How to Swallow a Pig

by Robert Priest

  IN STUPID SCHOOL

  In stupid school they hated our guts and taught us the stupidest things they could think of. Geography had France located in Namibia and the Persian Gulf a subject of the Mississippi. It was good to learn false geography, they told us, so that later when we were traveling we would have the advantage of not knowing what country we were really in. This would make us much more employable. Falseness and confusion were my two great subjects — to make up the past each time anew. They spliced together old clips, dull montages, the worst in humour, failed jokes, commentaries for morons, and told us that this was history. I can’t tell you the tirades of ridicule they put us through. The taunts and insinuations that were hurled at us in the name of basic grammar. “You are scum. You were scum. You will be scum.” It was insulting. For a religious exercise each day we were forced to bow and salaam to our desks, the boards, the teacher’s hems, all the while chanting absurd prayers such as “Please let us go on being excrement. Please let us continue to be useless shit.” All to convince us that the world was stupid. That it was run by the stupid. That it was owned by the stupid and you would be best to make yourself as stupid as possible in order to be fully employable when you were older. The problem was our innate intelligence. Some of us couldn’t believe the facts put out by such schools. We tried and tried but we failed in our education. We could not get certificates which assured us we were stupid and so now no one will hire us. What a fate! While our more stupid friends secure jobs in offices and factories, we must stand idly by, too smart to do anything but collect the dole, the dole, the dole.

  ON THE ASSEMBLY LINE

  Rage made me nervous all morning. All morning I had watched the automatic daisies go by me on the assembly line. Raging and raging. I was so sick of sticking on the stamens. For a dollar fifty an hour. Every once in a while I would pick up one of the lilies and it would be one of the true lilies — the kind with human or lion’s blood in it — and would just hold it trembling in my hand. Wanting terribly to crush it. Even sometimes curling my fists into claws, just holding it there, trembling and trembling. But, as I say, my fear had made me useless. I had centuries of obedience to overcome. What would the tall pink pig wear to its wedding if I crushed this lily? The thought nearly overcame me. Can you imagine a wedding pig without a lily and not cry? For a while I forgot about Marx. I forgot about Engels. I was in fact blinded by my tears. By the time I had finished weeping there was a veritable garden there all bunched up on the assembly line waiting for stamens. Unable to resist the intoxicating perfumes, I threw myself back into the task with all the avarice and determination of a mystic and by afternoon was all caught up.

  AT THE DOCTOR OF FLAWS

  All day long I dragged my flaws down Darcy Street, straining as I walked like a horse with a plough. I was craters, just flaws and flaws. None of them — and there were pimples there, epidermal cysts, pock marks and sores — none of them had the tiniest little bit of a wheel under it so that it was thus all drag. Indeed, so big was my heap of flaws that when I got to the Doctor of Flaws I could not get them all through his doorway and had to leave them in an ugly mess like a traffic accident outside his window. He looked down through his window with a telescope examining them a long time before saying, finally, “I’m sorry, there’s not really much I can do for you. I could cut them up and mix them around but that would only make it worse. I could give you glasses that make them seem smaller but that would stop you seeing pain in other lands. Besides, they cause gross ear chafe. That leaves hypnosis. You probably wouldn’t like hypnosis. You would never love a single bird afterwards and you could say goodbye to your intestinal fortitude. I would advise you just to put a sack over them and continue dragging. They are bigger to you than they seem, anyway.” “But my mouth is down there with my bad breath,” I protested. “I would surely die with a sack over it. I need my bad breath to live.” “Well, you’ll just have to learn to cope with it then,” he said heartlessly. Just then I noticed, tucked away in a darkened corner of the office, a little heap all covered over in sackcloth. “Well no wonder you are a Doctor of Flaws!” I yelled scornfully and, taking out my flashlight, shone it brazenly on the heap. “No!” he screamed, shrill like a frightened young maiden baring her biggest underground mole. “Please!” But there it was — his wallet and hemorrhoid. His Exxon card and the long strings like beads of sweat and pimples. “Dirty filthy little pretender with a microscope,” I cursed him. I would have elaborated but just then I was aroused from my fury by the shouts of a crowd which had gathered about my bad opinion of myself in the street outside. It was obviously a meeting of The Society for the Prevention of Ailments, for they all had banners and placards and were shouting slogans such as “Stop ailments now! Did you know most deaths are caused by ailments?” I was so embarrassed I ran downstairs immediately and, having a little book of my finest poems with me, began to scatter them desperately over the heap. But it was no good. The pock marks began to devour them, the bad breath wheezed through. You could see my desperate eyes down there, staring up like lost children. “Ban the boil! Down with cysts!” people were shouting as I strapped myself back into the halter and began to trot shamefacedly down the street.

