Allegedly, Fun (part three)

For Don Pépé (José Donoso)

© Mike Mosher 2020

From University Museum dioramas we learned Michigan had endured the cold and wooly Bisontecene, then the snarling and forested Wolverinecine epochs. It could survive this confusing era of Rock.

This was probably my brother Thump’s favorit era of bands.

The healthily swaggering and burly wave of virile, agressive Rockers soon wore off, dissipated to an oil-change-pit of violence-prone groups like the Band of Sorrows or the First Blunt Objects, the Roadblocks, the Kick Boxers, the Unfair Fighters and a gory dance by the Exudants. A stern guitar instrumental “Sten Gun” by the Ambushmen, and suspicious instrumentals, like "Mashed Potato Israelites". Corpse-scary, surfers’-hearse-Rock instrumentals by the Entombments. One bull-crystallized organ riff sounded like Bach's "Mass in B Minotaur."

The straight-arrow Pre-Law quartet the Habeas Corpsemen became the loud and grating Habeas Corpsegrinders. The Adulthoods were actually hoods, petty criminals in stupid Knuckleduster Brown shorts and collars, men too long in the tooth to really be called juvenile delinquents any more. So rather than going straight, they went musical. Of course Thump liked these guys. He shook his head furiously to the beat of bands like Atrocity Widget, Weimeraner Honor and the Femur Eaters. The Toppled Headstones, evoking our vandalism in the Civil War Catholic graveyard, when we should have been peering at lovers in cars, that I probably shouldn’t talk about.

No songs or riffs by the Pilfers were originally theirs. Though

simple and kind of stupid, I preferred the military bugle boogie of the Oak Leaf Clusters to iron powderpoufs like the Dream Castrati, and those bands who recorded for the Poxmusik label, started by an exNazi from Germany. Though its wind-up toy soldier rhythms were fun to dance to, their aesthetic was balanced by some weirder developments around here. Like grim collegemen the Jewish Corpses, shtetlgoth and bookish, who grew up reading Popular Monstrosity magazine, cutting it up or assiduously copying its movie stills in ballpoint pen drawings. The Befuddles’ “Girl Guide for the Perplexed” and he Uncircumcised had hits, though other suburban M'burgh kids celebrated their Jewish heritage while lampooning their builder-developer fathers by calling their Escargo blues band the Restrictive Covenants.

Vyvvyan and the Vivisectionists; what they did to those sadeyed puppies, that beagle onstage was really horrid. I had to turn away. Thump, of course, relished the gore, as did most guys in the audience. Those "Slaughterhouse Sound" bands got crazier and crazier, whole barnyards onstage going under the singer's (and often pointed out Thump, the drummer's) knife. Wurst-making performances, Kosher or—the latest fad, out of Motorsburgh, of course—Halal rendering. The holy man, bearded rabbi or imam, or simply a local hippie carnivore (often amphetamean guitarist Reb Narthex), was usually surreptitiously tapping a tambourine at the edge of the stage until time for knives to come out. Or in one band, the Man of Faith placidly smoking a hookah; I half expected the band to cover the instrumental cotton-candy AM radio chartbuster "Hubble Bubble".

Instead, they half-exploded, in real animal blood.

You had Daniel Boone-type backwoods bands with hickory amplifiers and buckskin drumheads, bone guitars in stout and shaggy bands like herds of buffalo. Bands that looked like the guys who killed Lincoln. Trapper bands like the Pinecones and the Woodsheds came out of the woodwork. Trailblazers of frontier violence like the Thieving Nightshirts, clad in Danielbooneskins, Patbooneskins even, wearing live squirrel ties. The Loggerheads and the Salt Porks.

Canadian bands the Mapleteeth, the Ospreys the Otters and comedic Blue-Footed Boobsqueezers all got a lot of airplay. The Bounty Hunters and other hunt-crazy bands like the Nimrods (recorded on the Lions' Breath label, lots of breathy echo), the Disturbing Thunderstorms, the Fiercests, the Fusillades, the Fratricides and the Foes. Fiercefights broke out between the Sidesplitters, the Shinsplitters, the Quakerflayers.

FM radio oinked and bleated a jostling slaughterhouse herd of brutal, impassively insensitive albums like The Bleeding Dress.

There was one Rock star the General, who'd sing lustily about war.

Then came the Battleships, the Jailers, the Wardens, the Prison Guards and those hip confined women the Cages. The Troublemakers, raucous cops on LSD. An all-rapist band (were they off-duty cops?) called Well What Was She Wearing? The Let'em Have It With Both Barrels. Pop police bands the Entrapments and the Strip Searches. The Blame-the-Victims, the Painkillers, the Illinois Dinner Jackets, the Onslaughts. The Wife Beaters. "So Clot Then" by I'm Bleeding.

The Fragments, anti-war band (originally "Fraggers") burst upon the scene like a fragmentation grenade hurled at an incompetent junior officer, in the battlefield at its most dangerous to all.

Then there were the Grave Roberts. The Castigators’ "Strangled in Their Sleep" album. The Delinquents, the Intimidators, the Naysayers, the alleged Murderers, the Aided and Abetted Criminals. The Irreconcilables, the Romans, the Parricides and the Pissers-in-Public. The Strikebreakers, the Rulebreakers, the Shakebreakers, the Bums and the Bummers, the Hindrance, the Bunglers, the Robbsters and the Gatecrashers. The Brickaholics, who threw one too many bricks. I'd be downright scared to go to a concert of the Drunks, the Trouble Drugs, the Hobnail Hooves and the Vivisectionists. Still, they all pay protection to—and get fan mail from—a motorcycle gang the Royal Freebases. Chain letters, chain mail using the chains that they swing around in fights.

A gross unpopular-with-girls group called the Child Molestors.

The Circus Who Wanted to Kill Their Parents, or was that merely the title of a movie at the drive-in?

Black Mattress. Steel Cheese, whom Tippy called “Stale Cheese”, haw! The Rebel Scapegoats, though we northerners had no sympathy for the Confederacy conjob. The Dreyfusards. The caustic sodality of the Lye, the Overbearing and the Tiresomes, the I Want to Farts. The Rivals, the Killyourselfs, the Off Guards, the Dupes and the Limps. The Flyspecks. The Fake ID's, the RunOfftheRoads, the Bridge Out. In the Washington D.C. metropolitan area the teenage sons of JFK asassains got a band together called the Grassy Knolls.

A band called the Illegal Home Taping Industry. The Idolators, the Trucebreakers, the False Accusers, the Munitions, the Fell Swoops. The Old School Crossing Guards, the Good Abusers, the Unemployments. The Maltreatments, the Muggings and even worse, the Naggings. The Officer Tippets and their Tippetinas. Baby policemen like the There You Have Its, and "Under the Knout" by the Louts. Spooky Hell Enough and the Heart Eaters' "I Eat Baby Hearts". A werewolf singing "My Dog Has Fleas", but only humans liked it. The red buttoned Skeletons, the Antichrists' Skulls, the Enemy Library featuring Red Guillotine. The Viet Nams, the Gun Crews, the Concentration Camps, the Deaddest Vets and the Viet Congs, remembering them all. The Early Graves, the Quicksands, the Body Counts. Viet vets shuddered at mention of the Poonjy Stix.

The Guernica, hectic, powerful and named after the city. The “impeccabilly” music of Billy Servant and the Manslaughters. The Cut-Off Hands; I mean, how'd they play their guitars?

The Blues Bludgeons. A band that gets real "serious" onstage, for this is a tale of men who keep themselves menaced. Push came to shove in hoodlums of sound like the Zyklon Bees, the Mach Schnells, the Scoundrels, the disinterested Disintegrators and the AngloSassins. The Depth Sounders took a sounding of the tremblor of the times and became the indiscriminate Depth Charges. Then followed a wave of accusatory groups such as the Who Stole My Wallet? and the Who Busted My Watch? A band that robs banks—or was that just a badly-remembered TV movie? Terrorist bands like the Kneecappers or the Letter Bombs. The Krugerrands and the Algiers Motel Incident. Terrycloth Brutality and the Butchers, the Corpses,

the Complaint Department, the Finks, the Cattleprods, the Demands, the G-g-girlfights, the Bayonets (from Bayonne), the Gumshoes, Burnt Owl and the Tireirons, all appear with the Ex-Firemen on the Fireplugs anthology album. The High Crimes and Misdemeanors, the Inauthenticks, the Peer Group Pressures. The Aggregates of Aggravation, the Whispered Questions, the Danger Signs, the Hairy Men, contrasted with bands that looked like the witches from Macbeth. The Quarrywomen, stripped down and sweaty with Rock and rock dust on their faces, gloved hands gripping hammers that alluded to castration, the crushing of a man's own rolling stones in their rolling mills-of-sex sound. Some guys who didn't know whether to call their band the Sons of a Bitch or the Son of a Bitches. The Ogres, the Gestures, the Conceits and the Stretchers. Bands like the Doves of Peace and the Olive Branches were laughed offstage. U.N. bands like the Staunchest Allies. Socially concious bands like the Black Like Mes. A band that spits on Dag Hammarskold's name onstage. The gut-wrenching Rock of the Snide Remark.

I seriously didn’t feel safe at the Massacre Lake Rock Rumpus, a festival of menace and mayhem. The Punchouts. The Drowned Rats. The Abrasions, the Concussions, the Minor Cuts and Burns.

Bob Gundamage's revolving groups the Stun Guns and the Sten Guns. The Secret Germany, the Ribbentrops, the plaintive howling of the the Das Schweinhunds, weimeranermaniacally guilty and fugitive.

The Detonators, former members of Malcolm and the Malcontents.

Lord Corpse and the Stadium Rapes. The Faux-Motherfuckers and the Forcecritters. The Automatic Backstabbers. The Percussion Warships, the Septic Hairdryers, the Flag Desecrators. A band in

KKK robes (they didn't really do anything) still suffered well-deserved political attacks from civil rights bands like the PollTacks. The Rockabilly Racists, denigratingly known as the Legal Lynchworms.

Revolutionary band the Heads on Pikes. The Dangerous, the Worthy Opponents, the Irrational Clergymen, the Every Action's Opposite Reaction. The Snyper Fyres. Psycho-isolationists like the Control Room, the Scare Tactics, the Gropes, several albums of illtrained guitars and barely-intelligible lyrics by the surly Bookburners. A band the Sunday School Windows, named after something they must've wanted to break or somesuch.

The Blindsiders' lusty ballad "The Virgin and the Hog". "Billy Goat's Gruff" by Turk and the Trolls. The garralous Greg and the Garottes. "Martian Megadeaths" by the Heavy Metal Pretzels, "Effrontery Rising", published by Unhinged Music Ltd. The Nine Point Bucks gored the White Bucks while the latter were gazing at their shoes. The Damnedest, a band called Kick the Blowfish, the Bun Kickers, "Vindication Day" by the Throw Rocks. The Spiderbites, the Nixonbreakers, the Vigilantes, the Citizens' Arrests, the Mental (or Moral) Fragmentation Grenades. Bomb-throwers the Bomb Throwers, the Projectiles, the Blasties and the Exocets. The Stolen Dirt Bikes, the Suicide Notes, Lord Treachery and the Lanternjaws, the Sucker Punches, the Puddlejumpers, the Treetrunks, the Heartstoppers, the Chickenwire and the Strangleholds.

Even the harmonic, wailing Circumcisions became the sharp, metallic Circumcisionator.

All these violent guys, how must a woman feel at these concerts, in cars with boyfriends popping in their tapes before

popping in their tips? Underlying all this stale pigiron noisehowling was the threat of violence to the girl’s body. Terrible as the potential threat to it of love itself.

Still, I guess we didn’t think much about it in those days.

Wintercold. Snowfat sky full of snot. Hypothermia’s Battle-ofStalingrad winter; snow corpses poking out of, guess what, the snow.

Not really, just unclaimed roadkill along the roads. Tired of applying it from a truck all season, the previous winter the city of Aleppo finally decided to just repave all the roads in salt. Cold umbermilk trees, twigs. Winter like a skipping record, stuck repetitively. Gad, I’m sick of it. I’m a hypothermiac too.

Winternight. Under an ice moon. The sun swears it plans to rise, but it’s only the sun of darkness. This time of the year, barenaked trees like the ribs and limbs of skinny bands like Tippy and the Chomps.

Depression is surprisingly cold like Michigan. Things came from all over the world and died here. Spiny trees. Lime juice sky.

Clouds grin like pale-Hell gourds. Under a rag-picker's sun.

The time of winter when spiders build cobwebs downstairs, corners. Psilocybin webs in my night mind's sky. Weather was important. The cold grey of Michigan smokestacks hanging like a beard in the sky. A currently-popular song began somberly with "Sometimes when I fuck in Winter...", possibly foreshadowing impotence. The day committed suicide.

In some aprtment windows the lights of Hanukah, proving how just a single teaspoonful of atomic communism, a highschool

greaser’s hair gel, kept the Motorsburgh riots continually burning all day and all night for forty of them one Biblical winter month. How many of Coral’s classmates were given abortions as holiday gifts by their physican fathers, hospital-administrator mothers? Probably a lot.

Banal winter sky under thick blankety cloudcover the sickly yellow-greenish white I painted the face and hands of my gluetogether plastic monster model Operatic Murderer, grotesque and shrieking unmasked with cape aflow behind him. Yeah, that color today. The Norse wind, for it blew over ox-faced lumberjacks up north (He who smelt it, dealt it).

Freezing rain was predicted in all the papers. In consolation, cold water is cleaner than hot, and always cleaner than it looks.

Dumb rain. Rain that washes the sleep from the corners of eyes, making sedimentary rocks and erosion out of women's faces. Sad onion rain, kissing in the downpour. Grey day, badly Xeroxed. A half-eaten day, the day had a runny nose. An imperfect sky. The day sucked itself. The rug of sleep had been pulled out from under me.

The morning didn't work. It's real cold, somebody must've put a part in backwards. Left me with a cup of tears. I have no pets. Under a sullen sky, the color of a cement plant, and the snow later in the season would taste like cottage cheese. Cold, dark late-Halloween winds, pregnant with threat. The guage on the day says Empty.

Blue Degradation. A spell of non-weather, non-Sun (cogito ergo Sun) in a non-sky, non-temperature that's non-warm. A kicking rain out there. Rain or snow impeding our progress like police dogs. Winter is something made out of frozen snot. Feet like bison, trees on the

horizon like black shoes. Roughnecked against the cold. One of the world's worst things will happen to you.

One of those Michigan days so cold you want to take a welder's torch to your face, itself a welders' mask of ice. The logjam of your thoughts freeze up in your head, the warm runs down from your frontier nose. Tippy would've had his nose taped up and hung to drain upside down. The sky had a stuffy nose, a head stuffed with grey clouds. So cold germs wore condoms. The wind like a motorcycle. So cold that winter in Michigan that there was no weather report, for the funny weatherman had used all his expletives, his superogatives. So cold spermicides didn't work, at least not without antifreeze. The wind-chill factor was in my blood.

Or the snow puked down. The unceasing snowdrift of the unconcious. The unceasing unconcious. The unplugged sky. Sky in its skivvies. Winter makes it hard to walk, worse than even a boner, despite the fact that the genitals have to be a few degrees cooler to make boneration even take place beneath that clothing. Distances become difficult, bad-dreamlike. Cold and ice not nice. My true self is bundled up in a big coat, and I don’t like it. One is rarely naked in Michigan and most of the United States for much of the year.

The snow uncanny. Aluminum-foil sun. You can never see the surface of the snow sparkling unless you've previously taken LSD however; so said a science experiment in one of these governmentsponsored university labs. But it wasn’t like that, that kind of winter day would be too nice. This one wasn’t

She called me that morning and said its coming out. Meet me down there. Imagine, in this moral weather, this mofo weather.

Then she changed her mind, wanted a ride.

Up at her crack of dawn. State of our Union undressed, under duress. More authoritative than the US President, Coral was the US Pregnant; threateningly pregnant, a cruel and unusual Christmas.

Coral was PG and it's not even TV summer reruns season yet. This one was just a February fetus, my insultingly funny valentine.

As it was Sunday morning, on the local radio a liberal Priest was giving the Blessing of the Witches, in a sing-song whining nasal voice. Elsewhere on the dial, Rev. Cough-in-a-Carload was excoriating promiscuity in general, a surefire fundraiser addressed to his flock.

When I went over there and Daffie Mars opened the door for me, she shook her head and laughed "You men are dogs", chorusing something that had been said to her by mothers and their mothers and her tribes of women (who probably domesticated the first dogs) back in time immemorial. When Coral turned puberty thirteen—origin of that number being unlucky I guess—Grandma Mars gave her a darning needle for personally abortive purposes, but mama—from the generation used to modern wire coathangers from the front closet— poo-poohed it.

Empty jars of Abort-Too-Late were strewn around her bloody kitchen.

Coral needed a ride to the abo-clinic. I balked at first, so she offered me sex. But she didn't want to get sweaty, having just bathed and douched. So she began to crank my male membership. For all

the times I'd seen Tippy do it onstage—I don't watch carefully, had to watch my fingers during solos, but there might be stage cues for us to go into the next song or whatever, and which one—it never occurred to me I had the power to do this to myself. Honestly. Power to the People indeed! Ooh…Aahh…Mm. "You're just not body-conscious" she sighed. The sap rose up, the sap rose up in me and I passed into the future with a feeling comparable to when I poured into her, though slightly different in the open air.

Coral admitted that, on getting pregnant, she'd been sloppy, inattentive with me. Beneath new dignity, beside herself. She hadn't accurately adjusted her wolfbane to the cycles of the moon, a matter of her gyne-lycanthropy. A lady developer’s behind that new neighborhood Lycanthrope Woods, or at lest female realtors promting it.

But that baby' would've been like my solo album, sort of.

Definitely my effort, something done without the band or Tippy. I halfheartedly picked up my guitar, turned on the fuzzbucket. Tippy shrugged, sang: When I heard she was expecting Gave her three ex-pec-to-rants To make her cough that baby Right out of her pants, and dance Hey! Hey! So even if the guys considered it sentimental and old-timey, I put on my jacket and resolved to accompany Coral to that scraper place.

We passed the turnoff for New South Abortion Lake Road, between Abortion and Abortion Lake, MI. OK, maybe it really said Asbestos Road, Asbestos, MI. The fire burning in me for her has been safely snuffed out, like smothering a baby in a blanket too.

So I drove Coral all the way to New Joke for her abortion, her Abu Simbel. Or seveteenth-century Fort Sainte Abort, Quebec.

Across State Lines for Immoral Purposes, all that abortiflimflam. We passed several Fucthouse unwed mother sanctuaries established in the 1920s by the auto magnate, each one usually populated by his own out-of-wedlock spawn, in hopes to keep them isolated so they wouldn’t claim to be heirs. Babies in more colors than you could buy a racy Fuctmobile or sturdy Fucttruck at the time.

No, actually it was in the barely-secret back room of the Free the Hippies’ clinic in an office downtown. The After School Clinic run by the Liberation Abortionist Church, which had an active chapter on campus. A downtown skyscraper housed the she-scraper. No, not really, I just wanted to say something that sounded like the beginning of a portentous comic book; the facility was upstairs at a nondescript 19th century brick commercial building.

I parked the car, and we walked up the stairs. At the first door a kindly crone said "No, dear, not abortion clinic. This is an ABSTENTION clinic."

Ah, we found it. The Aleppo Abortorium was decorated in hanging plants and placentas. Homey, for a traditional hospital could've been Sheba Brothers Meats; unfriendliest meatlocker. I didn't expect a Las Vegas newlywed chapel or anything, but the

hippie No-Cost (no caustics?) clinic was bleak. Most men sat glum, awaiting a shot for early stages of what Tippy must have gotten. That abortion pagoda. Hey, this place should be designed like an artful ruin on the grounds of a Georgian country house, a folly. Yes, that's what unplanned pregnancies sure are, a folly.

Girl barbecue, smelling of sadness like a lost cure. A big academic saloon painting on loan from the University Museum "The Raping of a Hippie Girl" hung menacingly, in mute judgment, on the wall. I remembered how lurid nineteenth century public health posters hung in the high school clinic: The Female Abortionist, dating back to about when Aleppo was founded and published in its first Police Gazette, her bat wings and bloody implements supposed to scare girls into chastity. In a recent poll, most highschoolers said they support abortion, but the woman should have to eat the kid.

Actually, it was usually just punkish boys who said that, mostly to impress and shock. Most of the girls wouldn't have their first abortions until college, the rest of them giving birth as troubled teens, dropping out of high school before graduation, unrecognizable after their hard lives. Our mother’s generation abortions were pressganged into factory labor during wartime, writhing uselessly on the aircraft assembly line.

Haw! Score! Lonesome!

No, just kidding. On the shelf behind the receptionist's desk were fetuses in jars from satisfied clients, behind each a framed photo of smiling non-mother. I flashed upon that rumor about a shelf in the Museum full of monster fetuses (fetii?) from tooenthusiastically-X-rayed mothers in the University Hospital 1920-

1940. One kid, who's father was a doctor there, said the little zoo was originally built to house the manglechildren, but it was decided they be responsibly, eugenically chloroform'd and euthanized, then put in formaldehyde For (as was chiseled over one junior high) Science and The Education of a Nation's Youth. They almost economically fed the babybodies to the animals procured for the zoo, then it was remembered the chemicals would make them sick. That founding doctor was a veteran of the Institute for Human Damage in Gotterdammerung, Germany. I can't pronounce its long German name. I could pronounce little with Coral's pussy in and around my mouth, or so I imagine right now. Orality is morality.

The Ozonorific Abortion and Womanliness Clinic and Men's Retro-ductive Services (vasectomies?) in the University's Castle of Ovarianto. Place of study of the female Ontos and Os. I don't think it's cool how the clinic's back door is a beeline to the University Archeology Museum, so students can practice Egyptian mummification techniques on any fetuses (fetii?) large enough, like thirty-four weeks, for pedagogical purposes. For that middle-eastern matter, was teenage Mary’s first abortion old Joseph’s, or somebody else’s? The Chomps thought of raiding their dumpster for the Firehouse's Hallowe'en decorations, but October's too early in the semester and there wasn't enough discarded student projects to make a scouting trip worthwhile. And nobody wanted to climb in, help me. I suggested to one of the girls around the Firehouse, an Art professor's daughter, of course, that she might put cardboard wings on them for Xmas putti and cherubs, but she didn't go for that.

University poets, Japanese, and LSD-besotted boyfriends claimed

the fireflies rising from the bushes near the clinic on summer nights were rising ghosts of abortions accomplished inside. Or even the crickets chirping were. Why not?

You’re a girl, what do you think? Never been there? Oh. What a place. A smear of blood on the window; a lipstick’d kiss left for good luck, good measure. Bar hostesses’ swizzle-stick abortions, dirty napkins and lipstick on the cocktail glass that needs emptying. That fastfood-chain of a clinic was as humane and warm as a cardboard refrigerator. Not even the rustic, rural warmth of those Petri-grown baby farms where you take a basket and pick your own. The waiting room of the clinic was filled with young butterflies who' had disobeyed the No Flitting signs. Garden of her Max Planck placenta. On the carpet little girls were playing abortion with discarded dolls, vacuum cleaners and roundedged scissors, daughters of women waiting in line who couldn't find babysitters on short notice. The Famous Abortions Coloring Book, and a few forlorn, mostly broken, crayons lay underfoot. The celebrity caricatures in it were peurile, and nobody we knew. A cloud passed over the sun, darkening the sky, and the nursely receptionist snapped on a desk lamp whose tall stem was he armless Fetus de Milo.

Home of slash-and-burn agriculture, search and destroy missions in a pregnant teenage junkyard. Reminded Coral of the exploding mirrors in her mother's china cabinet when Tippy rocked n' rolled into it. I hear the place was built by the abortion with a silver spoon in his mouth who left millions to charity, a legal wrangle that incensed siblings, other mistresses. Maybe the local multi-millionaire of red-sauced pizza was an abortionist in his early days, but I doubt it.

Some couples left the hospital trailing clouds of abuse.

Vultures circled overhead in the month of MidwiFe-bruary.

She was my Congresswoman of success. Now we're here.

If she really is pregee, I could use this foreskin as a forceps, I could. Maybe early on the band was flippant, declaring like patriarchs the right to abortion was OK if the girl agreed to eat the kid, a little rubbery monkey mummy envisioned sizzling in the pan. But now it dawned on me, sitting with Coral in the waiting room, that girls went to the clinic for post-coital penicillin shots too. D’oh! Dumbo strumbo.

A copy of the junior stochastic Scholastic Miss book Adventures in Ovaries, to occupy little sisters in the waiting room, if not the clients themselves. In effect, an abortion is cooking a three-minute egg, right? The way the Girl Scout’s cookie crumbles. Sitting, waiting with us at the clinic surrounded by suave babies of hippie mothers (usually faculty brats themselves), at the breast or conversing, arguing about the war and politics.

As Coral and I sat there, the Musicoleum system was playing a calming track from the Nervous New Fathers' album "Inattentive to Poop”, the merry singer changing a baby's filthy diaper, rinsing and pre-soaking the soiled cloth before putting it in the washing machine.

Who could love a shitting kid like that? Girls can tell when a guy hasn't got that fatherhood DNA put in him yet, or like a corn stalk he ain't knee high by the Fourth of July. So they come to places like this clinic.

At the clinic, we had to wait a while because one girl was rushed in for an emergency fellatiotomy, where her jaw had to be surgically removed from a boy's pecker. No picnic for him either.

On the flickery black and white TV on the shelf, the Saturday morning dance show introduced the Abortion Jump. You could buy the folkie Abortion Windjammers 45 rpm single at the counter too.

Attention, this week's abortion winners, two lucky and fucky girls, each with "a donut in the deep freeze".

The pregnant women in the clinic, giving me icy stares as a representative of the sex (both gender and act) that got them in his condition, there for an abortion or prenatal care. Girls who failed to use Shakespeare’s sponge. All looked like healthy Aryans or humping-ready Catholic huntresses. OK, and Jews and Asian and a kind of pretty brown mulatto girl, or maybe sort of Mexican or Indian from U.S. or India. I can't always tell. Welcome to rootlessly cosmopolitan Aleppo.

As we sat in the waiting room, somebody sneezed loudly MERZ! I asked Coral what she thought was so funny, and she dropped an explanatory bomb. My grandpa's name was Merz, Coral said, but chaged it after arrival from Byelotransyvania or some auroch bison backwoods back there, so he could be a gunnery sergeant in World War One and secure the respect of men. Mars sounded more warlike, y'know? Poppa Horace has still got his service pistol, the sidearm with which he shot two mutineers in his squad, and later in civilian life similarly did two bail-jumpers on their way to Motorsburgh.

He let me pump a couple bullets into one, she beamed. Or did I brag that?

Wow, I thought, like MERZ humor magazine begun in the 1950s we all grew up on, which so horrified Mom in its cheerful Jewishness, with that moronic "You Best Better Worry" kid, grinning

like Tippy.

I’d heard she could get authorized abortions in the school planetarium, but that wasn’t true. She had to fill out a card, and, being bored, drew flowers on it, wrote TIPPY diagonnally in ornate letters like it was her school notebook (as so many girls there did).

Fer cryin’ out loud! I blurted, until a stern look from a lady nursing a struggling baby shushed me.

"Which Trimester?” asked the nurse. “In that case, I'll have to refer you to Dr. Hermesther Trismegestus." I expected a bevy of authoritative male doctors, but the clinic was staffed entirely by wisewomen, herbalists and prairie midwestwives, crones and lunch ladies. Something feminist this way comes.

The doctor appeared in the doorway, said "Who's next for an Aberration?" in her twangy-nose midwestern accent.

After a few moments of fetal premeditation, she shrugged Hey, let’s do this.

P.G. as a pig. In a sow's sorry state. And that girl had prayed to all the ovulating saints not to get that way. Why they nicknamed the clinic the Dirt Farm, or the Piggery, the boy's part his stored-up Piggly Wiggly. Bookish girls called it “going to the P.G. Wodehouse,” a intentionally-confusing woodshedding, for sure. How many times has a girl ultimately been called Preg Nancy?

It's not legal in Michigan now, but, like marijuana, certainly will be by the mid-1970s. I proposed several ad hoc solutions to Coral, the simplest abortion being to tie a string to the offending embryo, the other to a door knob, then slam the door to pull it out like a painful

tooth. She reminded me that didn't work in a Chomps Trio movie we both liked, the girl knocked up in Mistaken Identity Hotel by her Cousin Basilisk.

One might borrow Acme dynamite from a construction site, push down the t-shaped plunger to blow that little fucker to smithereens, Dr. Roadrunner smiling over his spattered white coat.

An M-80 is solemnly required to be a quarter-stick of dynamite but if I know Coral, her natural lubrication would put out the fuse. So I guess I was right to accompany her to the clinic after all.

Newspaper headlines told of the Abortion Milk scandal, and claims that a meat market's veal was really waylaid and purloined fetuses (fetii?) from the Free Women's Clinic. Free-ranging women might be the part that stuck in the conservatives' craw the most, thinking of their daughters' possible friends, not just white but black.

The clinic's cheery logo— a smiling cowgirl spinning a lariat, upon careful examination revealed to be brandishing an umbilical cord emerging from her legs with an embryo on the end—didn't help the day’s somber mood. It was drawn by local artsandcraftsman Quentin Qumshare, famous for album cover semi-trucks and other Pop art motifs, but this took the cake.

In the Abortatorium clinic's waiting room, a copy of that popular how-to craft guide to abortion for teens, The Offal of Offspring.

Girls sat waiting patiently to end their pregnancies at the Aleppo Abortionarium, barely three months since their winter-break flings in the West Indies, their irate-qua-stern parents now absolutely forbidding them a black baby. Some college girls, thanks to

university medical experiments with fertility nostrums for which they were paid a small stipend, were giving birth to three, four babies a month by their professors. Child's Portion Abortions available for especially young mothers.

100% Abortion! Or what one waggish critic called a Disservice to her Cervix. If critics noticed, it's because by now every girl that any member of the band or our entourage squirted into seemed to get her name in the paper, fair game for gossip and awe, was a featured item in the delighted rock press.

The voices of tiny abortions recorded for that charming Christmas single, their songs and television jingles. Tippy could hear something from their muttering words, probably hear something when hie put his ear up to those relieved girls' newly-refreshed cunts. Like the ocean in a seashell. A scientific phenomenon.

Babies full of bathwater; of course they were thrown out.

I think the abortionists themselves were bloodsoiled-shirtsleeves volunteers, missionaries and seminarians from an order Little Obstreticians of the Poor. Get rich off this? The head doctor was only driving a six-year-old Ford Amniocentis.

Rrr-zzz-rrr. I thought of Mom's vacuum cleaner when I heard the abortion gizmo go off. Recall her anger at her lowly station, incessantly doing housework. Why I would never clean the Firehouse, no sir, personally fastidious as I am.

No longer pweegee. A peewee squeegee, Dr. Luigi!

Abortivision—it's like every channel I turn to, it's another girl

getting vacuumed or scraped. When the brain snaps shut in pregnancy, if not the legs. Serotonin Christmas for those girls. Her umbicilligolgotha at the edge of her Easter egg farm.

One loudmouthed harridan in the lobby claimed she often had three abortions before noon.

There need to be a whole lot more action movies where the hero is an abortionist, even a female one. Maybe a smart take-noguff colored girl. Punking, poking and punching small-mined illiberal opponents, whoever they turn out to be. Movies shown in the driveins if not as prime time TV movies, or even as the stuff of the Nixonson Show.

Just before leaving the clinic, Coral stuffed herself with a dozen (free) tampons, then went swimming, bicycling and horseback riding in white slacks. Police shot a bystander, too suspiciously curious.

Frizzy-haired teenage pregnantesses, pregnaunts or pregnauts, gazed out dolefully. "On-the-dolefully" sniffled Aldebbie, always dismissive of the Fair Sex. Wait, he wasn’t really there that day.

Oh, you know. Aldebbie the English Rock star. Yeah, he started paying attention to us around this point. Oh yes, I’ll tell you plenty about him and the band, believe me.

Aldebbie's manager Stanley was always thinking about the next big thing, on to it before anyone else, wanted Coral to wait with the procedure until he put a mic up there to record an album of whatever songs were the favorites of today's embryos. He thought the kid— more like a worm or tadpole—gurgling lyrics through amniotic fluid would be a smash hit with the girls, young mothers or girls worried they were p.g.

Coral politely declined—Coral, this is your record! Don't let the chance pass!—and went through with the procedure thing as planned, but Stanley nevertheless recorded his project with studio musicians, putting electronic filters on choir children's vocals to sound like it was recorded in the womb, released it to much radio airplay for a few weeks, especially for the Christmas market.

When she finally had the stillbirth, OK, abortion, Aldebbie snatched it from Coral, pressed it between sheets of plastic sarong wrap like a crafts project, and used the fetus baby on the cover of album Placed in Space. He sang of the three astronauts from Aleppo, from the University's Pilot-in-Training program. It was the dawn of the Geminiixon program, for the omnipresent Egopresident Nixon had to get his name on all things. And they were burned up in the capsule for the homosexual orgies that Aldebbie alleged, or improper thoughts, detected by the most sensitive scientific equipments of the day. Aldebbie claimed that the spacecraft blew up on the launching pad for one simple reason: one of the three had smuggled aboard a cassette of Aldebbie's first album, so the songs made the astronauts lean that way and consider indulging in it, so it was decided by NASA that they had to be obliterated at the single push of a button. For national security.

Noxious, Nixonous fire, as developed by the WWII Germans on the NASA payroll, developed after hideous experiments on humans, human extinguishers spread through the capsule asphyxiating the their seared and melted insides. Their bodies were like the styrene model kits at the hands of a pyromaniacal kid. A bad, bored kid.

I had actually shaken hands with one of those astronauts, running up

at a celebratory ticky tape parade, his long cowboy arm lazily leaning out the Cadillincoln convertible limousine, later the one JFK was shot in. Or used in the practice tests for the shooting. Plenty of those aborted feuses were trucked to the police firing range as targets too.

And now I used that hand to play guitar, which felt patriotic, y'know.

Similar to when I shook hands with the Republican Governor Hominy on the campaign trail, on his way to declare Motorsburgh a riotous disaster area, sending in the Natural Guard. He was the heriditary Mormon King from the long-bearded colony going back 150 years on Squirrel Island, Chipmunk Island, and had run a car company into the ground. Might yet be President, so what would that make me?

Coming out of the abortion, Coral expected me to be as happy as a father eating Halloween candy. Not completely sure I was though.

I haven’t asked you yet: have you ever had an abortion? No, I mean, really? So I guess you prefer I don't think of you in sexual womanly terms, huh? OK, no offence. G'bye! See ya! Thanks for listening to all this stuff, good to finally remove these heavy medals from my chest.

Mainframe computers got my girl pregnant. Ripples of Abortion ran through the streets. Children twice-conceived. White House pregnancies. The Smile Police. So what if I'm raging like Godzilla by night.

When I told mom that I’d gotten Coral pregnant and she’d

had that a-business, her jaw set. "Men are dogs" said mom. When will I ever learn, I don’t have to tell everything.

OK, to you I will. Even feelings.

As man is the only species who'd swat a fly, abortion like shooting a starling as it passes overhead, lying on a garage roof with a lead slug in a wristrocket slingshot and the hit bird quietly folds its wings and bashes its head on the pavement curb across the street.

Yeah, it's somehow like that. So you're telling me the pregnancy was ill-conceived, ill-advised and so had to be scrapped. Wasted a perfectly good baby. An unconvincing pregnancy, a corridor of veins under glass. Trash it, whup it. Offal, huh?

