Allegedly, Fun (part two)

For Don Pépé (José Donoso)

© Mike Mosher 2020

Bands, they're men's business, ma'am.

The Firemen, the

Mighty Turbines and the Meat n' Potatoes Men, no wonder there was often trouble. The Standpoints' "From a Standpoint." The Football Kings were what's called Rockne Roll, or Hard Jock Music.

Shortorder cooks of Rock the Heartbreakfasts, with their sizzling billboard "Finally, a two-fisted band willing to step OUT OF THE FRYING PAN and INTO THE FIRE of Rock...".

The success of the first dynamovoiced white star Johnny Delivery put Motorsburgh on the muscle map once and for all. This delight soon led to a whole dealer's lot full of cars-and-croon bands like the Automatic Transmissions, the Speedometers and the OffRamps, the Dealers' Plates or the Factory Air. The Rearview Mirrors—constantly watching girls' rears—and the Backfires. The Automobile Horns. The Fast Idlers in their foppish Regency clothes and matching economy cars. Bands with cars got into drag racing onstage, photographed wearing earsplitting helmets and flaming tennis shoes on the accelerator pedal. The Pivotals, the Speed Bumps, the Fog Lights, the Parallel Parkers, the Radar Detectors.

The Smog Checks were from California too. The friendly grit of greasers guitars sounding like the fingers of a mailman who'd just lunched on deep-fried chicken, an excess of cheap hair oil oozing from the plastic of every record. The Dirty Fingers' name implied they worked on cars, as did the spotty Dirty Shirts. "Was That All I Was Going?" by the Dirty Windshields. An auto-paint band called the Undercoats. The Driving Gloves, the Roll Bars, the Road Beers, the All Green Lights.

Outside the greasemonasteries, bands of food-truck drivers like the Eat Out Oftens. A hard-drivin' band called the Trucks Use Low Gear, who did the music for helicopter traffic reports, drowned out by the sound of the blades. The Overandouts, singin' through them little CB shortwave radios and intercoms. The Truckloads thought they were better than the Cigarette Loads, who were something out of an old novelty catalog. The Abandoned Chryslers, the Porschewreckers, the HairpinTurns, the Unlicensed Driveurs, the Brake Shoes, the Gas Wars, Otto and the Autoaccidents, the Flat Tires, the Dearborn Vehicles' "Kicking the Tires". The Stevedores boisterously singing "Your Truck's on Fire". The Promontories, the Washboard Roads, the Rollbars, the Sunroofs, the VentiPanes, the Locking Gas Caps, the Cobblestones. The Spills' "Spillage" and the live album "A Dangerous Spill on the Hiway". Mojo Ojibway's poignant "Speed and Blood".

Bands named after 1970s cars whose very design says "fuck you".

Fat guys the Stomach Troubles, the Deli People, the Porch Lunch Displays, the Two Desserts. The Potbellied Stoves, the Cast Iron Stomachs, the Ungainly, the Unimpressed, the Yet Unpublished, the Big Producers and the ByProducts. The Fortytwo Portlys, mildmannered guys named after mid-century suit sizes, short-armed sleeves barely reaching their guitars or drumsticks. The Lumps, the Heavyhandeds, the Halfaloaves and a frathouse band of fat guys from the Northern California coast called the NeoWhales. Native Californians like the Whalewatchers, the psychedelic Right Turn on Reds. Rural sweatshirt poets like the Beatsville Eggs. Mexican kids in a suburb called Los Burreatles, their rivals Los Jet Lags, the

Controlled Substances, the New Christy Pokeweeds and finally the Planters, whose name had something to do with marijuana warts.

The Mizzen Masts. The Depth Charges and, more peaceful yet more sexual, the Depth Sounders' "Used by Fishermen". The Fishing Boats, the Cormorants, "How Time Flies" by the Tied Flies. Trouty!

The Poor Fish, and small fish like the Throw’embacks.

"Jet Fighter Pilot" by the Wind Socks, photo'd at the local airport.

"Mud Train" by Bubba and the Bumrockers, the Movers' Blankets, "Trains (She's Pulled)" by the We Pull Out on Times. Railroad enthusiasts the Sons of a Double Birth, maybe it was Berth. Album from Britain called The Sound of a Pint by the Your Majestys. The house band at an Irish pub the No Irish Need Apply Themselves, with their credo, smash hit and football cheer, "Rum, Romanism and Rebellion".

Then came the Post Hole Diggers, the Backhoes, the Andirons and the Arms-and-Legs. The Stanchions, The Epicenters, That impossibility beat of the Sump Pumps, the Barely-Moving Vans, the Tractor Seats, the Deus ex Machinists, the Food Service Accidents.

The Hew-and-Criers and the Down-and-Outers. The surprise hit "Adroitly" by the Parliamentary Superior Motherfuckers, who backed up the Detroit Astronauts' on "Pseudovoodoo". Workplace sparemoment goldbrickers like the Baggage Handlers, the Bundles, the Airline Food. The Forklifts were always grunting under their load of Rock. Billy Bile and the Cabdrivers, the Steamships, the Dry Docks, the Hod Carriers, the Coal Shovels, the Stormsewers. the Stapleguns, The Pipedreams, from where they dream of plumbing, for this is an all-plumbers' band. The Heating Elements, and the Smokemachines,

the Streetcleaners, the Dustbinz, the Plywood Full of Nails, the Arc Welders, "Gypsum Boards and Gypsy Broads" by the Sheetrockers.

A blue-collar band called the Reuthers with a tough instrumental "Underwater Hoffa".

There were giant rockstars walking the earth in those days, literally giant amps several stories high, guitars that doubled between gigs as barges, if stood on end higher than the office buildings of most insurance companies. An odd old time of stripchords, graffitibilly music, gaffabilly, blind-man's-buffabilly and a sort of Bibley knobabilly music. Jewish kids the Skullcaps, played Hillellabilly on campus.

Russian-made ceramic amplifiers, old brown flower pot material.

Bands with clown-nosed amps. Amplifiers with big carved hands over their speakers called I'm Ashamed of my Music. The brandophonic sound of the Belmondos. the Cryogeneticists' coldhearted "Cry of the Ice Cream Cells", the Open Fires, the Open Flies.

All through this era I bought all the magazines, read of bands with names like the Mean Loadpackers whom and of whom nobody's ever heard. Doggie band the Hookworms. The Flukes, the Animal Tranquilizers, the Draft Animals, The Sphagnums, the Snow Blowers.

Tough little S.O.B.'s the Ant Poisons. The Burrito Doctors, the Prosecutors. the Class Action Suits. The Prestidigitations, the Talk is Cheaps, the Silencios (or Silence is Goldens). The Meatpackers' "Odd Lots". The Bacon-Slicing Machine. The Opponents, "Play Chicken" by the Pope'snoses, the Opening Gambits and the Alone Sharks playing "The Beat With Two Backs", the Corrective Measures.

The Unplanned Youth, the Inalienable Rights, the Foolhardty Parachutists, and the Grand Coulee Dams.

The Suffer Fools Gladly. The Shotglasses, the Sez Who? The salty lyrics of Sodium Man were re-interpreted by bands like (our friend Dink's sentimental favorite) the Shitfaces and those women menaced by menarche and its ensuing melancholy, the Pretty Heavy Drinkers. The Breathalyzers were Dink's first favorite group, and he was always testing himself on their songs.

People started offering us local gigs. No, not the Snot Festial, Tippy. I suspect he expected a crafts fair, a fragile yet necessarily waterproff bong made from somebody’s snot, or a delicate translucent vellum, tortise shell-like lampshade from its phlegmflakes.

Nearly every summery Sunday that year we played at the free concerts at Krafftebbing County Country Park, beside the ululating Uvula River. We walked among the picnic tables, trashcans, ball field.

The water over the rocks sounded like a girl with something stuck in her throat at a picnic. “Ululating like Uum of Egypt” said a smiling swarthy University beardo, enjoying it. Motto on the state license plate that year the same as the town crier at the edge of the park's Sunday rock concerts, "Speed—Acid—Lids".

But we realized it was time to take to the road, to play outside our own Aleppoan sandbox. After we played at Rough Grate’s leaky barn he claimed he was our Manager, we said OK, get us some outof-town gigs. We had the songs, we had the talent, now we had the musical fishing gear. This Summer Michigan would truly be a Gallivanting Nation. Let's load up some underage girls and go on tour around the state. Rock, this scalding business. Rock n' Roll does not equal rest and recreation. No way the Chomps could be accused of nay-saying to Michigan. We were enviable uphosterers of the couch

of Michigan Rock upon which so many kids were making out. We hit the road to play massively in public.

He set us up playing in nearby farm towns like Cloaca, MI. Foulville, MI, which was reputedly foul towards its non-Christian gradeschoolers, and whose barely-literate founders may have meant a "fowl"-friendly village. Lesserville and Greaterville, MI. Small old towns like Bowling Trophy, MI, their church basements, teen clubs, spotty bars. Concubine, MI, with its small college of Bible nurses, and Extreme Unction Junction. Salt Lick, MI; when we passed through there, Tippy compared Coral to a salt lick and her teenage lovers who pleasured her orally to the cattle or even roaming deer, finding their savory sustenance at her saline cube, to forage and graze. Or wait, maybe in those days he was talking about some other girl. So, as a band, we punched above our weight, punched our way from Manticore, MI to Mermaid, MI to Woodnymph, Nerieid, and then tiny Fairy, MI; the latter named after its founder, who stoically endured junior high taunts.

Played at car racing track a few miles outside a town in the Squeamish Hills called Bucket o' Agriculture, MI. The town in Michigan that cheese comes from called Pincushion. Bored burgs of greasers, coldwater rapists, full rapids and empty vapidists. A Michigan farm kid whose name was Silo, or at least that was his graffiti tag.

Bierstube, MI: oom pah pah. Slaveport, MI, though it was never really used for that. Walpurgis Lake, MI was actually incorporated by a coven of 19th c. witches who suffered persecution (short of burning) in the old country. Why a stern Church of Rivalry founded, with great

petulance, the fussy village of Persecution Lake right next to them. At their annual Lake o' Fire festival, they pour oil and petrol on the waters, ignite it to hold midnight boat races. We set up to play on a rickety wooden dock, all the while concerned the conflagration would float our way.

Bison City, MI, and though megafauna bison hadn’t roamed there since the Ice Age, the University Museum had an annual summer dig there. Massive bones had been found, plus murals in caves celebrating the hunt that spelunkers liked to further graffiti.

Bayonet City, MI, where you could still find rusted yet dangerous 19th, 18th, sometimes 17th century cutlery of war on the beaches there.

Finally, Beaver Coin, MI. Foxfinger, MI, a craftily-marketed tourist destination, where foxes are trapped, clubbed, dried into jerky, pelts turned into stylish jackets (Tippy wanted one), plush animal toys, and so on. Its annual Olde English Foxhunt would be fun to participate in some year; Thump claimed he’d bring a machine gun, which they’d decided they would allow, even at the risk of attracting more homicidal Vietnam and Korea veterans.

Aldebbie, olde English himself, asked about it, topic in an airline magazine. Him? Never mind, I’ll tell you about him in a while.

We achieved Big Radio Sarcasm when we played a radio concert in the Motorsburgh station's DeadAirium. I drank Krufft's salted ranch dressing by the bottle before gigs, made by the same German munitions combine that made the full bore blackiron Grand Claudine railroad broad platform gun in World War One. Not becaue I liked it the taste of it—though it did give quick energy before a gig—

but out of sentimentality, I guess. They also invented the brown Krufftpaper bag, out of their pulped East African plantation waste and workers.

Were were hired to play a big concert in Homicide Park, Motorsburgh, as opening act for several suave soul acts in competitive clothes. The instrumental "Neighbors' Dog in a Vat of Acid" was always a suitable challenge for me, and when it was announced, police approached the stage to question us.

Machine Island, MI. A fairly successful show at a two-year college for all the kids conceived in Drive-In Movie theaters. The industrial suburb Placentaville was the headquarters of a major abortion franchisee, the drab downtown bisected by murky Birth Control Creek. The night before that, a dingy, dank rock club called Unnatural Bedroom. I mean, who'd want their teenage daughters, or even sons, going there?

Just across the medieval drawbridge from Michigan to Canada, we played a roadhouse in Portcullis, ON. One of the stoned roadies nearly dropped an amplifier in its moat. Then at an unappealing festival held on Turd Beach, Ontario. On the Canadian network, Jewish TV guys had before- and afterschool Chomps Trio-plus-cartoons shows or even clean teen shows on which we played. OK, if not “played”, we mimed along to our record. My white pants and shoes disturbed the camera's vidicon tube, so I appeared to glow or combust.

Accurate representation of my unmitigated lust, I guess. Lust for guitar excellence, that is.

On tour, we avoided birthday drivers all over the roads, station-

wagon mothers glutted and groggy on cake. Poison Lake, MI, which was originally Poisson, I'm told (or they tell visitors, to encourage fishing). The roadside attraction Popke's Papal Park about three hours up north had a dozen concrete Jesus-crazed dinosaurs.

Eucharist, MI where the card game was invented. The town Pope's Nose, MI, so named because they evidently invent some way to build an economy upon the effective use of that part of the chicken.

Motorsburgh cars that drove us out into the ramshackle country rarely brought us back. It was really, really hard to hitchhike with our instruments, drums and amps. We found shelter in barns, haylofts, courtesy of farmers' daughters who lay with us there. Their brothers were eager to proudly wanted to share their homegrown week with celebrities, or at least regional hooligans who assiduously resembled celebrities. Crossroads churchtowns (we'd never heard of) like Marysafterbirth, MI. Liebstod, MI. Imperialism, MI. The interestingly named Nude, MI. Vertical Bay, MI, where Tippy assured us the girls’ slots were in the conventional direction.

Dog Doo Lake Pavillion, unpleasant venue in an unpleasant little resort town. One band that also played there had an expensive set of Featherbed drums, but Thump laffed they weren't worth stealing for tuff rock like ours. Lake Meshuggeneh, sparkling and crazee, way up in Cross We Must Bear, MI with a wounded baby Jesus sculpted in the 1920s by Italian craftsmen from Motorsburgh, for their football team the Cross Wee Bears. An appropriately named town of Saint Band, MI. Fishing village on This Island Earth, MI, its highschool football team the Metalunamutants. Modest resorts where the wellwater tasted of specially-spiced buckets of kittens. Drinkdriving and

momentarily losing consciousness, Dink swerved to avoid a LEFT SHOULDER SOILED sign. A summer place on Lake Debauch, MI, where Dink so indulged that he almost died that night. Sometimes we worried about him.

There was a teen club or head shop in Plimsoll, MI called the Magic Cyst. Now Tippy's got one on the top of his head, from which little devils emerge, when poked, but they mutter good lines for us to use in songs. Two tiring gigs in the paired towns of All and None, seemingly founded so bored filler-writers on newspapers around the state and country, and later TV weathermen, could make jokes.

Corruption Hill Ampitheater in Corruption Hill, MI. Famous site of their popuplar springtime Corruption Nuptials, thousands of couples massmarrying, a ritual supposedly dating back to the Vikings.

We debuted our moody "Land of the Unloneliness" one night in Thumbflint, MI, up there when trees had turned Halloween orange.

Next night, Fuckstick, MI, the Goshentoad County Fair. Then Vapors, MI. Lesser Vapids, MI. Grand Guignol, MI. Was Bochutney the Michigan town, or the name of its Mayor? Played the dockside resort at Screaming Island, MI and Frozen Ireland, MI. The quaintly naimed Shtetl Lake, MI. Corpse O' Jesus, MI, a town sprung up around an insistently advertised oadside attraction, but it was really just the dessicated body of an old Jewish-looking Indian on display. I want my money back.

Lake Gitch, Like Ee, Lake, Gu, Lake Mee, adding up to Gitchigumee, which means all the Great Lakes.

Alberich, MI holds an annual Ring Festival, but ring in question is a sweet glazed ring-shaped pastry. The only thing really Wagnerian

was the Gotterdammerung Creek Demolition Derby on a rutted dirt ring of its own, outside of town. Stubborn mid-stable town of Thirdreich, MI, is full of unrepentent oompah Germans. Chased away university sociologists wanting to study them a few years ago. The town up north Werewulf, famous for rich food and the Paschallambka's Easterland Store, especially that orange salty cheese like roofing tar to spread on disciplined crackers. Maybe they wanted us because they saw me wearing an Iron Cross or something.

We played on the porch of a roadhouse up north beside the FallingDown River, inebriates toppling into it with a splash. Heavy Pettiford, MI, with its Petting Zoo. Caesar Romero, MI. Played at Beerbarrel's Bar and Grill, where Bo Beerbarrel paid us in dubloons. In Afterimage, MI the vaunted Rat Mountain Ski Resorts, Inc. passed us a bad check.

We played the western, sandy part of the state, its cherry-eaten lies. They wanted one white band on the bill, so we plaed Safehaven, MI, where there had been a colored peoples’ lakeside resort since Underground Railroad days. A century ago, any slave catchers in Michigan would be jovially served until drunk, waylaid, slaughtered and fed to hogs or fertilize the berry patch—Haw! Score!—while the escapees were safely delivered in a boat to the Canadian side of the lake. Award-winning varieties of berries from that part of the state included Crackereyes or Crackercods.

We played at the University-run camp the Trigonometry Lake resort. Sacher Von Sandoz School, the alternative on the edge of town, founded by the Swiss university prof teaching one year at our university, who discovered LSD expressly in order to stop WWII and

the Cold War. We played at their Anti-Prom. Von Sandoz also founded the woodsy arts camp up north too, that many university daughters whom we enjoyed spent their earlier teenage summers.

And a more modest lakeside resort for Negroes, some working for the university as groundskeepers and boiler-stokers, funded with a modest deduction from their wages. Our so-called manager was terrified at the thought of booking us there, but it might have been fun.

Rough Grate did advance us some funds for better transportation. Piled into our new Wienerwagen van, the Chomps headed towards the Lakes. Pileated peckerwoods upon the Elviscolored sands. Under greaser rainbows. Cars on the freeway were like a pack of wolves, something very invigorating about them this time. We played a gig headlined by the town favorite-sons, the suntanned summery Michigan lake resort band No Shirt No Shoes No Service, then riding the success of their one slow-dance hit "Swimmingly", breezy echoes moodily plugged into their sandblaster guitars. We tried plugging our guitars into the sand like on TV on songs "Thinkin' 'bout Good and Evil" and "Velma is an Eskimo".

The weird election of the harvest festival queen Miss Penis Size, in Penis Size, MI. Nearly every band in Michigan had at least one song entitled "I Know a Place Up North" meaning a place to lose virginity. Boy, after watching those adolescent girls aroused by Tippy, if I were starting a new town, I'd name it Dream Orgasms, MI. We considered putting out a single on the tiny label DDLMS Records, which I always thought stood for "Doldrums" since it was up by the doldrumite mines, but was surprised to learn meant that Dia de

los Muertos Sound. Michigan calypso produced up north by Lord Snow-down. We went up north to the 45th parallel to cut a 45 record.

Near here the People's Puma revolutionary bombers were caught after they'd torched the school records building.

We visited the fort in the upper peninsula Michigan town of Saint Tippitatius. I was so amused at the idea of Tippy in Saint Tippy that I peronally booked us a gig way the hell up there. Up north we were well received, nostalgia tears in their beers, for ours was the wolf’s sound. Highway rest stops that usually had a corpse seated in the next stall. We borrowed a big car from Mom, sang along with plenty of cassettes and 8-track tapes we brought to drown the seven hours on the road getting up there. Except her car didn’t have any way to play them.

Good audience in Bearview, Michigan, on the shores of Lake Shapiro. Town up north Badass, Michigan and a town called Dentalwood, named after George Washington on his secret trip through Michigan for fresh piney teeth. In Rack-and-Piniondale we played a hunt and fish club stage made up of wooden ducks, decoys turned bottom-up. A resort town in the Upper Peninsula called High Voltage Village, where Tippy was getting a reputation as the Paul Bunyan of Rock by the reputation of his girl-axe. Out at Swarm Lake and Squirm Lake, Paul Mosquito’s Mosquito Park Villa, a roadhouse by a town Greenspray, Michigan. Club called the Cool Dry Place.

At another bleak one the Storage Locker, he began to grumble over the drum and bass, How's your butt?

Is it feeling icky?

That girl Is hot and sticky... and from that moment, he had them all in the psalm of his shivering hand, voice and beagle eye. Sometimes our music, or whatever it is, is the enema of a place.

A witches' cauldron of drugs were sent to us with greetings from an Indian medicine man. Watching the snowdrift and the shapes shape, we knew it's the Ice Age again. Barstool-breasted huntresses in Northern Michigan, nothing under their plaid wool shirts and hunting pants, would soon as take you lying down in a duck blind. Out in the Michigan woods, pinetrees and pineal glands. The town whose name is the Indians' word for "the perfume of our deflowered sisters." Now that's romantic. There’s that camp with at least one cabin where girls in trouble could spend a season "visiting a maiden aunt" on Abortion Lake, MI. More cheerful, Gabor Sisters, MI, with champagne cocktails for all! Romantically named Wetspot o' the Bed, MI. Yet with a new industry, prosperity largely moved to the neaby crossroads hamlet Waterbed, MI. Sure we went places. But you'd better expect little here about the actual experience of having a band, the sweaty rehearsal, setting up, sound checks and waiting backstage endlessly to go on. Half the lives of all the aforementioneds were spent setting up, wasted waiting to play a few short moments of self-realization. Punctual like a Swiss locksmith, I hated to wait for practice. Thought clocks telling the wrong time should be a capital crime for their owners.

To say you have a band, to name it, is to have one, in my book.

Dressing rooms? I'll bet you just want to hear smoking-room stories.

Life on the road is a new pack of cigarettes, a new pack of lies. The vacuum of fame. Collapsible souls. The other side of the icon. I don't know why it depressed me so.

Up north in Allegations County, MI. We wonder what the pine trees were thinking as the band proceeded northwards. At a trading post I splurged, bought a good pair of warm, wooly guitar mittens, the right one for lead and the left one for rhythm. Seasons changed, things got hairy. Weather got petulant, impeded us like stubborn parents. The van got stuck, wouldn't move on the ice, wheels spinning impotently. So Thump jumped out, grabbed two children on the way to school, bundled up in rough wooly coats, scarves, caps and furry mittens, to put under the back wheels for traction. It did the trick, and we were soon on the road home.

The Peoples Puma Party, optimistic though kicked out of Urban Wet Park near Mom’s, Thump’s and my house, convinced the city of Aleppo liberal desklocks to let them hold summer Sunday rock concerts at Godzilla park at the edge of town. One Sunday we were the opening act. Tippy and I wrote a new song about when a bad girl mosquito got raped, maybe in prison, maybe in the piney woods. The park was called Godzilla, a tribal Indian word (not the Italian Dean of Arts, with the pretty daughters), but it could have been Golgotha because, man, Tippy nailed our album we hadn’t recorded yet to the Cross in that performance. Between the two thieves, Dink and Thump, and me like the Roman with the spear—SPQR this,

motherfucker!—my solo sincerely soared.

We had been used to mostly student or youth from scrubbed suburbs, Aleppo faculty kids who went to a natural high school sheltered by the campus, but what a crowd, this Sunday park crowd was something else, rolled in by freeway from Motorsburgh and its Motorsburbs to the east and industrially downstate. Veteran bedouins who seemed to be at all summer rock concerts and festivals, shirtless, leather-tanned and mean. Guys in the kind of hair and beard worn back when Jesus was finished. Hostile hippies. Heat gangs. Hippies in herbal overalls. Hospital hippies, offering seltzer bromides and chanting to people on bad acid trips and freakouts, Psychotic Reactivators. Hippie satyrs, bearded and hairy, notorious for their lewdness. Their goat legs could barely grip their motorcycles, but woe betide you for making fun of any that rode sidesaddle. Musky basement-dwelling troglodytes, smelling of damp cracked concrete foundations, black mold between their teeth, fingers, teats and toes, under their neck wattles and nails. Organic, polyorgasmic hippies manipulating each others’ vegetable magnetism towards orgone ozone experiences, consensual communal hallucinations. Magnetoigneous lodestones activated or deposited by UFOs north of Aleppo, near the University Plumstone-Peachpit Pulmonary Radiumtelescope Observatory.

How will they react to droning, challenging songs like “Pants of Romance”? Guess we’ll find out today.

Guys in Buffalo Booney jackets of fringed, tawny Hiawathaskin.

Rich hippie students, many of them Jewish, who bragged how earlier that summer they had attended the big Vladivostock Rock Festival in

the small college town Upanishads, NY. A Krishnadelic Lentils for Gentiles booth (run by young yentas and Lenins) to the left of the stage, and rhinoplasty booths among those doling out healthy grainy food or selling t-shirts, pipes and drugs. A lot of college girls from the New York suburbs had their noses done here, but I wouldn't want a plastic surgeon in my nasal cavity or sewing away cartilage in all this dust and muck. Hebrews in the garden or forty-day desert, tempted by false promise angels, their nipples protruding, maybe even pubic hair visible beneath garments' fabric.

At first I thought the name of one of those bignosed rock bands from Motorsburgh suburbs I see up there was called The Conscience of the Jews. Just because. Instead they were called something like Nonsense Kangaroos; I must have misheard the mumbling announcer because I smoked something. Or maybe someone slipped something into the drugs.

Thump turns brown like a ground hog, laughs, spits.

That Sunday, jazzman Booker "Bukka" Blucher performed, in his workingman bluchers, his usual show-stopper finale, normally at 2:10 a.m. in a smoky nightclub, "Helio Centric Gaze" where he pointed to the bright mid-afternoon summer sun and hippies turned to gaze obediently skyward, the most LSD-besotted then permanently blinded or seriously impaired.

Haw! Score! But we love our audience.

From alcohol-less teen clubs to braless summer rain dances.

That girl high on drugs, drippy and psychobubbling. Girls with hairy sandals, feeling free. Badly-sewn east Indian fabric halter tops, dustsweeper gown, shirtless gownsweepers in Tippy-style pud-

bearing impossible cutoffs bobbing pistons of scraggly hair in front of them. Teenage celibates who might as well been priests, choirbison stomping together like when the French and Spanish missionaries joined the raiders on the plains for a Holy Ghost Dance. A student intern from the University museum who attended called Tippy an Eohippnotist, mesmerizing all the small ancestral horses crowding the stage, lanky and leggy junior high school kids.

Tippy whipped off his shirt in the sweltering sun, whipped it around his head like his own lariat of hair, flung it into the audience to their shrieking delight. Decided from then on, he’d perform shirtless.

Armpit equals ampitheater. Tippy grew beautiful onstage, alternately feathered surfin' serpent, surfin' seraphim. Soon Tippy took to wearing only grey dirty underwear onstage, holy and worn to a shadow. A portentuous sing-song voice. After all, a locust's song is produced when he rubs his belly against his legs. His words fly open.

There was a bulge, but the hall was filled with doubting women.

A few more lines of the song, then pants asunder. . His fly now open, snap snap snap went the buttons on his cutoff jeans shorts, and the real Tippy emerged. He was ready to show them what he liked to call his ten pound toothbrush. His muscles contracting with confidence.

Look at you up there in your Englandskin. My Window Faces the South so to speak. Exposed that lite and cool phallus, his frankfurter furniture, that shockwalnut with a satin sunburn. Out came the party snake, his big transparent dick. His vacation organs. Fresh pornography. Much like the difference between a naturalist and a naturist. Dick like a bear's baton in an animated cartoon featuring forest animals that start an orchestra.

As we sniggered, he began to sing: Hey, don’t pull down my pants Hey, don’t pull down my pants Hey, don’t pull down my pants Till I’m READYYYYY…! and the crowd went plum loco, began to cheer and chant along.

Said Threadbear, the student paper’s reviewer, philosophically of Tippy, "The penis mightier than the sword." He called the band itself "A house afire set to music," perhaps having been clued by somebody (other bands, groupies) into the activities of the Firehouse.

Twisty, misshapen body and big male membership, Tippy's the nineteenth century Elephant Man in both senses of the word. Called Tippy since one leg was shorter than the other two. Really, he lurched to one side. Girls noticed it more than guys, found it endearing. Twisty spine scoliosis, he supposedly had poliio too, spent an early grade in an iron lung. Supposedly the reason he so wanted to exercise himself now, on stage, on girls. On nudity, Tippy's motto was Only God's Got Skin. Wear nothing, fear nothing. Nudity like the Emperor's New Clothes, more than met the eye. Germanic in his nudity, somehow like the multiple murderers of the 1920's, ghostly weimaraner police dogs sniffing for clues.

Tippy's nudity amazes me. How can he feel so free, safe and secure to stand there. My own fear of being seen imperfect, smalldicked and—perhaps even more shameful—chubby and soft above the belt. Some day, some girl will warmly call these "love handles" but till then its tubbiness that gets me bullied or sneered at, visually spat upon. I can't imagine myself shirtless. "How much does your belly

weigh?" taunt cruel tougher boys. I suppose I could tighten it with sit ups, but I don't lie on the floor for fear I'll be kicked. By my brother even, not out of hate for me or spite, but just seeking something to kick in general. Or my Mom, out of cigarettes or in some sort of moonstruck hormonal rage so cleaning the house.

Or my father, just come back from the military graveyard just to wreak holy hell havoc. I'm sorry, I just don't feel safe on the floor. Hold my breath with claustrophobia there. That's why I need boots, with Cuban heels at least, onstage. And Tippy sometimes grovels on the floor as part of his performance just to make fun of me, I'm sure.

After Tippy exposes himself onstage Dink, my brother and I were often asked by magazines, how do we feel while he's doing that?

Like we even care. The hopeful rabbits-foot faces of girl reporters from highschool newspapers put Tippy and the Chomps back in Egotown, or at least in their gossip columns.

Michigan men generally made do with something like a spear of pickle alongside a deli sandwich. Just as Harry Fuct had the biggest factory in the state, in our time Tippy had the biggest fucker. How the wehrmachty-luftwaffle Germans even called their secret military rocket facility Peenemunde, which in ancient old Wagnerian means "worldsized-" or "world-smashing penis". Yeah, I could hang with that. Hey, don't point that thing at me, Dr. Von Braunbison! Tippy's flying saucer sausage. Any guy who pretends he’s not looking, mentally comparing himself, is a fraudliar. Jesus Christ Our Lord, I try to keep my fingers on my guitar neck; my own vintage Fascinator. The brawling Irish brewery's authoritative Beerdrinkers' Book of Biggests now listed Tippy, in the category "Schlong", which surprised me to realize how

some Dubliners were Loeb-and-Leopold bloomin' Jewish. Freud always painfully remembered walking with his father when a Calypsobobbing black man striding toward them demanded of the father "Show me your prick!" upon which dad stepped capless, into the gutter, and he did show it, to dismissive raucous laughter and sniggering from the challenger and his rum fellows leaning against a car as well. Which thus became the textbook definition of antisemitism.

What the British call a Barenaked Bank Holiday.

It's like—no they don't, interrupted Thump. Brother to brother, he obviously doesn’t want me to embarrass myself. Thanks.

One day, making a shopping list for the Firehouse, Dink was upset when he noticed the similarity of the words "urine" and "wine" when hastily written by me in bad penmanship.

That same evening, at a gig in a greasemonkey bar in the small Motorsburgh suburb of Rack-and-Piniondale, Tippy held in his pee while onstage like a nervous prisoner in a police car. Which would be Renal and Penal. He finally whipped it out, let it fly, hosing the front row, spraying liquid rock n' roll invective.

At one concert at a special school or veterans' hospital or some such shit place, a busload of blind girls were ushered in to our concert. Tippy soon peed on them from the stage, which horrified their attending teachers though the girls welcomed and enjoyed the warm stream on a cold evening. Oh, he liked this.

The following Sunday, as he sprayed the audience from the stage, Tippy cackled that this was his Piss de Resistance. Most of the

hippies winced, stepped aside, out of the stream. Hah! His Master Pee! exclaimed a chubby girl with velcro crowfeather eyelashes, inevitably splashed a bit.

Oh no, peeing wasn’t the worst of it. A week later he got even more extreme, out there, outrageous.

A bit early for us, this afternoon baseball game. When I turned on the radio in the van, Rev. Cough-in-a-Carload thundered at the beginning of his broadcast “Every Jew is a satyr!”, his way of obliquely referring to Tippy last night. “When he brought forth his astonishment stick,...”

I turned it off. Sheesh.

Motorsburgh’s professional ball team was called the Nigerians.

They weren’t African, but much like the oriental Arabialia of the Shriners, the name sounded exotic when the team was founded early in the century. Consequently, the city’s Negro population found it distasteful, but to placate them it had taken on a couple colored players the past three seasons. In any case, a sports gambler who owed Rough Grate some money arranged for us to play the national anthem at their first game of the season.

Or wait, maybe we weren’t working with Rough yet. Some kid I knew in high school asked us to do this. He was going to ask us to play at his church and that fell through, so somehow he lined this up.

It was the last game of the series. We arrived early, set up our gear, and were determined to stretch it out. Thump gave the starspangled hymn an insistent, undeniable beat. All the kids n’ teens in the bleachers—smiling t-shirt boys in caps and girls in their summer

breasts—swarmed out of their seats and on to the field, where they danced, jumped and jostled. “Today Fuct Field is a gyration house!” quipped the crew-cut bow tie sportscaster.

But instead of the Natural Anthem, Tippy started singing "Hip to Strip (to the Nude)", which Tippy then inscribed a perfect circle with his voice. Sang in tongues, the roar of lions, all the animals in the zoo moments before and earthquake. Sang like he had a gold-plated goitre in his throat. This wasn’t a prelude to Play Ball!, this was a thunder rite in the trickster wilderness, an initiation stunt, Tippy at the height of his paleo powers. And he was a bird that descended to father their children.

Interesting girl at the party did this Interesting girl at the party did that Smell-my-finger girlthumbs' indelible ink He's in overdrive! His self-oneness full of energy like an airplane running on only a teaspoon—this much—of Atomic Communism that never has to come down. Born of his mother's iron groin, he knew how to open mouths.

The pain that even a cheese can't feel You can't get up off the phone All strapless gowns fell to the messy flo-o-or So the cows came back, with their friends…

Finally he stepped off the edge of the stage, and rather than falling, the excited teenage crowd caught him, held him aloft. He walked on the crowd's hands like a silver fascist. Like Quetzalcoatl walking on the Mesoamericans, like Pharaoh walking on the Nile. Or Pharoah riding piggyback on Moses, holding on to his horns, as they

walked upon the Israelites in the dry trench momentarily bisecting the Red Sea. He walked upon their upraised hands like Jesus walked upon the Jews. Well, on the ones that liked Him. Jumped again, backflip and three twists mid-air until he'd stand on, dance on that crowd's hands like Christ used to dance on the waters he clamed by turning into wine. Felt like Jesus on His Honeymoon. Like Officer Jesus with his brogans walking the beat, you couldn’t stop those dancing feet. He danced hip and delicate, like dancing on ghosts.

Since many of those kids had worked summer jobs as waitresses and waiters he was lifted upon raised hands like a seven-course dinner tray. White handprints left on the soles of his moccasins. You could see him for miles. Maybe that was just the extreme condition of his cutoff shorts.

Was that the movie host Nixonson announcing to the TV cameras? No…all these smug honkie headshots look alike to me.

The veteran sportscaster Tommy "The Bomby" Von Eüchre, delivering light patter about the vital young Rock band while waiting patiently to deliver the play-by-play, was suddenly tongue-tied and flabbergasted.

Choking with amazement at this great theater. That's entertainment!

Von Eüchre called Tippy "a seed broadcaster" from the stage; little would he know how right he would soon be.

There was a woman near him with a full bag of groceries—she had come to the ballpark looking for her daughter—and a Rock-andmarijuana-ennervated wisenheimer reached into it, tossed the jar of peanut butter to Tippy. Here Tippy rubbed it pseudofecally upon himself, hurled peanut butter from the stage. I'm upset, the peanut butter-in-pants Draft Board dodge—NOBODY likes shit—was thought

up by ME, but never attributed to me in the popular press.

Tippy jumped into the audience atop the full-armed shopper, so he broke bottles of ketchup, corn syrup, mayonnaise and peanut butter. When he emerged from the crowd, climbed back onstage, it looked as if he was covered in menstrual blood, her pre-sex lubrication gleet and his orgasmic squirt, his own massive emotion emission of jism, plus feces, as if he had time and inclination to stick it in there too, avoiding nothing and prompting a voiding.

Prefigured amazements and horrors yet to come, yes.

The lights from the TV cameras, still expecting and waiting for the Anthem, focused on the lubricious glint of all the fluids and pastes dripping form him. Eeuuww. And this was how the nation came to know him. The embodiment of weird, dirty Michigan.

Instead of playing a Sunday concert, we got a gig at the Sweetbison County Fair. On the way there, we stopped at that old timey park, that folly of Harry Fuct, with horse and carriage. Tippy filled his empty popcorn bag with the turds horses left in the dust, and he brought them in a box to our next gig. During the song with the uncharacteristic country hippy title “Apple Road”, he began hurling turds at the churls.

Sunday concert hurls fertilizer from bag, dogshit from neighbors at audience. Dolphinshit. Dinosaur coprolites and spoor from ancient horses that he collected or asked girls to contribute, from a box he brought onstage from which to hurl into the crowd. And they luvved it!

Yet he hit a couple of broadside-of-a-barn bikers, who were not amused. And one of those guys looks like someone wetted when

Tippy peed on chomps he didn’t like in that bar. A growling beard shook a fist, swore. Somehow I think there will be hellified payback trouble later on.

See, it's like me to catalogue things like bands and girls.

However, I still wasn't having the right kind of fun.

Grim, chilled yet portentous October Hallowe'en'd night.

Businessmen plotted ways they could have the full moon up all month for evening shopping, assembled a delegate that trudged up the hill and spoke to the University Observatory, promising even better football stadium seats for the old lady tennis-shod Astrodominiiomy Professor, but to no avail.

Autumnal cloud cover dreary night, the full moon whitening the sky. That full moon is razzing me, making fun, makes light of my situation. Oh, foul razzberry, where are my binoculars? Clinking against my sunglasses. I want to see your lunar face.

Tippy must've gotten so high, he busted the sky.

Motorsburgh. Up to its neck or ankles in blood and car parts.

Under baseball skies, Motorsburgh was the biggest city in the US on Earth, in terms of toughness. Salacious and loud as Aleppo was prudent and circumspect. The rock bawlrooms in Motorsburgh and every city were places where capital-Y Youth could dance and scream, Aleppo faculty brats buoyed by enough drugs to unkink unhappy adolescence, family, even parents in absentia. The savage pacesetter, I was kind of embarassed to be the intellectual center of laughter, agony and attention, but kept on playing like nothing was happening.

We played on off-night at the place owned by a deejay impresario called Rough Grate, after an audition where we only did two songs, if that. In that Israelitorium, that grand Rock Vomitorium, we began by playing "Blue Robots" and "Blue Degradation" on a Brusselsprouts guitar. Ignored the arithmetic of prudence with mouthfuls of pills. Tippy's nickname was Lion Lungs, but that wasn’t enough to call him the antisemitic asthmatic. Tippy used the opportunity to debut his twenty-minute rock opera song cycle electric cantata about exercise-induced asthma and breathing problems.

Singing like twigs down the throat into the stomach, guitar necks and drumsticks. And we produced a vast flow of rhythm information, a torrent of drum facts, drum data they were starting to call it at the University. We added snakehandler saxaphones at one performance to be more Free John Crow Jazz. Hordes of teenfreeks were waving their hearts. People poised on the brink of an experience. Various colonies of cupidity. To know what Youth means, read Youth's own menus. So Tippy growls: Youth seeks a balance, Rockin' on hold An Academy of Silence Where we never grow old A series of reviews and essays by Rock historian Psylocibin Gibbon (actually a pseudonym for this guy Threadbear we’ll talk about later) put Tippy and the Chomps on the map, an inflamed, glowing irradiated wart on the grasping, slapping hand that was Michigan’s.

Nothing if not innovative, Tippy was dancing in a late-model car onstage. This greatly impressed Rough, turning up the corner of his

nose as if he smelled money, as he was spending it like crazy, by the spadeful, on his upcoming stampede. Calling us to his office after the gig, he announced that he could use us, he promised, in an early slot at the upcoming day-long outdoor Goose Turd Green Hugs Festival.

Not long after setting up, our amplifiers smelled like a cop's fart.

Those Motorsburgh kids had robots in their family trees, ancestors who were steam engines. An improperly-dosed Rock intellectual, freaked out and overloaded, was led away screaming “I have a great education! I've seen the best rock n' roll bands ever!” We would be playing for gas heads, grinning at their own gas-lad dancing. This was a time when nobody needed an excuse. Hair seeks its own length to those Rock conventioneers in their marijuana haircuts. They danced for days and then they fucked.

So that season our regular venue was the Grottesco Ballroom, grotesque with gargoyles, a grotto, stone-rimmed and rustic, gnomic, Victorian lawn rollers, garden fairies and all that. So many toughs, bikers, menacing greasechimps, I wanted to call it the Guillotine Ballroom. The Grottesco had actually been built in 1910 by Fuct Automotive Car Corporation (then still Fuct Flivvers) as a big round test track called the Fuctaround, a bowl whose cars stayed up on the sides by centrifugal force. But by wartime, under the influence of big aerodynamic bombers, cars had grown too big and slow to make use of it. Now, after years of neglect and disrepair, it was reopened for Rock concerts. "For a dose of the grotesquely grandiose" ran the radio ads, a pun on a drug or social disease. The first spaceship to Motorsburgh landed.

Tippy onstage in only his loincloth, his lioncloth like Hercules

clad in a pelt. What Christ must’ve worn on the Cross, same designer. Like a spitting rooster, an arc of venom or tobacco juice in his enemy's eye, in order to steal his women. Tippy even looked like weightless Quetzalcoatl up there. The hums of Youth dispel the hohums of truth and ho-hum literally means, after all, that which a whore hums on the job. Some of the audiences' faces out there looked like a boxed collection of Halloween masks, or disinterested guests on a TV talk show just there to plug their new books, plays or movies. Early earthmen. Little greensnake heads for noses, complexions like jaguars with welts and lovebites. Some teens, at the prime of life and good looks, were baskets with Tom Sawyer-shins, or steateopygians with gourd-legs, escorted by an audience of alligators. Fat girls who looked like urns or amphorae, their boyfriends stuck into them after the show like screaming spoons.

The Grottesco was at the corner of Motorsburgh's once-posh Bayreuth Avenue and South La Scala Boulevard. It wasn't until we toured Europe that we appreciated that. Sounds impressive! Auto workers used to shower, shave and dress up on weekends and take wives or girlfriends—sometimes when times were flush, and pay envelopes and trousers bulging, both—to dance to the bosomy bigband ballrooms lining the streets. A freeway had cut the old neighborhood like Wotan's sword, Thor's hammer to the local economy, expecially the Colored Peopletown’s struggling section of it, and all but a couple of the entertainment venues were derelict. The Grottesco was the most vital, revived by the Forcefield Jr. High assistant principal (remember him?) who, humiliated at our concert there, quit the teaching profession but later decided Rock promotion

could be more lucrative in this rebellious youth-driven day and age.

Flemslinger took on the name Rough Grate, for business purposes, played long stoner album sides on the alternative FM radio station, and away we were born into the regional ear.

The Chomps were set to open up for the extremely popular, fey poetry-pounding English majors the Pinprick'd Condoms, all harpsichords, hair and sighs. We were one of the opening acts for those guys at the pinnacle of their success and Etcetera Records’ cash herd-of-beefsteaks, to rival the Beefaloes. The other opener was another Englishman, this theatrical character supposedly on the way up called Aldebbie, whose album was skippity-skipping, sprinkling handfuls of daffodils and rose petals, up the charts. He came out in a clown suit topped with a gorilla head, and then changed into a gorilla suit topped with a clown head. Then nothing but women’s underwear topped by a diving helmet, the air tubes pumping nitrous oxide so his voice would sound even funnier. Only his fine backup band, of surly and sullen ex-coal miners from recently closed mines, gave him Rock credibility.

When we played right after him, we could see him gazing at up, rapt at Tippy’s body building a house of gyrations as he sang. That wispy Aldebbie was impressed, awestruck by our volume, agression, simplicity and directness. Does rock n' roll make kids less verbal?

No, just more insistently so, louder, shorter slogan-sentences. The first University study whose multiple-choice format included "Huh?" as an answer. Claimed to discover "rock n' roll", like it had been lost colonial explorer in the darkest, incontinent continent.

Remember, Tippy had at first just urinated now and then from

the lip of the stage to the audience—Dink had engaged him in an afternoon of beer-drinking—but as we developed longer, moodier songs and improvisational jams that evening, Tippy realized he could drop trousers, whip it out (to the gasps of the audience), began stroking and finally shot his wad onto some raptly attentive girl's face or open cheep-cheep birds' mouth, by the time my masterful guitar solo crescendoed. Ahh, pure theatre.

Those girls a herd of roses. He admonished those girls Don't let the human race Cum in your face like a true feminist, yes. But then did exactly what he’d warned them about.

He sang to a pie, as he took a slice: I'll put you on a little plate And then you watch me masturbate And the crowd went wild, lapped it up, so to speak. Cumphonic, jismaphonic majesty. Something Wagner's Wotan never even thought of. Hah, score!

You saw him do that? Your sister? In the front row? Well, she’s obviously still bragging about it today, to you, right?

It was spring and people were fucking, much in the manner of early stoneage adz-eaters beneath swirlycolored Squidlight shows.

But you can't have sex with factories. I suppose sex does get one outside of one's cerebral, masturbatory ol' self. Tippy started publicly doing that. In his joyous jockstrap he danced for about thirty seconds.

Masturbating was Tippy's first act of perfection onstage, that Erection Monkey. Masterful Bison. Jacques Orpheus, the god who plays the

stringy lyre of himself.

What did Tippy think he'd prove by that? Nothing says life like masturbation.

This was even before the college fad of Jaguaring, of kids masturbating in public, a line of them rising at a football game and rubbing it before the big kick or lining up in front of a favorite store, rathskellar or pizza parlor window. Boy, it would get professors flustered when a contingent would do it during a lecture. Yet it was almost never a solo Jaguar, lonesome as Tippy acheiving his apotheosis as he did on that stage. What the engineers call a loop, a self-completing system, a perpetual motion machine. A man absorbed in sweet thought. Fountains of selfabuse keep 'im young.

Young-fried. Exposing his weaponhood like a stainless steel seedless grape. His weekend weapon. A major erection on the Sun. The kielbasaforce. A Captain’s Capricorn horn. That which he liked best, he discovered he liked even better onstage.

Hideous white cascades from his lap gun, he turned into a moment of pure orgasm. I could see it unnoticed on the shoulder of a campus cop's dark shirt. A sperm throwing eggs at a house. White varmints, wrigglers, polliwogs painted white like a slumlord’s student apartment on campus. Sometimes Tipy felt like he was but a single sperm himself, big round head on a skinny body, Sperm Eddie the spermacetti. A man weighs less after he's masturbated, for orgasm's like lifting weights, or sifting sand for a lost diamond.

And it wasn't just pipsqueak cream upon that audience either.

Tippy's onstage masturbation as a musical feedback loop, a crescendo. Unsustainable, gives faith to all indolent boys that they

too will come in a woman, the feminized audience, a performance metaphor for their uncontrollable, unchanneled, uncontaminated wet dreams will find their audience too.

He did a characteristically Michigan sleet-footed dance, slipp’ring and slideful in his own clear greasemission. d Nervously, hesitatingly but with a determined look in his off-klter eye, a curious fan approached us after the concert, backstage. Who’s this? Aldebbie pulled a tooth out of his mouth, and with it still bloody anoited each of us, vowing that once he became famous, he would manage us and produce our first of many hit albums.

“Trust me, my brothers. Soon I will be a star star star star star (five stars), and will have the power and wherewithal to get the record company to sign you—their President Dr. Seuss likes me, in every possible way (wink)—and you will be a supernovalisses, supernovels, supremonovas as well.”

What? I guess that sounds OK, weirdo.

The next day, we knew we were getting somewhere when “The Last Conservative on Aleppo Radio”, old Bock Strudelspaetzle, condemned us on his afternoon radio show, calling us the Chompers.

I didn’t like Threadbear calling the band “a wet Wehrmacht”.

He’s so fickle and hard to please, I suspect his dyspepsia initiates and writes his concert reviews, not what he hears and see. Another reviewer, probably too genteel to write "orgasmic", proclaimed Tippy had an “epileptic fit” onstage, from which he soon recovered to perform a mournful, droning sort of Ur-ballad. Ahh, those silly big city dailies, and their Teen Page content, and their absurd, misinformed concert reviews.

Oh, you sometimes write those for them? Sorry.

In the Bible, and ancient Sparta, masturbation was seen as a luxury, frivolous, uneconomical somehow. A little blond Biblethumping girl who grew up in an overstuffed dusthouse at the edge of town said the Gospel of Onan predicted Tippy because, like Christ, he wouldn't marry his brother-cousin John the Bap's first wife—are you following this?—as symbolized by Aldebbie, or Aldebbie's wayward wife, so spilled himself on the audience. The sportscaster at the ball game called Tippy "a seed broadcaster" from the stage.

Huh? Thump and I looked at each other, wondering Where do you suppose he got that? Or what admixture of drugs?

Onan, which was the ancient Hebrew name meaning onstage, dribbled on the sand rather than in his brother's wife. I generally wouldn't pork some of my brother's women, mainly because he'd kick my ass if I did. Or, maybe he'd shrug, offer her to me.

It's the Latin-speaking Church fathers who really fetishise their jism, for "cum" in their lingo means "with". A left hand if full of with.

Blessed be thy with. Masturbatio ad Absurdum, said a Jesuit rock critic. Spontaneous sperm, generated like the medievals thought vermin emerged from grain storehouses or rotting food, pottersfields or fetid corpses and carrion, etc. Wait, what was I just talking about?

The jism of joy, not morbid creepy stuff. How they say if you masturbate on meat (a burger patty, or, for women, a hot dog) and give it to a dog it will hunt down and kill your children, and any you later beget, for the rest of its life. That’s what they say.

Queen Victoria's private physician or barber-surgeon urged her,

not to masturbate when steeped in her marijuanas, calling it filthy and an affront to God. But as she made her delight so well known, the caressing hand of pleasure became a fad, a fashionable folly throughout the kingdom, and her mighty empire of Great Britain, throughout the decades of her long reign. She climaxed herself for a crowd cheering Huzzah! on her Diamond Jubilee. That's the old girl.

The U.S. Postal Service asked for a stop to boys masturbating on letters and postcard valentines to beauty pageant winners, TV stars, the President's daughters, etc.

A prominent anti-masturbation pediatrician named Dr. Tissue, author of best seller Are All Our Only Children Onanists? Don't pick up a crying baby, feeding him will only make him (always him) resort to genital self-satisfaction later on, somehow.

Yet this quirk-of-rock dates back to the early days in the Firehouse, when Tippy's late night orgasms of unbridled creativity, when he couldn't stop making up songs, the rest of us in the band chugging along.

The band as a noise travelled rapidly thru society, a firetruck siren or a burglar alarm or even the buzing of a particularly irritating large bee at a lawn party. The fame, the fame fatale of Tippy and the Chomps spread like mayonnaise over the breaded belly of this country. The newspapers called us "musical napalm with aplomb".

Something celebrity this way comes. Tippy said onstage "Everybody send me money to buy drugs" and the postal service had to add another day to the week, between Tuesday and Wednesday, to deliver it. You've got to be careful with what you read. Fame to Tippy

was no more than like after and hour or two of noncommittal nothinghappens sex, where you both want it and don't want it at the same time. Mixed reverberations of that nature. He never had stage fright for to him the stage was just a shoe bottoms-up. In effect, he took the whole audience out for a drink, taught them funny little drinking songs with just the emotional rumble under his voice.

Tippy remained the shithouse shogun of tinkletown, with that shotgun of his the root cause of his (at worst, the band’s) fame. The way Tippy used that dick he must've really learned something from his dad, but then why was he an only child? Later, on Aldebbie’s crass suggestion, he would drive out onto the stage in a golf cart, one shaped like a giant squat square dick. Always as a finale stroking, taking soundings of the sea serpent in his slacks, flipping the flibberdegibbit out for grand finale, a quick laugh and easy applause.

The crowd went wild. What the Chinese call "setting free the demon dragon". What Protestants in Boston or old-line Philadelphia call "sandblasting the brownstone". After a while he thought they called it show business because all the had to do was show himself all the time, exhibit it up there. Jumbo's snout in the Barnum's American Museum of his loins.

Nevertheless, however, the click of the prick became a shtick.

Encoded with life forces. Kept repeating his most physical mantra.

When Tippy waved and waggled it up there and shot his kielbasa handgun from the stage cum flew like a petulant Halloween Trick or Treater throwing all his candy against the wall. Onstage seances of ectoplasm, protoplasm and stereophonoplasms, source of gooey, viscous placebo fluids. "I patted my sticky business", laffed Tippy.

Then he explained: only through my "infant pleasure" do I—and I'm an only child, fer chrissakes!—feel the confidence, strength, identity and integrity to go onstage; only through fucking do I create a bond with another person, care a poodle's poop about humanity.

And, afterwards, fucking give me a reason to take care of my beautiful body! He tapped his ribls like accordion keys, popped his navelcentered belly in and out like a bass speaker cone.

This had only been hinted at before in bands like the Bonarections, stage-monitor amps stuffed in the front of their pants.

Bubbles from a dick like from Lawrence Welk's pipe, the accordion of Myron. He could use a virgin as a broom, but in these cases he was not giving it to the young girls assembled. Giving it to the general rather than the particular, all girls vs. particular girl. Counter to some kind of Biblical injunction to sock it to a girl, not the Platonic ideal of "girl." For him the particular was peculiar. Full-bodied blood-and-wine orgasms onstage, shooting out loaves of bread that smell like fishes.

His one eyed Polyphemus Perverse. A flying saucer full of sperm.

Boner farina. How long could he keep that up?

Said to have pectorals in his pecker. Rising and falling predictably, worshipfully, like the Nile. A selfish kind of self-abuse. A very careful bottle of lotion. Cat soup. Transparent glass girl sucking him off with an x-ray jaw. He dyed her Easter-egg eye. Little arithmetic. A pinchaholic. Cock like the pen that writes under whipped cream. Cock like a lightning bolt, full of discharging electrons. Cock like a ball-peen cicada. Cock as scorpion, as Sagittarian archer. Viking Whorehammer. The foundry of agreement.

Balls as the scales, weighed in the balance and found wanting. Some

like it nuts. A poolroom gun that shoots 8-balls. Balls like bride-andgroom Mustangs. Cock as communications tool, the blindman's white cane. Cicada-sperm, summertime chirpings. They still talk about that Congressman who masturbated right on the floor of Congress, gasped and died.

Cock a scapegoat sidewinder to which parents attributed all that was wrong with the world, the economy, the State Highway Department—for constructing freeways kids could run away from home on—and the Russians, who at least would impose Draconian dragoon morality when they took over with the help of these damn protesting students.

When Tippy would masturbate onstage, nusic steadily building, it would send him into an athsma attack, which was always a good show. A wet admiral squeezing the enamelled canteen. Vague-ing off right in the middle of "Sicky Sicky". I strongly doubted his assertion—"Hey, I've been to college!" he laffed—that masturbation comes from the word 'marsupial' because it's like a kangaroo joey or little platypus jumps out of the pouch called my cock." Try again, Tippy.

Why, Tippy masturbates with his left hand and would probably write with it too if he were literate. He thought he'd published a book of poems for girls under the pseudonym of "Peen S. Slippry", photographed hands in pants for sincerity, when all he'd done was show them his cock. Instead he holds the microphone with the right, when not clenching it in his jaws, between his legs, under his arm like a hand tucked there to make a farting sound. I think he must use that

microphone like others use their minds, to store impressions and thoughts. Confess to it, broadcasts into the public. It's like a third dick for him. For a while he had a microphone like a bug's eye on a stalk, a giraffe's neck which reaches to grab branches, greenbacks even.

Such shows became as intense as the clubbing of a baby seal.

I'm the guitar liar Orpheus, Tippy the self-satisfied narwhale Narcissus. So from now on, groupies would bring narcissies to throw on the stage, sometimes nasturtiums because he's nasty.

"Pumping Ship" from the stage, wagging it like a bilge-pump; the crowd composed of the children of Motorsburgh suburb St. Sandbar Shores yachting types, got it uproariously. A man with a dick is like a hillbilly with a gun, he doesn't care where it shoots or what squirrel it hits as long as it goes off, makes a big noise boom. Beware of the whipsteak. The self-saxophone, the syntax of sex. Twisting like a Beatlesnake, snake appeal in the shake pit. A comet full of cum, the electric sand from his electric sander. Spurt like sparks from a grinding wheel, comet water, slut water, like squeezing ideas out of an orange. His shamus trumpet. Demonstrating the parable of the loaves and the foxes, fucked after a concert. Girl in the front rown, he let her drive that banana Cadillac. Penis decisions. Walpurgis sperm.

His prostitute gland. Honking off his silly goose head. Explaining how an elephant keeps himself clean. A great theatricum. False evolution, mock evolutions. Priapus with a chainsaw. Priapus in the wind. Spit on the galaxies, spit into the sun.

My own fear is that Anti-Rock parents in a mother's' marching organization called Turn That Down! will latch onto and cynically exploit this equation or equivalence of Rock and masturbation.

Religious country folk dismissed Tippy as just another snake handler, albeit a reverential one. Of course it created a disturbance, arrests.

He came up before a paranoid judge who was upset that the papers misspelled his name but not Tippy's. Afterwards the Police Athletic Little League auctioned off his Liberation-stained jeans. Just as "democratic" can mean anything you want it to, anything those in power, plugged in, want. Consider that kindergarten where all children were found dead, teacher weeping and heartbroken, after a wave of me-too masturbating broke out and spread among the little conformists, self-spanking their little frontparts with pleasure until they circulatory organs and constitutions simply gave out.

Perhaps I only remain in a band where the singer masturbates onstage because I was so scolded for playing with myself when a little boy.

And maybe we didn't want to confront the central true integrityblue fact. All of this Rock business was for Tippy just an excuse to play with his pud.

Hot sweaty industrial Motorsburgh like you could grow mold.

An unhealthiness machine, streets laid out like piano keys. Dynamite country, paint-job country, burning steelmills. A drunk city.

Mumblehandlers and singing trucks. The pollution was thick like hair in the air. Motorsburgh had been steadily going downhill in both idolatry and industry. In Motorsburgh, the part of the state that furniture would be reupholstered had it become cumstained. Barely a Mothersburgh, with a hereditary demand for sexuality. A good Motorsburgh concert would be a soft breast against a ski parka.

Hippie student revolutionaries and petty thieves (one had stolen a pair of pants) on crosses like telephone poles, hooked to the humming Motorsburgh Edison and its substations out in the country. Historic black vomiting.

The following weekend the Chomps were playing for the Onlookers Motorcycle Club in a bar called Guano's Club, on Scooter Street, deep Motorsburgh. These guys were raw construction equipment, strikebreakers and gristle citizens. Their girls came riding broomsticks. A slut machine clattered off the wall. They drank local pharohs' beer like the fat of young children, gimlets of steel. "Then you got to heat the gasoline," somebody was explaining. Tough crowd.

Tippy, as part of the orgasmic process of giving, started liking to hurt himself onstage. First just showers of self-inflicted love bites but soon he was punching stigmatas into his hands and insteps with a favorite busted drumstick. Rolling in thumbtack confetti, cornflakes and cold spaghetti, punching nonreturnable Coke bottles into his head. Cutting himself onstage, that ketchup man. He wanted to bring a Hindu fakir's bed of nails up there and sing from it, with sharpened guitar pegs coming out of his chest like six macho nipples. Got into the habit of bringing a sickle onstage, which would only provoke girls in the audience from Slavic countries to throw the hammer. Bourgeois women with penknives seducing young communists, but not any more. Taking wounds like a secretary takes dictation, under-the-boot spasms as stenos slept. Like Van Gogh, the music cut off his ear. He was used to illustrate popular medical texts. The wound (and I don't mean just wound-up) man. Scourged with bicycycle chains.

Sacrificial, like the lamb of the Rothschilds that appears on their wine and champagne. In this town I would smack the guitar strings with snapped car radio aerials, and Tippy smacked his open wounds with the same. People used to throw things at his head, bounce papers off it like a night bus full of GI's throwing cigaret butts at each other with the windows open. Slingshot like a crowbar for picking crows out of the sky. A fitting finale to the manchild who suffers, not only from the krystallnacht of broken glass and shattered drumsticks. The Saint Sebastian of Rock.

He was singing I died at the sound of your face A dog in the Pound of your human race to little effect. Tippy onstage, thrashing about, the mute poetry of a young Minotaur, as he looked like a desert boot, doing ju-jitsu on himself onstage. I assumed it was called a Mass grave because they shot everybody from the church when coming home from Mass.

Tippy gazed into the crowd, saw himself reflected in it, fascinated like Narcissus. So jumped into the people pool.

Doctor Frank Wagon would not have approved, though the physician was currently distracted working on the conservative campaign to recall the City Council who had permitted Rock and Sexiness to flourish. Had he focused on his practice he might've made a bundle in office visits, for Tippy had become the pelican piercing her own breast for blood to feed her infants. The Rock star as great sacrificial host that his disciples (those girls) ate of. A fortune cookie cracked open saying "Fuck You". The dog biscuit: anatomy or anathema? The crowd didn't care and dog-danced to the Thank-You

Man. Image and Self, locked and indivisible. Where self equals sci-fi.

Standing there like the lonely suffer surfer for a minute. Grasping the air for success. Truly the noisy season when the wind got heavy. A concert in a burning rice field when the tidal wave's coming. Melted candy bar blood dripping down his cheek and jowl, nutty shreddedcoconut face. Somebody else's shit puppet. "Badness" is nothing new, he thought back to the kid in his elementary school class who chopped off his thumbs, burned his face with acid "to look more like a monster". Unfuck the scars.

One dark-haired girl’s attention started to wander, and she began filing her nails. Angered that anyone could be distracted from him, Tippy started singing to that Jewish girl: You were born in a cradle With a gun and a dreidel... though no one is really born in a cradle, more like Mother's bed, even if they're soon torn yowling from the breast and deposited into one.

Or a play pen. Geez, I hated that. The chain-link fencing around the concert kind of reminds me of that. Shit.

Spittin' acetylcholine, broken synapses crackling like live wires, jumping off the Lovers' Leap edge of the stage altogether and into the audience, spilling drinks as well as girls' pocketbooks across the floor, erasing all boundaries between him and them. When he'd jump he'd undoubtedly be thinking: if an angel fell from a cloud, would he die?

What if a car hit him? The Eagle Had Landed, and it felt like dancing on an avalanche of dead eagles. The Onlookers were amused, whooping and flinging chains at the stage. Grateful as a cut. You got to hand it to him, Tippy created his own crowd like a rabbit creates

baby rabbits, like he created himself. Sometimes Tippy would lurch around up there on stilts, sometimes the whole band would which felt really stupid, especially during a guitar or drum solo. OK, I only meant that metaphorically, don’t print that.

I didn't like the danger. Any kind of risk in Rock n' Roll seemed pointless to me, who just wanted to play well. We didn't think a whole lot about the violence Tippy was doing to himself onstage at first. I seemed to bring depth to some of the weaker, more monotonous songs. He nearly killed a lot of people by rocking at them, by spitting.

Not really but at maybe he tried. Then all that pent up thunder and lightning and volcanic stormsurge fed into the flip side of the man who took it all.

The end of the Summer and school had begun too damn early for its own good. We drove about a hundred miles north to a college in what was supposed to pass for a suburb, but this was outside of a second-tire city so tough the kids all had doggy names like Fido and Rover and Boxer and Butch, none of whom I think were Saints. Just outside of Toughtown, and Tippy and the Chomps are supposed to play for a party there. Marsh-Lowlands Mechanical High and MIddle School College. Kids out there, man, flashlights for eyes, or buried in their seaweed hair. No tenderness around here, none of the factories made lace. Nuns and their small children would love us, sure. The Generation that Needed Haircuts, right? These weren't bitter hermaphrodites but normal guys n' girls. Motorized kids who threw paint on charity luncheons. Had drinking and drugs down to a science. A vast panorama of paranoias, every bitter flavor and color

of a dead rainbow. Descendants of street urchins, they talked a patois of hard-edged, blood-edged tree talk. You had black kids dressed like white kids and white dressed like black, Italian fashions and gondolier good looks on them all. Gangs of satyrs and nymphs like "the Hitting Team". You could smell everyone's butt and I do mean everyone. Chili children, chill girls and grey girls. Too much loose pussy. No place to police. They were making cop omlette there in those days. Someone swung a baseball bat, hit a guy in the throat crushing everything and drowning him on his own cough-up, and even Tippy couldn't sing like that. Jackets crunching together like all the pins in a new shirt. Girls in one of only four acceptable blue windbreakers, nylons, short skirts and shoes with those klunky cobblestoned heels. Girls in aluminum foil jackets shiny as sunlight, wet and glistening as sugar is sweet. Girls in plastic sweatshirts.

Girls full of eye expenses. Girls in Polish nail polish. Their cosmetic'd dropped-pie faces, rigid black eyes like stained gashy wounds, stared at the bozo band onstage through shiny bangs of hair. Hair in everybody's eyes like prejudice. Kids with haircuts like penny gumball machines, like flashing pinball machines set on top of their skulls, or like the other kind of gumball machines on top of police cars. Tippy thought for a second about how he usually used ant poison as shampoo, but consider where he lives. Some punk kids had nuts and bolts sticking out of their heads. Girls ironed their hair, but boys grew it short in back but too long in front so it fell into their eyes, the opposite of the shirttails their own badly-ironed shirts. Pastel lobstertail shirts were worn out of their pants. If this look signified inner vision that was bullshit, for these dudes' scope of conciousness

would fit in a shoebox. Prognathic Piltdown-faces. Faces like the rough paper of a matchbook and full of radio-impulsivity. Thalidomide Blondes. Greasemonkey debutantes, scumbag socialites.

Switchblade combs the most style they could muster. Hillbilly hotrodders with big consumer cars. Hoodlums with typewriters on their motorcycles. Sullen Slav brothers Dan and Grant Jawbonecoleslaw, those guys who photographed a prominent U.F.O. from their north side Motorsburgh backyard, now went to this school and dressed like that. All of their pants were too tight and everybody had a hard on 'cuz this was supposed to be a party, yay! and they were young. Some of those tight tight girls you could sip their whole ass with a straw, had the winning smile sticking out in back. Elaborate teenage tribal step-by-step etiquette for getting into them. Hullabaloo bollocks.

A theatre in the center of campus with a lodestone under it that made everybody have to go to the bathroom, with an erection yet.

Twisted people drinking twisted drinks, mixtures of wine and ethnic grain distillates, never-meant-to-be and soda.

Dink was nearly as drunk as they were, so ready to play. On Dink's insistence, we had first crossed over into Canada, city of famous distilleries and smooth clean Canadians brewing the smooth clear whiskey that even Horace Mars drank when he was on the wagon from bourbon, when the ulcer activated up. To stock up on the root beer of the robots. Then crossed back into Michigan.

