Now here in Frankfurt after getting his cock washed he was led by it to the bed. Musa sat him down on the sagging side and squatted before him holding a condom. Whhhhhat? This wasn't in the deal! “No.” “Yes, is necessary. Is good to prevent disease.” “But I—” “Cost you another thirty-five deutschmarks to leave it off.” (She'd already put the seventy in her little purse.) His erection lost some of its headiness. Some sexual sendoff! Mason decided not to give in. She went ahead with the pre-wet membranous sheath. Cold and distracting. Harnessed, he didn't feel up to foreplay one tiny bit. Musa got on the bed and opened her thighs. Yet somehow even with the rubber wall between them the tango was intense and sweet with calm ballet-motions strangely mixed in. He made better deeper wider richer contact here than with tannic Pirsig. When finished Musa encouraged him to come again for a mere twenty more. No thanks my dear fraulein. When they returned to the bar downstairs three other men were there watching the tangle, slipping-and-sliding on the screen. In the back seat of the taxi, he felt unsatisfied, slightly depressed. A sense of futility took him. At a certain point he paid the cabbie. Night air was biting cold. Suddenly he was in a bright winter crowd in some shopping center or a mall.
Herr Bend, a writer of perverse novels, handed Mason an autographed copy of his latest. “They made me sign a contract at gunpoint for this one.” He laughed so hard he turned into a Grosz-face in Widmung an Oskar Panizza: blasphemy was oozing out of his skin, red as burned crosses. “Let's be on our way. We'll be late for The Event.” Mason, pretending he remembered, slapped Herr Bend's shoulder. “I'll saddle up my sorraia. Did you come in your usual Kindl-Brauerei truck? Why'd you haul those barrels around? What's in ’em?” “Never mind. I'm doing research for my next.” Mason left the tip and the waiter, as lively as a Mendelsohn composition, thanked him as they stood. Outside on the bustling plaza a couple of giggling guys rushed up to them and playfully punched both in the mouth. Herr Bend's nose started bleeding. Mason tried to kick one of the jokers as they fled. He checked himself for broken bones. The taxi ride over to The Oyster had its merits: traffic was orderly, efficient. A crew was shooting a film in the dark park. Herr Bend kept slapping Mason's knee. “Fritz Rasp? No. I think he died. Valeska Gert? No more proletarians around?” Mason sneezed: “Was Brecht a communist? Kuhle Wampe.” But before the dirty writer could answer they were out. Herr Bend slipped immediately on a banana peeling. He slid toward The Oyster's brick wall and banged his head on the metal door as he fell, loosing his bleached wig. The Event had already started. Theatre was fun? But wait this was not German theatre: not De Bettler not Die Wandlung not the ghost-prisoners of Hölle Weg Erde climbing the narrow stairway from hell up to an unpromising earth. This, yes yes, was still hell: red hot and grimy. This was Rock. And weren't those people up there on the stage the same ones he'd performed with in London? The stage was crowded: musicians with yellow or green hair played instruments that released swine-grunts and bat-farts and . . . Yes, that was the great Sebastian! He'd changed the color of his hair to a blazing red with streaks of yellow. He was shouting above the voices of Silvia, Cornelia and Estelle, creaming the audience: “Give me your weak, your hungry, your poor/ I'll make gunpowder out of them!/ Lend me your ear: I'll bite it off/ and stick a firecracker up your asshole!/” Sylvia was screaming one long streak of Munch-pain. At the end of it she spat blood: “I shit on the mysterious silhouettes/ of your limited warfare-bombs! I crap on your stockpiles!/” And, just like at the Young Vic, Tamara Polese, still in her Nazi uniform, was running about the stage shouting her own mean verse and swinging the butt of her rifle at everybody in sight. She knocked Cornelia's teeth out and stuck the barrel of her rifle up naked-Etta Schnabel's cunt and pulled the trigger. Etta flew all over the place, pieces of her hit the ceiling and dripped down on those still singing and dancing. Then a team of police officers entered the theatre from a side door. Mason and Herr Band leaped up. But they didn't move in time to avoid the nightsticks. Mason's head was bashed in and everything went black. When he came to he was in the back of a lighted speeding van. His head was cradled on Tamara's lap. She was stroking his bloody forehead. “Who's driving and where're we going?” “Ssssh. Don't talk.” The van was crowded. Where was Herr Bend? “He died for a noble cause. It was better,” Tamara whispered, “than going by way of ulcers or diarrhea or colitis or a ruptured thyroid.” Mason felt his swollen joints: felt like he'd fallen down a ski slope with teethgrinding intensity. He felt the humiliation of the hotel doorman demoted to toilet attendant: long live Murnau! A couple of feet away, Sylvia and Estelle were trying to put the pieces of Etta Schnabel back together. Cornelia was resting in Sebastian's arms. She was grumpy. Said she felt depressed. Hadn't had a bowel movement in days. Had a urinary tract infection. Strep throat was surely coming next. Sebastian, bleeding from the ears, tried to soothe her. She said her muscles were too tight. Mason suddenly became conscious of his own tense muscles. Somebody up in the cab was stuttering. Mason's tension headache was paralyzing. Whiplash and arthritis had a good grip on him. Tamara said, “At least you're not on your way up some Fritz Lang-stair-way of Death. Okay Doctor Mabuse? You can trust all of us. Well take your blood pressure, tell you if you have irregular heartbeat, flutters, palpitations. Your hands are cold. Where we're going you can let blind men count your money. We're gonna make a whole new world safe for the swinging moods of a new self emerging from the old one.”
