Girl With Curious Hair

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Girl With Curious Hair Page 7

by David Foster Wallace


  That night Gimlet and Tit fellated me, and Boltpin did as well. Gimlet and Tit made me happy but Boltpin did not, therefore I am not a bisexual. Gimlet allowed me to burn her slightly and I felt that she was an outstanding person. Big acquired a puppy from the alley behind their house in East Los Angeles and he soaked it with gasoline and they allowed me set it on fire in the basement studio of their rented home, and we all stood back to give it room as it ran around the room several times.

  At the Irvine Concert Hall last night Grope nursed his mid section and began to opine that Keith Jarrett was firing forms of electricity at him from the outer regions of his Negro afro, and he became a nervous Nellie. Gimlet no longer cried but did become even more interested and fascinated with the blond and curled hair of the young child sitting with an older man in a very attractive sportcoat two rows of concert seats below our six seats. Gimlet stated that the girl’s curious hair represented radioactive chemical waste product anti-immolation mojo and that if Gimlet could cut it off and place it in her vagina beneath the porch of her stepfather’s house in Deming, New Mexico, she could be burned and burned and never feel pain or discomfort. She was crying and beating at fictitious flames, and subsequently tried to rise and run pell mell over concert seats down to the hair of the girl, but Mr. Wonderful held Gimlet back and offered her his assurances that he would attempt to get her some of the curious hair at an intermission, and placed something in Gimlet’s mouth courtesy of Big.

  Next to me at the end of our row of concert seats Cheese became very interested in me as a person and began to talk to me as we listened to Keith Jarrett improvise his performance right on the spot on his bench. Cheese stated that while it was evident that I was a swell individual he wondered how I had come to become friends with my punkrocker friends in Los Angeles, Big and Gimlet and Mr. Wonderful, since I did not look like them nor did I dress like them or have a distinctive punkrocker hairstyle, nor was I poor or disaffected or nihilistic. Cheese and I began a deep conversation which was very fascinating and I told him several facts about myself which he found interesting and compelling. We talked in depth while Mr. Wonderful restrained Gimlet and Big restrained the nervous Grope, quietly so as to be able to hear the very good melodies our entertaining Negro performer was putting forth at all times.

  I informed Cheese that my punkrocker friends and I were thick as thieves and that although I could not dress like them for reasons of my job and family traditions I admired my friends’ fashion sense like all get out. Since Gimlet knows that my excellent job and well to do family are what provide me with lots of capital at all times, she is not unhappy that I cannot dress in leather and metal or shave my head or sculpture my hair like a true blue punkrocker. My job is very fascinating and pleasurable and I have had it for less than a year. At the law firm where I am an Associate I am a corporate liability trouble shooter. Sometimes the products certain manufacturers manufacture have bugs and defects in them which might injure a consumer, and when a consumer gets a wild hair about being injured and attempts to litigate against one of my firm’s clients, I am called in to trouble shoot. This often happens with such products as children’s toys and power tools. I am an extremely effective corporate liability trouble shooter because I enjoy a challenge very much and enjoy jumping in there with the old Corps spirit and licking the competition! I am especially pleased and challenged in my career when it really happens that a manufacturer’s product has a bug and has injured a consumer, because then it is even more challenging to try to convince a jury or a jurist that what really happened didn’t really happen and the manufacturer’s product did not injure the consumer. It is more challenging still when the consumer is right there at the proceedings and is injured, for a jury tends often to feel sorry for an injured person, especially if the person is a racial minority and has swarms of small children, as racial minorities when they appear in court tend to. But although I have already had many corporate liability cases to trouble shoot I have only failed to bring home the bacon once or twice, because I enjoy a good competition in which I am part of the process, and also because people naturally like me out of instinct, because of my appearance. The average layman would be surprised to know how much juries are impressed by appearances. I am fortunately an entirely handsome devil and appear even younger than twenty-nine. I look like a clean cut youth, a boy next door, and a good egg, and my mother stated at one time that I have the face of a heaven’s angel. I have the eyes of an attractive marsupial, and I have baby-soft and white skin, and a fair complexion. I do not even have to shave, and I have finely styled hair without any of dandruff’s unsightly itching or flaking. I keep my hair perfectly groomed, neat, and short at all times. I have exceptionally attractive ears.