Abortion shouldn't gets compared to the starfish losing one of its limbs which soon grows back. A certain percentage of babies every generation are damaged by their mothers, especially by retard and underage mothers. They "accidentally" leave them in a bank, in a pile of old clothes, or drop their little heads—bonk!—while swinging them by the ankle. Saturday Night Massacre of the Innocents.

In tigerland India 200 to 300 villagers a year are killed by tigresses, man-eaters, wife-eaters. So our own elephant combat resulted in one small casualty, so be it. As when you empty a vase of its flowers, these are the Children of the Middle of the Night.

Neoabortions were nothin' compared to paleoabortions, fossilized fetuses tossed on aboriginal hospital slag-heaps, along with broken arrowheadds, chips of surgical flint. The primitive parents also trepanned all teenagers' skulls to find out what made them think about sex, so they could look into it better and monitor the hell out of him. They were repressive even back then, probably.

When Gerald Ford's daughter checked into the Betty Ford Clinic for that abortion, her mother with a smile flimflammed the Press

that she wouldn't mind, tears in the corner crinkles of her ex-dancer's eyes.

Equating masturbation and adoration, Tippy tossing selfsatisfiedly onstage like Coral's self-surgery of a me-me-me m-m-m"miscarriage". Selfishness or self-definition? Look, some people write books that never get read or made into movies, some put their soul and sweat into making records that immediately get put in the 99- or 39-cent bargain bin, like the Chomps' own. Having one's babies rejected can't be any worse than having a book remaindered later on, by a publisher. A girl’s abortion as a form letter sent back when you've sent in your resumé for a job. Not as bad as being rejected by the woman in the first place, though. We scientific men require test-tube babies to make up for abortions. In the old days it was like running up a tab in a saloon, a couple did it until she presented him with the babe. But you can't run a world without an economy, and this transaction's left me shortchanged. My dog in your manger didn't bark loud enough to keep guard. I guess I failed fetal management. Not the lioness tamer, I guess I'm just the filler and the extender. She edits and deletes. Ours was a private yeast infection. Campus corruption, a little carnage, and I lunged after it.

She might've birthed that damaged baby, that foal out in a barren field (actually a national forest that'd been flattened by a meteor or volcanic forest fire), licked it--tasted sour--the spindly legs of a colt, the spiny "test teeth" and petite simian monkey-face. Drugs we took during sex might account for surreal hints that the baby could've been deformed, like my own attitude. Illegitimate birth produces tears from the teats instead of milkjoy anyway.

Coral once sang something about how Boys are bad, Saying things that girls don't say, that's why girls like 'em so. Literature and thought as a kind of abortion, rather than getting up there with your pecker out and actually performing for all those girls! Sperm and spontanaiety. What I want to read is the biography of one of those World's Youngest Mothers, those five-year-old girls who have babies and get in the You Better Believe This comic panel. Publish the story of the, uh, "courtship", please. The father finds her walking alone, offered chocolates, right?

I'm so tempted to speak of it as "we had an abortion", for something of me was taken out of her. She's the other half of my pain. Sorry I didn't measure up on your litmus-test sheets. Due to Rock n' Roll I'm shitting OK now. Babies are just little bald women anyway, I didn't really want one, I just said that. My heart was a simulated winter. Look, I'll put my head out on a limb, put my cards on the wrong horse. I just want to blow your mind with me, blow your mind like I blew your speakers. The quizzical crying of a dead child.

Cain and Abel must've invented this kind of love, every bit of pain a metaphor for something. Unborn and already unpopular. Let's build an ornate tomb for Jesus Christ, hold a millage election to pay for it.

We're talking no little stone lamb upon the gravesite slapped above the dead tissue of his issue. Maybe a dumpster then sanitary—did somebody say Satanic—landfill, or office shredder paper, or vegematic disintegration. The baby had to come out. The baby came out. She soon tired of her heart. Like a spider proud of having at one time built famous webs, we still could do it once more alienation-style.

But it's not I could expect Coral to have my baby, I'm not really a high-ticket Rock Star; the guy with the same name as me in my highschool graduating class lives only a block from the Horace Mars household, and he's a lawyer. Many bands imagine lawyers messing everything up. I imagine him sneaking Coral out from her window.

Maybe Coral really wasn't pregnant. Maybe she just wanted the money for new stage outfit. Maybe she just wanted to buy Tippy some drugs, or some other boyfriend a plane ticket to Paris or something. The boyfriend cycle begins anew. Still, notable midwives, who had seen everything, said "He's a real knock-up man", meaning me. A fuckeagle, big wingflap fuckowl or fuck-fowl. People will say this guy could only offer childcare from the waist down. I hope they weren't confusing me with Tippy. How the hell does Tippy get away with it, filling each pornographic vacancy, shakin' all ovaries. It's just the wham of that maternity man. Did Tippy really father her child the normal way, or just rub his stuff on her shorts?

Maybe I'm that child. An unbroken child, the unborn children that live in fountains. They didn't have to surgically remove Coral's ass from Tippy's heart. Now she literally knew how to Rip It Up. In some places in the world you got to write your name dark just for it to be seen. You got to breathe the right breath, fire the right gun. History does not provide useless events I know, I’m going on and on, I’ll stop for today.

Whine to Coral my misgivings about it? Not for all the absorbent abortifacients in Michigan! It doesn't matter how I feel, what I feel, if I feel bad or not. Abortion is a woman's God-given

artisanal, artesian and antisocial right, somewhere in the fine print of the Constitution, read between the lines. Jefferson put it in to encourage his black girls, for their benefit and propriety's sake, but it applies ot everyone, every woman age 5 to tearful 96. It's a Bible Commandment too, I think, for Mary Magwheels spun and schooled the Jesus, probably in their morning-after or foreplay bed. Catholic girls are given the Host to taste, to acclimate them to the unleavened product of blowjobs, so they won't do the other and risk getting pregnant, then abortified. Those placard feminists make it sound like it just became legal in Michigan. Wait, I read somewhere that it isn't even legal in Michigan. Or maybe it's just something like marijuana or other drugs, that everyone does in parks and neighborhood streets, maybe supposed to be kept indoors.

So maybe Coral wasn't out of state "to visit an aunt", like our moms all must've. Only a couple years earlier we'd have had to flee to Crown Royal Canada for Coral's abortion. And I'd be taking her across the Intellectual Date Line for the most moral of purposes.

Some politicians still arguing that a woman can only have an abortion when the life of her doctor is in danger. Upstate, mostly forced sugarwater, or sugar-beet, abortions. A process bluesemen called Sookie Sookie.

Lot of little children dressed up as abortions this Halloween, how political. That same week a university classicist lectured on the concept of "Carthaginian Abortion", where the birth is allowed to take place, the baby sacrificed to propitiate a local god, then the earth (mother) is salted so nothing else will grow.

Abortion is the coin of the realm. Undeniably, this was womancraft. A mid-westwifery of sorts, the early bird that catches nestless girls’ worms. One local free clinic was where the "exploratory" procedure, however illegal, is, wink wink, performed?

Or maybe that was another young teenaged girlfriend of Tippy's, a couple years later in the 1970s. Where were we then? I forget.

In the future, you'll take one tablet twice a day for abortion. But now, all this. Opened up an Easter egg and there was an aborted embryo, the childish chicken. What had been done with the abortion calf. The abortion doesn't fall far from the tree.

Summer abortions, whose corpses or souls must become houseflies, shiny green buzzbodies. What the Germans called Abortionschafft. But they only practiced it on lesser breeds without the law. Her abortion was on the Fourth of July, so the fireworks I heard over the city that evening I imagined to be her insides bursting, exploding out, or the upcoming parade of other guys within her happily exploding, each one mocking me KABOOM!, again and again. Not patriotic in the least.

Oh wait, not true. Scratch that. This was in winter, I recall.

They called it to "prebort" when the girl involuntarily voluntarily accidentally-on-purpose lost her smidgen without intervention.

They, old fashioned, spoke of "her confinement", though the procedure rarely took an afternoon, and girls were often at the La Grandiosa for a rock concert that evening or a summer Sunday free

concert in the park that afternoon, if it (a pink sabbath, so to speak) had been performed instead of a church service somewhere.

Still, somebody—maybe the mother, father, doctor or mother's grade school principal (for funding purposes)—should take posession of that embryo. That'd be the early-Christian thing to do. Bake that apple pie kid, that baby pan dowdy. I don't trust that local successful pizzamaker getting into the act; he might take it to his world headquaters, feed it to his bison. Or worse, use it as a currycomb upon their furry flanks.

Just in case Tippy or the rest of us ever got some ailment, at Coral's abortion I had her placenta made into a cure-all placebo. An aid to my digestion, for sure. They said she didn't have much of one at that stage, they just sold me something the cat dragged in. Ho ho, these hippies, how they creatively fundraise for their alternative institutions, to buy their stash.

Song on the radio, might've been that incessant ad, "We are the abortion providers/Of love." So what if later I realize it says "absolution" instead? That makes it even more poignant, no?

"She earned that abortion" I heard myself shrug.

Her generous abortion. Big-print abortions. They tried to interest both teenage boys and girls in publishing ABORTION SKATEBOARD magazine. They actually did a favorable review of the record, and intelligent interview with the band. Take a look, here's a copy for you. The Aleppo Evening Respectable, newspaper to which everybody's parents subscribed, had a cover story MaskMaking Doctors in Secret Abortion Schools, but it was more innuendo than substance, filler between the appliance and car dealer ads. For

this, they truncated the Youth Page and its features on teen bands.

Like when the teenage virgin Mary, in a moment of doubt, borrowed a coin—they still debate if it was a Roman denarius, a shekel or merry widow's mite—flipped it, and it came up tails, so she kept the kid, the babychrist. Instead of getting her tail to the herbseasoned, season-of-the-witch, pagan lady abortionist in a wagon at the edge of town. No Tail in the Stirrups.

That's why the English pub Aldebbie took us to, to celebrate signing with his record label, is called that. Tail in the Stirrups. I wondered at the time.

You could fill a university dormitory with girls who don't know proper oral sex abilities, who borrowed fathers' or brothers' cars to drive late at night to conservative Motorsburgh suburbs to bail Tippy out of jail, when asked to speak to the Desk Sergeant's Supevisor, came back pregnant.

And there was that evil Right-wing doctor who performed an abortion on the floor of Congress, botched it for maximum effect. A bill went to the floor to declare sperm as private individuals, able to enter inter contracts and form corporations. Hey, sperm are people too! This was before these personal women's things were nationally political so don't expect a red-white-and-blue comment.

I know what you're saying, just like a man, blame the victim. I didn't come to start no epidemic of misogyny throughout the clinic, an infection of sicko woman-hating. Her father Horace's political position was to answer the questioner with some kind of dirty joke. You mean

I haven't brought up the possibility of Coral having any kind of incest with her father? Remind me to get to that later.

Seeing big Coral I thought of my misconception about sex in junior high biology class, that a single cellulite fat woman split into two separate smaller men, each of whom in turn divided himself into two little girls, like Lewis Carroll in Wonderland. Sperm selves as cellelves. Pregnant as a big, gruffbilly zy-goat, troll under her bridge.

Party in the milk. Coral had a rabbit in the oven, a welsh rarebit melting over toast on an afternoon's grilled cheese sandwich. The womb so like the grave, insatiable, never saying "enuf already". That garlic girl, a goddam of a girl. Her womb moving ominously about her body like a Sargasso sea.

Coral told me she had considered the Old Doctors' Wives' method, taking all the drugs the father used to take in sympathy as a way to induce abortion, though she might've built up immunity from the medicine chest of his sperm. Took premature cinnamon and that didn't work. Kitchen chemistry. How toxicology, pharmacology was all based on the science of what women took to produce abortion.

Why drugs are so intimately associated with getting seduced to women. Her mother, that jaded, faded dishwater blond, that household product, put it in housewife-colored terms Coral could understand: You throw your baby out with the bathwater. Pregnant and pragmatic. When her appearance at that talent show won her a trip to Hollywood with her mom as chaperone, she took a tour of various clinics, the ones that Monroe, Liz, Haley Mills etc. had gone to. Some huckster even tried to sell her movie stars' abortions outside the clinics' back doors, but it looked to her like a pig's foot in a

pickle jar. At Sheba Bros. gourmet meatmarket I thought I saw abortions pickled in white wine. Around all these pregnant women plenty of pickles had been fished out of the briny juice and eaten. I think I'll pass, thanks.

I'll bet all the Chomps Trio's Hollywood abortions became little comedians, slapping each other on the head, on the rump, in the gut with plumbing noises, all the while funny exclamations and ejaculations. One, two, three, many little Chomps. Like Mohammed, Tippy's three sons were going to be named Mikey, Louie Louie and Cutey or Shmendrick, surely (no, not Shirley) died of some crib death or avenging angel's flight, soon after birth. There was, you know, one legendary Great Missing Link Chomp brother aborted by his mother called Chimp, perhaps fathered by sympathetic movie villain King Kong during the filming. Must be why they call the Jews the Children of Shemp, vs. the Children of Hams like Mantan Moreland. Imagine all the little children the band had fathered as cherubs, flying around with the faces of the Chomps Trio, Mickey, Louie and Cutey. Or the Chomp who later appeared in the comedies with long intellectual's hair, fart-parted in the middle like a White Russian gangster. In one episode Chomps Trio invented a pen that writes under contraceptive foam. I grew tired of the cheerful Hollywood magazines in the waiting room, so instead I led the girls in The Chomps Trio' singalong from the 1940 short "Mistress Baiters", where they pretend they’re professors in order to seduce coeds on their desks. Coral was sooo embarassed. Everyone singing Ee-my-micky my baby. And they each went inside and did. Slipped their babies Mickey Finns and Shanghaied 'em.

Her own number up, Coral's doctors carried the huge and heavy cross of that girl on their backs, since the hospital cart got four flat tires in anticipation of her puncture. Bloated belly wheeled out in a grocery store shopping cart to make any fat girl with the tattoo "Born Homemakin", sentimentally put on her by her parents in gradeschool, feel at home. The anesthesiologist punched her in the belly out of enthusiasm but partially to see the end product. The Cheapst Shot. Knocking out baby's first teeth. Butcher the pig that is herself.

They rubbed her down with Oil of Thalidomide. Hooked up to some kind of fallopian tube voltmeter. Machines that make it easier for women to have babies. Birth-blowers installed just in case.

Cashew jaws to the nightshaft, night-checking like a robot orally massaging a car. Something that looked like a transparent clarinet.

Magic supplies and the funny posessions of funny psychiatrists. She gazed into a smoking mirror. Fairest of them all. Degrading lady, unfortunate friend, tetracycline goddess, tetraqueen. Our Virgin of the Catheter must've bitten into a candy heart. The doctor was probably a superstitious old cuss who'd touch a bison horn before every performance. Y'know, a lot of weird guys who have problems with girls must go into this profession. "Doctor Windowsill" cried an intern on an intercom. Dr. Loveletters came in and performed commentary surgery. She passed through the fingers of Dr. Sieve.

Like a pirate with a steel hook, he broke into her cabin, her pubic treasury. Crabbed embryos. She underwent a balloonectomy, removing all underwater balloons. Pin abortions. What is the sharpest pin? Doctors with their man-eating saws. Really scraping

the bottom of the sexual barrel. It's hard to make love on a pair of scissors. Doctor Ed Bread. The doctor who aborted me, Dr. Flying Fingerfuck. Impatient doctors sucking the insurance right out of her.

My check twitched with pain. One abortion was hurriedly performed on the way to the golf links or racquet club by Doctor "Slam" Jissomson, assisted by male nurse-caddy Jim Suture. They used the little round head on the tee as a prank golfball for a hole-in-one.

Hmmmph.

Girls were getting Family Way’d right and left. Some feminist investors in fast-moving Mo’burgh suburb Southpaw, MI were seriously considering a venue called the Abortodome.

Abortions are just doctors' shits. Abortion like a song strangled in the throat. Scratching an unwanted song off the record album with a nail. Coral, that ham warehouse, sang a song about it "Doctors' Signal". Blue Cloacas. Pregnant and in an interesting condition.

Pregnancy poetry. The use of aesthetics in childbirth, tracery of blood and strokes of the sponge, etc. First she was inspected by the gynecologist Dr. Rafael Falafel, which is Arabic for "pouch".

Obstetricsview. A pussygoscopy, insert a submarine periscope, command "Up periscope !" and go scope it out. A stomach wrench.

Pediatrician Dr. Frank Wagon was peeking from behind a curtain when the operation was performed. You didn't know he was Coral's as well, he'd fly his private jet to her side in Florida. At least she didn't have to go to a city in Mexico called Xitty where they pretend they're Aztecs cutting out your sacrifice with obsidian knives. They're gonna butcher my cow. This Resurrection Shopping didn't even take

us to the town of Saline Solution, Michigan where the Grapple of the Groups was held.

Hey, I know anatomy. Something removed beneath that girl's kidney armpit. Abortion equals absolution. Girls, start over.

Gentlemen, start your engines. I believe I mentioned Thump's clever abortion engine already, what a mechanic.

Doctors considered unplugging her fallopian tubes, disconnecting her hoses and circuits. Flushable amniotic sacs. They gave that sour cervix a placenta placebo. Of course, on the TV in the hospital that Saturday afternoon I would have to catch a glimpse of a movie about a bloody vampire named Coagula. Coral suffocated blood. The sore-o-sphere. I vomited the landscape.

They don't normally serve cocktails in the hospital, but I broke into the pharmaceutical drug locker to please her. She ate steak, ate steak tartare after her abortion. She got the million dollar medical treatment. Someday she will be even more a girl. Lactated and laicized, she's post-partum and now post operative, well I guess that makes you goddamdownright post-sputum so I won't spit. Much as I'd like to.

I had played with that which was playable in her. A slot in the dark. Rambling and groping around in her uterine elevator. No more ungloved love I guess. Just one of those disco pregnancies ending in baby bonfire. Orange love and an orange life. Pussy farts ending in wind pregnancies. Perhaps she was congenitally p.g., was born pregnant. A die-on-the-desk joke. Winter love like a white lie. An icicle fell from the ceiling and broke her heart. What do I tell myself, I thought she reproduced by budding a little Coral out of her side. Let

the innocence fit the crime. Despite what they say, women set the production or lockout of the Inner Factories. I considered calling a union organizer for these unwanted kids, imagine the headlines ABORTIONS OUT ON STRIKE, NEGOTIATIONS DEADLOCKED. Embryos in the pan with picket signs, petitions, sperm turning over and setting fire to cars in company parking lots. She discharged plenty of flyers, pamphlets. Abortion as the cheapest rite. The use and enjoyment of the plumber's snake. The rattlesnake gift. A postmigraine solution. She was putting her foot down (on the pedal of the kitchen trash can) for the disposal of the foetal leftovers, having her plate scraped. Blondie in the Eisenhower administration taking out the garbage while Dagwood sleeps on the couch. That sweet operation, or at least that saccharine one. She said "yecch" and "ick". The decision making process where girls cast the I-Ching nowadays, draw the tarot card of the Woman That Way Making an Appointment.

It had to take place in the deathbed of the season. Novenas for all them sperm. Semen mailboxes. Sperm or invective like flying mallards. My sperm reared up and attacked her, snarling. Sperm as bulldogs with spiked collars, fighting bantams with razor spurs. Were my sperms shy little Pierrots, embarassed smiles and collars like flowers? Only sperms with their tails knotted next time, huh?

I have a baby burning in my brains. Ride your abortion like a bucking bronco. Suicide of a voodoo doll. Picture of a head and neck labelled Where to Chop. Will the cervix be unbroken? Serpents lodged in the belly, right Coral? Dynamite 'em outa that desert cave, fuckin' rattlers. The abortion of a jaguar. She had my abortion? A

queen bee having an abortion, while I'm back at the hive sipping honey. The operation to cure serendipity that scratches the paint off the sky. Singing "I Need a New Baby" in a summer too soon. A dearth of birth. Your baby will be blood. Into the funereal funnel. A crushed winter. The University of Abortion. Agent of ovary insurance. Nude in the heart. A heartbusinesswoman. Undoing an ob-gyn lock. Urinalysis of the heart. A urine child. Kennedy's kidneys, I'll bet.

Abortion mothers. Abortion children, strike up the band.

"Mother and Baby are both resting comfortably", one in the garbage.

No fetal rental. A ghoulie under an insurance light. Do we have to name the critter AborSean now? A bungle of scruples here. A fly caught in a moral cognac. I thought of the guy who told his girlfriend, and all her parents' friends, that her brother had died in a distant car accident—and it was just a joke. Dancer at the abortion. It's Oh No Not Again Time.

Did that abortion have a Beatle haircut like all the fathers at the window of the maternity ward? I wanted to make a marionette from the abortion, or dangle it from the rearview mirror as a symbol of masculinity ("Look what I did..."). Fetus with a fetlock made me suspect she was playing with a horse, or at least a seahorse. Riding his underside like Mazeppa. That's really doing the Shetland Pony.

A fetus Faustus. Secret fetus, result of my own mud life. Going around selling fetus futures.

I'd have even paid somebody to find that abortion, some archeologist to dig him up or private eye to check the clues with a magnifying glass. Like the Tippyologists that'd sift through the

garbage at the Firehouse looking for topics to write magazine pieces about, the trash behind the hospital might contain that embryo. Pump him up with a bicycle pump, puff him up with life. My brother Thump would probably run over it with his truck if he saw it lying on the road, thinking it was an old anima. Dink would drunkenly befriend it, teach it to spit and play cards. If that little kid were around today I'd set him up like a grim schoolmaster, teach it to recite, obey, to respect discipline. After all, once I saw a little girl in Germany that looked like this one I could've had with Coral, then she fled, disappeared over the Berlin Wall and I heard a shot. Abortion somehow equals Concentration Camp for the fetus is the commandant of my conciousness in jodhpurs, monocle, swaggerstick, begging the question. I weakly masturbate in the showers of Auschwitz, or at least the college art center the band is playing at that evening. In one episode the Chomps Trio dressed as babies and all had the faces of my abortions. The first heart transplants were in the news those days, elderly foreigners with funny sounding names like all the parts weren't in right to begin with. Hell, in the future I bet they'll transplant birds' hearts into baby girls just to hear 'em chirp. The real babies of mine Coral had didn't interest me as much. Use my dick like a divining rod to find a nonexistent baby? In later years they put missing abortions on milk cartons. Like a poltergeist that baby kept banging doors, rattling cupboards in my memory.

Had Coral had her abortion yet when she gave that stellar Grope of the Groups performance? Containment hips. Some say she purposely miscarried there, onstage, for added effect because she

couldn't afford smoke generators or revolving colred Christmas-tree lamps.

C'mon, snap out of it Roque, this wasn't the first dead child in the history of the world. The baby went away in a joke at my expense. Affair became a nonencounter. Built to Lie. Her tatto "Born Hemorrhaging". That night the father must've had amencephaly, the state of no head or brain. Where's the baby? The baby's gone; oh, I finally get it. Who ordered this pizza?

For ecology's sake, new records made of recycled vinyl containing fetal tissues. Someone at the university's Children's Clinic is working on that. Weird smells from the chemical engineering lab.

Abortion as the converse of homunculus. Rainwater abortions. Just a pile of blood. Red in her turned to blue in me. Would you drink a pint of blood? Dink, add some vodka, willya?

Woman stands in dangerous rapport with the finite, croons an old Martino Buh-buh-buh Buber record that Coral's parents often played. Wearing the spaghetti-strap Slip of Fools. Something dark, some unspecified and unspeakable female lovecraft out there. Not that she had what’s called a "bitter cunt" viewpoint about it. I was getting get-thee-behind-me-Satan kind of ideas myself. She had bitter herbs down there, thistle, dry fennel. Not, Dink duly pointed out, the kind of bitters you order in a bar for a hangover. She mispronounced childbirth. She has nearly twelve miscarriages a month. The occasional temple.

Confused as to what happened? Good. That's my age-old male perogative, to not know what's going on in my woman's body.

What mysteries transpire under her tent. Coral, my friendly loverfriend, in the future we'll have to watch it, be more careful, be better and more humane. Let's treat each other as if you and I are the only people on earth, for if there are others think of the jealousy, or we'd have to fuck 'em all just be nice and all that. No human kindness besides manners, only animal kindness. Face it, that's the only place all bonds between humans come from. To think of the lovers you might have had, all the missed chances, would drive us mad. I just want to sit here and dwell on the sacrificial aspects of the soup and the lamb. Goat damage. Tears of God. No use crying over spilt girl.

If I saw Coral on the street would I cynically say Hiya, Safecakes!

Somebody was happy, there were inverted rainbows in the skies.

Actually there was a schism in my sperm, some wanted to impregnate Coral while some wanted to forget the whole thing and, lemming-like, go somewhere else. Coral, did I pour filth in your womb? Miswipe your boots on my doormat heart? When our hearts were young and desireful. Coral, I want you more than the next breath. Clichés like that make me a fat slob of love. Check with me.

The Man Who Sloshes. The innermost anticlimax.

Like a compulsive, completionist record collector, I was pissed off at the loss of my irretrievable cellular library. Eraser thighs opened for those Golden Erasers, those abortionists, wielding what they called the laser's girlfriend. I don't want to be no afterbirth hawk, circling around. I guess I got no floating heart rights.

TV news that night—Horace had been watching, you better believe—began grimly, "A child is buried in Michigan..." and, not realizing a kid had been shot Thursday in Motorsburgh, worried for a

moment the story was about us. I get hung up on that crucifix of jealousy, the wheels of jealousy turning in the submarine of the subconcious. So, she got a new trip for her hips. And I been depressed by the best.

Oh Christalien, yes I'm upset Coral, of couse I want babies like I want a solo album of my own, not called "The Soul of an Abortionist".

I want to make a goddess birth me a million kids. I thought you wanted to have Buddha's babies, little Buddhas and Chés. Coral, I have increased your travails and pregnancies, your sorrows and your groans. Mummy taste vs. mammary taste. Maybe you should be performing Mammal Labor. Take that baby ride. I wish I was a trout or fuitfly leaving millions of offspring. A cockroach meekly inheriting the earth. A bullfrog leaving tadpoles wriggling like bulky comic-strip spermatazoa, like musical notes. From the fishborn. A sturgeon like the Czar's headwaiter, jacking off onto the caviar. Fish as a symbol of Christ. God lost the battle. Like a flower is drawn to water except I never liked flowers. Floorplans of flowerpetals. When I was a little kid, I used to wish a burglar would come in the house so I could legally capture him, torture and kill, cut off his head and put it on my shelf. That's what you're doing with this abortion, Coral, that's what you're doing to me. Any boy-girl relationship equals an abortion nowadays. The American father is the child. He can't handle abortion, I thought as I was puking with Abortion Sickness. Can't you see what a good father I want to be? I don't want to be no Hitler's hunchback in the town band, I don't want to be Last Night's Man, no Segundo Schwabard or Sloppo the Clown. Uncool love. Is love Real TV? Any novel after 1966 should say "love" a lot. Gonna see thru

love's retina. A repeating stage direction. Soap in my eyes when I think about her. Drug? I thought it was a love philtre. Always after me lucky charms. You won't treat me like a mushroom man. Coral we built a ship of dreams and staffed it with persons like ourselves.

Don't I ever get to take a paternity leave? As Elvis supposedly said when the subject of paternity suits came up, "First we rape all the lawyers". Sounds more like Aldebbie. The apogee and perigee got a hold on me. You can't build a foundation with sleep from your eyes, not for any house I'd live in at any rate. My heart's squealing on me.

Your squeezes don't mean much anymore. My heart is an o-ring, an earring. My enema-bag heart deflated. My heart feels like you kicked its ass, upset its cup full of pain. My heart is but a sink in need of scouring, with a sponge or a steel wool Armadillo Pad. Coral, put your heart around me while I study you. Let me hold you like the dinosaurs hugged extinction. That hole in the mattress is from my heart. My bad-penny heart keeps turning up you. Hell on my pillow, feels like you wiped your ass on my glasses for all the blurry confusion I'm looking through. A man is not a little boat blown around, blown off course, by the strong wind called woman.

Robinson Crusoe and the Sphinx on a beach. Coral, when you open your heart I can see your breath in the cold. Don't be no love latrine for those Rock n' Roll troops. It's so easy to fall in sex. Coral, no one's asking you to sleep alone. I'm still in the Hey Baby Take Me Out of My Head stage. Inner and outer love. Coral, I could weep blood from my eyes like a crow does while fucking. Bird of filth. Bird of a film. Haven't you seen the spattered scarecrows out by Zebulon Road? Can't you have the decency to treat me like a tablespoon of

spice? Like asking Cleopatra to change her spots. Like telling a radio Hold on to your interference. Men fall from high places and cripple themselves for love. Fall from a pillow and break their love.

For weeks I've been rarely more than half a block from suicide. I'm just a soul whose tensions are good. Whereas I am only content in the warm library, or, frighteningly inside Coral on my return to the womb.

I was thunderlocked in love with Coral. Love-weasled. Coral, my heart is over my head, tangled up like a sweater's sleeves. How I slept through your lies, Lady Baby. The smell of your heart, of rotting, loving things in your heart. The whole experience reeks of coitus interruptus, despite a million kisses. We set the sheets on fire with our dancing, fires up the beach and a sunspot girl. If I'd never scored before I couldn't love you more. I love you when you disappear, I love you when you disagree. Like a monkey climbing a dancing tree, maybe all I want is for you to put your arms around my mind. Spread your mind and let me in.

Excuse me, excuse me for this intrusion, but you see I'm too much in love. I'm just a baby in love, love is what we're in for, I'm in love and I'm scared. Left in Freud-shame. This pornography is getting pretty Freud-core. The party's over but you remain. The assymetry of love, the hilarity of it. Maybe it was just a postcommittment era. We could fill a refrigerator with love, could make a salad of a sunny day. I'll paint frescoes in the Ovari Chapel. There's a lock on my life and love's the key. Graphite love, pyrite love. How many "bignesses" in the quantity of love? I sought solitude in sex. I want you so much I don't know jack shit anymore. Give me at least

mini-delights. Tears that taste like turds. I want only that which I want. Baby I'll be there when you lock horns with yourself. Coral, my heart says blow to you. I'd like to kiss you now but I've got blood on my mouth. Coral, I will love you till there's just a memory of where our bones used to be. Till we're no longer even should've-beens. I will love you a billion years, I will love you millions of years B. C. More like the love between molecules, between atomic particles and their charges. She got in my atomic space.

Meanwhile the band played a single gig, a lunchtime free concert in Motorsburgh’s Superchurch Plaza. We played before the cathedral of Saint Mary Magdalene, the older, more experienced woman who relieved teenage Christ of the his heavy Cross of Virginity, pubic crown of thorns of unwanted innocence. Her trusted advice later shaped his support for abortion rights, and blessed tolerant promiscuity. It was she who lobbied for Onan's sainthood too, for his prayer plus self-sufficiency in the desert. Saint Anthony had visions of her, her sexy tricks, toys and time-tested techniques.

We saw his cave, lonely rock, its—eeuuwwn—crusty walls.

Playing our music was a hundred times more intense than anything else, so Coral and women and fucking were invented to come close. Love me like you loved that artificial lake. Love has no balls. Ours was Anti-Love. Boogie-sensual. A sad and bogue sensuality. Fuck Love, Love Sucks.

Like Coral sang at the Grapple of the Groups: A whole lot of girls used to be your steed Now Coral Mars is all the ride that you need

Coral gave me a picture of herself, less an aide-memoire than an aide-masturboire I guess. Gratefully I reached in my pants and showed her I could use it. Jacking off is just like Tippy did onstage, it's amazing I never put two and two together myself. Did it take the girl Coral to understand what was really going on? Look Coral, it's biggening.

I didn't realize at first this gesture meant no more would I ride in her small American compact car, feather-light and father-bought.

You know, the Box of Pox. Girls calling the Body by Fishhooks symbol on all Genial Motors cars "the Miscarriage". A very Romantic nineteenth-century concept, the missed carriage. She had a misdemeanor. Like the car radio song says, Deepdown in your chewy chewy, in the back of your Tetracycline Ford.

She wanted to be more than just my typewriter, writing songs no one will hear. After all I said, there was still something blocking her vaginoreceptors, vaginodilators, a funny mood that made her not want to do it with me that evening either. Left eating air pie. Sick like I ate a whole appletree, all that bark and apples. You always hurt the one you hump. This will not work, like skiing over a hill half-snow, half-mud. I felt like an insect toilet. After a man's had sex he needs to keep having it or gets terminally violent. Oh, kiss it and make it better, Coral. You're not the only source of the Nile, Coral. I wouldn't like to see you fall down the stairs. All the gold of the Incas, the pork of the Jews, I would give to you if you'd let me help choose. Like onions to the eyes, you make me cry. Oh that we could procreate like the trees A few days later, driving to a local gig, we almost sideswiped a

van driven by Aborti-Maids, for after Daffie died Horace hired them to clean his house, and their work raised money for the Free, White and 21 Women's Clinic that supplied their procedures when they were getting too big to work.

She only glanced at me as if into a rearview mirror. Singing the alphabet when she didn't want to answer. She turned and ran, said "You don't even know what love is" and I was speechless. What do you mean, I've written a million songs that've found something clever to rhyme with that word.

You got a heart full of nails. No, that's not true, I don't know what I'm talking about. Crying when the steam pipes opened. One guage of sexual temperature. She was splashed with tears, probably mine. The Blue Rush Hour. Coral Mars is getting closer every year.

She put the puppy to sleep, the kitten as well. Coral's abortion inspired a line in the Aldebbie song about work down the drain.

Yeah, that Aldebbie. Have I told you about Aldebbie?

This was not fun. Not in the script. You're not singing the lyrics. This was not part of the fun.

The auditorium I don't mind; I don't think you should've gone to that Abort’um, Coral. I sort of don't think it should've gone up the spout of that Abortionerator. Don’t think you should’ve climbed upon that gummy gurney stage, signaled those doctors to solo and jam upon your nether amplifier in the civic abortitorium. But who am I to tell you what to do? It’s a free country. Especially for girls.

Enough for one day. I gotta go. Later.

Tippy and I did not both have Coral at the same time, as was

the popular custom especially among Rock n' Rollers, in those days.

But we shared her, both shone our flashlights in that dank cellar, and that made us cuntin' cousins. Sure, logic says Coral's abortion could have been Tippy's instead of mine. I heard it could have been Thump's, Dink's, several of the roadies in our, and Aldebbie's team, for she dallied and dawdled with the lot of them when Tippy was stoned, asleep and out of it.

Still, something in me likes to think it was mine. My accomplishment. My solo album, so to speak, however quickly it was remaindered.

When Tippy started singing the old camptown tune: His mind was racing at ninety miles an hour When his whistle burst into a scream... he was obviously singing about me, about my dick in Coral. To say nothing of the freshly lain railroad tracks on his own arms. As if we hadn’t noticed.

Was Dink screwing her? Don't be ridiculous, no gin boy and cat seamstress. When he met Coral he was impressed how she'd slept with Jim Beam, George Dickel, I.W. Harper, Hiram Walker, the Regal Chivas and other famous distillers. Dink was interested in her Mons Pilsener though, and how she had relatives in all cities beer was brewed, for he always tried to wheedle and cadge a drink.

Coral told me she and Thump used to laugh together and he'd be funny until he got mean, cold as a condom. His algolagnia then thrust the two holidaymakers into an unknown furnace. Drums like the humongous breasts of a watermelon woman, and that explains

his friendship and affinity for Coral. More Satan than satin. Unless it was just sex.