It was supposed to be a party celebrating the anniversary of the day the cute Burreatle died, probably of taxation, maybe of satisfaction in owning all the songs in the world, some which he

couldn't even play (the band’s drummer went broke). The rube audience expected truck drivin' bison killer music, hicks going down hills in low gear, in a lower key. The braying of asses, howls, "heehaw" refrains. The band was inarticulate yet iridescent. Tippy shook his—by now real long—fear-helmet of hair, his thoroghbred imagination racing. Onstage he was cyclonic, committing what he called his "artistic child abuse". Rocking in a semiconductor state. He spilled billiard tables onstage. The Motorsburgh audience of dogeaters only dimly understood our comedy conciousness. Voice like the mew-caw of a catbird. Soprano steel clanging. Cold sores burst with pride. The boobs and rubes howled and the earsplitters on stage howled right back.

The Mood of the Massacre. Girls squealed like exploding mechanical squirrels. Fights broke out, washroom bonfires. The glass showcase in front of the gym was shattered and people were flailing away at each other with trophies. A college so urban and tough its motto was "Come Teach or Castrate". The best events like a chandelier come crashing to the floor. In the future everything--war, business taxes, kissing-- is going to resemble a party or football homecoming parade, that is to say Cubist and simultaneous. Life as play, for the greatest hobbyists were the greatest artists. Tippy liked parties too, and the band played their butts off. Endless electronic droning, drums beating the leather jackets off the Creoles' backs. We were dressed up like Nazis of Nazareth. Know ye not that the best of ye under Christ's canopy are but chimps? A different Gospels said "but Chomps", at least the edition I had. Everybody milling about, shuffling loaferfeet in the refreshment slime. Nobody save the

inevitable liberal girls dancing in their little silverfish shoes. A girl who obviously sprained her neck giving herself hickeys. Moisturizing data on her hair. He'd spit on their flannel shirts, plotted a bomb that'd ignite the black cotton of everyone's jeans.

We played at a community college up north that specialized in turning out trappers, poachers and huntsmen. The Dean was off in his duck blind, so an underling authorized the rock concert on campus. The community college had been founded to provide skilled worker for the nearby chemical company that specialized in cat and dog poisons, both to exterminate the creatures and also largely distilled and manufactured from them. Humane Societies and dog pounds were well-compensated for supporting the industry; kittens hadn’t been drowned in a well in nearly a century.

She looked older and sexier than the front row girls. "So suddenly I felt like I was destroying the Mother" analyzed the amateur psychologist Tippy.

As if he could reclaim the semester he felt he

wasted at college, when he found out the dewy, willowy doe-eyed blonde fawn in the front row was the hunter-Dean's daughter, he leapt upon her and pummeled, with both fists, throbmaster turgidiferous pelvis. Tippy and one big healthy athletic midwestern girl, locked in their own sol-o-sombre bullfight. He danced atop her in rapid little flamenco-steps, stomping and clomping his high heels upon her face and chest and hands and feet and backside. Leapt from the stage, rode her like a pony chimpanzee. If only he could break through her jeans, hymen, heart or some such something; girl as time machine. In great spinning cyclones of boredom Tippy stepped into a snowstorm of applause and whoops, a shindig of rock angst or a rock

donnybrook. The crowd was on stilts. He'd galvanize 'em with his thunder mischief. Honeymoon with a nightmare. Date you like a snake dates a mouse. All that sex was just practice for him.

Suddenly bobbing up and down in there, his soul had an extra human head. The vaunted audience-participation chant "Up the Women"; he hollered back "Gimme you."

Tippy that janitor of jungle genitals, they expected him to show and unleash the Holy Worm but instead he got violent. Without hesitation the screaming meemie leaps shock troop into the audience, a satellite that farts and sneezes, latching his fingernails into the face of a girl brunette, her chilidog and sirop Coke paper cup spilling tumbling sweet from slender fingertips, between dimestore brass turngreen rings with birthstones and moodchangers as a scream takes flight up smooth throat from glossed-over lips between two peaperfect rows of gleaming white teeth. He dove from the stage into a roiling tangle or knot of pre-teen dominatrixes, leaving him with a sprained ankle. Yet he left a thousand excited sparks of memories in the little female hands or shoulders or polytails or barettes that actually touched him, and they glowed like radium nightlights for weeks. Moonlanding on her like egg hitting the griddle, congealing sizzle, like a cedar picnic table falling out the back of a moving car, the fuckin' physics of it. Hands huge paying customers.

Writhe, writhe, and before he knew what gives his manhandles dug deep, tearing into the transparent face with bone talons of soul.

Slicing a ripe tomato, a tomato frozen in a refrigerator turned on high.

Nails normally bitten to the quick ploughed canals of ruby into a receding asterisk pattern. A girl with a bad complexion like the

upcoming moon landing site, a form of facial lunacy from being out in cars, on golfcourses etc. too much, "popular with boys". Skin is a living thing, administering to her complexion, popping zits like a fur hunter clubbing baby seals. Salty perversity. The hysteria of the hydra. Gripping like glue Tippy shook and batted, he held and spun a baby scarecrow on a scarf. The crowd jostled into a medium, loud croaks diffused the rock hum load. My brother was groovin' on it, couldn't tell if the claret came from her eyes, mouth, hair or formed right on her tight polyester shirt and jewellery. At the College he performed a new one he'd written, "I'll Tear You Apart Like a Fish" when, motivated by the sperm of the moment, he leapt upon that girl in the front row. Prey and predator alike grappled back and forth on the floor, Tippy tore off a piece of her shakin' shirt and her legs kicked out fast and sharp. Scratching that girl's face like pioneer autopsies.

Her teeth exploded out of her mouth. Real black grease coming out of her, all over the stage, a wounded car on the bed. The night class sort of shrieked and laughed, crepe paper drifted down and got scared, backed off, surfaced, surged and danced a little. That was not very nice. Tippy kind of curled out a laugh because he wasn't so bored anymore, but for the lacerated girl it was an unladylike nightmare. Face opened up like a hydrangea. Poor rended friend.

Man, that was whorecide. Relax, a lot of kids get used to being called Sewage Face. "Maybe it's an emergency that's supposed to happen" said a bewildered girl, wondering why she wasn't a nursing student.

As a child, Tippy told a little Jewish girl that on Purim she could poo on the rim. She ran home crying. Later he leapt from the stage atop her at that upstate college concert, now an adjunct Poetry

instructor in her early twenties, attending with a foreign student. Tippy leapt on that front row girl, rode her like a rodeo bison. A neo-Quagga bucking, braying, whinnying complaint in nasal midwestern lady accent. Scripture tells us Abraham didn't kill Isaac, but cut him enough to drink his blood like an afternoon-TV vampire. At least swirl it in a refreshing glass of milk from a buxom milkmaid who recently calved. Kosher, shmosher, sounds tasty to me.

Still, business was business. When we went to the proctor of the college fun council to get paid, we found out the broken girl was the Dean's daughter. Would not have approved had he heard of it, and all that. Oh shit, O Mind, would a hassle follow, would there be Hell to pay? What if it was my sister that was chopped up? Thinking fast I tried to give the excuse, "It's all right, she's his girlfriend" but the Dean wouldn't buy that. We called the daughter of the Chairman of the English Department to bail us out. She brought down to the station well-known local bailbondsman Horace Mars, who sneered at us professionally over his bifocals and declared us a sorry sight, but was happy to take our money and do his thing.

Her father, the Relax-a-thon Community College President, had ties to a fierce local Republican politician, whose law-and-order brother (a cleaned up version of Thump) had taken a job in the Nixon administration. A few phone calls, and every state college, land-grant, federally funded, prison, jail, community center or poor farm gig they'd lined up to sustain them the next few months suddenly now dried up.

RIOTOUS ROCK RUMPUS: DEAN'S DAUGHTER DAMAGED UPSTATE said our first clipping from the big metropolitan Motorsburgh daily papers. Not the first time Tippy had destroyed a

girl. Her real boyfriend was mighty pissed that she couldn't kiss anymore after her braces had been ripped right from her mouth, taking half the jaw with it. Lawusits were sure to roll in, unless she could "Please, Daddy, don't, it was all my fault" her father out of legal action convincingly enough after he'd put down that phone to his staff of lawyers. After all, she'd voluntarily gotten lost in the irresponsibility of Rock. Nobody forced her at gunpoint to come to that dance party, and it was probably a moment she'd cherish all her life, meeting Tippy.

He was just a thoughtless dog biting a neighbor's child. But he could probably be very tender too.

Oh sure, Tippy loved all the attention slathered upon him, older women gazing at his eyelashes. Back in Aleppo, the horny wife of a Books Department Professor called the Firehouse, offered to help Tippy write his autobiography if he'd include their quick, torrid interlude in it, maybe in the Introduction.

Little did we know the wire services picked the story up, and it caught the attention of a confident new Top-of-Their-Popularity British Hitmaker and nuvostyle-setter who called himself Aldebbie. He had a nose for the sprig-of-the-moment, and thought violence might be just the paprika the recipe of Rock needed this season. And made a note to get in touch with its pesky Michigan perpetrator.

Years later, Coral would claim that she was the one mauled at this concert, taken up to the College by an older boyfriend. But we’ll get to her story in a bit.

I might understand violence, what Tippy must've been feeling, in a way. Sometimes it all got too much for me too, and I'd speed out into the country with the car radio on so loud. I say Run Run Pshaw.

Of course, I'm a fascist. Once I flew over Farmer Gregory's in a World War II airplane with teeth painted on it, and was rich enough then to bomb without fear of retribution the parking lot of my old high school on my way, where all the stupid contemptuous jocks were still—two or three or four years after graduation—hanging out, drinking Bucolic beers. Nyaah nyaah nyh-nyaah nyaah. Cutey Chomp says that!

There were more Rock Festivals that summer, and it seems like we were booked to play at them all. ). Teenybopper potpourri like the Hugs Festival and the IWuvYou Weekend. Even that PopRocky Festival, sponsored by RockyPops, nutty frozen dessert on a stick.

While plenty of Rock concerts had deep ritual and rural consequences, there was a long-running annual grassroots music festival called Sweetbison, all grass and groin, in both senses of "grass." Drugtaking deluxe. Those hippie breadcrumbs. Perhaps my bourgeois-aspirant aristo-contempt shows. Hirsute hippiemales, full of wheat germ sperm. A few orotund marijuana bison, shirtless and spilled over. Dancing, poured-into-faun’s gauze, un-underwear'd girls, bellies and hips smiling like big wooden bowls, living out on Love Farm Pig Flower Commune. Just as at the Sunday concerts in Aleppo, each Festival sported stout Eat, Bubbeleh earth mommas at the organic food booths, lentils for yentas, lemme tell ya. Female root vegetables with ladles, serving spoons. Girls in turnip tops, crackly baked potato-skin clogs. A lost hippie child at the Festival named Vinegar Beansprout, whom the announcer kept calling from the stage with increasing worry.

And our band, fronted by its lost child, a Nature Boy, a Green

Man made up of marijuana, a wicker man containing squalling underage groupiettes (borrowing feminine serviettes) within. Tippy perused the hippie girls, evaluating and concluding there was less yeast infection than yogurt culture down there. K’mere, Kefirikunt.

Rock concert hippie food booth Lentils for Gentiles, distributed by a weird church, green-Christing all passersby.

Fieldstoned hippie band singing "Let me Water your Farmer" or something. Subcontinental, Kashmirified hippie bands, wreathed in incense, djinn and paisleys, playing tabla and labia. I was incensed just to see small-town Michigan dudes like this, playing saffron-red Indian Indians. A band of wicked farm boys, who'd as soon plant a corpse as crops.

I've said it before about the hippie audience, I'll say it again.

The reminded me of those ramshackle regiments of concentration camp prisoners press-ganged into fighting for the Reich, distrusted by the Wehrmacht. Their crest was the flag of Israel, which somewhat irked the gypsies, Mormons and homosexuals from the camps, but they were still glad to breathe some fresh air, have a rifle in hand, be a part of their generation's war effort.

The HunterGatherers, a bunch of wooly mammothsmen from the plains and forests across the Motorsburgh River, got all rock and roll men stomping and snorting with the braggadocio of the quagga, hoofed n' horny. French missionaries, trappers and little brothers founded cities by the Grandiose Lakes Up North so Christ could land, entertain the Indians.

No-sweat bands. Bobbed-wire hair, frothy spikeless hairstyles.

And Bob Frothyspikes was the electrician hired to make sure

everything was plugged in safely. Like the piano wire atop a stern schoolyard fence, the diamond-wire grid imbedded in the safety and security glass.

A 1950s teenage weeper by Johnny Holocaust, who changed his name for business reasons, was being embarrasingly covered by he Feh!, sneering shruburban Maccabeatles, stumblebum drunk on their sweetly wines and contemptuous reefers, lurching and galumphing around the stage. Next, please.

One psychedelic rock band, lithe and wan as plants in nutrient fluid, was the Hydroponics. Then the Stargazers' long jams took as long as interplanetary spaceflights, left us in suspended animation much of it.

The Onwaterwalkers were one of the big name bands at that Festival. Their Christ of Recognition looked like Godzilla by Night.

They had Barnbuster amplifiers that looked like old weathered barns.

Barns full of buffalos fed on beer. Really backwoods bands with prehensile country tails. Ridiculous songs about "Stoned Fire" and the like. I hate Fauxmericana. Evidently a lot of these guys thought singing songs with the voices and inflections of old black men was transgressive, as (in my household at least) using Yiddish words in conversation that I’d picked up from MENSCH, SILLY and CRAZED humor magazines was, so shocking to Mom. Masculine? Tippy so outflanked them that every band might as well have grown breasts, then and there.

Tippy sneeringly called the Piston Rings, that old hot rod band now trying to reinvent themselves as "hip", the Pissed-On Onion Rings. He considered ordering some onion rings, whipping it out and

completing the prank, to give to them, onstage just before they went on. Haw! Score! Not your sense of humor, I see.

Bigfoot scalpers at the concert. Summersweat shirtsoak turning me into a mosquitosfood cake. Wronghaired teenagers. But others with flowers for nipples, in a round robin sky, a robin's-egg-bluesky.

Female musicians were something new, but the promoters thought they'd give them a feminist try. Miniskirted bands where everybody's recently had an abortion, if only for the novelty, to be contemporary. The heavy rock women's trio Third Trimester umbillifed bass guitar and kick drum throbbing like a gestating fetus.

Amplifiers and PA system not only in stereo but in utero.

Coral said she saw them, and was most impressed. But what did she do with that impression?

As a prank Thump arranged for the FGs musical instruments to explode at the down-strummed E chord at the end of the first virst of their regional hit “(We Need a) Virtual Revolution” in a grand flurry of phosporus, napalm fireball and gelgenite. Hah! Take that, schoolyard rivals! Nevertheless, the carnage soured our friendship with the Peoples’ Pumas, and their newspaper began calling us Honky Corporate DeathTrip Sellouts.

It's 1970 now, so we're supposed to have all kinds of drugged sex. And loud simplified music. Sugar, sugar, sookie sookie now.

I talk like my guitar solos? You're not the first to say that, kiddo.

But thanks, I guess.

When I heard we’d been booked at the lakeside Rock festival called Goose Turd Green, I immediate felt at home with the "turd" part,

Tippy at the advertised potential to goose a lot of girls walking by, prior to penetration he resolved.

It was across the state, five miles from nowhere, between the two liquor-gas-live bait crossroads Farmersfield and Freebase Lake, MI. The one probably not named for junior high teacher Mrs. Farmersfield though, though perhaps an ancestral family acreage.

This was the biggest Festival we’d played, and it made Sunday in the park, or even the baseball game, look like small, inbred potatoes.

The weather promised beige days for a summer full of engagements. The sky was that Stubborn Kind of Fella blue. The Giant Gig was filmed by local educational public access TV to be picked up by satellite, some beatlebrau kid who wanted to make documentaries. Workers bringing up heavy ceramic amps for a hollow, red clay sound, amplifiers named after historic U.S. Chief Justices. An amplifier named The Inarticulate Businessman. You, or timid bespectacled nerdboys, could hear the profanity that began each song from a basement over a mile away, the God Bless Technology of those big NATO amplifiers like mules turned up all the way on the Gold Rush trail.

The Brave Parents are on the festival bill? That must be a misfit's misprint. Whose honky parents would wade into this tidepool of revolutionary youth?

Psychedelic acid-battered groupie troupe the Lovefallopian Breadflowers wandered around trying to look important and welcome.

They even put out an album five years ago, but they look as if they'd aged twenty since then. But Tippy was OK with that.

The Human Dobro slid her fingers upon her stringed torso like

Hawai'ian glass or Nashville metal, sometimes gently tapping her resonator, smiling seductively. Suggestion of self-satisfaction, something I know about from mom's women's magazines. There weren't many women in rock, in command, especially in the midwest, so all the young ladies in the audience were most impressed. Maybe it will inspire some to seize the stage, besiege the stage and the roiling testosteraudience. We shall see.

It was OK to play longer songs now. Hippie FM deejays liked album side length compositions that they could put on, step out and smoke a joint without having to give comments or change records.

Their favorite was that new rock opera "Tempt Ya, Tony" you hear all over the radio about attempted seductions, soothing renunciations, the temptations and agony of the Saint in the desert, based on that well-fed, smug French recluse's novel full of ancient monsters and heretics marching and mincing by. A parade, a parody, a pageant, a triumphal march, a laundry list of misshapen wooden soldiers. A kiss, a piss, a party. Tried to read it once, couldn't focus. Someone stole a copy of the 2-disc album from the record store, and I could barely get through the pompous liner notes. Nevertheless, the once-natty and trim, now shaggy and bedgraggled English Mudlands band struggled through boring live versions of its songs.

One soul band that now lived on fried psychedelics, and outlandish clothes, performed their opera Black Atlantis, how all the slaves cast overboard swam home to a shining meta-Africa. Soon high school textbooks cynically picked up on the idea, claimed all found safety and thrived, so white people wouldn't feel so bad about slavery. It was always accompanied by an artist's conception of

smiling naked natives eating fruit. And that's why they called those colored candies Life Savers. After their set, that band, so loosely gallumphing and bumptious onstage, galloped into those willing girls like foaming horses mounting giggling nereids in the waves. Some girl-steeds' scrawny storybook bodies actually looked more like seahorses. At least what I could glimpse backstage.

Tippy called this festival the Great Yeshiva of Rock. A gaunt, skullshaved saffron robe passerby overheard him, hollered Yeah, Shiva!

Our playing was incendiary, but the crowd made an asbestos gesture. An octave of energy from Tippy, as Octave Mirabeau bands were milling about, arguing rock politics, wiggy, round blond-faced and big-jawed. All feared the guillotine of changing tastes.

Of course I was aware of the competition, my jousting knights of the guitar. I was embarrassed at the manic guitar solo by fuzzball-haired English wag Black Passingpond. Something to learn, copy, surpass and trample into dust here. Guitarist who took the name of a deadly accurate machine pistol because his family name was—I kid you not—Fumblefingers climbed onstage and performed the psychedelic spanking. Other bands’ guitarists were but Pharisee horsemen brandishing Calvary sabers. They couldn't kill a Christ with their riffs and fingerwork if they tried. And I'm not sure they do, not sure they don’t. I was the day's big guitar hetero, or what the hippiefrisco rock musicians call one big guitar hetch-hetchy, playing through big Vaginaophone speaker cones. A sweet petitie Jewess brought Dink a jug of grapey Pomonaschevitz wine, and he liked that.

The Goose Turd Green Rock Festival was a new town, demographically Michigan’s third most populous that weekend, a flesh ocean. Student hippies in their vegetable shoes, people as letters on a page. He saw at least one naked in the crowd, body surfing on his summer date. When I see hippies I think, sprouts equal sperm.

Friendly scars on a friendship sea of how many ships? A great rock plebescite, a powow and a potlatch. Free concerts where you vote with your feet and not your dollar. Head full of cold snuff. Then a sunsweep and mosquitoes buzzing in a boogie. For historical perspective I'd be tempted to compare this Rock festival to a Nazi party rally where everyone was frantically chanting "Relax". A picknicky sort of event, promoted by trust-fund bubbeleh’s Gary Shekels and Tom Spondalix, putting it on with their fathers’ money from development and construction of Motorsburgh suburbs. At the festival were plenty of God-is-Dead Heads, those Nietzchean athiestfreaks. Excursion dancers. Tattooed Jews. Christ, everybody looks like Christ out there. Christ even goodnaturedly appeared as guest vocalist with the band Kiss Kiss You're Under Arrest. The nerve of them, they even scheduled us after this band that stupidly, contemptibly, deigned to musically ask the Jewish question "What is the Meaning of Human Life?" Made me think of Tippy's racesubliminal freedom quest versus my New England Puritan poontangpunani ancestry, of the burning witches and branded adultresses teaching school.

Those hippies, they want to rebuild the shtetl out there on the land. But for that, Tippy doesn't really need me, or the others, and would probably have just as easily substituted a twanging rubber band

or ball-point pen spring, a slinky toy or electrified ice cube trays for our guitars. Made me realize humanity is a comic strip for the amusement of the atmosphere or higher forms, other spheres as they commute, or maybe that too was the brown acid.

Magi were there, and even Adam had attended one of our concerts. Merlin appeared onstage to quiet the crowd with spells.

He'd designed several guitar devices where the sound played through tiny boxes full of eye of newt, or gorgons' heads full of snakes seething and hissing. Not static but sadistic electricity. Gold in the treetops. Spades from Spain. A thousand flowerpowers waved and waned so Tippy leapt into the effect. Bathkeepers, barbers, fortunetellers, hangmen and gypsies all responded favorably. My first exposure to really shopworn girls. Photo-dancers and style mammoths. Some bands at that festival found their Christmas wrapping-paper suits stuck to their perspiring bodies in the heat, cheap vegetable dye inks running in stinky streaks, flowing and running as aimslessly as their druggy dietetic music.

We got a dirty look from a guitarist in the FGNS called Prisonfinger—called that for how he arrests, interrogates, bullies the long notes into confession—but the ironic thing is, the guy actually ended up in prison.

At the Festival, many blissful women held or were surrpounded by hippie children with names like Azimuth Mustang Venice. A world of children breast-fed for as long as possible. Hippie girls so organic they have recycling bins between their legs, compost heaps between their teeth when they stupidly smile. Tippy geysering all over the state, soon into those girls, I observed grimly, behind mirrored or

deeply tinted prescription sunglasses. Observing the spectacle through spectacles. Sparkling wavy maidenheadhair. Their mothers a 50 per cent solution of menarche and anarchy.

Purity of a kind of soup just called "Vegetable". Yeah, these people were Party Vegetables all right. Like looking thru a seed catalog out there, all those flowery heads withering blossoms of drug intoxication. Plenty of hippies on the hoof, bovinely skinny as Vermont cowsw Waterchrists. The whole folks catalog.

Unchristened children, uncircumcised Jews. Potato-and-marijuana eaters, when hippy equals hillbilly in those odd woody Michigan towns. Driving up in hippie vans that ran on burning American flags.

Hippie cars with their tires full of yogurt. Hippies who would smile eating organic cockroach granola. Natural hippies who shot salad.

Satori'd patrons of a natural foods concession blissfully sipped potato juice. These hippies were like individual grains of rice, individual the way the bottom of swimming pools are all painted the same color so they'll be identifiable from the air. Jackrabbit backpackers in truth shoes. Shoes painfully comfortable. Dancing abundantly, Uncle Sam-arms and anus-legs all over the place. Angle dancers. A rattlesnake spider sidewinder scorpion came up through the hole in his moccasin, bit his foot and made him jump like that. Everybody wants to get into the act. They did snakewarmer dances, formless and listless high-energy stomping. When hippies levitated the Pentagon, plenty of overpriced and underbidden nuts and bolts which they scrambled to pick up, drove off to commune workshops and garages to rebuild, some into dope pipes but to the more imaginative, electric guitars--just add an ax handle--or amplifiers, or the generators

to power similar festivals, or prepared pianos. Those natural chimeras included kids with bluejay haircuts and girls with foxsquirrel-red ponytails. Those country Buddhas had tribal marijuana-planting ceremonies and their dances at free concerts brought on rain as they moccasin-thumped and padded in the dust. Rock festival like an automobile graveyard. Huddled masses yearning to breath free marijuana. Gathered out there like all the cockroaches in a haunted house. After a while those hippies just started smoking their own beards or long hair, inevitably breaking their strands of beads and absentmindedly swallowing them as pills. Though he liked the drugs, Tippy was never a hippie. The Hippiedrome that was the hippiedom of Christ, the Christian cholera of love broke out in Michigan that summer. The summer no longer fed only the swimmer. In festival poignancy always a few hippies died of summer sunstroke, washed away by the current while bathing nude, or the couple run over by a farm tractor that backed up over them while making love in a ditch.

Can you tell, I have opinions about them? Did those flower children, in their garden-hose oceanic feeling, appreciate what was going on up onstage? Especially when we played? Those hot water bottles of soul, filled with the gunbreath of marijuana, panting longdistance greyhoundbreath as they did their breadfoot dances.

Emptying a water bottle, wineskin or koolaid pitcher on the parched crowd reminding me of garden-hose baptisms at abortion mills, spraying the filled bags of trash. A bucket went around raising money for Candide the Candidate, another for a fake political prisoner. What a festering festival. Pastures of hippies who dreamed or imagined themselves nude, wearing the shoes they were born in, looking back

to the days women would squat and lay eggs. Ringing the perimeter of the park the Portaplastic restrooms were even labelled MEN, WOMEN and NUDES. Bands were accosted with the old autographon-a-breast-or-buttocks trick of festival nudes. Fringed buckskin foreskin; duckskin, beaded fuckskin. All got wet as they clamored into the lazy unemployed river. Germans of the 1920s were into Nudism as much as they were Naziism, so I can get into watching this, studying skinnydippingology from the shore alongside emaciated sons of science-fiction in floppy suede hats and sandals.

To Dink the crowd was like bubbles in beer or ale. The spectrum on the glass when the sun hits the foam, or the moist medical speculum.

As the stormed fences tumbled, the ticket booth knocked over and rolled down the hill with the panicked ticket-taker still in it, the phalanx of massed hippies surging through the disarray looked like historic military campaigns. The battles of Dachau and Auschwitz, great sea and air battles with massed navies and squadrons attacking the embattled Hebrew fortresses.

The festival headliners were a band rich enough to put a man on the moon. Some of those top groups were Englishly civilized bands and frightened to tour with us so they got Masai, Maori, Ghurkas and Afghans as roadies and security guards. They got so good, tamed audiences with a whip and chair, a lassoing lariat thrown around that crowd. Their music cause children to vomit forth cooked pins, dogs to run loose at night. Waves of ch'i suitable for acupuncture or moxibustion. Our sound was immaterial and immanent. The sound of

one hand clapping but amplified real loud. This was about when massages got popular.

We were subjected to a set by the eccentric and cynical California musician Mushroom Cabbage. A jugband called the Post Hole Diggers—people thought it was a misprint intended to mean they'd fill them with pot—had just played and a band called the 500,000 had just put away their equipment under a hot uranium sun.

While the next band was setting up the sound system ran thru a side of the Little Opie and Opiates' "Of the People" album. With the bad sound system some bands sounded like a washing machine laboring under too much detergent. One band ate only scoopfuls of while sugar on their whirlwind tour until they collapsed in the middle of a jam recorded for their live album. But times were changing, another band ate only fruit and garden vegetables while another ate nothing at all, fasting until they got stronger and louder and louder and better and better until everybody was listening, everybody hummed their songs.

Once the United States Marine Corps Harmonica Band started playing those perfect characters' hit song instead of "Hail to the Chief" when the President arrived. Ha ha, not really, but wouldn’t that be funny if so? Instead, a bunch of Southerners called their Rock band "Bubba", southern hippies whose songs about marijuana swingsets, would sound ridiculous in five years but not twenty. Smoking a sunpipe, a peacepipe like that of the Pot-o-what-me-worri Indigents, in a peace laundary. In wild animal lethargy, your children's children will indulge in this celebration phenomenon too.

Our guitars we tuned and turned up with the sound of a sword being annealed, or rigorous product testing by an independent

laboratory, full of door-slamming machines, makeup on rabbits’ eyes, etc. We hit that young audience like a moral fragmentation grenade.

In those days we transcendentally meditated with the radio full-blast.

Full frontal amplifier and alternative crotch guitar. Toughened up enough, we had a drum set designed to look like a black cotton t-shirt.

Deranged physical pharmacist mounts the mortar and pestle of the drums. Drums beating on the leader's chest, like the crash of a seagull on a beach. Unstable and unstoppable. I like it when whe're really playing, really getting good so the wires in the amplifier get hot n' sensate, the tubes start glowing so much that they're having sex in there. At this summer rock concert our music snuffed out the sun, only briefly as when an Apollo spacecraft passed in front of it.

Sizzlepuppies. Hot as a leper up here.

Where was Tippy? Tippy was in, or under, a trailer with a frizzheaded girl, showing her his grace bone, his trouser knife.

Making machete paste. Pan on a minibike, Priapus on a chopper or in a VW bus. He came bounding onstage still sort of zipping up and was soon spasmodic with his band of ultimate culprits behind him. The flight from reason was swift and sure. How Hitler would sing (with, or to, his generals) that "his heart would Cracow open," and expected them all to laugh, or nod and smile warmly at the jest. I'm not going to say Tippy expected that of us, even at his most irritatingest. Tippy began a sad song with the line about A tear from her eye nailed up on the wall. Anything he wants he gets, asking for it in a cuttlefish voice.

Batwinged words. Sang like a bison with its windpipe crushed by a lasso rope or an ex-presidents. As a band we were like those early dudes driving herds of buffaloes off cliffs to slaughter. The Gutter of

Sound approach. A few hippies began hurling natural farm eggs that still had the sperm in them. But he liked those little peace vegetables, those peaceful negotiators, and felt a sympathy for their dysentery of dissent. They danced like medusae dancing in water, expanding and contracting, transparent legs and dresses. The audience a smash of cattle, braying, mooing, doves waiting to be crushed by a magician.

The shadow of an airplane panicking a turkey flock that crushes itself againt the fence. The First Buffalo Herd Stampeding. The only bison there, a little albino one, was crushed against the crowd. Terrified, it suffered heatstroke, carried away by medics and was the only casualty of the day except for a suspicious amount of stillbirths, maybe the brown acid was bad.

Yet the summer day was vibrant, life-affirming. And I realized what a spiritual experience this all was, is.

God's guitar string, which all touches upon vibrational and wavelength theory. God's obviousness. I just get jammed up with pleasure. An anesthetic aesthetic. Pandering to Christ. God is looking at me funny, sidelong glances out of the corner of his eye, and the Star of Bethlehem—sounds like some kind of stolen diamond ruby or topaz—is the glint. God is the glare. We're all LSD. Tippy as the Son of Rock. Tippy as Christ-killer, therefore I will dwell upon the prey; God's guillotine. Christ found himself Ali-Baba'd between forty thieves. Apostles like a Rock band raising Hell, raising forgotten songwriter Lazarus. I smell the first few notes of his hit.

Priests without the Saint Sebastian of Rock, or so often confusing their favorite Rock star with Christ.

You don't discover God playing the Rolling Calves’ or the Rowing Boats’ songs at a teen party in a church on Saturday night, girls bragging about how they did it with Bobby on the altar. The acoustics were right then; the Apology of the Earth. Christ's concepts of astronomy.

I make this guitar wail like a dying nun at an office party. It pours water on a dying nun, a nun in man's clothing. Our Lady of the Rifles. Rock’s compulsion to invade God. Christianity equals personality, and I've got it! I didn't set out to explore the theological implications of Tippy and the Chomps. We were Tippy's Disciples and Apostles, puzzles and pustules.

Aww Tippy, is it just a journalistic cliché to call you a Christ figure? I mean, we don't celebrate Tippymas, you know.

Sang "My Love is like a death ray, my love is like catnip..." from "Do You Want My Pencil Shavings?". He had his tongue in so many girls' mouths bees would come to sting it, it had become that sweet.

This would give a bulging, buzzing slur to his words, as the honeyed lyrics rolled out of his mouth, originating in a heart like a swarming hive of jive. A theater of girls. The crowd loved us back and showed it as human pistons dancing, jumping up and down like I would sure want someone to behave in front of my band. Tippy outdoing them all like a mad god, the King of All Women. More sex and sexuality than you could possibly use in a lifetime. Audiences love to be teased, fingered around where they sit. His criminal magnetism, still giving only about .1% of himself but to most that was too much. Tippy was dancing like a fishing lure, hooking, catching, yanking the audience.

Girls did menstrual dances, and a little girl named Coral, just arrived from Florida, was enjoying her own first menstruation that day. On the box it said You can swim, you can go horseback riding, but it didn't say anything about Rock. While her mechanical bottom half pumped and flowed, her concious top half was fascinated by a kind of music she never heard on father's car radio, a kind of performance and sincerity never seen in commercials on TV. Something out there, in that lead singer, she wanted. A child with a purpose.

The audience continued to bounce around like the representation of electrons under pressure in some old science class film. The old pigs-in-a-blanket or, more accurately, nuns-rising-fromtheir-graves-in-moonlight cliché. Matted hair girls in greasy, stained tanktops, barefoot beneath dusty jeans staggering dimly, dumbly, forward. Tippy, a real Meglomaniac of the People, leapt into the audience like a box of blazing jellybeans. Flipflop, climb over the snowfence into the audience to interview the crowd, hypnotize it. Look into my eyes, you are getting sleepy... Since the festival was held on old Squattowatomie hunting grounds, a tribe that wouldn't vacate their teepees after the whole kitcaboodle was sold to white farmers and developers, Tippy wore moccasins in their honor. Held on the site of the first airport. Climbed back up. Crashing down again from the stage crying "I love the cement floor". The first time he dove off the stage he actually had slipped on some ape's banana peel and lost his footing. From hippies smoking bananas scientists extracted that "instant banana peel" stuff that swept off their feet black or student rioters to slip n'slide into incomprehensibility and incomprehension.

Yet the manufacturers were on strike when Motorsburg burned. Like Mike and Louie of the Chomps, I must be Tippy's second banana.

Size or activity means nothing. Here I decided when I'm gaunt I'm

going to be supremely handsome. A face for Michigankind. To look at slutty-looking girls was important in my youth.

At the Festival, a sing-till-you-shut-up ethic onstage. How the song hears us. Especially since everybody's high, tripping. Tippy, of all of us, seems at the verge of losing control, staring at the audience like a hawk or falcon promoted to the rank of German General or Field Marshal. All the little honeysolubles were lapping it up, loved into giving up their warmwax and wet philosophy. That luminous paint of a naked pubis attracted attention. Then he started seizing what he wanted out of the audience as part of the show. Remember, hippie girls didn't wear too many clothes in the summertime. Fourth of July in Hell. The scary sweetness of the Chomps' music, what one critic called "our punchdrunk colloquialism", hypnotized maidens and brought them down to the spotlight—bloodstained them with light—to the very feet of Tippy with all this energy draining out of him, from his eyes his brow under his cheeks a fount. Tossing nighties onstage.

The animal that cries like a baby. I played on cooly, like a fatigued library.

Tippy spied this big blowsy experienced hippie girl Coral extraspecial transfixed. Thought: I must fuck those big stoned eyes of blue, incredible congress of flesh and pigment, push in the rubbery cornea, cut my tongue on the iris, posess waxed coral skin, rose mouth, only a pedestal for those eyes. To push it in, swirl, mingle slippery with tears. Her heart was swelling up like a paper bag, ladylike mashed potatoes. His billygoats' gruff spelled only two choices, troll or tail under that bridge. Take off your whiskers clock!

She asked for it, jumping onstage and lifting up her flowing skirts

around her barenaked waist like a hospital bracelet. Not really, he just imagined that. But strongly.

He leapt in love, tree shrew in outer space, a bursting sugar bomb of loud wreckage. Quick as a cricket’s wink, she was out of her clothes, her Mexican silver turquoise belt unhooked and tight jeans yanked down enough. Slurped her beer bottle breasts which at that moment probably were pretty full of yeast-sour homebrew beer.

Kissed her sandpaper parts. Mopped up with her breast sponge. The dairy farmer who gets his head stuck inside an udder, splashing the contents about as he sang in the echo. Didn't miss a beat as the crowd egged them on, doing it bumblebee-style, in the butterfly position, two gristle citizens in the God's position. Tippy and that girl did the Velvet right there on the ground. Humpa humpa bumpa bumpa. What an incentive to playing real good. A crowd of his sperm sang harmony. A descending progression of power chords, drum roll, cymbal. All over but the feedback.

I, for one, was glad to see him cover the public spurt with a woman for once. The rest of us considered taking turns with her but by then the set was over and we were expected to leave the stage. It was a small gesture, applying a woman from the audience as a bandaid or poultice like that, but one that would have consequences. Big, big consequences, yes.

He rolled off of her, and the crowd rolled onto him. When those girls danced on him when he was down and out he could swear some were kicking him with deer's hooves. Rhythmically he started counting "Doe-a deer-a female deer..." but before he got to so la ti do his lightweight lallocropia made him say "shit" "fuck", and those

hippies ate it up. His twisting and writhing knocked change, compacts, plastic combs and graduation photos out of girls' purses You could recognize specific Motorsburgh highschool insignias and signets on rings, if he was FBI he could bust those kids for being out past curfew and guilt by association.

The audience clapping made a sound like a big dog lapping up water. There were hugs, Happy Faces and "I Wuv Yous" all around.

Each member of the band took a ten-minute piss and it'd be the sound of the amplifiers hissing in your ears after the last note of a loud Rock concert. By the time the headline band came on, the audience was all lazily puffing cigarettes or snoozing, as if in postcoitum response to the public sex Tippy'd just had. Famous and well-loved, dogs put their paws under our bus. One young girl wasn't sleepy, and that was Coral, who couldn't stop watching her Tippy and his troops with an envy hotter than anything she'd felt before.

Sheriff Harvester Bug Percheron, watching it all from beneath mirrored sunglasses (I respect!), was not amused. He immediately arrested Tippy, tossed him in the waiting paddy wagon, the sole prisoner since the liberal State Senator implored him not to bust the reefer smokers abounding. In the holding tank they'd have to have sex with—or in vibrant competition with—the antipersonnel robots recently purchased by the Aleppo Police Force. Let that be a lesson to 'em.

We got offers to play next year's Second Hugs Festival too. It might have well as been a crucifixion festival once civic church groups like the Mothers of the Young Christ protested us. The Baptists' Guild. of the general Godishness. Before there was a Mothers of Convention protesting Rock we were condemned by the Christian

Wildlife Association. There we go again e-pattying the boorschwas I guess. Parents' committees were formed against us upon which gruff also-rans hung their mayoral ambitions like the wattles of their necks.

The promotors were pilloried, but all the performers' checks cleared the bank. Except there was some problem with ours, guaranteed to be resolved soon.

Coral showed up at the Firehouse that evening in her father’s big sedan, having rifled his desk drawer and wallet for bail money to spring Tippy. We drove to the county jail, recently relocated to the edge of the county. Tippy celebrated his freedom by taking the wheel driving back to Aleppo, speeding down the freeway in the divided highway’s wrong direction, criss-crossing the median strip in good cheer and humor.

Sheriff Harvester Bug Percheron, forced to step down for snowmobile corruption, ran for Mayor of Aleppo on the Citizens Against Rockmusic platform. His Campaign Manager Dr. Frank Wagon, Tippy's own pediatrician, now full of misgivings at giving any one of us a draft deferment—that boy might've had some sense and decency shot into him by clean-living North Viets—decided it'd be filthy lucrative to serve as Treasurer for one such group since his billing machinery was already in place. "Enough is enough, I wouldn't have cured that generation's childhood diseases had I known it would've come to this.” A good argument for pre-abortion euthanasia, or “mothers' mercy-killing" the physician vamped to the press.

The janitors washed off the stage with a firehose next morning.

A few lines and a few stars for "creativity" in the Sunday paper by the same oaf who reviewed jazz and classical records, who obviously

wasn't there. Cleaning up after the Goose Turd Green Festival, park rangers found a dead child with stigmata in the bushes. A broken Roman spear nearby was shrugged off as a copy cats, for the weekly newsmagazine BREATH had just come out with the story of the hairdresser and underage starlet in California murdered by hippies.

The dumpster sure stank.

Some poor square FBI agent had to wear a long fake wig and spirit-gum beard in the hot sun all day then go back to the office to type up this report of the Festival: "He sang one hour-long song and grunted, groaned, gyrated and gestured along with inflammatory remarks. He screamed obscenities and exposed himself which resulted in a number of people onstage being hit and slugged and thrown to the floor", the part of the story he clearly embellished like an old cowboy novel. Oh, these were the political times. A year later, the ex-Sheriff opened a bar after his forced retirement after embezzlement, and when Dink entered, he got Dink into an Indian rub and jovially accused him of stealing a case of beer. Ow! It was some other guy!

So we returned to our greatest constituency, and Tippy did mean tit-uency. This was something more nympho-classical than all the museums. That was Tippy the satyr. Yet I suspect we’ll see more of that Coral.

Are you enjoying this, these recommended listening lists, background to the background of really understanding us, of our band, and our Tippy? Good, but I hope you’re not just saying that to be polite. I don’t want them to feel like homework.

Bands that assembled in that long hot summer of outdoor Sunday free concerts and ramshackle pothead Festivals were like the kinds of rocks that formed in the earth: igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic. Or so said a long article in one recent ComeTogether, that jawbreaking doorstop of maddening Rock scholarship. Like, who cares?

Instead, what everyone seemed to have ridden was a whirligig, a summer carnival carousel, smorgasbored buffet or kitchen lazy susan of Rock bands. High school parties danced to the Long Lines' "Queue Up". The Sockbreakers, who later grew up to be stockbrokers. French people laughed derisively at the brother-andsister duo the Twalettes. The Xylocaine Kings, who sang with halfanesthetized mouths, but who can remember any of their lyrics? The Goiters, because that's what their bumpy lump-in-the-throat voices sounded like on sentimental songs. "Iodine would be anodyne" sniffed one reviewer, miffed at his inattentive supper-club waiter so taking it out on the band.

The Madame Butterflies, a squad of English wags in Asian-girl makeup. Sexy and drugsy pastel boys crooned of penny arcades and penny candy on the planet Venus. Beatlefed bands in saffron robes, and their begging-bowl acolytes. Swirly psychedelibands like Rebbe and the Innerrabbis, beards tasting of poetry. The glamorous

Seguin and the Sequins. Percy and the Perseid, whose hit song used a meteorite metaphor for ejaculating on his girl in the shower. The Pill-Poppers, nervous and shifty-eyed. The Flagellums.

The Arch-Newlyweds. The Brafuckers thought girls would find their name sexy, but were actually thought by them to be pretty weird.

Still, they were often hired to play frathouse parties.

Manufactured Dreambaudelaires for the consumption of consumptive girls. A singer called Dion, because to call himself Dionysus would scare still-classically-trained parents. His songs often got covered by Slavic crooner Johnny Syzygymatic, to be circulated behind the Iron Curtain. Bands that take drugs to sleep, all following in the tradition of crooners like Johnny Drugstosleep. Girls pinned their hope on Johnny Epitome, who'd slice their brastraps from the stage with a sterling silver switchblade, during the climactic love song "Stiletto", a girl's name I hadn't ever heard before.

The Breast Strokes, costumed like synchronized swimmers in their tank suits (later topless swimsuits), glowering in caps and goggles, playing teasingly with their attractive chests. The Saltpeters, which certainly implied diminished libido and lost lust for their audience girls, recorded Live at Saint Peter's. The Body Stoppers' "Stop Her Up", The Good Peckers. The Knockemups or Knock-'emUps. The Coathangrabortionists, whose name got both feminists and churchy misogynists upset.

The IDon'tKnowYous, managed by a crazy Scottish psychoanalyst who plied them with experimental LSDs, got them to spin anguished lyrics about their families. Their hit "Roy Can Take It" was homage to the band's founder, overdosed into drooling and

infantile insensibility by the shrinkster.

The ministerial minstrels the Mistrials, understandably snubbed by the Mistrals. The Longshots, the Cleats, the Crosshairs. The Bad After Tastes, the Solvents, the Sealants, the Coolers or Coolants.

The Unhingeds, the Stinks, the Distendeds, now they were a sight to see. The False Friends, the Rotting Rollercoasters, and the viciously macho Peahens. The Subjectives sued the Subjunctives in a bloody courtroom battle in which the bailiff had to fire his gun more than once to restore some semblance of order. The Burke's Peerage and the Sweet Jane's Fighting Ships, whom a typo in the review called the "Shit Hips", boy did they get mad, you should've seen 'em with guns blazing. The Toads, deprecatingly called—I mean, some wag even altered their album cover art on the way to the printers—the Turds.

The Paving Stones and the Plows That Broke the Plains. The Nightwoodsmen, the Drug Busts, the Glass Knives. "American Cyanide" by the Tristes Tropiques, "Such a Deal" by the Knuckleheads, "Irish Computer" by Kid Bad, and the "Pigs in a Blanket" greatest hits package by the Clawhammers. The Threadbares, each wearing a suit he hadn't scraped off his body in fifteen years, acclaimed by the Rock critic Threadbear. The Firearms, the Elitists, the Pipebombs, the Pipedowns,. The Devil Take the Hindmosts, and the ex-romantics the Rid of Yous.

Meanwhile, mystic blacks, whose horns uttered jazz secrets, or discovered new ones, maybe jazz test transmissions via UFO as some claimed during a saucer flap of sightings and more intimate beam-up-and-probe encounters. Skeptics said police beatings of the musicians, caught in after-hours Motorsburgh clubs where drinking by

adult men was present, resulted in their skulls becoming antennae, truncheons and batons reversing their cerebral polarities.

Hippie-van bands like the AssGasorGrass NobodyRidesforFrees, and the allegedly polyorgasmic Organic Nut Butters. A band called the Nurse Edith Cavell. The Insurrections' strongarmed guitar like the oars of a trireme. A band called Defrauding and Inkeeper. The Circumvents, the Dimeadozens, the Hapless. The Death Tolls, the Loveless Javelins, the Chokeholds.

The Young Authorities, the Perforations, the Smokescreens, the Bone Spurs. The Police Informers, the Headhitters and the Pursesnatchers, the Overpowering, the Knuckledusters, the Pirhana Pincers, Race and the Discriminations, the Intolerables, the Insolubles, the Insolents and the Entombments. For more impact and cachet the Fireworks changed their name to the Illegal Fireworks Manufacturers. Angry bands called the Your Mama, the Your Face, and the showstopper the You're a Toilet. The Arch-Nemesis, which they thought was plural. Some guy who murdered ten coeds started a band in Aleppo that summer but the cops put a stop to that.

A band called the Imitation of Christ, meant ironically.

No, babe, first question is mine for you. Have you got the record? Your brother taped it for you on his reel-to-reel machine? I suppose that’s OK, but the capstan drive might make Tippy sound wobbly. Might make him sound Tippy! Ha ha.

Our high school teacher stout Mr. Merlot gave us Finals early so we could go to Big Joke City to sign a deal and record the album.

Yes, Big Joke, our nation’s biggest oldtime skyscraperville, which the

comic book heroes call Mammothopolis, the mammary Mammonopolis, or Goddam City. In Big Joke, steak swirled up from the streets. In sky-high office buildings, a muffled paradise, distant thunder sounded like a plastic scooter being knocked over.

When we arrived to record the album, stepped on to the tarmac, Dink grinned, said the night had a thousand liquor-store eyes.

Dink so hoped for a successful meeting with the record company executives, he smelled of Bay Rum, not rum. Such excitementement.

Which for me means excrement-citement; I shit when I'm happy or glad, I guess. Water-borne turds and fecal eagles. In my stool, a bit of nature red in wheytooth and claw.

I told Tippy that it was a good sign that the Etcetera Records chief executive was named Jude Suess, for all through childhood I had assumed Dr. Seuss held a high position in the Third Reich, if only because hs books of children’s songs did carry such authority in the esteem of school librarians. I know the Germans made that hilarious big-budget movie during WWII about the successful financier’s 18th c. trial for some sort of chicanery with their Government of Princes.

When he got his old-country comeuppance in the movie, the judge and jury sang “Hey Jude, don’t make it bad, so nu nu nu nu?” I swear I saw it on a Motorsburgh TV movie show, either the pretty boring lady's show or the Saturday afternoon vampire's. Or maybe we played at a private late-night gathering there, a special showing emceed by movie host Nixonson among rapacious auto-industry bourgeoisie. Or was that the one with little kids in propellor beanies forced to practice upon a row of a million pianos?

Coral’s the one who remembers movie names, not me. Try me

on the grim Italian western soundtracks’ guitar riffs.

Dr. Hugh Haigh Jude Seuss, college humorist, then songwriter, arranger and producer, finally record company executive ending at the top of the pyramid, apex’d in the spy-and apple pie-eye.

Essentially, the wiry executive had risen from baseball card trading to aesthetic control of an entertainment empire. By the time he was twenty, Seuss had written the lyrics for half the classic musicals spun on Nixonson’s show. Upon entering the big man’s office, Tippy leapt upon Dr. Seuss’ desk. Pointing to the assembled executives and marketing managers, Zion’s elephants in their grippe-gray suits, he sang and bellowed Star-making meshuggenehs are we…

The limp-suited men of the corporation smiled, arms on shoulders began dancing a high-kicking hora with visions of dollarsigns sugarplums spinning. They called in the creative team, midlife men in suits the color of nakedness, shirts that look like wood, faces panting in collie expressions: the record company executives around the table resembled the Virgin Mary's many older boyfriends, especially her mom’s executive boyfriends in the Old Testament.

Seuss’s young servomechanisms looked on over gym-trained borschtbellies, each a rebuke to eastern Eurpean ancestors’ starvation slackness.

Like an older marketing buffalo silverback surveying the herd, the pursed cigar-butt lips of Barry Blitzkrieg, flecked with sugarplum sputum, soon grinned in anticipation of sales.

Though Tippy held a flailing, kicking and screaming tantrum in the nonplussed executive's office, breaking his crystal decanters of

expensive spirits, glass coffee table, engraved industry awards and his Baccarat baccarat set, the company insisted he be listed on the record sleeve as "Tippy Chomp" rather than "Tippy Fuck." Legal reasons, they insisted; Motorsburgh’s top department store, and others, wouldn’t carry the record if petulant Tippy insisted. So Tippy signed the record contract grudgingly with only the swipe of a dirty finger. The rest of us signed, though he called my barely-legible signature our Seal of Excrement.

Though Aldebbie was nominally our “manager of record”, from now on our concerts were to be booked by the agency team Kasabian, Beausoleil, Krenwinkel and Fromme. Eventually somebody named Godgold called lawyer Quagmier and said they spoke to song publisher Bernie Wunderkind and all systems were go.

The record company's aquatic lawyers Bluefin and Blowhole—Bluefin with his Baedker of record stores, Blowhole with his cigar—appeared to draw up a contract for us. Some other bean-counter had heard a tape and spun plenty of lucrative rumors he then displayed on flip charts.

The smiling executive Seuss popped open some cocaineful champagne, served us Dan Jew pears, and what he called Pooped On mustard on "cruddity", which sounds like the crabby Irish lunch lady Mrs. Cruddity in junior high school. What were we midwestern boys to think?

We hope Aldebbie had introduced us to the right people, fixed us up right.

I didn't pay much attention at the time. What did I know about money? Mom always gave my brother n' me all the money we

needed anyway, even gas money to get to gigs or buy drugs.

After the meeting, all four of us went out walking to look around a city with buildings of pure energy, science fiction happening today.

The Big Joke Shock Exchange. The Oomph State Building. The city to which all sizeable cities shamefacedly aspire. The capital of capital, authoring a critique of pure cash money. It was named Big Joke for 16th c. explorer and trinket-trader Jacques le Grand, also known by alias Joaquin der Groot when he fled debtors to Holland.

Its perpetually-winning baseball team, as if we’d care about that, was the Big Jocks. I'd seen pictures of centaurs pulling beer wagons in neighboring borough Brownstone of the 1800's. Now the dying breed mostly subsisted as melancholy nightclub pianoplayers. There were sill busmermaids, businessmermaids, nymphs from the upstatewoods working in the city as masseuses and hostesses. Overliterate guys like rock critics must go to a lot of science fiction and comic book fan conventions here.

We were staying in the Gotohell Hotel, its bar full of potted palms, in the darkness a hunchbacked girl dancing away the afternoons. We made a point of hurling televisions from windows, so they’d know we were a rock band of consequence. In an arty dark cinema down the block, that potato field fiasco that Professor Thoth had filmed was playing through a haze of intellectuals’ cigarette smoke. The groundwatered movie had been cut and reassembled and hand-tinted and treated by a famous artist, and was now called "Multi-Screen Miscreants", as if it was a Chomps Trio episode. Well, starring Tippy, maybe it kinda was. Strolled through the woolgatherers' district, down Out-of-Fashion avenue, up Gush

Avenue and the Avenue of the Adorables. Neon signs flashing, WATCHES CRUSHED, LIQUIDS REPAIRED, while WANNA GO OUT? blinked on and off beside terraced prostitutes, every window a pussy. Alive Sex club where onstage they have a dog have sex with a cat (foreplay’d by the cat's little rough tongue); I mean, I'd pay money to see that. Dink claimed he saw buildings with signs DRUNKS MAY PISS HERE, so he did.

We went out to the Statue of Gravity. Etcetera planned a photo session where the four of us were all peering out of her massive coppery pubes (there’s an appropriate and well-place opening in her robe), sweltering hot from her big torch that we'd brought down there.

On the ferry boat on the way back a gull shat violently on some guy's head. The guy was the laughingstock of the entire boat for a few moments, but felt taunted nonetheless through the excursion voyage and committed messy suicide shortly upon reaching shore. My brother Thump particularly dug that. But I hope it wasn’t some kind of an omen for us of ill luck to come.

The next day we roused ourselves, made it to the Etcetera Building for the recording session. Some leading researchers and pornographic actresses teamed up to produce an album Orgasmic Christmas, a big seller that year's gift-giving holiday season. It and Aledbbie pretty much sustained Etcetera that year, so they had high hopes pinned on to the Chomps.

Famous Producer Sal Methuselatta was assigned to our album, but we all referred to him by his fond nickname the Curly Troll. The splendid blond beast looked like Third Reich propaganda, had it

included seraphic angels and putti. Son of an early psychedelic churchman and a Miss Muffet-in-Training, a dishwater-quiet girl to whom everything happens in the storybooks, of course he had no use for me when I tried to engage him in friendly banter. With heritage of such European extraction, he had ideas and ideologies. For his string of hits, he’d been called "Wunderkind of the Woofer and Tweeter", the "Mumble-aged Mogul" "Teenage Tetragrammaton".

His own

boutique label YHVH actually stood for Your Healthy Virgins Home, records that keep girls in their room dancing together in socks or barefoot, rather than under squirming boys on car seats. But, at great expense after suave and flattering arm-twisting, he agreed to come over to Expectorate to produce us.

You gotta hand it to this genius though. His first godzillionseller was "You Aim Too, Please", a hit whose lyrics were all taken from a sign in a Men’s restroom, yet recorded by a Brooklyn girl group, the implication became that they squat to pee onstage. Of course they never did, but that image certainly lingered in the minds of the teenage male public who bought the record. Most of the other young borschtbeatles on the label, or studio musicians, had already played in teen bands in Big Joke and its suburbs. Fresh-faced midwesterners were something new for him, and he looked as us as he would strange extinct creatures reconstructed in a university museum diorama.

The recording engineer was somebody named Cartoonbuncle, supposed to be experienced and good at what he did too.

Tippy appeared in the studio—smeared into the studio I’d say— hours late, in his undershorts and a leopardskein jacket Aldebbie had

given him, the dirty garments stuffed with dozens of songs he had written since he'd gotten up, or gotten it up, that afternoon. When he first saw the recording studio he thought it was the place where all the stolen hats, snatched on the school playground and everywhere, are kept. While waiting outside the studio door Tippy wrote a dozen songs for the first album, six for the second and two for the third.

Well, we might not have all this time with nothing to do, not counting all these secretaries, he said. But then he mostly improvised the songs in the studio because his dog ate his homework. At that session three albums' worth of life exhortations were recorded: the first was an oral one, all portentous "uhhhs", grunts and "I wants”. It was followed by an anal collection, the grunts more deep-seated, like a man finally admitting to the public he went to the bathroom. My guitar really shone through on this one. Then last of all was a sexual album, genital yet gentle in its maturity, unreleased to this day due to contractual disagreements. Which really burns us up. All sounded like somebody else and all sounded like nobody else at the same time. That's the name of the game.

The producer used his vaunted Gutter of Sound approach. It was Aldebbie's idea to bring a weird cormorant Welshman with a big melancholy fiddle in to drone away on one track, the plaintive "Isn't Anything You?" Somehow, it worked. I'm listed on the album as playing the Ad Nauseum, but it was really Aldebbie astride that medieval instrument; he didn't want too many album credits, for tax purposes. He tried adding squiggle piano, electronic rubber-band noises, towels snapping in some girls' locker room in the Philippines, but soon yanked it all off in frustration. The Troll used the sprinkler

system in a city park, or the flapping of departing pigeons' wings, as percussion. To top it all off, we asked our high school friend, the sax player Biffo Beppo, to add Helios Eye jazz and noise-attitude to our thing. Going into a recording studio was like making cement, making committment, making our sound concrete, and the cement mixer filters out some of the gravel in Tippy's voice. Methuselatta had a switch that added the Devil singing harmny, but he didn't add it on our tracks. Yet he then wanted to process the tracks through a machine that made them sound like a young woman quietly masturbating, which he assured us resulted in some of the most chart-topping recent hits you'd never have expected. Straight from the medulla, baby, Unnghh! It ate my mind. Ah, the secrets of pop music.

The Curly Troll’s temper was legendary, his tantrums when he’d shoot a high-caliber police pistol around the studio, into the equipment, threatening the acts being recorded. To cheer him up, we played "Heaven Said Feh!" for his beloved Big Joke Buber's Blues Band just recorded it. Also their instrumental "Ecch!", from those riffdriven young men with dark eyebrows, Roman Governor-of-Judea noses. But soon after he left in a huff, and Aldebbie took over. Not the best idea, as he only randomly twirled the knobs on the mixing board, cavalierly had the master tape delivered to the record company when he tired of playing with it. About fifteen minutes after he began.

We listened to the playback. Mmm, smooth as pilsener, muttered Dink under whiskery whiskey breat. To me it sounded lifeless, low-rent, lackluster, limp-dicked bluster.

Hanging around the studio, a white marble beauty, blond

with a sepulchral stare, mostly at Tippy. Neuda was given that name by famous artist Artie Pupa, father of the Pupae Art movement in Big Joke. Her real name Baroness Elsa von Sontagmorgen HoezhollernShickelgruberz.

Whew. I need a break.

After our recording session I walked out on the streets of Big Joke alone. Fear of blithe death on the subways, cabdriver brutality.

Other bandleaders from Michigan had gotten so frightened there they returned to start suburban bookstores; should I stay in that state, where the money's just as green? In a shop I saw the inside of flaky rolled pastry that looked like a cunt. Yes, even then I knew what one looked like, from Tippy’s descrition of the retard girl. And I saw a picture in a medical book, a doctor's realistic painted illustration.

Attracted by the posters "So You Want to Meet God, Eh?" in the window of a religious artifacts store. Models of Jesus's possessions and exorcisms, little paintings of the Adoration of the Wisenheimers, The Man Who Couldn't Move, Jesus Hit by a Car Crossing the Street, the Stack of Jesus' Quarters. Little girls in Sunday maryjanes and jumpers kneeling in the woods praying for their first menstruation, or the golden keys of masturbation. Vestments for the informal, "with-it" priest with funny phrases like "Danger: Men Cooking" or "Come and Get It". For the enchantment of God and His Friends. The God Who Shacks Up. A strange Christ, taken advantage of by his tormentors, even his apostles, money and things borrowed from him and never replaced or returned. Little wax replicas (authenticated by the Jerusalem hardware store) of Christ's nails, spermheaded planaria or polliwogs. Yes, advertised at Better-than-Christ Prices. Who buys this

shit? The marquee on a church read All Jesus! All Christ! I stood in front of the window amazed, watching these animated Christs like I’d watch TV. This may have counted for a religious experience, and not many people come to this town for that. Tippy later went to the store and bought a sleeping bag full of thorns at the religious items section of the sporting goods store—there were so many Catholic huntsmen—and, at a last-minute nightclub gig, slid into it and rolled around onstage. He did a shnozz imitation when he sang "I Was Mortified". I guess making a record was kind of like the crucifixion to Tippy.

Satan is nothing if not smart. Old Nick cleaned up his image, reinvented himself as Old Saint Nick, smiling and snowy-bearded, dispensing toys and Coca-Cola to obedient children. An expensive investment in his brand, but worth it in public relations. Well, Aldebbie and the record company were like that. Cannily generous, open hand and eye on the bottom line. But they never knew quite how to talk about Chomps, or even their beloved Tippy.

Eventually the record came out. This was before stereos with atomic cartridges, before solar-powered or Univac stylus. Such a good record, man, that sparks flew when the tone arm touched down on the record player. Burned off the furburger, the hushpuppies on the needle of the record player, the part that normally says "sshhitt..."

We considered having it pressed on Motorsburg automotive steel so it'd spark more when dragging against the diamond needle like a sagging muffler on the freeway, but that was prohibitively expensive.

Something in the shape of the upper and lower peninsulas of

Michigan surrounded by the Great Lakes.

For the album's cover, they took us outside after a storm in the night, pointed huge klieg lights at us, which at that distance sunburned us in seconds, began to roast our skin, and as we began to wince and grimace, photographer Ivor Frankensteig (he's Swiss) went SNAP SNAP SNAP, then kept shooting as we fell to the cool pavement writhing, which came our blurry but weird and interesting when collaged on the the back cover. The cover was red hot and irradiated, a forest of arms, legs and ankles. The cover made Tippy look like a cross between the Medusa and Cyclops. All surrounded by arms and legs. Frankensteig won some prestigious award while our painful skin peeled off in scabs and scales.

What was so cool about the band came across in the first cut, like the angel, lion, ox and eagle of the apostles, like the four humors of the body in harmony. Not the bald promises of old geniuses. So good we got our taxes back. On the tape my mucus guitar came across as Jesuitical pursed-lips guitar licks. Something subtler than dirt. Fire from the Old World. This band was jamming in a manger, in Christ's study. The playing was real fast, for rock n' roll like sex is always in a hurry. Tippy didn't like to mix sex and communication I guess, for our sound was something between the inside of dead batteries or cutting open a golf ball. Suggesting success, the sound of big airports under construction. We were zen roadrunners, suffused in a kind of dirty wolf zen. In the future, records will have three sides. The rockstock nation was sick of bands whose hair got entangled in their guitars, drums weighted down full of drugs. Bands like us are just pins in the Lord's new shirt, just pushpins on a battle

map.

Remember, every album is intended for All Bums. Once the record was in the stores young girls who'd had Tippy's babies wrote his name all over their school notebooks. These same young girl fans interpreted some of the song lyrics to mean Tippy was involved with, and beholden to, major figures in organized crime. "Tippy's in trouble" they'd greet each other in the street, grimly in study halls, knowingly between classes by their lockers, as if with determination they'd found some purpose, to fuck his way back to health of course.

What are they talking about? We're on top of the world.

Each copy of the record was guaranteed to contain one of his chromosomes, a promise the manufacturer just couldn't keep. In so many copies there was stickum in the groove of the record from girls' masturbating with it that caused him to repeat himself. Hysteria in the stereo. Tippy had that power to make a record skip on the turntable halway across the room. A record is a command. But already the music wasn't really as good as when we just played it, the viny thing being the dust of us playing together. After the record came out we rested on our laurels, which is the most comfortable resting place.

Somehow I am concious that it's all over from that moment, that we have already turned the corner into self-destruction and selfparody.

It's all over but the fucking.

When Tippy was a boy he'd catch mice that'd make outlandish promises, some of which they had no power to fill, in order to affect their release. Later when he was older these caught mice would each teach him a song, which he'd then record and turn into a million seller. This city, its businesses, this company and project is a lock

box, while Tippy is the jack-in-the-box.

We were billed for the record company's Ruminating Costs.

The record company executives were driven around in a big expensive sled-like limousine, its engine powered by live wolves.

Still, the record company might have been ripping us off, the way a corrupt and conniving undertaker will keep the corpses of pretty children or preteen girls in their homes for their own foul use, the closed caskets at the ceremony and burial filled with shoes, hams or luncheon meats. The closed and hidden account ledgers detailing our true sales, promotional copies and store returns, felt like that.

Most bands get swindled, building up debts as promoters want them to look and feel important, but with their record not selling and soon remaindered. The record company's ledgermainmen continued to perform upon our ledgers and surgically removed a lump of taxes.

Financial phlebotomists. Some managers had Pounds sterling in financial circulation through their veins. Many childless couples, with eyes the color of billfolds, managed rock n' roll bands. Cash registers full of worms. Cold cash monkey. The white smile of the friendly presidents. A sort of tooth-fairy of Rock, leaving gold records under pillows. A manager who transformed Gold into Golgotha. Cigars that smelled of Pandora's Box. We knew nothing of music publishers except I recognized the firm of Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom from my old meritricious Chopin'd-up piano exercises.

Every time we called to inquire about our royalties, we’d talk to someone different: Jerry Sonofabitch, Hymie Hypoderm, the procession of Bludgeonman, Surrealman and Goldielockstein, Joel the Bowl. Then Seuss himself was replaced by a key executive in a

Christian airline, a Christian animal for business, and his new staff.

Raymond Bankpresident and David Faky, Larry Access and other Ego Beavers. Then Ed Buying, a dowdy debtcollector. Once, to placate us, they sent out Bobby Bread, stuffed in his suit like a loaf of bread stuck with pencils. Businessman-of-the-world with fleshcolored sideburns, Protestant eyes and you-colored money, the samurai as doughkeeper. One more of that race of enormographers—people who make things big—who, with a sleightof-hand-of-the O Mind, could take mere tragedic goatsingers and transform them into celebrities. He had a desk organizer on the dashboard of his car. Full of possum pith. Knew how to deal with the little man shaped like a baby bottle. Businessmen in eight- and sixteen-piece suits. Necks thick with aftershave, caked liked urinal deodorizers. Other newly-minted businesstypes who owned a piece of our action and organization included, porcine porcupines of business doing our World Media Thinking for us. Not telling us what to do, exactly, but suggestioneering. Investor Martians with martinis.

Offices full of steno sex, there's sex on file here.

The accountant was boiling gold. What use is boiled goid? We couldn’t escape those smarmy, scheming Payola Axolotls from the record company. And I worry that when today's teenage listeners are forty, they'll hate us.

Asked about the record, Aldebbie exclaimed Tippy's lyrics were "fuller than the teachings of Christ—fulla brush, man, to all them housebound women." The later part, his joke feebly made for our benefit to sound American, was incomprehensible to the rest of the world, which began burning records and wayward teenagers in

outrage for his blasphemy.