  I explained to Cheese that dressing in an accepted manner and looking a lot like an angel helps me in my career and that Gimlet comprehended this fact. My career pays me over a hundred thousand dollars per annum, and my mother also sends me checks from her personal wealth, so I have a great deal of liquidity on hand, which makes Gimlet and Big and Mr. Wonderful a very happy bunch of punkrockers.

  Before I got angry at Cheese I liked him a lot. Unlike Gimlet and Grope, LSD-taking made Cheese a quite happy go lucky fellow last night at Keith Jarrett’s concert. He did not see false events or get fidgety, but instead merely recounted that the paper on his tongue made it possible for him to discern the Negro Keith Jarrett’s music with many different of his five senses. He could hear it, but see and smell and taste the music, as well. Cheese stated that some of the music smelled like old velvet in a trunk in an attic, or like vitamins, or medicine, or morning. He asserted that he could see Keith Jarrett’s improvisational compositions as well. He gamely tried to describe in his own terms what a sunset looks like through fire, apricot and blue, and through smoke, plum and black. He said sometimes the music resembled weak light behind ice. I became happy merely listening to the sensual recountings of Cheese, and when Gimlet placed her hand on my penis in my gabardine slacks and claimed that there were secret worms and snakes in the small blond child’s curious hair which were incessantly moving and spelling out the names of Gimlet’s family of Imblums in Deming, New Mexico, I gave her a big buss.

  Cheese knew a great deal about many other genres of music besides punkrock. He felt that Keith Jarrett was a very talented Negro performer. He stated that only a genius could have a seat on his bench before thousands of distant spectators and begin to play any old melodies which were floating around inside his head with its afro. Cheese posited that for Keith Jarrett there are billions of these ditties, that he plays, and subsequently marveled to me that Keith Jarrett not only played the little tunes with skill but also joined them together in unique and interesting ways, improvisationally, so that each of his piano concerts was different from all the others. The manner in which the little melodies were linked was arranged by Keith Jarrett’s sub conscious, stated Cheese, thus his concerts were linear, Keith Jarrett’s piano performance was a line instead of a composed and round circle. The line was like a little life story of the Negro’s special experiences and feelings. I informed Cheese that I did not know that Negroes had sub consciousnesses but enjoyed the sound of the music a great deal, and Cheese frowned. Gimlet began to moan in a way that got me very sexually excited and Gimlet did not even tell the coughing woman behind Cheese to Fuck You after the woman behind Cheese requested that we all please keep our voices subdued so that everyone in the audience in the Irvine Concert Hall could enjoy the concert, but Cheese was frowning yet and he informed the woman that he would stomp her husband if she did not get out of our face so she zipped her lip and I held Gimlet’s hand and put one of her fingers with white nail polish that tastes like vanilla, which I enjoy, inside my mouth.

  The small girl with the yellow hair Gimlet felt was chemical and occult appeared to be drowsing and leaning against the shoulder of the older man’s finely tailored sportcoat. I admired the sportcoat and wished that it belonged to me instead of the man. I wanted
the man to turn around in his concert seat so that I could see who owned the sportcoat and I began to decide whether to throw a penny at the back of the fellow’s head to induce him to turn around.

  However besides being a fine all around bald punkrocker with pink glasses Cheese could also be intelligent and clever. He was extremely interested in yours truly as a person, and without me even noticing the fact Cheese took us from discussing musical genres and Keith Jarrett’s Negro experiences and emotions to no music and my white experiences and emotions. Cheese betrayed that he was anxious to learn why I had such satisfactory relations with my punkrocker friends. He said he wished to understand a Sick Puppy like me. He began to look very serious on his LSD trip but he became funny in a way which I found entertaining and engaging. He divulged his position that punkrockers were children born into a very tiny space, with no windows, plus walls all around them made of concrete and metal, often despoiled with graffiti, and that as adults they were trying to cut their way out of the walls. They were attempting to move quickly along the very thin edge of something and accomplished this feat by failing to care if they fell over the edge or not. Cheese stated that my punkrocker clique all felt as if they had nothing and would always have nothing therefore they made the nothing into everything. However Cheese stated that I was a Sick Puppy who already had everything, thus he wished to inquire as to why I traded my big everything for a big nothing. Cheese was being curious and amusing from his seat on the edge, but he persisted in looking at the side of my fair face, and had his hand on the sleeve of my new sportcoat, which I did not like, for his fingernails were unclean. He asked me why I was Sick Puppy.