The following season-of-swimsuits and her own troll’s toenails, Grandmother Mars died of her tan lines and stretch marks. Cellulite Cancer. She coughed n' laughed, said to her bedside favorite young Coral "Remember, give him that wet spot" and died peacefully in her sleep in front of a game-show prize big color TV. I’m not going to say Coral’s abortion had anything to do with Grandma’s passing. Considering all of the junkie musicians around us that we knew who died, dropping off in overdosed happiness, you’d think we could have thought of some cliché or well-polished received sentiment to say to make the family feel better, but didn’t.

Stifling a sniffle, Daffie immediately, embarassedly changed the channel from that religious broadcast singing old hymns like "There's a Hoosegow on Mount Pisgah", as the old lady’s life had become all Church and cigarettes. Inevitably succumbed like her husband before her. Upon Grandma Mars' death Horace might've asked "Do you want to use her for something?" and the home economist Daff might've replied "Good idea, waste not want not"; the way they made fingerpaint from Grandma Moses. Grandma's knucklebones could've become replacement buttons on the Nehru shirts she had made for the girls’ boyfriends. She could've been powdered into peach makeup. They might've flavored their BBQ sauce and ranch salad dressing with her. Grandma’s legs were like a shopping bag full of potatoes even in death. "Soups on! " the Reverend Billy Goatsgrufftroll cries. Cremated of Grandma Soup. Soup equals

Soul. Cut open at the public autopsy on Main Street Summer Bargain Artistic Days to reveal nothing but sweetcream icing and cake decoration rosettes etc. inside. Uniformed old women from the Quantity Bakery quickly spread the contents of these citizens on cookies and passed them out among the crowd for dessert. Free samples! Yecch.

Yet instead they opted for immediate disposal of her aged disposition, as they cremated her in a 99-cent incense burner.

Creamed her. Not even her ashes in a majolica tureen for the china cabinet. Horace said with Immediate Disposal, or Family Dislocation or Imprudent Dumpstering or whatever it's called, we might as well put her under the tomato plants that don't get enough sun in the side yard between the car and the hedge to help 'em along. "We could always get rid of it at a garage sale later" pleads Coral but NO. This had a profound effect upon Coral as unfinished business, an unbalanced checkbook that haunted her the rest of her life when she wasn't thinking about something else or boys. Daff's aunts set up a wail and immediately froze him out for two generations. Every family is full of Ghost Laws, not in-laws.

Grandma Mars had always so wanted a pretty funeral, with her friends all around gossiping and eating cake. Deserving of a department-store grave, after a bullshit lifetime of breaking fine china.

Coral wanted her band to play at her funeral, indistinguishable from a wedding, like a church picnic ice cream social lodge meeting kaffeeklatch. Something I didn’t know was that Grandma Mars was the first woman to put on a bra backwards, at her waist in order to snap it at front, then rotate it around her belly and slide up to fit

properly on her breasts. Many women have done this since.

I would've felt close to the Mars family. My own grandmother was secretly buried at a crossroads at midnight in Ed Gein, Wisconsin to forever haunt the mindnight, a stake thru her heart and ours. Somehow the lack of celebration was blamed on my brother and me.

Actually the Mars brood would never do such a thing. They'd asked me to handle the funeral arrangements and I was still so pissed at Coral that I just had Grandma trashed like the tot. They're still waiting to hear when the big public service will be.

Starlings splatter all over the funeral director’s car parked out front. A Michigan robin's breast exploded. Birds of the Plague. The British, they call girls "birds". Groupies? Hell, at this point we couldn't even get bugs splattered on the van's windshield. The band didn't sound so hot by this time either, all the presence of a fat kid throwing bricks not even off a highway bridge but in a lonely junkyard like Plansky's by the railroad river. Yeah, that’s what Threadbear called me in print, can you imagine. Flabby guitars with flaccid strings, son-of-flubber drums, soupy bass like fish lips sucking, opening and closing. Then again, maybe I am less of a hellburger than I used to be.

My brother, born hooligan, considered going to play soccer for the California Mudslides. Meanwhile Dink remembered an Irish grandfather, so thought he was ambitious enough to try to get into the same old college where alcohol was its symbol, school colors were the hangover gray and clear alcohol. He let it slide though, a wineglass suspended in a guttapercha of liquor. Reflective, Dink

gazed at his bottles as cenotaphs of the sun. As a bleary Dink called it, that's just life's Pernod. The subtle changes in his face from drink, as if decorative red flowers had grown under his skin. Dink had nursed the idea of forming a group called the Unhappy Drinkers Alone, but I'm not sure if they were actually going to play instruments or would just be a bottle gang.

Wheezing over the boiler explosion in his liver Dink mumbled "My hands have a drinking problem," to nobody but his regally purple hands, and nose and face. We had overdub his bass parts because his runny hands were shaking so. Throw that fuckin' bottle down while you're trying to play the bass, Dink, sheesh. But it's okay, he's our friend, right? It's allegedly fun to have him around so we'll keep him in the band.

Hey, if you run out of cassettes during this interview, I've got plenty, hundreds of cassettes of the band gejamming or practicing, sometimes a single song or riff stretched to impossible ridiculous length, both sides of the tape.

Tippy and the Chomps had acquired a fan that I wish we hadn't.

Aldebbie had a million hit records. Aldebbie had read about the Chomps and heard about us from business types before he ever heard us. So one day he bought the records in a cut-out bargain bin and took them home to listen. In that famous book-length interview Aldebbie said he was inspired by nothing so much as Tippy and the Chomps record and his goal was to meet us and work with us someday. Turned his gaze towards us and suddenly took Tippy under his leathery wing. Maybe it was father-worship, a father figurine, but Aldebbie replaced the peer group (what Midwestern girls call a pigi—no, wait, maybe not, forget that) pressure of friends his own age and neighborhood upon Tippy.

The world as a werewolf idea, an Elviswolf, scrubbed and perfumed, not a B.O. Beowulf. The Mephistopheles of music, Aldebbie was not a man at all, but a scent: wafting, exotic, memorable. We got his invitation delivered by liveried messenger, us of all people. A black guy dressed like Thomas Jefferson in wig and white stockings bowed and handed us a powdered pale envelope.

We thought we were streetwise and here this was high society. Put his head out on a limb for us, this manipulator of a marcelled and rubberized soundsex.

Soon we had been seen at the ballroom and the Festival by this

English piece of washing machine lint floating atop the UK charts and chattering. Artificial honkiness, like all the Nostromoturf in the Nostradamusdome, where we were the opening act for numerous touring British headliners...including Aldebbie.

Recorded our next album at Mountbison, a European spa that sounds weirdly bestial. Looking out the castle windows, grim aurochs snuffled throught the misty woods below. It was in the can, the master tapes to be mixed later by Aldebbie in a manner that would bring sales, acclaim, stardom.

Aldebbie introduced us to the Flavorcardinals of the Church. Or at least men dressed up as them, who knows? Aldebbies epigones were cloaca actors. Not exactly a dandyish Regency, but a flamboyancy. Some were threemales, who only were aroused by three or more partners of either, any, sex. Dancing badly to the Goosebulbs' "Beauty is Only Quim Deep" at Aldebbie's Pomegranate Club in olde Laudanum, UK. The Pud Club. These were not our kind of people, not Motorsburgh salt-of-the-earths, not Aleppo intellectuals even.

Those little metal clickers given children to let them, any boy, know that Halloween was coming. Aldebbie’s voice was like that, and that's what I don't like about him, he undeservedly wants to make it Halloween every day, 365 holidays. Like the Peoples’ Puma Party revolutionary demand for “24 Hour Orgasms!” I think non-stop holidays would get exhausting.

Aldebbie would gigglingly make

prank double-entendre phone calls, "Do you have someone’s Prince Albert in your can?" Aldebbie claimed his hand had only gotten sticky from the sap of an Xmas tree, and that's why he wanted to rub it off

on Tippy's nipples and then some. Sheesh.

Maybe you like him, think he’s coolish, but I’d say he was out to hoodlumwink and tiddleywink the general public. Yes, all of us.

Aldebbie mince-stepping around the stage, pseudodancing, doing that sphincter step. Such Vauxhall vaudeville. An English Music-Hole ditty, Aldebbie snakefully hissed the palindromic "Madam, I'm Sodom". Sung in a round, or is that just an electronic effect? Still more dipthyrambs for dodging rams. And he calls that a career.

He's cop, judge, jury and executioner, Guilty until proven age 21 in a court of the Lord, out on Psycho Church Road.

I don't like Aldebbie, he has too much power here now.

Aldebbie's fawnboys, I mean fanboys. Golden bowl-faced, gazing up at him from scampering, simpering faun-lawn feet. Stoopid faun-fucks. Blistering horrorshowsexuals. The barnyard rupture.

The overcaste, gazing up from a Disco Abyss. This contemptible Sun-Squisher.

Aldebbie had purchased the Athanasius Kircher Cat Piano, built in 1650 for a bored Italian prince, where a little spike poked a tom (lower notes) or kitty (higher) when the key was pressed. A fast rock song produced a caterwaul though. So it remained unused, except for weepy ballads like “We Are the Unisex Men”, which teenage girls somehow found “catchy”.

Alldebbie booked us in the posh Hotel Jesus Christ in Psalms Beach, Florida. The famous resort Shpritzers' across the causeway, built upon his seltzer-bottle fortune. Where the Maxy Gillbreather variety show is filmed ever week, Maxy weaving his fat frame upon

tiny feet around dancing showgirls, which he called "The sweetness of life...mwah!" as he blew a stage kiss.

Aldebbie's tongue-in-leather phase had its own tour. Backup singers naked except for their tongues, sheathed in bejeweled bronze. Aldebbie's stage was lit only by the light from an erotically burning lesbian. A pornofascist army-ette of ancient Euro-peeing Chrome Magnons, silver-blond and shimmery shimmying. Above the stage Helicopters of Hanukah, showering gifts for a week.

"You may know, or you may kowtow" sneered Aldebbie contemptuously to the crowd that had stood out in the Michigan subcold for hours to see him.

Aldebbie performed a real circumcision onstage, of his young guitarist, while the lad performed a long, hearftelt and painful solo.

Aldebbie wanted to tour the South Seas, in a sailor’s suit and cap, in hopes of finding the body of Magellan, supposedly still bobbing in that part of the Pacific. Most likely wanted it for immoral purposes too.

When you say men’s magazines, I think of pulpy hubba hubba bosoms, shotgun gauges and wartime thrills from the overstuffed Bluebarrel Newsstand on camups, but Aldebbie's ideas of men's magazines. to whom he’d give the choicest interviews, always mentioning Tippy, were weird ones like AMAZING PHALLUS, under the counter things. I admit, I didn't always understand Aldebbie's songs of Hohenzollern despair, the line in "Von Gloeden Boys about Dark, dancing Von Gloeden boys With whom we've all gone Greek…

What's that supposed to mean to one grown up snacking in Aleppo Greek restaurants like Mistletoeissi's Coffee Cups? Sizzling,

aromatic Elvisissis' Steak House? Campus feeder Giro's Gyros?

Some of the crowd he drew was crumbly and pale as feta cheese though, little flaky spinach-pies of men. We sure didn't understand his European art references, calling one album Sleeping Hermaphrodite just so he could use a photo of that sculpture he bought form a museum in Rome on the cover, its face chipped off and his laboriously superimposed upon it somehow. In the record's gatefold, the sculpture's fetching butt offered to the viewer, was replaced by Aldebbie's own. Real stonemasonry, or retouched photo-trickery tomfoolery?

But what's the point? Oh yeah, so he and his entourage, his coterie or traveling dovecote of douchebags, could titter, titter.

Aldebbie stuck a tailfeather in his hat and called it Mickey Rooney. Part of his English Inversion bands' banal invasion.

Abominations, abominatrixes and abominatrices—I never knew the difference—on Aldebbie's staff working both vile and quotidian deeds for him. Aldebbie was mincing fast. Jesus' parable about the transvestite and the...oh, forget about it.

Aldebbie had fronted an atrocious rent-controlled-houseboy band the Arsewipers, before he put on makeup and sprinted ahead of the pack. Aldebbie's self-penned limited edition vomit-colored vinyl single "Hey Sulfurous Boudoir", blaming a thinly-veiled Coral (whom nobody overseas recognized, fortunately) for the degradation and dissipation and dissolution of his old friend, a thinly veiled or trousered Tippy, whom everybody did recognize in it.

Yeah, you’re right, your haircut does look like his. Very nice, I

guess. Better on you than on him, really.

Aldebbie was just celebrating his hit "Motorsburgh Picnic" and wanted us around for local color n' character, so invited us to his “faun party” on the lawn. My heart dropped and lungs collapsed when Tippy shrugged, "sure".

Aldebbie's newest mansion, 2120 Dude Ranch Way, Mae West Drive, Mae West, MI, an auto manufacturing millionaire's old mansion. I shouldn't be publishing this to the advantage of his fans.

Aldebbie's mansion featured sky blue leather walls and mink panelling. Contrasting elk at the entrance. Cadavers propped up in Congressional doorways. Pieces of burnt witch, still trembling with unheard-of powers, were tumbling and wafting out of the incinerator.

Tigers run over by cars and stuffed into drainage pipes on the lawn outside. Catered photographers keep popping about. Parents come if invited. The clothes caught everybody's lights. Tuxedo eaters roamed the grounds, revolutionary decadents. Important people dancing with telephones jammed to their ears, pinned to their ears with heirloom brooches. Some of those characters looked like those movie star's abortions; extras from “Hollywood in Hell”. The place is crawling with Kings and Duchesses. I put on these fake satyr pants for that engagement, mock goat feet and genitals, felt like a fool.

Thump was wearing a red Phrygian Liberty cap. Not-just-hoodish men of consequence eating burgers wearing t-shirts of greased hair, these savoir ferrymen, meat-and-potatoes maniacs, meat-andpotatoes magi. So-called guests but casual caricatures. Wendy boys, Wendi-Go-Go dancers. Sixteen sexualities. Friends of the

fuschia. The smell of Satanists. Vim and vigor vampires. Moet et Chandon monsters. Beatniks of death. Later they substitued for their wives. Steeped in the smell of the funeral. First time we were around all these plastic tuxedos. Too much money and artifice around here.

It stinks of disinfectant. Aldebbie's party full of idlers like Socratic sophists, soothsayers, society dentists, weather prophets and longhaired onyx-ring wearers. Oh, those are the Onyxonics. There's Nigel Digel. Shit dancers of the Ivy Coast. Electric Coven. Red lions, outrageous orangutans, green dragons, painted medical school skeletons. Some of these guys got their kicks on Route Sixty-Six. How could there have been narcissism before there were cameras, magazines etc., how could there have been celebrities, personalities?

I stopped at the doorway and muttered "God, it's like England between the Wars in there". Deep down in my true confession I knew parties had always made me nervous, for all those people in their interaction didn't move fast enough for us. Drug croquet, teaching children to play, often poked with pickled needles. Little buttonmen talking their patheticology, the study of things sad, like old prostitutes.

A change in mood, this one's gonna be different. Parties come true.

Aldebbie's executive powderpuff insouciance was like a starfish drinking innocence absinthe. Aldebbie gave us a case of it for Dink's birthday and boy, did our impetuous imbiber pull a lot of girls with it.

Thanks, cockatoo-top.

Club footed Aldebbie, congenial and congenital. But because this was the era of high-soled boots, his huge corrective shoe didn't stand out or call attention any more than the rest of his Byronic stage

constraints and enhancers.

There in his porcupine shoes stood our host Aldebbie, that whitehaired electric chair, this pan-fried man smirking, lips alchemical green from licking too many postage stamps. This manicurist-junkie.

A Pontius Platypus. This man was mechanical pencil-lead thin, though had at times for certain concerts been enormously fat, expanding himself to cover the entire stage, amazingly pudgy and squishy and odd. His costume changes included weird brassiere-cut pantaloons, or trousers and short pants of bra-cloth. Like a skeleton with computerized legs. Aldebbie would comb his hair in his sleep, so it came out "dreamy", just right. He had curlicues on his curlicues.

His jackets, trousers or shorts made out of the silky black fabric a nineteenth century photographer would crouch and hide under to black out the light. Weird brassiere-cut pantaloons, or trousers and short pants made of bra-cloth. Such cunning pleats. Wearing his suit-and-kathys, shoes like little sampans. Fashions by Mr. David Davis of Davos.

Sure, every fopstar had 80- or 90-year-old passenger pigeon feathers in his big-brimmed cowboy and pimp hats, but Aldebbie had two full greatcoats of dodo and archeopteryx feathers, respectively; plus cold-weather coats of mammoth and mastadon fur. He gave Tippy a pair of pants made of the pelt of an extinct bison whose long horns spanned twenty feet, a symbol of virility.

Smile a swan boat drifting through a face a grotto of sculpted makeup. Keyboard eyes and control-knob pout. Skin a color called "Buff Jeff". Brass knuckles. The paralysis of perfection, expert inertia, not for a minute was it here thought work was cool.

The source of Aldebbie's fortune? In a song he once said "I with I had a penny for every time people made love, every where, all over the world" and somehow managed to collect all that money.

Aldebbie was important. Aldebbies zits were secret compartments in his face, and I'll bet he kept money in those. That theatre major had such control over the muscles of his face he could pop his zits and pimples without using his hands at all, one quick tic, by screwing up his face like a washcloth could wring out the oil thereof. But it was his sort of movie music that was like a pimple. If you pushed it too hard it'd collapse under its own weight, like a house of cards or matchsticks, a paper tiger or strawhorse, piñata music. A blue whale’ss lungs on land. Just cigar smoke or incense, vapor. Or a movie set's smoke machine, slightly fakey. Hyperrock. Insatiabilly music. Jerk jazz.

While Tippy's was but the yawp of the being-born, Aldebbie actually had a conversationally good singing voice fathers would praise. A newscaster's voice, atomizer to the perfume of his song.

When he spoke he sounded like censorship. A voice so sophisticated only poodle dogs can hear it. When he chose to make it low and gruff Aldebbie sounded like sort of a Wolfman Jackie Kennedy. Threadbear called him “the Dorian Gray of Rock, he keeps looking great but his music gets uglier and uglier.” With his royalties he had bought all the songs in the world—not that he could play 'em—held even the copyrights to "Happy Birthday" and the kids' playground song "Nyaah nyaah N'Nyaah Nyaah". Wore too much satin to look like Satan. Uncomfortable shoes so they'd seek the nearest divan faster. Inhabitants of the Sun. The name Aldebbie

supposedly means from Aldebran, but he was always more of an extrovert-invert than extraterrestial. Aldebbie kept lawyers dancing for him. His band had a resident fardeuses, now what the hell is that, a dame who farts a lot? It's the music that spreads thru space like a fart.

Tonight Aldebbie was introducing Tippy to everybody.

Smattering of coy, restrained applause. Aldebbie opened with a tantalizing smidgen of his latest release, accompanied by his own slime band. A solo upon a lampophone, a reed instrument that I was aware sounded like an esophagus full of food. Thump was stumped

by Aldebbie's potassium percussion. Aldebbie segued into "Flight of the Poltergeist" from his album People Are Sexual Here. Aldebbie's cruel, crass, bleached-white saxophone kind of sound. The beau of the ball then avantgoofed around a while, on a prepared and peppered piano. Mocking music for academic credit. Aldebbie claimed the coat-of-arms motto in Latin Liberace in Terra, or Sissified Pissartist on Earth, oozing Christmas-card sentiment. The pianogasms of an international keyboard thief. Make this piano equal potato.

Aldebbie anounced that his next project would be to produce in collaboration with the genius Tippy. Oh yes, and his little band. The Chomps. Clap clap clap, you kleptos. But Aldebbie as our coproducer? Heck, he couldn't co-produce a codpiece. Peering through, trying to use a tambourine as a mirror except it didn't have any drumhead surface, just a ring. Under the husband light of his audience Aldebbie grumbled "Those shitflies" as he leaned upon expensive amplifiers with carved hands in front of the speakers called

I Hate My Music.

Sneerer, thought Tippy, they haul you in for

Contempt of Court, there oughta be Contempt of Audience.

I didn't come here to be the Dr. Van Helsing of Rock, to this Draculaic host's Frankensteinian event. The music over, look at them giggling, smoking pricey cigarettes called "Mothers", anathema marijuana. How debased. Tippy is barely a ring finger for that wimpola. Holes in his ears, too. Tattoos on his eyeballs and the naked and painted face of most Potowatomies. Apostle of the weird stuff, alumni of the nonstop.

Aldebbie was sexually lemon-lime, the Unamerican Sex. Love like a hobo. The ever-so-slight difference between affection and affectation. How doctors and nurses kiss in surgery. That Childe Dildoe. Pierrot le Motherfucker. Hermaphrodaisickal, hermaphroditic basilisks. His sodomibilly, suckabilly, fuck-verbally fuckabilly music. Evil entertainment. I smell sulfur stench, the smell of rotten eggs or rotten sex. Aldebbie's hatband even smelled like brimstone. Everything he touched turned to fuck, turned to sex and not necessarily the right kinds. Fucking man in his own image is a crime reserved for God. But he could do real stuff for Tippy's career. Took him under his wing, taught him the secrets of show biz. Peurile Aldebbie, watcher and manipulator of his career, fed Tippy the apple of socalled rock wisdom. A producer who promised to make Tippy sound like something other than himself. Sign on the dotted line with a pen called a Bic Faust. But what about all those radio waves that travel through space for centuries, would you let them give a false impression?

I tried to engage the fop in conversation. The therapist who masturbates, warbling "Masturbating in the Moonlight" to the delight of teenage girls. A dinner-party host who who masturbates on the salad, gets all the women guests pregnant. Following him just as ardently as she did the Reverend Billy Ghoaty (pronounced "fish"), Coral just wanted to appear on his album cover. I thought I could put in a good word for her modelling career. When Aldebbie distractedly heard me speak her name he said "Coral? You mean she’s named after Dean Corll?" for he'd just seen the movie version of that killer's autobiography, starring a trim and menacing Elvis. Charmed but uncomprehending, No Aldebbie. He turned away to another bubbler of chat. That, if some are to be believed, might have been the closest Coral had ever come to a famous person, that is if her own stories of celebritysex aren't all true. Erecting a firm defense against participation, I huffed off in retreat to the bookshelf where I busied myself in a copy of Aldebbie's pseudonymous libretto (to, perhaps his most cerebral, album that bombed) A Critique of Pure Sex. Aldebbie was English, that druidy, mouldery moor. Fount of all decadence, aristocracy and their "favourites". At a command performace Aldebbie would command the royal family to clink their crown jewelery together in time to the music, then stop the song and berate them if they lost the beat, confiscating the jewels and even ordering the beefeaters to haul the young crown Prince to the Tower and lob off his head. English wags clustered around a Big Bisondorfer piano singing show tunes, what else. On flights to his U. S. Tours, Aldebbie would not only drink all the cocktails—making fellow passengers irritable, anxious—and have sex with all the

stewardesses in the bathroom, -often while in use by another passenger--but also with the pilot and co-pilot, most of the ground crew and baggage handlers and, before departure, sometimes several of the odd little luggage vehicles and pieces of luggage as well. A flying actor who launched his own Flying Actor Airlines with his song "Charter Flight".

What I heard a teenage girl once calling "heavy petfood", Aldebbie overheard, chimed in to claim his father invented "heavy petrol" to fuel atomic fireballs for the War effort, but there's no proof in any book I've seen. And then quickly recorded his four-song "Heavy Petfood" extended play single. See, that's how the magpie picks off shiny scraps of other people's good ideas and markets them into pop magic.

Ad-man and Eve. Aldebbie had a tattoo "Born to Relax". A Versaillesborg, half-robot and half-Sun King. Pseudoseduction rampant in his fecal blue eyes. Faux-Rock. He made an album in Germany with Dieter Deuteronomy. Songs from his cigarette mind.

The English fear toucans on the telly, like we are with chimps. A record by Dusty Dalkonshield crooned and Aldebbie was all aglow, skin that way from the pampering he gave himself. He'd take daily bloodbaths which dyed him into an oxblood shoe, baths in wells in which litters of kittens have been drowned, chocolate milk and beerbaths. Peking Man skull fragments and Moon Rocks were served as an aphrodisiac hors d'oeuvre and bits of dialog hung in the air like dog-turd incense.

Here Tippy met surf movie actress Barbara Beach Dynamite.

Had her upstairs a few times, sated, disappeared.

Aldebbie surrounded by bottom-boys, those young glassbottomed boats reflecting fashion on the lagoon of parties parties parties. This buggy Babylon attracted ambitious collectors of Aldebbiana. Pterodactylsexuals. Assorted sordids. Swordfish of the soirée. Viscious as a hibiscus. The Intruder King. All hail the jewel in the bogus. Prancing around like Perfume Boy in the comics.

Aldebbie the Great Pastry-Chef of Rock. He must've served hot buttered boy in basted bastard rum batter, or hot-and-cold running sores or something. The man who became a silkworm. A soup made of fleas. A feeble-minded ephebe with synchronized hair.

Another wasted Rockstar sat self-composed on twelve hits of LSD muttering as he diddled before refined critics. The flamboyant glamourous pianist Herman Afroditty, lifting the piano while he played with his erection.

Hmmph. Drugs put out on the table should be in a clearlymarked bottle, "LSD" written in magic marker or something. What kind of drugs would I want to share with this crowd? Sulfuric Acid, Carbon Tetrachloride, dynamite, TNT, gunpowder, nitroglycerine.

The vampire poet, a vampire mixing words, ideas, motifs and motives. Why this fascination game? Firemen of God, going out to extinguish or to ignite?

Aldebbie, you can fuck but you can't hide.

Positively clubfooted with deviltry, as Aldebbie spoke with Cardinal Bob, the ex-prelate turned big time rock promoter, his Luciferian tail swept away a third of the stars in heaven and threw them to the earth, that is the origin of many of our Rock favorites.

Kiss my wings! Sometimes he even ate angels for food, and

subscribed to a newspaper put out by the devil. But like a newspaper himself, he was smart deep parts next to dross, the distasteful boiled down to the banal. Parody or a party? He couldn't very well think about humanity with loud music playing.

Aldebbie was scientific,

university proof the devil existed. Contrary to popular belief, Judas didn't hang himself or bust a gut, but took the silver and became a leading businessman, investing in a music store and promoting rock concerts.

Lovers with doomed imaginations mounted each part separately, decomposing and recomposing, and it kind of reminded us of the snuff films they used to show on TV. Lovers line up for the lovers' lineup. Those boy chandeliers, mirror-ball beings; somewhere our nation’s best Ph.D. theses are being written on Why Disco Sucks.

Every so often a boy with a color for a mouth would enter with sharp tools and hack pathways between the semenheads and breastgivers, dynamiting a place to walk between the still wriggling human flesh, like a highway thru snowdrifts. All different flavors and colors of sex in there and that was just the hors d'oeuvres. Brown shoulders, a ring of shit around their collars. Latenight pornographers, these fleeting, improvised men. The milk of aphrodisiacs and insomniacs.

Weird workshops. Sumo Beach in its tiki-ness of decor, a cross between Hawaii and Hell's Harlem. Those pissapples, those sloping leeches. Pickled faces, pickled facts. How I wish the Chomps Trio were here, as exterminators for posh people's crawling vices, for there were pies for them to hurl. Of course, you have to remember in those days there were rumors that a transvestite boutique was going

to open in Beaverwood, the big new enclosed shopping mall just outside of Aleppo.

I could practically see what I felt to be my own beneficial influence upon Tippy crumble before that propaganda-person Aldebbie. I could virtually smell and taste the band Tippy and the Chomps dissolving, my own ennui playing no small part. Reduced to a grumbling curmudgeon, I bellowed "Who invited this fucking European anyway?" but it was no use. I realized I was creating an uncool spectacle. Bad enough it was in the home of that generous host. I didn't mean to sound like the terrified boy putting a fake ransom note GIVE MATH ALL A PLUS OR ELSE! on Math teacher Mrs. Dewlapp's door. The verbal equivalent of pouring foul-smelling household sabotage poison into your neighborhood enemy's parent's’ air conditioner on Hallowe'en Devil's Night.

Aldebbie, this are-you-mental mentor, coming in so late in life like a funky father. Like, who needs him? Doesn't sound fun to me.

We're young, we're real, we don't need no funkyassed mentors.

We've got our identities already all sewn up, upholstered in our black leather jackets. You don't need a father to play Rock n' Roll Tippy. I can't describe the Aldebbie gentle teacher and mentor scene very well because I've had such trouble with fathers, mentors and father figures in my own life. In a violent argument with Tippy, I screamed I didn't want to just do rock for people with bookshelves, which might've been pretty odd for me to say but you know what I mean. A business decision. Tippy stormed away. Oh well. Oh, Hell.

The rest of the evening at Aldebbie's everything I touched turned to calories. A barbecue where they were cooking up whole

sides of wolf, bear, lion, webelos. Sort of a salmon-colored salmonella, like the bits of food shaken out for dimestore turtles.

Elvis' pork served as cold-cuts at Aldebbie's party. An unclean cafe.

Nibbling chloral hydrate-powdered trilobites. The negative tree. The fairness chain. Spray shortening served as a main course. Hot-andcold buttered rum batter basted boy was served and sliced. They cooked up a huge cloven hoof especially for this banquet. Like the cartoon of the Food Convention, "Coprophagists? I was looking for the ANTHROPHAGISTS table, thank you." Coprophages drank fecal caca-cola, cocktails with little turds floating in each, this is where I draw the line. Plenty of real food over here. I took to overeating, must've gotten 40,000 calories before I lost count. Fall asleep on a couch, wake up to find my boots stolen.

I sincerely was getting a headache. It was the kind of fraternity house we'd never played in before, where they had a moose head as a hatrack over the mantle but the rest of the moose standing there in the next room. It was really a female, the horns only borrowed or grown with the help of hormones stolen from the biology lab, standing there for the initiate brothers to take turns fucking. Gentlemen concupiscng visibly at enticements of a deer riding a minibike, a deer riding a horse. Sweet Adeline penguins. All were offered up for carnal pleasures. Meanwhile, out on country farms several boys were drilling holes—sort of core samples—into the back of a large pig in order to hump it. Took several guys, soon squealting too, to hold it down. I'm increasingly convinced Aldebbie's unspeakable acts with polo ponies, had something more to do with rebellion against the upper-tea British class structure than taking a particular pleasure.

I strolled my drink and plateful out by the pool. Food and drink from the bottom of the sea. A pool so prissy no one would pee in it, even loose dolphins. Octopii would hold their ink. Spermy seahorses, sawhorsefish, seahorsegreasers and seawhores, their orgasms foaming from their cunts. Spermocrats like pink, wriggling shrimp. Sperm equal sea monkeys. Sea-uglies, pugnosed seapugilists. Sea-toads, sea-sushi, consumed by guests with complexions like sea-rotted oranges. One dish that looked like a sort of fhreshwater key lime pie. Cilla and growths, antlerfish, star-splats.

Orgasm's sea anemones, ululating, Omm-saying. It was only the guests themselves around here who looked like weird informal life.

He's got a starfish on the end of it. Today I am a star, everybody's one or at least got one.

Tippy once had sex with a mermaid from the Pottowatami River, actually little more than an ungainly carp. As if all mammals go to Hell, a narwhale pilgrim’s progress. Lap...lap...lap...lappingly in the moonlight and tropical anxiety, under Mau Mau lanterns by this house like a mauve launderette, out back tonight, as the grinning record producer watched, Tippy was making love to a porpoise in Aldebbie's pool.

One press legend had Aldebbie a remittance man, well-born and stubborn like the private investigator in those perennially popular English novels, paid by his father Lord Helpuss to keep out of England and embarassing him, his black Jewish Caribbean mother's name and liason kept out of the news. The wayward mulatto spent his allowance merrily, on clothes, travel, seeing bands. Aldebbie's

official record company press biography said he was born in Swaddlingclothes, Furtivesex, UK, but differing theories flew around his fans’ rumor mills, perhaps encouraged by the powers-that-be to keep him in the news, on the radar. Some claimed Aldebbie's alembic, where he grew up, was a small cottage in Spitballfields, UK. Others insisted that Aldebbie's parents John and Yoko, I mean Al and Debbie, met and nested in a town called Plentysex. Or Pantysex, as the rival footballers called it. Son of misbegotten Colonel Archfin Aldebran-Pebbie, which his son shortened to Aldebbie. A misbegotten Colonel, in the Empire? Lord. I don’t know, I’ve never Kippled, and all that.

If there's an Essex, Wessex, Sussex, then it's ironic that the invertedly-voracious Aldebbie would come from Nossex. Maybe it's name is an over-many-years contraction of Nothing-But-Sex. From Britain's wild Aldebbielands came this wild Arthurian authoritarian.

No, actually a small town; imagine Aleppo with no books and scholars, more weak tea. One influential fanzine had him ailing from what he called a "middle-lass suburb", in the valley of Squigglehurst.

What we would have called Michigan's middle finger, if the state’s contours didn't look move like an oven mitt. Still, one of our Governors even named a child Mitt. But Aldebbie's real, priggish wimp-English given name was Mildew, maybe Mildew Peter something. Some sleuth claimed Aldebbie's real name was Al Smith, like the boozy American Catholic politician. Nevertheless, I think he's Jewish, at least on one side. His shrewdnes, savvy, urban sophistication gives hime away; urban and urbane, though Urban was also a Polish Pope once.

That Scripturally-driven stamping out of sexual display is why no Pope in the 20th century, at least since the founding of rock n' roll, has taken the name Peter. So I guess this guy decided he would, out of spite. And Hitler was Pope for a while, wasn't he? Or they (especially Bavaria) wanted him to be, and his Lutheran Wehrmacht Generals said Hell no, made him turn it down. Sorry, I’m digressing.

Why does talking about the robed, pontifical Aldebbie lead to the Vatican?

As a precious, precocious little angel, Aldebbie used to entertain adults, delight his Jewish shopkeeper grandma, his bubbe, with a shuffled "My Old Man's a Dustbin, and His Da's a Handful of Dust." Of course his father reddened and fumed, but generally played along. Yes, Mum. As if Aldebbie hadn't given his father enough to fume over. They say some sort of accident when Aldebbie was a small nebulous child in Haphazardford or nearby Haphazardfordshire made him that way. And is Step-on-a-Fetus an English town or a provincial savory? Like the town Greater Soup-ona-Fish? He supposedly made some memorable splash there.

Aldebbie chattered something about it, but who can follow what he says when he's excited? That damn country and its silly villages and fens get me so confused. Him too.

Even as a child, Aldebbie called buttonholes "buttholes". This approach to words from their sides (or rear entry), leavened by his sharp, weird intellect served him well in the craft of songwriting, and made him appreciative of Tippy's own instinctive yawp like a horny baby at birth. Arriving in the city, Aldebbie had been stock boy for the English fashion design house Knickerless. Beast foot forward—the

cloven one—clubfoot Aldebbie had been tea-boy in an elegant tailor and haberdashery, with a little Mod rave-up band in the evenings, putting about London on a scooter that would be crushed by any American sedan or two-door muscle car. A Tudor indeed.

Where did he come from? Well, you’ve probably read the ComeTogeether feature, and smary items by Threadbear in CumOn!, but here’s what I’ve pieced together.

Few realize Aldebbie had been a teenage country singer in England called Bull Dustbin; he hated it when I'd call him, with a snigger, "Bully". After that, Aldebbie had played with rural English farmworkers the HIred Men. Aldebbie’s first band was the Quiffs, who suffered minor injuries in that brutal rumble with the Coifs. Aldebbie began his career playing cigar-box banjo, then a Tommie’s trench ukelele, at the Mid-Umberland Fennel Club.