Who is this English wag anyway? Not like I really hoped, or cared if, we learned. Had enough already.

I don't want to tell his story as a fullocky fullock, hillock of one thing piled upon another, a finicky ficki-ficki of a zinc-fingered Haiphong bar hostess. Yeah, that’s what some of our classmates are shtupping overseas.

Success in Rock n’ Roll spelled girls and all those girls Tippy and the Chomps had. Aleppo blossomed in tight girls in their tight tshirts. Female missionaries of the soft assault. Girls in cutoff shorts.

Quick-bottomed girls, miniskirts not staying down. Good-grade smart girls and gentlewomen. Girls who fainted in the voting booths, their father had to hold 'em up from outside; one said that to get Tippy’s attention, whether or not it’s true. Half-birds and troublemakers with birds' beaks. Groupies like the birds that follow buffaloes, symbiotically pecking at their backs and stools. Vulture groupies, buxom buzzards feeding on the carrion of bands breaking up, musicians breaking up with their girlfriends back home from temptations and pressures of the road. Girls whose stockings when they walked sounded like the rattle of Shieks' sponges. The city council seriously considered passing an ordinance making it more difficult for Rock bands to pick up girls. Girls who claimed years later they "went" with the band but didn't really do it, "they were too yucky".

Now that’s a crime.

Antiope the Antelope, christened by her father who must've been a classicist on the University faculty, perhaps from the

Antipodes. Capitulata, another Classics professor's daughter. Tippy favored her until she exclaimed, during sex, "SPQR!" "INRI" and "Quo Vadis?” The blind flower girl Pompeiia, nicknamed Neurotika.

Another professor's daughter, dark and intense, Hannah Haifa-Jaffa Rosenbookbag. Than a Classics professor's pampered daughter named Cloaca. Nevertheless, the University hospital didn't admit medical students from the southern US, for they always wanted to give insulting names to Negro babies and foundlings. And then were shocked when their supervising professors, dour and humorless Yankees, didn’t find it funny.

Then came Coyote Punchinello, daughter of the Art professor who founded the Aleppo Snuff Film Festival; a dirt-haired gamine, where dirt is the color and texture both. Other Art professor daughters were Ceasarea Section, and Deedee Profundis. All were groupies. Some were cleanies. Some were stuffed eagles.

A girl named Sarah or Sharon Dipitus, whose name even sounds kind of like "serendipitous". And we, like most are bands, dipped into it.

Daughter of a prominent Materials Engineering Professor, named Lycra Spandex. Her dad had put metallic fibers in fabric on the suggestion of his wife Lurleen, sent the girl to a cheerleading competition wearing the shiniest sweater, a hit. But later Aldebbie liked that girl glint glint for himself, gleaming under the stage and TV lights, glitz on his eyelids and brow.

Flitting around from budding-ripe girl to over-ripe Experienciata like a smart fruit fly, red eyes sparkling. A frumpish, sloppy girl we called Dishevelyn. "The Girl With a Thousand Eyes", which Tippy remembered, later thought would make a good song.

Girl named Cathy Filthycarrots, from a farm someplace around here, I hope. To a girl named Ruddy Ann Fire he said Ready-AimFire! His orgasm like a clay pigeon shattering beneath a shotgun's explosion gaze at a hunt-and-fish club the audience had become.

Like a holiday Jewess, she blew his ram's horn, shofariffically, I'm told. Another Jewish girl Kitty Krystallnacht, big grin one minute clingy and fawing all over her boyfriend, the next multi-used in the back of our van. La donna e mobile, and she was quite mobile on her back. La donnerwetter, maybe, but none stormier and wetter.

One girl was named Pécand, which her father thought suggested pecan candy, but when the cruel junior high boys called her Pee Candy, she was determined to learn exactly how to do that to impress them.

Even I wanted to meet that girl called Vivisectionette. And there was another, from a cemetery neighborhood in Motorsburgh named Viscera. A girl named Pertrada, who seriously informed us it was Latin for penetrated. Her brother was Protrudo, which could have been a good name for Tippy.

Hippy girl, professor's daughter of course, named Seagull Siegel. Her family name Zipporahstone had something to do with a hurried circumcision in their scriptures. Like those Aztecs on their human sacrifice tables, obsidian knives and dripping, beating hearts.

A girl with the summery but Jewish name Cicadasong.

Petulanta and Flagellata Frazzizi, beautiful stubborn struggleto-fuck daughters of the Midwest Intellectual University Dean. The son of another administrator there was our dope dealer for a while, until he was busted, exhiled to a sour, stringent college back east.

A girl named Valhalladonna, suggesting Viking wonderlands and capiscum poison in her ScandinavItalian ancestry, which could produce strange beauty.

Oh man, there was a girl called Cowboy's Horse. I don't have to explain that.

Hippie girls' proud massage wounds. Hourglass orgasms.

Hunter-gatherergasms. One, whom a single look assured you was untamed and formidable, was called the Elizabeast. Some girls might say the whole Latin Mass in the time it took them to orgasm. Some girls only needed the length of side three or side four from a double album.

I’ve heard of clitoridectomies performed in drum-African countries, maybe the hash-smoking pipes-tootling Jews'-harp north African ones too, I dunno, and sometimes wonder if more should be performed here in Aleppo to simmer down these young Rock fanwomen. After all the vigorous fucking of all of us in bands, will they ever be happy with factory-stiff husbands? Dentists, hardware store keepers, engineers? Just curious. Asking for a friend. Hose yourself down, girl. Wait until Dr. Frank Wagon gets here.

The old-fashioned girls' name Pertussia alluded to the feverish cough, not the cough syrup we enjoyed in junior high. A girl Pediatriciana, whose daddy must've been Dr. Frank Wagon, I betcha.

One girl named Party Pastry. A girl named Nougat. A stout girl nicknamed Piano Bench. That one, there, was called Leather Gums, for her abilities at oral sex. Like she was upholstered in comfy English club chairs in her mouth: florid fellatios, fond fellatios heard sweeter. Girl from a posh Motorsburghburb with the English garden

fairy-tale name Crumpetina. I'd like to dip it into her teapot, short and stout, imagine myself a garden gnome, her bottom like a pooh bear.

Sex was a frequent topic of sermons in the liberal churches of Aleppo (the conservative ones wouldn't dare mention the topic).

Tippy always maintained that Adam had several Eves, and that the authors of the Gospels quickly changed the sex of the Apostles to male when they realized they were establishing the stuff of a Church of Rome. "His preaching, it was rally all about fucking. And those miracles? Orgasms in hot-diggety, hoity-toity, previously-frigidy girls."

His way of being Christlike or Jesus-esque. Like fronting a cover band called Imitation of Christ.

Marching up to the stage, Tippy began singing, Stuck Up Gir-rr-rlls, You mean they have glue down there?

Why do ice cubes always melt?

Comparison shoppers of sex. Cum-paradise. Cum-stantial evidence.

The word "cum", in Romance Language, is a bridging clause meaning "existing as..." and it seemed the very reason for these young girls' existence was to receive his. He was a French witness when it came to opening old girlfriends. He could see himself bubble up in their half-closed eyes, monkeygrinning, his eyedrops of her love. The entropy of sighs. The romantic difference between a shipwreck and an airplane crash. She must've felt like the first mermaid on the moon. Thinks: there must've been plenty of catsized dinosaurs. Now there are plenty of girls.

And they fucked. Fucked until finally just breadcrumbs or, at most, crutons from his cock, or in her discharge. A stream of ants fell

from the dick, fanning out when they hit the water to swim to the sides of the toilet bowl. Survivors hightailed it (highthorax'd it) to the sugar bowl and other kitchen delights.

Balneary fun in the Shower of Power. Gives her man soap n' water in that squirt chalet. Sperm with spurs. Automatic tellers in the sperm bank. Stopping only to fortify yourself on bottled waterbed water, from beds that people had already fucked on. The little door may have been ajar and fucked-up with ice on the refrigerator, but Tippy sure knew how to defrost a woman. A sort of fibonaccism in the numbers of which the Chomps were known to have conquered those girls.

Despite all that sex Tippy never had to shave, though the rest of the band had women trained to shave us with blades carefully held in their mouths. Thump thoughtfully filed their teeth, saying "You don't fuck the face, except sometimes". When he'd come in those young things' mouths some would save it under their tongues—to Catholic girls it tasted like Sunday you-know-what—and run home to use it as glue to paste rock n' roll momentoes, ticket stubs, dried flowers, snapshots and pretty winebottle labels into their scrapbooks.

Those girls were the worldblowers. Picture of that girl captioned: Loves to Lick Envelopes. So many rock stars and star-crossed teenagers that an enterprising hip character outside of town with a vegetable stand and greenhouse, named Farmer Gregory set up a vat in his business where the girls could spit it and, when it was dry and crumbly he'd add green vegetable dye and package it up right pretty to sell as plant food. The highschool lunchlady Mrs. Mars bought some (sly Gregory told her to stick her hand in it until it turned

her thumb green), to fertilize the very houseplants Tippy and her daughter Coral knocked over when rolling on the floor and carpet. I'll get to that story soon.

For such oral occasions, Tippy often thoughtfully poured mouthwash on his dick, his old Minty McGinty. Ever since American History Tippy thought upon his death he would free his slaves, all those girls. He was a girlchanger, weltmaker or worldmaker. He had a lot of uses for a girl.

Tippy lived a lion lifestyle, sleeping sixteen hours a day, waking only to take drugs or love his women. They'd curl up to him the way cellophane curls up to a fire. Like fucking the pages of a book, those loose leaves. So many girls that when he opened his breakfast egg out came one, or at least the contents of some girl's purse or locker, brushes with hair still on them arranging a new hairstyle in the pan. A new girl was like trying a new brand of orange juice. Squeeze 'em like mandarin oranges, girls with California orange juice from one breast and Florida grapefruit juice from the other. Orange orgasms.

Wish they all could be California figs.

Massage-a-holic, he worked to erase the smudgy pencil-line difference between massage and massacre. Giving messages in his massages, different versions and body conversions. Kneading and reshaping those girls. Lovewheels and meatmaking. Technicolor brassieres. Vestal fruit flies. Chicken bottles. An angora sweater and Angostura bitters. Even before we went on tour, just at the little cafés and diners around campus, Tippy experienced something like hangovers following waitress after waitress. Dink gave 'em all the Lager Kiss. Opening girls like opening restaurants. Girls were rungs

on a ladder, pictures just begging to be taken off walls. He was like a clothesline for those girls, accumulating 'em, getting 'em all wet and hanging 'em up. He enjoyed those women momentarily, like the shadow of a plane passing over a house. Loving girls the way a jet plane, when you're in it, is fast and slow at the same time. All the dust in a housewife's lungs. Those girls were individually remembered by us about the way the frugal suburbanite remembers pennies rolled up and taken to the bank. To Rock stars girls are like all the stamps that fall off Christmas cards in the Post Office.

Being a single young man in Rock is like Christmas morning unwrapping presents except it's every night, the thrill of opening a new date. The way the Virgin Mary hospitably took these three Zoroastrian Magi—one or two of them black, of course—to her bed (of straw) soon after Christ's birth, when she knew she wouldn't inadvertently conceive, like the best groupie to a rock band. "Eat, drink and make Mary" had said the three wisenheimers, clebrating the Christmas birth Zoroastrian-style, tumbling her (no one around here's a virgin, I thought) like the Rolling Calves did to Marianne Festival after her celebrated miscarriage. All part of a respectful, venerable, almost sacred carnal tradition. And that was perhaps his favorite Three Chomps episode, “Danger in the Manger”, the one where they played the Magi (Louie Louie in embarrassing blackface) leering over the so-called Virgin. Tippy visited all his girls that Xmas Eve saying Ho Ho Ho, everybody having a (wolf whistles) GOOD TIME? I'm Santa Motherfucking Claus. Mistletoe hair, looking like a young, shaved Saint Old Nick. Gonna let my Kris Kringle dangle.

Christmas as a wet dream this year. Tippy was more like a gift-filled left shoe to those girls.

Groupies were a Ladies Auxillary, so to speak. The badinage of bondage. We had all those famous public young women, and so did all the bands. Boasting skin beneath the halter or tank tops. Girls at concerts like vestals in the temple giving themselves to the first band (often the obscure or local opening act) they see after dark, saying they're staying over at a girlfriend's house. Nine hundred thousand midwest milkmaids. Fucking like birdseed. There were so many around that now I can't remember if Tarragon-tops were a drug, a women's haircut or summer clothing for women.

The dewy and willowy folk singer Olive Branches was over a decade older, but—on tour and in town to promote her album The Rape Sting—still had a fling with Tippy.

A groupie named Permanent Praline. It was almost as if our band, Tippy, weren't rock stars, weren't a success until we'd had—or perhaps been had by—all these well-spoken-of women, our skills and physical attributes compared in the feminine gossip mills, our pix in the rock mags peering out from hotel comforters and coverlets beside them, all grinning of course. These were like the Hit Parade charts and rankings of previous generations, now pretty irrelevant in People' Puma Bonerstock Nation of Perpetual Revolution. "Oh, that Roque, he's got a tin ear for girls" the penile pud once murmured. I don't think that's compliment.

Tippy discoursed upon the cervixes of the cervixen, ever the gynecolorocker. What Tippy and Thump laughingly called Bikini Flavor. Harrumph. My badluckster short-end-of-the-stickness.

When it comes to women, no women, no comes. So excuse me, I'll just go in my room and practice guitar. The only curved body I get my hands on, sigh.

So Tippy claimed that menstruation was the female version of masturbation, its rosy exudent equivalent to a guy's whitenessing, but sometimes I don't think Tippy knows as much about women as he pretends. He says things because they sound good, like he's writing a song. Said things, excuse me.

Oh, you say you're doing this interview because you think the editor will like it, a smart and witty boy who likes the band, and you want him to like you, and take you to the Prom?

You kids still do that rah-rah slow dancing stuff? All that school spirit was ignored in my day, we helped the hippies bury it, but I guess you kids are reviving it, huh. Colored kids still took it seriously though.s At our concerts around the state, hotpassion women used their thwakking breasts to keep time to the music and clap their approval if they were big enough, aboriginal approval harkening back to the summery cavewomen who wore no more than a little piece of flint.

He knew the story of the singer who died after biting into a poision tit—of a groupie herself named Breast—and knew enough to look out for her.

Exposing their boogaloos, some of those girls were just waterlillies to Tippy the jumping frog. He'd always been a bit o' the ol' green Pan-in-the-garden, Pan-in-the-orgasm. Bake him and his bosom buddies. Looking out from the stage on puddles of girls near-

blind and about to break with excitement. Whither-Thou-Goests, and In-the-Light-Of's, flesh-and-bloods and fluid girls, honey screams and donut-shaped country courtesans or co-courtesans. Who couldn't but be a little bit grateful for all this success? If he was he never let on.

I suppose we carried a certain deep envy of the FGNMs who share groupies as a band of brothers, a squad joyfully conquering troops with grateful civilians, army nurses or bare-shouldered peasant-bloused bandolier-cross'd Mexican camp followers. Like an only child, Tippy never shared. OK, maybe with Thump or Dink, but not his vassal me. So many dropout girls were taking the name Honey Granola, it soon came to be a generic term for a tanktopnippled yank-hair hippie child-woman. Tippy was truly a farmer, watering (especially moistening) and harvesting his crop—a bamboozlesex’d bumper crop of girls. Some bigcity New Joke and Sanctae Chrysoplae critics called it razorsex, not for any bloodletting, facial, cranial or pubic hair removal, but for its speed and decisiveness, separating desirable groupies from the unacceptable.

Or merely acceptable, once or twice, mostly by the road crew. Day and night saw groupies pleasuring bands, crew, the roadies fingerchecking those girls. Poontang princesses and their panty pincers. Some girls were virtually bottomless, and he spent many kind nights with Bursty and other such call-attention girls.

I didn't like how those guys, those bands, used a girl called Incapacita, but hey, what can you do? Everybody backstage smoking Dirtygirl. One girl named Canary Ward, we could never tell why she called such attention to herself with bright yellow miniskirts, spreadin' good cheer. Discomfited women. Discomfort women. Even Tippy

finally knew enough to stay away from anyone named Pustulantia.

As the hippies said about that girl, Keep On Truculenta. Oy, the yenta, muttered Tippy rabbinically. With all the gravitas of his ancient race.

A rural hippie garden-girl named Summer Seedpod. An Italian girl whose name, literally, means "fellatio in church". Juliebreath'd maidens. As the blues song moans, got another man’s name dripping down the sides of her mouth. T-shirts soaked in peanut oil, jeans caked with the dust of men in other bands.

OK, we were mean to call that big Germanic girl Ludmilla Godzilla, but don't forget, she did have psoriasis on the inside of her thighs that turned your legs to wood shavings. At least that's what the rest of the band told me.

Young girls I liked to call Tippy's awkwardiennes, his awkwardesses, the awkwardlies. Little penny puppies, advertised in the back of comic books if you sell enough newspaper seeds; seedy, gritty newspapers that win you a bike. Those girls had the determined look of one who'd pound the pavement, house to house, charming husbands to assemble enough paid subscriptions for that damn puppy.

Slovenly love. Really tough girls. Those girls just pink thugs.

Sure, they'd blow the road crew in order to get to access to the the star, all girls do that, but these would then kill and keep the dessicated relics of the roadies as grisly, gristley souvenirs. Girls with carnal gashes like the E Pluribus Unum crack on the Liberty Bell.

Tippy said he'd just had a girl named Novena, but I didn't ask if she was Catholic or colored.

As girls were named after virtues like "Chastity", "Prudence" and the like in the past, now some were named "Jiffy" for speedily attaining orgasm. A groupie named Congratulationa, who hums you with pomp and cir-cum-stance in the bleachers at high school graduations. Diane Exhilaration, tasting more like kir than cum. Pam the Paramedic. Girls named Elvissa. One woman's name the German form of "Grass Smoke". Hillary Accuracy. Nembuthalia. A girl named Barbara with that Babs beat. Pamela Formula. Patty Turbine, body and hair with the mintbreathfresh smell of Dr. Boner's soap. Tess Tosterone, the daughter of New England stripper Pumpkin LaPie. Daughter of a stripper named Tempest Toss'd. All these names sound like professional showgirls, exotic dancers,, and in a sense, they were. Vaudevillian vulva-villains. Worthy of the Rock n' Roll embrace. I have trouble with the memory of names, especially of virgins. A girl nicknamed Spongie, perhaps for something contraceptive borne there. And Spermata Zoe. Of course she would figure in the later history of the band.

There were so many groupie girls, he could practically utter "I want a redhead named Vivisectionata" and one would appear, yearning, at the edge of the stage, like a tethered experiment-dog.

Aleppo, Ipsofacto, Claude Woods and the various Motorsburgh suburbs, with their profusion and bounty of female sexuali-bees, were all like that in those days. There should have been a suburb called Pomona, for those bra-less, apple-cheek'd girls hung like fruit on the trees, ripe for the picking. Girl Tree, MI. But no band should put all their eggs in one girl's reproductive basket, so to speak.

Girls were harelippin' the band on the stairs down from the stage. All hail the conquering hetero. When he'd apply "his vertical death" their pretensions would peel away like mica. Jewish girls doing it golem-style. Hava Nagila monsters, slim and tapered as Havana cigars. A Lisagator, crawling on the floor on her ligatures.

Made a birds'-nest soup out of a Chinese girl's pubic hair. Hundredyear-old eggs out of teenage girls' breasts. First-nighter virgins, butterfiles in their stomachs from performing fellatio. Orgasms in their food. Melting the ice cream up their ass. Exuberant teenage fuckpigs like big dark-clad Kyla and Ginia, from a small Michigan town with a blind gas station attendant. I would note mentally the pattern of pimples n' zits on all those girls' faces, sigh at the burden of so much to pop. Tits n' trinities. The pirate in us said Lie down, gonna make that girl walk the plank. Girls like hovercraft or monorails, gliding across our beds and riding those guys. Under the butt-tree. A love effect fatter than flattery. Late-breaking nudes, with bamboo-tinted skin. Burglarvirgins digging those burglarythms.

That's a lot of teenage sexuality on the hoof. Bird in the bidet.

Female cat salad. Our Pest Stop. Nobody girls. Debutantes and their debacles. Rock n' knockers. Don't give me your body bullshit.

Tippy had plowed through legions of discharge girls. Eyes like cunt. Like the little blown-glass animals in the window of that shoppe in Spackles Arcade. What pants glory? All those girls, Tippy was living off the fat of the gland. To use a nautical allusion, those girls were penis ports, portholes, and we were Porthos, Aramis, whomever, muskateers, ready to stick a long sword into them.

Memo: Use birth control with any buxom, ripe farm girl named

"Fecundity", "Fertility" or "Bounty".

At each wet-your-whistlestop gig, the band would break all barriers the moment we'd emit that girlbreaking sound. This radio station's run by girls. Miniskirt University. Sluttish teenage love-youforevers, blowing kisses at commuters that didn't mean anything.

Little Cistern, wontcha kiss me once and stop twice. Lumberjacking, his ax cleaving the blond resinous wood, beech or pine floating listlessly downstream in a Pasha’squoddy logjam. They made a sawmill. The plow and the furrow, the plowman down in the dirt. The cuntaholic clinging to the clit clit clit. As the copter of Priapus ascended to her scarlet conclusion, dip into that pink inwell. Country churchgoers crying jubilee! jubilee! The smell of margerine melting, a laughing lap's puss-in-boots oil, pouring into them his skillsuds and bestfriendsauce. So often they'd get down and call raw sex "friendship". All going into the purplest pants parts of a ripe raspberry girl. That jeansstealer got 'em all playing tie-your-shoes-ball. Aw, that's just mouse rapin'.

Nevertheless, having so many girls in the state of Michigan carried a terrific responsibility. When he sang that song with the line about a razor blade's edge, one thanatopic girlfriend blonde dreamer who went into the bathroom, cutting deeper than she'd ever gone, for her name even sounded like "razor". Not that we really changed our behavior or attitudes either way. Why shouldn't Tippy enjoy this underwater ballet from the sexual boat, conveniently build the amorous bridge? Why be a Rockstar if you don't want to fuck indiscriminately? Success or excess? A mere journalist's decision.

Tippy still didn't get much exercise 'cept for girls. Machine

heads tuning the bass like teats on a sow. A cuckold is like playing someone else's guitar, set of drums, we do that. It's said that there was sexual intercourse before there was Rock n' Roll, but I'll be damned if I know how.Girls built like a Stradivarius. We discovered an electric guitar is like a woman's body. OK, Tippy had to point that out to me, but he’s right.

Don’t move like that, it’s distracting.

When in doubt how to approach any animate or inanimate force, treat it like a girl—these are the words we have tried to live by, maybe the philosophy of the band. I mean, people are people, especially girls. We who had known the Guernica bedrooms of liberal college femalettes when it was considered sophisticated to have in your collection a dreamy cooing chanteuse's album The Sound of a Woman Being Porked. Backstage passes were something girls made at us, not something out of paper our management issued and distributed. Making passes and making wishes, making passes at wishbones. The stains on the bed were not their corporeal selves.

With all those girls we were the beerbarons of Nefertiti. Bananahaired girls. Time kittens. Sufi labias. Tight kisses and lipstick.

There is no ice at the bottom of a lake, or under the Bermuda Triangle. Women as a shirt-tail out. ONLY THE BIG said the t-shirt of Bananaphrodite.

Those days, around the state, Tippy's dick must've been going up and down steaming and spinning around like Hero of Alexandria's aeolipile. Just made bed and it sticks out for a mile. Plenty of healthy exercise for his good-luck dick, those girls kept him Pinocchiopeckered all dong-day long. Like Christ in the distaff logging camp,

an erection the locomotive of the morning train, a hobo harmonica blowing the old song “The Clown and the Clitoris”. One morning he woke up intelligent. His organ of generation the smoking barrel of a cannon loose on deck. His cock a talking can opener.. A kamikaze Messerschmidt flying saucer. According to her his balls were like little suns. That Tippy, his brain is down where his heart's supposed to be and his heart is upstairs in his skull. With that dick Tippy was the Ace of Clubs. Called his cock Music from Big Pink, after the wellrespected record. An ovary-pushing man. Priapic politician, he gave his loves a chicken in every pot. A regular Cojones Maronie. His Mildredpleaser, his Katefinger, acclaimed best of that race of Dutchmen. He almost died of sex appeal. White moon-spurts from his pink thorn. The offending member only offensive in its concupiscience. He was riding that salty ponytail.

Some girl who must've time-travelled, or talked a lot to her gunmoll grandmother, told me Tippy had the biggest cock since John Dillinger. She then turned to me and tried to make me feel good adding how my own small and demure one was like the ones on Greek statues, a Hermes-pud. A lil' pimento in the Garden of Olives.

Yes, I’m OK with that. Sorry I brought it up.

When I heard Tippy was in the little washroom backstage with a girl named Stigmata, "I was, uh, probing some holes, you guys", I wondered was she Scandinavian? A black preacher's daughter?

What kind of Catholic father would name her that? Imagine the confusion when she got her period. And undoubtedly only make her hornier? Blood, faith and nitroglycerine.

Dorky girl we called Casseopia the Cassowary. That dark one, is she called Colonista because she's like a Spanish colonist or his spawn in this hemisphere, or because she's big and unsatisfying back there in her colon? Not the latter, I hope. I'd swear it was her family name that was Stenchblossom, not anything the bands and road crews made up to call her All those little Tippy-faced toddlers started appearing as props in department-store fashion shoots, Ooberammagau’s department store’s annual Fashion Play, or were arranged in pageants of blue-eyed, straw-haired cuteness and marched around, through the streets in holiday parades, etc. Massed at car lot or shopping center Grand Openings and ribbon cuttings. A cliché after a while, he fathered so damn many of them.

We wondered if goat-footed vacation fauns had run in Tippy's family for centuries, thousands, riverrine nymphs and woodland satyrs. Girlseeking missiles, hot and cold running radar in his pants, honing in on hers; the signalsex corps.

Every Sheelah-Na-Gig who shows up at the gig to grin and bare it, especially after Tippy began revealing the missing part, the tube filler, convex to complete concavity's longing.

He would walk that caulk.

Here, I’ll give you the wheel, let you drive for a while, while we’re talking. Oh, right, we’re not really on the tour bus now, are we.

Talking so much about it, I just had a reverie that we were still on tour. Egad, J-Edgar-gallivanting around the state, what adventure.

Still, those were the days, eh?

Look, I may conflate events or concerts in the telling, you've got

to forgive me. Or mis-name certain misses.

America, America, America. If you laid all the women in Vegas, Palm Springs and Manhattan end to end, you'd be like Sinatra or President Kennedy. As people said about President Kennedy, his wartime PT109 back injuries made him seek all those women for relief.

Perhaps a car accident or difficult birth, seized by hipshakin' satyriasis, his cock switched to the On position all the time.

Tippy squeezed all the breasts in the world, all the warm women in Washington. And the rest of the country, as we barnstormed and toured. From sea to shining semen. Counting off, someone named Snack Pie. A tall reedy girl called Bamboo or Bambu, who didn't have to be bamboozled into bed. That damsel, that wim-o-weh Rapunzel. Eager young semenseekers. There were even a few with show-offy names like Cinderella Cheesecake, not their given Jewish or Christian appelations. Scalawags of sex, lots of lubricity in the city.

Appendectomy girls. At first I thought her name was Oriole, like the little yellow bird, but no, it was Aureole for obvious reasons once her shirt was off. Two egg-cups of bacon fat. Interesting.

A fast-talking, barely-sleeping girl called Bethedreine.

A girl—or perhaps an entire extended family of formidable women— named Hundredcunt. Girl named Roseate. Compass Rose, whom one ill-bred and bumptious band rudely called Cum-Piss-Roll. Don’t confuse her with Casserole.

A Sunday concert girl named Summercloud. Most of the girls around those gigs were like openfaced sandwiches, and we jumped on like the missing top slice of bread. Some merchandise floating in the woods. Drowning in a sea of lust and tube tops. Paternity suits

were considered as unhip and declassé as leisure suits. Oh spreadeagled trickster's daughters you, eyes full of Mexican mascara, your bellies are feline, can you handle this band Tippy and the Chomps?

Let's Rock!

We saw so many women's made-up faces we soon had Revlon revulsion. Airport girlplanes and playing ground hooky. Groupies need new stars as mosquitoes need blood, as Rock n' Rollers need fresh adulation. Beauty spiders. Blue Dalmatians. Ginger waves.

Every beach a hundred conches. She was making hissing noises down there. Mouthhounds. That mouth hotel. Kitsch witches. Takeout women. Philandering as philanthropy. Sperm from a cuckoo clock. We took whipporwill baths with pillow slaves. Heavy bradrinkers. Some girl's body like a light cross between a bicycle and a salad bar. Condomhouse. On Ob-Gyn Avenue. Various priestly temptations. Double parked in the nude. Ahh, girls, the fully frontal sex. A tufts university of pubic hair. A nylon nude. A funny kind of female smoke. Pussy from the bottom of the sea. That funbag.

Cunts n' consonants. Love angels burst. Evidence of sex play. This to me is turgid.

There may have been orgies on the road, the mixing of many spices and flavors—kitchen chemistry in the back of the van—but I must've been asleep on the way, or it all went on behind my back (so that's why ultimately that Coral was so important to me).

To continue: Girls with '60's independence names like Divorciana, Distancia, Careergirlio, Pantihosea. Girls who'd grow into secretaries with names like Miss Formfittingly, Miss Comehitherly.

They were feminists when it came to screwing. Groupie named

Christine Cyclonefence, name suggesting something done at the edge of a schoolyard. Beth Sofabed, Judy Alternate, Penny Pinnacle. Groupies named Angleface, Perfect Kathy, Barbara Q. Beef and Patty Melt. Andrea Collide, Honey Emeritus, preppie Linda Self and a girl named "Complicity". Silver-lipped Charlene the Razor Blade Queen. Four-way Linda, greenie stickum caps describe her nipples. Mary Mindinao, big n' swarthy Linda Amazode and blackand-blue haired lost Tituba.

Tippy was girl happy, with the groupies

Mobilhomea, another (younger) Irish Sheela-Na-Gig, and Devil Mae Care all joining him after the show for the real show about to begin.

The Pointed Sisters. The Invincible Roommates. One named Marianas Trench, another called Post-Hole Digger. Linda Preteen.

Annie Madness, the memorable part of Blushingbride, MO. Judy Alternative. Groupie Sara Circe or "Circa" 2000 B.C. Circus prostitutes brought us tits and thermos bottles. That lamb o' God Agnes Day. Voodoo doll Neda Girlfriend and a fun midwest orientalist named Suntana, allegedly Buddha's girlfriend with her rocket monster mouth. Lawn-tangling with Rosy Osiris. On the lawn he rolled with Rose Dust and Garden Hose. For some women screwing equals sewing, including a groupie named "Underpants". A girl named "Pillow", one named "City", one girl name "Cigarette" and another nicknamed "Hand Towel". I don't understand this any better than you do. Interesting love-variants like Miss Rubberman or the Lady in Journalism School, pretty as a personality, or Chataqua Cathy who talks/lectures all thru sex. Pamelama Fa Fa Fa.

A girl called Cakey. The way the roadies sneered it, I don't want to know for what. One named Humilia or Humiliata or something, I don't want to remember.

Stuck his tongue between the legs of Fate. There was even one homely girl with zits on her heart so bad that Tippy ignited the oil from her skin with his lovemaking, which nearly fried them both. The Tube Boy met the Dirty Girl thru sex. Cindy Cipher. Heifer Jeffries.

Groupie Tracy Lapdog. Indian-Head Nikki. Sandy Outhouse. Zoe the Opthamologist. A girl named Check Out Time. Payola Diode.

Karen Bergen-Belsen. A groupie Mary Martian, flitting waif, mouth like a moth around a candle, playing the pan-pipes of his peter, and that of his peer group the band. Groupies Dry IceCubeulah, Testubia and Peggy of Lesotho. Rotund groupess called Bitty Bitbigger. It was not necessarily a bad time to be a fat girl, for skinny rock musicians liked pillowing down into and beneath them, into the motherly behemoth, especially on a cold trousers cold tour bus night.

A bibulous, buttery lass from Scotland called Butt o' Scotch. A girl, deliciolubricious, named Spongey. Mary Echo Echo. She was daughter of a sculptor accused of statutory rape in a Catholic Civil War graveyard. Her brother was one of our drug dealers, until busted.

Big frizzy hair: love's mushroom. Got girls like fire salamanders and basilisks, jellylike Portugese women-of-war waving tentacles seductively. Girls trying to prove they're not lonely. Lanky giraffefucks, all skinny, leggy, longhair dancing on two snakes. Skateboard legs and Baby Bruises. Nice weird modern girls who stuck to his every requirement, girls who never got nervous (some worked in

banks), girls who might even have babies someday. A woman who never wanted love, still pliable just for the company. Rabbit-breaking all nite long. Yellow, green and purple budgie-colored girls, mouths a sea of lifesavers. Mallomar girls and dark Eurasians that looked like gingerbread cookies gone a little bit stale yet sweet n' buttery, more like baking cookies than making love. Molasses-assed girls, and have you ever kissed molasses? Licking a candy girl, a chocolate you. Does the baker's wife leave crumbs in her bed? Sloe ginflavored girls, eyes blackened by the charcoal filter in her cigarette.

Colored girl Citronetta, who smelled pleasantly like a summer antimosquito picnic candle. A teenage girl who burst into flames when touched, which unerved the rest of the band—well, me—more than it did Tippy, who calmly bent down and lit a cigarette with the flame off a delicate leg.

We liked to call it a flux of women, conveying constant change, heat of solder and fucking. Tippy could tell time twelve ways by a slice of their panties. Cedar actresses, red-headed fire engines, sheasses in tight red pants. Groupies so here-dear though tonedeaf.

Punch-and-Judy nudity and display. Girls who'd go to school in the morning and come home flat-chested. Young girls you could slip in your back pocket like a slingshot. Girls with whom you could dance the Grime or do the Grist all night long. Girls who'd hold a big sign from the balcony Learn to Swim Naked Tippy. Underumpteens, that is, girls under age umpteen. Famous maidens. Polymaidenheads.

Stinkdance. Tippy rode women because he never had a hobby horse, because he never had a nickel for the rocking horse in front of

the supermarket. Hobby horsewomen in hobble skirts, he rode 'em because he never stole a girls' bike.

He called that part of his car the Love Compartment, said it was reserved for teeny tiny girls, though all I ever saw him put in there was drugs. And Thump's automatic machine pistol.

So, you're going to ball me in exchange for this interview, right?

That's how I read the Shah of Iran always does it. At least, with pretty female journalists.

Oh, don't make that sour face. I didn't really mean it. OK, ha ha, I was only joking. I'll be nice. We can proceed.

On the road. Cornstalk girls from fields and farms around Douche City, Kansas, working after school as waitresses in the lunch counter at restaurants like the Cattleman. Nubile, experimental cornstockings. Cherry Coke for the furnace that makes the steel for the plow that broke the hymen. I think about these things just looking at their t-shirts. From things I heard going on in the next-door hotel rooms, I came up with the riff that was to become the instrumental "Girl Farm". Thank you, I think it’s a memorable one too. Killer, yes.

I'll never forget Tippy described one girl as "an all-glass clitoris, raised on stilts." Made me want to meet her. Turned that line into a song.

And Sophie Cutie, with that clawhammer clitoris. Siphon-mouthed Livia Trivia. He kissed a woman whom a policeman recently left.

Then he sang about it.

Tippy brings order to the cosmos. By fucking the young groupies, leaving them grinning, he is taming the primordial chaos of the the oceanic melancholy of their mothers, darkly smoking

cigarettes over black coffee in the morning, dreading the day's housework ahead, meant for more than this. He's lost in the Women's Woods, so every man listening won’t have to be. The Saint John Cock-o’-the-Woods around here. What University sociologists were starting to call the Era of Fornication. Mark my words upon a stout groupie girl's breast with a magic marker: they're going to call this epoch the Obsceneocene.

A girl named Penny Fusebox, born Fusbach. A girl Crystal Diode, whose father owned Diode Radio Electronics parts store, which Thump frequented when trying to repair our jostled Megaron amplifiers. Or, when he was tinkering on his ever-unfinished Nuclear Death Ray Gun on the workbench in the garage. Eve Pumpkin; known to be versed in Thingyphagy, she’ll put that thing in her mouth and swallow too. Krystal Krystallnacht, how'd she get that name? A girl named Celebrant, while another answers to the name Celebrity.

His latest put-women-down swipe, "Bimbo Akimbo". She was nicknamed V.O., not for her shampoo but for Vaginal Orgasm.

Similarly, Dink had one called Hennessey V.S.O.P., with her cognac pee. Poetry housewives. One girl called Led Zipporah. Lucy Tuttifrutti, now there’s a Rock n’ Roll name. A girl named Frailty was sure game, ripe pickings for bands and their road crews. As in an old movie, a wicked administrator cried "Release the Lisa!" This was how the sexual urge was manifested, ritualized in those days. I suppose there were couples dating, marrying, making love elsewhere than Rock n' Roll, but I don't think I even knew any. Maybe some high school jocks?

Some girls wore shoes called Mary Janes to signify they'd do it

in exchange for marijuana. Got to scrape that sweet vagina right off your shoe. An amiable scullery-maid of rock named Reefer Green.

We caught her snuggle-shuffling Tippy out of the hotel room. That girl said she wanted to lock Tippy up with her for the Hundred and One Days of Passover. We didn't know anything, believed that's what they did. Nail Girls, and I don't mean painted, or the painting of, fingers and toes. A cuddlesome girl called Redness Goaway.

Strutting Lady-of-the-Mange. Mademoiselle d'Oldtestament. The name Phyllis is a palindrome or anagram for syphillis, so was always a code word that the inevitably poxy girl by that name had it.

Another girl just called Equipment, whom of course we relegated to the road crew.

It was probably cruel—while impressed by the heavily pregnant girl's skills and enjoying her favors—to call her Spermata Zoe, but we found it funny nonetheless. Don't date that girl called Abortionata.

Always hitting you up for money. Tippy wisely sang her the ring-ading couplet "Abortionata, rhymes with Sinatra" and sent her on her merry way.

Our songs exuded experience, but mostly extruded pure and impure sex. We were young and at our best-looking, full of energy to play gigs and tour around and around, so we would make hay while the girls' buns shine.

He took pity on a big dorky girl named Golgotha, shunned by her church. And a churchgoing girl nicknamed the King James Virgin. Dink spread his rum all over her virgin islands too. Licked the head of a hydrocephalic girl—they still had them walking around that way in those days—as if he could lap out and drink the fluid pressing

upon her brain. Dink only wondered if it could be bottled, fermented or distilled. Tippy answered the hotel room door, his mean streak bulging through his pants. What he laughingly called, on this mighty tour with all those girls ticked off like milestones passed or succoring highway rest stops, his Pocket Road Atlas. Like a bag of frozen fish, a contemporary Rock band making the rounds of this nourishing nation should be labeled: May Contain Boners or Boner Fragments.

We brought gifts for girls, cherrybombs of sex and rock n' roll.

Spying the carpet of pre-nubile girls he points with a busted tennis racket he found at one, next. Speckled skin. She grins in her braces.

She thinks it's just a song, which it is. One of the young women that came around to the house was later to be spaceshuttle astronaut Mustang Sally, though there's no way you could get her to admit it now. All of the Three Chomps' daughters, attending college in Aleppo, came by. The small sexual objects like young women are what left doors and windows open there, or else there'd be no light or new air. We're mushrooms that way. Three female prisoners in the precinct, enlightened by the three p.m. Michigan sun in that Rock n' rumpus room.

Tippy had a lazy eye for girls, that arse-eyed fool. Drinkin' vile seducers' wine from a girl-shaped cup with a dirty bottom. That Playboyillic anti-dufus looking like Mister Cruel-to-Girls. Where else but a department store do you find so many women? Making dozens of cassette mushrooms to contain the clitoris sound. After ninetynine million hours of playing Tippy went upstairs with at least one little girl to his own room. The holiest part of the house, according to him.

Now you're entering the rude room. Essentially a sperm-and-eggs singles' bar. A creamatorium disguised as a wax museum, as in Hey Baby, want to watch the wax run? Theatre of all possibilities, with infinite entertainment policies inside. Tippy's room was the little manger in which Jesus lay, or in which Jesus lay a whore according to another, racier Gospel's, version of it. He had an athletic javelin stolen from the university or a Watusi spear cobbed from the Zinjananthropology museum stuck in the wall upon which he hung his clothes. A hunting jacket, its quilting stuffed with poison oak, its fleece was white as snow. A single flannel shirt covered with cocoons, the moths in it tended to dress up for Halloween as bats.

This was what mothers call a truly messy room, socks smelling like dinosaurs, clothes that've been dirty all Winter, dirty all their lives.

His tattered jeans he happened to be wearing. Tippy's a pretty impetuous guy, sometimes he'd turn over the record player instead of the record. A ratty, buggy bison pelt that used to be on the floor for the longest time now served as Tippy's bedspread, but was fairly foul as he'd shit in it. But that's where he gave 'em that diamond punch.

He was less a ladies man than something between a Ladies’ Maniac and a Ladies’ Manioc, source of their tapioca. On sheets where the stains have no names. Mushrooms growing on the bed, mattress a rock garden of crabs. A pack of mattresses on the floor, earthbed airbed firebed and waterbed. Black Mattress. Marijuana, sesame seeds sprouted from the carpet gradually replaced by doggy girl-hair.

"Whew—smells like somebody gave birth in here" said uninvited census takers. Who'd bother milking the carpet in this stink room.

So maybe it smells like a school bus. Bedshaving in the morning with

a sharp girl. Whose floor was most bloodstained? How do you clean the holiest of holy churches?

Churches, yes. Raised without any Christiannic religion drumming in his head, stilling his loins, Tippy just assumed the Twelve Apostles were women, the comic book superhero's traveling harem. Sheer baggy trousers, tiny open vests as tops, curly-toe slippers, all that. Christ of the Orient. Pope Pasha the First. He'd murmur "open sesame" when he wanted one to spread, present hindquarters for his release and relief. What Tippy called his catechism concert. Tailored for children's churches, full of candy and carnality. Bird-drums with little forked-leg drumsticks, drums made for virgins. Tailored for girls at that dangerous age.

Meanwhile I sat in my room, reading or practicing my guitar, thinking about music, working out the chords to "Bloated" on an unplugged Walt Derr Fenderbender Flying V-8. My own room had all sorts of inefficient junk in it that I might need some day. Chuck Berry's equine skull as a bookend. This is a piece of Archimedes' big lever with which he made the earth Rock n' Roll. A tuning peg from John the Baptist's guitar, a piece of the true cross to tamp my dopepipe with (it was getting pretty charred). One of the Cross' nails as a guitar slide. Drinking my iced coffee, as others their absinthe, out of one of Moses' or Saint Joseph's horns. Guitar pick is said to be the prepuce of Priapus. Rock has only three chords, for it only takes three to symbolize tit, tit, cunt. Never miss an opportunity to urinate, or to fuck, they say. But after sex you tend to have to shower and change your clothes more often, two things I don't like. Some girls from the University had chamber music genitals, somehow linking

music to sexuality, vibrations or chords and harmony, the curds n' whey of rock n' roll. Rhythm n' Lust. Some girls were fuckin' museum curators when it came to the Rock men they collected, makin' jello molds and aspics of his male aspect. Doggie-bag curators. Just like numismatists or philatelists in the way they assiduously collected experience. The storage facilities of a young female crotch are amazing! For girls must smoke cigarettes, play clarinet or recorder in grade school in order to learn how to foreplay and foreplease boys. Girls ride bikes to learn how to fuck, how to get somewhere on him fast. Some of those girls were ugly, face like a pooper scooper, dugs like doggie bags, but Tippy sure learned to love them. Gnostic whores. He felt for those girls like the electrician feels for the house he's just wired.

Sex is—to speak in double negatives—the death of death.

Experience made continent. Sex is like a school bus in the middle of the night discharging youthful passengers, a towtruck that serves no purpose but makes plenty of noise (as man is God's little car). Sex is pink and brown, speeding up pink road. Sex being the pushpin that holds a calendar up by its used pages; you have to pull it out twelve times a year. Sex turns water into blood in his jackolantern heart.

His sock-it-to-me heart wanted sex with the world. Here's someone who knew how to use his olives and Olive Oyl. Great lovers like Samson and Delilah, Noah and the Ark. Sex as a garbage disposal emptying man's burden, these women as a wastebasket, man's roundest file. Sex as the two-drink minimum for each species on Noah's Ark. The harem in the golden groupie age. The snakeoil of

sleaze, of sex. What the shower curtain saw. When Romeo climbs up and swings on Juliet without a net.

No, I’m not trying to turn you on. I’m just ruminating on something important to the story. Yes, I know you said you have a boyfriend. May I continue? Thank you.

Fingerpickin' this old guitar I tried not to think too much about sex. The Can't Have Your Cake And Eat It Too of chastity. Men have a heart, while women have breasts. Like trying to separate sperm and egg. Her punishment parts tightly fit the crime, undressing like the cap coming off a magic marker when it rolls off the desk. All the pinkest parts of a girl, openmouthed genitalia, blood oil and underarm hair which merely acts like the pages of a book. Cactus nipples hard as ten penny nails Tongue in the meringue.

A kiss, a piss, a party. This makes this go like this. The world's deepest depression, a decent depression, her not inconsiderable cootie-catcher. Then comes along a rape artist with his bullbug dirtsperm, shake-a-fuck masquerading as the fuck of love. Impulse rapists and rape athiests. The tag! no givebacks! of Love. Dogs chase cats. Water comes from love. Bees make honey and secretaries make coffee. The thrill of behavior. The pillows of tomorrow. Hey, this wasn't the closing of the Sex Age. In our times sex is light assembly, a penny in the fusebox, war bubbles in the marriage tunnel. The lover is the honeyed animal, laughter as lubricant. A birdbath for lovers. Let's de-emphasize incest. Skillful tricourtesans, their inflammations rubbed off with cortisone.

That which obviate plucking: hairs on a girl's chin, guitar strings. A guitar is like a woman's body I suppose.

You want to really go crazy? Don't think about the women you've slept with, think about how many you haven't. I'll bet if even Tippy thought of some names of girls he hadn't fucked—Rosalie Annie Luisa Linda Terry—he'd get depressed. An elfin thingie called Sprinklesparkle. Love is not the issue, completion is. When you're talkin' bout love I want a front row seat. I hit a G7 chord at this point and could've turned some of these thoughts into a song but didn't bother. Something like the German hiker who just had to kiss the icy stream. Who could've turned a song into love. Woman as a pump primed for love, a car that runs on love. Love is the answer and the answer and the answer is me. Fuck is the word and the word is you.

Men and women's minds work so differently, its a wonder they ever agree, can even communicate on the same terms. Do girls really even know how to listen to a record without it reminding them of times they spent, or would like to have spent on them, with some boy? Do girls really want boys to do what they just finished telling them not to do? Man to a woman must be like a bottle looks to an alcoholic.

My brother Thump had one fast girl he kept running in perfect condition, polished and well-lubricated, and another old beat-up girl he kept out behind the garage for parts. He rarely had sex outside the garage except for her, few engines off the chain hoist. Meanwhile Dink went upstairs with Ann Toxication. Girls would call Dink "rum cum", and could tell by blowing him that he was a White Russian.

A girl—or perhaps an entire family of formidable women— named Hundredcunt. Girl named Roseate. Compass Rose, whom the band rudely called Cum-Piss-Roll. Andrea Accident.

Lighten up Roque, they say. Here, this girl likes you. Take her for a spin. Hmmph. Having any kind of a home is both a blessing and a curse, a two-edged blunderbuss. Energy gets unblocked here.

This place is both astral and nasal. Let me clear my throat. Dogs fucked cats. This horseshithouse is ours. Home is anyplace you can make love, can get it up and come. Maybe someday I'll come home.

I really don't want to sulk and balk like a vitriol troll. Immersed in my primordial repressions, I tend to think I'll just sit this one out.

G7 D G7 D G7.

One sensation after another. Yeah, that's how I'd describe being in the Chomps. Thank you, my dear heart, for asking. Your father fed you a deer heart during November hunting season? No, that’s not what I called you. It’s just that it’s so cool that you kids still care. After Tippy's demise and all the rest.

To keep the cash flow solvent, the record company arranged another tour. We hit the road and the road hit us. Hell, we’d been out to get Michigan, now we were out to get the Midwest. Lookout, Primrose Path, Ohio!

Ahead was a demi-national tour, in Thump's sex-offender van and slippers. This would be fun, a string of cities like a chuckleberry song, or the emigrant tales westward in the covered wagons. I'm getting Amerigo-sentimental. All our equipment piled in, fastened on the sides with the bondage straps that Tump usually uses only on girls. Our eyes glaze over after hours traveling in the van. Bland Road was replaced by Blind Road.

We played at Put It In Bay, Ontario. Tried out different material

in each of two towns on either side of a river in Quebec called Siende-La-Vierge-Marie-Doit and Sien-de-La-Vierge-Marie-Doit-Gauche.

We played for a bunch of pilled-up piltdown giants at New Golem, NY. Placebo, NY. Some hemi-fueled wisenheimer felt permission to expectorate towards the stage in Salivaton, NY, so Thump calmy stood up from his drums, walked down the steps at the side of the stage, walked over to the offender and smashed him down, herniated him swiftly with his sharpened boot so the spitpud leaked like a crumpled, broken bag of birdseed, while Dink and I kept up a filagree of bass and feedbackhanded fluidity. Our manager called, upbraided us but said we were booked the next night at a small college in Girlsbush, NY but I don't know if he just made that up to titillate the Tipparillo. A couple hours away, Freshness University, heavily endowed and continually grantsupported by a nearby manufacturer of feminine hygiene products.

East coast ballroom promoter Max Opera called us, offered us a tour and all that it entailed. Several states in the part of the country called the Englandesque, as aged and primly stuffy as overseas though not creative, swinging Beatles Britain or anything remotely like that. We sped to that stodgy part of the US, were merely received with wan politeness. We played the Armory at Policemansex, MA. Then Suffersex and the village of Wantonsex, Massachusetts, the bricks still glazed from burning witches. Nearby Secretsex, MA. A town with a big public library called Peternoviceville. I’ll bet our bailbondsman friend Horace would like Subpoenaton, its big cozy courthouse. Is the name of that Massachusetts town Satanscream the command “Satan, scream!” or Satan’s own cream? Played at the Katz Meow Klub, Katz, NY, and felt like the Chomps in their early-20th-century vaudevillain youth. The Fuckingglass Center for the Arts in Port Kathy, NY. An

there. Tippy held what he laughingly called "Viking burials" with several of them, sacrificing his longship in their mossy bogs so to speak, jeans buttons popping like Sutton Hoo. Yeshivaton-on-theHudson, NY. Small Catholic-college towns like Temptation-of-SaintAnthony, NY. A town called Massaging, NY. Saw a buffalo herd sweeping over Nicaraugua Falls. We played for traditionally honeymooning couples, some still in their bedclothes or reeking baby doll lingerie, in Negro Falls, NY. Fluidtown, NY, where, until recently, something had been manufactured. Touring took us as far east as Placebo and Placebottom, NY, but that was still the huntershiftworkers part of the state, the Scheissarbeiter mountains, not Moxiehattan, Moxibustahatta, Megahattan, New Joke or New Big. Look at that Golgothadome full of girls. Look at that crowd of thorns.

Zookipsie, NY—maybe there's a zoo there, or where zookeepers come from, perhaps the shy undergraduate student who ran the little one at the University so rattled by Tippy’s shenanigans. Good drugs like Genesee Ginseng came from Upsnake, New York. We got so good, so well-practiced, we passed around electropercussive musical equipment like that tricky Harlem basketball team palmed their interlocked balls. We played the Gorge n' Bowl at Pathetic Falls, NY. Across a short bridge, the armaments manufacturing (originally arrows) Saint Sebastian, Quebec. One-Arm, Quebec, and Tippy could relate to that. Then back, to Barnum, NY, prosperous docklands spun off from New Big when the circus and spectaculars entrepreneur wanted a tax haven, an auto-humorous and autonomous zone named after himself. Amazing how close he came to becoming a Civil War President.

We played in Tinseltown, Delaware. A club called the Hell's Storage Room in Apnea Park, New Jersey. Melted ice cream and sticky cotton candy all over our clothes and equipment in the town Theme Park, New Jersey, where they held the famous beauty contest "The Broad Walk" which ol' Sinatra hosted, pummeling the TV cameras with his fists.

This worked so well that we were up for more. A string of prearranged dates playing at military bases down south, were set up by the quasi-official service organization set up in WWII where soldiers could fuck their moms, or a kindly reasonable equivalent of her.

In Ucky McUcky, Kentucky, we were the improbably opening act for old country singer Red Prostitute. This fact impressed Coral's parents when she told them. We played in Nationalville, where we were billed as Midwestern Country-Rock. Mount Awful and several other hillbilly Hollywoods. Gutbuckets in the sky. Played in slave cabins in the deepening south, in the empty Montgomery Bus Station (some kind of boycott going on?). Played a club with a revolving barbecue dance floor under infared hot lights called the Rotisserie where Tippy spun around like a rock n' rolling pin. Niteclubs like the Kiln, The Cocoon, the Bedding, the Savings and Love Loan Association. After that, Foreskin Mountain, GA. Of course we posed for silly tourist snapshots next to the giant rooster statue in Famous Cock, TX. Played in Mahogany, Alabama at the opening of a Bible storage company. Perpetually, petulantly defiant state motto on their license plates "We'll Have to Eat Our Slaves". Fetid Beach, North Carolina, yawn. We played at the Biblical resort towns of Beersheba and Bathsheba, supposedly the site of the Queen of Sheba's beer-

baths and hot-spirits springs.

Plato Beach, South Carolina, and an unfriendly town called Restrooms for Customers Only, Georgia. Couldn't remember after a while in what states we played Franchise Hill, or Laser Park—spa at its famous animal, vegetable and mineral springs—but we played that carp-and-catfish pond at Pincus, LA. The tiny waterfront club Shrimp Louie's in Bok Choy, FL. In one beach town we played on the boardwalk and underneath the stage was a dead mermaid we could smell, she stunk to high heaven. Wide-eyed families stared from their houseboats mired and buried in the shifting sand. Every band played in the southern town of Poliomelytis, GA where FDR stopped to bathe, pause, drink and nap in a dusty old hotel with an Army nurse who later gave birth to the little sister of Horace Mars; or was that Eisenhower?

Relax, I’ll tell you about Horace later.

Balm Beach, where envious wealthy dowagers and heirs sprinkled jewels and sharp-edged diamonds upon the road to cut our tires. Anything to fight the hippie hurricane. We played at truck scales and feedlots. Dodged a spat when Thump spat at the spa. At slurries, sludge ponds, scummy irrigation ditches in the sunny farmlands of this long-distance state. We should be rich enough to found a new town Horace Mars, FL but aren't yet. I haven't told you about Horace yet? OK, in a little bit, stay tuned. Important guy. See, Florida makes me think of him, his family, the sunshine they brought to Aleppo.

Weaving our way back to the midwest, we did a night at the pavillion on Invective Lake at the resort called Uranus in the Poconos.

Cheeseburgers' itinerary. The town of Girl's Bike, OH. sounds sexy,

but wasn't. Ho-hum quotidian nights in Athletics, OH, and Lecture, Ontario. Pipedreamwood, Ohio and Genitalia, Illinois. In one night on tour we drove between Iowa and Jupiter's moon Io. Tippy was taking a pre-mescaline while the rest of us mentally counted how much money we were making. But kept losing count, and were glad we had a manager to deal with all that.

When we told her of the tour, Coral thought Zirconsin was where pretty gemstones came from. Was Rhinestone the name of a town, or club owner? In Drumwater, WI, Thump stole some drums from the Indianenemee Plantation or Reservation or whatever. Look, music—and they say the music biz too—is all about stealing the good stuff from someone darker than you, right? Why such great plunderers commissioned all the European classical stuff.

Celebrity. Nobody calls it "celebrity-chastity", cuz it ain't.

We had low expectations for our gig in New Celibacy, IN. Every Fall the University varsity team charged out of Aleppo to play against that state university located in New Lidice, Indiana. So we played there too. Opening act was a quartet of local wastebeatles.

A week later we were heading west, Appelbaum, Kansas, and Freebase, Missouri where the drug process was first discovered.

Oral Hill, Nebraska; none of the milkmaids, nor any of the barnyard animals on Old McDonald's farm in the dell were safe with Tippy in town. Crossing the Foodlands, out in the fields I expected to find the Green Giant out here, canning and freezing vegetables. Amber waves of grain and a town hall in Bad Reaction, North Dakota. Black Mold, ND. Some towns still had goats in graveyards; others, junkyard dogs digging up remains, sickening from formaldehyde. Fulfilling a

boyhood dream, Thump rode a banana seat bike up Mount Rushmore. Then vandalized it severely, knocking off Presidential noses, etc. Devil's Playground, Montana. On our first tour the odometer changed to 00000 as that old car crossed the exact center of the United States.

Played a club in the snowy Rockies called the Continental Drift.

Then a club called the Swingset Ranch out west, decorated in tumbleweeds and rambling roses. Out west they called me the Rockalope, and I liked that. From there, a command performance for administrative staff at the Grand Coolie Damned. Criss-crossing between Los Bojangles, NM, Loeb y Leopoldo, NM, Los Tangelos, CA and Vengeance, NV. Nirvana, NV and the casino in nearby Jackalope. We played in Gasp Valley, NV; famous gambler EightDaughters Woman hanging around the stage. When we played in this sperm-n'-eggs singles bar in a sad place called Sperm Lake, the comedian opened the show spewing drops of rhetoric from an unmade jaw. Quaint, Colorado. Like the atom bomb tests, we scorched at Enema Sands, New Mexico. A big concert on its atomic testing site, the ground still warm though late in the season, and not just from hippie butts. The small crossroads village of Cuñasa, CA. We were stuck in a motel in Mimosa Beach, CA. The Rose Bowl fingers of dawn when we'd go to sleep, if then. Tippy liked this place; could have been a silent movie actor 4 or 50 years ago. Then down to Fruit Bat, CA, a strange agricultural town, the country-Michigan of the west. Thump started climbing on some agricultural equipment, almost got chopped up and canned. We had played a small club in Hassan i Sabah, CA. Farmwreckers' union halls in Peasant Valley

and Spazz Valley, CA. Hashish Valley, CA and the small town Opiate. A sunny farm town Pressing Medical Need with a plaque honoring founder Elvis Pressing.

Don’t ask about that abysmal festival at Castrato Valley Speedway. In a brighter note, all bands got sex tans one day at the Puta Seca Raceway. And us? All, yes ALL the girls 13-24 in Cantalope Valley, CA. Palm Strings Attached, California. An expansive polyopolis boasting suburbs Choloville, XrayVista and Mastectomy Beach. Fall bees in California, Tippy could lean his arm on the open car window and find it covered with bees after a single block. In Dental Beach all the zoo lions were out of their cages for a daily run on the sunset beachfront, regal joggers. Guidebooks to beaches full of women with their legs spread. Surf guitars twanging like the springs in car seats, bikinis snapping and unsnapped, slinky toys or screen doors slamming in the top-down nonstop summer.

Carseats wide as state parks, for all weatlhty teenagers’ friends and girlfriends in heirarchy. Winter mosquitoes, bunnysuns who rolled into that state through the greasy mountains over Donnerwetter Pass.

We were booked for a brief appearance to play members of a motorcycle club on a TV series about an international crime fighting rock band the Danger Phalluses. Not Phallii? We met the old movie star Zsa Zsa Azusa, who just had to get it from each of us and the road crew, whom she called our "key grips". As she gripped their dangling keys. Spelled sideways it says Egad, Ega Vaboor. Tippy was worshipped lapdogfully by actor Matt Dirtbike. In Hollywood we couldn't get the Director Tippy out of a bar called The Casting Couch.

Sure he liked the warm soft weather of L. A. but Michigan must be

remembered, he persevered.

After returning from Banal-y-wood we had our initials put in the sidewalk in front of our house, near our handprints. It was nice being rich and famous but each one of us, Tippy especially, was the kind of guy who'd rather open a new girlfriend than a new shopping center; less ribbons to cut.

Up to Wall-o'-Water, WA. When we played in Alaska the Eskimos turned their igloos upside down to use as speakers so they could hear us better over the midnight sun and tundra. In their honor the Chomps sang a song that used all seventeen words in their language for "snow". We played at this dreadful Rockfest on the White House lawn which caused the kids to dance all over the hidden Easter eggs, spoiling the egg roll, colored shells crunching under the tiniest hippie feet imaginable. When some kid chucked and egg at her the President's wife burst into tears on cue, and a tax was introduced in Congress on "music supposed to be played loud".

Tippy brought a young girl back to the limousine with him who had a crunchy heart but left eggs under the car seat.

We played at a World's Fair at the top of a stalled ferris wheel.

Thought we'd cheer those people who'd been stuck there for several days. At one stadium show the band appeared as little animated figures in a University Museum diorama. Tippy illustrating molecules under pressure. The rest of the crew spread out over the stage like paleolithic bones. This reminds me of our Science Fair gig, and I shed a tear. My life remains a museum.

And for Tippy, a girl in each port, his ship in each girl’s port, her berth canal. Hoist up the pubic portcullis.

Have I told you everything? In this nation towns sprout names like Yokoonowood, VA, or Shapirosperm, NY. The Chomps went on a tour of the loosest cities like Oil River, Ontario and Giraffe Patterns, West Virginia, Bangkok, Georgia and Sodom, Washington. Man, we were everywhere. Musical festivals in tiny Lee Ving, California and Fred Waring, Pennsylvania. We played in Pigsfoot-upon-Bottle o' Beer, New York (home of the Dufflebagburger) and Wife'sbutt, Wyoming. Beer and sausage farmtowns like Fartburg, Wisconsin. A roller rink in Twitching, New HampshireSome audiences were only small clouds, small prehistoric chickens. States we wanted to see: Montanaho, Idah or Idakota, Wisconsota. Buddhasberg, New York.

By that time, EVERY state had a town Truth or Consequences. We played the Academy of Mutants. All over the American anthill.

This all said and done, the accountants looked at the books, clinked their cognacs, patted their protruberant bellies, nodded sagely and proposed a world tour. Tippy takes his orgasm all around the world. Better international stardom than in-her-vaginal condom.

I'd specifically requested a flight with a gremlin on the wing, but got Smoking. On our tour the Chomps drank and fell asleep. Thump crafted our "flight canteen" for booze by welding a suitcase handle to an old jet fuel tank that we lugged to their seats. ‘It'll fit under the seats if I say it will, bitch”; That Thump, what a card. Tippy would chat with gremlins on the wings, tomb adders on the plane beneath the seats, count UFOs. That airplaney smell like the farts of burning carcinogens. Crawling in what federal air wreck-pokers grimly called the Big Red Garment Bag. The scenic tourniquet. All travelling is travelling with your parents. My mother said "wear two pairs of

underwear" meaning in case I get taken to the doctor's office in winter, for cleanliness or sexual hygiene? On tour my mother would send drawerfuls of clipped cupons, recipies and advice columns. Felt that road anguish Are We Any Good? Fame equals impatient and excited ambition. Road angst upon a beaming band maketh apprehension. In near-total misapprehension we were presented to the audience as something supposed to be an alternative to the prevailing bacchantes and bolshevieks. I tried to use my bowels as an excuse not to travel, What if the plane is Occupied...? You've heard of the Fuller Brush Man, well here's the full o' bull dude.

Tippy's impetuosity to create, as opposed to mine to evacuate.

Brilliant wit versus shit. Am I just fertilizer?

On tour we had a special large suitcase just to carry all our drugs, full to the brim—pills would press into and imbed themselves into gooey brownie-sized chunks of hashish—about which we'd say to customs inspectors "Don't look in that one." We had durable guitar cases and luggage made of porkrind and skunkhide, with the scent turned inside out. The rubes' world tour. Entourage in tow, we flew on big commercial airlines piloted by guys in casual golf clothes, drinks in hand like yachting playboys, or by shaggy students in funny t-shirts, cutoffs and sandals. Fly Air Alcoholics!, exhorted Dink. All the seats had been taken out for people's bedrolls, to appeal to the kids. Of course we got student rates with our fake ID's.

We toured England, a country the color of damp cardboard on the back of tablets of typewriter paper. One fashionable King had abdicated for love of the electric guitar and the instruments had flooded the country up the Thames and Mersey rivers. The band

rode horsey English Dames. Beer, beef, biological puddings.

Bullbaiting in the Globe Theatre, public hangings of pickpockets hauled before wiggy magistrates. Played in an English pub called The Hippie's Foot, storing our equipment in the loo. There's no town in Michigan with any quaint king of name like Psychedelicfriars as you'd find in Britain. I had hoped to see unexploded V-1 or V-2 bombs left over from the War, as well as all the famous Rock bands that hadn’t played Motorsburg or Alepp, or hardly enough. We met Lord Leo Archbishop Fender Chancellor Exchequer Gibson CBS. Aldebbie got us booked into a rough night club in Germany called the Prostitute's Egg, where we played all night in greasy hair and leather jacket to accompany strippers, which forced us to learn a million songs. We had become a mighty, mighty band. Inspired. Like the Biblical prophets Buchenwald, Birkenau and Belsen, in the fiery furnace, or the lionwhale's mouth, or whatever. Whatever shit God threw at 'em. Stopped to sweep up föhn-blown women crossing the autobahn. I wanted to go to Germany, East West and Midwest.

Longed to go to Hamburg and do Nazi imitations from the stage, the secret of the Mercybeat you-know-whos’ success. The Spenglerian Kabarett Neuchwanstein. Nightclubs named after Tippy like the Cigaretten-Esel cellar in Delrio-Harburg, Germany, where the doorman had to lift the tail of a giant donkey to let you in. We played the giant stadium at Nuremberg, came down and landed in the zeppelin field. Like the Three-D Reich's architecture, our volume control knobs had no sense of scale. In Bayreuth I wanted to conduct all sorts of shit. I demanded we take a side trip to Spandau, big lazy estate of famous comedian Rudolf Hess, where Speer designed

stage sets for Rock concerts. He chuckled about the consummate boredom of the Third Reich, and reminisced fondly about Hitler's secret mistake, the so-called brown gamine (why the feuhrer selected shirts in that color), that Jewish girl who used to shit on his head, piss on his tonsils like a good German's beer. This is the guilt even Aleppo Germans still carried around with them, made them so conservative. We visited the elephant-man skeleton of Goebbels, who limped from dancing too hard on his cloven hoof. His novel Mickey inspired a whole postwar generation of American mice to be called that. Supposedly a most remarkable radio voice. Rudolph Hess' roommate artistic Artaud, a tempted Saint Anthony, another Marc Antony to the Cleopatra of haunted-eyes insanity, haunted eyes of history. The hospitable Russian guards were hoping I'd make sure those two each had some sort of fatal "accident"—were they mistaking me for my brother?—but it was not yet time for that.

