today right here right now, to walk away.” Then, he picked up a guitar that he’d secreted behind the podium, plugged it into the amplifier, dimmed the lights, and sang into a little microphone clipped to his T-shirt:
Look up, look out stand up, get out,
hurricanes and pestilence, my how we pout.
Earthquake tsunami, better call your mommy,
ice caps are melting, getting mighty balmy.
Ah, the end is so nigh, I’ve lately heard cry,
the end is so nigh, and we’re all gonna die!
But let us hum hymns of ham,
chant the dumb, dim, and damned.
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