He would hitch up his knickers, hitch-hike and turn trucker-tricks to get to the English portside town Fabulousmouth. He toured, singing songs from his weird folk-strumm’d first album Workshop of the Celibates, with its scary hit song "Will Kill for Mars". But few saw him, and even fewer cared.

Aldebbie's breakoutuous appearance was on the Buddinge Sylph show, hosted by a lecherous comedian whose contract always included the right to sexual congress with any young act who appeared. Appropriate, because much of what Aldebbie did was essentially transforming pub rock like "Tits of the Brits” by adding drums and lugubrious synthesizers to that silly clarinet song that, sped up, Mr. Sylph always chases girls to, for an evening’s last laugh,

at the end of the show.

Hip FM stations, sure, but even AM Top Hits radio were playing Aldebbie's summer confection "Sunshine of Your Foreskin", alternating with his landed-gentry "The Beat of the Footmen". On this latest tour to promote them, Aldebbie had Chang and Eng, the Siamese twins, playing a double-necked guitar, though they weren't very good at it, their other two arms behind them flailing a tambourine and pair of maracas. Still, impressive. Behind them, bearded lady black backup singers with long Rastafarian tresses of whiskers. The World's Fattest Drummer, poured upon a great iron oil-tank stool. A minotaur and a mantiore on saxophones, a harpy on the keys, a sphinx on synthesizer, etc. All the animals in the Zoo are jumping up and down for you. An Anglo-Reptilian culture on display.

TV appearances goosed upward the sales of Aldebbie’s new LP Songs for Androids with Hemorrhoids, as well as his earlier tracks.

Aldebbie impersonated President Whisper, one more pose with extreme whiskers. The man of a thousand twirls. This narrative, mumbled like a mouthful of ice cubes by the Drug Mod model called Neudsch, began Aldebbie's concept album Transvestitopolis, where every man wear's his mom's clothes.

Aldebbie sang: He showed a hologram to the Holocaust Pretty, yes, but at what cost? in an ennui-dusted drawing-room voice, or something from Genesis in the Bible. After they'd made a burnt offering BBQ to him, Eve dipped her finger in the charcoal, drew a mustache atop her lip, said

"Madam, I'm Adam" in a masquerade prefiguring Aldebbie's trendsvestitism today.

And I think he got that gratuitous Holocaust reference from me.

Aldebbie spattered songs with foreign vocabulary, sang some lines in Old Franglais, and a spattering of Spanglish and pidjin, like pigeons on a statue Like a palace-building Renaissance French king, he began "Force Majure, Droit de Siegnieur" about deflowering the young daughters of the yoemanry and peasantry. Then he got to the verse about deflowering the burghers.

Aldebbie later sang Hey big Stephen Spender, spend a little night with me I ain't Auden, I ain't kiddin'...

Aldebbie claimed the melody was based on the old World War One music-hall song "The Laudanum Derriere".

Aldebbie sang Well, the girls don't know, but the little men understand in his backdoor blues voice, and crowd tittered merrily. I think even I knew what he meant, and I don't like it. Aren't there still special courts here in the Queen's England, to take care of this? Maybe not any more.

Aldebbie claimed to be descended from several famous operasinging castrati, and on the other side, from celibate churchmen. He giggled, sniggered and chortled.

"She was an ape ape ape/In polyester estrus" sang Aldebbie, and all but his adoring teenage girlfrenzies knew he might've been singing about a boy. Dancers onstage displayed bright enormous engorged pink-and-blue behinds, waiting for the man-drill.

Aldebbie wouldn't perform, or let his band perform or practice, his old songs. For him, rock was a matter of art or death.

Aldebbie’s first song burst out of the radio with the opening line "Every rock star must kill his parents", instantly becoming a hit. The second line was the same, with "your" substituted for "his".

Soon came his catchy song "Gonads Keep Swingin" from his album Transvestite Heart. A dash of the old Brutish Music Hall about it. He was resurrecting these Olde Englishe knees-up horsechestnuts and Abbey Tavern roadapples like "The Time of Your Mum", foisting them off with electronic Beatlebock upon the American public, half-expecting Tippy to sing then, even. A crass outrage.

Some critics wrote that Aldebbie was both bull and heifer.

While he hadn't pulled down pants or Olympic swimmer's trunks, onstage he appeared in a spangly Happy Birthday Mister President decolleté cleavage bra. Dirty mother scapular, dirty mother supplicant. With his fine classical English education (so he claimed; in their Bizarro world, public schools are private) from Pabulum House evoked decadent ancient Rome with his False Necros tour.

He told the press excitedly how the Emperor, in his enthusiast to torch crucified Christians, burned down his entire capital city. Hah! Score! Lonesome...! What a pud. He expelled Jews shortly before, in AD 40, and they'd taken their shpritzing seltzer bottles with them, so there was no way to put out the flames. I wanted to interrupt, remind him how the Chomps Trio carried those bottles for mischief in this century, much as a migrant rabbi might carry Torah scrolls.s At one point, Aldebbie called himself the Grand Iced Turk, or

everybody else did, after he sang of one. His costume chryselephantine bell bottoms, a jumpsuit all white marble and gold, splendid, spangly, atrocious. Robes from Banalywood’s Hermes Trismegestus for Men. How fey can you get?

The CumOn! review was titled "To Aldebbie, Posing as Sodomite" and heaped invective on him from there. Threadbear set him up like a straw man against an idealized, healthy "Motorsburgh machismo." Helpless and hopeless before these arguments like a Moloch wicker man, in which innocents are burned inside. Tippy, other neo-Michigaborigines were posited as healthy Green Men of the woods, farms, factories, towns. A memorable piece, but still piffle.

Later Threadbear reversed himself, was as enthusiastic (while snarky) about Aldebbie as he was about the Chomps. It always time for him to come around, for Jesus to change his tiger stripes, but the process always made for good, lively reading.

The press took to calling him "The unthinkable Aldebbie” and he liked that.

Aldebbie supposedly fathered a child by the Queen's mad sister sequestered in the Tower, but that might have been tabloid fodder, what the English call a Treacle-and-Spotted-Dick affair.

Always one to cash in, Aldebbie appeared in a glossy, colorful ad for the Sadocaster, a guitar designed to torture the fingers, crushing and stretch-racking each digit methodically (people who don’t play, like its designers, thought that was cute). And the jerk didn't even PLAY guitar, just liked to pose "rockstar" with one.

You’re right, that really gets my goat.

His contract contained a rider demaning a phrenologist at each concert venue. One was hard to locate in Motorsburgh, so a brain surgeon from the university hospital was hired at considerable expense, transported by taxi fthat night to the Grandioseum. But the surgeon had a habit of probing the patient's skull not with fingertips but a scalpel, so Aldebbie's fine English paper-like skin was nicked and bloody by the time he took the stage. One side of Aldebbie's face was like a beautiful colored girl, the other like an ideal English athlete killed in World War One. Oh, so you think he dresses “cool”, do you?

Aldebbie's costume like something an astronaut would sleep in.

Y’see, things were changing, the times a-changing, the loving touching promiscuity of the hippie flowers era had given way to a cruel, cynical, metallic smugsexual urge-edge. Paisley and patchoulicolors given way to shiny day-glo black, silverblue, where prim girltwins I'd admired from afar turned up on album covers and billboards in glittering chains and restraints, bound and gagged with eyeshadow barenaked. And I blame Aldebbie.

Aldebbie was sporting that 1930s fashion, the tittering rage among English foxhuntsexuals of a pink and puckery foreskin suit.

No thanks, give me good old-fashioned leather for my jacket, even pricey motorcycle dungarees now. A cow's sweet butt, a bull's proud flank, tanned into a soft smoking chair in a gentlemen's club or a rogue's own jacket. Like mine.

Aldebbie's stage suit was woven from platinum cocaine,

pressed into fibers at great expense in a famous wartime northcountry roughtrade cryptography laboratory, ringed with radar.

Aldebbie wore dramatic two-tone kiwi boots, one the color the skin and pulp of the fruit, the other made up of feathers of the flightless bird.

Elsewhere in his closet, the jacket made from a dodo, the pelt purchased from a Dutch sailor's famil, the beefy claw-like legs as epaulets and the menacing beak hanging down suggestively. A pair of tight trousers made of coelecanth, a warm jacket he wore in Michigan from mastadon with Baluchatherium insets. A belt made up of trilobites. Oh, he raided the museums, all right. Faux-military regalia, or maybe that's just standard colonelblimp’d British issue.

Claiming he was Field Marshal of the massed armies of Testosteronia. He wore clanking suits of armor onstage, fired a cannon gun that shot ornately-metaled sixteenth century halberds into the audience.

"Do you like it, Tippy?" Aldebbie cackled. "It's a cumberbund made from a cucumber." A perfect and wry fusion of of the organic— the lacto-vegetarian even—and the theatrical-artificial, which Aldebbie so assiduously sought. He felt it made an ironic commentary on hippie virtue, with old fashioned steamer-trunk and ocean-liner pizazz.

Aldebbie, like a lot of those fellows, powdered his face, pouted on red moué-lips, and tittered his way through the Marriage of Figaro to the Barber of Seville.

Aldebbie in vestments, his Vaticatholicism a veritable potpourri of Popery. Animal crackers—which, to the groupie girls, still tasted

like boycome—and Tipple wine from the bottle for his "Mass for the masses" festival ritual. Was he incarnating some recently-dead rockstar or, polytheistically, all of them? He liked to think that he was that good, liked to think that he was that God. Or, was it all merely show biz, song and dance and seltzerpants, bagel-belt schmaltz? At the end of the set, to get sure-fire applause, the old vaudevillian would burn the flag.

But it seemed to work, and he raked it in. In the Poshcrossing district, tabloids reported that Aldebbie's flat had gold and silver waterboy watchdogs out front, ever-vigilant bulldogs who would molest and hump each other and passersby for guests' amusement.

But I'd only heard tell of it, wasn't invited. Instead I spent the evening in the British Library, in Marx's favorite leather smoking room chair.

For the grand bearded savantstein and I both contemplate history in terms of economy; he, in terms of labor; me, in terms of Rock. And our Tippy’s fucking.

Aldebbie had bought a chateau on the Rue-Saint-Jean-Genet, had his staff gilded and gelded, except the rent boys on the payroll.

Acquired a ceepy country estate whose florid entrance gate bore the Latin battle cry "Scrotum Rex". Aldebbie went to a seaside golf resort in Hitlerhead. He went bathing Ostend-tatiously. Aldebbie was everywhere, dammit.

Aldebbie's drawing rooms and table, where every grain of salt was cut by hand. And you'd want to take his stories with a wide grain of sargasso. On the mantlepiece, shrunken heads with a cannibal cuteness. Ghosts wearing glasses.

Aldebbie claimed he had a guitar pick from a slice of Queen Victoria's stones. Or maybe mad King George III’s prostate.

Aldebbie drove an English sports car powered by butterflies broken on the wheels.

Probing journalists found he was descended from a family who brought in a sizeable income when their photos were used to illustrate successive editions of famous medical books. His famous rock video freaturing swells performing aerobics in nothing but top hats. For months now he’d been running diamond miles.

Once, the poor boy starting out, he lived on the oily discarded newspapers that had held fish and chips. Now Aldebbie was eating satin steaks. Bread-and-bullet pudding. Afterwards, emerald ices.

Other foods in girlfriend colors.

And pudding from real puds. Aldebbie's cook served him hammer-softened sirloinscrotum. At Aldebbie's tables, codpieces were centerpieces, phallically sculpted from pieces of live cod. Live fish flopping around the table like concubine boys, fish-shop catamites. Unappetizing, if you ask me.

Invited to one of his incessant dinner parties, we found him dining on a duck's soul. No, not that kind of sole. Aldebbie claimed what he served was toasted, roasted nubile crudités of Smoked Girl—"It's Scandanavian!" he beamed—but was possibly dugong manatee or porpoise whale. Even Coral isn't that addipose.

Aldebbie drinking a Kangaroo's Pouch, and Ostrich Feathers and a Lemur's Stare, in quick succession.

Aldebbie's dogs weren't fed on table scraps, but truffles and

nougats. Sleek Marzipans, those almond sweet-fed Nazi eugenic maulhounds.

You know the Shroud of Turin, and how some guys want to carbon-date it? Aldebbie just wanted to date it! No, he actually served it up to us Carbonara, with crumbled bacon on pasta. Just because he could. We could taste the stringy old threads between our teeth. Subsequently, Catholic autoworker unions used their outrage as an excuse to strike. Communist unions joined in, just for goof. A holiday for all. The record company advanced the slippery Brit huge sums of money to do things like that, for they generated news stories that sold records. He's so crazy.

Aldebbie took us around to exclusive No-Nose and Hellfire Clubs. Aldebbie invited us to an upper-class party at Lord HellPuss' country house for a "spot of lion burning." The sportsmen would set manes on fire, taunt it to exhaustion, then shoot, jolly good and smashing, fun. Except he wanted us to dress as pygmies for it “because you’re from Motorsburgh, and that’s practically coloured—It will be kicky!” Mud-daubed in grass lionloincloths. Fuck you Aldebbie, fuck you and the unicorn centuar you rode in on. Or satyr that rode you.

Aldebbie cultivated his decadent ways over many urban years.

But we're midwesterners, who barely knew the difference between chalcedony and sodomy.

Aldebbie had a wife Bikini, mother of his dozen children, each named after a cell (Epithelium), cell part (Nucleus), or single-celled animal (Paramecium). His first son was Spermatazoa, of course.

Somehow to the American Sunday-supplement press, the featured family made his amours and frolics with fey boys all the more alarming. Someone swore he ran a church youth group, but despite the lubricious benefits, I doubt that.

He popped tablets to address his Lower Homosexual levels.

Aldebbie was fascinated by what the New Yorkers down by the docks called Rockefellatio, named after the stern silver spoon Governor with the bulky transvestite wife called Happi-Coate. Or Hippy Hippy Shake, or something like that.

Aldebbie claimed his quest was to scientifically sees the Heterosexual's Stone, but I think that just meant he wanted to fondle the bellies and genitals of normal guys, guys who sexually liked girls, pretending he could detect stones within.

I understand why call Aldebbie's type "inverts", for they invert and change the direction of sexactions. The vagina is something you're supposed to go up, the anal and rectummy something from where stuff goes down. And he and his ilk flip them inside out, like stolen wallets. The Brit wanted Tippy's royal gold scepter up there, a concept which only briefly amused the American, to Aldebbie's great dismay. But that's just policemansex, said Tippy who, after all his disturbing-the-peace-of-underage-girls-arrests by then ought to have known. Following the experiment, Tippy moved on to more girls.

What Aldebbie, atop or beneath his burly furry funny roadies, called bisonsexuality.

During the reign of their first Queen Elizabeth, no one in England lived more than a mile from a man who practiced cunnilingus. Aldebbie told us that.

Aldebbie, that wizard-weasel. Aldebbie, that sneaky Pope.

Oleosanctus as carnal lubricant, vile goat-smelling lanolin of the Smelly Pope. Aldebbie the Abbé or Abbess, the aberration, the abortion. Aldebbie, that polypoltergeist haunting our career.

Aldebbie resolved to be epicenter of the epicene. Which sounds like an ancient geological epoch, doesn't it? When cave queers had sex with mastodons, sturdy horses, long-horned aurochs of either sex, a lot of wet fur flying until the chilling Ice Age, the result of a punishing meteor. No, it was something more effete than that, delicate drawing-room china and doilies, young men as grannies.

If I were Jewish, I'd say Feh! Ecch! But I can say Shit! Fuck! like a Michigan man, yes.

Shortly after that, Aldebbie was riding high on the international success of his breathy rock opera "Bob Buckingham", about a London bobby who kept both a devoted wife and a famous catamite, both sex receptacle and pedagogic conversationalist. He loved strutting onstage in his police uniform, in extravagant trimming, regulation yet redesigned by a Japanese science-fiction eccentric.

Wide shoulders, riding pants with outlandish hip gold buttons, button frogs and braids. Imperious imperial sunburst (where the sun never sets, where the sun don't shine) badges on breast and helmet, foppish and fey. Captain of the Avant-Guards.

That one Royal House of Winners Princess who was mad, drunken and promiscuous presided over Aldebbie's dubiously official Transvestiture, which he boasted “fit for a Queen”. She presented the Order of the Bent, previously given to King's favorites, the woozy party girl putting the garter upon his slender, waxed leg. Smart

Laudanum Economics dropout dope, he spun glorious ambitious plans in her ear, designed florid currency for, a chartered Transvestment Bank. Maybe Aldebbie's a transsexual, like Victorinx, inventor or the Swiss Army knife.

What had reversed Aldebbie's magnetic polarity? A UFO passing close, or merely a woman? Maybe just a change of haircut and stage costumes. Aldebbie belonged to this esoterica-Egypto Temple, Rumpletemplars who spit on the Cross and divined the furure from people's jackoff, which is why Aldebbie was so interested in Tippy's. He'd have little groupies scrape it off the stage, bring it to him. Aldebbie spoke of "pre-dishwashing lotion" which Tippy took to mean he masturbated before tackling something quotidian as household chores.

Even the most mundane things had been sexualized for the nineteen-seventies ahead. Now you kids reap the beneifits.

Fey fops, ephebes and feebs in wasptail coats. Pompous pomipiers in their pompadours. Conceited, self-important, preening like that orchestra conductor Distemperer who wound up playing the comedy Wehrmacht Colonel on TV. They still have TVs playing that sitcom on a loop at Schickelgruber's Bavarian Buffet in Werewulf, MI in Franzkafkc County a couple hours north of Aleppo.

Aldebbievanilla epigones, copycats, clotting the airwaves with feypop soundalike fairydom. A noted black poet in the English Department was at Aldebbie's party—clearly that way—surrounded by a crew of male and female butterstockings. What Aldebbie called his boy gum.

Ghostface castrait. Female castrati. While the

laughing, fawning assemblage of careerists were drinking glitter cider with Aldebbie, with glints of Splatterite swirling in it, Aldebbie cast aspersion-sperms on those normal men.

"I never became a proper Satanist because I could never remember if you kissed the toad or the goat's hindparts first" I heard wine-soaked Aldebbie cackle.

Tippy was indifferent, holding fast to a pantsless young nearlyneuter girl-thing.

I was surprised to see several school counselors, principal Phlegmsinger from Forcefield Junior High. If that wasn't Horace Moon over there, it sure was one of several local hair-oiled business hamburgers like him.

"Ashmolean?" chuckled Aldebbie, suddenly noticing me. "A lovely museum! I had its Director, Curator, did the Head Conservator in the basement—the poor boy’s spectacles dropping, breaking in the juicy melée—and the Keeper of Queen's Pictures on my weekend there."

I had no idea what he was talking about.

Though the two had been linked romantically by rumor, evidently Aldebbie won the Chomps' management contract, sold by Dr. Jude Suess to pay a gambling debt.

How much? Don’t ask me, I dunno. It's all hazy, I've got no head for numbers, to impatient to deal with contracts and all that.

Aldebbie booked us in Laudanum's bluff and old-fashioned Arthur Onan D'Oily-Carte Theatre, where Aldebbie had performed as a cheerful boy soprano in tights years before. He then had us play

two nights in the Confectionary Theatreum, the plush pocket jewel box beside an old bon bon factory, it reeked of nineteenth century sugars and West Indies molasses dripping off a slave's back. Knees Up Your Brown Mother! they sang.

Then a package tour. Rumor had it that the cosmetics subsidiary of that great corporate combine conglomermonster sponsored their tours, not that very visible beer company. Aldebbie endeavored to be friendly and helpful to the other bands on tour, to the point that, when they would normally share a nubile female groupie with such a supporter, instead they'd say "Well, he's been such a jolly chap, shall we all shag him then?" That was his favorite moment, and he'd beam with pride as he undressed, fluffed and greased them up. Their moment of silly boy-solidarity, though his role in it was decidedly different from theirs.

It was a publicity stunt when, for a day, our own Michigan town named itself "Aldebbieleppo" in honor of his nearby concert in Motorsburgh Mammonnitorium. A lot of out-of-work hippies we know were hired the next day to paint all the signs back the way they were, with the real name. The money mostly flowed into the dope dealers' economy, but we like to think some was spent to buy our record, if they hadn't already.

Aldebbie was inspired by his brief drive into working-class Michigan to write his Heat-Seeking Hunters album, its photo shoot depicting men—some athletic, some burly and ursine—wearing only bits of camo or safety orange gear. He wanted men in both forest camo, and safety orange. Aldebbie wanted to come to Michigan during hunting season and wipe bottoms of the baby deer. But I

suspect he had more designs on those fauns, as the tittered the show tune Doe-a deer, Fel-La-ti-o...

Aldebbie had bought Tippy an angora anorak matching his own, making sure they were photographed together. Geez, like the pretty Whysocketi twins I knew in high school, tall babes who modeled for a downtown professors'-wives fashionable department store. Pees in a pod. The gozzippy British rock press writes that Aldebbie usually put seven, eight, ten conditioners on his hair each shower. They go on to say he taught Tippy to masturbate in a "lovein" shower staffed with Aldebbie's wives past, present and future— and planned to record a live album in there—but Tippy was doing it onstage in Michigan for years prior.

You better believe, if a Rock n' Roll flying saucer lands, even a saint exuperyous open-coccix-cockpit alien monoplane, we'd welcome the space alien...though Aldebbie's album about burly bigeyed space brainmen drones on and on about apocalypstick anal probes. He based it all on stories Tippy told him about the saucer flap in the woods north of town, by the university radiotelescope; "Swamp gas!" huffed the out-of-towner, expert in conventional thinking. I think spacepuds would be more like curious foreign students. They'd buy bluebooks and spiral-bound notebooks at Buchscheiss' university bookstores just to jot down their notes about us, or songs.

Aldebbie, that second-class Satan. He wanted us to play a Walpurgis Witches Sabbath, where he would serve as the kissable goat. Many girls were organizing covens in their high schools, preparing to attend. Learning to fly happy plastic brooms, flower

stickers on the handles. In that arboreal experience, the band went a half hour out of the city to a woodsy glade. I left the fiery circle for a moment to pee in the woods, and could hear a witch shrieking "Tippy, you were supposed to kiss the Great Goat's anus, not stick your dick in and fuck him!" "Hey, I don't know goats. I thought it was a female."

Haw! He really got their goat, so to speak.

And this unpredictability was what Aldebbie found so charming.

"Dear boy" this and that. Gad. Since Aldebbie couldn't bed the band, he turned us over to his exuberant, almost manic, inexhaustible wife Bikini, and she did. Did us all. One night in the van. And the rest of the season too. His overworked aide, tomboy Capricciodentata—reputed to be bedmate of Aldebbie and Bikini both—watched and scowled, when she wasn’t writing florid publicity and ad copy, yearning to be considered a real journalist on the level of Threadbear soon, at least in Laudanum.

Guys who bullied me in junior high—big Gordo "How much does your belly weigh?"—or the sporting torment team Joel and Marvin, turned up working security detail for Aldebbie's tour, guarding the sissy entourage and isolating musicians from all but nubile groupies, mouth-groupers.

For one tour, Aldebbie was dressed in what the baby Jesus wore when trick-or-treating. Or nowadays more suited to another kind of tricking, yeah. The garb of a hideous and morally handicapped child.

His Christmas single in Great Britain was even called "The

Viscuous Child", picture-sleeve showing the cradle in the manger empty but full of snails, their trails.

Aldebbie's "Pissoirs de Paris" tour, with men in little street stalls urinating and tipping their derbies to passing ladies, puddling and dripping down the front of the stage, was copied from Tippy's smelly rain-spattering the audience. He felt he was urbanizing, civilizing, Europeanizing the characteristic behavior of rough creature from the Michigan woods. How many of his good ideas did he get from us?

I couldn't stand Aldebbie's fluttery, buttery Flibberdejibbit Rock.

Couldn't wear those high-heeled laxative shoes, high emetic boots. colonoscopy footwear, supposed to reference astronaut adventures but were turning burly men into tottering newborn giraffes, unlicked fawns fallen in the grass. I called on the little brown bats in the trees and caves to come down and bite Aldebbie, but I don't think they did.

Aldebbie's band the Delicious Centurions were like the costumed hustlers beefcaking around the Coliseum in Rome. There was something sort of evening-prayers macabre about Aldebbie, that crepuscular busker. After all, the word "macabre" comes from the name Macabees, the folks who invented the concept, with their Roman tourist-tempting roadside Haunted Mystery Fort on Masada.

Their name Scots-Irish but Jewish too. There was a big scandal in the Laudanum and Motorsburgh Jewish communities, outraged rabbis saying Aldebbie only agreed to preside (his contract said "perform") at the circumcision so he could suck the bloodied baby to his first orgasm, a photo-op as well perversion of the ceremony.

The hypnogogue of the synagogue. The brouhaha? What Aldebbie called using their jodhpurs up. He may or may not have

been completely Jewish either.

None of Aldebbie's sodomy stuff for me. I have enough trouble with my bowels without it, and have no desire to explore a smelly bandmate back there. Though Tippy says it can be delightful with a girl.

Shit, perhaps the decadent Aldebbie only slept with groupies of either sex with the clap. Globerigenous goose-turd-green ooze from his peccary gave him something new, a novel bodily sensation, to sing and scream on record, stage, screen and television about.

Around the card table, at a stag party in a lodge, dogs playing poker, blue movies to be shown later, Horace Mars suggested I might file and Alienation of Tippy's Affection for our Band suit against Aldebbie. The guffaws around the table made me unsure if he was serious or not.

Aldebbie's Apostolic Masturbation EP, singing of spilling his seed outside the Pearly Gates of Heaven-to-Betsy. So fey and daring, darling. It grew into an album obviously influenced by his special little friend Tippy, called Masturbation in Bell-Bottoms. I helped him write a couple of the songs, like one about teenage criminals in Ypsofacto, so sexy the water tower cranes its neck to admire them. Aldebbie's "Master of Godzillions" album, for on our own tour we had more fans than Godzilla ever killed.

What Aldebbie called—and named an album after—Coral's Pop Art Clitoris. He may have been also inspired by a Swiss lady's giant sculpture of a reclining gourd-mama, where the patrons of a Swedish museum could march through her open legs and pubiparts. There

the clit was the light switch.

ComeTogether magazine reported the new album by Aldebbie boasted a theremin made of cerumen, the fancy name for earwax.

This was his "orange" album, to match his absurd dyed hair which he said enthusiastically was inspired by vinyl booths in a fastfood Burgers n' Fries restaurant on his first American tour.

Everywhere, the damn record racks in department stores, in SpinCycle Records, Viscount Records, were filled with Aldebbie this, Aldebbie that.

Aldebbie's new album Sex as Prank.

Aldebbie collection The Velour Album.

Aldebbie's album White Mylar, his whining "White Mylar, the polar molar..." and more idiocy. Unrock crap. And the one with plumbers bending over, called the Buttcracker Sweet.

Aldebbie's moody Discussion of a Circumcision album.

Harrumph. Feh, I'd say, if I were Jewish.

Aldebbie's mournful "Single-Room Sycophancy" clogging the sewer that is pop radio now, crooning "Into each life, a rainbow must sicken and die/And fall from the sky..."

Aldebbie seduced girls via albums like Teenage Clitoris, with its bosom-bouncy, thrusty sax-penetrated beat.

There was an Aldebbie Park now in Aleppo. Source of his stage name? In his song about the future, Aldebbie chimed "I See Bumper-to-Bumper Aleppo", but I think his vision was of homosexual frolic, not miserably slow, stalled traffic that you see on football weekends.

Ye Old Campus Apothecary, what new management cloyingly

renamed Altkocker’s Aleppothecary, was soon the place where Tippy, Thump and Jake, the new guy (Aldebbie's lover?) scored their addiction pharmaceuticals.

What goes around, et cetera.

God's Abortion, Aldebbie's dramatic sports-arenas stage show to celebrate the new decade, had real ambulances crashing, bursting into flames onstage. Its mock-gladiatorial combat, seminal seminarians, versus ovulating novitiates, skillfully choreographed live sex show numbers.

In the words of the Old Testament Yaweh to Adam, "You're not the boss of me!" Or wait, was it the other way around? As you can tell, my attitude towards Aldebbie is not panic, as he once accusingly shrieked, but a healthy midwestern skepticism.

In his horror at Tippy's debility, and to rile ComeTogether and CumOn!'s free publicitywagons, Aldebbie wrote and quickly recorded "Wheelchair Monday" single.

Aldebbie’s manager Rudi Schlemiel himself and his beloved client with lower-East End shlomosexuals, who'd grown up playing Spivs and Chavs on the dank streets of Laudanum, England. Using foreskins as tiddleywinks. His suave mitteleurop manager laughingly called his client The New Limpwristkov, like the dashing balletsexual dancer who'd recently emigrated to the west. Aldebbie was offering the great allure. His verschlagen noggin.

Now we were signed on the dotted line to this dodgy, scammy Megamanagement Company. Figs and their little dates, tapping at

typewriters while tippling beige champagne. Mister Toad’s Wild Drum Solo ahead.

Aldebbie's manager sported a deep-friend mustache. In contrast with the Chomps' hippie manager, who mostly just obtained their drugs but booked badly-paid tour, Aldebbie's crafty manager had learned the ropes as a savvy young student appointed to oversee a program of rock concerts on campuses founded by the National Endowment for the Sex. Aldebbie wanted Tippy for his own natural endowment I guess, for he entertained reversal of the businesswives on the committee beneath their lifted skirt suit ensembles and nylons, pillbox hats, matching shoes and gloves.

He's like that.

Aldebbie’s epicene and feeble fauxbelle-of-an-ephebe of a personal assistant was a stern tomboy called Phoebe Pleasureton.

Tippy cleanly blew fire upon her clitoris and g-spots, which charmed her right away, saw her attentively furthering his career. Her father (born Plotztink) an executive in the rag trade, she tried to convince Aldebbie to market his own line of Bougainvilleawear.

Baphometrics, clacking like abacus chopsticks throughout the offices, businnes-suited men devoted to Crowleyian quasisatanic algorithms of how many units shifted and shipped; refined mathematics theorized, calculated and formulated by sons and students of the fey university codebreakers of World War Two These various dubious man-Beatles on Alebbie's payroll? I don't, trust those guys. Probably never will.

Our new handlers wanted us to use Venn Diagrams, classroom

counting men with magnetic fingers, and set theory our songs, in the writing and performance. Yeah, right.

Aldebbie was gung-ho dead set on the idea of me wearing a glitter Hitler mustache on stage. I told him to stuff it in his primrose hole. This finally made the management company carry through with Aldebbie's suggestion "that Roque get replaced by a gayer guitarist."

Later you’ll hear how, at a crucial moment, a featherhead was found, made up to moué, and I thwakked angrily on the bass. But that’s later, I’ll get to that. Oh, you’ll see where Dink went.

Aldebbie's vision was of Tippy as comic book hero—alongside him in some kind of Viking paradise—and the rest of the band comic book villains, trolls, drawing with a broad brush. Aldebbie urged the management and record company to set up a hierarchy, for us to call our friend The Tippy. Well fart on that.

On Aldebbie’s dime, his little favorite Tippy visited all the pharmacies of Phonecia and Pompeii. He took Tippy on a five-day whirlwind lakeside tour of virgins, then took Tippy to the German opera at Bay Root (he pronounced it Boy Riot) high atop a mountain in the dark forest. A foaming schweinhund with a baton named Distemperer.Because this was Europe, full of terrorists and other kidnappers, Aldebbie feared waiters bearing explosives instead of the dessert tray. They attended Overwhelminggau, long passion music and draggonade stage sets, horn blasts and everybody's climax where the breastplate nipples and winged iron butthead helmet’d fat lady sings. They wore matching tuxedos in Tippy's (and my) highschool colors, crushed grape ad silver mylar plastic, with a pattern of little pills sewn on by the cowboy Jewish tailor. The

German and high Scandanavian magazines ran photo spreads, noted, tittered and tut-tutted.

Me, I stayed home and practiced those opera riffs (what the feuhrer-composer called moteefs) on my guitar, full fuzzblastobleater, in case I found them promising in OUR endeavors. Another band’s fuzzmuddles guitars sound just like the FGNM albums Tippy must've played for him. That great imperialist sponge, like the bewigged Laudanum royally-blest rogues bleeding America two hundred years ago, oppressively just before the Revolution. Limp, damp, damnable, sticky-fingered in all disreputable respects.

Aldebbie produced a lackluster single by the Passionmen, then introduced his flighty and fey new favorites (of the week) the Surrender Dorothys, in sparkly red Mari Juana shoes whose heels mechanically clicked together to the music. Smelly stockbrokerbilly music from his latest discovery, City of Laudanum feconomicists called the Colostomy Bagehots; “My own Bilbo Baggots” he tittered, faunishly and fey-spritely. He produced an anthology of overdressed witty sissy bands called Fairies Ovaries; moderate sales. Primped and pampered Aldebbie-wannabes like Auguste Heatshield.

Makeup, check. Rhythm guitar, check. Talent and interest value: optional. Save the effeminacy, not much different from a throbbing, working-class thumper like Billy Money, boy evangelist turned rock n' roller.

Monogrammed—no, titled—British wags who sang of trousers, tea sets, the Piffle. Donny and the Adonises were a fave of Aldebbie for all the wrong reasons. The Anatomy of Pap. In Aldebbie's wake, the Cumrockers, several fluid instrumentals by that name, with

spurting saxophones and dribbling synthesizers. The feminine and the masculine there. Aldebbie-produced fey male voices, contraltos of contrition. I fear that Aldebbie will unleash unstoppable streams of outrage and outrageousness, like bands where every member has diarrhea onstage.

“Give a beggar a bright penny of new ideas, while demanding a thruppenceful of respect and service” was Aldebbie’s motto. Sheesh.

Dickensian, or dickheaded? You be the judge.

Recently, Aldebbie began to produce stern German noisethuringers. In World War Two, according to my father, the Allies colluded with the German Air Force to especially bomb the concentration camps, out of fear the Jewish prisoners and displaced persons would want to start their own country after the war or something, or worse, emigrate to the US. Michigan's own Harry Fuct, not even German but authoritarian to beat the band, advised the big munitions maker Kramppus on using slave labor on the assembly line, much as he used hole-in-shoe southern crackers, colored exsharecroppers, a smattering of Arabs and Mexicans. So it's not like there hasn't been any Michigan influence on Deutschland dreampredators, say nothing of its military-arty fashion influence back on me.

One theory is that there aren't any good German rock bands because of a demographic phenomenon. During the war, concentration camp guards would give female prisoners a morsel of food in exchange for getting their dicks sucked. When the war’s favor turned against the Germans, and prisoners knew it, they'd sometimes bite off the guards' cocks, and consequently the men couldn't father

the sons necessary to populate our generation of Rock musicians.

America’s fascinating victory.

The record company spent dumptrucks of money on Aldebbie’s production of an album by his showy backup singer Poli Tesse.

Tippy had a backstage ka-ching with her before going onstage, and thus vitalized, gave 'em his best. He also produced a movie that starred her, and bragged to us how in Motorsburgh he appeared on Beau Nixonson Movie Showtime—a new Producer had convinced Beau to get hip, he was watched by “the kids”, or at least the truant and sick ones—mentioning us highly of course, especially how he wanted to do a movie with Tippy as a Shakespearean faun.