The audience felt like Russian guards and Cold War military ruffians when we played one rushed and disorganized whistle stop of a concert in St. Saltpeter, USSR. Some gigs were like the Crimean war. We played for the dick tater of Youth-go-saliva, Josip Broz Titties. No, not really, but he may have dug us.

We used Saints' bones as a bong in the Cathedral at KurtCobähn. At another pilgrimage church, Thump grabbed the Saint’s tibias to use as drumsticks, but hammering away on the marble alter they dissolved in a paraddidle of dust, eliciting rolls of laughter from us. We saw that famous church—nearly destroyed by Allied bombs in WWII from planes piloted by my dad, and Aldebbie's—that housed the remains of a female martyr saint. Just a skeleton above the navel

but below it a perfectly preserved body, legs open, fresh, warm and lubricated. A miracle, they'd claim, but seemingly refresh that lower half every ten years with part of a new body, a local girl sacrificed and sawed for the town's pilgrimage economy, tourist and souvenir trade.

Of course Tippy paid the deacon a pfennig to climb on, “take her for an Autobahn ride”. Burn the carbon out.

Planet Europe. Played in a country whose motto was "I Like School". In Europe we saw arcades like the Nicholbach Arcade in Aleppo, with Jewish intellectuals feverishly reading, scribbling in cafés as if the war was about to start. Still, Aleppo, to my knowledge, doesn't have catacombs; should. Fill them with former Mayors, university professors, somebody. Anyway, we played at a French yéyé pop club called the Pere LaChaise Lounge, full of those comfortable stretch-out lawn chairs overlooking the graveyard. The City of Bedroom Nightlights illumined fishnet-stocking'd hostesses in the Rue Pantiés. Breakfast was served; two girls to go with that.

Tippy remembered only pigeons doing the can-can outside the old luxury hotel window. On our European tour, asked the musical question does a bidet automatically masturbate a woman, or just keep her clean and fresh? They didn't appreciate our graffiti in the caves of Lascaux or Altimira, writing our band name on the aurochs, sly European bison with dagger-tipped horns. We motored south across this godforsaken country to warmer seas, and played the Grand Casino in Pornaco, the principality of a graceless Prince.

The cathedral were postmarked letters were on display written by the pockmarked Christ. Pigeon priests of the Vaticoliseum, for they combined the two favorite Roman tourist sites into one. We

were struck by Bells-of-Saint Mary's behavior on the part of a pouting, prissy Pope. Vaticannibalism, and what a deviant parish priest is thinking when he calls a choirboy "Romecakes." We got the hell out of there lickety-split, on Vespers while the priests were still praying their own, into trains-on-time, secular SPQR safety.

We confused the Mideast and the Midwest, for we couldn't very well be photographed standing on top of the K'aaba in Mecca, Michigan and convince fans we were cavorting and clowning on the authentic one. We travelled to Asia Minor, where they invented the key of A Minor, which we used in a long, droning antiphonal song.

Tippy would "in-public" with a Koo-Upchuck Hanuman, famous dancer and Egyptian Recline-With, hashish languor of two landrovers rolling over a desert of squirting puppies or two wounded scythes.

Likely that’s where he got…wait, I’m getting ahead of myself in the story. Pomegranate prostitutes. Young slave girls with a mulberry instead of a cherry to pick. Mucous and couscous. When I farted loudly onstage it was Wind of the Gods. Bulls were drowned in the Nile for us. A pyramid of fingerprints, like the lips of Nilotic art-girls that you just have to kiss. Asp and ibex, supplicant and scribe, High Priest of a selfish cult am I. Allegories of Tippy as jackal-headed Anubis, sacred as a cat in Egypt. Our sound had dessicated corpses shitting in their unrobbed caskets. Me, I tuned my guitar under a nearby pyramid for razorsharp accuracy. Dink shared his bottle with the sphinx. Tippy thought how someday he too would be an Egyptian mummy, parched n' flaky papyrus. Thump inspected armies massed at the border preparing to invade Israel. He was especially disappointed to find they weren't hanging anybody that day at the

Hanging Gardens, Babylon. Saint John the Baptist was in the audience munching on locusts, eating acorns like a hippie rodent.

We went cattle ranching in Catal Huyuk, rode power mowers in Mohojendaro. Played volley ball with a sacrificial scapegoat on Baalbek Beach, its trussed hooves flailing and tearing off girls' swimsuit tops. Vacationed in the Port of Salads. Fort Vatican, an outpost far from the original one. Played at the Youth Pavillion in the Sinai World's Fair. We played a poorly planned festival in the Holy City of Qum, and the heliocopters hired to bring us out of there crashed in the desert.

In India the opening act was the Success Sikhs at Rat Bastard Park in Calcutta, on a party barge floating like a turd in the Ganges, cases of cans of beer as ballast lurching over the waves of humanity, brown polluted bathers. On tour in India somebody called my brother a low-caste barber—their equivalent of hollering "Get a haircut"—and he leapt from the stage upon him and beat him up with drumsticks, dishevelling the rogue heckler's turban, dagger clattering and spilling his bag of carved ivory betel nuts about the filthy sidewalk. And everywhere the Chomps gave them what they expected, the curse of polyphony. A multiarmed dancing Shiva on guitar, but elephant-headed and stout as Ganesh. A blueskinn Krishnas singing his Vedas, Nude Deli. A music both virtuosic and idiotic at the same time. Played in decorative cities and civilizations, amps painted gold-leaf, lapis lazuli'd and marbellized.

Before the east Asian leg of the world tour, a paternal Aldebbie turned to me, hand on my knee and said that Tippy finds women everywhere, but maybe I’d have better luck with “geeshas”—at first I

thought he said t-shirts—in Japan. Strewn pagodas, blackened lambs, bitchen gamelan. A Japanese goodluck HoTai on drums.

How much did all that equipment cost? Oh, all the tea in China. You know we played the first Be-In in Beijing. Taiwan, realm of the soft palate.

We played in Paw Paw, New Guinea. Not really, but I saw their jungle mudmen in a cigaretto ad, and they seemed kind of cool.

Later I shared their beat and riff with the Peoples Puma Party’s other band the Upper Peninsulars, who quickly recorded a song "Mud Men o' Michigan", lots of tom-tom drums to sound pure and primitive, summoning their holy unholy barefoothood. So that was kind of like a tropical jungle trip. On tour in the South Seas tippy set fire to, or hurricaned-off with a megapuff of his wet breath, some Hawaiian girl's grass skirt, which got her tattoo-face headhunter boyfriends pissed off at him, many of whom were veterans. An island of confidence men sold us a bridge to the mainland.

Returning stateside by looping to the south, flying over aforementioned tropical jungle, we disembarked in the carnavalesquito city of Rio de Janet. We played at deep-dish Arecibo (where someone recorded that famous acoustic jazz album "Arecibop") but the space aliens' listening and tapping on their telegraph keys became distracting to us and interfered with the amps.

After all, in our honor a star in the heavens was named Beatle Jews.

Flying home a spattering of lakes and ponds looked from the afternoon airplane like dripped gold across Michigan. Michigan was the gold we were given.

Bring souvenirs of these travels to show you? Uh, they’re

packed away. Oh? I see you did your homework. Then this is all the tour we plan to take, after we’re a hit superband, that Aldebbie promised we definitely will undertake, to promote our second album.

Surely, Shirley. Next year we will, for sure.

Hey, really great to see you again. Did you know we recorded an album? We went to Big Joke and all that. Tippy will be talking to the radio station about it soon, when he gets an advance test copy he can bring them.

Man, we got the Gold of the Lions. Had magic lawyers. They knew what was valuable and what was vaudeville. Buying and selling teenage futures. A self-critical parkinglot. We were getting prosperityitis. Musical Federal Reserve notes, fluid as the tears from the eye in the pyramid, royalties flowing from its tear ducts.

Desposited our earnings in a special account in the McKinleyMorganfeld Bank. Tippy was wealthy on paper and on vinyl. Rich enough to hire a tornado to whip through the mobile home park, hurl his parents' housetrailer about, just for goof.

The record company accountards, those fiduciary saducees, told us we were so rich, all of our checks we wrote bore the same number. I don't understand how that works. And they wanted us to think that we had numberless Neuschwansteins of disposible follywealth, but I suspected accounting chicanery, an inevitable paring back ahead. We were gullible rubes when it came to spending money, everyone from the record company on down took advantage of us.

We (OK, Tippy) had so enjoyed the spoils of girls' lubricious sex, now we went hogwire on material sex—that is to say, the possessive trappings of success. The decline into consumerism, hemmed in only by the limits of the suburban imagination. In my world there are objects. Fiduciary bubbles, bubbeleh. Now we were living in the superburbs. The Michigan farmer who invented bacon said Prosperity Doth Best Discover Vice, and we were vicelords discovering new ones every day and night. Hey, can we patent this one, or that one, for residuals (like a hit song, hah) in our old age?

Ehh, not so new after all.

My first, perhaps conservative, purchase with our ill-gotten gains was my second electric guitar. A cherry Beatoff from the UK, named after the Old Estonian, later knighted, who discovered the Beatles. It soon became my favorite slash-and-burn agriculture guitar, ladang and clang clank-kerrang.

I then got the classic Irish Borstalbison, smelling of peat every time it was plugged in. Soon after, I bought a nice Flabbergaster, said to be the most baffling to master because of its card-carrying 52 pickups. But I was up for the challenge and soon tamed the frisky pony, then saddled it with effect boxes and pedals that sounded sweet and sour and bitter and salty (on the #97 Tears setting) as Soul’s sal ammoniac. I liked that guitar a lot.

Soon I was navigating on some songs a choice, golden Breathmeister guitar. I resolved to play that thing through an Umkalthoum Ululuator on one song, echoing like King Tut's tomb or the corridors of Karnak. I don't remember which song though.

We invested in instruments, guitar picks of mica or unicorn horn for potency, fingernails of Nazi war criminals (after Nuremburg it was okay to take 'em) or made from dried semen from a unicorn pecker tamed by a virgin if you could believe that was what she really was. I had a telephone to my guitar, talking to it like the engine room of a ship. Dink had one on his bass so he could drunkenly fumble, usually dropping the dime, to call a cab when he couldn't drive home. Splitlevel guitars, with spit-level control knobs that could cut your fingers if you weren’t careful. Amplifiers intricately carved as the walls of Nineveh or Babylon or Ankor Wat. Guitars and cars of a precious metal that sang. Cut glass amplifiers that no dust can enter.

We got old Alexander von Humboldt out of retirement (he’d designed and ran the Natural History Museum, brought its Havana Gila Monster to its Michigan exile) to make us exquisite twangy guitar strings from Orinoco forest howler monkey and boa constrictor guts.

I can tell by your expression that all this guitar minutae is a guy thing, and you’re losing interest.

Let me just say we filled Thump’s drums with pâte de foie gras.

Drums made from the skins of unborn tigers. Soon Thump bought expensive steam-heated drums, clanking like old radiators as they filled, even more expensive than ones with solid-state electronic warmers. He had to put them up as collateral for bail money— thanks, Horace—when he murdered a girlfriend in an historic New Joke, NY hotel.

Oh, you’re a girl, you’re not as interested in specific musical equipment as we are. Then maybe you’ll be more interested to know what we wore, eh?

Onstange and offstage the Tipparillo indulged in the basest fashions of the contraceptive era, sometimes just from a distance. Tippy became more bohemian than Bohemia. So delicate he had feelings in his hair. Tippy ordered minimalist clothes from this boutique called the Ça Suffit. The clothes Tippy started to buy got him boy-and-girl clad. Fool, he's no longer taming the beast—that is, taming the female—within himself. Mr. Cleanclothes, visions of a capacity crowd filled his brain, the best deodorant. Some of the underwear he wore was merely red steam. His condoms, and cervical caps for guests, were made from the skin of unbred veal, and a product called Racoonex, for robber-mask sensitivity. He was the kitchen sponge of Rock. We were pretty sloppy when we started out, wore sweaters made from the lint from laundromat dryers in tough prostitute-infected ghettoey beerbottle neighborhoods. Smelly old cutoffs from junior high school and waterproof Indignant moccasins he bought on a family vacation up north had been stage-sufficient in the past, but with newfound bloodmoney he bought a shirt spattered with tears, and other literally new vines. Leopard leotards underneath, exclusive designs from Mr. O.D. deLust of The Pose Office. He got this lacy-to-the-point of breakage shirt that even Grandma Mars would make Coral take back to the store. Expensive grease-lined jackets. Got himself a corned-beef coat, rufffled cabbage-sleeves and collar. Dog collars that formed a seawall around his chickenbone neck, especially with little spikes sticking out of them so he wouldn't fight. Shirts made out of the dust of modern art. Fine feathered clothes. Bought smoke bottom pants and snakelegged jeans. Buffalo Bill wore his dick to the right, according

to the notes left by his tailor. Dozens of pairs of silver slippery elm lamé gloves that would offer no protection from anything to a small immobilized female astronaut. Peeling them off and waving them around, they made his hands feel horny. They'd make his hands want to fuck, like a wristwatch that lights up with "Time to Fuck" periodically, make his wrists like an apprehensive bride's. These two doves eating each other. He'd lubricate them inside with dishwashing liquid. Young, strong and troublesome.

Once I joined the band, I stopped wearing clothes my mother had bought for me in town at Sockmeisters, and bought exactly what I want to wear. Until the money started rolling in, Thump and I had only bought what we wanted at Army Surplus stores, mercantile monuments from the rapidly-forgottening World's Best War. I visited Big and Tall Celebrities’ Shops on my own; I need jeans, where's the Husky section? So first of all I bought a paisley smokescreenshirt at Mod haberdasher The Sunken Chest, patterned with repeating images of the Shroud of Turin. Some of those shirts were just sad cigarette smoke, barely smokescreens for a sunken chest. Mink shirts. Wealthy-student shirts, with hand-inked test answers on the cuffs. Shirts made out of oriental spiderwebs. We bought shirts made of Uvulon, fine fabric made from the uvulas of opera singers, castrati. Shirts and slacks woven of mastodon silk, or two hundred percent Algodon cotton; that's like alpaca or glyptodont or something.

Wool suits with the egg-laying moths already woven in. Panotcratic pantaloons. Bellbottom trousers made of old fogeyskin, specially distressed by kids on his lawn.

There's a hippie tailor named Pantsky, son of scrap metal

dealer Pantsky up on the railroad tracks by the river, but this guy's a hirsute haberdasher for the hip. I bought a Stradivarius suit. Clothes in manly and dignified cavalry twills, or chalk stripes like around the body on the pavement in a murder or accident scene. Then we bought sleek brushed aluminum aircraft-skin suits. We considered matching Mod greatcoats, fine Carnibus ties and flared shoes. I seriously considered investing in a brand of menswear called Rabbi of Chelm, tweed sportcoat blazers, pork-pie hats to serve me the rest of my life, from a longtime campus haberdasher called Cossacks.

Elsewhere, 1950s fedoras had the brims cut down by "Clovis, Clovis" the Hat Brim Man who advertised in the Motorsburgh TV magazine.

But that was too square for us.

Some New Age woman told us to get outfitted in natural fibre fabrics so we picked up a racoonskin jacket (with two tails), skunk collars, moss vests and fern pants. Viscosity coats, porkskin jumpsuits and crackling pork-rind cowboy boots, delicate as hell but what the heck. Terrapin serapes and frog-pelt velts, soft toadskin shoes, slip-ons, troutskin boots and fish heart socks. A Fort Knox of clean socks, and with my airless Prussian horseleather boots, and Thump’s heavy industry private police stompers, you better believe we needed them. Tyrolean troops in the Great War had bat wings sewn into their underwear, so at great expense on the collectors' market, I had to get a couple pairs of that.

These items purchased on credit with a card from a major department store, honored in hip boutiques and headshops. The band together splurged on religious designer motorcycle jackets, applique'd jeans and cowboy suits, mine depicting several of the

Commandments. Thump bought thirty-two identical black t-shirts for each day of the month. Thump wore his favorite necklace of knuckle bones when he posed menacingly for a month in the Cat Killer's Calendar, distributed by a leading midwest producer of Cat and Dog poisons. You often see it tacked up in exterminators' shops.

Thump's the major Circles of Hell, the jugs of wine at the annual loaves n' fishes banquet for Dink, and Stations of the Cross for Tippy.

Shirts made out of mosquito netting. Bought myself a beltbuckle made like a mermaid's butt, little perfume-bottle sprayer bulbs. We took pride in the fact we now wore the little things dentists implant during cleaning to later cause toothache. That was practically a gross of garments.

I got a splendid bright rich red Dr. Pozzi therapeutic electrical bathrobe. You, stand right there for a dressing-down in my dressing gown. To celebrate our success, I planned to sit indolently in a velvet dressing gown and ruby skull brooch, letting uncut gems from my pouch slip through my fat fingers as I listen to records on my stereo, as Goering did during meetings of his General staff. “The guitar Goering of Rock,” Threadbear wrote admiringly. Once we could afford it, we bought socks and skivvies made of pure fabric softener.

Tidy Whitemen's briefs. Poochwear.

In those days for a band's socks to even match was considered an accomplishment, as many bands didn't even wear socks, but we bought some the color of Godsblood. Black Myself brand calfskin socks, black leather socks, black leather condoms. Lovingly-tanned vealskin and baby-seal and sad-eyed porpoises died to caress my feet beneath my boots, now swimming there as special stockings.

Dove-gray, because freshly made from real doves. I wore those with well-designed, well-crafted four-legged boots.

These days I rarely take my bedroom slippers off before putting on boots or slipping into shoes. A pair of boots like the hooves of bison or other ruminants. These boots have live snakes as laces.

Tippy bought eaglebeak-toed shoes, had a pair of boots made from the cooked greasy skins of Thanksgiving turkeys. Boots whose suction-cup soles were a pattern of communion wafers, glued by their own starch like on the roof of the mouth. Wearing black leather spats. Sometimes he practically wore no socks at all. Snow-scented skis. We bought boots with scorpions, live, already crawling in the toes like morning in Texas, menacing to ourselves and, hence, others…especially women we'd slept with. Balsa wood boots, smooth chocolate jodhpurs, laser shoes with spruce socks, or plastic socks. Boots made of rhino horn, and unicorn guitar plectra pics. I bought shoes that sounded like puppies whimpering when I walked.

"Menaced, as if nearly stepped on" said the enthusiastic salesclerk.

Our maleficent mentor got us buying long, slender shoes like pirogues, others squat and rippled liked dhows—“Nothing is too good for my Chomps.”

Purchased sardineskin suits, euchreskin shirts. Sundy best Eucharistskin ensemble, accessorized with a shiny Eucharistwatch, face made from a real consecrated host from the Vatican. Enough of this patterned Moodware: I really wanted the genuine Shroud of Turin, to make it into stage t-shirts with His face or back of His head, even nail-hole hands and feet on some. But it turns out I was looking at a photo negative of it, it's not black like a biker's t-shirts but dark,

mucky gray on dimly stained rag white linen. Then forget it. Aldebbie outbid me at auction anyway, and I assumed he'd make it into a warm-weather Englishman's summer suit, but he just wanted a famous man's sweat, however ancient, touching his body, so wore it underneath other garments. That miserable, mincing murgatroid, him. Maybe it’s the hair shirt Catholic in me responding, but Long Johns was not a Saint, nor our Lord a union suit.

Yes, I’ll tell you more about our ageements and arguments with Aldebbie and his ilk. Please, a little bit later.

Tippy got special gloves made of peacock feathers to caress girls on cold nights. One ghastly hippie girl offered to make Tippy childskin cutoffs or a loincloth or from cuttings and parings retrieved from the dumpster behind the abortion house and the University's Children's Lab. This was the first gift from a girl he ever refused, impolitely but understandably. I don’t understand some of these girls.

On a sweeter note, back home Coral asked Tippy to send her, from the slatternly stores of downtown New Joke, a sexy pair of those high heel shoes made of the lucite plexiglas of aircraft cockpits, or perhaps the floor wax (machine gun-proof!) advertised as equally hard and durable. And a pair with little fish, tadpoles or a salamander swimming in the platforms of each of them, plus a lizard to walk alongside her to immediately eat the little creatures flopping on the sidewalk if the shoes broke. No, I don't mean the stumbled, tumbled, fumbling Coral. The lizard could lick her bruises then though, Of course Tippy ignored the request, most likely forgot.

You’ve mentioned how my eyes are kind of strange, weak and wobbly. So I bought prescription sunglasses, pairs that each let in

ultraviolet, infrared or ionized lozenge light, and other pairs that did just the opposite, kept them out; advanced university-lab optics, all the light and shadow that money could buy. One pair made everything glow blue like the swimming pool reactor, but the radiation ultimately gave me a headache. Graf Zeppelin aviator specs like the Gamma Ray Spex advertised in the comics, dissolving women's clothes with a gaze, sometimes the women themselves. Other eyeglasses with aphrodisiac milky-white rhinoceros horn lenses.

Glasses with creme lenses. Bought ship-to-shore sunglasses.

Sunglasses with snakeshell frames, the insouciance of the reptile sunning on a rock. My stained glass eyeglasses make everything looks cathedral. Bugs splattered cooly all over my sunglasses like a motorcyle or sportscar windshield. I had a pair of black leather eyeglass frames made, the thick lenses tinted white, etched in a fingerprint-smudged design. Plus jewelery designed by the City of Aleppo Engineer who came to lecture at our school "Careers" day, rings of heavy reinforced concrete.

I guess we started living high off the hog, whereas we’d previously just gotten high. Tippy wore that absurd brocade jacket, soaking wet with drool while spooning mouthfuls of girls' shower caviar. We sipped from 18th century Neapolitan stemware that represented notable courtesans, escorts and paid companions.

Supped upon silver bawdware, with cunt-emblazoned cutlery, each sterling piece infused with Dr. Cutler’s delicate female pheremones.

Upon these fancy dishes we ate fancy dishes. We were served Roque, I mean Rocky, Mountain Oysters, but the most expensive kind, jackalope testicles, drizzled in hallucinogenic jungle toad sweat

secretions. Served banquets of wounded veal, two-headed veal squealing and their little legs still pumping. Ordered a la carte from the D'Oyly Carte Company. When the band was on a tour of the orient, we savored the dog and cat dishes; Thump more than I, for they sometimes greatly irritated my stomach. Thump especially loved the restaurants where they slaughtered and scissored the creatures at the table, sometimes roasting parts when the animals were still alive. Neither of us were pet owners, so we had to remember that some of the girls we had were, so we kept tales of thise luscious meals under wraps.

For me, twenty-four birthday cakes a day. Some might not consider a hundred bottles of ranch dressing a day the lap of luxury.

But for me, denied the breast as a babe who shoulda been in arms, it's the mark of success, the mark that the Chomps have finally made it. Switched from salads with Thousand Islands to thousand dollarsa-bottle dressing. Eating Porschemelons, Porschepies, smoking Porsche pipes. Dined on imported King's-head-on-a-platter. CocaCola oil. On tour down under had Koala Kola and kiwi-beak pie.

Rolls-Royce's need beer. Expensive malt vinegar made from singlemalt scotch. Dribblepizzas and distemburger. Success meant eating dragon bacon, Italian sports sauce, egg linoleum. Trichinosis-colored pork chop cutlets, for true gnosis of the pig, knowing but not in the Scriptural, Old Testament-Torah sense. Not only did we dine on wild, gamy veni-son, but plenty of venidaughter, the furry part of doelike Venus in Furs. Yum! We used to think a night of special food was some things from a takeout Chinese restaurant called the New Order. But we got rich

and started eating roses dipped in honey, special wasp honey with the stingers still in it. Nibbled chocolate-covered asterisks. Ate rich food like Bleu Suede Cheese. Remember, cottage cheese was originally a religious item. We were just rich, healty-concious hippies eating fig-o-delic fruits in quetzal oatmeal. What Jesus snacked on, wiping his fingers on the Bible. Ordered pizza with seashells on it.

Ordered specially cooked frog-bitch cloaca, frog butter and frog Bufferin, and swan's pecker.

Champagne bottles with psychedelic mushrooms for corks.

Drank those fashionable drinks called Godawfuls, made of aguardiente, chartreuse and Lourdes water. Azure soy sauce.

Drinking expensive champagne from novelty dribble glasses and not even caring. We drank pure pectin nectars, soups made out of lecithin and laetrile. Fatted calvesmilk and veal in its plain brown wrapper. Mescaline salads. Garbanzo-bean incense. Eating great belly steaks. Nibbling jojoba jujubes. bloodseeds, bloody birdseed stained cardinal red. Grilled mosquitoes. Sheepskin-seatcovers sausage. Eating huge sheets of executive breads.

We dined on Airburgers at the breatharian restaurant.

Elsewhere, ordered Ceasar the Somnambulist salad, romaine lettuce and barbituate reds, the downs adding color to the leaves like pimento shards. Plus, peaches from Machu Picchu. In a Japanese restaurant, at first I thought the mushroom Shitakes were called Shitcakes, grown on it in the vile place.

Garlic-stuffed girls. Yes, the garlic exactly where you think it would be. And they seemed to love it, our munching mouths twixt legs spread out on the table. Much laughter all around.

We could order a folliesburger from a Paris niteclub at 3 in the morning, their time, or occupy ourselves in the rooftop sewers of Paris. Dined frequently on mermaid tail until we were sick of it. All the French maids Tippy could get his hands on.

The Firehouse bubbled a big pot of Call-and-Response coffee, the brand you always find in Gospel churches. Dining out, we regularly ordered bacon fat in our dinner coffee instead of whitener, though Tippy preferred the heavy cream of nursing mothers, provided by a nurse under his spell at the Catholic hospital maternity ward.

Dink spiked his with a double shot of Tennesee Tamerlane, while Thump sweetened his with crankcase oil, and that essence of corpses that puddled in the graveyard early Spring.

Breakfast these days of success included hash browns made only with the finest Bangladeshi hashish, that the Maharishibeatle himself had procured and sold our managers. Very different from when we were young, only a few years ago eating spiders off the wall, flies purloined from their webs or off the sticky dwightfryepaper.

I hired a mangy Chinese chef just to make all their traditional dog and cat dishes. What? I'm not proud.

Success spelled the world's most expensive crackers, surfaces studded with crystals of cocaine, heroin, methedreine and methaqualone rock salt. I now savored various luxury cheeses from the breast milk of fixed and unfixed house-cats or puppy-farm bitches.

British Museum cheeses two thousand years older than Christ, or from his own Virgin mother's milk, or women like her back then. Cold cuts from chestnut-fed wooly mammoths and mastodons, on ice all these years waiting for us, our palates.

But to pork n’ beans, meat n’ potatoes boys, this was fey, unsatisfying Aldebbiefood. Food as performance, exibit, theatre, aesthetics. I want Motorsburgh beer, washing down mouthfuls of good ol' fatty, sweet, salty and crunchy Michigan comfort food.

Indigestion be damned.

Dink splurged his share of our earnings on an Irish whiskey called Peaty Wheatstraw. Would only deign to splash his liquor with water brought over Niagara Falls to Michigan at great expense. With his share of the advance, Dink took out Thirst Insurance. Now that he could afford it, Dink was drinking Old Meglomania. Meanwhile, I drank kif with a knife. No, that was kefir, or South African kaffirsmilk.

Dink purchased a painting of a nineteenth century German beer wagon being pulled by young seminarians and priests, nude women riding atop it, smiling and whipping their steeds. Kitsch, I call it.

Kirsch? asked Dink, signaling the bartender to make him another.

All around the table were smoking opinionated tobaccos.

I imagined that success meant we’d be afloat in a big golden barge upon the Spee, Seine, Thames, Motorsburgh or ululating Uvula River—or perhaps one barque upon each—rowed by bare-chested and tanned girl galley slaves, hither and yon.

Cars? Oh yes, we bought them too. At first I was content with a reliable, discreet Chevrolet Coriolanus. But we were destined for much, much more. The management company made sure we were driven around in a big Anglo-Russian sedan circa 1951 called a Purgeworthy. But we’re Michigan boys, we’re supposed to want cars, big ones and plenty of them. We went to the biggest car lot in

Motorsburgh, corner of Eight-and-a-Half Mile Road and John De Conquerroot. That year Fuct put out three high end cars, the Luxe, Calme and Volupté. Eyes bigger than our stomachs (except mine), we each bought one of each.

Plus, Tippy bought a 1769 Cugnot, big slow steamer with boiler in the front, in which he steamed and chugged around Aleppo a couple of times, about 3 miles an hour, low and slow. I considered buying a 1923 Tobacco Roadster, a short-lived marque that ran on the leaf, that were manufactured by former Confederate cavalry officers, while Thump tried to interest me in a collectible 1930s resort car. Soon I had a car with an expensive muffler that sounded like a fart. An American sedan so big it's called a Dodge Dancefloor.

Driving a BM car from Germany, a name we used to laugh at but now found prestigious. Cocoa brakes on it. The car that’s featured on the dollar bill, that comes with a bank's night deposits window as a standard feature. Dazzling tires, special hubcaps designed by Quimshare to look like flaming, rollling swastikas; he lobbied for triskelions instead, but my price was finally right. Wished we were one of those bands wealthy enough to install studded leather tires upon on) black leather roads, speeding through newfound success like a train with diamond wheels on silver rails, maybe someday after a couple more records, more touring. A Cadillac with a ladder in it. A Cadillac Father Coffinsmasher, named for the beloved radio priest.

Thump grumbled “Glove compartment? Aw, I thought you said BLOOD compartment.”

Cars that smell like a dry cleaning establishment. Big werewolf cars. When cars were big blue whales. The velvet bidet in a

diamond-studded sportscar. Cars with Casseiopiea's chair as the bucket seats.

Safety seems like the last thing a rock band would want in a car, but it was considered hip by Motorsburgh at the time. Safety cars that came with their own anatomically- correct crash test dummies already strapped into the seats. Safety air bags that burst upon impact and filled the passengers with marijuana smoke or a very nitrous oxide. A powerful Turdhead engine, not horseshitpower but bullpower. Cars with burglar alarms that sounded like flying saucers; radar detectors that hissed like ammo dumps exploding during stagparties at police firing ranges when the damn cop pulled you over. Pricey two-seaters with radium headlights, neon-filled brakes. I bought a sports car with chrome teeth, chrome seats, chromed tires, chromed windshield opaque like the sunglasses of a motorcycle cop. The reflections could blind pilots, pluck planes right out of the sky so of course I spent a lot of time driving around Motorsburgh Metropolitan Airport.

We purchased overpriced collectors' cars that'd been formerly owned by the Three Chomps or bit-part players who appeared with them, or the hosts of local TV afternoon movies or kids' shows.

Big luxury cars with storefronts as grilles, or with starched tuxedo shirtfronts with little colored lights where stud-buttons would be.

Against his better judgement, Tippy bought this fast Australian car shaped like a wombat skull, camouflage seatcovers and an aborigine spear for the aerial. I wanted this new car just out, supposed to sound fast, called the E=mc2. Jade and coral license plates for the van. Once Tippy had a funny car to have sex in called the Tuff Titty.

Got so rich we had cars with clocks for wheels. Superdiamonds for knobs. I bought jewelled cannons for a prominent pirate ship. Black leather studded tires. Buying a set of nice tires, I'd always thought that little white fat guy on the ads was the way the French pronounce the Michigan Man. For a while we had a female chauffeur named Motorette, named after the Motorsburgh suburb.

Thump had a car customized by that baroque Negro Jeremy “Papa Legba-Ogun” Rotgut, visiting his country compound just north of Motorsburgh. Beyond their historic familial racism, bikers swallowed their pride and came to Rotgut to customize their bikes, to become his best customers. He was said to be the father of Peoples’ Puma Chingakook too. After delivery, Thump sat behind the wheel lazily polishing his chrome chromosomes, plated from taking too much Hot Rod LSD. Ozone bafflers on this car. Dark liquid steering wheels, goldfish swimming in them. A car with a custom windshield made from the shards of the fairy tale princess's glass slippers melted down. You couldn't see out of it to save your life, but that's what the guy who sold it to him said it was, ad and the record company said he was OK. Thump bought a surprisingly menacing 1920s car from a shortlived marque founded by the man who earlier (perhaps inadvertantly) was the first in the U.S. to hit and kill someone with an automobile.

Thump really couldn’t decide if he wanted to invest in collectors’ cars and motorcycles, heavy construction machinery, or just his recreational drugs, especially heroin.

A gyration house and a vibration yacht, or vice versa.

Farley-Grangehall came out with a big motorcycle called a

MotoHolocaust. You got a chromed Wehrmacht helmet with the purchase of one, with a real dessicated German (WWI or WWII) soldier’s head still in it, but you could take that out if you wanted to wear the helmet. Of course Thump had to have one. And this may have gotten various Motorsburgh bikers upset, envious and vowing revenge later on.

Or maybe they just had it in for the freedom that was Tippy.

But wait, there’s more. Little stuff, but these are the details that make the man, the men of consequence.

We bought several umbrellas made of batwings, waved them about during a photo shoot in the park until the wind turned them inside out and we lost them.

Wigs—for a TV appearance, mind you—powdered with mummy dust. Something woven from the fur of Christ's cat. A rug braided from His long hair, that of his Apostles too. A macho perfume called Oil of Gaol. Talc that's plaster dust from Christ's cast when they broke his bones. Frankincense, the smell of the Frankenstein monster. The myth of myrrh.

Wore a fashionable Werewolf Boy Watch. A solid gold goalie mask. We bought fast-acting watches, watches that ran extra-fast or others that moved so slowly that they "Soul walked". Carried with us a Victorian crotch-crab press, myriad gears and pulleys activating the gentle probing tweezers, purchased at a genteel antique fair or farm garage sale or Schpuds’ Antiques full of ancestor portraits and grand furniture. An expensive electric shaver called Mark of the Beast. A morning coffee pot that plays "Ride of the Valkyries" as she whistles.

We started smoking caviar-tipped cigarettes, like you smell on rich girls' breath. Tippy considered having platinum plaque installed on his teeth. His dope pipe hookah was a large intestine, coiled all around itself like an interstate freeway. Smoked like all the phosphorus in the Bosphorus. The king of fifty-dollar bills, snapping them with each fingerpop to our urchin fans. Female accountants would stare at his immense cash. So rich, we got a six-digit Zip code.

The Big Business magazine’s cover story boasted Chomps: From Dirty Sox to Fort Knox. Its rival analyzed rock success as Gang Wars to Ganges Water. You can't argue with this thing called success. Success was cool. Success must be the true fun.

The record company president wanted us to consider doing the music for TV commercials, and introduced us to his golf buddy Mr. Fortinbras, inventor of the PantiBra, as well as that garment where a mother and a daughter could wear a single bra at the same time.

Nice. We enjoyed the dinner and cigars on him, but ignored requests to call him back. Wanted us to pitch, “to the kids,” unusable kitchenware like shrimp sharpeners. Someday we’ll regret passing up the chance to make more, bigger, money. He even named his daughter (whom Tippy had under a far, discretely-cloth’d table) Cash Flo. Now, Aleppo barstools were peopled with guys who, when teenage or twentyish hippies with lawn care jobs, were cutting grass while inadvisably on LSD, and forgetfully reached under the lawnmower into its spinning blades. Their guitar playing was spirited, if not particularly skillful or accurate. Other guys from our high school

were dirty motherspacklers on construction sites. They were the popcorn kernels that didn’t pop. Anyway, we had them all working for us now, as their bands couldn't pull in money professionally enough to live on, and their yard work left much to be desired. Guess we kept them on the roiling payroll out of nostalgia, pass-the-tokes friendship, hail-fellow-well-met affability, real or sham.

Because we could.

Yes, we improved our Firehouse too. Like Coral's mom, we started ordering things from the gift catalogs at random. A fine fellatio pillow for the Firehouse. Ivory towels, carved in lacy filagrees. We had a fresh bar of SnowOil Ivy soap at every sink, and girls liked that.

First of all a fancy sound system, a Yamaguchi Gamahuchee stereo, which made the five cent 45 records from the charity store sound even scratchier and skippier. Now we were rich enough that we would listen to a record once, throw it away, a habit Tippy said he’d already developed , or vowed he would, when working in the record store.

We had toilets installed that filled and flushed expensive perfume instead of running water. The house now strewn with stateof-the-art chemical toilets filled with salad oil, mineral oil or vaseline.

In some rooms, expressive toilets, every flush a song or operatic aria.

In each corner, spitoons with sump pumps, songpumps.

When that Parisian cathedral burned down, we bought the communion rail to set up at gigs so girls could line up in orderly fashion to fellate Tippy. He’ll be her hipshaker lipstick tonight. Tippy had a jacuzzi tub installed in the Firehouse, with jets that stimulated every one of his chakras, but I damn well don’t have to tell you which

one it stimulated the most.

Tippy got a bedisde telephone that I thought looked kind of girly, but he was convinced if it was called that then it came preloaded with the number of every Princess, who'd then want to fuck him (terribly disappointed when it arrived, wasn't). He got a private line that sounded like Cutey Chomp woo-woo-woo when it rang, and Mensch Chomp eebeebeebee...when it was left off the hook.

Because someone was stoned.

A big machine from that brand of power mower and home tractor called Lawn Courtesan. Placemats made of placenta, from multi-babied women in South America or somewhere. Thump once put an overly-excited girl in the microwave to dry, to ill effect.

My own improvements were controvesial: I had the bathroom, from toilet to sink to shower, tiled wall to wall in bathroom scales, so everywhere one stepped a weight—sometimes wildly divergent, granted—was read. "Why do you want this guilt-inducing shit?" muttered Tippy in wonderment. But I felt our house now kept me better informed.

For my library shelf, Bibles pierced by bullets; if not authentic, now manufactured cheaply in Japan.

Did I tell you about the movie? Hitler's favorite filmmaker Labia Sturmunddrang, moved to Michigan after the war, ostensibly to make a movie of Harry Fuct's tract The Absolute Jew, presumably to distribute in the new state of Israel and promote the new and sporty Fuct Feremone. She had an affair with Fuct that might have been what killed him. Before grand old Fuct died, though, he established

the town of Sturmmunddrang, Michigan, a girded, well-guarded pasoral smidgen carved out of mongrelized Motorsburgh to be an island of white people's purity. Research labs were set up there to make automotive use of the salt turnips, filling corporate-owned fields in the flat, dull region to the north and west.

Aleppo' tallest skyscraper, the Pizazz Tower, with its private Pizazz Piazza, was where Tippy and Labia Sturmmunddrang skinny dipped, cavorted and humped. Smitten, Labia announced she wanted to make an "oonderrgrowwnt" movie of Tippy, dancing in one of those salt turnip fields, for she so liked lithe and muscled men of all continents in the altogether. What she called classicism. Don't know if she intended to show it in the Snuff Film Festival, poisoning Tippy in the last day of filming for the intended Dying Faun sequence, but the whole project got called off. With a European-accented assistant Director (one of Labia's previous husbands), they began to make their underground movie intended to debut at the Festival, but neither of them wanted to die at the climax so it was never completed. Irate, the assistant Director took his footage, went up north and filmed some more, and turned it into a quiet meditation on sparkling water flowing over rocks. Pretty, poignant, but insignificant.

Say what? Oh, really? OK, lil’ doll, you’re right. You’ve looked at the sales charts, eh? Talked to the record company to obtain the figures. What a journalistic little bloodhound you are. I am impressed.

We didn’t really get significant advances or any royalties. It all went for studio time as we mucked and procrastinated our way through recording the album, me insisting on take after take until

near-perfection, guitar sounding right as rain, ninety-nine onehundredths percent pure. So we ended up owing money to them.

But they promise our royalties will roll in when they play the album on industrial midwestern and Ontario radio stations. Maybe I’ll have a house, a home of my own, some day.

Big deal, we’ll earn it back. I’m sure of that. You’ve heard us, we’re at the top of our game.

Were there a lot of magazines around your house growing up?

There were for us, for Mom liked them, to read until falling asleep or battle insomnia. Now there only seems to be ComeTogether and CumOn!, perhaps a military, guns or muscle car magazine of Thump's around our Firehouse. Don't mention him? OK, I won't.

Guess he did something to you. Anyway, maybe someday you'll be writing on bands you interview for all of those.

When we outgrew television (maybe not the Chomps Trio), second only to record albums the critical media were the rock magazines. OK, maybe that was just me, the one who reads.

I soon became obsessed with fame in print and media, rock journalism, magazines like FAN! and GIRL LIKES!. Surprising how stout some of those girl editors are too.

The local hippies called their newspaper the Aleppo Codex, since, after all, that's the name of the oldest and most authoritative copy of the Hebrew Bible, right? They were the first to write about us, at the Sunday summer concerts.

Meanwhile, straight newspapers were starting to print sympathetic stories about the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo astronauts'

growing their hair out beyond their standard military buzz-cuts, and what that means for the nation. Finally we were in the conservative evening Aleppo Auroch, on p. 24, between the column by the bald, financial advisor plugging his new hotseller LSD and Money, and a worrisome article Pregnant by Marijuana. Artful articles on our band, and others playing in the region that the kids liked, like the FGNM, began to appear in all the honky daily whimperpapers. That churchrun magazine Chastity for Teens didn't run features on rock bands, only worrisome editorials, largely negative.

A classical music reviewer stupidly assigned to cover us wrote of Tippy's "kettledrum-faced guitarist". Another called me "a barrel of manic feedback". Harrumph. Hmph.

One critic called Tippy "A toilet that sang".

Smoky newspapers wrote about us. Critics, those prophets of derision.

Cheap and cynical, now there's a contradiction in terms.

You have to have money, or have known it, to be clearheaded enough to be a cynic. Rock critics discuss the criticism of the criticism of the review of the band that almost didn't appear in the daily paper, to say nothing of the fact that the band cancelled its appearance when its van got stuck in a snowbank or the muck accompanying an early spring thaw. Some write for Nietzchean superdalies with headlines like GUNMAN KILLS GOD, HIMSELF. Others for Magpie magazine and the weekly entertainment paper Inferiors. World-Ends. Wolf-ends and crying meaningless wolf tears.

We gave 'em drugs to shut 'em all up.

Sybils and oracles set aside their entrails to become rock critics, often using divination at concerts where the feedback was so

loud you couldn't hear the words. Critics with awsomely powerful bonecrushing opinions, who with a withering turn of phrase prompted perhaps by something they ate or a resemblance by the performer to someone who wouldn't hump them in college, made great edifices of career and corporate investment come crashing down. The critics served as our own Propaganda Ministry, fan newsletter edited by a smiley sinister young Goober Goebbels. Weird kids, dumb kids could hang aspirations on those early albums. Nervous narwhales, who as kids would answer the phone "What, I didn't egg that house". Rock writers, canker-toothed caterpillar critics, hookah-smoking in their caterpillar glasses, all they know about life they learned from reading the wrong comic books. They made life into school. Librarian arbiters of style like Barry Dishwater and other leftovers of Zion. We met the famous columnists Ear Thwacker and Evoca LaRocka. Old Hollywood gossips used to wear outlandish hats; you should see today’s pathetic women's ill-designed Hot Pants. No wait, that's their girlfriends, the writers are the dufy-looking guys. Bookmobile Beatles, Bookmobile Jews, Batmobile Jews. A regular Pope's Pick, those journalistic pickled peppers. Their fathers all taught graduatelevel Psychology, no wonder they were so fucked up, sleeping in glass boxes till somehow they all gravitated to become museum security guards.

Rock intellectuals clapped their books together. Other prematurely middle-aged men would give up their tenure- or careertrack jobs upon seeing us play or hearing that record and fumble at writing unselfconcious monosyllabic songs. Critics said of it "Quiet Please", as if this was some fucking Library, which of course Aleppo

was, in a lot of ways. Michael Managingeditor, a snotty rock critic, thought it was funny when he called us four "Orgone Bachs". But these days you could shout "Fire!" in a crowded nursing home and get a laugh. One Rock magazine's motto was "She who listens hard doesn't see", its editorial office a spooky Halloween-costumed Batman-Mitzvah, crones kvetching around kabbalah cauldrons.

Cassette-lipped interviewers appeared. "I think less about imprisoned girls" I said in one interview when asked about success.

Their duty was to assassinate information.

Infotainmentalists.

Photophrenology. Tippy usually expected them to fuck their way into admission and good quotes. We'd hurl down a couple of groupies and see them prove their mettle.

From the editorials you would've thought we were entirely responsible for the Absinthization of Aleppo, youth with drugs of Rocknroll and their own taut, fresh, finely-tuned bodies. Cover story in The Blat, appeared in the column "Cacaphonia". There hasn't been this much excitement in it since the assasination of Pope John XXIII, or of Gerald Ford that fateful day in Sanctae Chrysoplae. Kids in grade school knew about the Chomps for such bands even appeared in MY NEWSY READABLE—as did anyone with a higher salary than teachers and school administrators—as an example for both educators and youth. The band was accidentally featured in a cover story in SEE YA: The Magazine of Deep and Abiding Friendships. Second graders read a book about Tippy's face's complexion called See Spot Run. Political cartoonists would draw Tippy's imprecise and uncertain mouth like a wiggling sperm's tail.

Once he told an interviewer that often he'd rather have an athsma

attack than sex, or maybe it was vice versa. Only through fucking did he really, really communicate on his own terms.

Finally, there was venue for serious Rock criticism, out of mellow Californa. And an anti-serious rival one out of shaky Motorsburgh.

Its cover story DOG SHOOTS ELVIS, Sanctimonious Sanctae Chrysoplae, California’s Cometogether was named after a responsible peacenik ideal. Pompous middle-aged reporters in their sideburns and Pubertyberry raincoats, photographers pointing cameras with Vengeancefinders, crafted long droning portentuous stories about politics. Maybe because suave jazz critic Theremin Hollow III was behind all editorial decisions, a fatherly presence. And you know I hate fathers.

The family of the publisher of Cometogether had been involved in publishing since, oh, the Almanach da Gotha was found on Golgotha in an earthenware jar by the Dead Sea Jesuits of Nazareth.

That long ago. I just made that up, but they were old and established and rich as all get out. Grandpa built a coastal castle.

For example, one smug Cometogether magazine critic exposed Tippy as this "poor widdle gweeser fwum the tuff midwest side of Aweppo..." and it made our bile boil. He went on to say we'd "conciously achieved the unconcious...smart enough to know when to be dumb." Tippy wasn't even a greaser, was so skinny he couldn't get his shirttails to stay out, too short for his pantlegs to ride high enough. My own hair wouldn't even stay in my eyes, grow long enough in front. Yet who is to judge? Like the billboard the hippies

put up outside of town, Baldness May be a Sign of Virility but Shorthairs are the True Space Aliens of Amerika.

To add visual sizzle, the Sanctae Chrysoplae Rock concert poster artist Roofbeam Carpenter (nicknamed Roofbeam by his girlfriend Dustpetal) crafted the Cometogether logo with the traditional care, groundedness and solidity of his namesake, ancestors who were responsible barnbuilders and masters of millwork on Sanctae Chrysoplae Victorian houses. You could probably hide beneath the ornate but watertight band name lettering on his concert posters during a summer thunderstorm. Cometogether magazine’s logo emphasized the cosmic, shimmering outerspace nature of the word "comet" within. For its wealthy publisher, liberally mushroomed, mused upon the message Comet-o-Get-Her, a command for the celestial object (angel? UFO?) to come take an earthwoman, for pleasure or seeding a new terrestrial race. Maybe it sounds Californian and tye-dyed, but that's still the kind of thing, wordswithin-words, that occupies smart guys when they're—OK, we're— tripping.

Now let’s tell you about the Michigan version of a Rock press.

The cliché had not been invented and then minted that could describe Tippy, so this challenge sharpened (and sobered) this wordspinning dude Threadbear of the eccentric local fanzine, originally called The Cream City CumOn! What began as a tabloid, published by the Breatharian commune on campus (we played at their house once) it moved to Junkyard Lake at the country edge of Motorsburgh and grew tough and sinewy. Snide, Michigan-centric, after a few issues, CumOn! appeared as a stapled magazine, funded

by lush ads from record companies, head shoppes and local ventures like Rough Grate Productions and Mars Bail Bonds. Threadbear’s mind was a thesaurus, crammed with all the drugs he could take and still type. CumOn! had grown into a grittier, eccentric midwest nextgeneraton (founded two years later, that's a generation nowadays) heir, hernia or rival to Cometogether, which was surreptitiously read but considered sad, bogue and staid..

The FGNMs opportunistically recorded a song Cum On! as the finale of their live album, but the swear words in it kept if off the radio.

Hah! Score! And they call us the chomps around here, duh.

The boys at Motorsburgh's CumOn! laffed and guffawed at Cometogether magazine's seriousness. Megafemininsts demanded explanation of the guitaro-genital politics and posturings of Rock music, and though I was often a target of their ire, that was probably a good thing.

Look, our midwest Bustbelt’s upstart imp CumOn! contains skepticism, pugnacious challenge AND mindless sex in its very name. Even the exclamation point conveys girlish enthusiasm of the early-'60s teen magazines like POPSTAR DATE! or NEW BOY KISSED! Both publications' names suggested arrival or return— come home, all is forgiven, which a parent would never say to a hippie kid—plus commingling and orgasmic product. That product: the rock music! Certainly just as much the names mean jism, for rock was a virile men's game.

Once when in Aleppo visiting the People’s Puma Party commune, Roofbeam the artist whipped up logos for both CumOn!

and the Chomps, in a more modernist style that Cometogether wouldn't recognize and get peeved. But the piece of paper the CumOn! logo was on got lost and burnt up in a dope fire, so his aspiring local imitator Quentin Quimshare was brought in to redesign a reasonable facsimile. I love the flyers Quimshare drew for the Chomps all through the early days in Aleppo, before he too moved to the hippie west. All creativity in America begins in Michigan then heads to the coasts. Makes me wish Etcetera Records had never taken over our marketing, hype and hooplah.

When we got publicity I reflect, for I suppose our mothers had bought fannish CROON magazine in the 1940s to clip out pictures of Frank Sin to put on their walls, his name to write on their school notebooks, on sanitary napkins with their fountain pens before use.

Girls pulling off bobby sox in their saddle shoes without untying them, tossing them onstage before they'd even thought to pull off their panties to symbolize immediate, lubricious access.

At least, that's what I assume it was like then.

In the rock press, Tippy had become the favorite Momo Monster of Rock, Michigan's fabled and oft-sighted great slouching Bethlehem bigfoot glimpsed betwixt Motorsburgh and tiny Lake Eerie port town Montebellocello to the south. Any mention, or twisted photo of Tippy's onstage and offstage antics in a magazine, was equivalent to the old poet saying The Goblins Will Get You If You Don't Watch Out. A frisson of what the English call the ghost train whistle. And I guess it sold magazines to the teens and the romantic.

In his charitable munificence Mead Threadbeare wrote, in barenaked prose, that he only liked part of the record, "When the

smoke got quieter." In a later feature on us, he reversed himself.

In the most florid Rock critiques, words were smushed together like big bank and insurance company mergers, supply chains, combed consultants, supply chains, stock ticker symbols. “Their music was loud and soft at the same time from their advanced state of being and non-being, nice and not-nice.” This and a lot of other outlandish statements were written about us.

Hello, we got a review in another music magazine, DISTORT. And a write up by NY critic Sylvester Bong for the band in Hippy Hygiene magazine.

Earnest, scholarly rock critics debated if that guitar effects pedal made the band Gnostic-, Cathar-, Vaudois- or AlbigensianHeresy Metal or not.

On Tippy’s songwriting, Mead Threadbear mused "He took the sediment out of sentiment", which was absolute bullshit. His, our songs were all crushed rock (and Rock), broken glass, eggshells. He sang of the horror of uncollected sex.

An angry rabbi wrote Threadbear to say it was wrong for him to call us “the great Tetragrammaton of Michigan Rock.” Or even call the riboxynucleaic acidheads the Beatles genomes of the Y-H-V-H strain.

Pretty much now making a career out of writing about us, Threadbeare claimed our cover of "Honey Dump" sounded like "A fusillade of beats upon which melody floats like a boar." Was that a misprint? Did he mean boat? Threadbeare said Tippy singing a slow ballad was "like eating soft and runny shit from a human skull."

Sheesh. What does he really think?

The effusive, effulgent, emollient critic said me n' Thump were the Romulus and Remus of Aleppo Rock, which Mom didn't like to read for it implied she was a she-wolf. There are so many twins in this town because of the University Cyclopsotron or Psychlotron Sciencey Campus just north of here. I may have mentioned that, but it’s true.

Men's magazines could be behind the curve, and still had sheepish articles like "Do Women Have a Sex Life?" before the orgasms burst, the shivering ecstasies of self-determination, economic power and bralessness in billowy shirts or a huggy knit pullover; in other worlds, feminism. Orgasm Life, for women hobbyists and lobbyists, detailed the mechanics of femininity that every smart boy should know. So I soon did, sort of, so do.

Contrast and counterpoint to Prepuceboy magazine's "How to Make Her a Fetish"—psychology, not craft articles. The reviewer Mead Threadbear wrote a long appreciation of the band called "From Cock to Cochlea" for Prepuceboy's more gyneco-colorful rival Pantihosehouse, or Pantihouse, something like that. I’ve never read it. In an interview with one men's magazine, Tippy had sneered how the very notion of chastity was "the cork of the dork, the cock on the dock", the latter phrase evoking a gasping, aimlessly flopping fish.

Asked his goal for his music, Tippy said "I want to move monsters". As opposed to the uncanny warble of the castrato, Tippy's voice dripped encrusted gluten with the mood of masculinity.

Instead of the surface-fluttering frippery of the effeminate, his groans betrayed Cthulu-cthonic manly depth.

Or so wrote Mead Threadbear in the CumOn! review of our

second album, which hadn't come out yet, but we played him a prerelease tape reel, gave him some drink, girls, drugs to like us.

So when Tippy sang low, the wag called him the voice of the slaughterhouse, or of the sausage factory.

Meanwhile, the Cometogether Feminist and Femininity Editor's quickie sex book The Erotic Critic was illustrated with positions that famous groupies recommend from liasons with certain English, Californian, Caribbean or midwestern Rock stars, demonstrated by them upon nerdy and bookish Rock writers. She considered using a photo of Tippy standing balanced on girls' breasts as the cover, but chose a famous Englishmen in bed “with birds" instead.

Rape Bumpkin, Tippy’s latest traveling companion, took memorable photographs of him (which looked to me crafted as a possible solo album cover) published in CumOn! What kind of cruelcountry bumpkin would, seriously, name his daughter Rape? Oh, that he's the Midwest University football coach now is supposed to make it OK, huh? Sheesh. Tippy later saw that we were asked to play after her swank and catered Bas Mitzvah.

Tippy certainly liked her la-bas, French for down there.

Famous rock photogroupie, later a big Cardinal's wife, then still wed to Peoples' Puma radical, Gemma the Camera took moody shots of the entire band that we could use on our album cover. Soon after, a session along with Tippy, his prodigious nudity. No, none of the rest of us attended that, thank you.

A smitten faculty wife named Linda Bath-of-Savages, whose olde body-English house in the professorial neighborhood Briarpipe

was fitting for her ancient name, resolved loudly she'd ghostwrite Tippy's autobiography, film a documentary movie or produce a multipart TV special on him. What the turtleneck'd professor, her first husband (not the current one) calls beatentiated music.

All because Tippy poked her with it, evidently well.

Praise rolled in. Rolled in like pinata pinwheels of respect and money. Took us no longer to get famous than a female bison's menstrual cycle. Grew to be as eminent as former U. S. exPresidents. There was no struggle to the top, we were merely embraced and were successful. As easy as anything else in this blessed life, leaving no more to talk about.

Where did we get? On Hell's televisions, hell's infernal turntables.

Record players served as a bus line giving out Hell's transfers.

"B-Side of the Bardo" was an underground show on FM radio, on an underutilized part of the spectrum that some entrepreneurial owner said Eh, why not? Radio station WNTR, “From Michigan, Where it’s Always WiNTeR” blasted our songs out of the state’s second largest city Filth, Michigan. Still, we were never played on the Radio Stations of the Cross, the ones you could hear in your car if instead of turning the dial you pushed the buttons.

Disk jockey named Mort Douce interviewed us and clapped his hands. A network run by an outlaw motorcycle gang, who sell speed to the talk show hosts and sportscasters. We never thought our songs would be played on the fast-talking pop music equivalent of Canadian whiskey. We got on only because I'd opened a checking account I'd forgotten across the river in Canada, and paid needless

utility bills there, in order to evade the draft. "The only radio station in the entire world. When you think about it, to even suggest there's another...is ridiculous." Yeah, they liked it and played it constantly, the single "Self Indulgent".

Moonful astronauts on TV; with the sound off, we could pretend they were talking about our band to Houston Control.

We actually played a gig to plug the record, on the Odd Silenus show right after a Hungarian flea circus he kissed goodnight, before a bear that juggled fire. The same bill as the cornball "hip" druggy comedian Sam Psychoactive, who got laffs saying "It don't take no hallucino-genius to see." On one TV show we got punched in the nose, “one for the columnists,” by the tuxedoed crooner Cad Cosanostra, who called us "the martial music of every sideburned delinquent on earth". Didn't he mean "marital"? Nobody interviewed us about it. It didn't matter, Tippy had a deviated septum anyway.

The Immedia, with its connotations of immorality but really just meant "immediate media". Once Tippy's fame spread and his parents read about him in a mangazine they called and asked him to change his name.

When we met Benjamin Franklin the old millionaire gave us advice for dealing with fame in America. Fame and success is like the difference between a pianist and a piano player, to rest and to relax.

Came to realize Rock was a game of bluff. My solution was to look out on the audience with contempt, those worm-Catholics. We had grown accustomed to the conversation of applause. Each member of the band was constantly bombarded with questions like "How often do you have to shave?" Would daub mercurochrome around our

eyes just to look wild, men with bad psychiatrist eyes offering the redistribution of dreams.

We posed incessantly for the Camera Sutra and other pseudography magazines. Got a good writeup in Spend! magazine.

The first men to discover the pout. The ego in the trees. Ego Ranch.

For a while there might've been a peanut butter called Tippy, nearly all nuts. He appears in the commercials, rubs it on a scathing rock guitar played by a character dressed up to resemble me. Magazines had their funny picture of Tippy or outrageous anecdote column every issue. Magazines like Tippyweek, Tippy World, Tippy!, Chomps, Chomp Digest and Chomp Today sprung up 'shroomly. LSDimpregnated subscription cards falling out of our fan magazines.

Men in bands have a certain vulneralbility to that chimera the camera. People don't even look at art like that any more. Because while Pop that girls like might be a form of whining, our boyish, manly Rock was like winning.

There weren't styrene plastic model kits manufactured of the band, Thump flailing his drumsticks, Dink reeling, me leering selfassuredly and Tippy roaring back like a roan stallion with a megascallion leek for a pud. No such excuse for fathers to sniff the kids' glue. No Chompsomania on Christmas morning.

My mother, goddam her, half-lived on a steady mental diet of magazines at the hairdressers, afternoon talk shows. Foot-asleep, falling-asleep, and sleep journalism. Celebrities who mattered.

Elephant celebs in print for all the trouble they've caused. Someday our names might be misspelled among those.

From those shows and glossies, the temper of the times is problems about women's breasts and men's haircuts. Special issues of national magazines on those topics, somehow lumped together, some sort of sweeping faddish fear of a Beatle moptop resting against someone’s daughter’s warm tank-top. Anyway, even she read about the Chomps, so therefore I existed.

It's like a school yearbook, isn't it?

These bands lined up like

grinning, smirking, bored or even scowling faces. There's supposed to be some damn difference between a live performance, the recording, the band photos, and the magazine or underground newspaper review, but it all feels the same, doesn't it? Tippy’s professor had said there's a pipe-smoking picture-book Canadian studying all this. Well, good luck to him.

Hey, I don't want this story, especially when I start listing things, to sound like a too-long, show-offy, album side-length drum solo.

That said, business was good and bands shouldered up to each other and fell into place like billiard balls in a rack. I’m talking bands like the Grandees, the Baritones, the Arts, the Oligarchs and the Mountebanks among them. Plan City and the Greenbelts, the Suitable Aspirations and the Good Work Habits, the Subalterns and the Self-Fulfilling Prophets all earned their keep in this industrious, even entrepreneurial, period. The Paragraph Skimmers, the Dallas Stenographers, the Correction Fluids, the Second Cups of Coffee, The Coffee Whiteners. The Levelheadeds, the Essays (photographed making asses of themselves at the Assay Office), the Diminuitives, the Pollsters, the Busted Telephone Booths, the 800 Numbers, even a band called the TiedforFirstPlace.

The towering billboard read "Only once in an organization's lifetime comes a band willing to tackle the staggering Paperwork of Rock: the Administrators" but all that rush-hour traffic below was in too much of a hurry to look up and read it.

The Cigarcutters, "Morning Cigar", later covered by the Stockbrokers and the University Presidents. The Air Conditioners sued the hell out of the Hair Conditioners and won big, too. Rarely did kids call their band Please Do Not Send Cash, unless they were sponsored by a utility company. The Sandwichmen, the Moneylenders, the Moneychangers, the Embezzlers, the Appointed Usurers, and Perjurers, and vacationedly, the Sailboards and the Sargasso C-Notes. The Soundoffs’ name described how they watch TV while stoned. The Bank Failures' "At an Alarming Rate". The Beg, Steal or Borrowers. The Checking Accounts, the Unpaid Bills the Businessmen's Lunches, the Check-Cashers, the Back Taxes, the Profiteers. Loophole rock of the Taxpayerz. A country band in a federal agency called the Lonesome Whistleblowers.

Some bands now got button down guitars, briefcase drums, grey flannel cocaine. Take, for example, the Vetters, and those iron kings of arithmetic the Smart Money. The career-oriented Careerists featured Bobby Candlepower, the Sixfigure Incomes competed with the Consumers of Soul, the Resumés, the Home Improvements and the Thank You For Not Smokings. "Execustasis" by the Bank Holidays edged the Smidgens and the Senate Whips off the charts.

The Uneven Gifts, the Underemployed, the Cosignees, the Paralell Paralegals, and the World's Tallest Bridegroom all made money for their manager Col. Harry Plurality, and money’s what it’s all about. A band called the Do I Make My Point Clear? with lead singer Irest Mycase. The Your Own Devices, a band sponsored by YOUR LIFESTYLE magazine editor Neil Lifestyle. The Finger Bowls, the Suppressants, the Auctioneers, the Fine Financiers or better yet

the Romanciers, were all handled by George Gestalt, whose business card billed him as "The Prince of Quality", the name of his own long-buried unsuccessful single when he still fronted the Cottonmen.

The Burton Tremaines, like the Centerpieces, were always invited to play (i.e., replace the vase) at big auto-money barbecues.

The Respectables (a.k.a. Receptacles) vied for the same gigs as the always-welcome Revelers and Partygoers. The smarmy Freshen Your Drink Ma'ams? A dance band the Watch Your Steps.

Michael Off-White the Fabulist, Buddy Greeting, Monte Martyr, Billy Thunderstorms, and Bobby Left and the Rights all got their start at Bobby's father's plush Café Right. On the other hand, Donald Ducttape first sang "I Don't Need No Mentor" on Dick Cloak’s newest show "Dance Your Dick Off".

One band relied too heavily on the back-of-the-comic-books catalog, wearing Handsome Man's Wigs, Heavy Man's Rings strumming the guitars as carbide Big Bang Cannons punctuated the songs whose lyrics borrowed heavily from the Ventriloquism, Masonic Secrets, How to Make Beer and the How to Make Fireworks books.

Bands with small private incomes like the Factfinders, the Pickipickipockets, the Bric-a-Bracs, the Handclasps, the Chef Salads, the Panelists—fans' signs on their Italian tour called them "Panelisti"—who made more money as game show contestants than playing music. The Porsches' "Front Seat", by a band who wore the seat of their pants in front. The Posessions, the Still More Household Gods, the Comestibles, the Chauffeurs. The Thread, the Fedups and the Breadcrumbs. The Cognacs, the Intermezzos, the Cumberbunds.

The inevitable ignominious breakup of Fox and the Hounds. The Backlogs. ComeTogether magazine noted how in the 1970s bands from California like the Cappucino Machines and the Hot Tubs began seeping east to scandalize the incredulous Middleagedwest.

The Capital Improvements, whose record you'd always find in discount remainder bins, was still not tax-deductable. The Corporate Polluters, The Del-Stock Markets, the Glass Accountants, the Added Incentives. The Lows and the Highs, and hippie-shopkeeper bands like the Pay What You Will's. The coy Well If You Insists all had long musical stories to tell, to make a long story short, though you’ve never known me to do that. The Attention Spans, the Subpoenas, the High Prices, responsible for those PAID stickers their fans put everywhere.

None of the above would be caught dead in clubs like the Bargain—or Barge-In—Basement, which featured economy bands like the Discounts, the Guarantees, the Pricedrights, the Cheap, the Buy Nows and the Buy Lows Sell Highs. The Customers, Firesales, Firesuits, Fire Eaters and Wire Walkers, the Wheelerdealers, Whirlwinds, and the Handwritings rode in on the coattails of subway bands like the Straphangers. The Kings of Gold, the Deep Deposits, the Diamond Cutters' "Right from the Start", the trustworthy Institutions. Even counterfeit band appeared like the Bogus Twenties. Those ex-Bank Examiners who developed their pigeon drop take-your-money-out-of-the- bank-and-leave-it-with-me scheme into their own lucrative sound, the Felix Krull Confidence Men. All-shoeshine boy band the Junior Bootblacks optimistically changed their name to the Junior Bootstraps for an album produced

by Horatio Alger. The Grocery Bags. The Enrichments, the Decisions, the Overpayment of Taxes and, most appreciably, the Banknotes, later to reorganize as Ira and the Cee Dees. Young city women who always count their change and invest their mad money called themselves the Local Girl Makes Goods. And the Spreadsheets’ songs were more about financial planning than the morning after.

Network television, of course, tried to perpetrate a big smilingfriendly singing group with its own show called the Cats and Mice, noticeably white and black people in corporate sweatshirts who sang cornpone songs about America. On the rival networks were the Robinhoods, a TV movie about a Rock band that robbed banks, and those fly-by-nights of the firmament the Luminaries. Few bands carried the sense of peace and security as the Hearths, the Evinrudes, the Enrichment, the Behavior Mods, or lithe Penny for Your Thoughts. Afromillionaires like the Africaffirmations, now there was a happy band right from the start. The Cask of Amontillados, the Automatic Teller Machines, the Donations, the Rolling Vassals. The Spamzzms' "Spazz Attack Tax". The gameshow music of the Come On Downs! (predictably razzed by ComeTogerther magazine).

A lot of people thought they could make a lot of dollars and cents our ot Rock n' Roll. Not all of them wrong, though maybe us.

“I’m Coral. Lemme in. I know Tippy’s here.”

I hesitantly opened the door. She wasn’t carrying a Stagolee revolver or anything, and I didn’t detect vengeance in her cackle.

Only an electric frisson of girlheavy lust and anticipatory

determination. Who is this female basketball?

Coral was aerosteatopygian, which means an aerodynamicallybalooned blimp-worthy big ass. Hers an airship that could float us over morning rush hour traffice right into dowtown Motorsburgh or its surrounding factories. Stereosteatopygian, on the other hand, meant ass cheeks like big bass speakers. Coral, you and I are Michiganbodied people, dessert-suckled and breaded frozen food-fed.