This was hectic ego work. The train along the Rhine took Mason's vermin-breath and held it somewhere inside. Snow covered hibernating vineyards and the torrid castles up the hillsides matched his own desperate frost . . . Then he arrived at the dreamy (deceptively quiet?) little city of Aachen . . . In the night he slept through the gunfire of his own plot: Clarence Mckay was after him, and this time, jack, with cannons and machine guns! Mason couldn't find a rock to hide behind. In his hasty flight he bumped into William Carlos Williams, on a beach somewhere. Bill grabbed the shaking man by his shoulders and spat these words into his face: “Nine-tenths of our lives is well forgotten in the living. Of the part that is remembered, the most had better not be told . . . / We always try to hide the secret of our lives from the general stare. What I believe to be the hidden core of my life will not easily be deciphered.” Doc's speech only made matters worse. Despite Mason's respect for the poet. His plot still had him in a fit. It wasn't simply that he was not achieving what Public Enemy “told him to do, he hadn't even yet embarked on the discovery of the basis for his complex identity. Well, he might be able to fly again but he'd have to swim, like Shine, to Greece, to find parts of the puzzle, then, surely to Africa for the other parts. France wasn't enough. England? Forget slavery. Germany was as useless as his “false” past. And, hell, he had to do something about his own paranoia! Everybody wasn't an enemy! . . . He lost himself in a network of beach rocks. True, he wasn't driven to avenge himself any longer. No need. Since leaving the states he knew he'd changed. His needs were now different. How? Well, he got up from sleep. But it didn't make any difference. He sat in the dark and looked into a patchy bed of lights from beyond the Gaestehaus window. One had to become Somebody or Nobody. Odysseus? Since arriving in Europe hadn't he reached a murky point? He couldn't go back. He was now assigned by desperation and the sense of urgency he felt always to go on, to discover the Whole Picture. The parts were everywhere. That was too bad. Their discovery though was his only hope of building a Self firm enough to withstand the threat of “The Other.” The Other? One was driven for reasons other than one's shortcomings, one's mirror. The more he thought of it the more convinced he was that Africa would offer a way in. Why not Italy and Greece, too. Anyway, keep moving! He made up his mind to plunge, to swim . . . Without turning on the bedside light, Mason began work on his novel-in-progress. In the morning at the Technische Hochschule he wanted to give those bright German kids the best prose he could produce. The quality of his life depended on it. It was no longer just the blank page he had to face:
“ . . . He was bo
rn in, I think, red-dirt Georgia, grew up, maybe, in hog-butcher Chicago, had many thick-headed problems in elementary and high and was a hardcore dropout . . . got into trouble in the Air Force . . . He's got something against all of us: was busted for possession . . . served time in Attica from 1977 to 1978; while there he was betrayed by a guy who claimed to be . . . this other so-called writer was receiving grant money due him, the real writer . . . the Foundation had gained a reputation for giving such awards to ‘people of talent and accomplishment’ who had not been widely recognized for their professional efforts . . . Victim he surely was . . . It's true he'd been a fart and a troublemaker from day one, he'd fathered—in and out of unholy wedlock—possibly as many as fifty kids, certainly a minimum of thirty-five . . . Before going into the joint he'd come through, so they say, many failed marriages . . . Though there were those who protested his right to everything, even his birth, he insisted he was born December thirty-first, 1936 in Georgia at Grady with wristband number 105847 clamped tightly to his little red arm . . . He was taken home to six-o-seven McGrader Street, South East, by his parents . . . so how did he find himself years later in Amesville, ready one fine day to step down from a John Deere and set out to reclaim his identity? . . . Well, parole ended: that was certainly a factor plus a private detective in New York had agreed to find the culprit . . . But, Jez, it was like coming out of amnesia with a sudden cold memory of endless dark tunnels