  ADVENTURES OF MY HAND

  So far away as my pocket, as close as your breast, my hand cannot get to the banquet on time. It is coming in from a far-off place, on a rocket, on a train. My hand the worker — a gigantic fist kept in a stall, pounding in fury. My hand in a suit pretending to be a man on some luxury liner crossing its legs. My hand is a great poet always writing. I remember it coming back from the factory crushed in a machine when I was sixteen — a fat mottled rainbow, huge as the hand of a God — a great fist in bed. I remember it slipping like silver into those rollers coming out crushed flat — a white web of bones till the blood held back rushed in to fill it, to rejoice in its return, shocked, running over the broken vein mouths, bleeding ever and ever inward — a huge gush down from the wrist that would blacken and rot. My hand screaming. My hand in bandages — those fat purple fingertips, that burnt palm, that swollen wrist — all of me threatening to bulge out into this multi-coloured bruise. My hand Joseph. My hand Jacob and Christ and Neruda. My hand the rebel, the fist, tied down by a million machines but still rising in the air, still smashing down on the earth, snapping the threads, grasping and clawing its way to freedom. My hand is hunted now. It wanders over the world in search of its own kind. It goes from door to door trying to be joined up to something, knowing it is just a small piece of the puzzle.

  MY THERAPEUTIC COCK

  Sometimes I think I couldn’t go on if I didn’t have my cock to laugh at. If I didn’t get to go home sometimes and whip it out and have a damn good laugh, I think I might just have to pack it in, give up the slave trade, and do some honest work. Fortunately I have an absolutely hysterical cock and am able, by laughter, to exorcise my guilty business demons and just be alone with myself. Me and the mirror and my lucky therapeutic cock. Sometimes, looking at it, seeing where the base goes in there by the pelvic bones I am absolutely howling. Remembering the words of a woman at work who once called it “a musty little tuber of my male ego, a big fish-stinking one-eyed monster,” I will laugh until the tears are rolling down my cheeks. Once I stood up and spun it ‘round like a propeller or a Roman candle and nearly burst with mirth. Sometimes I crawl around on my back and look at it up there whirling and just scream. Of course I worry about the neighbours. What if they called the police? What if I am dragged out of here shrieking and hooting and pointing at it like some kind of madman? Cock! You monstrous comic! You old hag! So what I do is spread pictures of starving people, tanks and landowners, countries and their flags, old lovers, battered children and parents around me and then if anyone comes to the door wondering what the hell all the screaming is about, I just show them these extremely hilarious pictures and they understand and begin to laugh with me.

  PRECAUTIONARY CHANDELIERS

  For some, luck has the thickest thread a
nd it hangs them over the world like little Christs for a while. The bullets go bouncing in the grand ricochet — the pin-ball of America all lit up in neon and you never know when that thread will fray in a wedding vow, snap in a brake cable, or simply come undone in some madman’s mind. For some, fate’s thread is just the line a big fish snaps — or just the wire a puppet dangles from, for yes, all are swung on ropes‘round and‘round in a huge tangle like intersecting yo-yos. For others, no matter how consistently they turn, seemingly in balance, slowly winding up the long thread of their days into marriages and coffins, no matter how consistently they spin‘round their deeds, there will always be a chance of fate’s big careen knocking them off course, over-turning families, sending children scurrying out in huge automobiles, launching astonished girls in cradles over rooftops, ejecting wives and husbands from living rooms with dogs in the big doppelganger. And so is the science of prediction, puffed up in computery and fed by stealth, employed at any cost as telescope to the well-established neighbourhoods. I warn you though, no matter how many times you sit in that armchair, no matter how many times you pace that circle, inserting the protection like clock-work, establishing the blood in concentric circles on the moon, no matter with what consistency you pace out the dull legions of your one day, there is always that small chance, some small snapping of something somewhere will send a grotesque item hurtling through your picture window — a gigantic Greek talisman perhaps, a white alarming dog, or a yo-yo of bones snapped by some punky God. There will be a ricochet at light-speed shattering the glass to crystal and great fish of flame leaping up. That is when, if you have been careful, we may see you swinging above them, safe in your precautionary chandeliers.

  SILENCE IS COMING

  Silence is coming. Silence is coming. Over the steppes of Africa, right now over wild seas, across the pampas of Argentina. If you are in Atlanta, if you are in Berlin, Toronto, Montreal, alas, a silence is coming. I don’t know what it is. It may be a wind without substance — but it is full of the cries of dead birds, full of the cry of the natives and it is moving up through the prairies of America. It is sinking in everywhere — a silence of buffalo, a silence of bison and whale. One day soon the silence will move over us and we will not at first notice it — at home in the vast-ness of the silence, but then it will continue for an hour and each of us, as though in a dream, beyond the reach of sound or speech, will gesture in horror at the soundless reverberation of our axes, the silent working of our machinery. The jets will go by and there will be no shrill sound. The radio will glow but there will be no static and no cry from the crushed animals who will stare up from their pain at us, the stabbed man’s cry lost in the silence, the raped woman’s scream absorbed in the silence, and infants born into a soundless world — a world where the dog’s bark goes unheeded, where the bugles blow without warning and where even the clocks lack for an hour their steady and unstoppable ticking.