Coral's voice husky and gruff from too many orgasms. OK, cigarettes, probably. Like the sigh of a ham. She'd posed for PIMP magazine, whose pipe-smoking publisher still claimed stood for Politics, International Money and People, where they'd airbrushed out her teenage pimples. No, actually she hadn’t stripped on camera yet, but told everyone that was her goal in life.

Coral Mars sat on a sagging found chair in her peachsilver rompsuit and sodomize-me shoes, impatient as a starlet perched on the stool at the counter in Schvalbard's old corner drugstore waiting to be discovered, in the afternoon movie host’s telling. She absentmindedly fiddled with her female fat, scratched beneath her Odysseussuit, zippers everywhere, between her Scylla and Charybdis. Corpulent as Siamese twins. The American Cow. A big pink girl as a raspberry bison. In her laughing shirt, breasts fresh from that laughing laundry of dates, a big pink medicine cabinet of a girl.

They say nobody cares about the fat girl but she'd known a lot of men. Was getting used to being used. A woman's sixth sense can tell when a pass is going to be made at her. That girl's thinking was a sloppy as her waist and hips. Plenty of unwaxed morals. All a

woman thinks about is sex means all is sex. Grand engine of satisfaction. Logicbutt. Sequined heart. Young girl, the kind whose ears get criminally assaulted by our music.

Coral had stars in her pants. Top Forty took the baloney ride.

She showed a lot of boys the greatest distance between her shoes, practiced on lean young them when they were nothing but candy cowboy cigarettes and bubble gum cigars. Tippy too had been a barefoot boy once but only once.

We marveled at a head of hair so golden as to be totally transparent, scotch tape sticking to her head. Longnecked hair like Michigan wildflowers. A bongwater blonde. Damaged, abused and underdeveloped hair, which she hid with dyes and sprays. A bottle blond but oh! What a bottle! muttered Dink.

Coral's face was screaming blonde. That face a bright day's picnic, an ant her beauty mark. They called her Coral since her complexion was like a coral reef. Tanning compounds saw her the painterly color Infanta Orange. A Melanie of melanin. Leaning over the counter to pop her zits in the mirror, she reflected how women who didn't go through this self-purifying ritual tended to see their faces coagulate into elephantine tusks, ivory goo suitably cut into piano keys. Coral’s father listened to that old Rock piano player who now sang country, a flaxy bluebeard of golden locks and seven brides in seven hit records (each of whom died mysteriously when the records slipped down the charts), who made a point of playing only keyboards made of old female face material. Had some sort of deal with a plastic surgeon.

She was into Rock n' Roll something fierce. Guitar tuning pegs for her braces in her teeth. Hell, she would have had a twang-bar mechanism for the polio brace on her leg, had she been wearing one.

Coral was jeans-perfect in those weak-kneed jeans. She was built like the proverbial brick shithouse, Aleppo City Hall, that pyramidal "A" slouching towards a funny architecture, with the Mayor in the apex where the all-seeing eye would normally be, that they tried to get installed upon the back of a dollar bill. And Coral's back was like the back of a dollar bill as well, because money is what distinguishes the city from the country and that girl was thinking downtown thoughts.

We could tell right away, Coral was a part-time pajama party.

Memory full of sleepover moments. Promiscuous and viscous.

When she'd walk into a store the prices would go haywire. Her photograph didn't work right. A body that sounded like a fast car with the windows open and the radio way up as she walked down the summer street. Separate me, she pleaded. The itch of the nose of the hound that's just fought a porcupine. Pleasure from sitting naked on hardboiled eggs, not knowing if they were unshelled or what. She thought as a tiny child she'd save it for kings and princes, but her urge for something long and pointed had her pent-up, feeling like a closed fire hydrant on a summer's day. She settled for a speedy TV repairman while her mom was in the laundry room folding sheets.

She talked nonstop, so I unintendly, inadvertantly learned more and more about her. Found an informational pamphlet that helped at a church we played at, prophesizing Another Whore of Babylon; our high school had a mock United Nations, and Coral prostituted herself

before all nations like the rulebook says. What kinds of grades did you have to get to turn tricks these days? This trollop of truth, before I reallly knew her I thought she was worth only quick witty soldier-fucks.

It must not have been easy being a whore in the olden days, men knocking on your door at all hours waking you up to seriously tell you to go to sleep. If this wasn’t a Chomps Trio episode, should’ve been.

Ahh, he hollered, C’mon up, Coral.

As she ascended the stairs to Tippy’s room, I couldn’t but admire this vivacious creature he had leapt upon, ravished and ravaged, and who gamely came back for more. No pith helmet, whip and chair for this lioness tamer.

Coral downright defecated heat each sashay step. "Coral downright defecated meat" was a line of the song Tippy next improvised onstage, ostensibly about her. Softshell turtle twixt her legs. At least she was determined to be the last orgasm-dump he ever had, last banker's-daughter transaction he deposited; Tippy as Coral’s latest teenage grabman.

Time will tell.

So she made her way over to the Firehouse, the place which Coral's mother warned her was a Petting Fortress. Or was that what she called that closed-off staircase in the high school where she worked, served up the lunches? Had Coral a between-classes interlude there with a counselor, custodian, or even the school cop that busted Tippy? Terratetrabiology Science teacher Mister Ouroboros, a notorious lecher? Had Coral’s mother dallied there, perhaps with promising student Tippy? Had my mother? That would

make for an interesting bit of ancient pharaoh incest, a student could get a paper out of.

Why can’t I stop thinking about Coral? She even distracted me from sleep and a good night’s rest. Not just the thumping and mattress snarls overhead, but the very idea of her naked up there.

They say that after enough sex you can see ghosts clearly, and not just the pneuma of old (live or dead) paramours either.

Tippy'd o.d.'d on fucking, whew. No more tonight did he want to feel that female bath coyly cleansing him, that incinerator to consume his detritus or his excessive garbage-self until Halloween or Easter or beyond. The next day he knew he'd feel his Casanova steaming, a horse huffing from overwork. A baseball bat covered with pine tar feeling icky. It'd flare like a riot, a disturbance to be inevitably quelled but broken-windowed nonetheless. A puff of magazine magician's fire. A vacuum embargo. He'd gotten beyond himself. It was just like when he had a carton of icecream or birthday cake or a lid of Columbine, he'd gotten into the excess of it all. Two much too soon. Something I wouldn't do twice. Woman as a supply to dig into too much. Too funny, ouch! Blood on the pillowcase. The hum of sexual feedback. The Quaalude of love. Sick sick sick with love.

Tippy told us all of this on our way to that evening's gig.

Eventually I got it out of Coral too. One theory he liked to claim was that she had lost her virginity to Tippy back on the night before Hallowee'en, Devils' Night. Eggs were plopping against the windows, toilet paper being hurled into the trees. Tippy tried to wipe his butt on it, or blow his snotty nose. Hurled by the children of professors he

couldn't stand in the University. Defloration as a prank, thought it had something to do with marching thru flowerbeds, that'd really upset her mom. A hyena hymen, laughing at its own impenetrability. Menial of the hymeneal. Or maybe Coral had sex having taken Tippy to her own home, like a good female should. Therefore it was rock n' roll she later discovered by going over to the Firehouse.

She prostituted herself before all nations...or at least the white ones. Perhaps I was sort of jealous, or maybe that's just a form of lonely, wishing Coral was doing things with me. Professor Refusenik's wife the astrologer predicted there'd be days like this.

And, y’know, I think she’s also done all twelve signs of the zodiac, like in the black light poster, with Tippy.

A couple days later, Coral was downtown, and was looking at records in the store. She decided she needed something feminine at Schvalbard’s Apothecary across the street, so went in. But she passed Thump and I, lolling menacingly and sneering by the door, and Tippy was with us, for we were still doing that. Now, Tippy could always catch the scent of girls shaped like perfume bottles. Coral was that, but she also sort of smelled like coffee beans roasting.

Blind man as a motorcycle. Excuse me, gentlemen he murmured as he stepped inside. Tippy placed Coral against the drugstore counter and with a single step forward bodily split her open, glass gleaming and steel edges and donuts scattered on their wax paper underthings underneath. Not really but that was to occupy her imagination for several seconds until he took notice of her. She knew at that moment she would go to the Firehouse, his upstairs hell and

dirty indoor boneyard that night. This would be no push-come-toshove seduction. Words may have been spoken between them. She pretended her voice was just a kitten's mewing. A great Mallorcan mooing mallomar milkcow, baying out her sexual soundtrack. Tippy was halfway out the door as she took a last bite of her snack and she trailed along.

Back at the Firehouse she peeled off her cuntsuit, that peasanttopped metallic exercise suit ordered from some weight-losers gift catalog. He knew makin' love to her would be very spinal. Like making love to barrels. Her dirty sewing upon him. The hole that refreshes. He had a rock in his pocket for her. He picked at her pocket, the beg-for-it bag. One hypnotized hippie chick, snakecharmed by that pink golem. Like climbing Rapunzel's hair for sex. A female joke. He gave her tantrums, got her pouting like a genuine seaweed ghost. Heroic status like the Nurse Edith Cavell of Rock. Her body was a kitchen and a hearth where he warmed himself and baked his little loaf of bread. Roll you around like pizza dough, pat you and shape you, spin salt and dampen you. Those two, the pizza flavor of her underwear crashed foggily into his own unwashed horsey smell. Pure pizza underpants with the pepper below, (everybody shout) Pizza Ass! She even had Cajun relatives on her mother's side whose name was from the French, Cul-pepper.

When red pepper meets green pepper. When salt meets steak. Now he was sprinkling his salt and salting those bell peppers. This pizzahawk was getting his pizza hooks into her. Their picnic.

He vulcanized her rubber face with his finger. Mouths crashing together like Velikofskian planets. Didn't want her ID. Took baby

steps. Did the Junior Achievement. Dramatized all nursery rhymes.

Sucked lips. Passed between their lips a spark of bad breath.

Contact high from her breath, from the smell of her contact lens cleaner.

The leaves of his fingers rustled in the wind and turned the dried colors of fall, and fiddlercrabbed up and down her body like the imaginary insects he saw. He took to her like a moth to a t-shirt.

Tippy promptly began to run his fingers up and down the radardomes of her breasts. Like two fried eggs she kept her sunny side up. Nipples like gun emplacements. No banana teat, her breasts equalled waterbeds. Breasts like little pear-halves. Breasts like honeydew melons, green, ripe and sickening. She had drugs in her dugs, when he bit into them hallucinated. Decided his birthstone was her right nipple, she decided hers was his left nut, but neither had a ring made of either. The Star of Michigan diamond. Pretended she was a trapped rat and the only way out was through his skull and began to gnaw at his nose. Holiday Inn Hips and a big living-room heart. She took off her contact lenses only when she had her period or for guys she really really liked; today they popped out the moment she hit the mattress. She bronzed his sheets with her body.

Whistle-stopping her tongue like a campaign train all around and over his body. Why don't you kiss me in three places and stop twice? When Tippy pulled down his pants she chuckled, Look, devil horns. His Mildredpleaser. His mushroom cap and gown. His hipsnake, hipstick, lust blunderbuss. Ready to shoot in between a meat skull and a set of meat ice cubes. He had smoked so much dope, smoked greenfire and Debussy, that Coral got black lung

disease from giving Tippy head, a gruff voice which she was to use to her advantage later on. They listened to the bloodstained flute. The lovers' lipstick. Tears from his dick rolled down her cheeks. Oftkissed yet her own best friend. As far as she was concerned, this was her first time once again. Polydevirginified. Broken enterings.

Nobody has ever squealed Ow! My membrane! under this roof. Into her pap-test pants. The aboriginal vagina. Genitals shaped like the fig leaves they put on statues. His silken purse of a tongue slipped into her sow's ear, two pigskin gloves clapping or soft expensive wallets slapping down onto a gaming table.

Escargotomania seized 'em. In fact, the Pottowatomi used to call snails "mobile homes", bringing Tippy full circle with this act of sex. Escargorotica as the French practice it. His head between her legs like an ostrich head in the sand, and what was the ostrich's long plucked drooping neck doing...? Rooting for truffles. Nibbled her hair torte. The part of her body that gave him the most trouble. She's got a kitten in her pants. Ready for her fur saw, he grabbed her snatch like snapping a towel in the gym, slamming a locker. Saw something that looked like a wooly ruby he wanted. Coral's cloudy clitoris. A plaything of her time. Campaign clitoris, patent clit. Her two-men-ina-boat. A tiny omlette. She had an extra clitoris in her heart that the blood was constantly flowing over, refreshing and nourishing. These were the days that magazine women were starting to talk about it incessantly. Clit shaped like a toothbrush. As Coral-Operator craned her legs and quaffed pillow-liquor. No, Tippy had burned his tongue on a pepper in a Mexican restaurant so he couldn't give cunnilingus.

Hallucinating on all that cloacal peyotl. Like an outdoor faucet turned

on for a full ten minutes, it took her that long to get the mistakes out of her cunt and come. They removed the fish's backbone, gutted the building, trucks rolling into her warehouse lips, heart, hips. Snaked up on her. He brought order to sex in one young disorderly life. Here in the halflight, shed of sense, she smelled like wet paint or raindrenched flowers. Who was the fragrant one? She was getting noxious as when a skunk puts out, and that's good. She was all steaming hot springs. Smelled like a signifyin' tuna.

They got straight to the point, once, twice, many.

We're like a pair of socks now, she giggled, weighing at that moment as much as the whole world. We must rise above love.

Ride the bastard, or let the bastard ride. They made a great big love.

She sang him her hip serenade. They did it civilization-style. The squealing piggy-piggy-pig of their rutting hams. Embraced like two barbers shaving each other softly. We'll heat the electricity. He watered her garden. Like knifing a balloon. They did the Jonah and the Whale for a while. She was his forty-eight-star flag, the tax stamp on a bottle of spirits. Felt like barbecued beef. She gave him a jello punch. Touched the pudding button. Squeezed her butt like a puffball, releasing his own spores all over the woods. Molesting a bag of marshmallows. Skinny little guy amazed by the great beefbellows of her buns. They crushed grapes between their hips till the love-wine ran down, the medicine that must be ground between two lovers, Ms. Mortar and Mr. Pestle. They dived into lovemaking—last one in is a rotten egg!—and came up smiling. He swam in her like a duck in a pond. They fit each other like a sweater and a long-sleeved shirt. She gave him a shopping cart of love, and he was a little boy

with his legs sticking thru the basket seat. Every man is a little boy when he's naked and jumping around. "I'm younger than any part of you, remember" she rung up on the sexual intercom. In true Rock fashion he bellowed "Let me hear you say Unhhh..."

So hot she turned him into glass up there. She rode his trauma train, his pink pony head down, slid down the bannister till she heard the xylophonic plink-plank-plunk of his matched set of kitchen cannisters (right, his balls). Her Grandmother might've envisioned it as sliding down his cellar doors and felt it in her rainbarrel butt. Like fuckin a beehive while on a riding lawnmower, all vibrationsex. Boy, he was really the Farmer in the Dell now. Tumbling bar in a candy machine. Erotic calories of her cottoncandysex. She rode that candy Honda. Venus killed the umpire—well, balled him actually—in their pennant game of love. She knew the value of a star. Soldier of fortune, and adventuress. His secret spot. Her olive-oil hole in her middle pants pocket. He poured his special quickdrying cement into her, her belly like reinforced concrete. The distance between the stamen and the pistil. Her cunt is a rainbow, all colors there.

Spectrum in the speculum, spectral like the Biblical Josepha's cunt of many colors, kept her in a manger outside of town, a secret of his youth that Christ's Dad kind of kept to himself. Healthy sunsex, like two overturned lawnchairs. Fountain man and pneumatic woman.

Cracklin' butt and snappin' cunt. Snot in his lungs and on her legs.

Fucked like a horse afire. Almost 50% of the horse. Granted, they had a great fucking, a grand fucking. A four-alarm fucking. Green flames around them as a result of sex. She wrote "Enclosed please find Tippy". Going at it like Galen to a corpse. He fucked all four of

her humors. She was sawn, sown and ploughed. These bed apes fucked on the wings of a snow white dove, an alligator flushed into the sewers, the back of a roc flying over Baghdad, on a flying carpet or riding lawnmower. She made dalmatian spots on his neck, was a bow to his arrow. His cock behaving like a sponge up there, soaking up her femininity which at that moment was its most vulnerable.

Tippy and Coral, two mucous-covered otters in a bucket sliding against each other.

She was a football spinning towards a splendid Saturday victory, the voice of Midwestern football. Million-dollar moans. She let out a very adult "ooohh...". Whimpered her night name. Is it live or is it memorable sex? Her ass exploded in a million pieces. The harpoon hit the whale. A crustacean's orgasm tapping upon her surrounding big pink shell. So together they dropped the pumpkin from the overpass of their love onto the fluid, onrushing traffic of their bodies below. The bowman released the arrow. Several barns outside of town spontaneously burst into flame. Sweetvomit splattered the sugar bridge. He squirted up into her heart. Overring at her ovaries! Climax and anticlimax together, fact and anti-fact.

He'd always figured simultaneous orgasm was like eating dinner together, you don't mind if the other one takes a little longer to finish up.

He traincrashed three times in her, at least. Trashcan'd their breath. Horns that pop. The world was like her muscles. The first processed cheese in outer space. He was the clapper in her bell.

She was his wishing well, into which he tossed white pennies. Shot a wad into her which'd choke a whale, clog n' glue up the Grand Canal,

Venice. Science fiction novels were being written about the comet that crashed into her ass.

Tippy jumped back into the girl saddle all afternoon, creaking on her swingset, shoveling and making rivulets for water to collect in her sandbox. That cherry panel enveloped him like a Peruvian poncho. This time she smiled like an old time automobile horn, ahooo-gah! When they fucked, the magnetism of the earth reversed, again and again. The Van Allen radiation belts smelled oddly of pot.

Smelling the air freshener of Girl Garlic. Spinning pinwheel, whirling dervish. Paste pots overturned, magazines put out special editions.

She fucked him so hard he began flowing, squirting, come out of his eyes, ears, nostrils, navel, from under fingernails, ass, bursting out of his scalp, pores, his hairline like a crown of squirt-gun thorns. The twentyseventh time like the last drop of blood from a stone. The wages of sin are dreams. She massaged his brow and adjusted it so he'd never need aspirin again. She watched him sleep onstage beside her. Had Coral's mother peered in she might've smiled Those two are like Palm Beach spoons. They hibernated the winter together, burrowing into the riverbed mud of his room. A certain kind of muddy nudity like you'd see at rock concerts. Coral had taken an art class, so when Tippy was sleeping, with a magic marker full of m.s.g., she tattoo'ed little smiling cartoon faces on his balls, the guy on the peanut jar on one and the characters from the box of cereal that went Snack, Rattle and Pomp—really just elfin versions of the Three Chomps anyway, household gods of trickster uncertainty and the fuckup principle—on the other. She didn't need a government grant to do this, and couldn't have gotten through completing an

application anyway. Asleep beside her Tippy had a reverie about lovers building sawhorses, throwing and turning over large objects in each other's path. For a minute, just one minute, the memory and hegemony of all those other girls he had disappeared into disappeared themselves like the previous night's urine, company over, when you get up in the morning. That's an accomplishment, that's practically real love. If you're so smart, what's real and what's a xerox of love? He's had quantity love, now this was really quality love, not that he was sure he wanted to sacrifice the former for the latter.

The moon is a tampon, and Coraline Beauregardée Mars is the moon. She's appropriately Mars, kin to the murderous god in the War Between Men and Women. Or vice versa. General Venus accepted his sword. Tippy woke up thinking Coral had gotten snails from the garden to put on there, earthworms coming up after rain, pillbugs under stones. He got up and went to the bathroom. Velvet pissing.

That golden sink of the night. No, he only felt the cocktail of desire and repulsion any man does to be the first to pop a beercan's top, the first factory to blow its stack.

She felt she’d discovered the Horn of Plenty. Groupies working as Rock cartographers mapped it as his Cape of Good Horn.

Tippy was Coral's first orgasm, after fifty good tries with fifty bad guys. Oh, gradeschool sleepover follies with other girls simply don't count. Many attempts to jiggle up and down on the carpet, but her belly and massive breasts squashing got in the way. Daffie chuckled at how she used to do that; Horace looked up from his channel

changer and said to his gyrating daughter Hey! Do you want us to offer you to the county rodeo as the bucking bronco mare? Stop that!

When Tippy bragged to us that he "turned her inside out" I imagined him, as part of the time-consuming and variegated fucking process, inserting hands and twisting her, from cunt outward, until pink, lubricious flesh glistened on the outside, teeth and facial muscles, while hair, nipples, distinguishing marks and moles, even eyelids that were all inside now. Quite a curiosity, like a wet medical exhibit. One that he continued fucking in his bedroom and presumably, turned back to her original state upon exhaustion, completion, the next morning or afternoon. Whew.

Coral's entrance that after-school afternoon at the Firehouse was memorable, and by the time she emerged from Tippy's garret, smelling onioney, of mattress and experience. In walked Tippy, eager but nonchalant, the Centaur of the Century. He was your classic late-maturer, she was an early bloomer. She gazed into the icecream of his ass, tight as a drum set standing there. Tippy's favorite nourishment had always been girl babyfat just before it slid off in teenage litheness. She looked into his softboiled eyes, Tippy's ice-bucket eyes. A sea of Leviathan's exudent. He didn't tell her to go sit on a mirror, though his expression might have suggested it. A girl as a cathedral that we desecrate, in which we spill paint and topple candlesticks; a subway upon which we spray our mark.

Woman as a fountain we drink too much of then selfishly continue to despoil. Girl became objective, even standing beside her. Butt achin' like a billygoat's gruff, she would've gone out with a paper bag at that point. When girls rock boats. A moment sweet as when girls would

sleep with their boyfriends because they remind them of rock stars, not like today, the other way around. He'd feel silly to sieze and not to take.

I’m sorry. You’re probably getting jealous, me talking so much about another girl. No? OK, good. Whew.

Hey, nothing weird about me enjoying the thought of my inspiring friend with a pretty woman now, is there?

How do I know so much? No, I wasn’t there! Tippy bragged.

Well, maybe I asked him. What does it matter? It happened.

Coral was pregnant so wanted to talk. About Tippy, her Beloved Pipefitter,so okay, how could I stop her. She told me how she and Tippy had smoked this Love Pot Number Nine, how she had learned the language of the loins, pot orgasms and pet orgasms.

She told me about their fuckship—Coral, I was there, in the band as he leapt upn you—their meeting-flirting-fucking (oh, really?), her nude pregnancy as if it was a downright progeny project. "C'mon," she laughed, a woman can't have the same man's baby twice." Where do you suppose she learned that? Wonder why I never saw a baby around.

I once heard Coral talk about me to Tippy: oh Roque, he's so young.

Their bodies and their beds were friends. He served his pink term in her, he was her confidence man. Sounds like she just kind of backed into him with her pants off, in love's crush brushed up against distant morals, tears as a sexual lubricant. She sailed into his jeans and discovered America standing there, the capital of the Midwest,

the Aleppo Woods Water Tower or the Ypsofacto one. Climbed aboard the love railroad, the world's largest cactus, sat on the world's longest thumbtack and the world's slowest snail tonight baby. The ax in the tree. His ice cubes poured into her. Semen as blood filtered thru testes. Coral couldn't tell if they were just coughing spasms, for she had conceived Tippy's baby during his asthma attack—possibly induced by drugs—so bad sirens were blaring and people running for shelter.

She must be talking about some other time than when she came over to the Firehouse. Not sure if he was at his house or Coral's parents', rolling about they knocked over Mrs. Mars' china cabinet, but it wasn't rare glasses inside as much as something from another planet called "celphas", "mosdemo" etc. Can only be described in dreamwords.

For all the men she'd had since she was young, Tippy was the first to make her hear the loud music in her hips, her buns like car stereo speakers to his roving channel-changing adjustments. She gripped him like a utility company linesman grips a screwdriver.

They'd breath the same breath. They fell asleep kissing so dreams travelled between their mouths. Insex and Egolove.

Tippy would never grow up, bet he took that drug called NoGro-Up, a soda pop nostrum dating back to the turn of the century.

That bastard is like an embryo. I mean look at me, facing all this squarely. Tippy made love like a criminal, for with a girl when she's that age even making love nicely is a criminal act.

Inspired, he sang: Ours was sex between imbeciles

Under sixteen years of age…

They made love in the towns, love in the forest, love for politics, love for lies, sex and opinion. Only Mao's dad knows all the women Mao's balled. Her third stooge, her chomp of love. She fucked his very name. He fucked her house and afterwards smoked and may have passed water under her window too.

He'd sing: My heart is a sewer Spirit sleep in you Baby, I can't patrol you...

One would've thought Coral carried a zippered travel kit full of various contraceptive pills, balms and devices comparable to the journalist Threadbear’s famous (bragged-of) suitcase full of recreational drugs and guns. Maybe if her parents had been physicians, not a bail bondsman and a school lunch lady, she’d be so equipped. But she wasn’t, and that’s why she was barenaked down there when she enveloped Tippy and his magic. Coral called it "one of America's greatest coconut candlesticks" as if she was an auctioneer or something, spouting her superlatives. She managed to spend a lot of time at the Firehouse, under her Tippy, just as she planned it, snaky as a lamia's labia.

But in reality a hard molluscy snail-shell had grown around Tippy’s heart towards this girl, and I was trying to pry her open. I stubbed my toe on her heart right there. Trying to get into her mind by going through her pants. Blow her mind like I blew her speakers.

Baby Take My Risks. Let's reverse wood. No more of your slippery sleeping. Lovers landlocked in a field, just doing the Pygmy Up. The

marriage of the eraser to the pencil. Her Greatest Sheets. A clock on the wall said "It's Seven O'Clock—This Means You". On that killing floor, that bedroom dancefloor. I got your legs all over the place, pressed your softly-filled workout shirt to my chest. You sure can do a lot of laps. Coming something soft this time nearly broke her heart.

The rattlesnake recalls the melting dance, now a hindrance.

Nothing left by coupling.

No, I just imagined that I guess. I hadn’t been with Coral at this point. But soon, yes.

That Coral, she was some babe herself. She told me about how she lured the editor of her highschool paper over to the house, had dressed up one of her skinny boyfriends in a silvery shirt of hers, had mother cry "Coral, Tippy's here" and athsmatically triggered several decades of creativity in the only true Chomp in the room. Let me share your lies.

She said Tippy once had her help him, had a bunch of her girl friends lie down on the floor like spokes of a wheel, had her braid their long hair together like a fuse so he could fuck them all linked together one after another like firecrackers. Everybody likes a medieval rat-wheel. Tippy was even capable of borrowing money from each of them, fer chrissakes. How personal can you get?

When she, like a jerk, asked him about his family he said "My only family is the woman I'm on". If fortune is a fat girl bobbing down the river on this innertube called love then the Fortune 500 must be all his old girlfriends at once. I had always just assumed Tippy'd had

sex with all my childhood babysitters. I knew I really wasn't trespassing on Tippy property, I was just pretending for power.

But I could tell the wistful effect he still had on Coral. All cock, chicken and chimera, everything he touched turned to turmescentsex.

He'd rubbed up against her heart, maybe rubbed hers against his if only to make static elctricity, rubbed up against her health and (later) his lack of it. He had her heart in his hand, he put his head into her heart like he would under the hood of a car. Kicked her heart's tires then kicked her heart's ass. Smacked around an abandoned heart.

First to crack her legs. His speech wounds were like insults to her body. His words come on her. Her heart wears severe red bellbottoms. Thought she'd been screwed by an airplane. She had made love to a Revolution. She was in a vise called love, he beat up on her heart something fierce, bullied into love by a gift rapist. First to open her cardoor, really yank it off its hinges. Now her midnight hour never comes. Coral, clean up your heart like you clean up your room or face and cover your mouth when you cough. People are people, especially girls.

C'mon Tippy. I think Coral likes you.

We got used to Coral hanging ‘round. The band would sometimes use the cardboard tube from one of Coral's tampons to snort cocaine. Tippy called her cunt "her smile upside down." He performed Orestes sex on her Clytemnestra. I pronounced it her clithymen-straw, implying a multi-decker milkshake or spongy, moist sandwich. The part of the vulva called the Apocalypse. Comparable to some sort of automobeatle, industrial strength and assertion with a

plush vinyl interior, cushioned for making all kinds of love upon.

Coral confessed that Tippy's spunk tasted like a Holy Communion wafer, for I gave her one from the box I'd swiped over a decade before, out of Mom's church. And her Confession wasn't extracted under torture, either, except that of my myself at the thought of her indulging in such oral offal practices as I'd certainly never heard of. OK, that I’ve never been told of by Mom. Help me, Roque Get her outa my heart.

Tippy didn't actually sing this, but it would have been sentimental if he had.

Some of the British rock guitar players, in order to prove how tough the are, actually whittle a notch in their male member for each bedquest, but that sounds irritating to me. Some even hand the girl the knife, let her do it. That's trust.

Coral was a moment's pleasure for him, but just a notch on his belt.

What if I had taken her off his hands then?

Brought her to an anti-climax. His big dada art and anti-art.

Maybe T & C reached the sex limit. Tippus Africanus she called him, like an obscure (and by that, I mean dark) Roman tribute or general.

But you know what she was talking about.

Or how the name Peenemunde, the Third Reich's rocket Abomb missle project, meant exactamundo "Penis of the World".

Coral told how a honky lawschool-bound (at the rate Nixon’s going, perhaps someday Supreme Court Justice) fratboy bully insulted or goosed her while she was walking across campus with Tippy. Tippy leapt up already hugely firm and turgid with anger,

depants'd and sodomized the culprit six, seven hard deep strokes, spun him around, boxed his ears so his mouth would hang open, rammed his dirty and shit-crusted thing into the back of the gurgling throat to spurt a mighty mass of cookie-doughjism, and pull out before the baffled victim could even bite down. Hah! Haw! What a man, that Tippy. Coral's eyes sparkled. Every girl wants a guy who could do that.

Perhaps definitions of masculinity are undergoing change in our new decade.

Huh? How do I know all these intimate details of Tippy and Coral? Well, you know how she can talk. And he, while not quite telling me stuff, implied a lot and I can read between the lines, the silences and smirks. Plus, I just kind of put two and two together, right?

Early in the morning the cock crowed seven times. That is to say, Tippy and that girl had done it the usual seven times already that night so it was time to get up. Actually it wasn't that late, she was only pretending. She buttoned up her senses and went home. Tiptoeing her way down the stairs Dink got confused and asked this teenager to go into the package store and buy him a drink, instead of the other way around. All Coral craves is the alcohol of love. She walked home from the Firehouse by herself. Night with an olive sky, heart as big as an ax. Two breasts walking home at dawn. Under the expedient moonlight. The Dawn of her 'Pubicacy". She was stopped by the cops who sensed that she'd just made love. Violated underaged curfews. It was only 9 p.m. and already she was pregnant.

Can't wait, can't wait, she got pregnant on the first date. Sperm meets egg, the first situation comedy. Sperm and egg mixed like oil and vinegar in Coral's cruet of love. In-Uterosexual. Uterine ice jams breaking up and starting to flow. His sperm shaped like little sputniks—remember what I said about Tippy’s father's suspect liberal politics?—with heads like Kruschev or Eisenhower because of the 1950's. Neither virgin birth nor midwife toad. Sperm steppin' on each other, rushing, clamoring, bruising each other to get within her comfort zone. That boy's sperm were a buffalo herd, hoofbeats of stampeding animals on the deck of a nighttime Noah's Ark. Santa's reindeer on the roof. or on an aircraft carrier on the high seas. You never know what animals turn up in that jungle juice. You can't beat off a dead horse. Eggwhite cum. Spazzattack sperm that end up getting a good girl baddened, pregnant as all get out. Masseuse abuse. Sam Sperm, Private IUD. Pregnancies, those are merely dad details, nothing to get concerned about. The clamoring cherubs from a cheering penis. The human sperm-man as piston and penis. After Coral got home from the Firehouse she discovered she was wearing men's underpants, accidentally switched in the hurried darkness.

When she noticed they were Fruit of the Womb brand, she knew she was pregnant. Babies conceived in cars parked at romantic overlooks alongside the Ululating River were often born hydrocephalic, as children shunned by unnerved neighborhood parents and kids, but that didn’t affect us.

The ribbon of DNA in a single spermhead is long as a guitar neck yet narrow as the theoretical "line" they go on about in Math class. Some rockstars choose to take out special paternity-suit

insurance, the rates based and prorated upon their sperm count.

Imagine the cussing actuaries, with jewelers' eyepieces, individually counting all the sperm in a drop of the client's seawater spread out upon their desks, flopping all over and into their calculators. Some rockmen make the groupie girl sign a not-responsible clause voiding any suit beforehand, or their bodyguards and road crew intimidate her into it after the act, not letting her leave the hotel, locking her in a broom closet till she tearfully signs. Coral had to sign one for a night with the businesslike Beatle once, his horsefaced wife standing there glaring at her threatening not to take her picture till she complied.

Little eventrix Coral, with a street value of uncut love. Like taking a canary into a mine, she rabbit tested a-ok, and the doc had rabbit ears on top of his portable TV while the nurse made them behind his head. Deciphering the words in the womb. Coral told teacher she was absent because of a heart cold; you would've thought she'd have rather missed class than missed her period. She thought she was so smart, had timed her vist to the Firehouse to the chirps and whims of her menstrual magpie. Her premenstrual blood pressure spiked and plummeted throughout her first tri-malignancy.

The doctors borrowed her blood pressure pen to note the results.

Her heart was impregnated with love. But little boats should keep near shore. She slipped on her freedom where scandal rules. She had tried every kind of no-babe voodoo, but ended up riding her baby cuz she couldn't find a bike. Guess the women in some families are just born spermmoms. At the age in which girls are often taught to carry babies to term. She was like an egg-laying machine, a starbirthing planetarium. Fecundity tightly packed in those jeans.

There are some babies women have better than men. She better come to terms with coming to term.

Coral that scrappy crocus, she was soon one big brimming cup of coffee, and you can't drink a cup of hot coffee too quickly. A football player lookalike. One great loosely sewn canvas. A mermaid in the land of milk and tuna. She'd read the letters that got a girl pregnant, embarassed. Now she was like an experiment: reproducible. When boys and girls have babies. Beautiful as a burning car with her hips full of child. Even her voice was pregnant, with sex. Pregnanter and pregnanter, she was getting bigger and better, she knew the little shrubbery would bear fruit with the farmer's green thumb up there. She felt like all the Midwest now. It was neither right nor wrong. She was scared crows would pick at it there under its cabbage leaf, so she kept a boyfriend as a scarecrow inside herself much of the time. There's a pizza in the oven, coffee brewing in her, percolating and dripping. As if she was expanding everywhere, she made slits in the front of the legs of her jeans. Like the American cars of that era, since pregnancy made her bigger it commanded respect from teacher and student alike. Michigan's been worse.

A hipshaking mammalian Ma'mselle. Her bottom clean as a baby's whistle. One tit milk and one tit honey. Smiling milk. She was all uterus, legs turned inside out, you should've heard her uterine utterances. Called her uterus her “otter”. The moon was getting full, her inner ivy's a-climbing and her belly's filling with blood. She was overfilled with the love of that guy. She's got two hearts, two laughs.

She was twelve, and twelve times twelve is a hundred and forty-four.

They must've grafted a Graf Zeppelin into that girl's belly. The

Pregnancy of Pig Nancy. She certainly affected pork belly futures on the Chicago Board of Trade, for there pregnancy had something to do with Blues, BBQ. When she'd go out, insectologists from the university would say "Look at that thorax". But Officer, I'm driving so fast because I'm pregnant was the excuse out of which she got a lot of mileage.

Maybe her daddy was right: sex was a free lunch for which they always brought a bill. He would wag his finger, peer over his glasses and mutter gravely Contraceptive Thyself! And here this young girl gambler had already met Tippy's bets of babies and raised him one, on a knave of hearts. Her mother just laughed "And I thought it was just the flu!" I guess the days when The Girl Can't Help It were over.

She would put out a baby and Tippy and the Chomps would put out a record. Yay! Tippy thought he was having the baby, the way his dick ballooned up so, he needed all those midwives to succor him more than Coral did. Tippy might've suffered fetal pain like couvade, he was so sensitive to her. Headaches hoping to become Bad. Went to the bathroom like an expectant father, like in the Middle East they showed me the bathroom Jesus jacked off in after he got some girl pregnant, now a major shrine. Of course the shit of a man smells different after he's fathered a child. PAY ATTENTION, the picture magazine, did a cover story that week on after-school pregnancy.

Melancholy belly, my baby's full of child. Coral was no scandalous Teapot Dome. Tippy'd made jokes when he'd seen women going to places in shopping malls like Hav-a-Baby and BabyBreakers—things were easier in those days--but instead he blew the last of the record

company advance on checking Coral in to the Presidential Honeymoon Suite of the Happy Hunting Hospital in a posh suburb of Motorsburgh. That sounds good but it's not true, he never spent a cent on a dame.

Coral, in advanced pregnancy, accompanied the band on tour.

She claimed morning sickness, noon-, twilight-, and night-sick too, or maybe she just couldn't keep up with our drugging, drinking and fucking. She entertained several of the headlining bands, that trouper-grouper.

The Birth Palace. Girls with pregnant underwear. She sat in the waiting room reading Nausea Stories magazine. Horned babies, some with tiny goat feet, their incubators glowing red.

Red sky at morning, sailors take warning. Or maybe those were only the mixed-race ones.

This hospital's a real son-and-daughter show. While in labor she listened to a thumbful of her favorite 45's--like her own 45 breaths per minute—by the Backbreaking Labors. The rock n' roll birth canal.

Mouth dry as underpants. Tippy gave her a ripe omlette. Coral's mother Daffie considered giving her a ceasarean at the dinnertable, said to Horace Will you carve the turkey Father? Maybe Tippy was the Thanksgiving guest at that dinnertable, where he overturned the china cabinet. Births tended to take place at dinnertables, the only time a family was really "together"? She never went to baby school but she skimmed a booklet I sent her called Is There Afterbirth After Birth? about the round robin of birth and death. A knock-down drag-

out life. She cannot bring forth till she's given a reefer and the latest 45 to shake her hips to.

Coral upon the gestation altar. I guess she's only having me now because she's already pregnant, right? OK, she didn’t, but I thought about it. She should have.

Her Rock n' Roll delivery got a good review from the midwives who were already rolling in the aisles, boogie-ing. The birth was attended by Dr. Babylon Babyteeth, clad in his Ban-Lon golf togs, hurrying to tee off. Frozen labor in a hospital that was pure refrigerator. Coral started to sing but a sock in the mouth performed a vocal clitoridectomy just fine. Of course the band was present at the event, making music on tissue-paper-covered combs, Thump drumming upon incubators to the (I hope) enjoyment of the neonates inside them.

The birth was like an art opening, where wine and cheese were served by the mother's own body. No embryonic hurdles, they cut her maidentoad with baby scissors. Coral split and cracked and crowed and crowned and halved and, finally, calved. Push push! Let me hear you say Uhhh... The hillbilly obstetrician hollered "Quit yer bellyachin'!" and plunged right in. Coral's cunt had a cleft palate. A placenta previa birth like the envelope of sound preceding a jet's sonic boom. We tried to make our electric guitars sound that way. Girls' uteruses sometimes burst in the middle of our concerts, the owners running weeping from the auditorium to stuff themselves with paper towels or old fan magazines so as not to miss the rest of the show, sure to stay to meet us backstage. Birthgas, enough to fill Thanksgiving Day floats. Body pneuma. Birth slid down like an

elementary school corridor. The tunnel of love. Before there were skateboards. It had rained that evening inside the womb so the streets were slick. The baby just pee'd out, riding his first innertube— he inflated the afterbirth—downstream. We could hear her body going through its changes, thought to incorporate that rhythm into a hit song.

She screamed Bloody Murder but she meant "Life". Tippy offered to jump on her stomach like making wine from a bursting grape and Dink, slouched in the corner, perked up at that. Amused, Coral said Don't.

This is history repeating itself. Tippy tried to fuck Coral as the baby was coming out, instead momentarily sticking it in the baby's eye, which shot up its crying volume something fierce. Baby's first rattlesnake. Fortunately, it appeared to be a girl at that point. Maybe it was my Mom. Tippy's tongue caught in the vena cava, or the birth canal. He sucked with a soda straw, making a rude noise. The doctor was forced to perform a premature separation of the parents with his scalpel. Some orderly named Floppy Flores garlanded Coral with forceps flowers. The doctor pulled out his child-saw but didn't have to cut the baby's head off to get him out like a princely dauphin in the Guillotine Revolution. A bunch of beerdrinkers at the hospital got into a fight at the scheduled circumcision, so it was promptly cancelled.

Then the doctor grabbed and hauled the baby out by the foreskin— what the physician, a Sunday yachtsman, called his fo'scle. I hollered Hey look, it must be mine, not a Jewish baby! A so-cauled baby, a Little Red Riding Hood like the Grim Raper or Batman. Baby was born in its own cleaners bag, supposed to be a good luck omen like its own Brooks Brothers suit. This hippie's baby came out wearing a suit

and tie. Came out fast asleep. This spaced-out baby flew out of the Mother Ship. Out of deep space into hyperspace, started crying a triumphant Ta Da! A bully baby. Baby Jesus' first urination marked the spot. My God, a poem, said the nurse who'd majored in liberal arts. Tippy called it the best party he'd ever been to. Your baby was expelled from your body for swearing, from hanging out smoking in the parking lot of your placenta. The place stank to high heaven of premium placenta previa, breech-birth spots all over the place, the housepainters came in and they began replastering the walls even before it was over.

You would've thought she gave birth to a pine tree for all the fuss. It was an ace preganancy so the team doctor Doctor Ace Badinage wrapped it up, had Coral do twenty-five inclined sit ups and sent her to the showers and was all right. Tippy never could climb a rope like a monkey, but that baby completed his long climb down Coral, umbilical hand-over-hand shinnny. No petite simian monkeychild of second generation syphillis, she didn't feel fire in her baby's heart and subsequently cry "Burn my baby!" or anything. The baby was cleaned and pressed, between the pages of a large book.

Blocked and its brim cut down like an old hat. The tot was bundled in a snowsuit against the fetal chill. She got excited when she saw the afterbirth, thought it was a purse she'd lost in a parking lot. Mrs. Daffie Mars, school cafeteria employee and upwoman lunchlady, served as the midwife and often served the placentas of local highschool girls in the cafeteria the next day as shepherd's pie, until protests by the Union of Shepherds and their Sheep. Fathers, as a group, were usually mild sheep-men though. The afterbirth was made

into a tambourine, the placenta into a placemat. Modern, they chose to refrain from the suggestion of an aboriginal nurse present, of the old marsupial custom of taking the baby outside the body and stitching it up with the birth-bag over its head. Coral didn't become a sewbutt, needing extra dental care and plenty of floss for suturing down there.

Baby signed, sealed and delivered, Mother sewed Coral up with a satin thread that looked for all the world like a negligee strap with a pattern of little bows climbing up to, and finally modestly covering up, the inviting and troublemaking clitoris. The bastard was born to Coral and she cut off its tail with a carving knife, did you ever see such a sight in your life? Tippy remembered his own birth fondly, began to hum life's sweet refrain, howling and crying like a newborn babe.

Coral and Tippy exchanged umbilical cords, for Tippy said in her honor he'd wear an umbilical cord onstage but it was only a microphone cord round his neck. I got her an album of songs a baby sings in the womb, produced with lots of feedback. Includes one from a Broadway show the baby sings as a duet with his mother, still wearing the umbilical, called "Strongly Attached". A steppin' birth.

And a spot of milk. A new baby needs a girlfriend so they put it in a double incubator. After the birth Coral was so stretched out she used a diaper for a diaphragm.

Illegitimacy leaves a child on the books. A belly full of sin. A sinny sinuschild. They put the date of birth down as June 95, Nineteen-eighty-seventy-five, just kidding. An illegal birth, an ordinance was broken as soon as she broke water. You can't park that thing here.

And the baby? Sold to the gypsies, or shoplifted by them when they passed through town on one of their burglary jaunts. Mortgaged to a respectable adoption agency where nearly white babies were at a premium. Raffled off at the annual Aleppo Summer Shopping Purchases Fair, its face painted in mime-clown makeup. She gave away the baby to a church bazaar or old-clothes charity, wrapped in one of Horace’s old coats. Put in the "FREE—Take One" box, along with other kittens, at a garage sale on the old Midwest side of town, or an overflowing charity bin in the parking lot of a supermarket. Given to the university for science experiments by ex-Nazi doctors or for Science Fair projects ("Where Babies Come From"). Given to the nursing school, or the highschool Home Ec department to practice washing and changing. Dressed in merry clothings: Pink if it’s a girl, the color of the vulva, much of the passage. Blue if a boy, the color of future veins on his turgid dick, or ring around the glans. This birthskunk placed inside Thump's bass drum or tom-tom before a particularly rigorous Rock concert gig. God, I don't know. Ignored, as they so often are. The baby had a gig on New Year's Eve playing the New Year, in a top hat and banner.

From that day on her baby was easily passed off as her older sister's, the gelid even-chubbier Hyacinthe Charmaine Mars. Yes, the baby was had by Coral's twin sister, Morel or Moral or Michelle or Chanterelle. Dink asked Coral if the lactation might be used to help her prepare him a Brandy Alexander, or that drink called something Cow. One girl, adopted sister of a guy in my old nieghborhood, when accused of mischief in the maternity ward, snapped "What, I didn't throw those eggs at that sperm". We never played Doctor with her,

sadly.

Coral doesn't want to talk about it now, preferring to talk about Rock gossip and new records, so you needn’t bother to go over there.

Wait, you say you already interviewed Coral for your newspaper story about us? Damn. So maybe I remembered things differently.

Maybe Coral’s baby is just something I imagined. Coral didn't really have the baby but her sister—whom I’ve never met, have I?— did. Perhaps another girl in her class, and she had her picture taken with it. Or the retard girl, from the olden days, had one by now, inevitably. Something to think about, anyway. I'm so easily fooled when it's by a girl.

Oh, what am I doing, kidding myself. It was gone, up the spout, long before that big fat domestic earth mother scene. Coral got rid of this project. Like a school assignment unfinished, never turned in for grade or credit. It’s just a fad, a fashion, something going round, just a phase. Some girls do that. Yeah, they are.

You know me, how I’ve always made these lists of bands, lists as notes on those days, on how we experienced the times. If you were a medieval saint in a cave, a bespectacled teenage journalistic bangin’ Hildegarde of ring-a-ding Bingen, you'd suffer a similar onslaught of temptations, heresies, nattering distractions from your prayers too.

And by this time Rock was sex at its most well-lit, and if and when sex was popular you had—oomph!—sexy sexy sexy bands.

Like sexual couplings that just kept happening, it was a Rock Freemasonry Lodge of free-love sound bites: the Mouthwaterings, the Mesmerians, the Flowernecks. The Fare-Thee-Wells, who claimed to be President Kennedy's in-laws but probably weren’t; the Whys and the Wherefores, the Romeo Romeo from the suburb, and the Wherefore Art Thou Romeos, a suspiciously long name for a jug band. The heavily wedded sounds of the Best Men. The Love Diplomats, the Blues Batons, whose lead swinger called his pecker his "Baton Rouge", the Whoopsnakes, the Wifeswappers. As these were still the days a couple could make the national news by living together off-campus, a band was formed named the Cohabitations that was something serious and significant.

Only with dating, fucking and hence, hungry disappointment, you finally get an inkling to what all the words in the songs mean. No nuance beforehand. Manhood before metaphor. Teens had forgotten the rode to the Temple of Abstinence. Or older kids had stolen the signs

Self-descriptive bands like the Kissing Noises. A saccharine girl band the MissMes? The Assignations, the Beauticians. The Pelvises were barenaked Elvis imitators, each representing a different weight in his life. The Forget-Me-Nots, the Roosters and "Cat Sugar" by the Wavelengths. The Love Lightshines. The Love Publishers. The Beads, the Meaningful Relationships, the Divorcées, the Intercessors. That memorable week when the Safe Dates' "Kiss My Date" was parodied by the Shorts' "Eat My Shorts".

Accumulatrixes like the Night Before Last, even satyr-footed bands like the Never-You-Minds. The Heartbrokers from the hearty side of hearbroken Hobobroken NJ. Analysand bands like the deep and swirly Interpentration of Dreams. The Uncanny's "Return of the Repressed and Reposessed", which was actually about a car, not a girl. “Blown in Advance” by the Laborers of Love; similar wailing by the Emotional Microscopes, the Panty Shields and the sobsistrionics of the Pushaways. Their male equivalent, various off-psycho-kilters like the Underfreuds.

The Spayneuters, girls with cute cat whiskers painted on, each girl on the pill of course. Belly dance records like "Girls Get Preg" by the PeeGees. The bumptious B-side was a version of the old rural instrumental "Teats". "The Casuistry (of Love)" by Canadian kazoo band the Chiliasts or Chiliastics. "Once, On a Couch" b/w "Sentimental Judy" by the Cupid's Bow Mouths. The Swimsuitlinez.

Prisoners of the garter belt like the Charges d'Affaires, the Plague of the Personal, and the Cordon Sanitaires in their Sanforized satin corduroys. Crooning Franco-Irishmen the O'Revoirs. The Palmettos, the Prosciuttos, the Pepperonis, all Italian acapella and antipasti, not

paella. "(She Gives) Horizontal Sugar" by the Top Tiers. The Sacrificed Virgins, who sacrificed their youth and its loveliness to this demanding career. Dance track "Do Not Adjust Your Sex" by The Newly Aroused. The Shakewells. The Massage Oils. The Strawberry Lovebites. The Wet Spots, and bands like the Things Crop Up. Bluejean knives like the Live With Women and the jovial Jellyrollbakers.

Until I started thinking about sex, I really wasn’t listening to bands like Bio Bob and the Bosom Riders. Elegant bare-shouldered and not-too-busty women the Bandeauxs. A band of men whose girlfriends had worn poodle skirts in the 1950's called the Your Slip is Showings. They all recorded on Chest Records, whose logo was a busty gal. Big girl groups the Bell-Shaped Curves, a rival group of buxom women called the False Fronts, and "The Tryst of Trust" by the Top-Downs—is that name connoting daring girls or a management team? The Top Layers, now does that name refer to the clothing you first remove in order to have sex in the Winter in Michigan, or to some kind of special egg-producing chickens? The Shirtsoffs, who play at parties where someone always takes off his shirt. Everybody likes the Bare Breasts, but for a while the Bazooms could only get gigs in a bar called the Giant Bathroom, where the heat was kept so high they had to take their shirts off to play. Above and beyond the Short Skirts, there were several bands that were nude except for shoes and socks. The Airbrushed Nudes. The Nudist Publications. The Skinnydippers, popularizing the dance by that name as well as a cocktail the "Skinnydippers' Delight". The Dugs, busty tank-top feminist freebirds in the Aleppo free concert Sunday

summertime dangerous sun. That one I’d told you about changed their name to the Department of Social Cervixes, those crazy Rock cervixen. Somebody clued me in that the Sugarbeets' "Beet You Red" were a band of women having their periods; never got close enough for aroma.

The Pea Shooters. The Moist Towelettes. Innocent bands like the Spring Peepers, sounding like the crickets and cicadas of summer. The Hazelnutz, the Sleepovers, the Sparkgaps. all had the adenoidal ring. No, not a thing like a special phone, but a tone of voice, a particularly irritating nasal descant. Someday machines will do that to ruin songs.

I found myself humming "Seeing Someone Else" by the Still Be Friends. Tim Hyphen sang "Lisa's Less Interesting". The Lennys put out a brooding instrumental called "Size Anxiety". "Personality and Chastity" by The Small Children. "December's Genitals" by The Open Containers. The Beef Emanations' "Aroma of Broth". "Love Onion" by the, uh, I can't read the label, it's torn and making my eyes water. Another band was called What Gets Seen Thru a Speculum, and what a perfect combination of sex and drugs in the band the Feminine Syringe. The Busted Water Mains recorded "Then Her Water Broke" and returned to Mainz, Germany, where they changed their name to the Liebfraumilchmen. The Breast Pumps. Woodstock obstetricians' band the Labor Saving Devices. Stupid English group the Pram Pushers, all right if they were all nannies or something. The Withdrawls, for that's how those southern boys sang. Surfblonds like the Sunbitches. "Touch Me Underwater" by the Feelings Express.

Chubby girls the Pinchmarks, girlfriends of the Pickpockets. Pubic

beards of the Dick Van Dykes, the longuers of the Postillangeurs, and that festival where there was an awful fisticuffs donnybrook between the Prima Donohues and the Prima Donovans. Multi-instrumental jazz-rock organizations like the Had I But Knowns. The album "Beaver Island" by the Buttwatchers. The Pursesnatchers (of "We're Snatch Pursers" fame, in their silly railroad uniforms) became the Rumpursesnatchers, which sounded more British though they came from Ennui Bay, Ohio.

The Ladles (of Love). Michael MeYou and the Thrice-Blest.

The Withering Glances, graduates of Wuthering High. The Swan Divers, the Sightseers' "Up Girls' Dresses", the Madams' "Madam, Madam" hit the macadam and sped forward, displacing the Talking Weiners' best album from the top of the charts. The Anklebags, the Act Twos, Kick Pleats, Birdswatcheds, the Wet Eggs. The Ram Repellents, the Intense Cravings (managed by Arthur Cravan), the Entirelys, the Sweetheart Deals, the Fellatioburgers, plus Candi and the Condescensions. Don’t forget "(Everybody Rocks on) Septaguisima Sunday" by the Baby Goats.

Whoof! Catch my breath. All the later, greater sex bands like the Cache-Sexes, the Comes, the Excesses, the Nymphettes, the Hormonettes, the Pantsbusters, the Aureoles, the Embraceables, the Alluring Set Ups, the Complaisent Women, the Everynights outdone by the Twiceanights, and the Washerwomen. Anything by Jack Orpheus and the Jackofficers. The Crotch Shots. "The Elvis of Cum" called Elviscuous. Gad, you should've seen the Ostensibles, the Vaginodilators, the Cherry Pickers, the Soft Touch. Bobby Lovethis and his band of Scented Youth. Those (in Threadbear’s phrase)

“sexual Maoists of Rock”, the Moists. Suddenly Tippy loved the girls in an underground group called Your First Sexual Experience.

The Little Sausage of Strasbourg now sang with her newlyweds of Rock the Sweet Lie Nightengales on "Marriage Night Gale". The Martin Luther King Bees. The Bacchanaliacs' moody synthesis "Baked Enamel Lilacs", the Lesser Lights, the Long Novels, the Boiling Waters, "Creating a Back Seat (Using Only Your Boyfriend's Legs)" by the Accelerators, the De-celerators ("We decelerate girls"), and the Meter Beaters. The Gladiolas and the Stamen Pistils. From San LaBamba, California came several bad girls with their heads shaved back the Hairline Cracks, the Just-Big-Enoughs, and campfire followers like the Golden Opportunities' who intoned their way through "This Serpents' Bed". A band where everybody had vasectomies called the Rise Men, doing their moody "Mark of the Birth Control".

You may not care, but its guitar riff was reminiscent

of the Slices' "Of Life".

The Garterbelts, the Marriage Counselors, the Beautifuls, the Twilights, the Secret Admirers, the Summers, the Games and a band with their flys open called the Thing That Dangles. The Midnight Specialist came onstage to good-naturedly sing with the Likes and the LikeUs's. The sentimental ILoveYous were soon displaced by the Cads’ loved-and-lost sound. Naked fine-liners like the Love Affairs' "Desertion Derby". The Impassion'ds, the Spendthenights, Clitor and the Surrogates, the Coughdrops, the Rakes, the Your Place or Mines?, the Propositions and the Four Gone Conclusions. Spritely 4H Club girls the Milkmaids sang about the pleasures of making large farm families. Their success was followed by the Calves (when older,

the Calving Cows), then the Cow Pastors, finally the Three-Legged Milking Stools. The Endless Pride, the Foreheads, the Maidensprayers, the Romps, the Stockingtops, the Skingrafts, the Fantastic Brastraps, the Aspartames and the Bath Salts. The Ability to Love Inc. were producers of the International Sexual Rights' "Do It, Siegneur", as well as hits by the Impalers and the Roués.

Bands like the Rules of Thumb, whose name conveyed something sexual about teenagers and girls. Young girls' first psychedelic sex albums like "Funkfinger" by Dannny Love Victim and "Size Is Immaterial" by the BigLittle Books. A big condom covered the record by Johnny Vas Deferens. The Chloës. Any list of these bands made a hollow imbroglio, a seraglio with coins in their cunts.

Can't you hear me jingling.

Blues mania reached such a crescendo there was a group the Baby Please Don't Go's. All-female orchestra the When a Man Loves a Woman, though most of them didn't love men back. The Nineteenforties and their leader A Man As Smooth As A Voice. The Your Privates Band, the Curfew Violations. The Erogenous Zones, the misshapen Babysitters’ Tremors, the Medullas, the Prostaglandins, the Neptune Nuptials, the cheery-sounding Good Morning Sicknesses. Coy cowgirl bands the Pickmeups. The Greeters and the Gross House, the boozy Betty Fords, the Explosive Heat Death, M'gai "My Guy" Japansex and the Seducer-quaCuckolds, the LoveyDoves, the Beeves, the Grown Men, the Ex-'s, the Shakes, the Speculumps and the runny, gliceriney sounds of the Emoluments and Emollients. The Mashers, the Pubic Servants, the Village Blackguards. In those days of the elephantisis of Rock there

was a band of men actually proud to be called the Virgins. The Seahorses, the Honeymakers, the haphazardism of the Paramours and a Joan of Arc Bluesband called the Maidenheads. The Adulterymen, the Wedlocks, the Idolators, the Love Denyers. A notable band of determined young women called the Saint Teresas in Ecstasy—truly a phalanx of beauty—climbed the charts as each might (and did) a recalcitrant record company executive. An anthology album called "Fresh Disappointments" included former members of Weddingrings. The Want-for-Its sung about a girl called "Wallpaper" whom everybody rubbed up against. Ladies, meet the charming and humble Widowers.

All this revived the careers of Max Mosher and the Moisturizers, and leering nineteen-fifties singer Carl Prepuce singing "Robins Egg Blues". Those acclaimed "Beau Brummelly Belles of the BelleLettres" (Threadbear again), the French Letters. The Tourniquettes.

A fat gypsy rhythm-and-blues singer called Big Tarot. The Notorious Bathrooms (of your high school), and sexy druggy girl bands like the Giving Heads. I think they were parodying the Halfpennys when those young ladies called themselves the Halfpregnants. The Hot Cross Buns, the Come Ons, the Horrid Age Spots ("Just goin' thru that horrid age" said their fathers, who paid for all their equipment), the Time Delays, a band where everybody's named "Gus", the Suggestiffs. The Pink Dupes, the Sex Nyet (who really didn’t mean it), the Double Chins, Aretha Frumkin and the Frumpettes, Vikki de Ripoff "From the Department of Vikki Secrecy", the Lozenges from Lozangeles, the Legwaxers. The Blackhead Removers, whose

symbol was the little hypodermo-suckafier advertised in gift catalogs; members of that poor band were always unjustly accused of racism.

A band, catalog and documentary film on the Hollywood Underwears. Melanie Kafka singing "Beautiful Penis". The Double Wands and the Magic Wandas. The Underwears Without Stains.

The Megavitamins' "Milk of Elvis", the Sighproducers, the Eyecatchers, the Bull Necks and, as backup singers, the Cheekbones. Redhaired women the Red Snappers. The Wedding Knights. The Massage-in-ists. The Dream Mammograms. The Midsections, from Middlesex, Massachusetts. Bands that would even make your Great Aunt feel bad if she died a virgin. The Compressions, the Comprehensions, friendly macho guys the Sheetrockers, the Pleasuregivers regularly appearing in a bar called "Lukewarm's", the Nerve Endings. The HusBand, the Acknowledgers, the Sharkskin Suitors, the Shower Curtains of Soul's "What the Shower Curtain Saw".

The June Brides, blushing baby junebugs, the Ball Gowns.

James von Braunface's biggest hit "Tweeze Me, Tweeze Me, Tweeze Me." The Extraneous Delights, the Basketweavers, the Puff Reefers, folky sinweavers the Laughingstocks (extremely miniskirted girls named after their brand of pantyhose), the Sum Totals' "Of What I Paid (for Love)". The Hormonetones, the First Timers, smart Canadians girls the Safe-T-Firsts, and the 30,000 Thighs. The Body Predictions, the Changepurses. "When Momma Goes Moonwalking" by the Masterstrokes, the Legspreaders, "Skirt Life" by the Jock Itches. The Inamoratas became the InLoves with their biggest seller "In Love with your In-Laws". The Sly were a bunch of married women

performing "On the Sly". A band named after the book How to Pick Up Girls. Hollywood Girlfriends and The Snakehandlers—we know whose snake these women were talking about. The Human Cartridge, singing "Going Up Hole Hill", The Camisouls, the False Eyelashes, the Seductionbirds' song about a traction-seduction. The Mock Turtledoves, cooing out records on the Gendertree label. The Saddhus, with erotically pierced amps, their heavy Kalamazoo-made instruments hanging from the skin of their backs or genitals by taut guitar strings. "Pimp and Circumstance" by the Famous Pits. The He Did What to Whom? and "We're Only Human" by the What Shall We Wear? "Don't You Want a Massage?" by a band called These Women Will Probably Marry, Bear Children. Concept album, maybe from France, called Miniskirt Worn in the Nude.

Clitorex commercials were sung on TV by the Uneeda Escorts, teenage girls who, with each allowance, went out and bought that stimulating product. I wonder, did the Pipe Cleaners understand the implications of their name? The Giant Girl, the Fuckings, the Protectorettes' forays in "Chivalric Rock", the Balmwreckers, and the Lady in Journalism School came close in the things they did on those hormoney guitars. The Hymenbeaters became the Steakeaters, or vice versa. The Hypnotic Hymeneal Chariots and the Rocket Burstings, the Shimjammers and Whimjammers, that splash by the Cooling Towers "Hose Yourself Down, Girl".

Just yesterday I bought the novelty hit "Fido's Boner" by the Big Guy Bona Fides, but when Threadbear called them “catnappers of Rock”, did he mean they kidnapped cats or took catnaps? Then I

bought the latest from the Needs (always really big) and "Boil Some Water" by the Somebody's Having a Baby.

No, I know of no band "Tit Tit Cunt", unless it were all guys.

Where did you hear about them?

Coral, other makeup-crazed teens, liked the Dermabrasionaters. Who’s Coral? Wel well well, now let me tell you about her.

Yes, of course I remember the OPTICS, our school paper. No, I never wrote for it, probably should have, for I have always had opinions about bands and their qualities. You’ve brought an outline, excellent. So you're Nora Epinephrine, I've read something you wrote.

You are obviously a very organized young woman, college bound, certainly. So let me see your list: I’m going to have to get a new prescription, I’m not sure these glasses, cool as they look, really help anymore.

Oh, I saw you tense up when I mentioned glasses. Yours look fine, very nice. I still think you’re hot, and I bet there are a lot of boys in your own grade trying to get into your pants. Trying to get even a little glimps of panty beneath that plaid skirt, eh?

Then there was the Owl Girl—you might have liked her, on your paper. She knows plenty of facts. Like, Who! Who! Heh heh.

OK, OK, I’ll get back to talking about the band and music and stuff. No, let’s get back to Coral.

It was only through the spare change of good fortune that I met Coral in the first place. Hanging around her high school I'd seen her pumping up the stairs, cosmonaut-girl ass, all pork ballet. Freight train thighs, Holiday Inn hips. Anxious sacrifice to the food gods, trapped in a ghetto of rich Sunday dinner. The poem you're writing with your stretchy clothes. In the halls of the school we committed eye indecency. Looking at the seat of her pants like professors look at a painting or a literature book, inviting as a TV, warm fireplace flicker, or weekend sports event. A bowling butt. Coral's butt was like an endearing double chin. Ford Rotunda ass in her rubbery blue jeans. Her wiretap jeans. Closely watched jeans. I wanted to find out what made those jeans tick.

If I were really Nazi, I'd probably be attracted to the anorexic ones (like the "Menace Time" TV Producer's daughter, glowering, silent waif at the edge of the classroom), camptown ladies, but instead I seek, like that fraulein movie Directoress, to climb Coral's Alpine mountains and hillocks, plant my flag and probe her valleys.

Though I am secretly attracted to Maccabee girls too, tanned-shirt sabras with shirts open, no-bras, if you can believe that. But don’t tell Mom. The only reason I was hanging around the high school was to pick up my lunch lady Mom that afternoon. No, not that kind of “pick up”; no, not the other lunch ladies that way either. Stop giggling.

Sheesh, some times you’re as rude as my bandmates I guess.

And it was lunchtime. Calorie factory, she poured sugar onto her slice of pizza and dipped a corndog into her fortified vanilla milkshake. Going down on her breakfast cereal. The lunch of big

birds. Kissing her own lips. Smile like the horshoe over the door of a blacksmith shop. Cherry mouthed and chinny-chin-chin. She chewed in time to the music from her transistor radio—she'd been listening since time began—as it played something bland, workday soporific, by the Sleeping Pills.

Still, she sipped incessantly, in cafeteria and in class, the diet cola called Her Nibs. Teacher in Poetry class, where Coral mostly read teenage fan magazines, said that product name reminded her of old penpoints. Coral looked up a moment, shrugged.

Bayonet my way to the head of class to meet that girl. I take to Coral because she too is a little too fat, a not-so-secret fraternity or family chubby in this world of sticking-out ribs of the svelte and skinny, shirtless smoothbellies, concavity whereas instead we have state capitol- and satellite radar-domes spilling over our jeans.

When Coral walked into the Scientists' Class, she and her cohorts, her co-whores, made such a rabbity racket, they turned it into a blabbatory, bubbling beakers of oratory. She shook her mane of cherry-blossom hair. Crew-cut Mr. Keystothekingdom, teaching since just after the World War, tried to shush them, so she raised her braless t-shirt and cackled "Study these!" Her muskmelons, pinkish orange softskinned cantaloupes. Coral's birth bra, the bra she must've been adjusting when she was born. Party princess. Coral was as brassy as a spittoon in an old west saloon, Ptoo-TING! Down there an accumulation of dark fluids too, from gamblers and badmen.

She showed off her brace of dueling Goal Vibrators. Later, Aldebbie sent her an English Gaol one too, menacing as the knout.

Who can't love a girl like that?

I think of images of parts of girls but, like insects, they crumble when I caress and touch them.

She was a lebenheifer or love-cow. How ironic that the descendants of Germans who escaped tyranny in the 1840s and 1850s to settle in Michigan were now conservative business burghers in Aleppo, who would prudishly sneer at a sex-giving fraulein that their great-grandfathers would have prized, slaughtered pigs and sheep for, even built altars and hilsside chapels to.