  I proposed to Cheese that he was a fine fellow and that I was enjoying having an in depth conversation with him a lot and that I admired his earring. His earring was composed of bone. At these statements Cheese became a grump once more and I told him to turn that frown upside down.

  Gimlet observed my penny in my hand while I was gazing at the back of the older man’s head, and she read me like a book. She requested into my ear that I throw my penny at the girl with the curious hair so that the girl would be hurt and turn around in her seat and Gimlet would utilize the opportunity to observe the face of the girl with the curious hair. She said she predicted the girl’s face would be the face of an absolute giant, with planets rotating in the sockets of her eyes, and that her breath would smell like apples. She stated that the curious hair when removed from the child and placed in Gimlet’s LSD-influenced vagina would alter Gimlet from a Sandy Imblum to an area of fire with arms and legs and vagina of proper heat. Cheese politely asked Gimlet whether she would care to take some tablets of Vitamin B12 in order to tone down the strength of her dosage of her controlled substance, however Gimlet had stopped being aware of Cheese. She placed her hand in the vicinity of my gabardine penis and thereupon stated that when she was full of curious active hair and fire she would pay a little visit to my father at his office in the United States Marine Corps and throw herself into his warrior’s arms and commit the sexual act with him and when he had his orgasm he would catch on fire from Gimlet and immolate while she cut open his warrior’s throat and allowed me to bathe in his blood. Gimlet’s a first rate gal but I have to admit that these statements got under my skin, Gimlet talking about my father and the sexual act in public in the Irvine Concert Hall. Cheese hypothesized that Gimlet was having an unpleasant LSD experience and advised Mr. Wonderful to keep his well developed arm around her for various persons’ protection, and Big told Cheese to zip the old lip and mind his own business.

  I was royally peeved at Gimlet and as the back of Keith Jarrett’s afro head began to move in a side-to-side fashion and as his music became louder and more like punkrock, I crossed my arms and began breathing through the nostrils of my nose with anger at Gimlet. Subsequently I got her in a stare-down and stared at her with anger. Gimlet’s black pupils in her eyes became so large that they obscured her eyes’ color and she began to become frightened of yours truly and to cry, which made me a small amount happier. Cheese put his unclean hand on my new sportcoat’s sleeve once more and I turned to him with my arms previously crossed and must have appeared extremely ticked off at him, as well, for putting his hand on my sleeve, for his immature eyes as well became extremely wide and purple behind his pink glasses and he felt at the whiskers on his head and stated quietly that we had to step into the interior lobby of the Concert Hall and have a chat with each other for a moment, and wait for the other kids to join us in the lobby in a moment at the hour’s intermission. I was mad and on the horns of a dilemma about whether I wanted to throw my penny at the girl with the hair’s head or burn Cheese with my lighter in the lobby, and I decided to burn Cheese and I trailed him up the stairs of the aisle and into the pleasant and cool lobby of the Irvine Concert Hall. Gimlet asked me Sick Puppy where are you going? but I gave her the cold shoulder.

  Except when we entered the lobby I failed to want to burn Cheese because it would not have been any fun because when we entered the lobby Cheese spontaneously sat down on a pleasant bench owned by the Concert Hall in his leather pants and black combat boots and leather shirt with amounts of chain and ammunition strapped across his poorly developed chest and back and bald head with bristles and whiskers and began to cry, so that tears of Cheese’s began to run out from underneath his rose-colored spectacles. Cheese began to look as young as he truly was, which was a minor. I knew that Big’s LSD on the tongue was having an effect upon good old Cheese and that, unlike me, his consciousness became affected by controlled substances.