I thought abourt how that damn Aldebbie was always urging me to have a high colonic, hooked up to a fire hydrant and one of those septic tank cleaner trucks you see out in the country or near cabins up north. He was convinced that would make me svelte, elegantly think enough to be presentable and in Tippy’s band. In the outer office, staff pueri were arguing the best plans to market Aldebbie-on-a-rope soap for the shower. I strode in to the inner office while Aldebbie was lathering another kind of the silk soap he bathed in, the verbal, spinning pedantry like an Oxblood University don around Tippy. I know some history, how Charlemagne Wotan Barbarossa, last macho emperor of Germany (the 18th c. Aldebbisch one doesn’t count) until Hitler, called his scepter “Christ’s Pud”. But Aldebbie told Tippy that since their Royal house had actually been from there—why they war so fiercely—the English name of the ceremonial bejeweled baton was Dorothy, as invoked in

the old churchwardens’ prayer I, friend of Dorothy, member of Christ Surrender, Dorothy!

Forever and—ooh!—ever, Amen Prayer, Hell. I myself think the pansied puffball was trying to seduce him. Why am I even here any more?

Aldebbie's country mansion, made of Vietnamstone, quarried under gunfire. A fountain out front of frogs in a pot coming to a boil.

But from his well-located apartment in posh Dorian Greyfriars, he was always going out on the town to see promising young bands. Soon, from their appearance, he was betting in management gambles.

Little bath-goats. Other male rock singers, macaroni fops all (and thus loved by teenage girls who imagined sharing their makeup with them, at the intimacy of her mirror and dressing table), wore long swinging cavalry sabers more phallic than useful for defense or command. This morning Aldebbie was deciding whether his latest boy-syringe ingenue-protegé-discovery, surly lad from Sandchester, UK, should be called Alan Steeltoe or Alum Stilletto. The fey pop fop was backed up by a band I thought were called the Horseshoes, but were really the Whores' Shoes. With high clear plastic heels, of Jet Age plastic, the kind machine-gun bullets bounce off of a fighter jet windshield. But why?

Aldebbie's guitarist Fishbrain was called the Left Hand of Quirkiness. The guy was actually from Michigan too, but we never knew him…something weirdly familiar about his looks though. He

already had a couple of unmemorable, undistinguished solo albums out by now. Such are the joys of being a speck of dust in a celebrity’s orbit.

But to these urbanes and aesthettes, I guess we were just pug midwesterplugs, rubulants and rhubarbarians who didn't know the difference between caca and creme de cacao. And who, for Aldebbie’s money, in his asymmetrical mismangled eyes, barely damn cared.

Hey, we're working too hard. Stop and take some time to smell the reefer. We were invited to cool our jets in Aldebbie's mango-like retreat on the tropial island San Kasparhauser. I don’t reacall if the island is in the Caribbean, Mediterranean, off the California or Mexican coast, we were so waterlogged and jet-laggged when we arrived. The pool overlooked the ocean, permitting bathing in either for those so inclined, which certainly didn’t include the Chomps. As if I’d take off my shirt, with this belly.

The village had the kind of esplanade, lined with Biblical Psalm trees, where people would greet or bid farewell to each other "Have great hair!" Swimming-pool people who squish when they walk, like gourmets squishing snails. A limitless stretch of vacationing among goatmouthed girls and guys with palm trees for hair, who lived by breathing sunshine in thru their bathing suits, who communicated via the glare of their sunglasses, not words. Young Morgan le Fay Wray kingykong-squeeze toys, slim Merlin buckos for whom the sperm in their white pants had turned to sand. Sangfroid at the supermarket.

When introduced, I asked Karen Hall "Like Karinhall?", alluding to

Goering's private hunting lodge, but she only looked at me funny and excused herself.

Click click, clik clik, claque. Posing, preening Aldebbiography.

Shutterbuggery, Feh. Tippy likes the constant cocaine-and-limelight, but Thump’s, Dink’s, my own heart, just not in it. I’d rather be anonymous, undocumented, obscure, known by cultish or local fans—maybe a pretty girl like Coral—and an elite few others than overexposed, trivialized, spread too thin on the Salteenage cracker of media and fame. Just give me a check that clears the bank, finally, OK? Titteringly, in the bushes, Aldebbie’s lads were immersed in some kind of netherfellatios. Leaves, twigs, rattled with each squeal.

The mild scandal and mild sounds in the leading medias after one of Aldebbie’s sexdollboys was fished out of Laudanum’s great river, the Thanatos (pronounced “Tomatoes”). Kitten drowned in it like a famous nineteenth century pretty Parisian dead girl, discarded toy of him who’d impatiently and curtly dismissed many complaisant fangirls so he can eat his dinner in peace. Perhaps the lad crossed a line and called him “Aldo”.

Light and gossipy conversation jiggled poolside. When Coral’s name came up, Aldebbie half-gasped, giggled, nearly spilled his drink. He claimed he seduced Horace Mars, but only after all of Aldebbie’s records had become such hits that there were shoppingmall violin versions, where Horace first took to them. I don’t believe any of that. We could probably name any living ex-Presidents, and Aldebbie would claim he had congress with each of them.

Aldebbie gave Tippy a golden hypodermic syringe—“I know you like drugs”—made by the same gold-and-gunsmiths in Antioch who crafted the spear that pierced Christ’s side on the Cross, y’know.

Which some flashifingerd Michiguitar Rockstar now owned, paid good

local and international, celebrity and obscure…but don’t hold your breath, buddy.”

I think it was the Beatles who first marked the passing of time by changes in head and facial hair. Since Rock is only combinations of early-discovered chord progressions and beats, you can't tell dates by the music, only by the hair length of the musicians. Tippy's hair colors included puce, day-glo black and briefly, clear. A silvery effluvial sludge-pond rinse, for the same effect as chlorine bleach on his bluejeans.

Dink, counting the change in his pocket several times, slurred speculation that he might invest his band earnings in a liquor store near the campus, for there was talk in the State Capitol of lowering the drinking age eventually, as so many veterans were coming home thirsty for a drink. Thump, ever the bouncer, spoke of opening a bar in Aleppo called the Crankcase, for people to come congregate, drink, fuck and fight. All the good bad bars were closing as old men died, impoverished and vacuous.

Meanwhile I'd developed a paunch, nascent Goering-belly hanging over my original belt. No, really, I was slim when the band began. Right, not like now. If girls looked carefully, as they might at their fathers, they'd have discovered these expensive KGB sunglasses to be bifocals. And I grew old enough to get bored at parties again. Great, but it wasn't getting any rock n' roll played. Quit stalling.

For long stretches the band had forgotten to practice, for to play, forgot to even hear any music. Ecch. Records just stopped

getting put on turntables, radios forgot to get turned back on after being shut off. "Tippy's definitely listening to other music" said some of those girls confidently, but they were dead wrong. The dust patterns on his records glued down by amateur craftspeople.

Successful to the point of sitting boredly picking jewels out of a reliquary. He was accused of wish fulfillment. When I passed an oil refinery on fire I suddenly thought about how success had made us start to burn out. We weren't bad, just overamplified. A dog barking in a straight line. For a band segmentation equals stagnation.

Spermata Zoe’s father turned out to be a lawyer, so once we were back in Michigan his firm hit us with class-action paternity suits, against each member of the band, listing all the girls in her private school as plaintiffs. Oy McVey. Those cobweb days. Tippy in exile. He grew a wooly coat, and if any female fans saw him it'd only be when he'd wrestle her to the ground in the woods, crashing through the pines. He noted he didn't seem to have big emotional, romantic needs. Maybe a big love for yourself, you become an "attractive person". No attachment, only detachment. I'll bet we wouldn't mind real danger if it bit him in the face.

Coral had hung around the empty Firehouse so much she was nicknamed "Come Come" for the sound throughout of the boy squatters hollering it over her rattled thoughts. Now she sat out this time wistful and longing, befogged in Tippy's silence, his no-news.

She wanted to give him a semaphore slap. She wanted to tell that swimming boy to just come drown between her legs. Crushed weekend. At a rock n' roll standstill, a watershed. Coral is thinking

she skinned her knees on the concrete floor of life. He was her favorite furnace, 98.6 degrees asleep next to her. She slept around with her eyes open, she told herself. As far as men went, she knew ninety-eight point seventy-six trombones. Women make men sleepy by having sex with them. In my sleep I quote the papers. Is the man like a book just printed, or like a book that's just been read? Run me thru the press a couple times to absorb all the ink of ideas. If we make a hook and you like a hat hang yourself upon it? Sex like a four-leaf cloverpatch, a guy's cock a rabbit's-foot keychain. A vibrating sound from mouth to mouth, perhaps she'd Frenchkissed Satan. She had red lights, blue lights on behind. Did it for money just to see something in the eye of the pyramid.

Coral would take the phone off the hook, go out, find a phone booth, call the Firehouse asking for Tippy, masturbate on the phone all alone to the busy signal. Regarding Coral, I don't think he really loved her anymore. That is, even remembered who she was.

Think of our return home to MIchigan like the big classical painting “Christ’s Entry into Aleppo” but depicting the original one, middle-eastern, not midwestern. After we flew back, tails and pieces of tail between our legs, Firehouse fauxguests would find Tippy sitting by the radio in absolute apprehension, waiting, hoping we'd get played. But did we really even make a record? But did he ever really even send in a tape? Tippy began questioning it all, did we really even try? He couldn't do anything else in these moments, dragging the ball-and-chainsaw of attention, like waiting for someone to show up. He spent all day watching Contradictivision, a special TV that

argues with itself and presents both sides of the story. The TV Movie of the Weak. Obdurate hours. If he did go out by this time Tippy, that Son-of-a-dog biscuit, angular, lined n' lived in like a leathery late in life Hollywood comedian, perspiring sunglasses, loud sportcoat, maybe gold jewlery in abundance. Remember, the word "Elvis" even hides in "television".

The album had been remaindered, now going twelve for a dollar in the JMJ Mart six blocks from Mom’s house. A slice and two holes through the cover, like a comic book with the cover torn off for publishers’ credit, supposed to be discarded but craftily bagged and re-sold.

I would like to be able to say with our royalties we bought several counties, farming communities in depressed Michigan; that we built a state-of-the-art recording studio in a huge corrugated metal barn, recording engineers' booth in the cab of a huge harvesterthresher, then launched the Agribusiness record label. But Tippy lost the key, it fell through a hole in the pocket of his ragged cutoffs, so we never got in to use it, and some hoodlum kids (or maybe the Sheriff’s posse) burned it down. Or that we bought cheerful corner liquor stores, sporting goods stores, gun shops, armories and gun batteries, apartment complexes and franchises. Or that, richer than self-made men who spent a lifetime in manufacturing, we endowed orphanages, university buildings, schools of graduate studies and endowed professorial chairs. Except no, we spent it all on drugs.

OK, mostly Tippy and Thump just bought drugs, and Dink, his booze. I sat in my room. The stuff upset my stomach.

Thump crashes the damn truck with our equipment when angry

at us and a stoned-out junkie. First reports on the Police Radio had him beheaded by the railroad bridge that some prankster had painted with the name of his boyhood electric train set. Cop amazed how his head, rolling to a stop on the pavement, turned and called him "Motherfucker", spat, seemingly died in a staring sneer. But Thump was now rich enough to have it sewn back on, so the band continued a while longer.

Instead of quantities like ounces, liters, lids, we were buying drugs in quantities like a hundredweight, hogshead and half-limo.

Perhaps it was wrong to charge these to the record company against our royalties. We were young and stupid.

No, I’m not tired. Maybe just a little ragged from the long crosscountry flight back. Happy to talk.

March thaw. Dogshit winter. Earth becomes sticky, dirtying the finest boots of authority. Day like a dribbling, sullen baboon.

Drizzling like a grizzly bear drools, if we even still had them in Michigan, dammit. Gray and drizzle, stale-steak gristle. Rainy day pogrom-gloom, hovering in a Cohen sky.

Boots on the ground. Puddlejumpers. Slush-soaked socks.

Everybody talks about the weather, but only our University scientists try to do anything about it.

Newspaper headlines would roar WHERE IS TIPPY? or he'd like to think so. Maybe just papers published in Coral's heart. He pretended to audition to replace a dead Irish rockband poet on the West Coast. News filtered back over word-of-moth that he'd become a zen golfer in Scotland. . Actually Tippy played golf with Coral's

attending physicians Dr. Postpartum and Dr. Obstetricianstein. Of course he knew how to play, you see something on TV enough times you know it more than if you do it for all your life, that's common knowledge. Remember the episodes with Three Chomps in Scotland, all hoot mons and castles full of skeletons and scotch whiskey—Dink's vulpine ears perk up--and Lorna Doones, Daniel Boones and southwestern Michigan’s Warren DunesAfter Tippy's record came out, cakey brown crud sort of like old soy sauce came out of Coral. But Tippy, with his feet spread on the links like a U.S. President's first wife became a magnetic A-frame going all the way down to the center of the Earth. Notice this was his stance masturbating too. Arms were like hair blowing in the wind, taut freedom of a fait accompli, always Fate's own accomplice. Time stops with concentration, a swing of the iron and a little planet careens over the heath. He wipes his boy eyes. Remember, Tippy is the boy in whom adolescent LSD and the detritus of childhood diseases have combined to produce changes and combinations of possibilities of amazing subtlety, and that's special in sports. Tippy hits a crow with his golf drive, smacks it out of the sky again. Like the single pure shot of a wristrocket slingshot on a lone starling in a grey summer sky, plucking the bird from the sky, bead on him, slug shattering the sternum, fold of wings crash skull on pavement opposite curb. Pow! Tippy was now a gangster of golf. A proper white boy's Saturday morning burden. Tippy on the links with a fat tipsy Silenus, a hot-combed and sprayed grape haircut, record-industry Bacchus, wheeling up in a whirring golf cart. As he'd coyly ask groupies, Can I

putt through? The celebrity golfer's wife confessed she "kisses his balls, makes his putter stand straight up" that very night on a network talk show. This sporting activity occupied so much time because Tippy no longer felt creative, couldn't make those rhyming couplets or concentrate even the length of a 45 rpm record. He couldn't remember the various combinations unlocking those same three chords. He could no longer keep the beat. His own vocals used to be so clean and reassuringly transparent, while now his murky brackish vocals barely stirred the sounds of stagnation. And this was Tippy, remember, whom every word he uttered had been a classic Rock n' Roll lyric or riff.

Then my Mom got that assignment to write the "This Week in Aleppo" story “The Unpredictable Tippy: So Popular With the Young People”, for a sprightly new local tabloid, the Midwestside Aleppo Consumer-Shopper. I got pissed off that she spent that weekend in that apartment with him, came home smiling and disheveled, glancing at her Margaret Hamilton watch, in a shirt I'd never seen before unbuttoned incorrectly. I mean, she used to only write about the school board and the Democrats' chances for a seat on City Council.

The most animal thing about Tippy now is that he's a motherfucker.

But why did it have to be my mom...? This only adds insult to injury.

I find this somewhat upsetting. She was always forcing a candy dish upon the band, money for gas to get to gigs so I guess Tippy dimly paid her back the only way he knew how.

Or maybe I just imagined this, in a visit home when I couldn’t get my band buddies out of my head. Shit, I hate conversation, trying to read between the lines on her face.

Tippy'd picked a card and I guess he'd traded the Deuce of Brains he'd been dealt for the Jack of Brutality. This didn't get much press because his temperment had become like a cross between a tiger and an ape, eating photographers and their photographs, and the GentleBen of the Press preferred to deal in illusions.

The night we showed up to play in the Club Centrifuge Tippy sang in the ugly buzzing voice of a fly, or a child going "Owww...". Up there in his classic old Fort MichilmackiSoo Locks moccasins, raggedy cutoff fatherskin pants without underwear. All thumbs, a runt, his head a gold dolt helmet of diagonally medieval hair. A birdcage of ribs, a live animal trap with its shirt off. Arms flailing, aghast as an Afghan, vein relief and armpit beard. Mouth woowooing as he nursed a bandaid mike at his lips, mumbling into an electronic breast, slobbery, chin full of school paste pout, golden chipped teeth glittering with foil, honey and sand. Houseflies around his loins. Face all unhealthy white like a foot that's been too long inside a shoe. Half man, half mucous. Less than half-jalapeno.

The almost daily use of hallucinogens for several years is bound to have an effect. He's just a nervous trainwreck. Lumber glued to his head. Eye like a strange weather balloon.

Tachyphylaxisicized. The blunder of dependency. All sixes and sevens and scams; pockets brimming with pieces of eight. The firstwater mesmerist of the stage, found himself in the White House of Horse. The land of Hypodermia. Hypodermichigan. The Hypodermics of the skeptics, the styptic pencils of the stoics.

Encoding himself. Adding, growing complexity, which some say

might happen anyway in adolescence but just to be safe we took the damn psychedelics. Pilsener n' pills. Chemical prostitutes.

Comatoseology, the study of being stoned into blithereens. Soporific drug-taking man, Homo Quaaludens. He became acquainted and addicted. Drug addiction must've been wanting something very much, like mom or real estate. I never let myself want anything much. There's no tachometer upon attachment. He changed, must've been taking another brand of drugs. Trying valiantly to cut back by smoking crystal methadone, sipping methadonic tonics. Had an operation for a reefer removal, or the part of the brain the LSD just keeps bouncing around in. Psychedelic laughter, freebase facts. By this time all the drugs he took were calcified in a large deposit bump at the top of the head, expanding his mind like a sundeck or automatic garage door opener. The button at the top of his head for the President to push for the Bomb? The lightbright pinhead purplish pupils of the drug addict, norepinephrine eyes, really fucked prisms for eyes. Seeing things with his freshwater eyes, soda-water eyes.

Blinking holograms, OFF ON OFF ON lights. Drug-eared and dogged. A good place for drug addictions once they could afford them.

Christ's suggestion: What, you haven't been crucified yet?

Then why are you taking all these drugs?

Oh, you heard that in church too?

This bandboy took international drugs. Cocaine from the thimble to the pitcherful. Our drug use became a snort story, cocaine from dusk till dawn till you could leave fingerprints on the powdered walls above that boy Tippy's bedroll. Cocaine snorted thru a quill, a

shaken-loose tailfeather from the Holy Ghost. Opium knives. Maybe it was fear of beestings and the danger of the inevitable allergic reaction he'd have to them, something like rabies shots, executed in the hundredfolds, upon immediate removal of the stinger. Herbicidal heroin brought back from Vietnam in bodybags, permeating the spongy corpses themselves, so they'd have to powder the Lifer or Grunt. The iron mushroom. Hospitalityhead.

Meanwhile, his song lyrics keep changing. Our band selfmedicates, of course. Me? Drugs only make me thud. Thickfingered n' witless, turdfingered and punchbowl-craterheaded. I couldn't do things like go out on a school night, read Rosicrucian books or erotic classics like Vesta Clad in Ferret for parental fear that I'd take drugs.

Or the ordeals of years of weekly childhood allergy tests put us in a strange relationship to the needles of significant addiction. I had thought, but I was wrong. Hypodermics started jutting out of his arms onstage. Lyrics whipped his thickened lips, told me more than I wanted to know. Danced like an imbalanced potter's wheel now.

His body grown swollen, streaked and droopy from fathering too many children. His women's bodies were often even worse. The floor of the Centrifuge Club shakes and rolls to the music and Tippy held his position onstage, kind of trudged along like a robot on a floor full of flour.

Voice like a deserted uncle, his echo voiced back his breathing, chuckling things about him. Went away whistling the old cowboy tune "Heroin Wind". He would spend the Summer day laboriously filling mosquitoes with heroin, later pluck the full slow-moving insects out of the air to jab into his arm and squeeze in the contents instead of

letting blood be sucked out. Tippy would hurl hypodermics loaded with needles like darts into the audience. Tippy shot up. Hands shot up asking "Does that prove anything?"

By now Tippy was seeing drug dealer Julius Needlespoon more than he was his own band. Tippy fucked up, had become a damaged goat, little beard hanging from a drooling chin, cloven feet rubbing holes and poking through tennis shoes, horns lost in matted hair.

Moths bonkingly bumped into his head at night, mistaking him for a moonlight bulb. Ankles swollen from poor circulation. The skeleton of a fat man. Psilocybin life forms. A carbon cartoon. Bad mottled potatoskin. Tippy's oblivionized eyes rattled about in his head, as if the store of drugs there got nervous and started chewing on the muscles that connected them to thought.

Young lady, these were sad times indeed.

As if Mikey of the Chomps had poked his, or his brothers’, eyeballs once too often with extended fingernails. What, I didn't egg that house. I think of those classic Chomps Trio episodes, "Spring Sporting Snakes" where Shamus (born Shinola) thinks lovers on a beach in the night were a log to shit from and falls back in the sand, butt covered with turd and sand, or "Wife-Beater-niks" where Mikey pisses on his wife during a bad dream about barbecued chicken.

They were often going after the same woman, which we never actually did at the same moment, except for Coral who wanted it all, wanted all the musicians on our record label plus at least several of the leading executives. One of the Chomps had died on the set from a brick inserted into a pie his brother threw at him. But I noticed the Chomps Trio never appeared as villains, for villains are too truly

independent of the sticky web of the system, too assertive and intelligent by their defiance. There is always an applical example for any situation in the Chomps Trio canon. So why am I thinking about them instead of the performance going on right now?

Because it’s the musical equivalent of a curfew. I got bored.

Mere professionalism on my, Thump’s, Dink’s part. That audience was darkly beaming with skepticism. Many were shouting for "Wider music!" "Wider love!" Tippy had long stimulated them to the point they were getting scientifically dangerous, a kind of stimulus-itis.

I stared at him, what’s left of him, through my opaque aviator sunglasses. More like the Dope Dealer for Christ than guitar-playing friend. Heroin is for people who need God too much, it's synthesized God. An aesthetic prosthetic device. The "Bop-tizum" of avant jazz.

The Apocalypse of St. John a reefer vision, a beatnik poem. As John of Patmos lost his head to too much apocalyptic psilocybin in his psilocabin, had a vision of Patty Turbine.

Never mind, a girl I knew in high school.

Tippy had given so much by this time, he was just a weak and piddling orgasm onstage. Maybe Rock music stopped satifying us, like a diet of sugarless gum.

Ecch.

Ptui (Roque spits, rumbles lips)! There was a lull in

the action. Bands were reflective, passive for a while, almost too quiet.

Out of summer radios wafted the Inner Hippies, the Angelics, the Screaming John Crayons, and, attesting to the importance of the weed in the culture the Growers (formerly the Groovers) and, wouldn’t you guess it, the Mareejuanas. Nice, yes, but no more than the musical equivalent of giving a lady your seat on the bus. Bands you really couldn't even see had you walked right into the club they were playing. Yawn.

Then something sexual came over from Europe, something oldworld. Singing Europeans, "Neuro-paens" if you prefer, beginning with the Tartuffes, the Tableaux Vivants, the Idiot Savants, the Moiré Eels, the Bravuras, the Frottages, and delicately wistful the Au Claire de la Lunes. No more Charles DeGaulle bands with accordions and dignity, two pairs of burly brothers the Goncourts and the Montgolfiers joined to form a band called the Engulfers. The Vivaldis. The Coupe de Villains. The Modus Operandis, formerly the Modus Vivendis.

The Potpurris, the Peccadillos, and the Port-a-Sans from Japan—not Port Said, as Threadbear originally wrote. Earl of the Royal Nonesuches, and other young English meathooks like The Negative Publicities. The British Bangers. The Gauze, or maybe it was Gauzes, I forget. Decorator bands like the Floorpillows, the Curios, the Curlicues, the Collectibles, the Breuer Chairs, the Dribble Cups, the Golden Gift Books, the Salt Cellars and the Carpet-Destroying Solvents. Then the loud laughter of the Perennial Bachelors, boy-

bathing bands like the Bachelor Buttons, Mick Croissant and the Boulevardiers, and scholars of the lonely arts like the B-Students in Paradise. The Watch Fobs, the Suspenders, and from a nearby suburb (I forget which), the Buttonieres. Bud didn’t they then begat Johnny Buttoniiere and his Daisy Secrets? Daffie Mars enjoyed a TV appearance by the Yellow Creamery Butterflies, wearing live butterflies as bowties. The Fey Photocopies and the Living Photographs were performing lush covers of old Fops' songs.

Furtively fashionable bands like the Undershirts, the Full-Length Minks, the Stolen Mink Stoles, the Mudpacks, the Toiletries.

Everybody made scathing fun of the Inelegants, the Straw Boaters, the Frog-pelt Vests, even the Hong Kong Suits. The Hollywood Torsos wouldn't stop changing their suits onstage. Liberace (a different one) and a wealthy frathouse band called the We Spend it All on Clothes. The Pierrots, all whitefaced and consumptive, appeared in baggy medical-clown garments and carnation puffs.

Now that’s Pop melancholy for you.

Peculiar sissified bands like the Perseveres, the Mudmidwest'ners, struggling through Lord Caveman's "Two Kinds of Strange". The Isuelts' debut "You Dare Insult the Isuelts?" Populist cigar bands like the Rum Soaked Crooks and the Swisher Sweets.

There were those strange bending stalks the Talking Rice, the NuDuplicators, the Implicators or Imprecators, the Unchecked, and the Transmogrifiers. The Secret Catholics. The Groinmen, the Ganymedes, the real or imagined Slights, the Pedantics, the puffy Puff Adders and the Polo Ponies. The Effetes, the Morals, the Epicenes (from a small town like Epicenter, California), the Primps,

the Weirdhopes and the Allrightmen all exhibited a swaggery toughness. Who can (or must) forget the Disturbances, the Delusions, the Twenty Two Ninety Fives, the Broken Champagne Glasses and the instrumental "BRIDGE OUT' Sign" by the Bridget Sighs. I don’t know how I recall all of these.

You, baby girl, would have liked a band caled the Puffballs, their soft squeezable amps releasing spores of sound. The Implausibibles.

The Erosions, wanting to erode Rock and soften its contours. The escargot cult forming around the Escargotones. The Vinegar Kings feminized their name into the Vinaigrettes. Yessir bands like the Soft Touch or the Stay-in-Touches. The Lese-Majestes, the Sons of Salome, the Stay-at-Homes, the Holier-Than-Thoughs, the LessThan-Perfect Plums, and their album Dark Washcloth. The Cakedecorators, the Clipboards, the Enlarged Maxims, along with the Jonquils, the Beaujolais, the Hibiscuses, the Invisible Oleanders.

These new bands' had a weird and abominable relationship to the female nude. Sure, there were some good records like the Backsliders' dance hit "Backsliding" or "Waiting for the Wimps". But Rock was at its slightest with doofuses the After Dinner Mints, the Insoluble Blunders, the Jugendstils, the Biblestompers, the Bottoms Ups, the Butterballs, the Poor Persons, the Famous Last Words, the County Commissioners (or School Board) from Hell, Michigan, plus rank amateurs like Eric Is Deformed and the Laughing at Facts. ”Incense and Smoke Detectors" by the Food Stamps. The Mission Statements, the Namedroppers, the Underbrokenhearted. The Potted Palms. The Herms. The Faux Pa's. The White Whiter Whitest Lies. The Longed-Fors changed their name to the Longed-

Four. The Limegreen Leisuresuits. Mo’s like the Bullrushes or the Bumsrushes, the Bigger Bathers, the Bigger the Betters and the Bigger Than The Beatles. Donkey broods like Dork Destroyer, Love Furnace, plus several other bands that asked boring questions of Rock.

Pesky and the Pestilentials. The Dizeazez. The Cutoffs were hopefully talking about their short pants, not their conversations (or boyparts). The Hyperbolic Censors, the NotNice, the Cicatrices, influenced the poppish, foppish Cyclamen, and their female backup singers the Cyclamates. The Kiss Mummies. Five old blind boys of Aleppo called the Macular Degenerates.

Obviously my brother was attracted to any group called The Thump That Went Wrong, and if they were oblivious to him when they chose the name, by the end of the day they sure as Hell weren’t. The Infractions appeared live on the normally unwatched "Infractivision".

The NearCompletions, "Urge to Debut" by the Spoiltwells, the Unencumbered, the Free Moral Agents, the Infinitely Preferred, the Provosts, the Crennelators. The Bauxites, with aluminum pursed lips.

The Offhands, the Walterpaters. The Prattle. The Palpables. The Permissives, the Deracinators, the Beau Jobs. "Things Were Going Too Far" with the Nunephars, or Throbaloo and the Ormulus. Ooga booga! Just wondered if you were still listening.

I was always suspicious in the dressing room with the Tailgayters and The Cultured Buttermilks. A British Invasion of privacy with "We Wed Our Betters" by the BedWetters. Other privacy bands the Fruitcovers, the Neuschwanstein Monsters, the Munificent Suns, and the Oxen of the Sun, before they destroyed themselves.

The Good Lord Chokes; was that a band name, an exclamatory statement, or some fearful exhortation from old sci-fi comic books?

This simply was not the best year for the business, and promotional copies of records were dispensed like boxes or baskets of Free Kittens outside the grocery before they’re drowwned in a well.

Threadbear, seeking to be paid, wrote his characteristic effusions, emoluments, emollient praises for these albums. But more reflective critics telegraphed their sincerest curiosity and underlying dark concern: What hath Aldebbie wrought?

There was something else starting to trouble Tippy. Remember those “social diseases” they told you about in Sex Ed? Girls’ classes had warnings not to be “too popular”, right? Could feel the semenscratch within. Sperm as piranhas, circling and snapping; meat in the water of the meatus.

Disease as the ombudsman of the fathers of all those girls.

The disease was his parents' way of punishing him for being such a bad batboy and Bad Guy. For not taking out the garbage, I guess they put that garbage in his dick. The head shop The Putrid Shoppe carried a special oil for "Ganesha's Gonorrhea", and an audiotape for meditation called "God's Groin", from O'Kundaleeney Products.

Incense you're supposed to stick in your dick and burn, except it's already burning. Like the comic book where blowsy, bluesy Tuskeegee Institute syphillis was indroduced (lucky Airmen!) and carried in sultry French collaboratrixes dropped into Wehrmacht barracks in the darkest days of the War. Springtime, moist as a pussy. Or so says Tippy, noticing dew

on the grass and night-wet pavement out front of the house. Or on his balcony roof. Ours was the nocturnal normal. One morning a girl came stumbling, hurried, down from Tippy's room, incensed, confused and griping that his scalp now sported ticks, lice, riverwswamp leeches. His crotch too. That's when we started to suspect something might be wrong with the guy. Tippy had always been scrupulously clean around the crotch—his Lloyd Dangle and Sherry Nederlands—because he used washing as an excuse for whacking off, evicting any last laggard spurt. Like polishing the chrome and enamel of a vintage antique car. Early evidence of his discomforts, he was embarrassed to find traces of his thoughts upon his lice, and vice versa.

In an age of bronchial pediatrics, allergies hit the young by the millions once Spring sprung, started shpranging, and Tippy was no exception. Not that he hadn’t a good excuse. Through testing, trial and error (he had vainly hoped each could get him high), he had found he was allergic to dry cleaning fluid, mothballs, spar varnish and lacquer thinner, households, normal temperatures, hearing his parents speak, stressful fatigue and exertion, scholastic scheduling and even the thought of college—if not for him, then others, especially girls— in the Fall. We played one gig, and it was a disaster. Beforehand, sharing a toke with the opening act backstage, Tippy blows his nose, and it's what the Calypso singer, repulsed and rearing back in horror, calls a Bumper Clot.

Taking More-the-Merriers not for goof, but to self-medicate.

Cutting his LSD tablets in half like an old man in the morning, while listening to geriatric band the Pillcutters. Name brands and less

pricey hallucino-generics. Smiling at the interpsychedelia, like in the olden days. He lost himself in patchouli-scented Van Allen Radiation Belt, incense and swirling Milky Wheys or Magellenic clouds. The skies were filled with multi-colorful bird-Beatles.

Tippy laughted "the rest of us have to take LSD to see stuff, like what Roque thinks about all the time", which made me very happy and proud. I am the special fellow.

News of the sad example of that heroic and beautiful black Motorsbourgeois singer Bobolink Bisexuelle, who shot his Minister and Deacons in a crowded church one Sunday, his mind snapped from a short lifetime of too many megadrugs and polymorphined girlfuckings. Face like burnished wood, handsome as oak paneling and varnished floors in a judge's or ninteteenth-century doctor's fine old house. Like Bobolink, at one point Tippy took all the drugs mentioned in the Bible. The Holy handful in a single swallow, one big nauseating prayer. The drugs made him a zoomnambulist, zooming about in a catatonic state. Or is it zoo-nambulist pleasuring himself with a Noah’s Ark of small animals while technically, legally, asleep?

We grew concerned about Tippy's healthsplat. Tippy looked terrible, damaged Friday the 13th teeth, and his lucky rabbit's foot of a dick now more like a shriveled peckish chicken foot. Hard living had taken a foot off his dick. Now a cancer with a vegetable.

Diseases spread by shouting. I've been called by Threadbear the whale of Rock, yet it is Tippy's lungs that are full of krill, plankton, diatoms, parameciums (paramecia? paramecii? paramice?), stuff from under the microscope. The Microphage of Rock, with stout, bignosed tapirworms spanning the length of his intestines, twisting

uncomfortably in his heart, sometimes peeking out of his throat when he feebly sings. The kind of cough that rumbles in the back of the through like distant summer rainstorm thunder, guns moving closer that they must hear in Vietnam. Heat lightning crossed his face afterwards. Could marijuana-smoking have cased this?

An Apothecaryopalypse of over-the-counter drugs and dubious prescriptions. I bought some Copaiba Balsam from a kid at the corner of streets named Copaiba and Balsam; Flaubert had said it worked for him.

A big, toothy South American instead offered Capabyra Balsam. Dink enthusiastically misread the medicine label as May Be Taken With Alchohol and, trying to help, suggested several pills, capsules and pharmaceuticals that all had to be washed down with copius spirits.

A girl, claiming the healing knowledge of hundreds of generations of female ancestors, offered wishbone water. Cannibal sativa.

Connubial sativa for young marrieds. The Virgin Mary’s own aphrodisiac.

Tippy's increasing paranoia also came from Nixon-Bormann paraquat-infused Nazi cannabis, flooding the streets as part of a USDA farm program, much as the Veterans’ Administration imported heroin.

His songs were at first psychedelic, swirly. Psychedelic scrutiny. Then purely, poetically sexual. Now they'd grown dark, morbid, violent.

Who's this little head in my bed?

Pulling me down into the waves of sleep So cute, I'm gonna fuck you to death...sweet, sweet death...

Wait, wasn't there a Broadworry musical—the cast, arms outstretched, exuberantly singing the rousing overture on the Sunday Night Show—about all the gonorrhea in Gomorrah? If not, maybe we should write it. Too few musicals about abortions that year too, sentimental paeans to the states girls travel to in order to get 'em. At the awards they’d be competing with those show tunes about German doctors' cruel medical experiments upon concentration camp prisoners, but also, weirdly erotic and masochistically, upon themselves.

Tippy had Koala Chlamydia, brought to town by a groupie. She came to see the famous Aleppo of rock history, because she once spent a weekend with that kid from Aleppo who took our sound to Australia and the antipodes, the Johnny Appleseed of Michigan Rock.

Koalas, wallabies, hybrid Koallabies, surrounded him during his psychedelic adolescent walkabouts, he then became a Rock star playing fierce fanged pork guitar in a style not unlike my own.

But this was another kind of sick. Girls who thought they followed Astrology columns muttered Tippy was a "Cancer". Had cancer of the love life was more like it. The melodrama of the melanoma, Old Man Mose moles all over his nose, cheeks and of course peckerwood pecker. Fetish craters. In viral dignity. A peaked cyst at the top of his head. Thump offered to tear into this Stone of Folly with his bowie knife, set the devils free to fly away. But someone in the band's management organization said we should have a barber-surgeon do it instead.