  ALL THE SOUNDS A SCARED MAN HEARS

  All the sounds a scared man hears — what are they in the dark but the footsteps of many gods across a kind of inner floor. Yes, the tympani tapped in the mighty anthem, the patter of rain on a dry roof. These are impossible pauses in the beating between hearts. He who listens gathers in a long skein of veins long ago woven into monstrous patterns for the agony of gods. That is when, at the centre, small bloods may jump out and demand critters. But it is no good. Fear with his huge sponginess persists and absorbs. Nothing will put him out of the body, for he is a wise tenant warning you of accidents. He bloats you out, distorts your face in a tormented whisper, reveals to all the world the sickliest whitest part of your soul. But that is how it is — Him on his high throne with the crown of tears and everywhere like the dancing steps of majestic horses — those sounds.

  JACK THE INSOMNIAC

  I am Jack the Insomniac, a kind of Rip Van Winkle in reverse. Twenty years of insomnia is fine, but it is part of my gift that I do not accept the gift. I resist wakefulness. I can’t help it, when everybody else goes to bed I get lonely. I want to go to bed too. In fact I am dying to sleep. I do all the rituals well the walking in circles, the salutation to the sun, tense, efficient, now a hot bath stirred sideways, the brisk shit, the harried read, and now to dread to bed. Yes, I get in the bed and I lie down and then I remember the sleeping tea! I get up, head to the kitchen, prepare the tea and return to bed. Maybe the TV will help. There are talk shows on. These are sedative. Where’s my Vicks? My tryptophan? I lie down finally and turn and click and switch and stick my head up one side and watch awhile like that. Then I click again till I think I must surely be getting tired. I lie flat now, the pillow under my neck. I take a deep breath, forgetting who I am, and think I’ll just listen and click, not that, click, not that, click . . .

  It’s been three nights. I can feel a big ball of sleep submerged in my being, luxuriant, enticing but impenetrable. Several times the ball wells up, overwhelming the little bit of mind, an image dancing, slides, I might just take this ticket but no, click, remember I am Jack the Insomniac. If I am not asleep by two I’ll take the tryptophan. I can still sleep four hours, be up by six and my world is dancing, but I just missed that ticket. There is a small magnetic sound in the house and I remember. I need the fan on. I get up, creep in the other room where people are snoring, lovely faces opaque with desire, destiny, inner alertness, comfort and dreams, and without envy I remove the fan, take it down. Aaaaah. That will probably do it. I lie back down. If I’m not asleep by three I’ll take the tryptophan. Aaaaah the luxury of sleep. To live in instantly created environments tangential to the worry, the hassle, the domain, the plentitude of the sleepless one. When will he accept that he is vibrating? When will he accept that his spine stands straight up above the bed like a divining rod to his soul shouting, “Son of water, you are Jack the Insomniac”? I have danced in a lyrical way the world would love and just as I would come down skidding, madly sliding into sleep, I slither, I scrape, I stop. There is a sound or a moment in the throat that draws me up again out of the fertile water, still hooked to the sharp curve of the night when I lost everything, gave up comfort, rhythm, vitality, to become a guardian, a watcher, a werewolf. My being vibrates between the two worlds. Some of it in, some of it out. Bits going backward, bits being erased, bits not even making it to memory or moment at all. But they’re all there and fucking awake anyway. I begin to pray: please God help me, please God let me sleep. I want to go upstairs and apologize to my children. I want to wake up my beloved and weep of my love for her. I am a much deeper being here. The wave has had to come up into this world to get me. A giant on the thin bed, this man who fell out of time, opiate-eyed but wide awake. What a blossoming to strip off the skins of sleep seven layers deep to enter this new life naked, but what I’d give to spread wide at last these two leaden wings of insomnia and fall.

  PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST

  The “artist” enters stage right. Stage left, a large television monitor faces him. Beside it we see some recording equipment, a camera, and a small black box. A black bar stool stands centre stage in a tight spotlight. If the audience makes any noise when the “artist” enters, the “artist” shushes them severely. The “artist” should be prepared to be forceful in obtaining complete silence in the hall. When the crowd is quiet, the “artist” turns away from the audience and aims a remote to activate the audio recorder and the camera, stage left. We can see by the movement of its lights that it is now recording. Sitting upon the black stool the “artist” looks into the camera and tells the following joke:

  Question: “ What does Minnie Mouse say when the phone rings and someone asks, ‘Is Minnie Mouse there?’”

  Answer (in a high mouse-like voice): “ Squeaking.”

  If anyone in the audience laughs, the “artist” turns toward them quickly with a very offended “Shush.” Using the remote, the “artist” stops, rewinds the recorder, and retells the joke. Again, if anyone laughs or shuffles, the “artist,” ashen with affront, begins anew. The “artis
t” retells and rerecords the joke with varying emphases until satisfied with its delivery. The “artist” then dons headphones and watches a replay of the performance. If it is still to the “artist’s” satisfaction, the “artist” turns the monitor toward the audience and plays the recording of the joke for them. If the audience laughs or applauds, the “artist” is incensed, the nostrils wide-flared, quivering with rage. Only when the “artist” has played the recording to utter silence in the hall does the “artist” aim the remote toward the black box at the back of the theatre, unleashing deafening canned laughter.