Thingamajugs, eyeslappers, brumskies, chesticles, and happy-fun-squeezy friends. From Bronx bombers to Boston wobblers, from the devil’s dumplings to the goddamn gland canyon, Elizabeth had heard it all. Invariably, these reminders were more accusation than compliment, but Elizabeth had nonetheless developed a fondness for certain descriptives and a bitter disdain for others. She despised, for example, any suggestion that her breasts had anything at all to do with cannonballs, hubcaps, sandbags, distributor caps, dual air bags, torpedoes, fog lights, blimps, buoys, submarines, atom smashers, intercontinental ballistic missiles, or any other grease-monkey fantasy.
On the other hand, the implication that her breasts were akin to the bounty of Mother Earth was much more pleasing to her ears. Apples and oranges, peaches and pears, lemons and nectarines, kiwis and kumquats, papayas and pawpaws, guavas and sugarplums, there was something undeniably sweet about such associations. But of course, her tomatoes soon grew into grapefruit, and graduated from there into mangoes and melons, avocados and artichokes, cantaloupes and coconuts, eggplants and honeydews. Then there were pumpkins and watermelons—totally ludicrous, she hoped. The doctor who had diagnosed her with macromastia—which is how doctors say big boobs—informed her that her breasts wouldn’t stop growing until around age twenty-five. She wasn’t much worried about this, though. Aside from lunar and seasonal tumescence, her breasts had more or less stabilized just after she finished high school and moved away from Normal, Illinois.
Returning to the topic at hand, gluttons were not without their contributions, either, projecting their favorite desserts onto the nearest rack: loaves, muffins, butterbags, dumplings, macaroons, cream pies, cupcakes, and Jell-O molds, to name only a few. Elizabeth had no strong feelings about these culinary comparisons, except that they were at least preferable to the gobs of sports slobs whose beer-soaked imaginations went no further than comparing her breasts to their favorite toy ball—double dribbles being a notable exception.
Truly creative remarks, such as hug bumps, rib cushions, snuggle pups, sweater kittens, and dueling banjos, were at least memorable, though not so much as the Latin dance craze that seemed to be the latest trend. Elizabeth’s breasts could dance neither the mambo, the cha-cha, nor the rumba, yet these were somehow deemed equivalent signifiers. After reviewing her collected list, she speculated that this was actually part of a much larger genre of machismo, in which any Spanish word possessed of the proper rhythm becomes an instant metaphor for breasts, regardless of whether it has anything in common with breasts or not. Thus, she had not only heard her breasts referred to as tamales, tortillas, chalupas, enchiladas, and chimichangas, but also as carumbas, casabas, congas, maracas, marimbas, muchachas, Montezumas, mamacitas, chiquitas, and Chihuahuas.
Over time, Elizabeth noticed a common denominator to this nonsense. The vast majority of these Latino derivations ended in —as, as in “ahh”—a sigh of satisfaction. Furthermore, the entire category ultimately devolved into such celebratory gibberish as gazingas, gazongas, bazoombas, bazongas, gongas, goombahs, splazoingas, chumbawumbas, mambajahambas, and lollapaloozas, not to mention hoo-has, tatas, gagas, oompahs, yayas, and wahwahs. Indeed, it occurred to Elizabeth that while no one had ever told her she had “nice Pocahontas,” she surely would have understood their meaning if they had. Elizabeth sensed there was a deeper significance at play, but it would be a few years before it would occur to her that these might represent attempts to recollect a word, the first word, the word that no child needs to be taught, and the instinct whose repression fuels neurosis, aggression, and war.
Until that time, however, Elizabeth merely thought it ridiculous.
58 IT WAS NO ADVANCE in the arts of human expression when Brian Berlin blurted, “You have huge jugs,” to Elizabeth Wildhack one afternoon during their senior year of high school. She had been working in the school library for course credit, and Brian was returning a book—on Pocahontas, as it turned out—when he made his uninspired observation. But before Elizabeth could react in any way, she caught the whisper of a karmic impulse, an opportunity to finally return a tit for his long-ago tat. Not yet seeing what her intuition felt, she simply smiled sweetly and thanked him. Brian, flustered by her unexpected flirtation, retreated quickly. Free of his grunty presence, Elizabeth looked at his student identification number shimmering on the computer screen in front of her, and a calm alit upon her heart like a butterfly on a barbed wire, soothing the seethe of her lopsided Tao. No do-overs.