Underground papers and critical wags pronounced their verdict: Tippy was hypnotized by hypochondria. Bored after a long illness.

No, he had Crazy Tears and Waiter's Cramp. Gashed n' gored by that bull gonorrhea, the Pre-Columbian Disease. He could be entered among the Heroes of Herpes. Danced on boomerang leg and sabre shins, like courtesans in Hell.

Tippy had every venereal disease in the L.A. phone book and then some. Disease circulated through him like a coffee percolator, buppa buppa bup bup, visible through the clear knob on top of the cheerful TV coffeepot. His sperm system had too many rock toxins in it. This was the fuckedest thing in the world. If you listened real quietly behind the amplifier hum, the band could practically keep time to it. Told he had the plague, he thought they meant like plaque on his teeth so he went back and brushed again. He sported diseases of the beard, of the breed, diseases of the palm of the hand, of felt.

Tongue joint and nasal court, shovel-like nails and brass nipples, vines of sinewy eczema made a salad of him; fat on the foreskin formed a silver meatus.

Oh, it’ll heal, he was confident of that. Just a bit of Rocky Mountain Hay Fever. With his withered green and dead thing, he checks the population. Cock of Swiss cheese, he was the alter-ego secret identity of the Skunkman. Bee-sting strings. All day long he could feel the colony of ants carrying bits of anti-matter back to the hill. Killer amino acids. Trippy amino acids. Cute information. A protean protein. Ero-toxins. A Tampax full of anthrax. Poison dinner in my pocket. What Hitler called F.D.R. Nibbling Upon Me. Candy corn for the coroner. Fighting tooth and nail with fang and claw disease. For a long time we thought it was only a parody of disease.

A stunt.

Gondoliers of gonorrhea, O Sole Mio shrieks, groans of the groin in the night lagoon. The Bride of Sighs. The Lion of St. Marx atop a column that's his own scratchy, pained erection. Nuclear herpes. Stuff that looked like the curry lentils served up at the Sunday free concerts by hippie and Hindoocult communes, and well might've been scooped up and transported there in a hippie van for exactly that use.

His pee was like absinthe in water, milky greenish white, for he hadn't had girls as usual to sluice off the semen. "And Aldebbie's his green fairy" quipped the FGNM to Threadbear of the CumOn! this month. He said every poop was like a Russian serving of borscht, dark as what might be served at the upcoming Bat Mitzvah table laid to honor that girl Hanna Hirsutenik he had some weeks ago, his blobs of colored spunk afloat upon it like sour cream.

Spirochetes, which the roguish Vice President had spread while President Nixon had ruled, overruled midwestern students' paltry shots. Ahh, that troublesome dating syphillis, for which even Christ sought medical attention. Before "infected as Tippy and Coral" had become a local, and Rock journalistic, cliché thanks to Threadbear.

You’re the Chomp here, pompous pud. If I get my hands on him…

By now, Tippy was just brushing his teeth with his own blood, if he ever brushed them. He seemed to have click pox. Chick pox?

No, click pox, little clackers all over his skin, croaking cr-r-ikk like a springtime pond frog to the touch. But I didn't touch him. A certain blood-blurriness. The Academy of Redness. His corpuscles had become red and white Popsicles. A hydrocele sounds like a feature on a 1950s car, keeping rain out of the push-button transmission or

similar benefit. His fluid-inflated, inflected scrotum at least was now proportionate to his pecker, said a girl headed for art school, maybe another Dean's daughter.

Maybe Tippy got cut with a rusty toilet seat.

I imagine pipkins, their Catholic skirts pressed up and legs akimbo around him, as he sat on the toilet, pooping with each fecal simultenacity spurty climax or climactic spurt as the girl cried out a Saint’s name in delight. Yeah, I bet he'd do sex like that.

Tippy had groan into this ghastly misshapen thing. But that's what photographers like Laleña Ludovici, née Shapiro, liked best.

Character. Gross, grizzled, frazzled. Gives Threadbear something new and colorful—wounds, blemishes, skin discolorations—to write about. He smacked his thesaurus against Tippy once again.

In solidarity, Thump started subscribing to creepy porn like PUSTULE PUSSY. Tippy brushed off my own concerns for his health, claimed the doctor's prescription would be "Two girls per hour, 24/7, call them something nice in the morning" but I doubted that. He said Look!

Look! It was a bracing föhn of Satyriasis, which left him with the insatiable grin of the satyr plus one's boner; called pubielephantaisis for it left him with a mammoth elephant's trunk raised, trumpeting. It was ironic that it looked like black iron with rivets up and down its length, like an old bridge over the river, or railroad coal car, for that was advanced disease and its lesions, blueing the sooty barrel of his uncannon, unfunctioning boilerpipe. But then, like a wisp of weedsmoke from a fugitive bong, it eventually went away, deflated,

detumescalined.

A bat fallen to earth is usualy rabid. The sick thing on the pavement doomed to die, ready to bite and take you with it. The Boy Who Exuded Swollen Pus. Like the sissy Sysiphus pushing his swollen balls uphill, 1950s Polish polio pus pours out of every four pores. And ringmaster Forepaws, other circus maxims. Aldebbie convinced Tippy to record hacking, wheezing background vocals on the Nazicynical "Sex Uber Alles". This decadence I realize, is the real fascism—not my army man and costume stuff. After the session, I could see Tippy, pale and gasping, having propped himself up against the wall of his room, face and scrawniness bathed in smoonlight. Like a drawing in inky darkness and shirtfront white by Brokenby Barbershoppe, or Osprey Beardservice, or whatever that menacing fey bastard whose ink drawings Aldebbie collected was named. "He died young" the pinkheaded punkintended fop moons and mopes as he admires the artworks.

Tippy figured something bought on the street ought to cure about anything. He ran through an alchemist's apothecary of death camas, poison ivy, coincockle, foxglove ("the fox o' love"), larkspur carefully combed from the backs of purring larks, upas (formed when festive Greeks toast “Upa!”), nux vomica, poison yma sumac and amy camus, alkyds and Billy-the-Kid alkaloids, sandal-shod monkshood, Thai stick, locoweed, jimson weed, castor oil, pokeweed, sheep laurel, white snakeroot, black henbane and bearded darnel. Learn to play Bach on the Rauwolfia Serpentina. He took a palindrome of heroin, stereo headphones of heroin, followed by a handful of

prescription Umm Kalthoums, washed down with ululating Uvula River water, to little effect.

Tetra-cyclones threw him around, bounced him off the porcelain walls and miraculous mirrors, the roof of which was really the floor of the next bardo. Unable to tell up from down 'cept for gravity. He ate thermometers for the curative mercury, mummy oil and camel powders, took nothing which was absolutely dry. Hot rock salt by the shotgunful. Oceanic cocaine as a cure only spurred the Maple Syrup Urine disease. So many vitamins he got a healthache. He secured some oxblood and hippogriff. Massive doses of methqualone and Protesterone (the '60's hormone) and Agnosterone, which makes you disbelieve your God. Took the hot squat. Prickamice and nude mice, werewolf balls that only said "takes one to know one" to his irritation, Beaver Brand Hot Mustard, DemiUrge Pink Salmon, Sprio Agnew spirulina. Pastry elixer. Pancakes of panaceas for the porcine pancreas. A sodden sodium. Baby Piss. Headbands full of ch'i and moxibustion. Piping-hot Killer DNA. Enough curare to immobilize a curate. Small gifts to pamper his Mr. T. cells, his neuropeptides and lymphophagacytes. Mitochonderance, messing with that part of his cells. Tippy bought the white inkster of a sober lobster from a bevy of lain-off whitesters by the hospital backdoor, Philippine nurses indicted for ritual murder, defrocked and kicked out of medical school for spreading "a little white mixture", now hoping to run senior convalescent homes in Michigan country towns. Ever the morning optimists.

Instead he just buys more street and drugstore drugs.

Frantically, he spent more and more of the money the band hadn’t

made yet on drugs from every source. Pulverized rhinoceros deviated septum, dried basilisk boner. Scrotal sac from an australian bunyip. Prostate of a thylacine. French classroom wax or the teeth of good vampires, taken through plastic hypodermic needles liable to snap like hard honeysuckle candy sticks. A scrutinizing monkey's head. A castor oil cocktail. Sat in a china chair. The plastic flash trees that hold the parts of model kits. Smokewear. The hideous canyon. Toilet choice. Some sort of squid or flounder pussy from the bottom of the sea. Lux Vomica, or "Light in the Vomit".

Hyperalienation as a cure. Dragon Blood Fever. Dirt-level Pustulematics.

Can you get contaminated by painted wood? Pencil-eating for hangovers was what he had recommended to Dink, so he might as well try that too. He took his pencil from the fire. Someone told him to rub poison sumac on his chest, yow-ow-owwww! Drink a cup of fat. He performed static electricity exercises dutifully. Promptly chartered a jet to Jamaica for obeahmint treatments, obedient poultices of Ackee and Saltfish. Brazillian ecologists prescribed some combination of Gasahol, neo-garlic, agar agar and fly-in-theointment agaric. He prayed to Santa Claus, patron saint of toys, to bring him a doctors' kit. A circus moment in the coldstream, he sat up to his navel in cold water, sludge and crud. All the common cold remedies He tried the oldfolk’s remedy of taking a bath with a maniac.

He used alkaloids and wood of a special kind from Joveswood, Michigan, land of the lukewarm waters. Almond plasters, rancid vaseline, Hebrew Balsam from Peru. Monopoly charlatans of Galen told him "eat boiled sawdust", urged him to try yellow flowering gum

mastics. Cinnabar alimony winds. Pliny Jr. suggested he kiss the hairy muzzle of a mouse. He heard an old wives' tale of someone who said "To hell with my disease" and it stopped. Groupies may have often danced their way out of disease, jumping beds so fast the germs don't have time to catch up. A chemical ground only between pelvises. A single drop of perfume on a pinhead. Medicated tattooing tools. Afternoons spent cutting off fox heads.

Anteaterbiotics. Skin sloughed off the lip of a white horse, feathers from a bluejay who died a natural death. Various lacquers and insects place upon the ladybug-spotted infected member.

Everything he could buy on the street.

Still he felt the imbedded BB downunder. Pearls of wisdom from his pants-lips, on the tip of his pelvic tongue, his Baton Rouge.

From sex organ to mouth or mouth organ. Like stepping in an elephant pile or a puddle. Infectious sex between a grape and an apple, both now soft, rotting and mouldy, or the two taped-together halves of a rotting peach. In other fruit-growing parts of the state food withered on the vine. The olive demon, the rose demon, the violet demon who caused diseases of orange bread. Left to selfexperiments on his scrotum, egging the house of his mind, he tried Dr. Bumstead’s taped balloon, tapes of his scrotum attached to the waistband of rock n' roll pants that now made him look like a eunuch.

Some hippies attached it to their headbands. Decomposition of allhis cassette tapes from violent coitus. Patent leather curfew rings, like sexual studded tires. Not so far off, for he equated self-mutilation with self-medication. Tried to open his legs with a razor, inserting a bowie knife like a set-screw there. Cutting his leg like cutting an

onion. Cut your basilisk vein and add petrified fern or coelecanth bones. Catching cold left him to resort to shotguns full of pills, grains of black powders that'll blow out your brains. Soft gun velvet catheters, eight to each wound. Even tried removal of the cystic Stone of Folly from the center of his head, up there like the capitol's dome or a German helmet's spike, a single cuckold's horn, antler, coccyx or hoof—voices lived there, tape recordings of old girlfriends.

Amethyst cysts.

Crap, none of this is working. None of it did any good at all, and spent up Tippy's generous songwriter's share of the record company advance several times over. We determined Tippy needed professional consultation.

OK, I did.

He was so messed up, he was actually vomiting diarrhea.

Damn. Maybe we should get the little pud in denial to the hospital.

Yeah, I hate doctors and medicine and all that too.

Coral told this story to her friends, how she ran into him on the street. Maybe she told the school paper, who knows. She told it to you? Oh. Coral was all about this several times in her third-hour Commentology class, the extra-credit science of offhand comments that some university peasant-bloused liberal had dreamed up. How she'd seen Tippy on the street in this pair of poverty pants, a pair of papier-maché stage pants but a pair that automatically fell into disrepair, shredded jeans. The motto on his t-shirt said JUST LAID, or was it JUST FORGIVEN? Sad old cuckold, ha. She had greeted him with HihowareyaTippy but he gazed at her with polarized

Polaroids so fucked up on drugs he shivered like a spaz and gurgled his hasty retreat. She said he was like the skeleton of a Freemason, skull used in a ritural; something her father had told her about that he was sworn to not.

Feeling energized, she was on her new diet and all she’d eaten that day was the stinger of a bee. She announced "Tippy, I have a band now". "Gotta go, gotta go..." he simpered. She was amazed how little of him remained. A cop said Saints Begorrah, what's that spotted thing doing on the street? and proceded to draw his gun until he realized this was Horace Mars' daughter with it, saying soothingly That's OK, Officer, I can handle it.

Now to a kid that sounds like the ultimate in anarchy, wearing non-pants so blithely that your pud and cods hang out on the street, observed, obscene and demanding obeisance, practically pissing in the public eye. Like the swastikas we used to draw all over our schoolbooks I guess. OK, I still do. Swingsets specially designed with holes in the seats, to look up little girls' dresses. Pain-stained pants like an American in Purgatory. Stoned on Hell in Satanpants.

Nakedness as a uniform, like in Sparta. Chameleon legs, all carmelcorn stuck to the hair on them. His maiden-man-hood and cock eggs. Little beds for shoes, soft and tucked in with their own sheets, fitted, quilts, pillowcases, a parting gift from Aldebbie. Still in his t-shirt made out of stuff for people in the world too poor to afford Kleenex. Hair like a head full of burning Christmas trees, she felt the fire when she touched him, toked him, burning her hand on his radiator or stove. She's just a suckin' on his soup bone. He’s a wooden fork.

"You're stuck up now" said Coral.

Tippy was even growing tired of the Rock life, some girls parts like leather cabbage. One of the times Tippy was jailed for indecent exposure on a Sunday, the anorexic daughter of the Chairman of the University Literary Not Spoken English Department bailed him out with a poem she had plagarized from the highschool arts magazine.

The cops were moved to tears, in contrast to the vile lyrics of this you-can-have-him prisoner here. Tippy was a damaged ant dragging his hindquarters. Head, thorax, pendulous abdomen and we know what part that is on Tippy. So skinny he’s a scarecrowfish, a human comb, human corncob. Huskperson, not merely a boy in (don’t remind me) Husky jeans. Like Lazarus rising when he was just a dog-bone, a fetid rotting E-Z-Comics type of thing. Fucked-up dribblepuppy so messed up and sloppy on the street. When Coral saw Tippy in torn pants by that time he needed those rubbers just to hold that thing up, wired like a push-up bra. His foot got an erection and broke through his shoe. Everything falling from his clothing. Too old to wear underwear. A nude empty sea. That old gray-haired river. Hair falling out into the vomit sink in clumps like false eyelashes. A sickly piddle boy, fighting life's battles with a fistful of pus. Deranged air, popped-knee dungarees, a jacket with all broken buttons. One of those sad men who ppeared in public with his sweater buttoned through the wrong holes, mismatched shoes, all conveying I Need a Woman Real Bad. He'd walk onstage in mummy wrappings. A smart and articulate faculty-brat toddler on the street pointed at Tippy and shouted, "Your name is Let's Go Dance Penis!

Bantu Football Juice Pants!" and you know, he wasn't half wrong.

Walked around with his Bank of Sweden simply exposed. Tippy appeared naked on novelty Toby mugs, highball glasses and pens.

Tippy's physique at this time a sacrificial loaf of day-old bread, with pencils for arms and legs. A homunculus in exile. Pigs love company. But when all is said and done we're still a species. He was but the sum total of dirt normally found in a shoe. Coughing like the 17th century's witchy song "Suffocation of the Mother".

Forgetting the parable of Christ and the witches. Like the song says, Drugs keep pounding a-rhythm to the brain. His mind, a once-fine vase now used as a low-life spitoon. There could only be one Tippy, and this one wasn't himself. No longer just impulsive, impetuous but dissembling, shambling. Tippy had gone ape. He had sliced, diced, chopped and grated his health and constitution. Murder where he walks. Fools drool baroque pearls of spittle. Puking skeletons, nowhere for anything to come out of. Death by lying prone too long.

Shit on a skeleton. Lycanthrobby werewolf-urges, morbid and gravey. The imbalance of the ambulance. The chanchre of chance.

Trivia and saliva. Zen diseases. Giant centipedes ambling in his larynx and trachea, a cold dead thing in his chest. Got love in the chest. Your " chest" becomes your " Christ", your intestines start gettin called your Albert Einsteins. Dr. Burt Contact at the Burning Chef Medical Center removed a Philosopher's Stone from the top of his head, or might have. Pneumonia from his bubble machine.

French reverberations. What an Arab student called Fatima Fatigue.

He felt flies' legs sinking into his arm like into quicksand. Footshock flatworms, circuits even crushed earfingers. Mummified finger feet.

Oil sounds and plumbing noises. Unnatural occurrences in the river,

aware of a constant swimming-pool smell in the nostrils like club soda or tonic sparkling into the nose. Indolent, slovenly, cough-shattered, uncharted degredation enveloped in the special dangers of life. He broke into floral patterns. Like the movie director said to the screenplay, you might be a hot property but you'll never get well.

Tippy was olding, oldening, able to talk about the olden days from experience rapidly because he was so trapped in a kid medium, and to be trapped there forever was a form of eunuchry.

The incurable boner by which men become monsters. Ignored some girls with tattoos "Enamored of Danger". The last few children he fathered weren't right, were erased, exploding with a wee stinky pop and blowing apart the confused bodies of the pert preteen girls who unquestioningly lie there, lay them, lay there and bore them. By this time his sperm were just a few grains of table salt. Dolphins and invisible snakes, flying crabmonsters, shrimpmonsters, flying seamonkeys in the shadow of hot water. A Ban on my Baby. The only child is always a monster.

Rock walls appeared to slide, eighteen-year-old girls became buildings or bottles. He looked out at those girls and saw only menstruating skeletons. Well, they were a bit anorexic. Looking at a woman he saw only the naked ovary sitting in the chilly, draughty abdominal cavity. Girls that escape like the contents of the eyes.

There were still popular girls all right. One epileptic little thing was a source of contagion to her entire neighborhood. The dreaded accident of infection of seven young girls at a party where kissing games were played.

Down and near the tomb, his own kissing

probe was the tool of doom. An old veteran said Cheer up, the clap

is like sex, everyone gets it sooner or later while Tippy said No no no, you don't understand, this impotence is something more, something metaphysical.

When she heard Tippy was under the weather, Coral brought over healing offerings of a rabbit's foot, a four-leaf clover found in a bag of marijuana, a horseshoe Horace had hung up in the garage, and herself.

Coral bubbled up a while later in Tippy's mental effluvia.

Hmmph, I'll show her, he thought. Everything here still works. By this time Coral was blocks away so he turned off the road on to public property. Ye Olde Sludge pond. A prehistoric bog full of Space Age sphagnum moss. A cantankerous landscape. Boredom deer. Smallscale scapegoating. Wriggling swampthings within. I'll never forget that color, the color of a black-and-white photograph of melted cheese, melted pie- and cake-tins, a fish turned inside out. If Hawaii were a robot planet, poi would look like this. A place in the human heart or pajamas where all poisons are kept? Separated by a chainlink fence from the children, these purifying poisons did their duty making the water clean and healthy and the children agressive and free. In these alchemical concentrations they'd cure venereal complaints for sure. A sludge pond of his own poisons forming in the sump of his pelvis. A sludge pond of fat for me.

Just for goof, he whipped it out and masturbated into what poets in the classroom called "the chemcrust slimeval", adding his own. Riding his sewercycle, shoulder neck muscles hard as rocks but that was just stiffness. Thoughts about plumbing, the removal of foreign matter. Death's-head insignia on his dick, flashing on and off

and flaking like moth wings. Headquarters of the hot ghost. Playing Pull the Vampire. Was he real in the salve? Fully frontal causality.

Hey angrypants!

Uggghhhh... Lilliputian ejaculations. Cock a toy cannon shooting crabs. Soapy water came from his dick, you could practically wash dishes in it if you wanted to. The love expelled when a fireman burns. The pearl of great price. A frustration spill.

Warning lights on his picnic. A pain on his Peternovice. A thousand infections. A freak in his sleep. Just a shadowbladder, couldn't tell if he was peeing or not anymore. Expecting to expel with a pop the tiny sea serpent, the little fishbone stuck in his cock, stuck in his couch, with the lemonade jet stream. Cum was jes' ghost shit. So messed up that shit itself started oozing out of his cock, the toothpaste tube squeezed. Remember, a piss is just a shit to some. We'll get back to that. By this time Tippy's shit was probably firetruck red. When he shit blood he knew he'd become a woman. The feeling of worms crawling in his butt. Half-dead, half-distinguished, dead robbery and fat flatulence. He was a moo-cow, the cow's steaming pasture patty, he was owl feces, all fur and little mousebones. He'd shit the country itself. I'm obsessed with the shit, the detritus and excrement result.

What the museum artists call documentation, rather than the experience, y'know.

Glad that's over. Look at it, that hideous hunk of broken balloon. The Antichrist as leper. He had his pocks in his pocket, his pockmark-maker. His cock looked like he had fallen off a speeding motorcycle onto it while thinking about that sitcom with the pretty blond genie. Balls are a man's batteries, highways are dried boners.

His balls were but used teabags on a little silver tray in an elderly lady's salon. He was making a "come back". Scales fell from his groin and legs and became oak leaves, rotted apples, ashes from the trashburner, cigars that smell like newsprint, clotheslines, horselint, blanketmeat, the very moment Tippy touched the city limits of Aleppo.

His bones were made of sugar from drinking too much Cola. A hand with rings for each of the planets. Getting pizzas to suck poisonous plants. He looked out on the city from where the sidewalk began.

He walked, haltingly, back downtown. Soon he stood in front of ye olde drugstore where this adventure all began.

What is this, the Encyclopedia Tippiana or something? You think I’m the authorial 18th c. Doctor Lyndon Baines Johnson?

Flattered, I’m sure. But he was a bore, no?

Air conditioning was becoming bipolar, Bible-polar. Summer was supposed to be hot, but air conditioned public places became popular, grocery stores where it was turned up so icy high in summer to prove they had it. Daylight Savings Time keeps everybody in the dark, like parents (not-) talking about sex.

So we surreptitiously doubled Tippy’s drugs one evening and took him to the hospital. When he awoke, after they’d revived him, I told him he could start a one-off band there (anticipating the royalties from another album) called the Patients’ Belongings. And we—Dink, Thump and I—wouldn’t mind. As long as Aldebbie wasn’t involved.

No, that wasn’t how it happened. I'm sick, he realized. I should see Dr. Wagon, everybody’s pediatrician in Aleppo. No, Dr. Wagon died of a heart attack Up North in flight on his private plane, crashed

into a fishing lake or onto the deck of an ore tanker in the channel between the Big and Huge Lakes. It was never fully explained. At least my brother and I both got from him Draft Board letters recommending total deferment, so we didn’t have to go and perform like a Tippy.

Or maybe Tippy could afford to flee to The Mayonnaise Clinic in Terrorvista, California. This posh canary ward was run by the two wonderful Mayonnaise brothers, a physicians' parody of Thump and myself. Sanitorium of a generation. Scene of a shootout many years before. A place where they examine optometrists' eyes. Where milkmen become mudmen. The crawdaddy of them all.

Palace of the Placebos, sniffed Aldebbie, now on a trendy naturalopathic healing kick, daubing Tippy with sentient oils and nonmarijuana herbs and spices. Diseased flower with aphids on its petals, this was the quote over the door of the clinic and I think it was Shakespeare.

That was what Aldebbie, through a barrage and

phalynx of screeching, feverish phone calls, got the record company to want him to do. The grumpy can't-tell-boys-from-girls-nowadays ambulance driver almost took him to the Groupie Hospital. It treated Superdigestive Ovarian Cancer, but he didn't have that I insisted Tippy be taken to a Catholic hospital, and for once I got my way. We could try taking him to a famous hospital dedicated to St. Jewish, who (confusingly) wasn’t. One that was originally affiliated with St.Tempestuous' convent of the Urinary Sisters, but now looked efficient, bland and corporate on the outside and in. Over the door, for the benefit of children, it said Land of the Sick, Home of the Brave. A hospital is like a frightened church. Its learned divines

plied him with church medicines: cathedracillin, ex cathedra, into the catheters of this ex-cathedral.

Tippy was too old for admittance to St. Nude Chidren's Hospital, founded by a TV comedian whose first role was as a bratty kid in a Chomps Trio short, throwing peanuts at a prize fight referee's bell. Nevertheless, pea and pee shooters, slingshots, air rifles, H.O.train sets, these were all children's toys that would all soon be used to try to cure Tippy, to no avail, no suitable results. He was frightened at the sign Doll Hospital, began stammering he didn't play with dolls, even if young Aldebbie did, but we assured him that the Doll family was just the donors, buggy- and luxury-carriage makers who'd easily adapted to the motor age, to great success and subsequent philanthropy. Yes, yes, Tippy, we know you only play with teenyboppers and women.

The University had a second Medical College of Glandular Implantation in the 1920s, where bison, wildebeest, coyote and especialy goat glands had been inserted into sexually compromised men. But the Impotentists on the traditional medical faculty opposed it, and Father Coughinacarload began broadcasting that the Great Goat himself was periodically summoned in the operating theater, so local churches soon demanded the facility be shuttered.

We considered an almshouse, lunatic asylum, pesthouse and even vetenarians' clinic for Tippy until we finally snuck him into the University hospital. A bed was found on the fifth floor, still unchanged from the previous patient, whose chart on the clipboard at the foot of the bed was turned upside down (to show decline, not recovery), then re-labeled TIPPY CHOMP.

His window looked down upon the Grunting Grove, bouncing with hemaglobin robins. When he was still well enough to stand up to pee in a bottle, facing the window he was seen by students in their twilight, nocturnal or mid-day couplings on the grass and gardens below, who'd all stop and gaze in amazement at his still-formidable virility, his University Endowment.

Hospital architecture reminiscent of the French Manhattan cathedral built to house the thorn in Christ's paw, cause of the hole in the one he masturbated with. Why hospitals' names, like many Soul songs, dwell on the idea of "mercy." Don’t mention the poorfarmers’ Motorsburgh Misery Hospital, I wouldn’t take a dead dog or accidentally-on-purpose Thump’s van run-over cat there.

This hospital's emergency heliocopter was called the Rubber Eagle, and periodically landed clattering upon the roof periodically with car accident victims flown in from the freeways.

Not necessarily the mental hospital west of town, with the alarmingly damaged playground equipment out front, but Tippy was turned away from several hospitals for his "noisesome leg", which meant not only the suppurating sores where he walks but his swollen third leg shrieking like a boiler's whistle, disturbing throughout the night patients and headachey nurses alike with its hubris.

Fortunately, this wasn’t the hospital that had suffered the scandal of doctors and orderlies abusing the mouths of male patients after colonoscopies. "Hey, they've already proven they can swallow vile-tasting stuff," they reasoned.

They considered looking at him under Dr. Roentgen's latest.

"Rent boy?" Aldebbie's pointed ears popped up, "Ahh, those were the

days..." Bet if I had run away from home, could've been a successful one too; a business that needs no capital besides youth to begin; I’m still saying the Fact of Contrition. But the “Snotspital" admitted him.

Aldebbie reminded him how the first English pub his first band played was called the Snot n' Spittle, fetid place with un-emptied fauxcowboy spitoons everywhere. Dude, what are you babbling about?

This is your friend and "favourite" who's got serious medical shit going on. Sheesh.

The way the hospital staff looked at us, I wondered: are Rock bands parish priests, or pariah priests? Signing Tippy in, I left blank the part of the admission form where they asked about Coral's abortion. The insurance forms wanted to refer to Tippy as "the diseaseholder". Frustrated at the delay, Thump intimately whispered to the sweater-skirt-and-beads ladies at the counter that hey could promptly admit his friend, or have their heads torn from their necks, their hands torn from their wrists.

We dumped Tippy into a wheelchair and he was wheeled out of sight for observation. One thing you always have to do in hospitals is wait. Sitting there, between Dink and Thump laughing and cracking jokes, I thought I saw old Motorsburgh TV clowns Cottagecheese and Buttermilk, pale in white greasepaint as death itself. Oh heck, maybe it was Death itself, in modern medieval scrubs and pocket scalpels instead of a hooded cloak and scythe.

In the lobby there was a big, ornately-framed daguerreotype of the doctor who also founded basketball (and was, incidentally, ancestor of the only musical member who could play his instrument

on the "Chimpanzees" TV show), a sport which, like Rock n' Roll, sort of brought black and white together. The contemporary staff liked to see themselves as his noble heirs.

Dr. Slugme, Dr. Drugwell, Dr. Wicca Coven all conversed in congress around his bed. Dr. Merrill Winecellar, now there's an old California name. Dr. Gloria Oxgored, Dr. Oxblood, Dr. Giotto Gloriosky Goriox. Their names rang through the intercom like an old Chomps Trio routine, middle fingers raised together like Prussians to exclaim Hindenburgfully “The humanity, the humanity!” Kindly old Doctor Alzheimer forced him to appear in a skit "The Physician's Enthusiasm". Dr. I. Sal Mineo tried cinemaradiography, making the patient act in x-ray movies with a supporting role taken by Dr. Bingcrosbyman, long a friend of the hospital. Suffering Arsphenamine Arsenic! exclaimed Dr. Replaced, Hollywood doctor to the child stars. Dr. Charles Proteus Steinmetz was good electrical scientist, but a bad mad doctor. In an irradiated massage parlor Tippy sampled glass-jar irritation. He considered galvanism and gallavanting-ism, but the hospital's negative electricity apparatus was under repair. Negative apathy. Honeymoonitis left this intact dog with a real earthy carrot.

Like tea, Tippy was always steeping.

So the sawbones got out their arsenal, medicinally trying a little bit of this and a pinch of that. They had him inhale Bozochemical gore in hopes of checking his geysering, inhaling his own blood.

Elements like Hertzogovenium and Rockefeller arsenic. Spinal tap with a wrecking bar, fulcrum straining, the crackling and sparking high tension wire of the spinal chord cable visible inside. An Attica State

Prison of the brain. Surgeon Generals ordering atrocities upon those germs. They looked grave, rubbed their chins as expected when talking about his case before the little chart of red mountains and arrows going down. Amused at his inability to bleed, one intern poked a thousand holes in the skin of his hand one night before he asked, Are you sure you're a Doctor? Fed with his tubular siphon, his gas station spout. A cathedral of catheters, a human hubblebubble water-pipe hooked up by Dr. Ballyhoo. Glass psychiatrists, blue and jagged. Psychiatrists Drs. Oberheim and Kurzweil suggested a low-blow lobotomy which would only leave him to answer all questions with a sultry "Duh..."

Doctor Clothesline came in, gave him air conditioning powders.

First base: penicillin for that penis villiain. Distilled and refined from only the finest penises, "From the crowned heads of Europe" claimed Aldebbie, who funded the expensive drug regimen for his friend. The more venal and mercenary doctors wanted to patent and call a new drug Tippycilliin, but decided not to as his marketability waned, instead decided on Aldebbinox.

That was the first thing they always tried, but this was something else, more serious. Other antibiotics were developed in university labs from spores taken from girls shared and passed around between bands' road crews in equipment vans.

They tried pickling him in an amniotherapy bath of his own mother's water, expelled when he was born twenty-three years before, somehow saved; maybe as snow. Other doctors and interns plied him with mothers' milk, his own or had him squeezing the tits of fresh new mother's they brought in.

Others plier'd him, squeezing and twisting things like Chomps Trio as dentists. Everywhere, people whose Band-Aids had fallen off. And why do they call them that? No tiny flech-colored plastic bandage strips ever helped my band the Chomps.

Aww, where is the rockstar Christ to cure this spazz Lazarus of his leprosy? Taking off-the-druggist's-shelf hair and mouth replacement just doesn’t cut it. Please help.

Hospitalizichigan. A spittoon zoo. Phrenologists came in, soon growled "The surface of the moon—under all that hair!" They marveled at how his brain displayed no communis sensis, or area of common sense. Acromegaly cells from the late Rondo Hatton, the horrific actor now that disease's endlessly replicating HeLa lady, were injected into his dick. Tippy was given cells from university experiments on unstable, infertile puppies. "Guppies?" Tippy inquired, "My sperm usedta be as big as them" while indicating the length of a rifle cartridge with his thumb and forefinger. "Truckoloads from fisheries, small fry, fingerlings and minnows" he gasped, before his head fell back upon the pillow, exhausted.

One Jesuit chemist wanted to try something in his laboratory apparatus, for he asked for some acrid ammonia from Thump, some water vapor from the melting ice cubes in Dink's drink, Tippy's own bouyant hydrogen (The horror! The horror!). He then asked me, of course, to donate some methane. He gave the damned admixture shock treatment, and was pleased at the results. Those medical texts were wrong, a misprint: it wasn't really powdered unicorn horn curing so much, it was eunuch-horn, the dried and pulverized pecker of a

boy castrated for his singing ability, fluffed to maximum erection at the moment of the knife. Aldebbie sniffed it as snuff. It often did the trick, but not for Tippy, alas.

Those were some mean amino acids. Though building blocks, they didn't produce one-celled intelligent life hoped for in Tippy.

A drug originally formulated to treat architects. I asked if the medicine might be good for my own gout, and the twinkle-in-the-eye French Canadian Doctor said "Chaçun a son gout," pronouncing it differently.

The same doctor who didn't want to use anesthesia sewing up Thump's tongue (and lips, which he proudly thought made him look like a big Jivaro shrunken head)—"Hippies only slur their hip lingo slang anyway"—now refrained from giving Tippy any sedative while administering electroconvulsive shock therapy—"Like I do in the state prison. If this punk hasn't killed anyone yet, he probably will."

Cardiovisual nerds, who hooked up film strip projectors and reel-toreel tape recorders to the heart. Tippy's inadvertent erection and orgasm spat a wad of choad jism into the malevolent sawbones' eye, and he ran screaming from the room, "It burns! It burns!", without bothering to turn down the current. I finally walked in, turned the dial, flicked the switch and shut Tippy off, to my friend’s grateful relief.

He dribbled, or as one nurse snickered, "genitally drooled."

He'd evidently picked up some kind of new hospital disease too.

At first I thought pranksters had stolen the Archeology museum mummy when I saw dessicated Tippy lying there. Swallowed a chalk

ghost. Specter inspector. Face like a blank cannabis. A blank nerve. Ambulance full of rain. Walk me out in the morning pills.

His appendix was removed for good measure. Wouldn't want it to burst on tour far away. Spleen, liver, kidneys for convenience too.

I'd hate to come down with brucellosis, the bison-wasting disease here.

Outside in the herniated hallway, doctors cast lots for Tippy's Las Vagus nerve.

Aldebbie frequented that hospital for facial reconstruction; tummy fanny and bunny tucks; repeated penile enlargements and reoganization. So often, the Operating Room maitre'd would welcome him, "Mister Aldebbie, your ususal table?"

Oh no, he didn't come here. It was a private hospital in London.

There he'd inhale uncorked vials of miasma from the 19th century docklands and stews.