Coral in school was the first time I ever smelled perfume. Mom didn't wear it, supposedly bothered my military officer father, "like whores of Pusan" he muttered. Like candied dessert, fruity, like those candies with the whole in the center to make a man think about the female wearer's hole in the center too.

Coral as a laundry-basket of lubricity, of lust. A laundry-list of sexual activities. Rude lads called bovine Coral's bra her "udderwear", their dicks anticipation-swollen and balls poking up their trousers like an overturned milking stool. Rural boys make shooshslurping noises like a cow barn's milking machine as she sauntered by in cantilevered Levis. She was part lioness, part cow, laugh of a crow but with very blue eyes. Like Tippy's, yes, you’re right, very perceptive. She wore negative clothes up top. A barely-nubile sent home from junior high for a see-through blouse. A sheer chimera of cleavage. Impermanent paper breasts. Big orange Chinese lanterns, tenderly aglow.

The girl certainly was an instinct dog. Got vaseline mixed up with Listerine. Gargled with the jelly, used the antiseptic mouthwash as a lubricant which, despite the friction, was probably a healthy idea.

Still at that age that couldn't really distinguish ovaries from storybook fairies. She had boyfriend back. She was "taught the vice of a calculating servant" with her mouth at an early age. This very school paper once waggishly referred to Coral, jostled in a race riot, as a "local pillow". Well slept-upon, or cushioning churlish church pews, indeed.

One of Coral's friends was a Catholic girl who claimed to be the first ever to fuck ALL the Saints, not just the prominent Evangelists and bishops but bloody martyrs of both sexes, efficient Abbesses too.

This, she assured Coral, was quite an accomplishment in her longestablished Church. To the best of her understanding, Coral was impressed. Once she even went with her to Mass, took the gumdrop of Christ in her mouth, smiled in recognition of its boyish taste.

Calmed my psalms. When the irate priest hurled a golden bronze candlestick at her, she replied with a bland blush.

Oh, the things I did because I thought it would make her like me. Once I stole Communion wine for Coral to daub on her canvasbag-stuffed dubious cheeks, but before I could tell it it was the Blood of Christ, she dumped it into the bottom of her bong and re-upped a long, sensuous drag of smoke; Holy Spirit swirled sensuously about the room.

She was still in school, yet anything but still.

Coral wasn’t dumb; she actually read one book during her seven years of junior high and high school confinement: Aimée Fink’s Secret Diary. The fifteen-year-old author hid it from the Wehrmacht occupiers, recorded quotidian details of her tiny room, peppered with graphic Judith-and-Holofernes fantasies of seducing

then decapitating or eviscerating besotted Krauts, peeing all over faces and feldgrau uniforms with burning acidic urine the invasive inspectors at her arrest, even a final squirting orgasm (yessss!) in the good eye of her monocled, dueling-scarred interrogating officer.

When I read the book, I had hoped Aimée would grab and twist off the beltbuckle off an Obergefreiter hustling her down the stairs, clasp it to her heart throughout her imprisonment in the camp, cherished as a gift to her future unknown beloved, me.

Where the locker-lined school halls intersect, Coral had meaningless lunchtime affairs for whose assignations she'd be excused from class to hide with some guy in the dark stairwells of the school. These were just School Sex. The earth sciences teacher came out of a chemical-storage closet with her, looking embarrassed, disheveled and scratching himself suggestively. Touching his lips nervously, and hers.

This hooting two-shoes. She's a nightmare after school. Life, she thought it was one big cherry ride. She got stopped for wearing Levis too loud, but the school cop got off on her for good behavior.

She was what secret records in City Hall called a policecar sirenchild.

Authority love, all the male school counselors, janitors and coaching staff knew her. Sniffing their fresh aftershave as other kids sniff reefer. School principal Mr. Wolf from the Little Red Ridinghood story. She grew sick of being interrupted in classes by FBI men with their flys open.

A scandal-lit romance. Reclining thoughts. Polyfecklessness.

Creampuff rising. A unit of measurement based on all the chocolate she'd eaten by age 12. I sing the body pornographic. Fat equals

shame, hence pornography. Hips as wide apart as her nostrils.

Odor of a small lilac ghost. She tested pinch-positive. She's "small underwear", which means it looks small with her inviting rolls of pincurl-pink fat bursting over it. Wearing underwear that was impossible. Isn't there some kind of law, like everybody wearing pajamas? Knock the lovestuffings out of her. A big affectionburger, an affectionate space. A dawnheart. Her body a cake with sexual frosting. Candles with rosettes. Wivesfoot cake. Dungarees dissembling. She's got the dimples where she walks. The prettiest pathfinder. Dancing and damaging. Bet she could dance and climax at the same time. Her heavy flanks the rising dough of yet-to-bebuttered bread, her coffee table back!

She was a personality Venus, a sweet hibiscus bison. Her whale-blue eyes, as if gun blueing had been spilled onto her corneas by her haphazard father. A dyedsexual blonde. Beneath the cornsilky thatch, pubicolor roots. A child with gas-station lips.

Was it her mother, or other little girls, who told her all about the Birds and the Bats? Little pinafore girls were laughing as they chased each other through the grass playing Egg, Egg, Sperm.

Winter children making snow Spermatazoangels, but probably not in Florida in those days. Childhood games, yes.

She could swat a fly with that butt, even in junior high school.

She could sweeten a cinnamon roll by sitting on it. Boys made decisions by the seat of her pants. She went through that age, all smoke n' foam from cigarette-pack contraceptives, delighted with every new thing. Next to her picture in the yearbook she wrote "Why do people even pretend there are other things?" She desires all

desires, has a good bad reputation. She was practically sweating makeup. As a candypants'd jujube-popping preadolescent, she dated a black boyfriend who, in her Florida innocence, she hoped would come chocolate syrup all over her double vanilla scoops.

Coral had a certain pink popularity, a female centaur's popularity, a fairground ride that childish men (and not-so-childish) would jump upon. She was like the tower that fireman set alight to practice upon. A burning barn of a girl. Like a female pork sausage, or spicy crunchy pork rinds; such metaphors I wrestle with laconically.

Describe the undescribable; a particularly midwestern kind of sexual obsession. Not so much on her part, as mine.

Bountiful dessert-date girls always seem to wear low-fat shoes.

Shoes like she was walking on a bulletin board. Shoes with filter cigarette heels. Nothing is so slovenly as a woman who walks on the backs of her shoes. One scientific boy muttered she must weigh about a ton of urine. The Wicked Witch of the Midwest. She wore Christmas stockings with her blue jeans; “I’m crazy, I wear crazy socks” a shy librarianette imagined this zaftig role model saying.

Oaken knees, big as any deciduous tree in the southeastern part of the state. Laetrile legs. A miniskirt makes her stockingtops hurt.

Coral arrived at her Art class. Looking aimlessly around the classroom, around the world with her hips, she sashay'd from all the seesaws she's ridden, shooting gestures right and left. Lady in a green setup. Other girls were just wearing knockoffs of something they saw in VELOUR GIRL magazine. Coral brushed some clay dust

off the woodplastic chair, sat down. The hippie teacher seemed distracted, so I followed Coral in.

A certain hoary whorefrost blonding her hair, evoking romantically 19th century circus act The Great Blondin, crossing Niagara Falls nude on a highwire while the Maidenhead of the Mist goes over the Falls in a barrel with Helen Keller's mentor Annie Sullivan and ten men in a horny brass band. Mm, hair like that.

Coral’s hair was shredded satin, glimmering as shredded Sistine Chapel. A girls' rainbow. Her corn-liquor hair. She had tree stumps in her hair. Hair cut like a paintbrush. I walked up and sniffed the patchouli patch that was her hair.

She turned her head towards me. Her eyes were like comparing apples and oranges. Enameled eyelashes turned upwards at the ends like an old time villain's waxed moustache. Her eyes a lapis lazuli azimuth. Beauty, where face equals sex. Heavy evidence of eye makeup. She blackened her eyelids with charcoal from the backyard barbecue, her "racoon mask" as her father Horace lovingly called it. Staring down the town. The living kohl on her eyes.

As hip teachers stood by inhaling amusement powders, Coral barely powders her face. Pancake makeup refers to her weight and density.

Her Crème de Chameleon day-care skin, baby porcelain. Her pores like flowerpots. The servility of her mirror, every bit of glittering metal thread in her lurex tubetop reflected her fierce floppy beauty.

The skeletons of past kisses were strewn across that mouth.

Lipstick slapstick, a lipstick afterlife. Her lips read mind. Pair o' dice eyes, inspiration breath. OK, cigarettes. Cigaretty breath smelled like the dangerous part of the garden, the old oaken bucket that spent

the night in a well. Liposuction breath. Each breath she takes sounds like the tinkling of a million silver ashes from all the right cigarettes. Invisible pigeons cooed.

C’mere, big little Coral, tell me something extremely nude.

Breasts like a bushel basket full of overripe apples, there's a Michigan-in-October image for you. Golem Delicious apples. Her open shirt like a greeting card, my funky valentine. Coral had been sent home in seventh grade for wearing a see-thru top, but even dressed in her best she was quasi-naked. Momentarily I'm thinking Tippy stole his stage nakedness from her. The spermatazoan night of her black t-shirt. Points of light on her breasts, mousetrap breasts that caught this mouse my heart. "Look at that pair of Golgothas on her" whispered her disciples.

She had the look of liking it. One of those girls just out for kicks and orgasms. Some called the Mars sisters "hicks" for all the hickeys they gave and received. Coral and other morally-barenaked girls would loudly ask, in their elementary school classrooms, Have you ever seen a boy without clothes, isn't that something? so what do you suppose they talked about now? She had invented a drink where the bartender drinks from your glass. She'd go anywhere. The Eskimo word for "boy crazy". Well-versed in squeezology, the squeezing of magic wands. She was pugnacious and peaceful in the manner of many tough girls who know the ways of men. A baluchatherium of lust. She's got a monkey mony mony. The cheap, sunny seats in the pubic bull-ring. She stays out with rockets, kicking up a thrill. The night invented her. She had brightly painted nails and orgasms. She did things even sapphires are afraid of.

Like all girls ruled by the passions and those positions, she'd stoop to quality. Remember, women at that time thought of men as these large objects they'd put on top of themselves. But after a while, girls all come back to love.

Most girls Coral's age are interested only in shoplifting and sex.

Beyond occasional tank-top hallucinogens, Coral's fave food "in the wholest world" might have been French fried onions, good preparation for crunchy boys. She wore negative clothes up top.

Sent home from barely-nubile junior high for sporting a see-thru blouse. First day of school too. Like I thought "shiftless" meant a lady who'd taken off her billowy, roomy nightdress, perhaps body gone to seed or stout. Stout from stout would certainly catch Dink's attention. More often in the blackest t-shirtfull of Eldritch Cleavage.

Aargghh. There is no horror like chastity.

Getting into Coral's panties was more symbolic to some men's work than the symbolism of any painting or poem ever had been. As a touchy-feely blond. She knew how to kiss a man with more than silvery lips that tasted like Michigan apple cheap teenagers' wine.

In suburbia heat a gang of tomcats slipped into her room through the open window or a hole in the screen and humped her, as did horses on a dude ranch out west, snuffling peccaries in the woods on a family fishing trip up north. She'd been gangbanged by bikers at a Rock concert but that's another story. Blithely used like a state park picnic table before they moved on. Her cunt was a dumpster.

Where the racoon found his mask. The beak of the owl. She'd had

probing crows' beaks down there, so go question the probity of that.

Pant pant pant said the spider to the ant, plenty to do in my web.

Now Coral bragged how she went (underage) to bars like the Love Lever, a roadhouse on Umpteen Mile Road filled with little pillow-dogs like her. Put on her marijuana lip-gloss, marijuana false eyelashes. Cigarettes colored her rich brown breath. Pills were everywhere. Hullaballoo houris makin' highschool hunchbacks out of the best braggarts. A steady diet of drugs and serenade. All her friends were liars and daydreamers. Fancy hearts. Never thought about things like when people would have to get up for work. Around the house she was one usefulness machine to a band struggling for its sound. Mumbling softly the Biblical injunction "whosoever cometh in my face". She was the kind of girl who, in a Chinese restaurant, would get the fortune cookie that said "A valuable object will slide into you shortly".

She was thigh-ridden. She had different men when she needed different kinds of cars--station wagon, truck, motorcycle, boat--"Shiver me fishermen!" said the Captain when he saw her. A fundamental bubbleship. Girls like that they climb right on. Sometimes the sound of a man showering is enough. Barenaked Lil' Butterfucker. She shed clothes like a snake sheds skin. There's a certain kind of hippystrippy Midwest exhibitionism from the Look-at-my-New-Car state.

Truly Take-it-All-Off country in the Summertime, and behind closed doors in the Winter.

She laughed that I reminded her of swashbuckling urban rogue Studs McJagger in the comics. Me, older guy, I was hotly the bachelor boiling. Tamed erotic fighter in a world of men, women and

chemical companies. I figured now would be a good time to meet her, you know, just, ah, for goof. In the classroom she sat lighting matches and dropping them into her lap absentmindedly; was this some kind of signal to me? So I kind of supple'd, subtle'd up to her.

My specialty is driving cars on ice. Introduced myself to Coral. She just teased her coleslaw hair. Her glasses like candy or red rhubarb.

Meaningless glances exchanged, from behind my own mirrored aviator sunglasses. Clearly, already she got three-fourths of her posing from me.

She didn't know what my words meant but thought I was cute.

She trembled, then split and whistled between the thumbs like a blade of grass. C'mere! Come ON. Recline to quality, baby. I'll be your hootchy cootchy monster. Sunshine for Skippy. It's spring, let's crucify Christ. And spring smells good. Smelled caramel right off the bat.

Heh heh heh. I am truly a cad. Let's see how you can dance to me. Cloudcuckooland ahead for the Grand Cuckold of Rock, mister you-know-who, thinks he’s so rock n’ roll star. Moses' horns will be his antlers. Like the vapid rabbit-eared portable TV her mother and father must've had in their bedroom the night they dreamed her up.

Remind me to try to tell you some time how Tippy was cold-cocked cuckolded by his closest of frat brothers, kookoo cuckolded by me.

Michigan winters weren't too bad for her—her abdomen was like a quilted down jacket anyway, rubbing you-know-where to keep warm. Before disposable cigarette lighters came on the market she even strike a match upon it to light her adolescent cigarette, just as

she'd light some boy's cigarette with her lips and uvula. Coral was born wide awake, born not-a-virgin. Some boys at school compared her to a motel bed that'd just been made love upon, one which they rent out at hourly rates, or to a damp wash cloth. She glared back with hot Teamster eyes, tearless desert eyes, wet everywhere else.

Dumb in school but posessing a mathematical heart for boys, complex as compound interest. She knew boys had their male parts, women their shopping-mall parts.

Coral's childhood games of Men and Cold Woman. She loved playing Doctor Howitzer-Doctor Feelfine-Doctor Howitworks with those boys, them authoritatively making up names for her parts where they put their fingers. No, she wasn’t the retard girl in my part of town; this was in steamy Florida.

She called it Bestfriendsex, her imaginary playmate between her legs. Rumplestiltsex. Pubic hair a sweet, pink and attractive carny’s cotton candy. And she'd say "Yessir, yessir, three bags full" to grown men and they'd get the idea, how three times was the expected minimum. Make sexy Billy Goat's Gruff references to her father's friends when he was out of the room, when they were all over to the house to figure out how to catch that damn bail-jumping troll still camped under the bridge. Coral hoped to appear someday in Prepuceboy magazine's special annual "The Girls of Sex" issue and be recognized in barbershops on college campuses all over the world, but her mother would rather have seen her profiled and featured in respectable magazines like Poolside Cosmetician. Coral was such a good little baby girl she put curlers in Mom's pubic hair for her while she was—as if Mother didn't have enough to think about—

coming out of anesthesia from giving birth to Coral. She relished the baby role. If she was found under a cabbage leaf, she weeded her folks' cabbage patch and cut a few fresh forsythia and daffodils and hollyhocks for that evening's dinner table. Hooray for Coral!

Her parents prayed for the seven Mercury astronauts by name, but she couldn't even name them for a gold star in fifth grade. She had an orbit with a boy who looked kind of like an astronaut she saw on TV, or in that parade for astronauts after the historic spacewalking, she can't remember which. Horace thought it would be cute for his little daughters to run up and kiss the spacewalking Gemini astronavvies, as their open convertible rolled by in the parade. Big sister shyly gave one a cheek-peck then hurried back to family, but Coral jumped in, soul-kissed one and undid the pants in the lap of the other before a cop snatched her out of the car a ticker-tapey block later.

She grew like Topsy separated from her top, old racists like her father’s clubmen used to say. Later, Aleppo experienced a lunar eclipse every time Coral had her period. Astronomers gathered at the university's hilltop observatory, and the old lady professor at all the football games in squeaky tennis shoes, gazed at the red surface, proclaimed it a Heavy Flow Day in the middle of the night on the dark side of the moon. All the animals in the little zoo howled, a cacaphony, as badgers and racoon hurled their caca about. She considered a tattoo The Moon is My Tampon, but for only a minute.

Didn’t the teenage so-called “Virgin” Minniemouse, married conventionally to a respectable mature workingman, get knocked up

by someone (OK, -thing) so foreign and unlike her as to be otherworldly? Maybe the UFOs up in the cornfield by the ratiotelescope were looking for Coral, or lively girls like her. Healthy, humping, miswesternesses. Still at that beachtowel-for-brains age, she hung out with boys with chilidog eyes. Sex and cigarettes were all she cared about even then.

Coral was descended from sturdy and stout women who, in the south, had slept with every deputy in the posse, every klansman in the night ride (or, sometimes surreptitiously, every worker in the field), and when up north, every blacksmith in the shop or machinist on the factory floor. A point of pride for them. Legs like Trajan's Column, or (said Aldebbie) the Cleopatra's Needle obelisk in a riverside esplanade. Oh, her rivers did flow, like the Negress and the Euphrates!

When raising their first daughter, the Mars had bought bestsellers like How a Child Becomes Human, but when Coral came along they pretty much just let her play outside in the dirt while they stayed inside with the older girl and watched television. Which permitted Coral to grow a wild independence. Like Tippy.

She was creative, like her mother, a hand for handicrafts—like handjobs—making a swimsuit out of lint from the clothes dryer she wore when her class went to a beach on the last day of school. What Threadbear of the CumOn! came to call Coral-colored, which got me suspicious. Even him? It figures.

Coral had a special doll designed to teach girls to cry for their boyfriends. Hey, don't fondle the foundling. One Christmas Horace

bought the girls each one of those cute little early horses, born prematurely or something, called an Eohippus but Coral broke the back of hers when she climbed on. Coral had gotten a report card—a sexy lacy one—so Horace was in a good mood and brought her home a record by the Teenage Diets. Something that was implied between the lines in the slurred lyrics changed her life, for listening to it she discovered men too could be pleased. Coral the child clobbered the little kid next door with a pair of shoes and discovered "bad" feels "good". That suppertime her mom reminded her that sex was bad. Seduced younger children. Her father used to say cynically, to be gross, "Girl, are you swollen and weak from giving birth?" which he thought was uproariously funny, but he didn't know the half of it. She sang a song at the dinnertable Do Your Thing With All Your Fingers. Had a kiddie vibrator, a Doggie Dildo, like an electric sander to her lust. . "Oh, that's just my hand penis." Whe she tried it on a boy he'd throw off the white hat. Then they did that which makes you say "thank you".

She'd always been interested in music I guess, for even as a little child she would mix her parents LP records of female vocalists and male big-band crooner-bandleaders together in the record sleeves so the recording artists would "sleep together". But she had snitched a "Take a Number" display from a supermarket deli and put it in her bedroom, a joke her father found as tasteless as the salami that deli served anyway.

She knew this year she would do it with some boy, who it was didn't especially matter. Oh yes it did. Her older sister Charmaine

Mars had nine children by the time she was twenty-one and old enough to buy a beer to relax. Early on she got to ride that transparent motorcycle. That daughter would go out at night and have sex at an early age because for a while the didn't have a TV. One of the last on their block to purchase one, they finally did just to watch the renomination of the penis-pate'd Eisenhower.

She was the schoolyard bawd. When she was a little girl she tried to use Daddy's used shaving cream as contraceptive foam—she had a secret pipe to the sink—but she was too little to have to worry anyway. Still unfucked yet readily unlocked. I don't know if anybody'd actually slept with Coral, that is to say spent an entire night. Kittenish? More like a spayed dowager. Gorilla in garter belts.

Born under a promiscuous moon.

She was well aware of the possible consequences of chastity.

Her wild calling. Fire sale and fire extinguisher. A lipstick crapshoot.

When she reached jeans-age she felt like a little plant crying "fuck my anthers and my pods". Made dove noises. Tested the waters. "Do you think boys like me?" she asked over early slumber party exploratory sex. Hands probed like walking flowers upon her moist earthparts. Hands rolled over her abdomen, alabaster thighs, into her sleeping bag. She soon spent time at several fraternities after football games and big anonymous dormitories till the veil of virginity, that witches' curse and Blood Libel was finally lifted. Her hymen a Picasso-painted drop curtain that had to go up for historic performance. Without that helpless membrane she could breathe free as a wild young squirrel crossing a street on a telephone wire.

She could breathe Picasso's breath. All them guys grown-up'd Coral pretty fast.

Coral had corn and grain in her hair from rolling in the country Midwest with boys of her choosing. She'd go into the woods just to break branches. She's the Eve Arden of Love, a potbellied beauty queen, that Queen of Sheba. She wasn't happy but she sure got a lot of phone messages. Somebody said she was kooky from an operation, she had gone for silicone implants and had gotten mixed up and asked for psilocybin. Consequently she was stoned and lovely. Hospital honey. There was a little trough on her side where her kidney had been removed because her parents thought all that open-legged, open-trousered, open-mouthed pissing would lead her into sex. Mile-long legs but township-wide. She tried once to get a job, at the Having Sex All the Time Secretarial Agency. She'd almost joined a convent but her classmates at school advised "Don't marry Christ". Somebody said her lovers were local heavies, even old men so toothless she couldn't feel them bite, little lapping minnowfish upon her.

Coral's little car was bright Fuck Me Red. A police magnet, officers asking dates or taking their ticket fines from her right then and there bent over the hood. Coral was always the first in magazine fashions, like Rudi Ed Gein rich fauxskin topless swimsuits. She was brave to wear one in the middle of winter, and through the entire day and all her classes, like that. For she wanted to impress, not depress guys. Coral's microwardrobe, sheer see-through halters and tops.

Nano-miniscule-short dresses, her legs so beefy that her knees, seated, formed a pudenda.

And this defined cute, in our Aleppo.

A Hindu Engineering student once said of her that she simply had at least one more chakra in her body than anybody else. He’d light a stick of incense, tell tales of street vendors in his country who’d clean your nose for you with a trained snot-eating locust or beetle.

Hired assasins would pose as a vendor and release a chewer without a tether on its leg, into their enemy’s nasum, so unless you could find a long-billed bird fast enough to retrieve it, the bug would chew into the brain until headsplittingly painful madness ensued. And he assured her that his passion for her was like that.

I don’t know why Coral is so darn attractive to these foreigners.

They’d methodically show her Kama Sutra positions, say “She’s like Ganesha if he was he elephant-goddess”, powder her folds of fat with pigment and ritually carry her down to the river. The medical school student who'd studied her reported to his circle of her flatulent hymen, homeless but noisy like that New Orleans novelty song about the guy who's just a croaking frog.

Engineering students would entice Coral into dorms and labs and married grad-student housing to demonstrate, and have her try out, their radiofellatio devices and piezoelectric vibrators.

A smart, bookish-but-not-too, high school boy took Coral one Sunday afternoon to the University Art Museum, seemingly wasted upon her wastebasket eyes, but after that she claimed "The Bride Stripped Bare by Bachelors, Even" as justification for fucking Rock bands. After Coral saw an erotic Japanese print "Dream of the Fisherman's Wife" there—shown her by and old professor in order to lure her downstairs to the dark and isolated Print cabinet—she used

all her birthday money to buy a live baby octopus at the JMJ Mart Pet Department, and then, you know. But it soon tired of so much carnal duty, crawled out of its tank and hid under the couch, dried up after it died. I mean, wouldn't you?

She supposedly went into a Music Department equipment locker with the orchestra teacher "to play his oboe." Or that's what some other guys told me, when my name came up associated with music. Coral would go down to the Music practice rooms, let seriomusical boys pounding out dutiful blues progressions play runs upon her body, Hanuman finger exercises, take her standing up, bent over the schoolmarm pianos, pubic snuffle raking the keys, one cigaretteburnt blond banging up against another. Supposedly the intensity of the act turned a bowl-cut wheatstraw peteyboy, who had Coral up against one, off, off of all girls from then on, she’d Tchaikovsky'd him for life. Maybe Aldebbie had experienced that, if not from Coral some rowdy, crafty, maggiemae, bawdy anglo-Wenceslaus wench.

The Principal at Coral's junior high school was a dour by-thebook button-down bureaucrat named Estrus Rollo. A Biology teacher had been fired for pointing out to him and privately, not in a staff meeting, that Estrus was the sexually receptive condition of a female ape. Gossip! said Rollo, interpreting the conversation as a homosexual advance. Later he was seen in a dubious bar with Aldebbie, y'know. “Oh, we were just writing palindromes” he insisted as the Police hustled him away for booking.

Her dad's friend from the Weblos Club took her back to Florida, taught her how to kick the dugong around. "Oh, nothing, Mom" when Coral was playing Pillows and Beds, the childhood game her mother

thought harmless, with boner-wielding boys well into her teenage years. Jolly men on the wetlist to ride her onion carousel.

And tonight, that would include me.

Coral Cobalt Mars. Someone said that was her real name. Her southern-romantic parents thought Cobalt sounded Anglo-Saxon, one of Hamlet's courtiers or something. But that caption under her picture was just a misprint in the school yearbook, for student editors were careless and stoned then.

Horace considered calling this one Coriander instead of Coral, but he usually called his daughters affectionate nicknames like "Doughykins". Horace had intended, sentimental old horseheart, to raise his daughter only on delicacies and pastries beneath powdered sugar, petit-fours on all fours, other morsels. The Mars horsehold nibbling hillbilly piccalilli. But between those aforementioned dispensed treats she gorged herself on hamburgers, hot dogs (fellatio practice at that age), pizza and fried chicken, the engines of the campus town local restaurant economy. When menstruating, rather than raw blood-fed buffao or something, she'd switch allegiance to heavily battered fish platters, gummy seafood bites, fruit of the surging tides. Call her Dinah to mean a diner.

Chloe Coral Mars, or "C.C. Rider" as her father jokingly called her. Sometimes when spat out in haste, the name Chloe became, appropriately, Cloaca. He then reflected upon singers on television with big bouffant hair. Her name on her Best Certificate, was actually Corale. Her father wanted it to imply voices raised in song, thought it sounded both cowboy and engrossingly female, cry of the female

enclosure. Based on its success with a champagne-light malt liquor, a big brewery came up with coriander-flavored beers, so Horace called her that when he was drinking it too. Her friends just called her Co. Like carbon monoxide, not supposed to be good for you in a closed car.

Aldebbie would persistently call her Clive Coral, seeing something boyish in her no one else did. Yes, that Aldebbie. He’s in this story too. We’ll get to him.

What became of Coral's older sister? Young women don't just disappear like that. “Visiting a maiden aunt” indeed.

Coral's parents’ house is on the border of Ypsofacto and Aleppo. Horace liked that: he could run for Council on each, promoting his platform of Free Coffee in both downtowns.

Every Christmas since they moved to Michigan, Horace put a little turban on the iron jockey out front of their old place, turning the colored fellow into the wise man Basilisk or Ballshazarrsfeast, or whatever. A sweet black Angelo. Hung a little package on his iron ring like a baby gift. Who needs the rest of the scene, more kings, Holy Family, farm animals, etc.? They'll only get stolen. And the black kids will respect this, stay off our lawn.

But now this year, in front of their new house, Horace had added the venery and novelty of two cast iron Hottentot Venuses, right arms extended to hold a ring like a groom ready to tie up a horse. Shiny bronze paint gleamed and sun-sparkled on their rounded breasts and amazingly prominent prognathous buttocks.

They added beauty and class to the estate. UFO-devotee that I was,

I always thought that dry cleaning process was "Martianizing", perhaps red dust packed against soiled clothes, or a series of rinses in canal water.

Horace and Daffie Mars were most probably butter church Baptists, with their rigorous, frequent and ecstatic baptasms. Firstwater hard-tack Baphometists. Church of Jesus Christ Day Late and Dollar Short. But still I sensed they like what their God-given bodies could do, a sweet carnal warmth around the house like that of a baking spicy apple pie. Medieval wax Christs burned by the Germans like candles. This Mars family belonged to regional Christian cetainty or invalidity called the First Biblethumpers’ Church.

Their church sang that weird old hymn “Ours is a Menstruating God”, but never thought it would apply to their own daughter, bring her comfort. As a child, Coral pranced at church suppers with the Bible Belles. Could childishly recite the Dogs' Prayer and the Cats' Meow of the Lord for his eccentric becardigan’d cat-lady mother Mary.

Charismatic, apple-cheeked and rouged, she cut a swath through those pious mens' affections; Oh Suzi Q and the Elders.

The interior of the Mars' house was decorated in the chintz of Christianity, a sturdy Faux-American, for the kind of family that serves candy turkey on holidays; I could imagine overstuffed relatives all driving up in their Thanksgiving Thunderbirds, smelling of pumpkin or gourd. In the kitchen, what Coral and her mother proudly, gigglingly called their De-Bonering knife. Vasectomy potatoes got it, but good.

Breakfasts the next day on what Horace jocularly called Daffie's famous yeast-infection waffles.

Theirs was the world of Florida cakewalking catfish,

caterwauling crocodiles, singing magnolias, psalm trees and the mangrooved swamps of escaped slaves. And they brought it all with them north. Decor all pink and shiny, protective plastic glacee'dsmooth like a layer of candy, covering brocade furniture, pink plastic drapes, drapes, carpet, cloyingly-sweet everything. Other furniture was covered in nylon slipcovers that resembled panty hose, husband Horace's WWII parachutes or plastic drycleaners' bags. Designer clothespins. I'll bet this means she knows all about designer birth control. In the living room was a Velcro painting of the crucifixion of J.F.K. Over here two erotic prizefighters, Hummel collies, genuinely painted gold cobrastone sculpture. Spun glass items and German porcelain chitchat children and pouting puppies on shelves caught sunlight in the windows. An orange rug thicker than her father Horace's notorious crew cut. A big chair that celebrates Laziness, once considered a vice in their very church. A vase on the table held a small deflowering plant. The Mars household smelled like antiseptic flowers, from which the ants and aphids had been chemically scraped off.

Daffie had ordered off the television that eleven-volume Margerines of Michigan set, but of course never read them, high on the dust-collecting shelf. Horace subscribed to sports and gun magazines, while she piled tables and setees with unread, aging copies of COUNTRY FIST and EMBITTERED HOMES AND GARDENS magazine. Notably absent, the magazine for managing little boys called SPITTLE & PIDDLE, consulted assiduously by their fretful mothers. Coral's Mom got the celebrity picture magazine AGAPE ONLOOKER, left it lying around the house. She showed me

the piece on our band and the album, a brief sidebar to a loopy feature story on Aldebbie of course. Damn.

As Horace unabashedly liked war movies, the Mars couple were watching the wartime drama abut a fetid submarine “Dark Spittoon”. Looked up, gave a lazy wave, looked back.

I peeked into Daffie and Horace’s bedroom, which had the kind of soft and spacious bed called the Graveyard of Pillows. In the Mars’ master bedroom, their sex toys: littoral stimulators, esteemulators, devices like small hand crossbows, onagers and trebuchets, battering rams; rubber halberds, pikes, march-madness maces with little spiked balls on a chain. Daffie was what was called a hot coal wife. Mother's own copy of The Fellatrices' Bible on the nightstand, both practical and affirmative-inspirational marriage tips.

These things, which had formerly been sold only under the counter were now appearing in elegant university-readers bookstores, mall discounters and dimestore display tables. Red Light Special usually indicated sexual, educational content.

Mrs. Mars would dry the dishes by moonlight. No, I shouldn’t make it sound so onerous; Horace had bought her a state-of-the-art nuclear hydroelectric dishwasher for their 16th anniversary. And that new oven, where retro rockets cooked the food.

Coral's mom had worked as a lunch lady in the highschool so long, she'd served Tippy shakes, and several generations of girls fishwiches that had helped them discover the tartar sauce thereupon smelled like their cunts. That was the “Health” classes our high

school offered. Momma Daffie Mars was born in Bamalama, Alabama, or to the only white family in a tiny black town of Sweet Jump., on the Humgeeamappa river. Whether or not her own lineage bore a trace of the tarbabybrush, I did not venture to speculate. Still a young teenager, she went to work as a catheter. No, a cashier. In the Memphizzy stores that sold Elvis his first guitar, his first sharkskin suit. Then she became a school lunch lady, dolloping nutritional portions but also working the cash register, because she could.

Make change not war!

Through glass doors I could see Horace and Daffie’s flabstone patio, well-swept and picnic-ready. In the kitchen, Daffie Mars was padding over Quaintwood floors in her house slippers. She had put out a plate of Auschwitz's Best cookies, an old midwestern brand going back before the name had any nasty Nazi associations. Like our Mom, she put out a bowl of holiday snack candies called Toddler Mix. Daffie always served a plate of those oldfashioned cookie called Piece o' Jesus, popular in the Depression.

Here Daffie’s so nice, though I’m told in the school cafeteria she’s a winged scold. There's a crude old altarpiece in worm-eaten Germany, coincidentally a small version over the mantle under the rifles in Horace and Daffie Mars's home or in Daffie’s china cabinet, of the Virgin Mary throwing Christ into the mill, a peppermilled Ground God, and turning the crank, where he issues out the other end in the form of sacramental wafers. I suddently realized, Tippy gave of himself that way, Rock n' Roll records broadcasting from his own particular spout. He'd always been manipulated by women, like Christ on the Cross, like corn on the cob. Tippy as a vampire Christ,

biting his batty self.

Gimme another cookie, hey. Thank you, Mrs. Mars.

Daffie wore big Presidential-widow sunglasses, big as the moon her husband's favorite US Presidency had conquered. Now remarried to her "wealthy Greek sex" shipowner, Our American Tragedy widow had appeared in a clingly public t-shirt without a bra, and the magazines still tittered. Ha ha, you know whom I’m talking about, not our dear Daffie.

Coral introduced me to her mother. I mumbled a greeting.

What can I say? What a scented mammal; mothers are mammals too. Mom wasn't so much down at the heels as down at the hips from childrearing, called that because they came out her rear end.

Horace Mars' cellulite wife, Mrs. Mars wore what they called "Largessewear" around the house. Her hairdos were absurd World's Fair architecture. Dressed like an architect in a blueprint dress. She got satin bones. God in a print dress…uh oh, that's Mom. Coral's mother even boiled her face in flowers, Florida Waters, toilets full of cologne. In her pancake-batter makeup and waffle iron curls, Daffie lay out in the sun on the lawn chair reading a magazine with a cover story about JACKIE'S SECRET FUCK. A cassette copy of The Good Lord's Greatest Hits rested on the coffee table, beside a lazilythumbed paperbacks The Undetected Marriage and Smoke Your Way to Health. Popular mainstream magazines like Fat and Butter and Beau: The Magazine of Who Has Slept With Whom sprawled around them. Women's diet books like Become Hungrier! and smudges of Cal-O-Rimeter brand powdered weight-loss brunches spilled everywhere.

Daffie Mars faithfully watched a sentimental TV show "Animal Hospital", all those dying—really vivisected onscreen—puppies and kittens, their romances and adventures. Housepolite while doing the goosework. The local preacher once proudly said that Daff Mars' motto was "Dust the Devil". She drove a car just for Moms that runs on ammonia. In the basement was a flower-washing machine. When Mr. Mars got a raise, Coral's mother ordered a new one of each of the things in all of the gift catalogs. Now they had a home so modern the dishes washed themselves, the vacation suitcases packed themselves. Built like an airport and full of machines that turn themselves off (why Coral had never been taught to turn out lights when she left a room). She bought bric-a-braxas gifts, mantlepieceand windowsill- dust collectors from a place called the Thing Shoppe.

Gin-spiked Bibles. The Mars family had won a Lifelike sweepstakes.

Excess too cheap to meter.

What the hell is that brushing against my pantsleg? Coral's mom had a dog like a loaf of bread with shivering pencils stuck into it.

I rolled it over with a kick, and seen from underneath it was a jellied pink monster, and from above a gray suede shoe-like cube, animated and troubled with the coughing spark of life. With pretty toys and furry things and children's records and cute clothes life for these women was idyllic; there could never have been the pain and passionate explosion of childbirth, never so much of a newsworthy event to upset Daffie’s sub-puppydog storybook existence.

I gazed at this lady a little longer. Hey, I recognize you! Coral's mom had worked as a school cafeteria lunch lady when we said "Me for a shake" pretending we were letter-sweater'd teens from her own

generation. Evoking a smile from even those gridiron gombergs at the Androgens vs. Estrogens game. Nowdays Daff made Horace some wifely waffles every morning. Poured juices in that Christian flavor Agape Grape. After he came home from work, a bock beer made of burgers. A calendar that only marks Bake Sales. Coral's mom would wash things—pots and pans, underclothes, Grandma's false teeth—in raspberry jelly. Coral's Mom had a tattoo that said Born to Bake Cakes. Where? Where hamburgers sizzle on an open grill night and day.

Nevertheless, in that family dietetic foods

were everywhere, but eaten in such quantity they didn't work, everything deep-fried in dietetic lard. Mother did the dieters' dance before daytime TV. Lo-cal bubblegum sodas in the refrigerator. Coral and her mom and lady relations all used low-calorie cosmetics, dilettantish dietetic oils, depilatory cremes and emoluments upon the rich pastry-shoppes of their skin. Low breastfat. Raised as babies in sugar-covered diapers. Her fellow lunch ladies might have called Daffie Mars a shopping cart with breasts, and that was said with the deepest of admiration. Holidays of careless cholesterol.. Munching barbershop bread and Baroquesticks. Kids could only smoke herbal marijuana in the house, and her careful mom would insist on reading the label on any LSD Coral took.

Coral was a perfect product of that fat girl factory the Mars household. The threshold of the Plus Sizes dress shop; a part of town called the Sherbet Belt. The nickname that her father lovingly called Coral was "Calorie", saying something was "Calorific" like "Terrific". She was oral and immoral, and her parents gave her Advice and Consent. Big stuffed tiger sandwiches waiting for her

when she got home from school or boys. She kept a burger by the bedside, dresser drawers full of chop suey and makeup. For days at a time she'd bang around her house, frothing and knocking things over on a pure carbohydrate jag. Pure calories covered in chocolate.

Man, I'll bet she's got a mink colon. She stoops to swallow. So that's where Coral eugenically gets her bulk.

Then, her father. For all his rube-ishness, Horace was a modern and refined old southern gentleman, and had lived in the north long enough for his word for a Negro to sound more like "Vinaigrette" or in plural,"vinegar", or when especially charitable, "egg nog." Much like them, Horace Mars drove a big Chrysler Egg Nog, creamy, indulgent and holiday-special. Coral grumbled how, during the reign of Presidents Johnsonson and Nixonson, Horace had made snide southern crackajokes about President Jacob FitzJewish Kennedyberg, but I saw him sneak into a Church of Rome to light candles and pray for Coral's virginity. Or Dink told me he saw that, for he was there stealing the Communion wine, and he's certainly reliable. About the pink elephants too.

Indulgent daddy Horace had bought little Coral that doll that could actually drink champagne. And an accompanying wardrobe of several glittery strapless gowns that came off for wealthy swains and mountebanks. The following Christmas, a doll that drinks and drives.

As Seen on TV. Some parents required their daughters take prescription vaginosuppressors, unhealthy and unlikely eroto-desensitzers, grinding them into their food if necessary. Horace always threatened

to get Coral on them when she misbehaved—a constantly fluid concept and moving target—but never got around to doing so.

Either that, or Horace threatenened to send her to that nunnery started by Jesus Christ's high school girlfriends—"We climbed upon the Cross"—and devoted women carrying on its traditions. My Mom almost went to a school they ran in Wisconsota; her mother probably did. Coral's grandma did too.

Horace called out to his daughter affectionately "Hey, bottlesugar". Or maybe "Hey, battlesugar." Horace bought his girls a box of chocolates a day, called Authority Mix. The girls were what a fat TV comedian that made Horace laugh called "Bubbleh blondes".

Blood-blister blondes, bet-your-bippy blondes, heh he heh. On her dating, Horace quoted Scripure: And the bear shall lay down with the bison.

Say you don’t like that either? I didn’t make it up.

Horace ran for City Council on a bi-partite conservative platform of no parking meters downtown and no rock concerts in the parks.

So in rebellion, of course Coral fucked all the rock players...and I wonder if she also masturbeat herself on the cold metal meters; why girls like ponies and merry-go-rounds. Maybe only when warmed in the summer, so her moist cunt wouldn't stick to the icy steel pole on a frigid morning like the tongue of a kid on a dare against the gradeschool playground swingset or monkey bars. So this Fall, Horace was sipping politician juice for the primaries. He hated those damn parking meters like student radicals hated Selective Service Draft Board registration, like high school students loathed their

Permanent Records—we're in a band, we want a permanent record.

Still, I'd think Horace would like devices that distracted boys in cars from parking to, beneath steamed windows, take their satisfaction upon his daughters. Oh, I guess they don't have meters out in the country, outside of town in the Cornfire, the farm woods. But after that campaign I was in his corner, and voted for him in his various unsuccessful campaigns for for Usurer, Sheriff, Dean, Regent, Bursar, Professor and Proctor, Doctor, Goalie, Astronaut and local Television Personality. Truly, a jaguar of the people. Horace was a personal friend of the Three Chomps, said Coral, who had helped him on one campaign. His campaign slogan Vote for Me Because I'm a TV might've been a little bit over the heads of some of his rural constituents, who squinted at him to ask, Hanging around them 'fessors in town too much Horace, eh?

Still, he's a businessman of sorts. Should Horace Mars be our Manager? Our secret financier, to get us out of town and off of Coral?

As he always did when some young fella was visiting Coral, Horace Mars came upstairs from the basement. He was beaming, for, in Executive Session downstairs, he'd just been elected President of the Opti-gnostic Templar Knights of Col. Reed Birchcaning Business Rosicrucians Society, a boozy gathering of hail-fellows-wellmet to grouse about all the pointy-headed Economics professors running what was supposed to be a God-fiven free-market government. He was deeply ingrained with value, price and profit.

The incense of smoky money-as-God wreathed him. Some of his realtor friends, homeowner-mongers, gave garish lectures "What is

Reality in Realty?" They chortled at the old one about the dog and the contraceptive. Horace could often be found in the living room in front of the television watching an instant replay of the Nymphs vs.

Satyrs game. They'd all sit around the coffee table eating bags of Octoroon Cookies ("Only 1/8th Chocolate"), police files everywhere.

Family reunions meant overeating and cackling, while the men were contented drinking, burping, talking businessball, discussing prostitutes on gambling trips or the best techniques for hunting escaped prisoners for the bail and taking it all off your taxes. Like any Michigan patriot Horace Mars went up north every Summer with these guys to fish for irradiated and pollutant-mutated Superperch and HumptyDumptyfish. Or, for beer, cussing and a lack of electric shavers. Hemispherical-valved sea otters were gutted and use for bait. Up around Michigan's Northwest Passage. Site of several UFO bases up north near Canada, little shaver mystery spots like the ice cap caves whose passages extend all the way down to the center of the Earth. Saucers come zooming out of, leaving Northern Lights in the skies like other planes leave cloudy jet trails. Horace loved to watch that from the cabin porch, Huron showgirl on his lap, dusky as the forest at twilight.

A clubman to all, Horace was an enthusiastic member of the Cove Otter Lodge, whose members wore wolly brown watch caps, festooned with insigniae, to look like the smooth brown heads of otters. A friend of Horace's came up from the basement, empty cocktail tumbler in hand, a District Attorney with a d.a. haircut. He buried the Presidents. Painfully plaid sport coat and requisite white loafers too. Sized me up gruffly as we were introduced, as he

freshened his bourbon. Thought I heard pediatrician Doctor Wagon downstairs, laughing too. Backslapping. Meeting adjourned, until next week, Horace, they were all just leaving.

Horace was skeptical about the SS uniform that I was wearing, so I had to explain how garb of the same guys who had shot at him overseas were now a fashion statement. Mine was a weird kind of sportcoat Nazism, the surfers' Ironic Cross I must bear all the way to suburban Motorsburgh’s Harry Fuct Synagogue. Aw, I'm just an Okie from Skokie; not really a Nazi, I just like to dress up like one.

Horace had a closet full of Brad-washed pants, bat-waisted slacks for comfort. The boob is a rube. I sure appreciate Horace's white shoes. I should get some like that. After meeting Horace Mars, I too began wearing white lobsterskin loafers, thought not a rebel loafer or semi-retiree myself.

Anyway, Horace motioned me over, lit me a stately Royal Somoza cigar, asked as one self-made man to another if I thought Coral, down the line in a couple years, should attend an expensive Ivory-Billed college, or a Ten Ton university. She wanted to attend International Cosmetology Atelier, or strike out after highschool graduation as a plus-sized hand model. What did I think?

No adult had every axed me that. I shrugged an answer.

Horace Mars, convinced he was descended from the Roman god of war, wanted me to know he entered the Armed Forces at age seventeen. Like many small-town Florida boys, he was fired up by the patriotism of ready money, exotic pussy and suckers round the card table or crapshoot. Mars, a traditionalist Right-wing name, even connotes more years in the service than Horace actually deserves

credit for, but try telling that to Veterans' Benefits with a straight face.

He was conceived on a rooftop during that big flood in the deep South you still hear all the Blues songs about. After leaving the Army Air Force Marines before coming to Aleppo, Horace Mars ran his mom's hotelran a barracks for Florida migrant workers. Something about him, something Spanish or Caribbean, made me flash that he may have been sired by one such transient if you ask me, as an ox is gored, or is that just my Mom’s gossipy birdwash? He never even considered trying out for the fledgling astronaut program at Cape Carnival, for he thought he was just too country. Memories of the service are still somewhere murky in his mind, Horace built a little shake pillbox home for his wife Daffodil (shooing away her ne’er-dowell brother named Boabdil) and two daughters, shaded by coconut trees beside a canal. The canal was warm and opaque and silty and little Coral often tumbled in, held her breath on the bottom like a stubborn child, a teal child. Coral is a real Florida name. She was born under a postmark, found in the satchel of "the Barefoot Postmaster", not to imply she was conceived by the mailman while Pop was at the office. She was born underwater, caught in the turbines of a dam her father was pointing out to her pregnant mother.

Horace Mars made it clear to me that he had made himself quite a pile of money taking a friend's tip on investing in a Bible Storage Company down in Alabama. Churchlove was actually one of Horace's friends, conservative as all get out. Horace had then worked as a salesman for the big, pregnant-with-promises insurance company National God, whose name made people think they were insured against an act of God. Hah, score!

Horace Mars had once met country singer Red Engine, when the “Red Rogue” was in deep for crimes-of-the-semi-truck, and offered Red money to straighten things out. This succeeded, and got Horace into the profession of providing bail and making book on criminals’ eventual return to the scene of the crime. Horace Mars learned to capitalize on the fact that he would often stumble upon package-store robberies, and when the robber dropped it in the scuffle Horace would just put his buckram big foot over the gun.

Buckle glinting off the white patent leather of his shoe and the flare of his polyester pants leg would blind and stun the stickup man till Horace's good buddies the cops arrived. One rum-colored kid from Coral's class stole a pair of teenage tungsten dungarees, came right in through the roof and, moments later, the police snapped the cuffs on and the newspaper photos snapped, all at the same time. Horace went out bail hunting some poor fool wanted for violating the Deceased Wife's Sister Act; despite what the Bible says, unlawful in Michigan. Nowadays he was a bailbondsman for students who ran away from the University, started riots or holed up in the attic of a local church for three years or more frearful of bad grades. Horace dabbled about sixty hours a week in the bail bond market, the buying and selling of criminals, sometimes for their brains and blood to be used in fiendish medical experiments. Clutching his drink he told me I should go into bailbonding, and at first I thought he said ballooning, meaning his old-fashioned way of telling me, Better use condoms with MY daughter, buddy. The brilliant tailbone bailbondsman wanted me to know that he always worked very, very closely with law

enforcement agencies. He earned his nickname "Bubba", and was happy just gnawing on a barbecued dollar bill, telling us wisdom.

The women of the Mars family implored and compelled me to thrust my hand in the candy dish on the coffee table several times to fill my pockets. Then Daffie said Coral, darling, introduce Roque to Gramma. Now, some girls’ grandmothers and great aunts sat there like a few cobwebs blown together, but Grandma Mars was a sturdy stack of civil war cannonballs on a small town square. Fat enough to sing "God Bless America" convincingly, she hoped Horace and Daffie’s little girl-child would be too, assuming that's why Coral had that American flag patch on her jeans. Gun barrel blue was the patriotic color bluing in Grandma's hair, while her neck hung from her face like a major theater's drop curtain, pink wattles woven of flab, cross between a turkey and a frog. Each leg like those paper sacks full of Idawhore spuds from nearby farms, her stockings like the revealing string mesh on each bag. That head was a rubber county courthouse building, perched upon a neck that resembled so much the fissures from an earthquake in the desert. A turnip holding her spectacles. Even in the house, Grandma’s big unwieldy bison bag hung from her arm like a lockbox. On one side of the family grandparents were Daniel Boone and a squaw. She began most sentences with "Any fool can see that..." and they could, too.

Passing down female lore of primordial and premarital sex. Grandma Mars was just a diamond-in-law, living the in-low life. She had served some of the town’s leading citizens by working as a school lunch lady like her daughter, back when food was food. Now Grandma a big game, a virago with a dead kitten pinned to her hat, her bra curving

like a ram's horn. She looked as if she had been mounted by a great bull zebra. Her icy tongue had scoured the pavement, hollered "Happy Motoring" to me. Or did I just imagine that? I suppose Coral had led her to expect me to croon some Grandpop music, on concertina accordion or mandolin. Fat chance. The grand emphatic umbilicus wife. What a heifer house. Coral and her grandmothers marched through a bestiary of pastries.

Grandmother had transmitted some widow wisdom to Coral, for she’d been a model of penetration in her day. Knowingly sang the vaudeville Yes My Darling Bastard. Coral understood why Grandma had always identified with the heroine tied to the railroad tracks before the chugging locomotive's onslaught, for in her day she had done it atop a rolling freight train that first time with Grandpa, and thus conceived Horace before the whistle stop to take on water.

Sixty-nine rotten years spent with that hobo stud. When Grandma Mars' memory started going bad, that was the end of the continuity and thread of the family. From then on, memories were as easily switched around and cancelled as the prime-time season of TV shows that replaced history there. Horace always claimed a piece of shrapnel in the War robbed him of his memories, but no one thought to ask why he didn't have any scar. And boys impacted on Coral's consciousness and conscience as much as record albums and 45's from only a summer or two before. But Granny Mars had some female knowledge in the telling of her old wives' tales of affectionate female energy. She could walk past the flowerbeds and grassy islands of a shopping center and between her bifocals spot a four-leaf

clover, a horseshoe lying there or a rabbit's foot (which were all a girl had for contraception in her day).

Mmm…mumble. Hem and haw and spit and scuff shuffle. I didn't know how to talk to an elderly woman. Heck, I guess I'm descended from an ancestor who, whenever an old neighbor lady held a quilting party, would ride his horse into it, tearing and spoiling all the quilts and trampling the hostess to death. We’ve all known guys like that. Started murmuring platypus-billed platitudes. Mrs. Mars was distracted, hollered down the basement stairs for Horace to get ready, that they would soon be going out to play mah-jongg and canasta—now what the Hell is that? Since Coral was, in Daffie's mother eyes, so young, she tried to euphemistically call the girl's first menstruation "The Red Badge of Curds n' Whey," Like Germans are now calling it the Red Brigades. But wise-beyond-her-years Coral was having none of it. "My toddler...with breasts! And hips!" she cooed. She never wondered why the child had properly penciled public hair upon all her baby dolls a decade ago.

In Coral’s telling, Grandma Mars had actually been a famous stripper in those days, also a spy for the World War One allies. She didn't mind bumping and grinding onstage with a live alligator but when a club owner asked her to perform THAT with one, she had swampland-selling gangster boyfriends dispose of the impudent impresario pud, return him to the primal ooze in gator-friendly pieces and parts. Oh, Florida.

While grandmother was a horny old beast from a generation of flappers and rumrunners, I suspected Coral’s mother wouldn't have sex with Horace if she thought the houseplants were watching. The

Smiling women who wore towels, stroked and brushed their legs, tube-sucked out blackheads beside pouting mouths, fingered a suspiciously rocket-shaped cordless electric vibrator in the ads AS SEEN ON TV magazine, dropped beside his or her living room easygoing chair. Mars women all lounged around the house like the Venusians of Willendorf, hot white Hottentot Venerises, all the women in the 1940's big-shouldered dresses and their hair piled up on their heads in front, who gave themselves to the Chomps Trio going off to war, or at least to make a comedy about it. Perhaps Daffie Mars had in such a merciless moment of teenage abandonitis. An Indiana Giver. Like the 1940's, when a man never went out the door without a hat-check girl.

Daffie and Coral's grandma were watching a mid-day television special on strange and carnivorous plants. "That Venus Flytrap reminds me of Coral" laughed Daffie. "Or of that boy Tippy, eating up the girls!" cackled grandma, her wattles aflutter, jelly legs jiggling with glee. I immediately thought of the Museum unwrapped mummy's gray withered dugs, deflated hot-water-bottles (or yesternight’s condoms) lying there when I saw her chest flapping in her loose shirt.

Grandma's jugs were like that strange fat, yellow, sausage of a gila monster lazing in a glass box on the Museum mezzanine. I’m through with grandmotherology.

Granny Mars, old goose of a mother. The grannyboss, bliss was her family and those girls, her spawn's daughters. Every grandma like an old veal. A chop hen, or hen chop.

I love you, Grandma, Coral whined.

I didn't, from the moment I saw her.

Leaning against the stereo, the sleeve from Songs from TV Courtrooms, as performed on gavel and guitar.

Thinking how Coral batted the lashes of her big grapefruit eyes, her mother envisioned her harmonizing in a charming girl group like the Pretty Hairs, all fluffy and shiny, bouncy and pert. Pets, like those little dogs, doglings, advertised in teacups. . Or the pretty, scarred girl group called the Cicatrices.

For a Christmas show at the Veteran's Hospital, Horace thought it a bright idea for child Coral make up like the hardest casino Nevada showgirl, dressed up like a Douche City, Kansas 1880 dance-hall saloon hoor, to sing bawdy boomba-boomba Mae Pohldanzig songs from the 1930s, that the cigarette-dying WWI and WWII veterans remembered fondly when the silver screen singed their eyes.

Flipping, flapping her come-hither feathers. They assured themselves some boy or guy had long ago found her maidenhome, broke the bank holiday's panty piñata.

Horace and Daffie had taught her wartime big band songs by hairpin combos like the Oh Johnny Johnnies. Girls were starting to wear the high cork fuck-their-fathers wedgies of that era too, which I'm told in those days were later burnt for the makeup used in minstrel shows.

Horace's favorite LP of Gospel instrumentals on the electric organ included the tearjerker ""Christ's Gotten Wet." Horace wanted Coral to sing like Becky Texas, to be like child star Kelly Dimples, tap dance with panties showing.

Coral's mom got her copies of Fan

Dancer magazine, drove her to Future Strippers of America evening

meetings at the Farm Council and various liberal mainstream church halls. Daffie spun old Bo Brothel and Beau Brunhilde 78 rpm records, the bovine mooing they called crooning in those days. "A happy tongue is her calling card," said Horace, meaning she had a kind word for everybody, not the oral succor she provided. Her snickering, but rather clueless, father called her a "blonde bundle of hormones waiting to happen." A blonde balloon, buxom inflated and inflamed she-baboon, accompanied by other bursting junior high breastlings on their carnival prowl.

Horace oddly insisted that chipmunks in the backyard had been completely silent until this damn rock n' roll, now they chit-chitchatered incessantly, irritatingly, obnoxious as teenagers. Coral's father had her sing that old song "It Behooves Me". I remember a performance of it by the TV talking horse, guest on the Fred Sundaynight Show, the set designed to look like a blacksmith’s shop.

Though her parents usualy disapproved of Negroism, Coral learned songs by "the Lord's Dumpling,” daughter of that fiery Motorsburgh preacher Reverend Washington Adams Jefferson Madison Monroe.

And even some by the tragically slain, Gospel-trained and soulful Lard Diaphragm. Pulling the blue-and-white box from her closet shelf, dumping them on the floor of her room, Coral would sing to her tampons, as if they were little music critics or fans.

But Horace had a musical bone in him too. He listened to novelty crooner Mister Cleansheets singing "I'm Drifting into Clean Linen", asking the musical question "Does your wife try on your underwear when you're not there?" The Mars family watched a TV preacher, wideclad in a suit like the upholstery of a large Motorsburgh

car, named Opportunity Knox. Send him one dollar for prayerful prosperity or your money back. Buxom Coral could have joined the Knoxettes in their choir gowns like underwear satin.

Coral would be annually trotted out to sing Christmas carols for dinner party guests, and her folks were always disappointed her friend Tippy never made a Christmas album. They thought Coral was as cute as the chubby one in the Cow Belles. Coral's parents had LPs carefully shelved, including How to Strip for Your MInister or Rabbi (a couple spirited klezmer tunes with big drums), and sparkling blue nightclub comedienne Fanny Zaftig. I noticed the LPs lying around, unsleeved or unshelved. Their Ruby Incest records. Country songs with bison calls yodeling into the chorus. Melancholy, morbid vocals, anticipatory "Here Lies" above the singer’s name on the cover.

Horace wasn't quite sure that the liked her looking at all those magazines full of Orgasm Underwear ads, or Extramarital Bust Developers, a certain kind of bandaids ladies applied. Yet Horace and Daffie would not have minded Coral singing workabilly music, lush country songs like "Take Off Your Clothes and Say Goodnight" by the late Sarah Pugh and the Cadillac Cabins, for folksy as they are some of those country songs are literally cunt-er-y than most, and sex is what brings a tear to Godfearing American eyes. Horace was oldfashioned, he believed old country bumpkin doctors about a womb hysterically rising up into an agitated girl's throat, and didn't want that happening to Coral so encouraged her to sing hilltop, mountain gal favorites like "Coal Dust Wedding Cake", "Papa was a Graverobber", "Left Deflowered Like Old Rose", "Call Girl Country Church" and the

reverential "Her Clean Parts". Some was actually as bluegrass as a baboon's estrus-driven blue ass.

Songs learned from her mother's old Bobby God albums in the early 1960s. Horace bought Coral the hair-teased bosoomy country star's ghostwritten autobiography My Life as a Pecan Pie. Corny, old-fashioned old Horace liked to call the radio "the Radium dial".

During the month-long Halloween season, Duke Frankensteinatra crooned sentimental holiday favorites on the maturefolks’ FM radio stations.

Horace's idea of good music was the gospel ballad where, in the first verse the innocent girl is Christ's sister, offended by a boy's inappropriateness, "And he's gonna kick your ass"; the second verse warning the listener against intimate involvement with a nun, for she's the Bride of Christ "And he's gonna...", etc. I picked out the riff on my guitar once, but Tippy and the band were uninterested.

Coral's mom came in humming a folk-rock songwriters' ballad on the radio, "Lay across my big brass husband."

At the Two-Fisted Huskers Country Flimflamboree, a yearly event put on by Florida promoter Colonel Canalfish, Coral's father introduced her to Root Q. Wavering and his entourage. One look, and he immediately took her backstage.

"You pimped me out, daddy."

"Nonsense, lil' pudding pie. I just want you to be popular. Did you give him your demo cassette?"

"Gave him more than that."

If Mars was martial, Horace claimed proudly that his daughters

were directly descended from the goddess Venus—"source of their hot Latin blood!"—but I thought I detected a wink or twinkle in his eye after he said it.

Coral's parents were worried Coral would ride off with anyone with a talk show. Hoped she might someday enter the Miss Deodorant Pageant. Horace called birth control her "butt control", evidently meaning restraint when she lets a guy climb on to her that way. Aldebbie would probably assume it insured accuracy for his sodomies (like a gun director on a ship), while I wonder if the stuff would be good for my indigestion, constipated diarrheas, polyfarts.

Horace waved his medicine bottle, his heart-and-soul pills, at Coral. "See how it says 'Take with food'? Well, a lady doesn't let herself be taken without having been bought a good meal by the gent." That was his idea of sex education, all right.

Horace joked that Coral's hymen was like the broken-down awning or piece of plastic taped over a broken window in a ne'er-dowell's trailer in south Florida on a deserted patch of land by the sea.

That he'd thought it through to that degree kind of amazed me, but I'm not the father of a teenage girl, y'now.

Daffie and grandma chuckled about the old wives' tale of how using a piece of lettuce like a dowsing rod could've told when Coral was no longer a virgin "faster than a lily's pistil".

There was a little car Motorsburgh marketed for teenage girls called a Lolita, and one was in the Mars garage soon abandoned and covered with dust. Rather than just sex with boys in cars, I'll bet Coral had sex with the cars themselves.

Fathers were spraying Prostitutionblockers on daughters they feared would work for more spending money. Pop could've actually told Coral more about sex than he did, a miserly brothel-keeper of his own memories, each bit of birds-and-bees’ bastards revealed to her as painfully as pulling birds' or bees' teeth. He complained how she was getting big and older, implying sex, but her mother shrugged it off with the old wartime cliché "If rape be inevitable..." and rolled her eyes theatrically.

Coral just wanted a roll in the hay of the manger in Bethlehem with a good stud shepherd. Like gamblers with bets all around the table, or different numbers on the wheel, the Mars family belonged to all the churches where you had to roll your eyes Heavenward, roll up your sleeves and work extra hard to make God like you, burn your homework in the midnight oil of Faith. I still haven't figured out if that was part of the problem or the solution.

Nevertheless, Horace Mars had been Casanova's bailbondsman, and knew what kind of trouble a young cock could get itself into. Wild in his own youth, shaving with a switchblade every morning before roll call. In their vanilla villa, Horace in his Hawaiian shirt decorated with shuffleboards and frisbees, definitely from JMJMart, and Bermuda shorts, lit a big cigar called a Regicide, offered me one and I shuddered to think that meant he was wise to me on to the possibility of Coral having my baby after this evening was through.

Puffing, I looked up to see a honeymoon picture of Horace and Daffie in straw hats and sandals at the nudist colony. Horace claimed

to have Seminole semen in his balls' veins. Driving the van home from a gig late one winter night we saw a string of bright lights and shiny parked cars and just assumed it was a stag party with prostitutes that Horace Mars must be attending, but it was just a Used Car lot. That's the kind of influence this rube had on us. Still, you got to hand it to them for one thing. Whereas I'd only known parents to be fuck-hungry sexual frustrators, devoid of decent fuckaesthetics, Horace Mars had always called Mother's cunt "the best room in the house". The warmest fireplace, the home and hearth. Called her cunt his "lobster holster". Sure, Daffie had had all Moms' radical mastectomies, hysterectomy and all the operations, but you could tell the moment you drove up the block that Horace and Daffie still did it.

Feeling that, warmly incarnated in the furnace of her daughter, I knew I had—and would!—come somewhere special tonight.

As she shut the front door Mrs. Mars cooed "Have fun children, don't fight". I still get children's birthday cards—Big Birf'day Greetings to a BIIIIG Boy!!!—from her every year, with a three-dollar bill enclosed "for a soda". Yeah, right, like I'm the biggest boy her Coralita ever had. Don’t be cruel.

These were such sitcom parents, You probably can tell, I immediately liked them.

Horace then told me about some of Coral's crazy friends—and here he wanted to say dirty motherfungus—who liked to be up late, how one of 'em—and I'm sure he meant Tippy—came over to see Coral, knocked on the door for a long time and finally put his arm through the window and started to change his pants right there in

front of Mrs. Mars, Horace had to punch him in the nose. Did he know that was my band-bro? When Horace called Tippy an "oil-andvinegar" I think he meant mulatto. Horace was feeling just a tad guilty that night, the weekend before having torn down all of Coral's posters of Rock stars the first time he found her drugs, so he wanted to be extra-nice to this new boy of hers. If Coral didn't exist her father would have to invent her, and when this got back to Horace she got a whuppin' somethin' fierce.

I sometimes think Coral must've sprung full blown from the head of this gruff godfather. Middleaged mutant. A blue-bottle fly in his pinched-bottle bottom, gold-filed glasses on a baby's bottom face.

An ointment fly in his aquae-glo blue leisure suit and silver moon gleam.

Her father found her hot-flash mescaline, grounded her. She spent half the night on the phone calling back with a vengeance some boyfriend—maybe that school newspaper editor—for snitching, "liberating" the silver belt she had draped around her abundant hips.

The belt that encircled a troop ship. When she shrieked "I got it in Mexico", I thought she was just talking about some intestinal disease.

Threatening to sic a troop of some of her closest bikers on his goodgrades ass. She threatened to enlist me to beat him up, probably confusing me with Thump.

Coral was such a sensual pea-princess she could feel a gram of cocaine under her mattress. So could her father, which is why she was grounded and couldn't go out with me New Year's Eve, I really wanted to be with her too. However a couple weeks later Horace did ask me for advice what paramilitary academy Coral should be sent to.

Coral hoped to write a book at twenty-two called A Decade of Sex, or at least a concept album by that title, or have me write it for her as she was barely literate, making misspelled words in a big-looped ballpoint hand, circles for the dots on i's and crossing t's like a churchgoing Sunday hat, but soon lost interest in the idea and went off to play with some date. Maybe that was all mostly my idea in the first place. Her attention span was such that a million of them could fit on the head of a pin. A computer programmer described Coral a logic bomb. She was venereal and vulnerable. Surprise supplications. Brimming with acids from the battery of sex, crackling with love's volcanic voltage.

Talking of my impending evening with Coral: "Do you intend to use all of her?" asked Horace Mars, frugal and proprietary. "Good idea, waste not want not," said the prudent leftovers-conjuring lunchlady Daffie. Not sure they exactly understood my answer.

Coral had been told and reminded never to go out without clean underwear, in case she had an accident and had to ball the ambulance crew for a ride to the hospital or home.

Out the door, I noticed I went over there under a pale buttcolored sky and now the night was as velvety dark as her pubes. I got soft for a moment when I thought I heard my Mom and Mrs. Mars conspiring against this—and any—expression of my sexuality.

No, I resolved this night was going to be fun.

Maybe my memory of my father's only sex advice, galloping into my room and thundering "You'll get venereal disease!" was only a dream. Or was it my Mom, channeling the WWII flying ace or in some secret campaign war? I'm only wearing these aviator specs and long white scarf in his honor and memory, aren't I? Did I steal them from his open coffin? Or am I aping a character in some TV movie from the Gunga Din's scrap-metal-drive, gung-ho 1940s? Something I saw on TV? Oh, Nixonson, what have you done to our minds and morals?