of the past . . . Walking away from that tractor, he looked up at the pancake in the Sherwood Anderson sky and took a Saroyan-breath, exhaled it . . . Minimum wage was chicken, no birdshit . . . He stepped through freshly turned earth till he gained a road then the highway . . . Beat his blunt toetips on concrete . . . He stopped in the city of Amesville for a cup of coffee . . . A yellow-white cat with one green eye, one blue, leaped onto his lap . . . He rested his elbows on the red-dotted plastic tablecloth . . . Cat refused a sip of the brew . . . Clock on wall reminded him of something: what was it: gave him an awful feeling of anxiety . . . clocks were always running: warning you of the thing you didn't want: that magnetic force: hands without fingers: radium into visible light . . . He had to move on: it was urgent . . . He though the cat was . . . he set her down . . . He didn't have much faith in his luck to thumb a ride so he began walking . . . His mudfrog, a birthmark on his right forearm, itched horribly . . . Ass still sore from the tractor seat . . . He stopped to rest under a tree: turned out to be Joyce Kilmer's . . . Quick! a train was coming along the tracks only a few feet from the tree . . . Was he dreaming? A woman was tied to the tracks where another set crossed . . . He got to her in time: untied her and threw himself and her into the ditch as the iron beast shot by . . . she was nutmeg color: a dark beauty and spoke in a musical and mysterious voice . . . said she was from a reservation in New Mexico, had worked the canteen circuit, made movies, danced professionally, hung out with gangsters, but was now seeking a new life . . . She told him her name was Painted Turtle . . . He was heading for New York and she, well, she'd go there just as soon as she'd go anywhere . . . ”
A barrage of bullets swept the room. Mason hit the floor and crawled under a table. Munich was not a safe place. He'd been talking to an old friend, Lilia Pant, when the violence struck. Leaves fell from winter trees. It snowed upside-down. Knucklebones broke in butterfly lava. Gangsters were moving in. Who would have thought the gambling room (called The Wheel) at the Greta Garbo Entertainment Palace would become the scene of buffoons of death? Pant hit the floor too. Some folks ran. A barracuda fell from the wall and got stuck on Marlene Dietrich's head as she too fled the madness. The air felt like that of a Prussian boarding school. Except at the moment nobody was much for bedside-baroque-chatter. Gunsmoke seeped into wool cotton and silk. Screaming and crying competed with drum rolls and bells. A stranger under the table with them said, “It's just carnival time coming early. Somebody thinks it's February.” Another, who introduced himself stiffly and drunkly as Eichberger-the-Calan, spoke: “If we crawl slowly, being sure to stay under the tables, we can make it to the Faust-Mephisto Room where they're showing an erotic film of Otto and Lucie against a yellow sky. They're supposed to be immoralists who've escaped the Russian October Revolution. Lots of finger-fucking.” Mason figured he had nothing to lose so he was the first to follow this Rasputin. Lilia trailed him. They were snails with scales moving along the surfaces of the soggy orange rug. Rasputin's big ass waved in front of Mason's reluctant face. He held his head sideways. He could still hear shouting and fists smashing into wine glasses and Peter Lorre-lips. In the Faust-Mephisto Room the three escapees stood and blinked. Mason's sugar-coated eyes saw an orgy at its peak. Geese were flying up out of flesh. One man was dancing with a bullhorn hanging from the crack of his ass. Intestines were scattered around the floor. Expressive ladies and unrelenting men were deeply engaged in a daisy-chain of sixty-nine action. Projected on the wall was an ongoing series of scenes depicting Otto and Lucie in goggle-eyed combat: frosty steam lifted skyward from their action. Lilia Pant groaned. “Here we go again!” Mason laughed with her. Six sailors emerged from a torpedo and joined the carnival. One waved to the camera. An expressive lady grabbed his left thigh. “Oh, Chief Mack-Verand! You're back!” He took off his mask just as Lilia fainted in Mason's bruised arms. Rasputin said, “Oh, my dear!” Back in The Wheel the gunfire stopped. Mason could hear the official counting of the dead.
My Amputations (Fiction collective ;) Page 15