They tried slathering Tippy with silver sludge from the pond near the elementary school, flown in by the handfuls by emergency heliocopter. They tried deuterium, which they kept carefully pressed between the pages of Deuteronomy III and IV. ominid fluids. Ironpoor Ape-iron apeiron. Medicinal sweet algae. Sealed bull frogs' electrical urine. Orlando Furiosemide. Dangerous chemicals the Nazis invented called Holocaustics. Or is that a kind of word puzzle in the New York papers?

The avuncular old doctor, pleased with himself and and his wit, chuckled something was haywire and cuckoo with Tippy's "hearteries". Doctors in wetsuits, ready to spellunk.

When the doctor said to Tippy "bulbospongiosum", it made him smile. When I walked in, he cheerfully said "That's Roque, the most bulbospongiosy guy around here!"

One doctor, nose in a book, said Tippy had Esoteric Fever, a sputtering out of the gasoline neurons in his brain. Another blamed flashlight worms, flagrant flagella. To stem his polyepilepsy, they implanted a hippie's hippocampus, and when that didn't work, one from a tiny eohippus obtained from the university museum, dried but soon re-hydrated with spit into our usability. You're supposed to use Doctors' Jelly, a crabby nurse warned us, too late.

Tippy asked for a suckling nurse—pretty sure he meant lactating—for milk with which to take his hourly regimen of mediciene pills, and of course the hospital—charmed and dazzled by his cultstatus celebrity—indulged him. The stout new mother's dark breast popped out of her white uniform to his withered lips, a strange mahogany madonna and child, or "Roman Mercy", depiction.

And, incidentally, Roman Mercy had been the name of a Motorsburgh mayor, overthrown by his own racist Police Department.

Girls in the hospital, pert and perky as an episode of the Chomps Trio when they're mock-doctors. Some hot girls become nurses, fattened with professionalism and care, pillars of family, children's photos beside their tiny administrative desks on the ward.

Can a girl both love fucking and family? It boggles the mind. Other female patients, sylphlike or some simply sapphic with syphillis, their bone that liked men dissolved or atrophied.

Hospitalized groupies, some sporting big blues tattoos I've Had

My Fun. Like crackers crumbled in soup, they served the Revolution.

Seated upon one bed, an old woman was letting a bat trim her fingernails and toenails.

A Jamaican hospital orderly made rude regional exclamations upon seeing the blood clots tumbling from Tippy's nose, ears, other orifices. The university philosophers and its alcoholic poets came in to ponder and muse upon Tippy's decline, as great towers are struck by lightning, and stately wood mantlepieces and bannisters are eventually eaten by worms. Various forms of Reversed Skin Diseases. Skit Diseases spread through high school Drama departments (via Aldebbie and his ilk, obviously).

Humming a California band's moody song about the hotel housing it, one scalpelman excised the Crystal Cyst, a cyst containing Christ, or at least a little chalky white Catholic host from a Mass. The vending machine in the hallway had Stone O' Folly, the nougat like the one on the top of a hapless Walloon in the old painting, surgically removed as a little devil jumped out. But by now Tippy was that clear crystal skull from Mexico, polished, transparent and mysterious, That night in the hospital he dreamed of Dog Poo Vampires, leaving their canine dirt on your neck when they bite you. But it turned out to be only night nurses, with cotton alcohol swabs.

Each Fall semester, I remember seeing the new crop of all those guys in my high school who'd been injured by power lawnmowers, young operators trying to cut lawns while on LSD. Hands were mangled or removed when the sunburned doofs thought they saw a baseball card or hotel room key beneath the mower, or

eyes torn out of heads when they got too close to inspect the whirly blades. And some considered themselves quasi-professional too, cutting lawns for their drug money or to buy hip clothes. To see the budding lead guitarists, now walking on hands and feet reduced to mere buds, getting therapies and pep talks here in the hospital, is a cryin' shame. Hey, I have empathy too Tippy got philosophical. "Our lives together as a band have been sparkling, like a good LSD trip." He smiled wanly, then lapsed into darkcloudiness, a non-funky funk.

Despite their black and white t-shirts, their tiny white tank tops, the worried girls who came in to provide succor weren't exactly nuns; not Brides of Christ, but Brides of Rock in general. They prayed to the ex-Virgin. Definitely manipulated his doctor muscles, his invasive doctor mussels. Muscular boredom smote him. They rubbed Irratatum on him for inflammation, like a flying squad of rural firefighters launching a controlled burn. Trying to be helpful, I draw a chalk outline around Tippy, like the do at other similar crime scenes.

When the hospital parish priest recommended Extremunction, I heard the single word as if the doctor, washing up by the door, had thrown his voice and prescribed a new miracle drug. But he hadn't.

I brought, for Tippy's healing, some objects pilfered from the university's Natural and Unnatural History Museums' cabinets of relics. Not from the dioramas of primitive local injuns, but the Hall of Christianity Superstition. I carefully mashed and powdered those sea turtles and middle-class rats from the middle east that had nibbled Christ's toes as he hung upon the Cross. That dessicated chamois bag is a virgin Saint's womb. And those knucklebones are actually

the petrified nuts of an early Pope as lascivious and wanton as Tippy, so should work on him. And the Archeologico-Anthropological Museum across the street from it sported pagan items (mummies, etc.) that should have some power left in them too.

The body of that hidden, bad-grades-ashamed Asian student starved in the church attic: can we make some medicine out of that?

Rhino rigs for rhinoplasty. "Rarely does sex activity so displace the nose" said the sawbones about Tippy's achilles heel, possibly the result of Jewish blood back there someplace. Many middle-class girls had their noses fixed, or prettied. Realizing this subset included many of the doctors’ daughters, I held my tongue.

Like you'd send an old horse to the glue factory, we jokingly threatened to ship Tippy off to PrepuceCo until we realized just how sick he really was. I tried to joke with the doctors that Tippy was a Romeo who so loved young girlfriends, their medicines should be dispensed to him in "capulets" but, hurried and distracted (and perhaps underread, unwellread), I don't think they appreciated the joke.

We were going nuts waiting.

The aging ragamuffin, a siphoned man, put through the tail of the electric fan. Looking like a cooked and plucked Nixon.

Curmudgeon damage. Monkey anarchy. Caught dead in his steroids. Earwigs coming out of his ears, Elvis earwigs. Lumbago, plumbago in his pencil lead. His fat cactus. Agave worm in the mescal drinking itself. Medical mescal. He had devilitis and moth anthrax. The royal suffering, a biscuit suffering. The disease a barking sore. Jesus' diagnosis. The Stations of the Crotch. The

Lord's Attacks. That French night-eye rattler. A playground of prurience, consciousness-wise. A ramshackle life. By now Tippy resembled a little piece of dust. The dust faded. Micromegaly, where aspects of the face and body grow misshapenly smaller. His hard intestinal eyes turned a gynecological color. Eyeballs like an automobile tire about to blow out from all that glaucoma. Like a blue burst Cadillac. Disease of the coordination. Trouble driving the inner truck. The penmanship of indelible ink disease.

The horribly burned sugars in his face carmelized, giving him a wet but crackly glazed-over look. In sympathy, I and the rest of the band ate plenty of bachelorsfood cake, doctorsfood brownies.

Indulging everyone’s sweet tooth, nice, sweet. But what of the marshmallow in his loins?

His debilitating krankheit wasn't mentioned on Arthur Healthisickness's Evening News show.

It appeared they hadn't bathed Tippy in days, but the nurses swore they did, even gambling, arm- and Roman-wrestling for the privilege, sometimes several times a day or even hourly.

Nevertheless, his hair and skin were crapulent crapola crappy.

Banana-peel fibres run over by a tractor in mud, skin like a bad potato rejected by KP for the soup pot even in impoverished foreign armies, the near-starving Viet Cong. Test-tube testicles, in vitro vas deferens, all sorts of damn experiments going on in this research hospital, mostly on Tippy. Lots of Vietnam War grants awarded to this campus and these docs wanted a gravy train too.

The guy was a mess.

"Inflammation equals information," said the nurse to no one in particular, certainly not the uncomprehending doctor.

Doctors and their Doctors-in-Law stood about, perplexed.

Young doctors who only went into the field for the deflowering.

Shopgirl treatments were applied to him on their lunch hours. They gave him green pedophyll pills, though the side effects were socially undesirable. They plied him with radioeffective materials, still wet from the swimming-pool reactor humming at the researchery over at the north end of campus, it being loaded with a succession of green, brown and white radium, and later whirling him in the Cyclotron.

Radiation nation. Moleculecide those candyglands. They had only recently removed the radium TV sets in each of the patients' private rooms after too many patients died from them, old shoe-size fluoroscopes. I had to put on a lead sweater-vest, face covered like a Moslem prayer Mom on the street whenever he was being X-rayed.

Remember, the WWII plan was to have Negro invasion forces sent to Hiroshima and Nagasaki since the bombs' radiation would run off black skin. Einstein, the conscience of the Allies, nixed that.

More and more damn doctors were trundled in. A specialist arrived from Beatles of Lebanon Hospital; another flown in from the medical college on Surgeon Bay. A phosphoric philosopherphysician left an autographed copy of his bestseller The Sulfa Drugs of the Self by Tippy’s bedside. But the Bible organization soon purloined and pulped it, leaving a staid Standard Revised Edition in its place. Ahh, the King James Infirmary blues. Physicians put their gloved fingerthings in his wounds, calling each other "Hey, Thomas!" with a doubter's grin. Some were even appropriately snacking by his

bedside on the candy bar Doubting Thomas, available in the vending machine by the elevator, downstairs. Ingesting black helium from a misshapen inhaler. Oil of Suprises. Oil of Bozo. An Oil-of-Bonzo Dog-faced kitchen orderly served him raspberries full of rabies, an old Western Michigan folk remedy.

Some daring young doctors used his trapesius as a flying trapeze. A Spanish grandee specialist physician said the warts on it were Human Pamplona Virus, genitals both running and like bulls' own. Bloodhounded by gonorrhea’s gunshots, his Daisy Mae-pole BB gun thus tarteted. He was thought to have his turpentine-filled piney woods pineal gland in his cock and balls. So then that’s where his soul was housed, if people still had those anymore.

Stricken with bone gonorrhea. Spill the flakes of psoriasis.

Mercurechrome craters. The intern stammered something about Tippy's syphillitic gonorrheisis, his syph-gon, gon-syph. His sin disease, his sex-sin-death. Texas Sclerosis. Guards and psych orderlies hustled him out of there. They brought in a nurse Miss Placebobottom, and while her pleasures made Tippy wanly smile, little effect was gained. The tertiary syphillis of love. Under examination, his several malignant tumors winked at the doctor, or his pretty party nurse.

One doctor came in, took one look at Tippy’s dick, shook his head (the doctor's, not Tippy's, nor the dick's), said "That's not disease, that's disuse!" and left. Not what our imaptient imp-patient wanted to hear. Consequently, his groggy misreading of the sign at the entrance to the ward for Gynecology as Gymnasium made him enter to coach a few girls through a hundred reps. He came out

grinning, and humming "Papa Was a Medicine Ball". Elsewhere, bratty girls that had come to see him again, too young to know better, taunted him “Hey, oxygen face!” as he wheezed beneath the mask and cannister.

An unsympathetic nervous system, acting upon the body like a mustachioed cartoon, comic book, or Chomps Trio-episode villain.

His lymph glands and nodes may have turned his oomph glands into limp glands, promoting too much limpness. Aleppo German oompah band glands, probably.

An attending physician from India looked at Tippy's pockmarked, suppurating manhoodlum and chuckled that some of those girls must have been from the subcontinent's province of MySore.

God, dick dick dick. What, I'm not obsessed with his cock—the rock press and concert-going community is. Compare Roosevelt’s polio, Eisenhower’s heart attack, Kennedy’s satyriasis, Nixon’s phlebitic watergate. Like the greater American public, I'm so bored with Tippy's dick. And I never paid much attention to it myself. Nor my own, for that matter.

He’s been there what, three, fifteen, thirty days now? Who can keep track?

Hospital breath. New Jersey Pleurisy. In the hospital, he was poly-limited. Oh, that shapeless, lifeless hospital.

Neuroprofessionals with hornrimmed leucotomes probed around here and there. Our High Priest of the Hernia merely watched, bemusedly.

Tiny and rickety aluminum ladder to his bladder. Nauseated viruses.

Wiggling cilli like Jesus Christ's tiny legs. His prosti-cosi fan tuttiglandin. He was kindneysnaked, which must have hurt. Chemical sepulchres, like classical sculptures around the pharmaceutical research facility in Sepulveda, NY. Lizard-targeted therapies for his cells' brigand proteins.

Oh, you better believe those university doctors used the celebrity patient as an excuse to try all sorts of stuff they'd been waiting, positively shitting to try. A smart English boy named Colin invented the Colinoscopy procedure, but the authorities later gave him hormones to replace his interests, until he nearly suicided with a forest candy-house witch's poison apple.

I may have caught coconut-sized stomach crabs visiting Tippy in that place.

A specialist from the continent declared he’d gotten himself into the solo drumbeat of a Gotterdammerung-a-Vida. What the doctorclassicist called his hymensword had been blunted, and he was determined to find out why. The old roué of a physician, old-world and seasoned, shrugged fatefully at the vagaries of Love Diseases.

Is this the best we've got here?

Doctors drummed their fingers on his tympano-thymus, gave him salicylic acids more hallucinogenic than regular aspirin. He was taking drugs for which the doctors recommended he not eat grapefruit or pussy.

Cancers from thinking too much of something, or thinking too little. Fact-fighting cancers. Christmas mistetoe and cobra venom.

Hot and cold running cancers. Dinosaur spores. The doctors proudly

showed him, since they knew he liked women, some undying cancer cells from a black lady who died twenty-some years ago. Having never been with her, he showed little interest, but i dipped my finger into the petri dish and touched my fingers to my tongue for a taste, something between cocoa powder and chicken. No, not fried chicken. Sheesh.

Sun infections, spreading around the ward when patients would wheel themselves, or stagger, into the afternoon sun coming into south-facing windows in winter. The diseases spread among men frequenting barbershops where tools were put on a shelf under little blue "ultraviolet" light, often really just a single colored Christmas tree bulb. I found Tippy wandering the hospital grounds, in the hospital gown, back door swung open like a human hearse, babbling, murmuring, sun-swearing.

I brought a hammer to the hospital with me, so if Tippy fell into a coma I can bonk him on the head, say "Wake up and go to sleep!

They probed a part of the brain called the Immoral Lobe. What, doctor, you say it's really the Immortal Lobe?

Perhaps it was a women's movie we had seen on TV called "Fur-Lined Physician" that raised our expectations for Tippy's hospitalization unreasonably.

It wasn’t comfortable. Throughout

the venery wards, fathers and mothers screaming at sons and daughters, weeping and gnashing of teeth and enforced haircuts.

Several prominent Aleppo businessmen whom Horace would've known, drank, joshed, and golfed with, were admitted to the hospital for Kiwanisyphillis.

Tippy had a real splendid pox, braggadocio thunderpox,

something a French King would die of. Claimants to chlamydia.

Brewery-workers cancers. Lip service cancers, especially found upon peforming girls. What they called his Gamma Gloubulingam, bloodfilled object of phallic worship. Knowing his reputation as a roué, the sophisticated and worldly doctors x-rayed him with double-entendre film.

Meanwhile, Tippy was retching like a ratchet wrench. Bulletins monitored his scrotum sputum, effects upon scrotum cholesterol.

Botulin boils the size of a nightmare's egg. Candid-camera candylomas, candida and thrush. For cholesterol, which he somehow had arteriosclerosizing the blood flow to his dick, he took pills called Mazeppas, first formulated by a 19th c. Barbary Coast Frisco actress in a bodystocking, representing a heroic youth, strapped to a horse onstage in a Byronic melodrama.

Testicular brass hanging full and shining yellow like a freshlypolished scrotum spitoon. Try as they might, his cellular onanisms could not be duplicated in a test tube, only by his own hanging tube there. Distended, like a snake eating a pork-pie hat. Like a might stone log in a petrified forest, it stood mutely, unresponsively. Uh oh.

In the hospital, old men, not even necessarily churchgoers, whose prescription blood thinners made break out in Christy stigmata. One ethnic nurse came in, shook her head at the stigmottles staining their shmattes. This oliveskin said Oy! Dr. Schlemeil had him popping Mazeltovs like marzipan candies on Hebrew School Purim.

Any time they needed to draw blood from arm or hand, Tippy imagined the other own was stimulating the phlebotomist's nipple or

pussy. Wait, he's not pretending! They tested Tippy for blood loneliness. Anopheles foot fungus. They triggered medicinal strokes, blood clots the size of autographed major league baseballs sent by them to his brain. Bled his brains before an argumentative Blood Parliament. Put him on a regimen of medicinal stress, chronic irritants and worry to see how he'd react. Rubbed on the Bavarian Aspirin Works’ Weinachtenactin, for minor winter holiday cuts, pine needle pokes, Chrismas tree bulb burns, orignally the military ointment Wehrmachtin, liberally applied on bullet holes and bayonet wounds.

As this was a university teaching hospital, they based their diagnoses on anatomical facts, like how men have that whopping extra rib from which Adam created Eve and her big behind. How black men have an extra set of muscles in their legs to run faster, away from lions and tigers in the jungle, Motorsburgh cops and bail bondsmen; Hitler's doctors proved that when they dissected Olympian Jesse Owens. They then tried to implant the muscle fibers and pipestem cells into the brandied bandy legs of a dozen scrawny Jewish camp children, but of course it failed.

Eminent Dr. Buffalovitch recommended his radical buffalovian therapies. A doctor from the College of Hymneroptopathy applied wasps to him. They stung, flew off. I brought to the hospital a wolf's skull that Thump found (or twisted off) in the woods, thought maybe Tippy's spirits would perk up if they swapped all the menacing vulpine teeth for his own, or what remained. They didn't like that idea, but kept the skull in his room as a unique bedpan.

When Tippy was in the hospital, I also brought him The

Psychopathology of Everyday God, which I thought a light-emitting rockstar would like, but which I later found soiled, torn and in a pile of unspeakable offal under the bed. What, I don't care. Girls whom I give books to are careless with them too.

Nurses sprayed pharmaceutical Death-Off and competing product Off-Death on him, to keep him alive, at least through their shift, so they wouldn't have to then file a detailed report. A nannyogram determined he needed a steady lady, with excellent references, looking after him. He barely knew the difference between Nude and Nurse. They contacted a noted physician, specialist in satyrisis, who slept with all his female patients, but he demurred. A homo doctor from the College of Homeopathy, which stil hid in the basement of the allopathic victors valiant, declared Tippy's boiling lustblood could only be cured by hot peppers stuffed into his dick, and several Habañeros and Guantanameras were inserted lengthwise until he was chased away with cries of "Impostor! Fraud! Phony!" as well as numerous brickbats.

In his wake, Aldebbie arrived all aflutter, gave the ward of hydrocephalic children sparkley electric guitars and big hats, but only for a photo shoot, snap snap snap snap snap, then hurriedly took them back and left. Had an assistant shoot Super 8mm footage of staggering, drooling adolescent idiots allegedly dancing to his songs to project as part of a stage show. Turned a visit to his supposed friend Tippy into a cagily staged, aesthetic, commercial exercise. Not cool.

"His thymus has become his anus" quacked one quack, soon forcibly hustled out of there. Blood in his stool, red flowing in the

shower like Aldebbie's various hair dyes. Fillies' flies, maggots, mealworms, all in Tippy's poop; when the doctors had him on his stomach, a cloud of gnats and cabbage moths flew out of hs butt.

Doctors asked me, assuming I had experience with gastric distress (did I just fart?), if Tippy had eaten a massive amount of egg salad, macaroni salad, food left out in the sun for a long time at a picnic.

What, do we look like a picnic or country club pool party band? Field proctologists, returning from their patrols, induced prevention worms to spontaneously generate in his viscera. But it was too late for that.

"I have to make Number Eight," he cried to quizzical nurses. Stools looked like tar and nicotine from a non-filter cigarette. Cotton cancer of the colon, which is sort of cotton-candy colored when turned inside out.

Doctors tried steatopygian therapy, where they blew his butt up bigger than mine, big as Coral's, then deflated it to see if that forced the disease out along with the bad air. Just pull up to the polyp. His jejunum was jejune. Or was that what they said about me? The attending physician scheduled the procedure late summer afternoon so he could use the expelled gas to inflate his colorful hot air balloon, float over the Michigan treetops and field like a Montgolfier of golf courses, into the gentle sunset. Ahh, and what aerial feats he could perform under my stomach smoke. It left Tippy with a floppy buttocks that had he better surgically tighten if he ever intends to drop trousers in subsequent concerts.

Doctor D. "Dee" Foliant tested his intestinal floradora. And not not-with a finger. I was shocked to learn there were few physicians who are specialists in Fecal Inspection, less professors in that

discipline in the university's college of medicine than in any small German city during the Reich or even Wilhelmine era. I always took that serious, hard look, knowing it to be the foundation of therapeutics and health. All the roadside museums sprung up in Germany, near Autobahn exits, were built up around laboratory samples of Hitler's poo, Beethoven's and Bach's, sent off for analysis but then carefully saved from being discarded. Not exactly shrines, as Bavarians insist, but more like those unearthed Indian skeletons or sleepy snakepits Open All Summer in vacation-besotted northern Michigan.

Yes, I know it’s boring. Nothing is more boring than being stuck in a hospital. Every hospital is a concentration camp. Someday, after my heroic military career ahead, I'll be waiting for the end at the Veterans' Hospital outside of town on Glacial Overlook. Every over-lit hospital is a dark forest too. We return to the prim evil of the primeval.

He was prescribed Malaprop, which made him utter astonishing and whimsical, but ultimately tragic, things. More Prescriptionicillin.

Crepuscular surgery. The way every knife hates Christ.

So one sawbones came in, blamed the whole shameer shebangaboing upon his heart. His heart had its problems too. Got a wide blood pressure. Heart blood vessels gripped by pressing, pulsing, window-shopping angina, he stopped for a minute and pretended to be looking contemplatively at a new kind of comb.

Heart full of angina gangrena, a death's-head potato. Groping at noonday with astonishment of the heart. Chest cavity full of hot water.

Vena Cava in furs, worn inside out and restricting blood flow.

Tippy made fun of me for wearing some x-ray specs I ordered from the comic books but I could see disorders down there as murky cancerous shadow spots, and I know a lot of girls who keep away from pubes like that. One day his hair flew off his head with a slight breeze like a dandelion gone to seed, so putting on a watch cap he went to buy a Beatle wig at JMJ-Mart. His cancerous prostate audibly thrumming and hooohing when you put on a rubber glove and turned the knob on your stereo all the way to "Ultrasound". Frightful abcesses, swollen and abcedarian and veined like space-alien melons. Like Coral's tits with the skin peeled off. Try looking at THAT diagram, through a diaphragm, all though Biology class, junior high schoolers.

Tippy was getting to be like a ghost's eyebrow. A clock cuckoo's coughing spasms, Gog and Magog with their hammers racked with pain. Like Thor on Thorazine. Sperm drammamines.

Mellowed into meow. By this time his shadow on the ground was just two serpents behind him. Orange dogshit all over his white corduroy pants leg, or is it only carrot salad? "Aleppo boys always manage to get messy" someone on the bus said with cynicism, a jealous picturepostcard of a man. Sure, many old Midwesterners carried Dutch Schultz Elm Disease from from banging up against trees when they were young, stimulated by all that swinging in a tire hanging by a rope or chain. Why young girls mustn't climb; why grade school Principals dreaded tomboys. Vice and drunkenness in its various forms were still the best outlets of an entropic universe, to skim the wheatberry talents off the top. Think again of all the faculty brats who took too

much LSD upon entering Junior High. Return 'em all to the earthbound the conqueror worm. I can't compete with funerals.

Yet at this time Tippy was still writing about a million songs a day. Written in iambic pent-up bama-lama, the boomboom of bulemia. Getting creativitis like crazy, writing songs with lines like "Went down to the corner, ask my heirophant". Gossip wags in the magazines said Tippy was doing a solo album called "I'm Going to Die Soon", with Aldebbie as the producer. He went skydiving, and recorded a three-record set before he hit the ground. He lay down tracks for songs like "I'm On the Critical List" and "Did You Ever Have a Rash?" for a posthumous tribute album to himself called Diseased Pock Music. He used to be Number One, now he's just numb, sang the assembled youth in the schoolyard. Kids say the goddamnedest things. He wrote one song called "The Impatient Leapt", another one "Troubled Sleep"; maybe he was trying to tell us something?

Tippy fell into the medical os, an anti-tank Ontos that rolled like an ox. Procrustean-bedridden, downright crustacean patients, scuttling along the corridors. Corridor widows of the unleavened dead. It isn't the hospital, it's the humidity. Tippy's head and body was itself like an abandoned hospital, mouldering there in its doctorlight. A dead rat that fed on infected fleas. That Gonorrhea Goebbels, blubbering that Medieval Jews poisoned his wells. Do not confuse the collapsed nose of the syphilitic with the cosmetic nose job of the suburban Jewess. Overdose defined as to overdoctor. A store open all week like a V.D. hospital, till midnight Christmas Eve. A doctor who had just returned from the Museum said Tippy tested

positive for Diplodocuscoccus, then dined on couscous. Tested Captain Nemo-Positive, pressure in the veins like so many leagues under the sea.

A biopsy that grew like Topsy. The doctors were disgusted.

Performing repugnance tasks. A racoon vaccine. What is this, the game of Kill the Intern? And they try to say that it's the salt on the roads that doesn't melt only snow. Diseases of the car, of roadhouses and roach motels, diseases of the beard, of felt, of spotless research parks outside of town. A consumptive consummation like the Disease of Meuniere the Legionnaire. A poliomorph. Cheating in the typhoid lane. Danced the dammit dance. Eye of newt flying saucer ointments that girls use on a broomstick like others would a hypodermic or vibrator. Or maybe these were cosmetics in the hospital Beauty Parlor, you'd think people's Moms would come here if it was cheap. Rascal surgery, by which they take the glands of a skunk and implant them behind your face. Passing genital minerals, minarets, mood rings, rolling stones of hard rock is not a good thing. Philosophers' stones were removed from his kidneys, groanstreet sidneys and a pig's epididymis. Frostcrystal cysts. Coming out of the anesthetic Tippy heard one attending surgeon say daughter-in-law equals Doctor-in-Nurse and everybody laughed; what did I miss?

Hospitalsplitting screams. The doctor bragged how he'd transplanted a human tooth into a rooster's comb. Grafted one boiled and one raw onion to replace each of his testicles. His baby balls bristled to think. Pomegranatecide. Pomegranate attitude. His Prostitute Gland enlarged like that of a Methuselah man of sixty times

sixty years. Scene during a plague: a lamb selling ice cream, singing Italian songs. He was hung like the Lamb of the Rothchilds, like you see on their wine. They made winebottle corkscrews from his spirochetes. After all, Spirochetes were named after the VicePresident whose nickname must've been "Chete" with a hard Semitic "Ch". Kiss Me, Chete, it’s Kismet. One doctor was arrested and tortured for having left a copy of Medieval Medical journal lying about.

Doctor Irving Peccer listed Tippy's ailment only as "mankabassam", Japanese for "the Portugese sickness". Joe DiMaggio's Disease, where you lose your wife to J.F.K. The Sleeping-With Sickness, the American Disease, the Diesel Disease or the ululating Uvula River Disease, Tippy knew that, call it what you will, he was getting pretty syphillodoggoneous. Syph in a jar, a baby as a culture medium. Cortisone art. Wide Blood cells. Galaxies on his back, oceans, pink and yellow lithographed swirls in brickreds and kellygreens, visceral paralellograms. Syphillitic insomnia of the foot.

Bone involvement. Disease a-creeping: Bloody Bones the first step, Bloody Bones the third step, Bloody Bones the fifth, seventh, ninth steps and the sixtyninth step like a manic gradeschooler might chant for attention. This was what they hummed around the hospital, and he was chewing it over like a nurses' outfit. When Tippy and the Chomps sang "I'm So Sick", at first Tippy was talking about his nose, but after a while he was singing about his balls, his frame of mind and his balls. There are some diseases even doctors get.

The disease reached his auto-anomic nervous system, the system used for swearing, lying, cheating, childbearing, wifeswapping and beating them. A nervous system of teddy bears, tabes

and paresis. Hypothalamus like a hippopotamus. Disease was pummeling the blood-brain barrier sumpin' fierce. Temperature still normal—for the Moon, maybe its dark side. Antibiotics for Tippy's penicillin-resistant infections were brought to the back door in railroad freight car loads, and of course Tippy thought penicillin meant a shot to strengthen his penis. A pencil full of penicillin. A pencil full of pus.

Erythromyin earth. Antibiotics for women. Chubble made of Cephalosporin furan-2-acetyl popocatepetl for staphylococcal gramnegative furball infections. A veni vici vidi clinic. None of your bismuth. Plenty of drugs, which I call doctors' dung. All that glitters is not an abattoir. Red-hot aneurism forges. Suffering retrocedent gout, the doctor then enforced entropy upon him. Blood dinosaurs were filling the hospitals. Problems with his bone sugar. Day-glo black bile. Phlogiston in the blood instead of phlegm. Amoebic dysentery caused by weak swimming-pool chemicals. The steamboat-pilot intern monitoring the measurement device yelled "Count Five" as his pulse went round the bend. Mild side effects were found on the way home from clinics to be 100% effective.

Romanian leaching oculists, sucking the disease out of eyes to keep it rolling around their tongues, absentmindedly blowing on their spectacles to wipe them. Sentimental old doctors murmur Ah, the old syphilitics round the clinic in my student days. The doctors danced around and sang these words, those evil professionals fucked his heart on the ground.

Only musicians had the choice of Haitian no-nose bocour voodoo doctors, the squamous flesh of schnozzolas eaten away, all driving Mercedes Benz's without radiator grilles, big gaping rustaway

blackness like the open nasum hole. Other cars in the lot were missing headlight eyes, rusted out hips. The front of an ambulance even looks like a skull. I would've driven one. These guys honored gonorrhea gods. Lepers on leapers. Wouldn't you know it, Tippy's nose was the first thing to destruction-up. Severe hemorrhage as a result of straightening a chordeated dick, the cables stretched, tensed and finally snapped in the suspension-penis. Held together by Budweiser bandages, Buddha bandages. Chuck him into the vasectomy vat. Coldwater castration. The insurance form they made him sign began with the injunction For it is sometimes profitable to cut the member off and toss it into Hell. Before Tippy punched him out, one even suggested the operation by which boys become girls.

Changing a truck into a car.

Tippy was pumped full of X-rays till his very marrow was transparent. X-ray legs. He felt like one of those clear sightless fish or amphibian critters at the bottom of a limestone cave's cool inky pool, or the contents of a delicate Vietnamese spring roll, all ricenoodle- and bamboo-shoot viscera, ricepaper skin. A soldier's pizza. A medical monster. Mad honey poisoning. Glowed in the dark like a novelty watch, pale ghoul-green. Triglyceride teams.

Good morning little dietician. Playing his niacin and thiamin upon a theremin. Litmus tests on a color organ. Chomping ampules of suicidal truth serum—hey, the truth hurts—and spilling his guts to the awestruck interviewer in MilkRock magazine. One of those doctors wanted to open his neck, hotwire his nerves from cock to voice, was bitterly disappointed he wasn't given that lucrative chance.

Dissected his penis, bursting like an overcooked kielbasa at the touch

of the scalpel, for a center photo spread. Anything to get his name in the papers each month.

They rolled him down to X-Radium machines, past the hospital morgues full of parents dead from the bite of an infected child.

Progress seemingly forgot to be made, and as Tippy stuck around the Clinic, further complications arose. A Byzantium of bedsores. Candylomas and the Alopecia baldness and a peeling desquamation, the kind that sometimes resulted in pseudopod false feet and ancephaly (no head). Thanatospermisis, which is a condition suffering catacomb-glands full of thanatospermatazoa. In a rare for of urticaria solare, visible light was found to cause an erthema-qua-edema rash attentded by dislocation and swelling.

Multiple raisins on the breasts, pestilential yaws venery, small ulcusculas and larger, fattier sore pungiores. Fifty-fifty calluses, the boas or the lichens, rhinoscleromas turning people's faces into maps, elephants' curse and pendulum mollusca fibrosis vulgaris ictyosis scleroderma dematolysis like sheepskins dangling from a face's back and neck. Viscosity pustules and putrid germs that haven't bathed in lifetimes. Pemphigus arising from decaying beaver hats, moon craters and even decaying gods. The surging "Itch-itch" of physicians' scabies. The vomit of pregnant hairy monsters. Vamps paraded in the horror of mirror revolts. Stopgaps of the old spy and prospector in police court. Zits and carbuncles on his legs and back from inaction. Freaked by causality.

I’m sorry, I don’t mean to get too clinical. I can see you turning green. Here, have a sip of this. No, there are no drugs in it.

A nurse with a southern accent asked him for a Lurleen sample.

One, two, three, splash my knee. Tests soon proved Tippy had a backstreets and backseat blackwater fever, characterized by violent trembling urine, effectively preventing him from using public Men's Room urinals (Hey! My leg!). Footgrinder genitals. Riding a motorcycle is what destroyed my brother Thump's kidney control.

Never one to wet park benches, Tippy wet his bed for a while as a child (proud of what he called his "self-emptying kidneys") but quit when he found out there were kids around the world who did it too.

Like that kid in our high school who urinated in his first date, it was utter. Heck, a believable little boy mistake, he just couldn't shift gears fast enough. Peeing monster Galiano into the nasal cavity of that soul cistern. That oceanic feeling at that Kennedy urinal. Moth's milk. His hiccupping urine. Yearning urine a cloudy smokescreen of octopus ink you could print a book with. Hey diddle diddle, the boy's got to piddle. Had a spazz attack in the specimen cup, even gravity couldn't help him tell down from up. My whistling and tunemaking failed brighten Tippy's day as I wheeled him around the fetid hospital halls. By now he was a Pissing Machine, hooked up to a loser's lunchbag. Opened like a lung saying "Glug". Couldn't piss straight.

Christ's rain for that golden pain. Finally his urine was just powder.

Situation grim as when doctors jokingly pee into an opened operatee.

Every visit to the hospital I tried to cheer him up: "Look, Tippy, as long as you got your health..." Second graders now read an edition of that book about Tippy called See Spot Run that had been rewritten to emphasize his loins' problems. Fans who heard about his ill-health sent him French letters, and a pet syphilitic rabbit with a skull face. Polar explorers heaped a perfect pelican upon him, from

Albatross, Michigan. Letters reminded him that nobody ever got it from a swimming pool, I mean, thanks. Plague, cholera, smallpox and yellow fever, all deserve quarantine—but in his dick? That spermheaded psychologist felt like life had grabbed him by his third of fourth ball, shook him around. Kicking writhing bawling tantrum spermatazoa, wanting their Maypo or a new toy as advertised on TV. Sperm from 1450. Sperm go into a spazz attack, wriggle away and they don't come back. His sperm caught fire, tails lashing, trying to beat out the conflagration. Things got so lawless, anarchic down there that his crabs started biting the heads off his sperm, when drunk a gang of his crabs broke into a girl's eggs, substituted the fruit of her cycle for a little bit of caviar they'd stolen from a nice restaurant.