Meanwhile, all the time my brother takes his girls violently, in a parody of wartime. Reminded of the comic book I used to get about the G.I. named Slobbering Segundo, aways back-of-the-regiment any time the troops took their turns on a village woman, the humorous punchline each time. French shaved-head collaborationist women and fraulein war brides, or Pacific Island Gauginettes. One book had pleasures of the occupation in Japan, printed just before the ABombs were dropped, and later ones where our troops ravished the daughters of paddy rice farmers in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, and their grandfathers’ Phillipines too. In every story Segundo was victorious in his own way, climbing upon some dazed and bruised lady at the end of each comic. Her rolling her eyes, muttering Oy Vey. So maybe I'll go through adult life like him. Where’s my Army cap? Why bands with prominent singers call the guitar player "second banana." To Coral, I might as well be Louie Louie Chomp, late to the put-it-in party.

Anyway, if women ever gain feministic equality power, there'll

be trouble, a reckoning, Hell to pay. I even worry about that smart radical teenager running for School Board; she looks at me funny.

Rich and impassioned, agonized and frustrated, I play guitar so well because my loins remain so full and un-vented. Once I cum in a girl, will it be like an adolescent guy's voice changing? Will I be relieved...then mediocre?

Oh Roque, Coral's feeling good. Go ahead, she'll welcome you too. She likes you.

So I went to that boogaloo bungalow in the neighborhood Bitchcrest., where Coral Mars lived with her parents. The family lived on Park Neutral Reverse Drive. She's a great kid but we'll have to comb our hair before going over there. The only normal home I'd ever known. The bakery of bigotry. I'm suffocating with this normalcy, having an asthma attack which Tippy will only mock onstage if I don't watch out. Or Coral might, for that matter. Such an unearthly glow to everything—I guess it was just new—I checked to see if the name on the doorbell said "Mars" or "Marshgas".

Before that date, shaved my face at least twice. In the driveway sat the family wheelbases: a big Cadillac Loupe de Garoux, a stately Buick Lycanthrope and for Coral a sport-pink Chevy Choogaloo, the first peppy, zippy United States sports car with less power than a spayed housecat. Though he'd always driven a big dark Quagmire, Coral’s father was thinking of buying the wife a pert Ford Fare-Thee-Well. Coral never used her car to drive to school, preferring to ride with older boys “for the experience”. Few rides were without one.

When I went over there, Coral was catnapping. In her cat

nappies. Coral smiled like a just-painted room as she greeted me at the door. Tongue-tied kisses, little open mouth pimento wet and piano wide, beverage colors in there. Coral in a shiny shirt, purchased at the university museum gift shoppe (where a high school nerd took her), made of fake archeopteryx feathers. I’d only seen her in lysergic acid-washed jeans, but tonight she wore a pair of plush bellbottom VulvaTeen trousers. She smelled of a brand of French perfume for fat girls called My Spoon, or the JMJMart knockoff equivalent of it. In true teenage tradition, she put on her parking lipstick.

A handbag with yellow and black beads like the back of the gila monster on the Museum mezzanine. A smile that caught on fire, she reeked of sunshine in that swimsuit top anchoring solid cellutite into her white jeans. Smelled of fresh hotel too. Looked at me with wellscrubbed washroom eyes. Began to hum House of the Rising Skirt.

So I took her to this bar that was a cowboy college student lackof-concentration camp, where we had a few wine Spazzattacks, smoked some of Coral's facial herbs. I acted 'fisticated. I'd dated once before, had taken a girl to a graveyard after a few drinks and conversation but she was drunk and said Take me home so I did without doing anything. Hey, even if I've never had one, yet rest assured, my knowledge of the female form and its menstrual bowels is as sharp as Galen or any medieval wisenheimer.

Tippy says I'm obsessed with the female. "So just DO it, don't THINK it, fer cryin' out loud" he laffed. What Victorian mothers used to tell their daughters on their wedding nights, "Lie about England". I told her about the Hitlerbison, big thing mounting the bovine Europa.

Played follow-the-vampire with her neck and she laughed. Not only Tippy would claim sexual fishing rights in these waters.

Can that girl Coral ever talk. About herself. This solip-sister, her for whom the world revolved around. She wasn't spoiled, just overripe.

Coral was a transfixing narrator, a buxom-zaftig

storyteller. For others, a cunt; for me, a campfire. I never got the story straight. Didn't have to.

When I was in that school there was this tough colored girl just up from the south—the only one to raise her hand when the American History teacher asked "Has anybody ever picked cotton?"—who used to stand up on the desks in a miniskirt and shriek "What you lookin' at?" as she hardkicked any steal-a-glance meekboys. Coral wasn't like that.

Born just across a corny county line from Turpentine Farms, Georgia, our Coral grew up in Florida's Manhandle. Coral had no life when the family lived in Florida, always overdressed as a child as the family prepared her to attend the Ceasarian Bible Institute. Prepared for sainthood, she'd bake her face, wore beads and hair up, and sat about fat in the Florida sun till she turned ham pink.

Coral had a tattoo "Born Pretty", in case anybody forgot. Her lips like backyards in Michigan winter, white but muddy.

The girls of Florida, wow. I imagine pubic fur drying like freshlywashed palm trees as they lie outside the bungalows. Coral's quim was like the swampy underwater Florida real estate sold in the 1920's. Worth a pretty penny. Tugging a tube-top label over those lovebottles, jars full of bewareberries. All cheese n' cherries, that little

shopping cart of a girl, half the world's food passed through her body.

As a little Florida girl she had inklings of sex's power in its tropical storms, föhn-like hot winds. One blew over a floor lamp and electrically gave the little child her first orgasm. Hurricane Coral was raging on her birthday. The state motto on license plates down there: Make Believe Phenomena.

She could turn snow into perfume once they came up north.

When they moved to Michigan in the dead of winter Coral found it sexy, ran outside behind the garage and masturbated with an icicle.

Under yearbookish peer pressure, she was voted by her class the girl Most Likely to Be Wet, just as a popular guy in her class was awarded Most Likely to Be Hard. Kids would put that on their resume for summer jobs, often vetted by employers’ wives. Yet this one had the wicked, twinkle-eyed energy for pranks. Coral had spat, shat and smeared the paste-up of the school yearbook on its way to the printers, violating the careful listing who was elected Drug President, Boy Voted Most Stinkiest Hand, Most Valuable Smoker, Miss Fecundity, Miss Vulnerability or Availability, etc.

She's a counter-courtesan. Embodying counter-vulnerability. A near-chimera. About a girl in her class, Coral shrugged "She has a disease that stops her from masturbating." Hmm, indeed.

From the way she talked you would've thought she'd slept with everyone who had ever made a record. She knew the best way to make a boy like her was to give him that wet spot. In school a halfcircle of guys would sneak in behind and form a washroom stall for her. The way those boys touched her, or she touched herself, all her

makeup would come off. A Chinese kid called it Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy. If she were a used car on the lot, the sticker would say GOOD TO BED. I could hear in the back of the room cruel girls who worked after school part-time as maids compare her to a motel bed that's just been made love upon, the hourly rates of a damp washcloth. She made enemies in that Art class, getting everybody sore when she went around smashing all the ceramic dope pipes, their term projects. She didn't care. She's like a crime with no discernible motive. An unchild, underchild. Streetless youth.

The unwicked.

But on this night, Coral had told them I would be taking her to library to help her with her homework. Motel-warp lips full of hip hillbilly lies. We did go out, we went looking for the Midwestern University Snuff Film Festival, but it had been closed down “for moral and aethetic turpitude” by the blue-nosed cops. Naw, it was going on, the place was packed and we went in.

The winner of last year’s Aleppo-Motorsburgh Snuff Film Festival “Black Leather Enema” returned with the even more disturbing “Thmbtacks/Pushpins Enema.” Tippy had appeared in that one aborted snuff film, romping in a salt turnip field, with a European director and, and though it was never completed, its existing footage was to be shown in a special showing tonight. Tippy’s co-star was the famous German model Neuda who sang with the New York Pop Artistic band, whom they plied with so much turbo-strength heroin, they really expected her to succumb on camera. She didn't, angrily recovered, bore a horrible drug habit until her early, obese and grizzled death.

It probably should have been Thump in this movie with her, not Tippy. He would have gotten the job done. Anyway, this may entertain us, turn us on Nevertheless, the Snuff Film Festival was said to be healthy and cathartic, helping good liberals, civilized faculty and collegebound teens channel their natural aggression towards, through, and out of the screen. Like cockfighting among Mexicans, dogfighting among Motorsburgh negroes. In theory, at least.

At the University Snuff Film Festival, lubricious porn was everywhere. I think President Whaxit ordered that in hopes all the sex would steer the hippies and intellectual cynics away from Revolution, women from bra-burning into augmentation and push-up bras.

The porno-bloody "How the West Was Won With Cum" was at the Snuff Fest as we entered the theater. The next up were "Leather Stepmother", "Poison Teats" and "Feces Broken on the Wheel".

The snuff podium pleased the erotomaines, sensualists and lovers of exploration in the sensual and tender scenes of the movies' first halves; pleased the moralists in the conclusions, where the girls (sometimes guys) got their comeuppance for consent. Like the Comics Code-unapproved horror and crime comics of the 1950s, which all ended with the moral "Bad is always punished. Evil does not pay!" Except in the film industry. God Bless America, and the California that invents it. Something especially romantic about watching snuff films on the evening of the day JFK, that colored civil rights guy, and Kennedy’s alleged brother were all shot. The thought of Coral tonight was starting to turn me on.

Few realize or remember that the Aleppo Snuff Film Festival was actually begun by professors in the Warlike Studies Program and the College of Decapitation, on a fat Cold War government grant. But since then erotic aesthetes and free love hippies have taken it up, and its slo-mo atroicities are glimpsed through heavy hashish smoke.

I gaze through the haze. Of course they'll let me wear my sunglasses in the darkened cinema. At ASFF, its founder Prof. Lucifer Lightbearer lifted up a corner of the tent so Adam and Eve—or Roque and Coral—could peek at the circus. By this time, every State Fair, country farm carnival, had its Live Sex Show. People just liked to see squirming. So Hollywood and the independents all had to do something different, ratchet and hatchet it up to the next level of tittilation, hence the snuffery. The fast-movie competitors that made cheap comedies like "Nude in a Swimsuit" and "Sex-Crazed Car Wash", later moved into the international snuff film field, in which the pretty girl was always the villain and had to die humiliated at the hands—in the arms and legs— of the hero who took her so graphically, repeatedly, before the final bloody climax. Often recounted in the form of Dear Diary entries, teenage girls especially seemed to like these, at least the carnal villainy before the deadly dénoument.

So that’s why I invited Coral here.

Porn movies like "88 Asses" and "The Swordfish of Paris" had new footage hastily shot to include a tragic demise at the end. The last film of the evening, "Mondo Michigan", was kind of boring since the biracial and hippie orgiasts were predictably shot by one girl's father, a cop. And the rest of his precinct too. Ka-pow, ka pop,

blamblamblamblam. But I was thinking of her secret police down there.

Someone opened an EXIT door and light streamend in. The summer dusk mosquito light or car headlights, I dunno. But it was soul-signal we should split for her house, and did. No more Snuff Films for you, big girl. I'd rather catch you alive tonight, alive alive-oh.

I went to the bathroom and went to the bathroom.

Mom always taught me to look in a host's medicine cabinet when I'm a guest anywhere, to size 'em up.

Like Indian medicine chests, squaws they rub upon courageous braves. Roguish rouge. Cosmetics and astringents, Drumbo Island Dolomite, boullions and base bouilabaisses. Youth Breath Mouthwash. Eau de Content. Look at all this stuff, sheesh.

Plenty of hair products. Grandpa's Black Cat Bone Shampoo, a southern favorite. Seamus’ Seampoo, containing real shamrocks.

Curvaceous little bottles, for putting on the shpritz of the Ritz. A shampoo actually made from babies' tears. Mrs. Mars' bottles of Palomino Lotion, Catamite Lotion and Bide-A-Wee Lotion stood side by side. Old fashioned girls' hair care products for midwestern blonds marked Smooth as Corn Silk. Daffie’s large plastic bottle of Reductio Ad Absurdum, For Drug-Addicted Hair. Products specially formulated For Abysmal Hair. Hair colors boxed Bikini Blonde, Beachtowel Blonde, Burst Blonde. Half-opened boxes of Beachball Blonde, Volleyball Blonde, Bongwater Blond and blowsy Pub Blonde. Another color called Slattern. And periodically Coral would decide to dye her hair the colors of all the pills she liked to take.

A shampoo called White Rapist. A flavored, scented shampoo called Spermmango. Substances that make our hair soft as buttered spaghetti. Or conversely, armored with a spray as stiff as battlestations. In the cabinet were supposedly medicinally therapeutic shampoos Avicenna and Averroes. Maybe these were for Horace’s impending baldness, suspiciously near a hair care product Eunuch Creme. Products advertised in parochial school magazines to grow hair on angels atop the head of a pin.

Coral and her mom got the giggles when they used natural hemp hair conditioner from the old British firm—Purveyors to Queen Victoria—called Wife of Bath. This was a liberal farmhouse. She was naturally a platinum blonde, and thought the hair of old women like Grandma Mars naturally blued like the barrel of a gun. She wore a very good brand of dandruff.

A shampoo bottle that says No More Baby Steps. Maybe I should masturbate with this stuff, or at least grease myself up for her.

The company founded by Moses' grandma, a cosmetician and hair stylist between the Wars. But some girl students (after bribing the security guards with sex) would dangerously dip their long hair in the blue glow of the campus "swimming pool" nuclear reactor to flatten it, make it phosphorescent in low or ultraviolet light. Some supposedly birthed monsters, or their dates' genitals became swollen and monstrous, and barnacle-encrusted, as a result so that fad soon stopped.

Haven’t ever told anybody, I once considered being a hairdresser, as had the big-nosed pop drummer from the Betelnuts.

But only for a moment. About as long as I considered (at age 5)

being a fireman, because I liked the color red.

And I guess a lot of this stuff, women, they put it on their skin.

Girl Grease, a blend of scented linoleum lanolin and vanilla extract.

Her grandmother just had used Model T grease, but boys were so sweaty from working in the fields and steel mills in those days, they didn't mind "or notice", she chuckled. Various full-strength Policing Creams. Harold's friends in law enforcement had obtained some jars for Daffie and the girls. Pterodactoil, made from the ancestor of hen's teeth.

An encomium, emolument or emollient called Convert Soft, with a masseuse nun smiling on the bottle, out of her wimple spilling thick, dark hair like a Marrano’s in Spain. Toby Smollett Emollient. She had little bottles of Gringo Oil and Griot Oil, which I always thought were for lightening dark-skinned women from the ads in their magazines. Could Coral, or her mother or granny…? Naw. What does it take to get these women clean? Xanthippe Soap.

Funny Face Remover, softens that evasive expression, boasting New Hope for the Noncommittal. Bottles of Tim O' Derm and a soap called Clean & So Forth. Colored girls’ Cote d’Ivoire soap. Gospel soap called Sin No More. Fruit-flavored Buddywash. Aquae Vulva, scented and bracing. Said to be contraceptive too.

Absentmindedly arranging the jars and bottles: what am I doing.

I've got work to do in there. Alleged to be fun.

One whole shelf full of Coral's healthfood cosmetics, the latest Organic-Orgasmic Farm thing. Coy Avocado. Psychoderm lotion.

Snake phagnum. Kelp dandruff. Soap and spirit. Spafonified avocado oils, woodsy chlorophyll fragrances, discomfort comfrey and lamprey, essence of muskmelon bee-beer spritzers. Hello Vera brand aloe vera. Bottled in natural plastics. Fetal tissue cosmetics.

The True Makeup. Do Not Apply to Bright Skin. Dangerizing Gels, Disturbing Oils and Dramatizing Compounds. Age-Inappropriate Scrub; must be Coral's. Pockmark of Ages, fret for me.

This cabinet is a facial organizer. In effect, Coral’s desk.

From this medicine cabinet, Cro-Magnon Masque on her face before bed, which I first read as "crow mask". Miscegenation Creams. Blood lotions. A whitener obsrerving Jim Crow laws. Old fashioned southern salve or balm called What-We-Make-Skin-Sweat.

Something Doctor MardiGras would rub onto his piano.

Roque Rogue Rouge, from Bruges. What???

Old bottles of that vitamin Daffie had bought Coral when still in junior high, MegaPlus Virginity, in vain hopes to keep her fresh and intact, but they were long banished to the dusty back of the top shelf.

Chloroform, for when Daffie, aware of her wifely-duty, didn't want to have sex. Suppositories intended to keep one "fresh" before, during and after sex.

I am learning about women here, yes.

In minutes, perhaps moments, I'll learn the deepest secretest secret of them all. In Coral’s bedroom, not here.

For a moment I got cold feet, thought I could still escape sex if I used my imagination noggin’. I could make myself up, say Oh no, Roque’s not here, I’m Roquel, and sashay out the door to safety.

Catch your breath, old man.

Though Tippy, and countless others (especially in her) have gone before me, I will discover. Discover things for myself, the best boy and smartest guy in the world.

It may seem like I've been here in the Mars bathroom a long time. But I can feel it rising, getting impatient. Oh yeah. Gonna be good.

There were the usual Anti-Gravity mouthwash, and several sealed-and-sterile toothpasties, toothpustules and toothpasteurs in different colors for different members of the family. Dental defoliants, fungices and depillatories that boast VIETNAM STRENGTH. Patentmedicine products from magazine offers that barked SAVE ON SURGERY. A delicately-scented something-or-other called Juliet's Curse. A perfume called Eau d'Equipment, Eau d'Europe or something similar. Was Oil of Oblivion a perfume or sleep aid? Mrs. Mars' cabinet held Softspasm, a weird experimental electrode paste, and battery astringents. Rosemary's Bohemian Baby Oil. Cold cream salts. Frogs in aerosol cans, “from contented ponds”. Sun Spazz, for summer slathering. What I first read as Brain Softener proved to be on a second look a branflakes product to scrub sins from the skin, more of a Bram Stoker.

Enema powders from American Rectum. And here are packets of Theta-Seltzer, the effervescent digestive from Omnicron Pharmaceuticals in the western part of the state, the company that also makes Tranquos and Stupafids, prescription perceptidepressants increasingly used for soporific recreation. And coincidentally, pills found everywhere at the nearby near Goose Turd

Green Rock Festival.

On this little shelf, for Horace, a shaving soap called Beard Bastard. Over here, Daffie's menopause razor, beside a Periodic Table of the Elements of Coral’s cycle.

Wonder if this is Coral's, or Coral's mom's (or grandma’s) Bierstube Stimulator, from Von Braun consumer electronics.

Family Doctor scissors. Razor blades that can cut inquisitive children's fingers, sewing needles that might—undoubtedly—pierce.

A glass fated to drop, break, leave shards under bare feet.

Every bathroom is a treacherous place.

There is an alchemical continuum between weapons like tear gas, fireworks and contraceptives, which the big DuChem Corporation—in Mediocre, MI a couple hours from Aleppo—that makes Greekfire Polysticky Pyroexfoliant for military use all over Vietnam, certainly knows.

Conversely, I found there some contraceptive herbs of the Iriquois, woven into quoits, though I'm not sure the southern country girl knows how to use them properly. She's a seminal vesicle or vessel from the land of the Seminoles, gaining carnal semiknowledge at her young age.

Plus a box of of normally-formed suppositories intended to keep a woman warm or "fresh", meaning they're contraceptive I guess.

I remembered something advertised called "Memory Foam"; a kind of mattress, while I thought it was a contraceptive that preserved and presented the good and happy times within it. And this, Saber

Sofeners, some kind of enhanced-saltpeter product bought by Daff for Horace, to make him less disturbingly virile.

A tube of Clitoris-Fix; I didn't know they ever broke.

Coral is your heavy-lidded, blowsy Mae Mid-West and I’m her nervous Salvador Dolly depicting her as a room, infinite entertainment possibilities inside.

My head’s spinning. Bruising douches. From the ads you'd think a woman's goal in life was to feel fresh. But Coral was too fresh. Like those diet colas and soft drinks, these must contain the hormones that make woman a woman; clyclamate clitorises for cycladic climaxes. I better not get any on my finger. Ain't cosmetics wonderful? And to imagine that there are English rock stars somewhere that'd wear 'em. Too much, man.

Need a full-time fardeuse in here. I guess all women are their mothers under the skin, even a young chub like Coral. She too worshipped the gods of the bath, perfumed oleo sanctii all over, soaps and lufas and sponges. All the Mars women used carbonated champagne-process bubblebath pink as a poodle's gums. Daffie and Grandma Mars' galloping cremes. A tube of Asphodelgel. Breath and Body Connection lotion, from a store in the mall called Beneath the Bath.

Bottles of thigh soak ringed the tub. Bath soaps shaped like Elvis, JFK or Christ, enlongated for obvious feminine reasons. In fact, Coral's family had pictures of Christ around the house as they did his aforementioned brothers, because he was so pretty.

Somewhat incongruously their faces pined, pinned upon the walls—

never face down—between Horace's rifles and liquor and swearing around the house with old army buddies. That girl comes from a long line of women who'd fuck old soldiers.

Toilet Water from a real toilet, but from that of a famous actress, the sloe-eyed buxomess in the epic "Cleothanatosia", an old favorite of Daffie’s.

Brands of tissue with feminine names like Chloesoft and Zoesoft, implying the feeling a guy would experience slipping into their beds and them. Toiletproof pleasure removal. Southern Scullery Maid brand something, cleaning supplies for the kitchen or bath.

In the magazine rack beside the toilet a copy of New Breast magazine, not a girly one for men but a beauty advisor for women, full of dating and marriage-enlivening tips about getting him to touch and nuzzle you properly, etc.

When I mentioned the medicine chest to Aldebbie, he hoovered it up into a song" Her chest is the Moon, red as Mars Her moon is the rose Uranus... and when I pointed out his misunderstanding, he snapped "I misunderstand things better than anyone else!" Still, I found the last part clichéd, like high school planetarium jokes.

Got me wondering about the kind of soap and shampoo they gave out in the concentration camps. The mint on the pillow, the sheets turned down just so when the guards wanted to make the prisoners feel special. Specialy catalogues sold what was supposedly the same soap featured in the camps’ showers. From

their London boutique Aldebbie bought me a bar supposed made of the ashes and baby fat of Amy Fink herself, kid who hid out from the Nazis in a dutch oven, trying to charm me and win my approval, but I'm still suspicious.

I guess I'd never noticed all these bathroomy feminine things before. Or kept myself from looking at them at home, in our crowded little bathroom. Things of beauty, the orchestra upon which a woman composes her face. Amazing.

I considered for a moment raccooning my eyes like Coral's, but only for a moment. Besides, it wouldn't show behind my mirrored aviators. Not like I'll be taking them off here. If I put on Coral's makeup or beauty-body oils and sauces, will I see through her eyes?

Feel her orgasms? That is, if I ever had one myself. Or will I be just another Aldebbie-aping fop, following this year's new bursting glitter glam zeitgeist, like his miserable snooty guitarist, whom I tried to say Hi to.

Wow, imagine if Rock stars wore makeup. I’ll bet Aldebbie already does, his lips can’t be that metallic purple, nor his cheekbones rouged, by natural means. Those aren’t the glitterspangled eyelashes he was born with.

Cosmetics are the drugs of artifice, of feminine artistry. No wonder Aldebbie wants Michigan's hardheaded boy realists, farm-fed mechanics and simple swearing shopsweepers, to wear them.

Christmas crafts every morning (or evening showtime). The mirror as potter's wheel. Putting poetry on their, uh, not our faces.

Enough of this. I’m here for Coralsex.

All right, I’ll start getting to the good parts.

Are you, she asked me as she finished her drink, ready to go back? I nearly knocked over the table trying not to look too eager, stumbled down the stairs to the street, fumbled with the car keys.

Lab Nurse, please do a biopsy on this terrific growth in my pants. Like the biggest dinosaurs had a second brain in the pelvis to control the movement of the tail, us men nowdays have evolved a brain in the dick. Like the control room in a nuclear power plant, monitoring the radiation levels of all female activity.

I drove fast and we returned to that shotgun chateau. Switch on the light. Coral's room was a pink trunk, padded beach with sequins all over. The bedroom furniture looked like Lippizaner stallions, all white prancing stocky wood. A pillow like the head of a cute-ugly dog with appliquéd letters Now I Wann Be Your Pug. Big bed means a big beg-for-it. A pair of LSD 3-D glasses on the dresser, for a sort of peyotl glaucoma. Said she only took LSD for her menstrual cramps.

Her room a borderline brothel. Coral's beaded curtain, incense, brightly painted paper-maché bric-a-brac. A world-class bed, Olympic-sized, for many highschool jocks swam laps there. Pool party at the female swim club. Coral is so big that when I said a tank suit, etc. On the dresser grinned the skull of one old boy friend who was drafted, went to war, died there; she vowed to drink champagne out of it when of drinking age. She apologized for the wrinkles and tear in her Tippy and the Chomps posters, recently torn down by enraged Horace on the night of her coke bust.

So what if I still live with my mother, she's never out of the house. I'm amazed that Coral's parents leave, actually have a social life, which is when we make it. Stoned already, I immediately got scared and started thinking of the climax of old movies like “Arville Garland Had a Gun”, or “Murder at Stonehengehead Manor”, where the parents came back and found the daughter involved in all sorts of sex. What if Horace was carrying his snub-nosed Police Chief? My tattoo said "Unlucky in Love". I've always tried to steer away from the Sex in Rock n' Roll. Flipped on the TV to a cooking show where they'd add some late-breaking spices like Royal Saudi, so we smoked some of that. In the days of marijuana, a woman was always proper wreathed in a homegrown gown. In her room, an auto-parts or muddy docklands bong.

She was no Sleeping Beauty but she could hold her drugs like a poison apple. Coral and I take ours out of voracious hunger.

Aphrodisiacally, we took some Human Fly. Oceanic cocaine. Like many such marijuana marriages, she was hot n' venerable, hot and reasonable. In love with life's liquid. She stood there an unkempt promise. Sweet sixteen, overweight and overwrought. Love handles like coffin handles. She just told me, she's got worms in her knees.

She was in a streamlined mood too. She asked me that slipperiest question. I answered Oh yes, let's "that".

I got work to do in my pants. An odd tumescence. There must be a copy of How to Hook Up Girls around here someplace. I remember as a kid while playing records in the early morning before classes over the junior high school loudspeaker once forgetting which

direction the tone arm went, from the outside edge of the disc IN, or from the inside label OUT. Hope tonite's not like that.

The pompetis of love? She was less Madame Pompadour and more Madame Pimp-Adorer. This was unfortunate. Lilliputian, putain-qua-puta. Buttercuts upon her body.

In front ot the closet full of Chloe clothes, Coral looked in the mirror. "Don't these jeans make my butt look cute? I know I'm a big girl. But you, Puddingman”—and she grabbed my belly fat over my Wehrmacht belt with both hands—“you're holding in a lot of emotion."

Coral ran her fingers through my hair. “It that conditioner?

Ohh, smooth and silky. Most guys don't use it except for masturbation, use it all up before they shower” (laughs).

What? I don't know anything about that.

Dry humping is like flycasting.

She peeled off my babyish white Fruit of the Wombwear. Or was she the one wearing boys’ briefs? Like the Babylonian mermaidslayer, a kingpinfisher taking control of the swamps reed by reed, like in Vietnam or the delta-of-Venus bluesman Moses Bullrush. Mine was the Coral Snake! Her fingers all over me like pricks from the needle of her grandma's old sewing machine, now difficult to treadle with those swollen legs and feet. What a school music teacher who dallied with Coral in a practice room called behaving pizzacatoishly.

She had lifted her t-shirt and flashed us all when we were over at Horace and Dot's house for some reason, but this was the first time she revealed to me only what Tippy called her swizzledugs.

Breathmint? Oh, I thought you said breast mint. Coral a mountain to

conquer, to top…but from the top down. Let me at her.

Coral's bird's-nest breasts. Maybe I've been birdtied by her.

Even before she took it off something rustled inside her shirt which made the pointer-dog thrall at the hunt, freeze straight up and fix upon that entire piece of tail. Sweater girl could fall in love with her own shadow. She opened a sardine can's-worth of buttons, lifted her low ceiling. Coral's breasts were like nice-cop and tough-cop interrogating me. Breasts that delclaim mise-en-scene. Boobs like bloated bladders, something medieval churls would use for games on feast days, floatation devices. To measure the heat in a velour pullover. The softness of these breasts, so long molded by wiry wire.

Tonight she wasn't wearing her cunieform bra, language of static electricity, barely colorform pasties to stick on her niblets. She had everything under her shirt and jeans except underwear. Fingers erased all traces of a bra. Her leather breasts, roseleather breasts, boobs like Rosenkranz and Guilderstern. Her breasts were masterstrokes. Breast like a French beret. Lace aureoles. Cleavage radio. I have always been the Rosenkavalier of breasts. A werewolf of breasts. The Flying Dutch Fuckman. A roc giving a flying fuck.

We sang her breasts like a song. Coral's breasts of burden. Giving suck to whole army of men in bands, or at least them sucking to bring her to maximum lubrication. Not a valley of tears between those breasts, but a crevasse that could host a roaring river.

Toothpaste on a breast, flouride nipple. Take a deep breast, full of breath. Drink coffee out of her open breast. I'm just wetnursing over Coral from this vantage point. I wanted to wash her chest, its complexion like tatoos of plywood patterns. She's got nipples made

of acorn bacon. The language of new breasts, the language of heat.

Made her nipples ripple, crinkle and shake, little braberries of her crosseyed breasts. Full-tilt full tits. Beatle breasts! Does she have to wash her bra afterwards? Does a beautiful woman offend the flowers?

She was chest-scented and emollienting down below. No, not molting! Removed her shoes and sex, I mean socks. Babylon's bluejeans opened and fell. Satin Cunegondewear, which crumpled like a huge butterfly that'd collided in midair with the mythic Roc and fallen to earth. Coral had contrary panties from Sexwear of Hollywood, embroidered by Barenaked the Tailor (born Herschel Hendrix Hollywoodwitz), famous for dressing and undressing big hair country western divas, drawers that had pearls around the lacy split, to represent the Jerusalemmy pearly gate of Heaven. Hers were only a plastic poly-Esther's knockoff from JMJMart, but they were cute and shiny and frilly. Those weren't pearls of other guys' trouser-caulk either. It's the thought that counts, that she'd put them on, a clean pair, for me. Panties wide as the windshield of a jet plane and could cover exactly that, blinding both the pilot and copilot, as she probably would've with her fingers playing "peekaboo" or even splayed legs had she been pretty enough to get a job as a stewardess. Marzipan whipped free from her bigcricket legs. Between her legs or leaving a poking-out line under her form-fitting delcate squidskin swimsuit, Coral had the green green grass of home.

Mississippi Fat. What islanders call her rolling calves. I thought they'd be like redwood picnic tables, but pants off her thighs resembled two beached whales a couple of days ashore—puffy,

bloated, sunbleached, perhaps pecked at by shorebirds and hacked at by seafaring types for blubber. Somebody wrote "Elvis" in spraypaint on the corpse of a whale washed up, and that wasn't funny. The breath of her knee. We were two terrapin under a tarpaulin. Cock and cunt like a freshly-washed machine.

She was a female gazebo. Ours a cathedral of arms. Like I still thought women had trilobite parts along their torsos and hips or something. I knew this was going to be a good luck fuck when my socks, tossed off fell on the floor in the form of a perfect swastika.

As P.T. Barnum said about the Hottentot Mermaid (George Washington’s multi-breasted wet nurse), THIS WAY to The Negress.

Behold her carpet-colored pubes. I hear they've already opened up a Motorsburgh carpet store where every color available is that of a part of the body of different girls who've been with Tippy.

The battlefield vision that gullible, war-weary—perhaps shellshocked—troops in WWI called the Angel of Mons Veneris. The public triangle is there to catch the eye, like a dark soup-stain on a shirt, silk tie or summer pants. Public hair like a horse's moustache.

Snow falling like girls' pubic hair, and twice as quiet. A fine winecellar of a woman. Me, a General touring a woman's secret underground missile base bunker. All nestled Under the Hill, like in the nursery rhyme.

Coral spoke kindly of my blue velvet gases. I really tried not to fart most of our evening together.

Just imagine. A full-featured fuck, on clean mother-washed linen. First on the Bedsheets! I called dibs.

Tippy normally had his girls on limburger-cheese sheets, or

skeletal mattress. This had better be good. Allegedly, fun.

We make love step by step. Ate our ice cream slowly. Like baby squirrels we innocently scampered. What Midwestern boys learn about girls from raking leaves in the Fall. She said "cigarette me lightly" or something like that. For a moment as I licked the side of her head I thought she had gills but it was only her ears. What I thought were liver spots turned out to be freckles. Ganglia girl. Tiny kiwi-fruit kisses. Her tongue like a toothpick in my mouth.

Tonguehelped kisses that really taste like bleach. Her kisses tasted like a crow, or the crow's foot at the corner of her mother's eye, which I guess I never kissed. Kisses like blowing the wings off moths with a large-mouthed air gun. Where her skin is normally obscured by revealing clothes, it's like the skin that forms on the surface of the pan of warm milk the insomniac fixes. Like the silvery surface of the sludge pond with all her tiny pocks and pores, each sporting a frail tiny worm-like blond hair. Like pearlescent pink nailpolish.

Her body a facade of roses. Ivy climbing a college edifice. A plumage ship. Her skin a tiny cemetary, ground "breaking out in ghosts". My fingers down her back like whispering F-14 Sabrejets, across a sunset sky of purplish orange. Skin, the odor of Jerusalem.

A musty nasturtium. Vegetable magnetism. Soul spots all over her heat. Scarcity in scar city. Cunieform tattoos on her back called complexion. Her skin covered with dingleberry zits, blackcurrant brambles n' thorns.

I stop for a moment, focused, attention trapped in an imperfection. Her zits like rhinestones, every disguising daub of

cosmetic upon them a masterpiece of painting worthy of being hung in the University Museum, so there. A pastemouth is human. That sweet sharkskin. Her regret-face, force-field face. Must be the pollution in the air blowing over from Motorsburgh that erodes this cathedral girl-gargoyle.

Absentmindely, my fingers like on the guitar. The music of zits popping. Ah, purity! Purity! Popped a zit like a trumpet full of yellow pudding that hit the stained glass window of a church. Squeezing zits like monkeys picking at each other's nits and carbuncles on a concrete Monkey Island, scampering up and ringing the bell at the top for me. Important to squeeze zits three times a day, Coral, especially after every meal or lovemaking. A large meal imbedded in her face.

Lethargic pore-spiders on her face. Your Halloween mask, your Halloween messengers. A festering feast. Enlarged pores on her face, can you whup the human race?

Hands like paper towels. Tapping on the bongo drums of her butt. Like a bird's nest built in a butt. With every beast of my heart.

Her anus smelled of anise, "like a girl named Janice" I imagined her saying in a sing-song, or singing. Stage buttocks like two old tube amps. Nonsense-sex. Aggravation acrobatics. The sound of a teenage girl being fingered as her underthings are pushed aside in the movies like the air in aerosol cans. Kiss My Wings. I took a bite of that Love Pig, took her home bite by bite. She met my Nazism with partisan love. Cross your mind, please. The bull and the goddess.

She was a hank of hair and bone and rag, a hundred-and-fifty pounds of clay lovingly shaped into a little deuce coupe. Little Prepuce Coupe-de-foie-gras. a garage soft and rich enough for me. Coral

pulled the chain on the iron cross around my neck, like the chain on an old-time toilet. I could slice your neck like a wire cheesecutter, Roque. Who cut the cheese? She would then dance around nude like Salami with the Baptistry head dripping, it still wearing my lightlytinted aviator sunglasses.

My old mudhead. I've grown attached to it. Don't, OK. Sexual rigamarole until my pecker gets rigor momentous, rigor vita. She smoked one screaming dick. Consecrated the purple peanut. Annealed it in her forge. Shipped the freight of the knight, amidst trumpets, into Valhalla. This got me thinking of the Virgin Mary as the patronness of oral sex, the Septaguisima Fellatrix herself. How do you think she stayed technically a virgin for twelve years in the Middle East with all those aromatic Aramaic Arabs around? Look how many boys’ names there are in the Bible, and since it's generally hotter than the Middlewest—summertime all year—the Middle East gets probably even hornier. She's called Star of the Sea because she was originally a crotchless mermaid.

She was truly the cat that swallowed the canary. Drank from that bubbler with the hot iron smell. Stomached the phallus' inner fuse. Mouth full of chipmunks. Like those grade school girls who gigglingly ate yogurt and pretended it came from a boy. Graffiti in the school Boys’ Room said Coral Loves Oral, and I hadn’t understood the enormity of what it meant. Slurp your coffee in this restaurant, baby. Bone-eaters and Bonereaters. She drank a Penis Colada.

She called cum "Egg Nog Gum". Dessert from the two colored food groups, the pink and the white. Somebody had told me that in a burst

of school spirit Coral had the highschool marching band playing the school fight song that afternoon on a different drum, so to speak.

You know that basketball team-and-cheerleader story, about the twenty ounces pumped out of the fainted girl's stomach? That was Coral too. Kingdom cum in your face Coral.

Mmmph, oooaaahh, that was a compelling fellatio! I'm priveleged to have you for a best friend.

Remembering while wincing how skinny, shrimpy Chet Aspberger made fun of my tiny manhoodlum in elementary school gym Boys' showers, then telling an assembled table full of girls when we got back to the Fifth Grade classroom. Still, it's my guitar pick, oft-examined head head even kind of shaped like one. I swirl notes around like Tippy swirls his thing in girls. And my electronic amplifier settings and mezzuzzahboxes distort creatively, like Tippy enhanced full of drugs for the stage. Coral had a vested interest in Tippy's good health, and now mine.

Tippy, being a short man, has an enormous apparatus. That's the way fate works. Me, tall and large, like that classical beefsteak Hercules with a curvy oak leaf of public hair and three delicate acorns. There must be some evolutionary advantage to this, like the strong small ponies running about the steppes versus lumbering beerwagon dray horses. As a three-year-old I told some little girls tormenting me for my red curls, "I'm a man, but I'm a short man" and kissed one. Flashbulb fast-forward to today, Coral saying short cock men take longer, need more time to build up friction, which pleases the lady. What Coral called my bathpenis. That is so cute, so motherly. As she played with it, she giggled that my cock was

shaped like a little swastika, but she just said that to relax me in this stressful situation. Coral's orals, her shenanigans with me down there reminded me that there were several Popes, and several stock comedy characters in Shakespeare, called Fellatio. Recall the foamy seafellatio of the shipwreck, the Ariel bender.

Her mons veneris like the hill behind our junior high school, behind which non-bulies—pugnacious guys with a sense of chivalry and restraint—would challenge you to fight after school, rather than sucker-punching you in the halls between classes. What northern Californians would have called her Squaw Valley. The labi-estuary lock to her carnal canal.

At distant first whiff, I thought it smelled like Fuctstone tires, not today’s in the store but the little experimental one I saw in a museum, made from salt turnips grown 100 miles north of here; Harry Fuct didn’t want to be dependant on southeast Asian rubber plantations as the World War beckoned. Or like those in back of the Firehouse puddled with mosquito-larvae water. I won’t “tire” tonight, you better believe it.

By now, both of our parts were inflamed. When Coral told me she sang too, I told her how the Hindoos believe singing began in the yoni—the cunt and birthday canal—so I touched hers to emphasize my point. And she liked that. God made the pubic netherlands in the form of a V to honor the Virgin Mary Mom and remind you of the vword itself, the same in every language. With her pants off the bitter truth hit me and I could see why she was all through junior high school voted Smiliest Smile. Things I'd only seen in PETHOSE (or

its more mammary supplement PETTHOSE) magazine. At first her cunt was like a little dry piece of wedding cake. Cunt the color of Santa's sleigh. That wet razor. Poodletail. Fur cola. Realty hips.

Vulture cunt. Finger in her laundaries. A tulip full of hair. Open sesame flower. Compact pocket mirror, tight fluid. In the heart of the vagina, a splendid slot. Brushfires between the legs. Her pergrinations berry. A denim pudendum. Barrel of hair, a battery bush, her pink easel upon which I painted my masterpiece. She's like the Wet Paint sign that makes everybody put their fingers on it. Me, of course I'd pleased girls before, dribblenudes under the unrefined forefinger. But a hand treatment is not a driveaway car to Heaven.

She was digitally sampled. Touched her kitten button. This cherry clay. Bridal petals. More than meets the Eve. Fingered her whisperclit. A rose on a windshield, stuck under a wiper. Fingers smelled of girl garlic, mushroom soup. Breath from the belly of a clam. A clock ticking on her, the rinse of her rain-drenched snatch.

Aniline dyes on her hand burned my eyes. She made her lips, then her legs, into French parentheses.

She was thick with great pies. Coral continually let me make music upon her stringed vagina till inflamed and reddened. She called it her Rosy Cross. Riding that tantric taxicab. Like a chimney in a large house. Her witches’ cauldron down there, I fingered her eye of newt. You could egg houses between those hams. The caverns of one's yieldings, Coral. Coral that female beefalo, her cunt like a bison's wet mouth to the first rejected Sioux Indian. Her cunt is like sauerkraut. Remember, "cunt" is the Italian word for a story and the French word for History. The female zoology. Hey, women built

the pyramids. Pussy like a meerschaum pipe. She elected me to the Hole of Fame. Showed me her half-smile. Her stinky vase. The hot pizza crusts of Coral's cunt. Her cunt like a box of baby monkeys.

Her nest of thorns like Christ's crucifixion hat, hippy headband.

Loops in the l's and the t's of her letters like the female ellipse. Her cunt was like a potato, like a slice of pineapple on a piece of paper.

The unicorn’s head burrowed, nuzzling, in the maiden’s lap.

That foul-smelling furnace. In a budding groove. In amused frontcunnilingus. A young girl’s lamb vinegar. I could see the heat lightning in there. Cave where they painted the ancient French bison.

The detective series “The Naked Wife”. Beauty wounds. A bird in there popped its head out, motherbird seeking worms, pushing the baby bird out to fly on its own. That pink machine was checking out A-OK. Her underdonuts. Pudenda innuendo. Hers was the cowgirl's cave. A "Pearl Harbor" was US sailor's slang for big harboring vulvadiddleydum with a prominent round clitoris. Horace told me that.

I had desserted upon her lasting raspberry. This is America; no pubic hair is naturally blonde. In the brunette forest; result of all those brides stolen by the Indians, considered fair play on both sides in those days. Beauty mark on her clit, or maybe just fibroids—hey, after all, she's from down south—migrating around those parts. I discovered the clutter of the clitoris, its Kansas Clutter family vulnerability yet fame-fed immortality.

Like I was never sure if cunniliphagy was the literal eating of the cunts or the eating—and gaining sustenance from—the persons performing cunnilingus. Like the 1950s dues-paying anti-Communist

society (I saw a bumper sticker, right around 1963, in Dallas) Eat or Be Eaten. Clit like a late-summer cricket, chirping with each gingerly taste. For a moment I got mixed up, thought the clitoris was called the "multicolored". No wonder I couldn't find it. Not the first to call her clitoris her "bachelors' button". What I called Coral's Iron Cross with Oak Leaves clitoris. Her clitoris like a well-thumbed Bible, leather cover cracked and historic, embossed gold title King James Was Here. Some kid named James King too. Her pussy downright secular, my pud a clod of earth. Her pussy dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue cleaveth to the roof of her g-spot.

By 1960—the Kennedy/Jack Ruby-strippers era—many girls could unbutton a man's shirt using only their tongues; Coral could using only her clitoris. Swear it’s true. It’s school lore.

It was the Arab term for a woman's tuning fork, the clitoral badadera that got African Americans shortening it to "bad" in approval, and the Arabic word for pussy bazr is the root of both bazaar (some girls are one) and bizarre (some girls are too).

You would've thought I was a bison head up there, fur rubbing and horns scraping, munching grass, the way she moaned. Long buffalo tongue, not abrasive like a cat's. Released the vaginal signal, and hairy men everywhere perked up. The way, I'm told, the Jewish Passover dinner contains different tastes, with pedagogical lessons reinforced by each. Well, sex is like that, with the different tasting parts (mouth, nipple, armpit, pussy) of a woman's body. A mermaid's nest-bed, now full of sea groin. Her leather fur. The pink opera. The acorn of glory, both mine and hers. Did something mega-adult.

Cunnalittle. Coral's paraclitoris. To the amazement of Dr.

Paracelsus. Her cunt a Puss in Boots. Her pussy was smellegant.

Venery country. Legs two conning towers of cunnilingus, at Aleppo International Hairport.

Oh Coral, creme de ma crème, the oh-so-subtle difference between a pudding and pudenda. I was said to have been eating quite a quiet white steak. Meaningful cunnilingus. She tasted of horsemeat, said a WWI veteran of the German army.

Sex with Coral was like cold pizza. Even if she hadn't been had by anyone else for hours, days even, it somehow felt like slurpy seconds, something cooled off and generally unwanted. An acquired taste, what the Japanese call natto. But I always liked cold pizza, and Mom would often asked the head lunch lady Mrs. Mountfujiyama if she could bring any leftovers home for her boys whenever Forcefield Junior High—where Mom worked alongside Daffie Mars— served it.

Did Daffie know I nibbled her daughter's little red personal pizza? Oh yeah, she welcomed me over to the house that evening, so she had to.

Baboon butt pink like the tongue of a cat. Her butt the Big Rock Candy Mountain of which hobos sang. I would be its relentless dynamite miner. No wonder she was so Rock n' Roll, her butt big enough to stage upon it a farewell concert for several long-touring bands, with their large followings coming onstage to dance, shake tambourines during the extended final jam. Her barefoot arse a burning shipwreck. I finally had her at butt-level. Bottomwater like Pacific Globerigina Ooze. The Girl with the Crystal Tail. Butthole like

buttonholes. Sipping bedliquor with this bedsnake, this buttersnake.

She was doubly promiscuous. Date-o-phrenic. Her finger there the most passionate laxative. I thought maybe she was still a version, of something we still hadn't tried yet. Ah, I see, I meant a venison. Her sister or grandfather Venison Mars.

Tongueless eloquence down there. Odor of an old factory, the generators and assembly-lines under her arms. Whose ox was gored at Sheba Bros. Meats, where they sell the garlic toasts? Slightly foetid and aromatically oceanic. Smelled like a suphur poodle.

Feminque, a perfume made from feminine--or effeminate--mink musk oxen. Perfume as pussy pheromones. Bedroom deer. By now I too smelled like a bull elephant in musth, killing 150 persons a year in India. A hundred of them in love. The hundred moments of ambivalence ensued. Submarine mouth and shiver me timbers. Call me Mr. Screwdriver. Playing ventilator-face with her clitoral toothbrush. Going down on her I wouldn't exactly yell "Hey Breathmint" at her from across the street, but there are are probably graves full of Russian or German soldiers died in WWII that smell fresher. Noah's ark full of animals. Maybe that was microorganisms.

Ms. Breakfast, meet Dr. Deodorantmouth. Jesus was a vampire giving treatment under pressure. Vegetable love, a food chain.

She's the Big Meal and I'm mealy-mouthed. As the French say, make grass for the rabbits. Like kissing a girl with a moth on her mouth, and moths fly straight from Hell. A spider built a web on your face meant for two. I'm her upsidedown daddy. Kissing Santa Claus or Fidel Castro. Cakefire and birds' nest soup. Love's oyster in a strong cellar. Her wolf's lair. Her furburger like the little sweater on

the end of the tone arm's stereoneedle. Snapping her clitoris like fingers with the tongue. I made her lay down in green pastures and stirred her still waters. Waves lap the lighthouse in the ocean. Blind boy putting his teeth on the railroad track to detect an oncoming train.

The bursting of love caps. Where the apple grows the tree. Let's swap something pink, a sexual shimmer of love like a radiator. A dark tattoo, a little house afire across her belly. Near total-perfect brushflower. The clitoris of Clymenestra. Amusing, this tart squeezably gaping lemon pie in this breadbody, a pie with so much doughy crust. Moonilingus. We feasted on Moon Pies that arrived in a crate from the south. Her moistpocket, her most perfect part like sexual steak tartare. She was moist in the midwest. Pink like the nose on a Siamese cat, I could hear the ocean in her lion house. I was at the tip of my tongue, my sword my throbbing lance jousting this Maid Medieval into a damsel in distress, into dixie-cup stress.

Went down on her like a radio station's traffic heliocopter. Like a swim coach blowing his whistle underwater. I pencilled marginalia upon her genitalia. She got background hair. She goes home to fart.

She made little whisperfarts, perfumefarts. Candlevoices to me.

Strands of DNA all over my face. Smile full of slime, shame on the squeamish. Creaking doors, the stretching of ordinary gnawing frustration gives way to foam like Tyco Brahe's beard.

Boy, I wanted to crack that ass like a cashew would a walnut.

Balls boiling, fresh and vulnerable like a pair of watched eggs. I'm the king bee of intimacy, no telling what you'll get with me. Let's mix waters, your water with my beer. Coral, let's do something selfreferential. History will judge, I said weepy teardropfuck to Coral, not

injurious tearfuck. Love in another direction. Love on the head of a pin. Glad you're the woman and I'm the man.

That dream bovine. The design orifice. Cunt like a rennet custard. What Mexican boys in my highschool call a flan. In Michigan more like a flannel. Swedish gynecologists called it her Volvo. Swiss sex. What the critics called Ringo Starr's favorite restaurant. Her Edgar Allen Pie. Lit her labia menorah. The female pore. Sun cunt, gypsy mons veneris. A squeeze-bottle universe.

Coral the cloaca, the University of Cloaca. Her squinty little Ben Franklin quim. Babylabia. The Golden Pudenda. She could hide all the jewelery in her room up there, long strings of dime store pearls.

She could pick up the tone arm of the record player with her vaginal muscles and put it down to select a favorite track. Could roll a joint with her vaginal muscles. That bagel animal. The angel animal.

Ready to meet a ram that heals. Time for her to show me what the hole in the 45 rpm record is for.

Prayers before fucking: Bless this Hole.

I'll bet in Michigan's early days, young girls had this aspirational admonition in needlepoint upon their cabin walls, or lower bellies.

"Prayers Before Fucking" was a grim wartime movie shown on afternoon TV a while ago too.

Gonna astonish that ass, yes.

Mr. Spitoon's fourth hour Biology class—he was my Homeroom teacher too—came to mind as Coral lay sprawled there like a fetal pig on a dissection tray. I called Coral an expression in German that I thought meant "my little mouse" but it meant "talks like Moses", like a

Jew, especially in business dealings, finagling and wrangling. Sorry.

She was no Passover, I mean, pushover.

As she lay on her side my wangthing momentarily slipped beneath the rolls of fat around her belly; I'd read in Mom's CONFESSIONAL magazine that a Hollywood actress had a "tummy tuck", but I don't think this was it. She moved her legs slightly, almost imperceptively, like the huge sentient, ancient snail-shelled squids displayed in the lightly-motorized diorama depicting the most ancient of seas, upstairs in the Museum.

Now I lay me down to Rock Girl got butt would stop a clock Oh yeah, oh yeah, push it someplace marvelous. I was penispolite. Sexfoot fleeting, all pineal gland, this light stethescope. A strawberry penis making click-click clicky-clicky clickety-clickety.

Making love lumberjackly, jackrabbitty. A metrognomic kind of clickclack fucking. A dick like those old maps showing the edge of the world, ships sailing off into space—like cartoon coyote running padding drumroll for a minute before he realizes he's off the cliff— puffing dragons there. The human body as those old maps of the world when it was flat that you could easily sail off of. Sailing into, wandering past a woman's edge into Feminina Incognita. There Be Dragons. My knees clacking the polished wood floor of her room as we bounced. I probably should've taken my boots off.

The poetry that goes bump in the night. Like a pair of spectacles in heat. A pair of leave-well-enough-alones. Radio noises from her stomach, our stomachs like two big drums pressed together in a roadie's truck. A pine tree left ajar was instantly noticed. Secret

smut temperature. Belly like a warm wet theatre seat or car-seat upholstery. The war between the sheets, a wet sticky summer.

Highlights the underpants. Breath like butter. Sowdust. Unwashed thunder, loins warm pink oil. She was fat but fast-boned. Already decided I like my women smelly, midnight mint, pizza between her legs, that throaty spaghettisauce smell women do. Nibbleable anchovies, nipples extra mushrooms. She rubbed down our bodies with pizza oil, orange runny stuff, why we kids loved pizza so. She rubbed on some electrode paste and we continued the great grapple.

The cervical leap! Deep in the summerthighs. Her background hair.

Someone from Vermont would find this sex like the tapping of syrup from a maple sugar tree. Jumped into her turkey in the straw with his fiddle already playing. The source of the Nile, the origin orifice and crucible of the heaviest matter in the universe. The game of Plow the Cow. Swam laps of love. Simpletonsex. Bordello boxes opened.

You got to take her from behind. In Platonic retreat I entered her cave of illumination, suddenly smarter, and suddenly knew all the words to songs. Sweetstomach pushed into the squirming rumpshadow. She was tight, it was like inserting into a drumhead, the negative friction of the kitten's purr. Carnage passages. That same open-sesame steel, the songwriters' steelcake. Positively pelvigogic. Guess I went all kundalini on her cundaleeny.

Sometimes lovers are sac-like bottles of wine from Mars. Sap sago saps and their soapdishes. Even the rules make love tonight. She could make a graveyard laugh, make my shotgun shake. She'll be riding six white horses when she comes.

Moon-landing on her. There'd been a parade in Aleppo for the first astronaut to sleep on the moon recently, now we'd be the first to sleep together there, humming the first Rock n' Roll tune there.

Spiderwheels. Flying Ringo. Adam and Eve in a thermos bottle.

She lay there on her arms like a limp Venus de Milo. Then an hour of her on top like a full coal train shuttleing on a length of lazy forgotten track, then imagine an accident between a cable car and a dumptruck full of gravel. A ski lift spinning into space.

Oily as the utensils fucking the tossed salad. Crankcase-oily love. Broken thermometers. Clink clank clunk go the shovels of love.

When robots marry. Fucking like a computer that could only print out.

She fucks like a State Trooper, two buses fucking at a highway rest stop. We made love bison-style, huge bodies crashing, smushing together. Pushpin in her pincushion, her broad bulletin board. I'm a homing pigeon for your cunt. The magnetic hardon to electromagnetic cunt. I was Up North in Coral, and I remembered in Michigan Up North is Nature. Therefore I can complete this carnal task.

Daffie had a nineteenth century whale sperm candle in the bathroom or in a bedside table drawer we exuberantly kicked over in time of passion and broke, sorry! It was passed down from her greatgreat-grandmother, and with it Daffie had masturbated early in the evening Coral was conceived, before Horace came to bed, as generations of her female forebarers had before. Morbidity Dick! As the stern whalers’ wives told themselves, think about New England.

But Coral and I did it Miami-style. We made the Boston cormorant, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. When you say "missionary

position" fast it even sounds like Michigan. We made the zweibacked beast. The kind of games you can't play in restaurants. Love amidst love. Night enlightenment. Like a car powered by ghosts. Playing sexual baseball, I could hear my heart beating at the end of my prick.

I made a fire and the fire is you. The samba is the sauna. Send her a bananagram. Love bodies rubbing together like the pencil and the eraser, like the eraser and the the paper rubbing out and off the names and memories of her old lovers, if only for a few minutes.

Two paint brushes from the bottom of the sea. Like a House Afuck.

She climbed atop and began what the Beatles called Straddling the Walrus. Comin' around the mountain when she comes, with her banjo butt upon my knee. Hers was no abstinance ass, yas. We read the Sunday Comics at the base of the spine, reenacted Beethoven's final tennis match. The Government of Priapus, where Eros and zaniness meet. Climb back on, Coral. I am more than a flatworm or planaria! Bite her ear till she feels she's sliding down a drain on the raft of her ears or the raft of your body, munching on her ears like two potato chips. Fucking as sharpening scissors. Bone solenoids clicking shut. As much fun as a fight between a kinkajou and a wolverine, and that ain't hay. Holding you tightfaced, I felt fatted calf, pork ballet and spaetzle. Us intimate sausages would golem about. Her eyes sparkled like bourbon as I discovered her form-fitted flowers, the two holes of the moon. Incredibly agile, but just with men's cocks. She wore a ghurka knife up there, lemme tell ya. She could count out change for a dollar with those muscles. My heart beating loud as love, loud as Mona Lisa. Like two trout scotchtaped together flopping on a dock. Snakehead slithering up

her right after a burrowing prarie dog. A hellbent telegraph key or stapler. Crashing and invisisble car.

Drifted into deep linen. I come into deep water. I wasn't exactly big with girls but it's easier to train an eager beagle than a Great Dane, and I rose to her wants. Like a peanut to an elephant. "Lite" Love. Plenty of mommymargerine. This was just melon dish swimming. Kind of like falling into a big warm cooked apple, like a flood in a dark basement. Like parachuting through the rain.

Softness like a goddess vomiting. Nature's glue.

The Graffenberg-Fallopian Express, like a train Freud might have taken. I'm riding steerage on this ship, a steamer trunk or small piece of luggage crossing the ocean on her Cunard Liner. Jonah in the whale. Noah in the Ark, can you imagine the noise in there, an animal hubub worse than the two of us? The Ark of the Convenient.

Whales in the ocean made out of baloney. A whalehalloween in a whaleoven. The size of the average narthex in a church. I didn't know I'd be playing in a cathedral. Like washing dishes in the back of a car. Her rear backhoe, our sexual construction site. A swimming goose. Her pearl basement. As big as where a mouse threw up, but felt as big as the whole sky to me. Vulva effluvia. Too much monkey strabismus. In that summer camp I guess I made of her a pink wallet, a sow's-ear pigskin purse full of satisfaction. This must be what outer space feels like. A million lovers had she, and all of them were me.

The perfect product. The choice between affection and erection. Our legs forming houses that rained down the roof. Of course I was very sick when I balled her, in a sea of diarrhea which we had to clean up later. It was very natural indeed, to mix manures. A dream on the

mouth.

Adam's first fart. Eve's. She was so cool her farts were drafts, refrigerator doors opening. Or maybe soft shhhhushhish tropical breezes. Crazy föhns that'd topple German women off bridges.

Dancing on her butt. She was a white sofa; did it upon the cow cow davenport. My pussyboat. Like saying grace before a meal.

How the Germans toast each other "prosit", meaning "prostitute", may you have many. No intimate damage to her pizzaself. Fucking like a food fight. A knock-down drag-out experience. As Slipeye Sailor might say to his goil, We was a delightwad. Uh-yuhtuhtuhtuh...

Sex as backbreaking poetry. The Golden Backache. Don't you ever get tired, Baby...? I was snap-brim brained as ever. Her hair wadded like a car wash. Like walkin' the dog in a steambath. Baby, I'm sweatin' like a pig. Going to fill her, go through her like a New York filing cabinet. Thought I'd die before I'd come. Sperm like a speeding locomotive, night train smokin' through the cunt countryside, shrieking The Honey's coming! Little white lobotomies, dumbsperms marching, not all there, like candy soldiers. The whole history of the United States passed before my eyes. Synesthesia let common sense roll over me. Learned all the Interior/exterior man/woman dichotomies against my will. I flowed into her like plastic flight. That warm meltedbutter feeling down below. That sweet conceit. Warmth of a kind that felt like clothes just out of the dryer. Y'know what they say, a watched pot will take about five minutes to boil. Awakening the slumbering dragon, a long slow orgasm like pushing a dinosaur off a railroad track. The fire fell out. A summer orgasm. Human being as crossbow. Send shivers down both my spines. We were talking hip

to hip. That necessary moment of objectification when you realize "I could be fucking anyone or anything in the world", necessary distance for a man's successful orgasm. Sometimes when I see someone with his girlfriend I ask myself "How does he know how to fuck her?" as if fucking was a secret which only I had perfected.

Stalin called it the cunt of personality. I won't get self-concious or self-fascist.

Other guys said you could hear Florida jungle screams, or at least tropical murmurs, in Coral's orgasms, and who knows? I only felt gratitude at the bio-hospitality of her thing, that warm thing.

I discovered women, when they fart, sound like a mewing cat. Or snarling one. Not since Columbus discovered the ocean has anyone been as "Eureka!" as I, right this minute.

Crackerjack! Where’s my prize? Present the peanut! said the field to the corn. Said the burrito to the bean. Said the squeezed can to the tuttering, jibbering heroic Slipeye Sailor's shredded spinach.

The smoke of trash burners in backyards mingled with the mariuana smoke from campus. And Horace Mars’ rec room cigars. And aroma of Coral excited, etcetera. I was like an elephant in musth first mounting her. She's a Splashasaurus, and a man needs a full slicker raincoat—like when exploring under Nigra Falls (Canadian term for the underground railroad), only reason to wear a condom—when swimming or excursion-boating around down there. Coral's sea calves, like submerged caves to explore, snorkel. Felt like several massed armies, Wehrmacht Panzer tank divisions, finally moving west with horrible determination. All across your nation. My dick Adam's rib from which she was birthed. Our fucking wasn't like Adam

and Eve's so much as Jacob wrestling with the angel, who was maybe just a big woman after all.

I could see from the floor of her bedroom that, on a sentimental top shelf, Coral still had that little girls' "plastic surgery" beauty mask toy called Cut, Shape, Paint and Burn. Grinding together on the shag rug like musical sandblocks in an elementary school song, or mother grating cheese for a macaroni casserole. Mrs. Mars wandered through our lovemaking room in only her blunderbus-breasted bustier. No she didn't, I just made that up. I was stuttering inside her pork pocket, what she called my Pink Pet. Like those little dogs advertised in the back of comic books that fit into a teacup; hers was more like a kitten drowning in a well. That's why they're usually lowered in by the bucketload. And a bucketload I finally did. Long Lady, took a long time to spill. A folksinger sang that. Just a minute, I think I have to Ukraine.

Ahh… Hum gee, it’s a map. Comfort you can spurt. Criticism jism. Bells of semen, sitting on stools-with-tails of the speeding spermy demon. Slow in performing my ladyservice like a frozen bird taking flight, I rose like jissom and she asked for it. She roared like a rabbit. An atomic mushroom come. A gasp as long as a guitar solo, as long as a song, as long as an album, as a concert, as long as a career.

Bullseye! That instant in Detroit a cop shot a young Black shoplifter in front of Woolworth's. The mousetrap sprung, Snap!

When I orgasm in the night dogs bark and car engines start. She left me on my loins. I was born once and I was born three times, born stiff. The sleeping tyrant awakes. It always tastes sour after

something sweet. Pink epiphanies. There I was like a sacrificial lambskin condom. Sexually it was like sitting on a tack.

This was the best part of all that fun.

My second chord rang out. Dirigible waves, spunk-blue spazzattack pemmican wriggling out of its can. A-Go-Go worms. Eohippus just born, shaking off its legs and running away. The personal burst.

Merlin had the magic in his wand polished, a king's sceptre sprinkling benisons among the crowd, alms to the poor girls. Whirling shouts and boomflowers, four performances. What they call two-drive sweetheart wheels. A milk screw. Small festival balls, sober warning. A moon shot come fountain, caution emitting showers of spunk, showers of adult sparks. A thundering herd of sperm, bisonstampeded sperm. Sperm becoming a dogie drive up that Old Jizum Trail to the stockyard pens of her fallopian tubes, the Dodge City of her uterus. She was dragging sperm out of their beds to the basements of the secret police station of her crotch, breaking my prostaglandin windows. Sperm bookshelves, sperm bankroll of the sperm bankers. Bird-sperm'd. Supersperms, suburbsperms, synergy sperms. She took that baseball ride right out of the stadium. A marvel to behold. No, a marvel to be held. She thought of love and a hundred other things.

Sliding out sounded like the German word for "possession".

When I was young my blanket coming untucked from the foot of my bed was the most horrible thing in the world imaginable. In her mothers' bedroom, cum shot over the sewing scissors, sperm windowsill, like a drunk n' happy cowboy shooting holes in the saloon

ceiling Saturday night. Lollipops of cum. Now I understand Aldebbie’s song “Treacle on the Spotted Dick.”

For a moment we were sexually hushed, her loins said "shhh..." to me and mine replied "that's okay" to her. By this time in the evening it'd gotten like a stick deodorant, antiseptic'd perfumey smell, hard and waxy and translucent, but easily worn down. Her underwear smelled like maple syrup, the towel roasty like barbecued peanut butter. Hey, was I the very first to stick my dick into another dimension?

Our lovemaking took exactly the length of one side of a record, but I won't tell you whose. Our record had been playing over and over again, a stuck spot in her room after a particularly fluid guitar rattle on my part. Somewhat melancholy when she hurled a cowboy boot across the room to set things right. All good things have to come to an end and this one was just beginning. Two little pigeons on a sunlit roof going "mmmph...", "oooo...." softly. We lay there like two flaky mummies crushed together by shifting sands, pushed by the magnetism of a pyramid nearby. Her butt smoldering smokily like the slow conflagration of a rubberized ship. Shuttlebuses of dawn, sweet lacks of committment. The Happy Ending of Orgasm. Orgasm and its Opposites. It kinda makes me all white inside, she said as I was pulling out with all the trauma of the garage sale to the house. A soft white guest in your Butt Cadillac. Her going PATOOUI and spitting out the spurted gob from between her legs, squatting under the contraceptive circus-tent of her lacy upraised bathrobe, contracting her secretest, innermost muscles with a grimacing uhhh... BEE OHHH in a foghorn voice, must be the moon going AWOOO...

My penis like a pet turtle’s quizzical head, starting, retreated back into the shell. A two-headed baby turtle. They call it "going out" with someone, but isn't it really about something going in? Neuralgia of the vagina? No, she just wasn't getting enough put into it. That was her only frustration, besides wanting more food, drugs, adventure too. Never having had a pillow, at first I worried I couldn't get it up with corpulent Coral, but I did.

I said weepy tearfuck, not injurious tearfuck.

She took out her diaphragm for no man, that thing halfbublegum half-balloon. Her underwear boat. Out of the fire and into the fryingpan for them sperm. Her diaphragm a moonlike little bark, an interior "little man in a motorboat", a fishnet catching schools of sperm, a ship of fools. That which only one woman can wear at once. A watch only one person can wear at a time. She took out her penis extractor. A kidney-shaped piece of rubber, a red thing. Fitted for a pessary? Peccary would be more like it, tusked impatient little pecker like mine snuffling in the woodsy hills. I thought she'd use spermicide like all the things—fire, silver bullets, tanna leaves and henbane, bazookas, high tension power lines and nuclear fission— that killed colossal monsters in the movies on Kennedy-presidency afternoon TV. Devilled eggs. Contraceptive foam the meringue from the lemon pie. It took a Floridaman to realize Key Lime even feels like a cunt. Now she only has wind pregnancies. Like mammoth cave or fucking in a fohn.