  While crying, Cheese stated that he did not understand me and that I frightened him. I claimed that that was a riot of amusement: a punkrocker with ammunition such as Cheese being frightened of a dapper and handsome civilian like Sick Puppy. I said no harm no foul and offered to ask Gimlet to fellate him very skillfully, however Cheese ignored my offer and took the hand I proffered in friendship and with his poorly maintained hand pulled me down on the attractive bench beside him. It was difficult to hear Keith Jarrett from the lobby.

  Cheese restated that he was unable to conceptualize a Sick Puppy such as myself, and stated that he also did not understand the happiness that was exuded by me at virtually all moments. It took him time to verbally grope for the word happy. Do you know what I mean, he inquired. There is something about you that is so totally happy, Sick Puppy. I patiently explained to Cheese once more about my great amount of income and clothing and fine home entertainment products, however Cheese shook his predominantly bald head and claimed that he meant a different word by the word happy which he had groped for. I wish to know why you are so happy, he said. After he kept asking me why I was happy he asked me if I loved Gimlet. I put the arm of my new sportcoat around Cheese’s leather shoulders and informed him that Gimlet was aces in my book, and that on many occasions I was made happy by Gimlet because she fellated me and gave me pleasurable orgasms, and allowed me to burn parts of her body. Tears ceased to crawl from behind Cheese’s pink lenses but he persisted in looking and staring at me in a fashion that made me want to hurt him until I hypothesized that he had entered a type of substance-induced hypnosis in which a person often stares at objects as if they were too large to comprehend, often for a long time. I did not know if I should leave Cheese in the lobby in a state of hypnosis but I wanted to hear Keith Jarrett play music, therefore I forgot Cheese and went away from him to the public drinking fountain and then to the doors of the auditorium. However before I could enter the doors of the auditorium I heard Cheese’s voice call and I remembered Cheese once more and he no longer blindly stared like a bunny in my headlights when I arrived back at his bench and did not even have to look or stare transfixed at me in order to say that if I would tell him what was the nature of the happiness I exuded at all times he would allow me to burn him a little and also allow me to burn his fiancée, who was part Negro.

  I stated to Cheese that he had made me an offer I couldn’t refuse but that, however, his question s
tymied yours truly because I had already patiently explained to him that there were myriads of times and occasions when things made me happy. The fact of the matter is that there have only been a few things that historically have ever made me unhappy and gotten me down in the dumps. Exemplum gratia, one thing was the time in college at Brown University when I went to proudly enlist in the United States Marine Corps R.O.T.C. program to continue to follow in the footsteps of my father and brother who serve with honor in the military and the Recruiting Colonel made us take a dumb personality test and I flunked and later when I went back to politely complain they gave me another dumb test and said I flunked it, as well, and then made me speak to a Dr. who came in the R.O.T.C. office and then the Recruiting Colonel for Brown University called my father who was busy with important work in Washington, D.C., and my father was super peeved at the whole incident. The Colonel repeatedly addressed my father as Sir, and apologized for interrupting his work, however I never got to enlist in any R.O.T.C. programs for officer training at Brown University or elsewhere. And exemplum gratia, another thing was the occasion in Alexandria, Virginia, when I was eight and my sister was ten and my brother who now carries the nuclear codes for the President was at Westminster Military Academy and my sister and myself were in my brother’s room playing in his desk and we came upon magazines in low drawers and the magazines, which were erotic, were full of men and women committing sexual acts and we read the magazines and witnessed pictures of men placing their penises in holes between the women’s legs and the men and the women looking very happy and I took my sister’s underpants off and my underpants off as well and placed my penis which was very excited from the magazines into a hole my sister and I found between her legs, which was her vagina, but having me place my penis in her vagina failed to make my sister happy and my father entered the room when she called him and saw us committing a sexual act and he took me down into his workshop by our playroom in our home’s basement and burned my penis with his gold lighter from the United States Corps and stated that if I ever touched his little girl again he would burn my penis off with his gold lighter and I had to go to a Dr. and obtain ointment for my burned penis, and was unhappy and down in the dumps.

 

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