After jotting down his ID number, Elizabeth did a subject search for books on male homosexuality. There were over twenty, many with remarkably provocative titles for a high school library in Normal, Illinois, and all of them were available. She printed out the sheet, located all of the books, and then hid them behind some other books in an obscure section of the stacks. A few days later, when she was not actually scheduled to staff the desk, she checked out all of the titles using Brian’s student identification number. Then she hid the books again and went to class.
The bureaucracy took over from there. Inevitably, Brian was notified that he had a number of overdue books. Mystified and not wanting to pay a fine, he went to the library to protest, where he was informed by the freshman behind the desk that he had over twenty overdue books. Aggravated, Brian insisted that he hadn’t checked out any books for weeks. Naturally, this got him nowhere, and so he angrily demanded to know exactly which books he supposedly had. The freshman behind the desk, irritated at Brian’s attitude, responded by reciting, loud and lighthearted, the onslaught of homo-suggestive titles. Brian, faced with this sudden violation of his adolescently precarious masculine identity—and by some dork freshman no less—threw a tantrum, trying to land a punch and crashing the computer monitor off the desk in the process. This succeeded only in attracting even more attention to his predicament. The head librarian intervened, and Brian sputteringly tried to explain himself, but after a search revealed that none of the titles were on the shelves, Brian was firmly informed that he was responsible for the cost of all of the books, as well as the computer monitor, before he could graduate. And by the end of the day, the dork freshman had made certain that every student in the school had been told of Brian’s sexual fancy.
None of this surprised Elizabeth Wildhack in the least. She had foreseen every reaction and consequence in its entirety.
59 “VINDICTIVE,” Diana observed several years later, after Elizabeth had proudly relayed her favorite story of how she’d once gotten even with Brian Berlin. “You sound like the mistress of Machiavelli.”
Elizabeth considered a moment before she licked the backstage joint she was rolling. “I prefer to think of myself as the Countess of Monte Cristo, but either way, I can live with it,” she said, giving an expert twist to her joint.
“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you?”
“Fuck yes, do unto others. If I’m ever goose-stepping around, minding other people’s business and harassing the innocent, I hope someone steps up and does unto me, if only to slap me awake from that sort of stupidity. And besides, I didn’t do this unto some random other,” Elizabeth protested as she offered the joint to Diana. “I did this unto an other who had done the same unto me.”
“You’re sure this is sativa?” Diana asked. Diana, Elizabeth had learned, considered herself something of a cannabis connoisseur, and while she held cannabis sativa in very high regard, she had nothing but disdain for the much more common variety of cannabis indica. The problem, as Diana explained it, is that most potheads don’t know their grass from their granola, and indica’s popularity has nothing to do with the more narcotic and less-inspiring quality of its intoxication and everything to do with the requirements of illegal indoor growing. Ever since she’d come across an ounce of Alaskan Matanuska Thunderfuck—a pure sativa variety—two years ago, she could accept nothing less. In Diana’s estimation, sativa soars and indica snores.
Elizabeth nodded. “Definitely sativa.”
Diana lit the joint thoughtfully and pas
sed it to Elizabeth. “So, you were proposing a proviso to the golden rule?”
“No,” Elizabeth insisted. “I’m not claiming it was ethical. I mean, I was also taking advantage of and thereby reinscribing homophobia. That’s surely unethical as well.” Elizabeth shrugged and took a contemplative hit off the joint. “But to be honest, if I had it to do over again—which none of us ever do—I’d do the exact same thing. Maybe when I’m sixty-four and otherwise illuminated, I’ll see it differently, but I doubt it. I take full responsibility for my actions, and if he’d ever guessed that I was behind his little catastrophe, I would have met his warpath fair enough. But he never did, and I knew he never would. The fact is, he’d been defining and confining my sexuality with his unwelcome words and gestures for years. Doing thus unto me, I can only assume that he would have thus done unto himself. Who are we to say which direction karma moves in?”