As a band, we weren't yet expensive rockstars, tortoise-shell diaphragms for our girlfriends, hammered-gold condoms or

contraceptive sponges, cut glass condoms, some made from flower petals or the beautifully dusty wings of rare butterflies. Wrapped and sealed like every little bullion cube in a snaptop plastic can. Then there were the natural bands who just took a chance. So why is the shrink-wrapped record album Factory Sealed for Our Protection?

Sold for prevention of disease only?

She put back on the garment that protects women from themselves. Pantyhose got caught on an IUD. An IUD Indian.

Contraceptive electricians, underwriters' knot in his vas deferens.

The children's catheter. Lover in a mud hut. She put on a crying lap.

The French Car Wash, precaution against the foetusthreat.

Contraception, kind of cogito ergo zero sum. That interruptess. She took a reflecting mint. A sneer on her hips. Contraceptive jellies and marmalades. A semicircle of spermicide. Condoms were only condiments to Coral. A rhubarb rubber. Song of the Abandoned Rubber. A rubber full of blood. Given joke rubbers that, with body heat, agonizingly shrinkwrapped his constricted dick, like the umbrella diaphragms made by the same company. Here the Joke Rules. A condom like a windscreen on the microphone, straining out the extraneous noise of stimulation, I mean don't you worry about me babe. Most of the time, like all humankind, we just skipped it. What do you mean, so petite—did I buy what in the "Juniors" Section?

My stomach and visceral feeling was what they called flabbergastric. Still, I soldiered on. First course she served up was what they call hair soup. The fur stove. My mother had a fur stole— she went downtown each spring for Masadamaster Furrier to keep it in a cold storage locker every summer, free from moths—but Coral

taught me this other, hotter, higher adornment betwixt her hammy upper thighs. Maybe it is a fur store, bargains for all who frequent there. Coral voided the sacrament. Wet gold.

I could go in there, Coral's butt, I thought. Like an octopus squeezing itself through a keyhole. What Aldebbie brought to Michigan from the English Royal Court and country houses. She tried it once, not so sure; All I'll say about her is that intimacy occurred.

We made a lot of sexual curds-and-whey, and she was tuffettough. Coral, as the old bluesman sings in a song, ironically, comparing a woman to a book, I'm not a masturbator—I'm a lover.

The night was pierced by concupiscence. She dirty-sweetened my life.

Coral assured me I was the only boy her parents trusted in the house when they were away. Sweet thing to say, but I doubt it.

So tell me about your first time. OK, you don’t have to.

Her parents would be home any minute and I thought I heard their car pull into the driveway. Here come those Martians the Mars's. Horace will walk in shouting "Martini, please." They'd pull in and I'd pull out, tiny splatter, white tears like embers dripping and dropping across her back, laid a river across her legs. But we didn't get anwhere near that far for Coral jumped into that cloth bus she calls her clothes. She was wearing a batik orchestra, bathrobey-like thingy. At the door the moonlight bashed her face. Let's chop off a piece of the morning rather than sacrifice the night. If her parents noticed she'd changed her clothes, they didn't let on. I said my

goodbyes, waved nonchalantly to Coral, and Horace shut the door and turned off the porch light for the night.

After sex like a fireman washing, polishing the brass on the hose, that kind of satisfaction. Appreciating my finessed intelligence, my wicker will. The Sunday after sex. For once I guess I wasn't melancholy. Post-coital comfort, for I guess I had breached her cumfort. I resolve to shed my inhibitions like others are losing weight. It wasn't my billfold, it was my wallet. A fine mess you've gotten me into, Coral. At last I was finally relieved of the burden of virginity, that young man's mark of Cain, by sweetly capricious, affectionate Coral.

Now I understand. That's what "the cow jumped over the moon" means, a big woman's merciful, cosmic, leap of sex. The golden that-goes-there. Tryst and shout. Guess I’m baby-I’mamazed at my own orgasmic accomplishment with Coral. Like Shakespeare’s Romeo and Jew. Today I am a Spam, the Goat in Outer Space, a spasm, not a spaz. King Bee Spermatazoa.

I'd only known dangledates, poaching and smooching, fumbling first-grader counting in base two and New Mathless, where 1 + 1 equals null. Passion permission which asks How d’ya like them non-parsimonious persimmons?

Her operatic divabody the Palace of Wisdom to which the Road of Excess led. In a just society, my mother's friends—if she had friends—or Daffie Mars' circle of lunch ladies, would recognize a lad's fifteenth birthday by delegating one to bed him, show him "the facts of wife," the Birds and the Bosoms, as practiced. But not in stuck-up Aleppo, dammit. Maybe an untenured lady college lecturer in the humanities might say it sure says something about America that a

bookish and allegedly smart boy of today knew the word "rape" before I knew any other term for sexual intercourse. At 8 or 9 I could only call consensual union "happy rape", despite household newsmagazines full of allusions to rendez-vous, assignations, consorting, etc. Of course, Mom kept so, so much from me.

Afterwards Coral’s room smelled like old limousine. After the swamp of making love a small green frog jumped out of the sleeping bag. Lily pads stuck to her stomach. A fine mist rose from and hovered above her. Coral's cunt was now a steaming amazing Amazon's rainforest river, a rutting, roiling, riverrunning clamshell.

Freezer wrapped in bland bedsheets—God's towels—we’re in love in the hollow direction, in love in the rearview mirror. I’m convinced she too felt my bisonfire. She snuggled, nestled with a vengence. My sleeprisk. Fade out while fucking. She slept through our relationship.

She slept with two peeled onions under her arms. Bed a stinking sea, a stinking soup. The swamp our bodies made, a sucking sticky mire of captured LaBrea sloths, a baluchatherium that was me.

Glistening all over the bishophric, like the bishop's rings. The way a coffee can full of fishing worms in the wintertime gets all slime.

She said well that was nice, called me her fat prince and fat astronaut. Said I was as good as many thirty- to forty-year-olds, fiftyyear-olds. I'm not sure what Coral meant when when she called my performance very realistic, almost lifelike. A cathedral indeed.

When are you ever going to get out of me? she laughed.

Duration of our lovemaking? The record-playing length, one side of a seduction.

Coral's legs and bottom smooth and warm as the blanket between a saddle and a fine purebred horse.

That little biopenetratrix. A sturdy seductress, at her most oatmeal-bosom'd. Cuddly and unchaste. She's a star full of fuck.

The eye of the pillow. Her starlit detonator. What it means when a country-western music singer called Coral a saddle ridden hard and hung up wet. Eeuuww...

I wouldn’t call my interlude with Coral making babies exactly.

More like distilling homunculi, bell jar meeting beaker. Special sauce spark. Balls-to-the-wall research is going on in our town’s university, in government grant war labs, and ramshackle bedrooms of students or student-age miscreants around, and just outside of, town. Her bed was a Faustian bargain basement, showily displaying my fustian.

Still, I inadvertently smiled. Christ was a motherfucker when he sought Mary Magwheels as the flipside of his Mom. Maybe it was just her all along with her hair dyed young?

I had never been nude growing up in my parents' house. "Not the world's longest, but the sing-songiest" said Coral. She was a shrimpaholic for small men—I’ve found me a sanity girl! Though I'd always been impeccably clean, I guess I'd never taken enough Gym class showers, which is why I'm nervous in sexual situations. No victorious Roman general lordly conquering my sexuality. Coral had, on the other hand, probably taken too many foamy, milky and bubbly perfumed baths for one lifetime, making her so languid. Smelling of Oil of Velour. The stick-to-the-wall stickiness of the soap flakes in a student radical's Molotov cocktail. She wore designer hands. Coral's

cold cream wasn't really that cold.

A kiss, eyes full of Good Mornings. Her body a piece of cheeky cheesecake. A drawer full of cutlery. A woman's body, so determined by the curvature of the Earth. Then the moon's tides determine her Scylla-, Charybdis- and Krakken-moods. She's both sphinx and sphincteress. Down in the deli of love, and love was delicious here.

Look at us, bodies Adam-and Eve-fat. Lillith, Adam's first wife was also called Sophia, for the lil' Promethienne gave him knowledge, carnal knowledge. "I'll bet you fall for the first one you meet," sneered God the Pappy. Or like Tristan and Insult, y'know, great lovers. My Coral was more a wharf than a waif. Old Masters artsists liked that kind of female body as an excuse to tap the patron for more paint, a bigger piece of marble. Occupying so much of the bed she was like a bunch, a troupe, of real obese people— meaning like over 350, 400 pounders—swimming nude in the splashing pool.

Out of a clear blue sky she said she'd known girls who'd gone "crazy" with concupiscence, girls for whom this was their calling, and who'd left their calling cards of love on many a boy's veined desk.

She tittered on philosophically, saying things like "It inspires me to fuck", "I just like the sound of sex". It was always sex or something else. Sex like a glass-bottomed boat. My love for you takes on fiery, fucking forms. We were mean loverfuckers.

I have joined a league of mighty men. Never a bad blanket, this cocktail shaker. Always good to her love-occupant, whosoever's

sitting at her big love conference table. A lot of guys had come here, like G.I.'s in a dungaree house. Well-scuffed carpet in her useful parlor. Sawed into the plank of her legs till the logjam up the river broke. After 60,000 men she went out and had her buns balanced.

Stale soldiers from Coral's strategic panties tramp tramp tramping away from exhaustion. The names of Rock stars she had slept with were dropping like turds. Passed around like a rosin bag by several players in those bands. She ski'd down many men, and now my Matterhorn. She says she hardly ever even pees anymore, but who can believe her? Though she may have had a baby she was still capable of having sex. Baby tries anything. Here lies anyone. So I'm in love with a whore. An awful whoreful.

Coming out of her shower, she hadn't a stitch of makeup on.

Coral's body a pink Cadillac of a successful saleswoman. "Honk if You Love Fucking" said the sticker on her trunk. She appeared to me in the form of a naked lady. She had nothing to hide, reminded me of that educational model kit The Visible Cow. The Visible Naked Lady.

A spy satellite could peer down upon her nudity. My eyes never left her fact. Half-werewolf, half-mermaid. You're my bird come true.

She smiled like a woman can smile in the dark. When I heard on the radio "The quality will knock you out, blow you away," was the announcer talking about Coral's sex or some appliance store?

We lay back, took a reptile respite. I was lying there like a spiked German helmet when she came back in the room, a spiked dog's head poking out of a river. I imagined my cock had been drafted and was a general or a missle or a bazooka with a bayonet on the end, a medal pinned on it adding sharp pain to my fatigue of the

battle. She made my cock burn the flag. The racetrack groom, not having sufficiently linement, rubbed down my cock's fetlock. Jowls on my balls, a double chin under there, or that's what some girl said but she may have been pulling my third leg-ette.

I got in the shower, turned on the spray. Wet Noise, like we'd build into a record. Evidently her parents never noticed the trail of wet footprints when I got out.

The sex-to-semen ratio. I found her in the kitchen and asked What kind of animal semen are you eating on that cracker? It was honey. So happy we could hardly care. We raided the refrigerator and I've never seen such a museum in my life. Eating tunacasserolefruit, tumescencefruit pie, drinking diet eunuchfruit sodas. In the supermarket freezer find a special on Apostle Parts.

In the kitchen Mrs. Mars had this expensively bound twovolume set of cookbooks, Light Lunches of Heaven and The Rich Foods of Hell. Another was Cooking with Flouridated Water. The only books in the home were found in the kitchen, like How to Buy What You Love. Kitchen disease, sink-and-soapdish allergies, sneezing from a noseful of coffee grounds. It's mud too late. Love my household gods, love my household grievances.

Aftermath, the inevitable animal melancholy the Prepuceboy Adviceman column warned about. I felt puddy-tat-whipped. Feline fucked.

Daybreak. One of those two classical flute-filled tunes used in cartoons that represent "Spring" played, maybe both, as the sun rose

over Aleppo's cartoon landscape. Sunlight bounced off her chicanery, her cloacacryptic puzzle-parts.

And it was only about 10 p.m.

Now I feel modernized.

Oh yeah, I knew I'd forgotten something, so I went to the bushes and peed again.

Peeing outdoors, mushrooms grow where you pee in the woods. I remember the story of the girl who pee'd outdoors, she had a big mushroom for a boyfriend; she was one with the earth, the damp leaves and logs. Coral must be like that too. Holding the smoking barrel. Piss tinking in the toilet of selfawareness sounded like the phone ringing. My water harvest. Pulling 'em down like an elastic-waistband'd little boy to pee. There's a chemical in piss that's also in turkey, a Thanksgivingy smell.

Making beaglelectricity. Aw, to be a dog, all that pissing anywhere, impetous, sincere, ill-mannered barking. Tippy'd always been dog-affectionate, enjoying meals and pissing and humping in public, a puppy in the pound's lost and found. Now I'm X-Marking the Spot. Standing there I wondered, like in a dream. How have I acquired so much carnal knowledge of her?

Erotic freedom feeling out of control. Sex is a glass-bottomed boat, that allows you to see yourself smelling like fish. Friendly problems, the setting of limits. That night I found myself mentally retarded in terms of morals. America's extremes of rigid disciplines to extremes of selfishness and license. In the 1950's the average American was doing sexual things only the movie stars of decades

before had done. In the '70's Joe—or especially Joan— Schmoesixpax was doing what only Rock stars in the past had engaged in. No sex after 1970 was natural. Sex as something men think about and women—except tenure-seeking feminists on the University campus, who think about it too—just do. What a battlefield a woman is. Trying to understand this thing called female sexuality.

An itch in the kitchen. Bwanasex. The purity of pussy. After all, a woman's body, like a guitar, a washtub to sail away in as a vessel to explore the world. Bitch of the Sea. My mom had said "Girls are the gentler sex, but that's still sex..." and her voice trailed off in hesitation at being swamped with meaning. They just want to be held.

Love is nothing but itself, and any story after 1966 should say "love" a lot. Sex will always be a mystery and a mess, but sex will always be cool. All our kum n' karma. The act of love is anything but an act. Man in love as a sad and foolish clown, a buffoon in a bad thrift store painting. Love as a game of one kind of impotence or another versus love as a game of one or more strengths. When I first saw her reprobate face that morning I felt I'd been hauled into a principal's office of pure sunlight. Who first goosed the duck? My gooseneck heart craned for an answer. How'd I get this Queen of Sugar? Looking at the sun through a telescope until your brain burns. We will burn in the light until the light goes out, then we will burn in the darkness. Tangerine heart falls from his girl-tree, rolls into love. We're still capable of having pretty thoughts about that, huh?

My heart beat fragments. My tummy heart. My baloney heart.

A forest of hearts. Dense thicket emotions. Wodchopper hearts, sharecropper hearts. Coral, you're the salt in my sea when we heat

up that heart soup. My dovecote, my lovecolt, my come-away-fromcome. Maybe we should go to Hawaii and make love in the steam of some wimpy volcano, bathe in magama. Out in the nipple-fresh country we'd smell like tea. Make you the casaba of the casbah.

Coral I like you too much to further subject you to the inanity called love. Coral, am I Dean enough to award your buns their baccalaureate?

I know, you specifically told me "Don't fall in love with me". I'm not very gallant to like you too much. The destructive labor of the glibness of love. The gods were soaping my objective windows, not simply knocking on my door. After throwing yourself like a monkey wrench into the somberly-functioning machinery of my life, you sabotage and short-circuit a boy's sloppy head. Punch drunk from a woman's rabbit punches, and the woman always seems to hold the rabbit's foot. Sent away to throw myself between the wheels of other, safer women. I should be banging my head on some other woman's sternum. If I were sleeping with someone else I'd think of you. When I grab my best friend the oceans smell like marijuana. I'm just a kissaholic in a romantic athsma attack. Now my heart is the Booogie Berlin Bunker. A series of bungled affairs, which I underwent as a dead child, have built a reinforced-but-static Maginot Line around my feelings and libido. Why am I telling you this? Come make out with my heart.

C'mere, flesh ocean. You're like a volcano to me. Be my lunar volcano. Her belly of validation. Her mony mony mons veneris, her sookie sookie. Underamazons like Coral amaze me. That post-sex stoned reverie the Hindoos call Hanuman Languour.

She sure knew how to use a boyfriend, again. What am I, an exploding cigar? She left me with nothin' but a Py-co-pay and a Pez. Love is a stranglehold. To like you is to hate you. I was born with a broken heart. I'm a bloody heart afloat on a choppy sea. Overturned by a heartwave. My heart threw up. My heart is a private detective, a ticketholder on the excursion boat called love. My animal of evidence. A criminal of passion, fucked up n' irrational, I'll scurry a retreat of a million erasures. A seduction rooted in hell.

Coral, don't sully your face with a smile. You even broke my horoscope. A displacementometer would show a definite moodfrost.

Let me wash your shame, hose off your pride. Hold her head high in night school. Hold her leg in France, a sandcastle on the Seine.

Coral, put your heart around me. I love you more than the Beatles loved all the girls in their songs. I give you all the cliches. I need you like a moth needs wool. I have to stay up all night just to catch my breath. Kisses so good I have to holler for help.

I came from my eyes, some tears. Maybe I'll just come that way from now on. I'm just wetcursing her now. Tender gripes.

African heartburns. All this thinking, meaning-squeezing I'm doing on the subject, then I tell ya it hit me like Kahoutek or pieces of that teacher in Skylab falling to earth.

My heartaches have been worse

since I lost my virginity.

For girls like Coral, sex was fun. Just fun.

After sex, I think I fell into a female sleep.

She used a magic perfume to make me like her after the act.

May have been called My Thing, or something equally continental.

Yes, used it on my. Mine. Z-z-z…

She must be called Mars, goddess of war, because of the eternal War Between Men and Women that the Chomps Trio even sang about, a creaky early-sound musical folly when especially young and vaudevillian. And after Coral has died, men will look up in the sky, at the full Mars, girlsblood-red and bigger than the Moon, and remember her, fat buttocks and loins presented to them.

Presented to us.

I went outside, looked up at the Great Square Penis constellation. Damn, there's that museum gila monster, that swirling Havana Gila monster up there too. Summer constellations are Lion, Virgin and Scales, which means aggressive dude pops her cherry, faces consequences. In the old midwest skies, Traveling Salesmen, Farmer's (or Bailbondsman's) Daughter, Justice of the Peace saying "Hold hands, you lovebirds", Rhinestone Ring, Shotgun, etc.

From here, looking up at the Moon I can see the Sea of Contemplation. If you have sex with a woman on acid during the full moon, she'll howl like a wolf during orgasm. Had something to do with the boy babies the she-wolf birthed to found Rome, Carthage and Constantinople.

Tinkle tinkle drip. I finished up peeing in the elasticity of the night. The University of the Night. Drunk on experience. I stood in the front yard shrieking Look! Smell! See what I stole, now I'm the King of Rock n' Roll. I had joined the company of other cunt oilers.

The Highschool King of Cuntopolis. Who was to predict Coral would finally end up with this New Age Nixon, this Agnew of Rock, the

formerly Mr. Always Second Choice? America-stained, I celebrated the Fourth of July in Coral and that meant a lot to me. Swam through a firey battle in that Kennedyesque PT Boat butt. Pubic hair red white and blue, Coral was an all-American ape in bed.

If it really was her first time, why the motif of blood after making love, how could that be from me? A firehose out of the Firehouse that spurts tomato juice for Bloody Mary's at the firemen's barbecue?

One fire station dined on pompano and oysters while an old woman's house burned.

To sum up. There was no way Coral would have to

worry about getting pregnant from this time. No way in Norway. No way in the world.

It may not have been Coral's but maybe it was my first time.

Was I a Virgin Mickey until this Christlike cunt?

After all, I'm rumored to have a sister. Same name as my Mom. Maybe I have practiced on her. Inside and incest. Insight and insex.

I'm losing the birth-layers. For somebody's first time, our sex had a high signal-to-noise ratio. There was evidently some mild lovemaking, a mild consummation, a consommé of consummation.

Coral sexually annealed me, like fire to bread dough. Like the marriage of bread and fire. Man, by then I was breathing bread, breathing hard. Sex, why, it's...it's First Communion and Confirmation rolled into one. I felt like a rejuvenated juvenile delinquent.

Now I'll never have to attend a pit bull dogfight, or a cockfight with feathers and razorspurs flying, flecking blood. No more earlier exchanges, furtive up north vacation attempts. I needn't ever buy a prostitute for now I know what it must be like. She jumped my bones.

I'll be one of those men who'll marry after the first time he finally sleeps with a woman and doesn't fall in love.

It was OK that we made love, wasn't it? Seduced into her baptism. The process of natural seduction. She wanted it, that's not possible, is that possible? In quasi-total venereal agreement. To love uncertainly. The rest of the evening she was like a door that wouldn't stay closed. Happy hips. Got love upside the head, was loveside-down.

Some girls just lay there, were non-orgasmic, hence blackboards for those students to work out their sexual equations upon, a lot of saying "hmmmm..." instead of "ahhhh...". She treats me like one more peg in her lovers' library. Coral's secret she let me in on was that she and I had smoked enough marijuana that, for all the times she'd been tried and user-tested, with me was the only time she'd actually had an orgasm with a man. She'd only had them onstage. A cat having a tomgasm. No wedding nerves with Coral, I was her reward-toad. She makes me feel so good as to ask What is the reason men are Gods?

Now I could relate to the idea of orgasm. Not bad. Fun. I could have fun. I am fated to come back and ride my Coralhorse.

Many sperm evenings ahead, anticipated.

On the way back to our Firehouse from Coral's parents’ house, I passed billboards WASH IT AFTER and PEE AFTERWARDS, knowing and cautionary. Real men must have put those up, good sexual citizens, erecting prophylactic public health messages for us all.

I went over there a couple days later, hungry for more. But she was actually in a state where she didn’t want to do it. She was looking very down-in-the-month. Denying me her crabbyhole.

I

offered to take her underblunderbus, which could dislodge any constipation she might be suffering, but she declined.

“Take down your frogpants anyway” she chuckled, for I was wearing this green shiny pair I thought looked military.

She oiled her fingers, stroked me gently but with determination.

She took my smile in her hand. She's got something growing in my pants, standing up like a dead dog leg. She petted the little animal that pointed downwards. Low songs on gland piano. A baby pickle. Sluicing the steppenwolf. She kept herself to the two food groups, the white foods and the pink.

The dick is the rod of authority, the schoolmaster's switch of correction. Beginning with Nixon every U.S. President took the honorary nickname of "Dick", though there's never been a President named "Peter" or "O'Toole". I craned my dick. I spontaneously took a shower on the spot.

She chuckled, "milking a tiny cow".

Amazing. Coral had just shown me how to masturbate, for those times when her phone was busy. I was amazed. I'd been told "Don't play with yourself" before but I'd assumed they meant guitar so I started the band. And I guess the tone arm massages or masturbates the record. Coral, of course, was born with her finger in her pussy. Masturbation with a nasturtium. During the organic food

rage, Tippy once sent her a carrot with which to insertingly selfpleasure. Why is there no name for female masturbation in the Bible? Coral did it with fastfoods like frozen cutlets, I could tell by the strange knowing freezer burn in her eyes. Sex for shut-ins and stayat-homes. The singing midnight. Mysteriobation.

When Coral did that for me, with her pudgy hand on my pud, she bestowed upon me the Sacrament of Masturbation.

Coral showed me something I hadn't always really understood when Tippy was doing it onstage.

Suddenly I understood what my own band was about.

Coral loved to tell me about intimate subjects, educating me to the priveleges of femaledom. A doctor who was performing heart transplant surgery on Coral when she was 10 1/2 popped a zit on her hear's sino-atrial node, unleashing a torrent causing her to have her first menstruation. She had tropical flowers in her menstrual flow.

Like they sang about in the bloody Civil War, The Monthly Coming of the Lord. Her mother enrolled her in Christian Menstrual Practice but she'd skip it to watch faithfully the TV puppet for girls Howdy Clitoris.

She used a tarpon as a tampon. There were public tampons in those days, like public transportation.

The old joke about the drunk teenage girls on a train: "What were you doing in there?" "I was having a baby". Get on that Having a Baby Train.

Something taken out of there at this time, red as a pale white girl who sits outside all day with her shirt off. She-vomiting. . Like a bottle can't fill itself full of whiskey, she had to go through her

menstrual drill. The breath of blood as she removed her so-called American Handkerchiefs. Wrap my feverish head in a sanitary napkin, like a wounded fifer in 1776. The red eyebrows of Christ.

Long red legs. As wet with red beer as when she was first born, and I'm probably not the first to say this. At this time women called their periods "the time of their life". The rubycopter. Like a maiden aunt they called her "Flow"; the colored Motorsburgh girls preferred “Floy Joy”. She made a Japanese omlette peppered with pink sperm.

She wore a sanitary napkin as a swimsuit. An ammobelt full of tampons. Fizzing redpop passion. A ruby, her menstrual jewel, menstrual drool.

But Tippy she let splash there. A swimming pool full of tomato juice like you might bathe a dog in, one that had encountered an angry skunk.

When a man discovers that women menstruate his whole perspective shifts. This gets serious. I thought a white laboratory rat had drowned in a pool of blood at the bottom of the toilet but it was only her tampoon. Like the seashell I bought up north called a Bloody Tooth. The Scarlet French Letter. Blood and idiocy. Ever since she was a child in Tampax, Florida.

Every time she had her period—"my boyfriend" she called it—it made her long for a child, anybody's child, to blot it up. When menstruation finally came it was more like a when skindiver's mask is smashed with a hammer and gore pours out. Red as the Firehouse.

Rorschach blots and Japanese flags all over the sheets. She got up from the table "all menstruated, thank you". The man got a pink moustache. Lustmuzzle when she bleeds in back. When girls called

their periods "the time of their lives". You got to take what she says from behind. The pizza of her period, a little spot on the refrigerator shelf, the porcelain sink, the dishwasher and medicine cabinet. Now she's an empty rose. This never-conceived ruby, name it for deassasinator Jack Ruby. That Big Red Indecision. That Red Detachment of Women. What Dink calls their distilleries of blood.

Like sleeping in a trench full of wounded, the officer commanding "Stop bleeding!". Rode that blood bus. Tippy once had a girlfriend so young that nine months after they started dating she had her first period. Sounds like junior high study hall or homeroom. He always needed some new blood in his bed. Girls having their periods bursting like full tomatoes on the street. Flood enough to stop a wedding. Cloaca-eyed for Sex and Accident.

Her fat menstruation. Her calendar boyfriend. She made the musical instruments menstruate. Monsters of menstruation, like a rich nun. First menstruating female astronaut on the moon. Her menstrual redpop soda frothing down there, blowing bubbles into it with his loins' straw. Out front, tubal litigation bigwigs debating Is it legal for a girl to get pregnant? Do women get tamponstones? Small red Southeast Asian jungle fowl, the ancestor of all chickens. What was the make on her pelvis? Bleedhead. Red Spurt. Roll out the Red Barrel. Wipe her butt or menstruation, it'd be motor oil. She's that Michigan. She felt her cunny was a stewpot that sometimes needed scrubbing, Coral I could be your ghost writer, working on your memoirs those few days each month and call it Seeing Red. Menstruation equals procrastination? No! Look how fuckin' long it took me to

bleed out this book, and I've been in the monastery of solitude, stamping out license plates, fifteen, twenty-five, thirty-five years!

Engineering students from India did experiments to measure the voltage of Coral's "Red Energy" during menstruation, of sex among fields of corpses and forcefields, on blazing trad-jazz funeral pyres made of foolish golden iron pyrite and petrified wood, determining if it would be sufficient to electrify the subcontinent. Her blood spurts everywhere, a monthly ocurrence. If it were weekly, now that would be something to worry about. Her Kotex Kotillion. A Pungent Judy Show. The semen Biograph, red from menstruation as the lady outside that shot Dillinger. Coral's menstruation as a charging rogue elephant, I suppose. Inflatable tampons, advertised as non-defeatist. What pursers on a cruise ship call the Big Red Garment Bag. Coral learned to keep her streetnavel clean despite dirty-minded boys. Blood from a breast. Fleck-o'-Blood candy bar.

Her monostigmata. She got bored with her own blood so got p.g. A TV series "Blood Sector", except it was about spies. Menstruation in some girls equals defenestration, or red smears spelling slogans vandals put on the elementary school windows, "Cram it, Mrs. Cookie" and all that.

Coral’s blackface menstrual show. Not that I knew what a colored girl's period was like, they didn't show that on the Sligo Sundaynight Show. Girl groups didn't have matching sanitary napkins, nor red stains on white satin supperclub gowns. Didn't bend over and wince with cramps, or cuss out the avuncular host with flashes of anger and despair.

I went back to Coral's house several times. So polite that once I even caught myself saying "'scuse me" to Mrs. Mars' houseplant.

The terribly useful youthful Coral, I squiered her to this teen party of younger rock n' rollers, the next generation, whom she said I'd get to see play behind her next week. A neon party where the lights were low all night—"Lights out’ has no place at a well-mannered party”, said the Dear Abbess. Pale dancing of the "Commotiontown" in this clubhouse of guilt.

Yet I don't think Coral was going to let me do it to her again, and I was thoroughly bummed out by that. I spit in my salad at the thought. When I asked her why not about a million times Coral finally said she had a nightmare after screwing me, of a giant moth on the missionary position pinning her down, entering her. Wings folded behind it, the color of hush puppies, dust brown. It's mandible snout licking her naked body, under my sunglasses and hair. Or else dropped onto her belly, wings aflame, smoking something horrible.

Impassive black bowl eyes peering into her face while strange ineluctable congress takes place. Rolling her over and pulling the essential cables out of her neck and spine with obscene jaws, crushing her fingertips with its leathery wings. Finally, eating all the wool garments in her closet. She woke up, kind of grossed out. She didn't know if it was the guy or the pizzas she ate before bed. A nice day for an acid flashback. Sooooo stoned! The back of her freedom.

Subservience is golden. Normally Coral slept like Saint Teresa next to the Lord. That's a pretty lame excuse.

I went again to see Coral—third time’s the charm—but she had the People's Puma Party negro Geronimo Bucephalus over, and he

was shirtless, barefoot, smoking a cigarette with the look of the justsatisfied. Still, in the bathroom she lifted her shirt, leaned against the sink and scratched her bottom provocatively. I took her then and there. Afterwards, sitting on her bed, she asked me to stay over with them since her parents were in Florida with grandma, at a greataunt's funeral. I stayed, and it was amusing and instructive. Coral like the sweet filling of a sandwich turkey, twice-skewered on a spit.

No, this never happened. I went over, but when I saw him there, I split. Kind of regret it to this day.

She missed that oceanic feeling that Tippy did to her. She liked being the cognac center of attention. The Thirteenth Annual Grapple of the Groups was next month, conveniently the weekend of the full moon. So she resolved to appear at the Farmer Gershom Council Grounds rocknrollishly having her nightly orgasms onstage. That'll show 'em. Body of Christ High School hosted a Feminine Purity Conference for its soda-jerk sodalities, and bands were hired for that.

Teenage Drug Safety Awareness Week was a last-ditch attempt by "hip" City Council and Police, and tax monies went for top local entertainments. But the Grapple of the Groups wasn't like that. It was secular, it was messageless, it was youth-driven, it was hot.

So I went to see Coral and her young musico-friends at the Grapple of the Groups, wallaby babies and exhibition bison. Coral had discouraged me from brushing my teeth nightly with cheese— bleu, limburger, or fine European rinds—which I always thought was a suave and continental habit. She said not. Had I misread

something? In any case, I showered, shpritzed scent, put on clean finery and tasteful medals, badges, regalia for the occasion.

The Grapple, aka "The Rattle of the Rock" was an annual event staged for the youthfuls of a small town several miles south of Aleppo just to take the edge off things. It began with a reading of the Declaration of Toys, for expensive musical equipment was awarded to the winners who usually then retired from creativity. Thump had generously donate an evening stealing equipment for Coral’s band to use tonight, which they could keep. When I told Dink about Coral and the famous distillers, he thought that if he had her too, he'd get some of that magic, their mojo. Or at least complimentary drinks, like those little airplane bottles of their wares. Nevertheless, hung over and groggy, he didn’t accompany me here tonight.

I got there early, like I always seem to do for everything. The audience was young popcorn-colored people. Sitting on the concrete floor, peering, studying Advanced Rocknrollology. Bands in the dark, or bands with dark grey clouds for heads that'll never make it.

Twelve honest bands called up for jury duty. Some bands were so boring, they looked like badly-printed high school yearbooks, dull on the radio as broadcasts of school board meetings. Rock athletes in torque-fitting shirts, steroid haircuts and glaziers' stares. Drumbeats like angina'd hearts, chewing gum onstage. Song called "Art Gallery" that began "Gonna take you to an..." then the drums went Whump!

Whump! Whump! The Pied Pipers of nearby Hamelin, MI versus the Rock Musicans of Bremen, the latter with burly builds like dockworkers or Coral.

The Question Market did a passable cover of "I'm Semi-in-Love with You." Eyes too close together on five o'clock shadow faces.

Wore rings and seventh chords. Awkward gestures, sore arms, guys that never said "Goodnight". Hair household-cemented to their heads. Triple Republicans. Future chaplains in leather feathers. The Profanes, who pretended they were all defrocked Priests, for publicity purposes. Someone who sang one song thought the idea of driving a car all night was exciting. It was only the mythology of light and amplifiers that made them look like someone special, like higher evolutionary forms than they really were.

Then a silly band with a silly drummer, the bored n' fey bassist doing hop-from-one-lily-pad-to-another delicate frog dances. Selfdisrespectful. Peasant puds. E-Z-Bruise Egos while pretending they’re Ego Beavers. Songs like zinc plates falling from someone's belt to the floor. Reverb rattlers engulfing the joint in Canterbury Cathedral catacombs, somber as a crying child lost in the sewers of Paris. Other groups had childish amplifiers, impotent grilles of a foreign car, or played through a clown's bubble machine. Trying to be Tuff TV. One group played a thick cardboard music, fibrous damp and musty, thick as birthday cards. Notes as a knife-thrower's business, sword notes thrown into the audience.

This made me realize once again to what extent the Chomps were the Alpha and Omega of Rock around here.

Next act was the disappointing Charcoal and the Sobriquets, her chuch-hewn voice soaring over the mediocre backing. Get-ahaircut sneerfaces. Then the Horseblankets vs. the Doghouses, the

latter all teenagers too young to have been in the doghouse..

Anyway, I put my magazine away and concentrated on the subsequent bands up there. At the Grapple, new young bands, shrieking like seagulls on a beach up north; birds triggered by fan support of classmates, not popcorn or spilled fast food in a parking lot macadam. There was to be one more band after the Nosedives, in their leather flying helmets, goggles uncomfortably over hornrimmed glasses, and nickel artificial noses made for World War One veterans.

A half-hour later, the Biggest Boners in Our Graduating Class, whose band name admittedly amused me, had just finished obeisance to dead and Afric art forms as college-bound students often did, when it was announced that Coral's band was the next contender. Coral first considered a sexy come-hither name for her band, along the lines of the all-girl Hurlmedowns. But, considering her po'-faced clowns, settled on the kinda stupid Cosmic Coral and the Marzipans.

One of her old boyfriends, a dour sort named Soupstain, was in that band that'd just finished and kind of lingered dismantling and disfiguring the drums in order to glimpse her again. Her band shuffled into the hall carrying equipment, cigarettes carried at the corner of their mouths. Dufy guys, some maiden-men who answered an ad in the paper she'd placed a couple weeks before. Drummers who play drums with their funny bone. Twice as big as the rest, I sat with her claque drawing attention on the concrete floor at the foot of the stage, joining them in bellowing and caterer-calling to the besequined girl-mound onstage.

She hadn’t played with a band for a while. Not since her one-

shot memorial concert for girls from her high school who, on spring break or upon graduation, in California or Jamaica to insert vacation boyfriends, then went surfing when menstruating and died in the inevitable shark attacks.

Coral onstage, just being there provided one hundred and one comforts to the largely--and getting larger--male audience. She was all dressed up like one of our TV favorites, that late-night monster movie hostess claiming to be half-piglike animal from the floor of the Amazon rainforest, Tapira. Barbed-wire jewelery, choker and halter top. Or the comic strip villainess Genocidella, her double whammys pressurizing her halter vest. Killer bosoms. Her fly-whisk nipples.

Aretha Frankenstein. Tall boots with boyparts clamps on them, squid holes in hers. Special folds in her jeans to emphasize Lady Chatterly's lil’ chatterbox. Ripcord on the crotchstop nylon dance pants like the top rung of a rollercoaster, like the top of an escalator.

Within sparkling distance, she was so sexual up there she was downright spiritual, bodhisattva in a body stocking. Take down your pants and dance!

Once Horace Mars condered even managing the Chomps as a tax write-off, then thought to manage Coral's band, then thought better of the whole idea and forgot it. Horace once claimed he'd played string guitar in a western country group called the Chicken Inspectors, but he may have just read that in the coffeetable collection A Treasury of American Sex. He waited for Coral at the lobby bar when she played the scruffy old King Priam Hotel of Lysistrata, Michigan. Horace wanted Coral to sing the Stuck-a-

feather-in-his-cap-and-called-it Mickey Rooney sort of show biz Americanacaca. She had supposedly tried to talk her mom and gram and even a couple of Motorsburgh aunts into a 1940's henna'd harmonizer distaff the Duennas, singing "Everything's Coming Up Flesh-Colored" with a twinkle in her eye. A trillion twinkles. She has sung at angles to the crossroads. The rose of cultivation. Keeper of the Royal Dust. The velvet puddle.

Coral had really wanted to join one all-plump-girl band called the Thanksgiving Turkeys, but the others all thought she hogged the show. Nevertheless I knew a lot of girls from high school out here, a very brassierey area. I'm a tit man out of motherlust, into big girls.

Like girls who wear t-shirts with witty, pugnacious mottoes on them then get mad when they catch you looking at their chests. She impressed me deep within my baggy jeans or winter courduroys.

While her band played a short version of the instrumental "Music for Bed", she shook that thing, big brass-bed bones danced in the round. Did these basin-brains even set up their equipment right?

These stevsdores of the tone deaf. They fumbled around onstage until the band broke into some tried and true old standards which they had to keep starting over. Sad cycles. Stage whines.

There was a kid in Coral's band named Decadero. I thought he was a private club's host in Aldebbie's London, or name of the club itself. Could that be his son? One of them, when his pendulum had chosen to swing in that direction?

Some of their instruments were pathetically out of date, a lemon elephant. Cheap pre-strung Evertuned guitars, inspired by a whore's

own Everturned brand of tricks. Bathetic wheeze of the Phlegmfisa organ, just letting the air out of a tire underwater. Coral deserves better than this. A band is a think tank, or maybe the opposite of it.

By this time even butchers, who'd accidentally split their hands between their fingers with careless cleaver chops, had taken up guitar. No way those stout guys could've hung like Christ on the Cross anymore, but they sure could spread 'em and play.

The Grapple of the Groups was a form of annual ritual warfare, warpaint on faces like Lincoln's beard on teens too young to grow one, or spatter on Bozo's whiteface. A cordon of incense kept them away. Coral finally turned her face towards the audience for effect.

Eyes, overpainted topazes of scorn. The sensual allure of a jumbo jet. Pretty as a French filing cabinet. Her hair fallen into disrepair. In her facelight I gazed up. A figuress. She blew me a kiss as small as a potato chip. She told me she'd appear onstage in clothes made of garbage, banana peel minidresses and see-through blouses made of coffee grounds sewn together. I say "onstage" a lot as if to people like this, people like us there's any distinction between eyes-of-theworld and offstage privacy. There might always be a reporter from some magazine lurking someplace, a snap snap papparazz, and that was our moral code in a nutshell.

Crosseyed and braless. Her shakefront. Coral's only underwire bra that guy’s electric guitar. The sound of one breast clapping, thwakking out zen rhythm. She had a meter in her breast.

Nipple aureoles around our heads. Pumpkin nipples, her monkey refrigerator magnets. Coral's breasts bouncing like her mother's checks, both to the consternation of her father. I look at the badly

mimeographed program, Coral Mars and her Bare Breasts. Innocent jiggletits humor bounced off of the decadent pessimism of the young like me. Remind me of this movie I once saw at the University "Parturition in Michigan", full of tip-top top-heavy native girls, and I always liked these big titted Kathys. During practice Coral said "Hey, in some band the drummer should be naked". Women are better drummers because of the internal clocking of their periods and the rhythm method of contraception. However, when the band appeared onstage it was all guys except for Coral, so I guess she couldn't seduce a girl on such short notice and flimsy pretences.

She began by singing "I Got Bats in my Hair", weaving her fingers through it like a dragonfly too. Queen Victoria was the first to try chloroform during childbirth and marijuana for cramps; well, Coral was the children's book foolproof Jubilee Empress of India of Rock.

Girls like that you'd only see Druid'd-up at Scroungehenge. Girls with that cabbage cough. Teeth like the crashed front of Horace Mars' car when he encountered a slow deer on a country road up north.

Decorative moonpaper all over the stage, she'd shopped in a DayGlo goods store all day long, determined to make the stage festive the brief half-hour she ruled it. She appeared wearing an archangel wrapped around her hips, murmuring "Kiss My Wings". That tower of eyestrain, that egomaniac. “She's just a void in which manners don't exist” said one petulant girl. She was often seen at a lot of public approval places. Shaking the dime-tree, shaking out the deluge. I don't want to get into frug-splitting. Shoulda known something was up and off-kilter when she sang "Hysterctomy Train". Pointed at me in the audience and derisively laughed. Those who've never stopped

to contemplate the similarity between the names "Jesus" and "Jizz" got no religion, nor humanity. For those who've never ridden a catapult. Coral, my oyster of empathy.

I noticed that Henry Threadbear was seated beside me, furiously scribbling, so I looked over and saw he wrote, reservedly, that her voice was like a creature half-cat, half-dog. After all, men are like dogs, women are like cats, men are like Congressman Gerald Ford. My legs buckled from being tangled asleep when I got up to go outside for some fresh air. But I didn't go, I stayed transfixed to the concrete.

Onstage, that girl was an inumane live animal trap. An audience of all her old boyfriends and Boy Scouts in Philmont belts admiring her. She was between Rock and numerous hard places in the pants of the guys in the audience. Sailor boys in silly shirts.

Shrapnelnosed men. Liposuction teens. A manic-depressive sect.

Blue-eyed Christians. Weekend atheists. Oasis breakfast teens. A mattress of numb neighbors. Big surfing swastikas. Smelly winter coat boys. Fans of a radio station that advertised itself as the Frequency of Vagrancy. This had all the innocence of an early Tippy and the Chomps gig, which made me smile and fell mature, seasoned. Girls a Godforsaken tribe of the Clitoris Indians. Badly Abraham Lincoln-skinned plug uglies. With that guitarist she gave her impression of a roast pig with an apple in its mouth. Guitarist hunches forward for a solo like a dead child supported by angels, dog angels in medieval, renaissance and reformation hair hanging down in their faces. Honeybrained, a honey-toed honeytoad. Muttered some somnambulists' bull about still getting the bugs out of this

haircut. The strongest alibi is excellence on that grand driveway, the stage. The crowd were teeny Indians and rainy horses, as this was out in the country. Like a Re-elect Pontius Pilate rally.

Coral's band was really too young to play songs with so much meaning. Those musicians just blood furniture to that blood furnace, Coral. Her bad little band of weird salad-bar boyfriends, little virilities.

Her band mere infants of the I-told-you-so. Kids in dream uniforms for miniature games. Her band a bunch of other little little pelvis heads, leering for their chance to leap upon her after a party. She had this string of slippery little boyfriends, the kind who'd rather have their shoes shined than shower. Tiny priests. Endless children rumbling like an orchestra chasm. Drums like a picnic chest exploding in the hallway. A necklace chain of lovers' brains round her neck. Dimestore womanbone and its manifestations, oral tendencies and olive-breasted. Dying to be her bedsheep. Not a coed, the few laid-back college students in the audience threw summer frisbees to her. Somebody lovingly stabbed her with a tuning fork. Be your Ms. Care-for-You. She was hysteria onstage. She caught on quickly with the dogs. Neither tragic actor nor whore. Vincent Price may have shrugged.

A heckler in the audience, perhaps referring to Horace’s conservatism, hollered Aw, your father’s earplugs! She cackled back No, YOUR father’s hair plugs! Score.

But I've got to hand it to her, she was good, like a beer popular with both blacks and whites. Onstage Coral was formidable, like a steel snotrag. Built like a hot water heater, complexion like a

fibreglas furnace filter. My bright and shining cow. She's built like a truck with tiny wheels. She's like a shit truck in the trashy night. She was squat, big tires, power under her hood if the metaphor was extended to mean her blue jeans, jacked up n' overheated, like a muscular Motorsburgh car. Coral like a dragstrip hotrod Kustom Kandyapple Kar Kaaba Khrist's Mary Magwheels. Sunday! Easter Sunday at Golgotha Speedway! Quarter-mile Stations-of-the-Cross pit stops! Boy, I could really advertize her, write her copy. Meeting boys equals "street racing", going down the "quarter mile", sure.

Fifteen hundred men as lovers, extending her warrranty. A whore of substance. I'm breathing the air of despair while she's going down the road having pubic hair.

Onstage Coral danced the Bee, like a bee or an entire hive of them, or a pendulous paper wasp nest, swaying and foaming with infuriated yellow-jackets, each itching to sting some mofo. That billowing bitch, towels in her teeth, she was positively sweating PMS. She was a sixteen-year-old chain reaction, like a cherry bursting in the distance. A bouncing bathroom, shake your fountains! There was no letting up! She's one brain-fever bird, that Coral. A sea anemone feeding on her eye. She wore an IUD onstage but the music opened it up like a bent safety pin, jab jab. She's got me in a Rock hold too. The one I love from behind. She's wearing her smudge suit. The lily effect. If she was wearing a meter it would've registered in the red. Applying secrets to her body. Beyond giving advice. Pushing in her forehead for emphasis. Her belly expanded and contracted, like a great oval ostrich egg praying desperately to hatch. Steamroller hips tumbled over each other as she never lost

her balance, her foghorn voice soaring and tearing the posters off that gymnasium wall. Like a blindman in a ladies room, she proceeded obliviously. I had too much to dance last night. Beautiful broken stems, red lattice phrases, cat-a-mountain looks. Cigarette butts pounded the stage.

She twirled, she spun, this way and that, now facing forward, now back. I admit, I slathered over the deli-delicous moon sandwich in those tightly stretched jeans. As did the hundreds.

Coral spun around, the rhinestone plastic spangles on her tshirt like the bullet-riddled corpse of Marilyn Monroe, riding with JFK in Dallas that day, on her knees and fellating him in the open-topped limousine, or pulling down the top of her strapless gown to the crowd's (and grassy knoll gunmen's) delight.

Will her top come off,

stripped bare by bachelors, maybe?

Coral's supercleavage onstage. Military fieldnipples, like a breast in the battlefield. And didn't Fieldnipple Publishing Company produce modular reading materials that we used in grade school?

Sorry, I get distracted. Her hair a set of bagpipes, tubes emerging every which way from her cheekpuffy bag of a head. The band squealed like a Scots regiment too. She turned boys' peckers to stone when they saw her bobbing unchained breasts. Monster of cuteness Adorablondzilla, smashing downtown buildings. Coral's voice like a braying snowfall, like the Elm Meadows Bomber Plant, and engines of its B-112 Sadocater, air whooshing past gunnery turrets, open bomb bays over Berchtesgaten. The voice of Venus, both goddess and hot, gassy planet. The one enveloped in clouds of

lust, boiled sunlight Coral's polyandrous beat, the bouncing of multiple husbands on bedsprings. Like—and it's not always this way in Africa—how a female lioness might have five or six swarthy mates; the bride of the pride. Before her gig, Coral had collected a multitude of fireflies— nearly impossible to do it this time of year, you better believe—which she ground up and ingested in hopes that the lights in the hall could be switched off at a dramatic moment in the final song and leave her glowing, eerily phosphorescent in a kinda ersatz light-show effect.

Didn't work, but she reported a mild buzz from the pulped insects.

The guitarist, a boy named Mark Wallop, began a muddy, indistinct, undistinguished riff. Not the brightest antenna on the satellite. In defiant response, she turned around and bounced her butt at the crowd, seat full of sandwich meat. Her beautiful ballast.

Her butt a natural soundstage, echoes like from doo-wop in its cavity.

A weighted woman. Now she was stoned and swimming; in a certain light these hippie women just a bagful of hoopla, repentance bags.

The solid gold sunroof. This steateopygatrice in bumble beeflight.

Steateopygasaurus. She must have one Hell of one of those exercise bicycles, a Steateopygator, the brand made out of a semitruck, at home in the rec room. I would've loved her had her name been heavy-breathing Emphesymephantine.

Dancing like the Earth on its axis. Generator wars smashin' ass. Her butt a singing bear. Coral should make an album called Oldies Butt Goodies. When I say '"her butt" I mean "she", the way colored blacks say "yo' ass" meaning "you". Her butt was as big as

Main Street's biggest bakery in Aleppo and all the old women in uniforms who work there. Temptationweight. More sugar in her laughter than her urine. On an all-menthol diet. She wore omlette underwear, a black leather omlette. Now who in the Midwest hasn't heard of Coral's bonbons, truffles, caramels, cremes and mallow?

She's practically shitting clothing, shitting cupckes. Some wag whispered to me that Coral could shit whole flowers or the sugar roses found on wedding cakes, and piss perfume when she was in a good mood, though I suspect that's just the unrequieted imagination of some highschool yearbook poet. I punched him out anyway for the audacity, behaving for a moment like Thump. It's only Rock n' Roll when you can shit onstage, sometimes just hippie catshit; Tippy merely hurled it dry, but Coral may just get down and dirty and squat.

She called her princessly microphonic sceptre "Jesus' Dick" and sang to high Heaven into it. Kids hollered back "Somebody cobbed it". By now I was just worshipping the worship. Half longhaired woman, half bison. She's the easiest girl in the world to love.

Coral was a mockingbird of Rock. Voice like she'd gargled with blues dye. Every word pregnant with impudence. Pubic impudence.

Her world-opinion breath. When Horace came and conceived her in the Florida night, the old bluesman Bawlin' Woof was singing at a barely-electrified chicken-n'-shotgun shack roadhouse midnight at the crossroads 'cross the tracks at the edge of the swamp, and it just kind of wafted over. Like the red dust New Orleans was scared was blowing over from Africa. She stained the room with the watermark of her voice. Her accent was an accident. She said in an

authoritative museum-guard voice "C'mere, kids" or "Calm down, kids" as the situation demanded. She opened her mouth and a wasp flew out. Her voice a moo-child, a barely hinted cowstrain in her best backpocket voice. One long divine unearthly cough. Weird of mouth.

A roar like a lemon sky. Squeeze my leg till the juice runs down my life. She wipes herself on newspapers. A roar like so many kisses, you felt her tongue before you heard it.

She led the band through a creaky but sped-up version of the Beach Bachelors’ “Sun on My Buns”, but Michigan kids will never feel Surf Music, just not in their beach bones. But her "Baby is Punctual" and "Got Me in Escrow" were amazing. Rock is full of remembered repitition, and we're still dancing on the same floor. Beat up your mind, your heart and your elephant legs. Big-breasted voice like twin speakers anouncing bargains in a supermarket, soundboxes on her chest. That's why they call it a double bass. She sang "Depilatory Dance" with its chorus Your hair comes out at night, "Up on Mental Hill" and "When the Trap Door Shuts". Saxophones farted out exclamation points, filth trumpets. When she sang you'd see her Adam-and-Eveula, her epiglottis splattered all over her throat. Money mouth. She bellows till her language muscle stuns. Chiming with the gasp and moan of an ice-imprisoned fleet. She was baying like an Australian dingo-dog, thistles in his pathetic paw. Her voice sounded to me like smoke, matches and ashtrays, the jingling of hotel room keys characteristic of a woman much older than herself. Fat spoilsports might say Coral had a gruff voice from sucking too much dick. The dead were brought back to life, fried in the batter of love.

Steam rising off her eyes into the air. Girlagressive declaring She-

war. She got the western movement, the ways to move men. For every lewd action there's gotta be a chain reaction. A chain reactor turning into a moebius strip. A scream with flowers. Sort of a girlmeets-a-Vandegraaf Generator sound, bzz-zz-zzcrackle. Coral, you take the drugs of the competition.

Coral in public, what a star. Flipping about her room she was just a sleeping girl singing in front of the mirror, the girl who bent over, but here she was this fat pornocratic child goddess, strange cult diety of the Late American Empire. Her stage-monitor amplifier was made out of the head of John the Baptist, perched on the edge of the stage facing her, woofer in the grinning mouth and tweeters in the eyesockets. A gift of Herod Enterprises in Kalamazoo, for her father had done some tax evasion work for Old Man Herod, happy to oblige.

The humming from it seemed to say Salome, Salami, Baloney!

Coral was knee-deep in a swamp of boners now, her spring peepers pump pump pump pound pound tura lura lura lay. Years of yards and yards of thighs. All that audience fell into the dumpster of her cunning, especially those boys-will-be boys. Coral was cum-plicit in those guy's crimes; get it? She would put up her hair, scratch her neck. A battered-boy-sounding voice. Who's your brother, baby?

How's your father? Does your uncle bob? Love burns on elbows and knees. Curved eggs popped out. This satin schoolgirl screeched like a cat at a stranger. I didn't say songs based on old folk songs, I said on old fuck songs. There's a difference, dear.

As the Grapple heated up and stirred, men were falling like tampons, spilling from a box on the top shelf of her closet, before her

formidable talents.

I saw somewhere a learned guy at the University was lecturing on Coral Intrigues, and that kicked my imagination into gear. Peering over his steno pad as he scribbled notes, Threadbear said philosophically of Coral, "Beauty is only quim deep."

Grandma ad suggested she take the stage name Sad Cleavage, which was the name of a boozy late-night-against the world instrumental jazz album popular in the 1950s. Perhaps the LP was soundtrack to the last time Grandma and the late Grandpa Mars did it, sigh.

Incredible problems with my passion, I got a date with a lady of fashion. Sure, I could see Coral on the cover of Modern Butt magazine. From the publishers of Popular Genitals, and the same format. You'd be surprised, a lot of good maintenance advice, clear diagrams.

Isn’t there an eastern European movie “Closely Stretched Jeans”? Every mood and inflection by the German model Neudsch (pretending to be German for "nude"), monotonous and monotonic but all over the radio under the limousine hands of her Svengali pop artist Lux Vitruquist, was copied by Michigan teen vamp Nembutalia.

And Nemb momentarily gazed at me, sighed, exhaled a Madame Claude of cigarette smoke. I think she has her eye on me, if I ever tired of Coral.

No photographer could capture Coral's beefsteakness. She made a sandwich out of the audience with her legs, the crowd riding her like a motorcycle. She used her empty stomach as an

instrument. Her Buddha face was all sweaty-pan-betty, swimmingpool smelly. She changed her outfits like Buddha changed the leaves on the Bo tree. Inflating Coral onstage like putting up a tent, a liferaft.

Shake your upside-down part! Watching her felt like being with a hurried person. She had an affair with an orangutan. A menagerie-atrois, sex with two animals. She'll be riding six white horses when she comes. The cornucopia of our desires. There was an orange skull or two and a devil sky full of sky-blue stars in that musky dusky dusty Grange Hall that night. To hell with treble.

Boy if you could hear the sound of those staremakers, it sounded like a four-alarm fire. One guy played guitar loudly, static electricity sparks on his hands running amok. Those guys in her band used cattle prods on their guitars, so when her energy flagged they goosed the Rock-hen till she cock-a-doodle-dooed some more and reared n' whinnied. Both guitarists clutched a garter snake onstage. Antigone and her epigones. She massages, postillinages the guitar notes. Emotion pictures, thick with bravura. A stripper in earlier days. Flamenco stamping on tiny stiletto heels, the exact opposite of functionality. No, the performance didn't cause her to spontaneously abort, she decided to schedule that next Monday.

Outside Coral's performance at the Grapple, harvest woodchucks and possums danced in the moonlit fields. There was interracial dating between a raccoon and a skunk. A girl pushed me out into the snow, an idea tangled in her hair, but I ran back in to watch Coral.

I was fascinated by each and every one of her sexsongs,

staring up at her awestruck like a pigtailed child in German-speaking mountains, lured by come-hither zither. A mermaid singing like Ethel Merman. She sang about what she could do, Rock Your Boner and Take Your Prick. Clitor Rock. Her mumbling flesh, and its effect on a boy’s knife-sharp mumbley-peg. Within a budding groove.

Karate chops and spinnners’ legs, appreciated by a frontseat bunch of teenboy skirt-spelunkers. Like a glass envelope I could see her sweet laugh, Gauguin-googing through a grass skirt. Could see her nuttin' button. She's like a roll on the sofa, or the flowery chintzcovered sofa itself. Without gym clothes, she's the female Mussolini, the Peggy Cass, the Shelly Winters of Rock, and I’ve been there.

Coral as the closest thing we've got to a female body builder, even if she only works out in front of the refrigerator stuffing her face and behind closed doors wrapping her legs around some pimplefaced boy. Hey hatchet snatch! somebody hollered, and was quickly shut down.

Then things started to get intense, serioius, seriously intense.

She's what the French call L'Inconnu du Sein, the unknown—or maybe unknowable—breast. Whoops! There it is. Then the other. We’re near the climax of her act, and perhaps act of climax. Coral lifts her t-shirt and flashes the audience. Her visibly-pregnant filling breasts cause a great scandal, newspapers' GIRL, 15! headlines. She was promptly nominated by one of the feminist radical parties barely on the ballot to the School Board, yet denounced by others as self-

exploitative. Like a multi-breasted goddess, like the topless cellist in VIVID magazine, or the VIGOR magazine cover that removed her Electroflux TV Bra, so an ancient Spanish cellist could investigate closely above his spectacles.

Title of that book I bought for a quarter in the library sale, The Wetnurse in Wartime. In classical poise and balance she’s a Venus de Megalomania. What the opera-loving rakish high school French teacher Monsier Oohlálá might call cleavage sauvage. Ever since Tippy’s naked chest of lead, naked chests of lead singers displaying themselves like billboards waiting to be chopped down were ubiquitous, legion. Now Coral decided to yank off her top, set free the femininity. In that light she practically had three breasts, a motion effect when she jumped up and down. Onstage I swear the strobe light made Coral now have multiple dugs like a sow, dangling for the nourishing pleasurelux of the runty band, suckling each band member in turn. A bitch cat with a litter of kittens, me the runt pushed aside.

Dirty gritty, cop-a-titty, witty pretty take-the-kitty. Coral's concert a party of babies drinking, chatting at the breast, bikers at her breasts sucking like off the spigot of a keg. Like the she-wolf symbolizing the twin cities (in theory) Aleppo and Ypsofacto, she took up an entire stage between old Farmer Gershon’s amplifier stacks and milking machines. Too many breasts except hers were PA column and guitar amps.

A jealous rival girl rock singer Nembuthalia hurled acid into Coral's face. But as it was lysergic acid, it only baffled her slightly, made her momentarily forget a song’s line.

Everybody knew that like a 45 rpm record, Coral had a large hole in the middle. Mrs. Murphy's Pay Envelope. She was shedding pounds like she'd slip off her panties. She's underpaid in her underpants. Wearing a see-through pair of pants called Null n' Voids.

She did something that reminded us of something else. All eyes upon her snotch, the pubifurr’d notch there.

Like Tippy, she was actually going to strip down onstage and show it. Climbing up The Ecdysiasts’ Crucifix. She's potentially naked. A giant bovine, as seen in the documentary “The Growing of a Girl.” She’s a bushnecked bushel basket of talent. She’s pottery in motion, a lump of wet clay on the wheel, spinning, shaped by the fingers of boys’ eyes. Promising backbreaking love, not boredom love. She stoops to socialize, eh? Cagily exposed her blasphemer femur.

Finally all the clothes in the world disappeared, disintegrated and she was left, fringe tumbling—her Mom had worked so hard on that costume—the band playing faster and faster and better so as to be too busy to laugh and lose control (like the Chomps so often did).

She became a nude abstract shape, flesh skies of love; Oceanus Fleshiana. She shed her skin like a big fat snake. Climbing to the slippery part. A flap of gold. Her twittering twat. Flared genitals under her bellbottomed, bedroomed pants. She showed us the Big Sequin. Was she making a donnerwetter in her jeans, as some babe's bladders can't stand the rock n' roll strain? No, it's gazzum!

Oh not really, but I was imagining how she could, would.

She was sending each of us Godivagrams of nudity. The performance culminated in the liquefaction of her clothes. Well, imagined anyway. Still, the dark front of her stage jeans indicated either loss of urinary control or a hearty, juicy orgasm. I so sincerely hope the latter. Glimpsing me in the audience triggered it, I’ll bet.

An anticipation real pretty; legal pretty. Nevertheless, Coral sang an updated version of the old inspiration "Don't Cunnilingus Me, Satan" that culminated with her usual orgasm onstage. Was hoping it woudl be one of her legendary spouting, spewing ones but this one wasn't, just a restrained gasp and satisfied shudder lost in the guitar feedback and tumbling drums.

Coral's orgasm saw a buzz run through her hips haunches around me like a jujitsu bee. An orgasm like Christ’s own, undoubtedly. Deep into her undercunt. By then she was covered in friend-foam.

There was something pure, celebratory, collective and inspiring about a big girl onstage shuddering like that. The pulse and its wave of energy probably stalled cars, tripped circuit breakers, baffled radar at the airport, shut off electric appliances and ended radio transmission for a couple minutes like a sunspot. Go! Go! Go! Yessssss… Coral, flooding orgasm onstage, not risking the life of youth at the Grapple of the Groups seated at the edge of the stage, but disgusted at its stickiness. The sound Coral made as orgasm approached, like a train gathering steam, boiler under rising pressure, lawnmower engine ready to fire up and start across a lawn full of gravel, pebbles, avalanche detritus and boulders.

Her chakras are firing on all cylinders, every one. Her magnetos and hyroelectric turbines spun, churned, rumbled. A wave of white apprehension gripped the young male crowd as it dawned, probably from a vulpine or canine olafactory sense, upon her approaching orgasm.

After a false start, a fight started when somebody hollered "I hope you lose your baby". A few bottles crashed against the stage but she thought they were only her subsequent onstage orgasms.

Sang a song that asked the musical question "Deserve an Orgasm (Onstage)". She had once asked me out of a clear blue summer sky Have you ever had an orgasm onstage? (I haven’t) but this was different. How is this different from a traditional stripper, Rock as Burlesque? She sang "Come or Peace" in memory of John and Yoko. Coral sang a song "Have You Ever Done It for Money? (Well I Have)". Began with that very adult "ooohh...". Growled a female growl like Mary Shelley at her monster. I was most impressed. She was shiny with cumstain. Rock was her Ubangi discharge. Exotic, erotic and esoteric. Punching her diaphragm in its envelope toilet, singing a song about "Driving Inside Me". She would open the King of England's kilt, rakish Edward the cigar man. She leapt and vibrated her nakedness, showing things to the judges they'd never seen on their wives or the women they lived with. Overtaken by nakedness. Stripped down to her sunstroke. Her whistling fork. She was the projection of a pornographic sun, a humid shadow, her suncakes gleaming. She got her power from the moon, from the recent moon shot from which astronauts and ground crew brought

her a piece of moon rock for her poontang so they could put it there themselves. You know how little monsters like warm dark smelly places, a scorpion climbed into her like into a shoe. Coral had panty hose woven from spider webs and you know where she was wearing the black widow spider. But she had toads in secret places too.

Shall I start an intellectually progressive band here called the Fatherforgivhersheknownotwhatshedo?

People copulating in mid air, comet-in-the-sky copulations, instead of just dancing. When "glamour" meant she made your cock invisible to you, made you think it had disappeared. A pocket calculator with a boner. The crowd loved what they would watch open-mouthed but never touch. I sure did. She's all crotch. Picking up the microphone with those pelvic muscles I told you about, she'd twirl it around over her head like a boondoggle lariat. Spaghetti and merchandise. Muscles for squeezing a bully or squeezing out a baby like others, younger, might pop a zit. Kegel muscles full of Krugerrands. She took the microphone fully in, looking like a grinning store dummy mannikin when she nether-swallowed the length of the microphone stand. Standing astride the microphone the amplifier feedback hummed and wobbled something fierce over the insistent pumping pygmy beat and guitar advance. Her entire body throbbed as a bass speaker until she slid that thing out. Like emptying the contents of a cat. Not standing ovations, but she got three standing ovulations. She ultimately came sequins that fell all over the first two rows of the audience. Buttflies were everywhere, circling the stage.

Orgasm like a fireman spraying criminal Motorsburgh rioters or

student protestors with his hose, except it was by a girl. She literally smoked her ass off. What a show.

A party in my ears for days afterwards. A vision of kleig lights, love bursting all around me like wet hundred-watt bulbs. The light that dries my eyes. Coral is some kind of healthy, resplendent and resilient hope for the future.

And the baby? During Coral's performance the tyke played quietly in the dust, then fell asleep inside the bass drum.

The prize for the Grapple of the Groups was either musical equipment or a lifetime supply of canned fruit, candy cigarettes, camping gear, etc. The gong sounded, the smarmy television host came out, young talented Coral was presented with a large check and sent to a resort hotel to wait for the promoter to arrive and dismiss the chaperone. You win the copper pot. She shat dimes upon winning. She appeared once on TV, and saw how small though colorful she appeared on the 36" screen, sank back into obscurity.

Some artsy boy she briefly carried in her handbag painted a mural in the hall near the art room of the high school, showing Coral, stylized but very realistic, singing to an audience of little yellow stars with smiling, comic book faces, and written on the stage painfully and selfconciously, LADY MARS' SHEEP. Coral wanted success so bad so she could buy her mother a house with a bathroom for each of them, each equipped with one toilet to pee in and one to poo, and thirty-one bidets, one for each day of the month. A very adult adrenalin. Hoping there was a talent scout from Nubile Records ready to spin her.

She bent the Pipe Cleaners all out of shape. That poor smalltown highschoolsters’ band had drawn a card of dumb luck that they had to follow her after such an initiation. Used to staring at TV test patterns, those stoned young men watched her with the attention a sperm watching the splitting of a zygote.

The Aleppo Auroch could only spare its sportswriter that night, who wrote that such action hasn't been seen in that town since the Lampreys vs. Ospreys game, pitting all the good kids from the two nearby highschool against each other as, by implication, this event embattled the bad. I wonder if he even attended it. Yet the Grapple of the Groups was written up by Threadbear for CumOn!. Most perceptively, he called Coral's agglomeration of the evening "ClitorRock", positing the band as the spot beneath the finger with which she pleasures herself.

Maybe Threadbear ignored he night of lovegift glory, but fledgling local rock critic Mark Twain wrote in The North Territorial Road Enterprise, a neighborhood shopping weekly, "She bends herself back like a bow, she pitches headforemost at the atmosphere like a batterjack, she whallops herself down on the stage, and Rock n' Rolls over as does the sportive pack mule after her burden is removed." That was Midwestern American literature too.

Coral celebrated the bands’ baffle, the Grapple of the groping Groups, by staying out all night with a boy. I puked on a girl's shoulders close by, lost my ballast and balance, getting up, for my legs were asleep. The expression a bear makes when he gets too much honey. Drove home alone.

April 1, 2020 Bay City, MI 48706 USA