Taking a long drag off the joint, Diana made a face at this dubious logic. Elizabeth continued unabated. “My posture improved after that. I had been slumping my shoulders for years trying to hide the fact that my body didn’t conform to the vertical plane of everybody else’s, and he was a major cause of that. He cast a lot of words my way, and the way I see it, when we cast words, we cast spells—enchanting others into believing that this is and they are what we say. He wasn’t minding his own magic. He tried to enchant me into thinking I was a slut because I had big boobs, and I almost fell for it. That’s dark magic, as far as I’m concerned.”
“Come on,” Diana interrupted, passing the joint and picking up her jug of water. “It’s not like he was chanting ‘slut’ over a voodoo Barbie doll every night while masturbating in her face. This pubescent prick you’re talking about hardly describes a dark magician.”
“Sure he does. We all do. Most of us are oblivious in our wizardry, spellbound by our own social structures, but that doesn’t change the fact that every word is a magic word. You do understand that we are only what we permit each other to be, don’t you? Well, he and others like him only permitted me to be a slut. Messing with my self-perception like that undermined my confidence, which rendered me even more easily manipulated. Whether or not he was aware of what he was doing, he laid a hex on my sex, plain and simple. Maybe he’s a clueless apprentice, but it’s still sorcery. An oblivious wizard is a wizard nonetheless.” Elizabeth hit the joint a second time and then tapped it out. She probably shouldn’t have taken that second toke. With this shit, as Diana was fond of saying, you take a hit and let it sit.
“But you are a stripper who calls herself Betty Boobs.” Diana gestured with her water jug to the V-sling Elizabeth was wearing, a racy costume essentially consisting of a skinny pair of black vinyl suspenders joining just in time to cloak her vulva. It could have been a pair of panties stretched all the way up to her shoulders; a ludicrous getup, albeit alarmingly seductive. It was the supreme elaboration of the decolletage, a neckline plunging headlong and reckless over the precipice of puritanical prohibition. Diana made certain that her glance did not gaze. “How do you know you’re not still spellbound?”
“No.” Elizabeth ignored her second question. “I am a woman. Everything else is an illusion. Taking my clothes off is crafting an illusion, just like putting clothes on is crafting another illusion. You know that as well as I do. That’s why every woman in this place euphemistically describes her job as dancing. We’re not stripping, we’re dancing. And actually, we’re not even doing that. We’re conning. Everything is cloaked in illusion.”
“But you adopted the nickname he gave you as your stage name.” Diana was amused. “You’re spellbound and you don’t even know it.”
Elizabeth pursed her lips. “There’s never been any question that I’m spellbound. Everyone is walking around casting spells on others, conning each other into preferred labels and identities. We’re casting spells out there, on ourselves as well as on the customers. And as far as they go, the more the men believe that we are writhing nympho sex objects, the more money they’re conned out of.”
“I don’t know,” Diana interjected. “It’s not all make-believe. There is such a thing as a coke whore in this business, you realize.”
“Of course,” Elizabeth replied. “But those are the women who’ve forgotten that they’re acting, and they probably forgot because they used too many drugs to deal with the stress of all the counterfeit intimacy and manufactured rapport. They got lost in the role, and the customers enchanted them into thinking that’s who they really were. It’s mutual enchantment all around.”
Diana nodded, then added, “But it’s only half as effective when you pretend. The spell, in your words, works best when you become the writhing nympho sex object they want you to be.”
“Naturally.” Elizabeth adjusted the straps of her V-sling such that her areolas were fully covered. “That’s true of any role in any situation, whether you’re a stripper or the president. But the goal,” she glanced at her preposterously erotic reflection in the mirror, “the goal is not to confuse your role with your soul.”
60 WAIT A SECOND, Elizabeth thought as she writhed like a nympho sex object in front of a stern man. It had just occurred to Elizabeth that he who controls the symbols controls the illusion, and though she was casting the sex con, it was only at the command of he who was casting the money con. And whereas her sex magic was very potent in the trickle of this particular tributary, it would be mostly powerless in the gush of society’s main streams. His money magic, on the other hand, held absolute power nearly everywhere. Who’s conning who?
Elizabeth pulled the straps of her V-sling to the side, dramatically releasing her breasts and revealing her forbidden nipples to the angry fellow who sat there holding his bottle of beer as if it were his cock. And why is there a market for this, anyway? Elizabeth wondered on. And what is he buying, exactly? A doll in the playhouse of his imagination? A fantasy where he pretends that my interest here is less than economic, where I pretend to realize his fantasy, and he gets to enact the masculinity by which he judges his self-worth? A sexuality stolen and sold back to the highest bidder; a masculinity mangled by the machinery of conquest and commerce. Another spell, another con. He doesn’t even know why he’s angry. He’s one more lost soul, trading enchantments across the universe with another lost soul, pretending my pretenses are not false, paying me to manipulate and deceive him. Where are we that duplicity, disguise, and deceit are the only media by which two souls can acknowledge the presence of another? What lies beneath these blindfolds? And why does this work?
My, but this is some good herb, Elizabeth noted as she found her favorite frequency of movement, an alluring flow of absolute eroticism that she imagined to be the tip of life’s whip, a supersonic snap immensely slowed so that others may withstand its beauty. Elizabeth smiled. The beauty beneath the blindfold. The words murmured themselves through her, inspiring further reflection. Humanity is on the lam from love. Unable to bear the brunt of beauty, our hearts are hidden beneath false identity. And as to why this con works: It works because most cons work. No one wants to believe that they’ve been deceived, and so they censor any information—no matter how obvious—that requires them to confront their own stupidity. Dancing—stripping—it’s just one more layer of illusion, a deeper version of everyday delusion. Projections replace perceptions, and the rest is history. This poor dupe is paying to sneak a false peek of the beauty forbidden by fear.
Or maybe I’m giving him too much credit, Elizabeth reconsidered. Look at him, sitting there fondling his beer bottle like the cap’s about to pop, another slobbering sucktit fantasizing about titty-fucking my banana squeezers. Yes, oh yes, Elizabeth thought, breathlessly contemptuous, let me roll your dick between my tits. He’s buying a lie, and he doesn’t even understand that. Just like everybody else, he thinks he’s too shrewd to be taken.
Elizabeth pressed her palms against her breasts as her mark dug another twenty out of his wallet. What a peculiar place, she thought with stoned detachment. We tra
de minds for masks and souls for roles. Society is a sting, a swindle, a scam. And we are all its grifters.
61 ELIZABETH BEGAN to regret having taken a second toke off that sativa joint. It was allowing her to see a little too deeply into the layers of social illusion. Usually, she enjoyed the kind herb because it relieved the tedium of pretending to have nothing better to do than writhe nakedly in front of men of all manner and demeanor. It freed her mind from the oppressive setting, releasing her imagination to soar while her body went on autopilot and raked in the cash. A little detachment can be nice, but tonight her mind was seeing much too clearly the falseness of the intimacy and the tragedy of the sexuality. Much too bright a light.
To make matters worse, Diana’s “mistress of Machiavelli” remark kept slapping at the formerly stout sails of her self-concept. Elizabeth was all about the con, it was true, but she had never thought of it in Machiavellian terms. When her mind drew a surprise lateral association to something she had once read about Hitler and his henchmen—that most of them were never breast-fed and were really just a bunch of bottle-fed brats—her body began to writhe not in sensuality but in worry. As the argument went, reptiles don’t breast-feed, mammals do. The lack of maternal nurturance that Hitler experienced contributes to the creation of a cold, reptilian personality. A simplistic argument, Elizabeth knew, but this dismissal did nothing to assuage her anxiety. For although Elizabeth knew that her mother had died giving birth to her, she had never fully grasped the implications. I was never breast-fed, she realized for the first time in her life. Am I the mistress of Machiavelli?
Or maybe the intensity of her insights was exacerbated by the presence of another big-breasted dancer working that night, a touring stripper stage-named Judy Juggernaut. Elizabeth had asked her yesterday why not just Judy Juggs, and was coldly informed with a practiced supermodel’s snarl that Judy Juggs was already trademarked by a dancer in San Diego. Then she told Elizabeth to go look juggernaut up in the dictionary. Elizabeth did so, muttering all the while something about Judy probably having thorns for nipples, and found that juggernaut describes a large, overpowering, destructive force, often requiring blind devotion and cruel sacrifice. The word is derived from Jagannath, one of Krishna’s names in Hinduism, and specifically from a tradition in which an enormous bust of Jagannath on a giant cart is dragged by thousands of devotees from one temple to another. Allegedly, the cart itself has to be guarded by police to prevent fanatics from throwing themselves under its wheels to be crushed into eternal bliss.
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