Not that he was feeling such great shakes either. Anxiety time, too late, lost youth, you never had a jumping eel slipping out of your fingers. He was in inter-trouble. The night Hansel and Gretl got baked in the oven of the Candy House. Fear of housewives pouring dishwashing liquid detergent into his butt. The demons' party game must've been dropping needles into a sleeping ass. The Devil arrives and told no one. The sadism of Satan. Get Outta My Face! God screamed to Job. Remember, Job got the pox, a slow burn, God's prank to worry Job's wife. Darkness is a unity, hence horror. I really think there should be a band called Pain of Fucking. Flashes of a fear of sex. Tippy? Naaahhh...

“No, not Hindoo,” said the subcontinentally-brown nurse, “I practice a sweet Jainism.” Me and that nurse, we could probably get

it on in a hospital bed, but most likely she got microbes, cooties, germs. Like a puppy got its worms. C'mon, we'll wheel you around to a better nurse.

Not sure about this place. Inhospitable phlebotomists lounged at the hospital Reception Area, passed around an inclined thermos, chugging down blood. A recent scandal at the hospital, of poison wet-nurses from southeast Asia, their milk stunting growth in American babies, or causing diarrhea. Some sort of revenge for the Nixon War...?

Think back on all those kids, circa 1950, who went mad, whose bowels exploded, who choked on their own, or someone else's, fearvomit, as soon as they were put into an iron lung. Included some of our teachers’ kids, why the harried crones were crabby to us decades later. We could use that pulsing iron lung hum in a song, maybe a ballad, some day.

A weird note stuck up in the hospital TEETH = DEATH. Every hospital, defensively, makes us think of comedy.

Cynic in the clinic; sounds like a Chomps Trio episode too. Like their "Spazzattacks in the Barracks", where they're knaves and princes but duiling and fighting off guards with the contents of a doctor's bag— saw, scalpel, hypoderminc syringe with needle, etc. Knowing crowd guffaws at these pufflaws as Cutey stares at an abortionists' rake with befuddlement, screws up his face. Doctor Homburg, Doctor Fame, Doctor Homburg. Roll out of the hospital on gurneys, into traffic and whistleblowing cops. Medicine in the nineteen-forties meant zoot suiter arrested for carrying a silver tomahawk, throwing gasoline

flares at a crowded theatre. If a Victorian lady carried a muff in winter, it meant she had a vagina, and the Chomps Trio still milked that gag fifty or so years later.

The Horseshit Hospital? I don’t see it in the phone book, but it may have been a private clinic called Horschitz. A pet hospital, with the staff playing a game of feeding each animal to the next one its owners brought in.

We’d been so worried Tippy would likely have to check in as a charity case to the Old Actors, Ecdysiasts and Carnival Employees Home and Hospital, out west, near the Studios.

Mrs. Mars, trying to be nice, came to visit Tippy in the hospital with her poodle, but it turned into a curvy-tusked boar and gored him in the groin and upper thigh. Further complications set in.

I found him sitting in the rubberized lounge, dozing, slumped and slurping under dapples of therapeutic sunlight, quite a placid and romantic image, really. On the clinic's sun porch were nervous moralists of prophylaxis, drinking plasma tulip and unsweetened Van Swieten's Soda, fanning their fungating yaws and green crabs, served by moist and exquisitely painful midwives. Old men in deck chairs, lost and swallowed in their bulky spacesuits, distended from the G-force of fucking. Called Mercury Astronauts because they now drank mercury. One English Department oldtimer sat writing a novel of a murderer who murders all the women who gave him venereal disease.

Tippy slept fitfully. He dreamed of panties, and bejeweled enemas. No, that was me. I dozed in the chair as the nurses made their rubbersoled clomping and phlebotic rounds.

Since doctors were worried about prescription opiates and codeine might result in addiction, painkillers were strictly rationed (“We’re a tough, two-fisted hospital” they bragged). Consequently, young candy-striper nursettes were expected to carnally, sensually distract old WWI veterans and heart-attacked businessmen with their young fingers and mouths, etc. This was part of the ongoing government anti-drug policies of the day. What can you do about it?

He was serviced by a cheerful black nurse named Chlamydia, but he was so sick, if not for the orgasm, he barely noticed. While he was in the hospital, I procured girls from the high school for him— wait, you were one? Your best friends too? Amazing!

All in a vain but valiant attempt to cure what ailed him. The doc inquired if he had ever suffered post-coital coma. "No, but plenty of the girls had", he smiled weakly. One smartypants, upon pulling her panties back on, said Man, that's clitoridectomy-fast!

Oh, that was you? Cool.

Every doctor had a different idea, and wasn’t shy about expressing it. One of his doctors had detected drama in his urine.

Lightheadedness of the right arm. Frequent shoulder vomit. He shared illusion diseases from people who got pregnant from blood transfusions, girls he had from menstruating states.

The diagnosis was stingy blood. Stingray blood, from the banana seat of that's girl's bike, her menstrual saddle?

Inflection, infraction, infection. Ride that tetanus train.

An autumn harvest of pumpkin leukemia. A coat made of cysts.

He caught various hospital cancers. Tippy sprouted, sported, ebolacoli embolisms that haven't even been invented yet. Beaded abscesses like an abacus, adding up Silk Road trade.

That Dag Hammarskold diagnosis! said an internationallyminded hayseed internist in mock cusswords.

The doctors performed a curioscopy, not sure what they'd find but happy to find something. Suggested by a young, hip (probably dope-smoking) doctor, they attempted to put Tippy on a terrible regimen of masturbatory medicine. Not a matter of putting the cart of lust before the horse Tippy, but by now just beating off a dead horse.

No matter how much the jouckey whipped, horsefeathers never flew.

His mental state suffered as well, y’know. A sort of push-pain.

Angina of the vagina, at least he didn't have that; perhaps his pains were indirectly from having spent too much time in there. Coral's heartache, on the other hand, was her concern and even love—there, I've said it—for Tippy. Like something in an old song, a ballad.

Canada geese flying overhead, squawking, cursing. Candida infections and dangling candyloma. Ecch.

His hair had become an anal white.

His allergies quickly metastasized into Alzheimers like a medical student's texbook left in the rain whose pages stuck together.

But madness loves a shining mark, and his mind was muskmelon mush soon enough.

He peed pure Algol-Selzer, computer programming which fizzed as it hit or the bedpan; later effervesced in his catheter like a hubble-bubble hookah.

No matter how many rabbits he rubbed upon them, Tippy had pink eyes. Like a cosmetic-tester, which he was, once Aldebbie got into the picture. "You're rubbing rabbis now?" I teased, but he was in too much pain to appreciatively find it funny. Aldebbie suggested an Anglo-plasty, blowing up a condom deep withinside his heart, and helpfully offered to fill it. Eeuuww...!

The old Homeosexual wing of the University Hostpital (those arguments still going on) gave him a placebo made of placenta, on the principle that girls he'd known each had one, rolled up like a plastic raincoat and waiting inside them, and he got his disease from a girl. They brought a saucy fish filet sandwich from O'Meatly's, since one girl observed that it smelled like a cunt, sort of. Smelt like a cunt.

The Silly, or Silliness, Cure.

A wise old doctor took his whore-o-scope, performed whoreoscopy to see if Tippy had been paying for it, which is absurd. As the French national anthem goes, "First they pay you for it, then you get it by your charm and wits, then you pay for it, ooh la la." Allons enfants out of wedlock, etc.

One scholarly sawboner ran up to campus and consulted a medieval bestiary in the University Lirbrary, proposed testicles of a unicorn before it had been tamed by a maidenly virgin. Why not?

Couldn’t hurt.

Vivisectionol, made from laboratory puppies. The postdoctoral blood flow. Rabbit enemas. At the end of the day, a humorous excrescence. Like the old Nazi motto, Blood and Shit. But me, I always consider a bloodless shit a good day.

Doctors extruded black bile "like Aldebbie's mum's blood pudding" said one English wag, but Tippy insisted No, No, I ain't no Ol’ King Melanchole, that's our sullen guitar man Roque. Sanguine, right, from sang-froid.

I'm what? Who shot the phlegmatic? The splenetic? What's the humor for a rock star, that powers fucking? The Mercurial humor, earned from your VD treatments? Now, that one's day-glo black, affirmed the oldest physician, a humanist.

Various royal pigeon oils. Diagnostrums. Nothing seemed to work, to do any good at all.

A purported guru came in to his hospital room to teach Cosmic Kozmik Auto-Anaesthesia, but was really only there to steal his drugs. I so wanted a Breatharian seminar.

He muttered something about Tippy’s muscle gas, but that was actually just me, other side of the room, farting. Sorry!

First the groupies, then the doctors, covered him in penicillin. Soon, in perdition. Somewhere a wafting FM radio played "Perdido". Some fan had brought him a cassette of sulfa-drugs rock.

Hospitalbilly music. No, inhospitabilly, considering Tippy. Sigh.

Like a reggae X-ray by Rankin' Roentgen, a harmonizing chorus of the physicians sang "Oh, Sweet Diminished Quality of Life" like light operetta sailors or captains of the guard, pirates of the Penissance.

Maybe Tippy foresaw his own extinction last year in his song "I AM the Passenger Pigeon." I grabbed my guitar, administered two thick anti-coagulants of song.

More doctors filed in with their alleged good ideas for curing

Tippy. Dr. Cheeseburger painted every exposed or painful surface with iodine; throat, orgasm, glans, suppurations and carbuncles, eye, ears, scalp. Some old-fashioned, paint-baby's-throat-with-painfulboiling-mercury doctors like to claim it was Tippy's onstage masturbation, not the wasting disease, that rendered him a complete imbecile idiot...but I think they simply didn't like Rock n' Roll, had their mulatto mistresses’ apartments too close to the park where the Sunday free concerts played, etc.

Sat through another long damn account of the Passion before the Crucifixion, in the guise of modern medicine. Down that hallway I glimpsed jibbering children with potassium autism. Nude fat men, in stolen over-the-head crow masks from a Greek theater production about birds, roamed the hospital hallways, bringing good cheer.

Some sported cigar butts on toothpicks like cartoon hoboes.

One doctor in the hospital was both a noted UFOlogist and urologist. Dr. Nicholas Van Syringe and Dr. Dogfooden, made the rounds and pondered, but it's never a good sign when the doctor comes in the room, spreads his arms, shrugs shoulders and begins "Well, the human body is a weird-ass thing..."

Dr. Schlemiel, Dr. Ganef, Dr. Putz, Dr. Altekacker, Dr. Mensch...all those old forbidden Yiddish DANG! magazine words I'd learned over the years made learned men, made medical. Like that up north Meshuggeneh Island US Army doctor and his half-Indian ratpack trapper sidekick, the doctors lowered specimens on little strings—meat, metal, frogs and salamanders—into the Christlike holes disease had worn directly into his viscera and urethra, to observe the gastric—"It's a gasser!" said one hot rod resident—

effects.

What am I, your chemistry set? mumbled Tippy.

In my melancholy, I thought nostalgically of that Science Fair gig so long ago. Has it only been a year?

I didn't like how the doctors' names, claiming over the intercom, all sounded like concentration camps', "Dr. Buchenwald, Dr. Theirenstadt, Dr. Dachau..." This did not bode well for Tippy.

I noticed one surgeon was named, not Eureka but Aha!, Ahasaurus, or whatever, the wandering jawbone Jew who was actually the rabbi who performed Christ's circumcision, put his lips to the Holy little wound to stanch the steaming blood, yet was later damned for doing so. "What? I'm supposed to do this, it's traditional." It inspired the Broadway play "O Fellatio!" going on right now, lots of stirring biddy-bee biddy-bum old country songs, performed in the nude.

Aldebbie said he was deeply, deeply inspired by it, but he's always theatrical, his songs nothing but show tunes, not many rock.

Impotence was something he could not keep to himself. His shrieking echoed down the hospital halls throughout the night, "Oh, I used to be grand as a bedman!" The nurses looked at each other, tut-tutted, for King Tut's obelisk now lay fallen in the sand. Aldebbie, allegedly trying to be helpful for a moment, mused-qua-quipped that there was a hospital for impotents in County Wicklow.

Castration Envy, one grizzled old doctor called our hero’s impotence. As the government saying goes, Pubic Health is Public Health, so he was registered with the Center for Disuse Control in Atlatl, GA. Maybe Axolotl. Maybe Tippy, as a celebrity, will be

selected for a Nobel Prize-winning Tuskeegee experiment or something. Among the drastic remedies in this place, last minute sleepytime catatonic castrations. Apology wards. A nut-brown, irritated Irrawaddy irradiosurgeon stuck his head in to hazard a guess that Tippy was now Limpopotent, like he'd been dangling it in the great gray-green greasy river of the female too damn long. A particularly cruel kind of wrinkled. Candy striplings were summoned, kneeled, performed limposuction.

Dr. Freud himself was touring the ward, blew into Dr. Fleiss' nose, and quickly, breezily, and offhandedly proclaimed Tippy 100% neurasthenic. No he didn't, but he might have, or some other guy.

One Motorsburgh suburb had a franchised branch of France's famous Saltpeter Hospital, where Freud was kept listening to Charcoal. Saltpeter, charcoal and sulfur, mixed carefully and…boom! And of course saltpeter from the public purse was liberally dispensed there to tamp down erotics. For many years it was a staple of all public school cateteria food, and Daffie Mars was concerned it might have been getting into her bloodstream when, in her fifties, she started spurning Horace’s advances. Yet it worked, and howling and protesting Apaché dancers who’d been pressganged off the streets and out of the cafés, university students found humping in the forested glen, were eventually sent home catatonic in wheelchairs and gurneys. Success!

I tried to make a joke about him owing his cock to Asclepius, but since he was still impotent, it went over flatly. Flatulently, even.

He like the momentary hallucination of two snakes entwined over a guitar neck, and grinned through his rotted teeth. I wanted to add

"and your golden ass to Lucius Apuleius" but that would've been showing off my reading, and giving lustful ideas to Aldebbie, so I held my tongue. In my leather-gloved hand.

"Asclepius? You mean to say you suffer ass-clap too?" tittered Aldebbie from his maiden-aunt perch on a windowsill. Or at least I could imagine him there, saying so. Actually, he avoided Tippy, the bringdown of the hospital, a sad setting impinging upon his sparkling carnival. His manager probably advised this strategy, just like you'd never see him photographed outdoors on a rainy day.

Windowful sunrise, next morning in the hospital. The light greases forth.

There’s no reason not to call that which is what it is. What one gentle, spiritually torn intern, still wavering between medical school and the seminary, called Tippy’s sore-crafices. What doctors who tsk-tsk'd around Tippy's bedside whisperingly referred to as the Kidney Stone of Rock, which would feel like a Megaron amp when he passed it. God's Clap, lwhat dripped down Jesus' own leg from under his small white garment as he hung on the Cross. What the Spanish doctors call Putashenic, the condition like a nervous whore.

Bionic gonorrhea from happenstance sex, glowing orgasm plasma hovering over the swamps, electrically charged from sex with UFO's. I speculate it was VD from another planet, the fried planet, a whirling disk of syphillis. Academy of Saint Martians in the Fields.

Germans call this the worst candy and the worst beer, in their leather candy bags. Angina of the testicles. Grasshopper worshippers’ consolation. Urine of the Minotaur. A kangaroo's ouch. Pox

humana. The Song of the Scorpion. Icy stigmata, but unfortunately not on his hands and feet. Instead of gonorrhea it's called Gomorrah, for all the Rock musicians living in farmhouses in that township just outside of Aleppo. There was also a Japanese science fiction creature called Gomorrah, or maybe even Gonorrhea, a giant flying pupae or something. It was shown on late-nite TV but we had to go rush to a gig, missed it, while other bands have caught it godzillions of times.

He should’ve sung that old hymn “O Rose, Thou Art Sick”.

Perhaps it was the fungus from the crumbled bleu cheese in the dressing at the salad bar that was growing down there, or mushrooms from the pizza he ate. Like the first time he ever had a pecan pie, that same day he pushed over a rock and saw the ant larvae and aphids squirming, burrowing down there under a leading apple tree. Like a bee with too much honey. Feeling all hurly-burly, herky-jerky, hurdy-gurdy heebie-jeebies. A night shake, the shudder that passes through him and his lust when he pees, the strained and drained feeling. He shook when he would piss. Some little Kathy would have to hold it for him; she'd ridden his drizzle stick, his dickens in her stickin's, so why not?

The way a bill screams at night when you put it in the cash register face down. The night has a million scars.

In a park he saw a statue of a flasher with crabs with the inscription "These are my friends". Tippy laughed, for his own little bug-lets were confined to the ghetto of his crotch. Lice like Lidice.

Obtained from a gift of a special toilet paper industrially impregnated with crabs. So hip even the lice upon him were exquisite. He called

his crabs his pepper-with-legs. Crabs tried to convince him that he was a dog and they were fleas. He let his crabs run away with him, different colored crabs. Up and down the escalators of his legs.

Love's Own Crawfish.

Hey, in those days sometimes I would think I had a pet tapeworm that did some singing. It’s a normal thing to love your parasites as your own. The noble race upon my dirt. Our dirt farmers.

As I was saying, his dick had always been the needle that played his records. This is a love story between a boy and his thing, his pud piano, his lap Wurlitzer. Little pearls were running out of Tippy's swine-thing. He was white-flagging it, playing his pecker by ear, all out of proportion. At one time or another a priest may have blessed it, Catholic or not. His sorestick, his smarting shaft, his official secret merely a secret offal. Like the olive in an acerbic martini. Useless wife. Magenta cub advocate. Like putting a letter in a dirty envelope, the part of his body that gave him the most trouble.

Squeeze, a pearl winks back. Dreams of toothpaste squeezing out of his pe'er, bruiseblood swelling the tip of it. Little white clouds in his fingernails, syphillis coldsores dripped cold from under his fingernails.

Chanchres being the nickname of the show-offy, public and visible manifestation of cancer. Penis as a match head, his giant nerve, his match head id. The mildew that kills. Plugged into his own poison i.v. Exhiliratingly irritating as the VD snakes up his leg. Trying to cheer Tippy up, Dink asked if his nausea was like shitting after being drunk. Ponytail heartattacks and rice chanchres. Tippy’s was as puffed up as Coral's grandmother's limbs poking out from her

frumpish shift, that Frumpelstiltskin. Now he was zebra-wang'd, a red and white striped barber pole on a boy who never liked to get a haircut. It occurred to him, as he sat on the bus next to a beautiful woman that he so much wanted to tell about it, that it was now pink and purple spots, or purple with yellow spots, or yellow with raspberry stripes or grape with green stripes or checks or whatever you please, or don't please. Incubi, succubi and homunculi, spending their incubation period in the back of the fuckyoubus. The groan when the sugar hits the coffee. The hot pain when I pee is only a form of understanding. His worm in the mezcal, a Dalmatian dog's-foot, a spotted planarian paradigm, now flat as a tampon tube dumped from the wastebasket into a trashcan then spilled by careless garbagemen onto the road and run over by the truck.

The terrible cold of the syphilitic, the dick that's bled dry, his tearful dick. Like rain on the roof of the mouth of love. Escaping gas going s-s-s spelled farts from his dick. To the uninitiated it filled the auditorium with a reminiscence of flatulence. He gets forty-nine blisters on his dick, an honorary seventh son of a seventh son.

Ninety-six tears trepanned into the top of that little head, oozing like maple sap. Gonorrheaic scorpions. Hastily covered in butter applications, under vealskins and humor beads. Poor Tippy sick to the skill, a light of love no longer compelled to "get" his partners. .

Cock like a leaky sieve, a canteen with a hole in it. That mousetrapon-it feeling, now agitating his little grey shrew. Swiss syphilis, like the cheese, or chocolates; the cuckooing of the clock.

The word for this disease crossed Tippy's mind: a nonsend, a nonsensical Godsend, a no-nose bocour doctor bird. All the

symptoms burst out all over his formerly too-perfect body. He had a rosy roof-of-mouth, ovals between his toes like monks breaking out in tonsures. Shrapnel without end. He was getting the coppery acne of equals, smelled of a burning cigarette left on a wolf. Mind herpes. A speculative sore. Unguents of the worst. Pus from the toes. You snotfuckers! he roared, to no one in particular, as his nose clogged up his mind for a moment. Disease became his fake ID. and his permanent record in the school system. A kiss of science. What the Hell-raising Mercury Astronauts called rocket pox. The Night Saw. The rotting of the sun. This clap is like a chain letter, envelope full of cooties, no givebacks. The clap was more than a ghost or shadow, baby. A shadow's baby, a lumber yard fire. Infection is like writing your name on a dollar bill.

An Indian doctor in a turban at the university had just published a paper on Trumpeting Elephantisis Penis, so I stole a copy from his briefcase as he lunched near the campus. No female mahout would climb up to the little tower upon this beast. Tippy’s cock grew a piggy snout, from which emanated porcine grunts of hot breath, fierce bristles and fearsome tusks. Mother's Little Tusker. Balls bright, like mandarin oranges, sexual gherkins. Driving the dismal wedge. Cataches. Snapping turtle puds. The inner spider. Wooden sperm sprouting, mahogany and white-people's pine. Liver spots on his genitals, I mean it's natural for a man about twenty to get those, right? His groove warts.

A lampshade was put upon it, or he could disguise it as the long sleeve of a pink shirt in a fringed suede jacket. Pustules in a mortar

and pestle. His wormy talents. His blood in whisperclots. Blood on the toothpaste tube. Bloodfists welling up. A blues philosopher sang that he was just climbing a ladder that turns out to be a saw. The way a bear climbs a tree. Every night I have the strangest spazz attack. Patted and popped his bloodskin navel.

It's not breakfast

till somebody eats it. The dentist's toothache. Robot feces.

Goddammitvomit. Death maps. Number dicks. Toxic leotards.

Spraying like a Bedouin bidet. A red scary. Disease as an adventure. It grew thorns like a headless rose, then the head burst like petals, his stamen and pistils covered in pustules like groovy garden aphids. Kiss-and-tell organisms. What are you doing back there near the fence? It all swelled up like a mosquito pumpkin.

You know me already as a man of blood, a man of my words.

But Tippy, he was hurting. Veins like a Roman roadmap, strained ends crumbling, crushed aqueducts, olive vineyards of drughardened veins. About his urine sample, a woods-weary doctor muttered “Red to yellow, kill a fellow, red to black, venom lack.”

He was growing cancer in the overgrown garden called his soul.

Turning over chromosome stones. Stoked abrasions. The part of the chicken called the Pope's Nose. Devil's flu, the Devil's catheter, the Devil's catchword and catchphrases. A suckin' salmonella, those little childhood turtles grinning in his cum. The scent of a mummy or where the mummy's been, aroma that cries "Don't go in there" for that reason.

Clattering penises left dust in the Firehouse. Greenstick fractures from running on broken legs, aeroplaning and telescoping on LSD. Imagine that Tippy had fallen out of an airplane and landed

on his ankles, his feet's wrists broken, or landed smack on his boner penis. Glassblown pipette-stem rammed in and broken off inside his pud. Like sticking it into a hive full of bees. No patent-hybrid copyright sign like a winged ear of corn, which is what some farm girls called it, upright in the fields to represent his unique nonspecific syphilitic gonorrhea or gonnorrheaic syphillis. In the shower skin felt like lizard leather, it was sharkskin, a snakeskin boot.

Venereal? That means having something to do with venison and its pursuit, like hunting by chasing does thru the woods, tackling and raping the soft chamois pony. Venus' hepatitis. He was the man in the airport with a ticking dick. A poisoned florist. Disease like rust or corrosion on a squeaky swingset of a cunt, which should only be squeaky-clean on a girl that age. Coral, she played dice with his spotted gonads. He was burning a dirty candle of disease. Like a poisoned whistle. A maltreatment of energy. Crotch felt like he'd been eating crackers in bed. Grunions in his groin, opinions in his groin he didn't like. Syphilitic ulcerating pizzas, Chef Ghou-lar-di lasagna sores. Jelly arthritis. Bacilli that cause confusion. A victory garden of vivid spermiferns. Diseases of the Women's Club. Private Parts Patients of the Crying Colony. Sisyphus pushing his balls uphill. Pain follows the pediatrician. Sputum bulletins issued. No rib respect in this "French Infancy". He got the French Front Information.

Voluntary syphillis. LSD infections. Wicked parasites, eating at his wallet from the inside out. Germs for a judge.

It puckers the blood to think about it.

There was some kind of nasty Typesetters' Syphillis going around, so Tippy had warned me not to bring a book into the waiting

room with me. "Words in a song shrivel when you write them down", he had always warned us. What’s more, my guitar playing was mush, distracted since Tippy's decline. So I took his advice when I visited, kept my gloves on, silk scarf pushed up in front of my mouth.

The Medical Archeologist on staff called it Gondwanaland Gonorrhea, a virulent strain from back when there was too much sex because everyone and everything evolutionary was on the same continent. "The incontinent continent?" snapped Tippy, immediately gagging and choking on the overpowering smell of rancid gonorrhea.

There were stern and tetchy women in that hospital incarcerated in the God’s Hospital since the 1910s for venereal crimes, the government demanding its petulant perpetual right to continually inspect them. Some of the doctors were literally the grandsons of physicians who had played doctor with the ins and outs of those bodies when they were all backyard children.

Exploratory over-the-counter open-heart surgery was performed on Tippy one afternoon, as a teaching tool. But they forgot to give him an antibiotic, so his infectious syphiloherpes gonorrhea germs leaked into the open wound and valves—no, he wasn't hung upside down, Mussolini ass over elbow—during the lackadaisical operation. And this wasn't good. Tippy has skateboarded along the edge of the abyss, of a subdivision called Syphillis Hills. Primal dance, debauch, Rock n' Roll hooliganism, the beautiful kamikaze autumn of his young life. Opulence and miscreants. The way old movies employed the cliché of lovebirds dead in their cage to foreshadow the eventual separation of the hero and heroine?

Disease as the ombudsman of the fathers of all those girls. The

disease was his parents' way of punishing him for being such a bad boy and Bad Guy. For not taking out the garbage, I guess they put that garbage in his dick. Maybe it was Bluesy Tuskeegee Institute syphillis, carried in sultry French collaboratrixes which the airmen dropped into Wehrmacht barracks afterwards. Meanwhile, “Gonorrhea of the Heart” was a Top 40 hit on the radio in those days, wafting over patients’ transistor radios. Syrupy, it sounded nothing like Chomps’ Rock.

Look! An angel that looks like George Washington. A gossamer Boomer. Angels, anangels, antiangels. A vending machine that says "Insert Angels", but all we get are cigarettes.

Conversion of the lab technician. Mine eyes have seen what's gory 'bout the coming of the Lord.

The hospital was a St. Patrick’s Purgatory. Or Celtic Hell, as Dink was forcefully discouraged from drinking here. I sat at Tippy's bedside, reading excerpts from bestselling novels like Catheters of War and The Spy Who Came in From the UFO. I don’t know what I was waiting for.

One evening when I visited Tippy in the hospital he was gazing out the window at the beautiful, bone-white full Moon. "All my old girlfriends who died are up there. All the older women who were my baby sitters, schoolteachers in whom I later indulged. Even your Mom." I ignored that. Mom was still hellishly alive and well.

"Oh yeah, you can have them all at once in Heaven, like a big slowmotion waterbed. Everyone's—even yours—dick is Jesus' dick, a mighty scepter. Big and hard as the rugged old oaken Cross, wood

that's straight and cedars-of-Lebanon fragrant."

Cross? Jesus? Wait a minute, I thought you were Jewish.

Isn’t everyone’s snippy-snappy dick Jewish nowadays?

Tippy smiled wanly. "Ha ha, Ostrogoth is one of those old Vikingbarbarian names, like Midwesterberg, Lumberjackson, Paulbunyansky or Thorodin."

Geez, I thought the latter was only the name of a sexual stimulant, not the doctor who developed it. My hagiographic concordance to Old Testament cognates in Tippy's lyrics has been derailed, ruined.

I'll have to find another project.

So I guess it's good Coral didn't have a baby, or we'd have to see this slice, slice, slice done to him too. I don't know if I've ever gotten over mine (for secular, not Rabbinical purposes, thank you).

Or maybe I have, dealt with the trauma now that Coral had to show me how to touch myself. Lubricant! Why didn't I think of that?

Lubricant rhymes with Fyrikant, which is an anagram for Ratfinky; we were reminded of this by a bookish LSD dealer in front of the campus Library on campus, good at wordplay like that.

Groan. That is so Aleppo.

Nevertheless…

Sunspots on his shining star. Gonads like magic mushrooms grown in test tubes were powdered and injected. No luck.

That too much fucking had caused an inability to fuck was too simple a theory for these learned medical savants; these were university-trained medical practitioners, men of science, not smalltown pill dispensers, so needed to dig further, get to the root of his

wintry dead root. With a certain pomposity and dismissive disdain towards me, they shut the door. Well, fuck this.

I was so angry seeing Tippy in this sad state, I felt ready to explode, to lose it, lose my aviator-specs cool. Confused, I left Tippy’s room, looked down one pathetic corridor. The pathetic patients sprawled on each side, beneath loud television sets in their smelly, suppurating rooms. Spavined Levantines. Lockjaw Jews.

As I walked down the the hospital hallway in my SS Cavalry boots, medals and spurs jingling, I heard a familiar voice bark "Who's the schmuck in the furshlugginer Nazi drag show?"

Why does that complainer’s whine sound like television?

Chart on the door: L. Fishbrain, M, 77.

Mein Gott im Himmel! Donnerwetter! and every two-ton Teutonic Aleppo expletive, It's Louie Louie Chomp! The name on the door put two and two together. I had heard he was a kosher vegetable by now. In any case, I recognized him immediately, even after the damage the stroke did to his face and posture.

Maybe somewhere I’d read the aged and dying Louie Fishbrain—Louie Louie the Chomp (born Louis Fiddlefeigel, 1893)— was lingering in the Hollywood Olde Comedians of the Past Home for his secrets of longevity and fame. Or in the Hollywood Has-Beens Home, but here he was, in Sequoias of Israel hospital. The Chomps Trio doubled their names, or at least Louie's, so they'd evoke sound effects, not notably Jewish. Louie had been briefly married to the even-Borschtier Catskillful comedienne Tush Tuchkis, who died there last Summer.

In fact, after the comedy troupe—aged, pathetic and broken-

down by that point—broke up, Louie Louie had taken a sympathy job on local TV doing commercials for appliance store, window installers (they even had him in a toupee!) commercials. The Beaumarchais Construction Company had him sit stonefaced behind a desk with a sign reading "Countertop Czar", wearing a funny, overly-ornate comic opera version of a Balkan military commander's uniform, as he had in “Axis Make Passes”, the Trio dressed up as European dictators chasing secretaries around a big desk and globe. Louie played Santa Claus in the Pudsons’ department store's annual Thanksgiving Day parade until the stress was too great, fearing a Black Revolutionary X-men's or People's Puma sniper would shoot him.

His hospitalization was financed by the dribbling pittance of residuals he got from those ads, like his 1940s comedies, perpetually shown, by station and network. And now the remaining Chomp, dim and needy, was deposited here, in this hospital, by the local TV station to eke out his final days wheezing.

He was undoubtedly lonely. Only that morning I had told Tippy I had always been impressed by the Chomps as brotherly love in the face of our typical numbskull adversity. "Brotherly love with the face of a human skull" Tippy had muttered back, through cracked, gummed-up and uncontrollable lips, thinking I was talking about our band and not the venerable aged comedy Jews. Tippy motioned me close and hoarsely whispered “They're not all brothers you know” meaning the non-familial Louie Louie was odd man out, while Mikey and Cutey and even Mensch were brothers, real names Michah, Kutl and Solomon Hungariwitz or something. That did it. Another illusion shattered. As part of the dual-star in the lonely cosmos that is me n'

Thump, I had to do something about the usurper.

That rheumy and swollen red-nosed old codpuncher Fishbrain looked almoust like Venous Shamus, longtime Motorsburgh cop (and former guard at the movie studio lot) who sometimes appeared to talk Good Olden Days on Nixonson’s show. Once he was assigned to stand outside to guard the ward’s celebrity, he nodded at me with sleepy, avuncular attentiveness.

Dink snatched one can of tomato juice off the aged comedian's tray, poured it into a bottle of cheap vodka he carried with him, toasted the Blessed Virgin over the bed, and proclaimed his invention a Louie Louie Bloody Mary. Sounds credible, except I was the only one who had entered Louie's room that day.

Summoning from his foggy endless forehead a line he probably used decades ago about ladies'-man rival comedians, Louie Louie slobbered "Ha ha, your Tippy has rigor mortis everywhere except where he needs if! For his shtick!", and at that moment I just lost it.

Seeing Louie dressed up as Santa the Pudsons' Thanksgiving Parade always made me angry, suffer years of nightmares of Santa's home invasion and floating hullaballoonmonsters, as I tryptophanslept off all that turkey, stuffing and all the trimmings, television crowds. As bad as the dairy’s milkfaced clown, or the puppet claws of the so-called dogs conversing off-camera with the local pieface.

The Chomps Trio were ancestor figures I too had worshipped, and that was wrong I guess. Why should I expect Louie the Chomp to be any more than a smelly old man who needed bathing, whose urine bag needed emptying? His Bozado von Clown corona of hair all gone, smile mangled by strokes, I almost didn't recognize him.

Louie borrows ten dollars from me "for cigarettes, sport". I raged with anger, wanted to slap this crass old croneman or at least dump the contents of his incontinence bag sitting under the wheelchair over his grinning, shining head.

"Yeahhh, we gambled, we whored, guess we stunk at everything but laffs... " Most difficult of all was to learn that venereal disease was the gambling debt of sexuality that killed longhaired brother Mensch of the Chomps, who I always thought was funny in a strange, non-Cutey way. When Louie nodded awake, he muttered spitfully into my ear "Of course we all had disease—why do you think there were all those scenes in different episodes of us snoring together in the same bed? There would have been riots had we been paired with the leading actresses of the day, so me n' Cutey n' Mikey, we were isolated and quarantined together. Chastity was never a watchword spoken on the set. We'd swap wives, have all the starlets like you wouldn't believe, the First Lady Marilyn Monroe, until she went on to be President..." The Chomps Trio all dreamed of fucking their mother. "Hell, a condom's just a cuirass to pleasure and a cobweb to infection" Louie gurgled, recounting the fight he had with the Director to title an episode with this motto. I remember Horace Mars had an old erotic print in his study of Dr. Henri Becquerel looking under pretty nurses' skirts at vulvas, with that saying under it.

"After my stroke I even wrote songs that were practically Rock n' Roll, you kids could perform them, uh, here, where's my ukelele? Nurses keep movin' it..."

In that hospital, for the Abortion wing was right next to the senility sanitarium I suddenly saw old Louie Chomps ukelele as my

guitar as if he were me and I grew so bald. His speech thick and slurred after his mental mangling, I had one novelty album somewhere in my collection where Louie actually had taken up electric guitar, or a studio musician claiming to be him. Next he would ask me for help chording, etc. All of a sudden it reminded me of Coral's abortion and if Tippy hadn't watched these faithless, restraintless anarcho bums every morning before and every afternoon after school maybe he wouldn't have been such a bad influence on Coral and she'd have settled down and I'd have a normal family by now.

I don't know what exactly made me lose my famous self-control and set Louie Louie Fishbrain’s hair afire but it crackles when I drop my corky dark filtered Egyptian Rosicrucian cigarette on his pale skull and he shrieks and thrashes in his wheelchair. Shall I now record a double album Wheelchairs of Fire, with one side consisting of a drum solo consisting of this old toad fitfully beating out the flames? Did I manage to set up my reel-to-reel and record this historic track, the Wollensak of Rome?

On the nightstand by the bed I glimpsed the musical instrument he sawed upon (sometimes literallly) in so many of the Chomps Trio shorts, and paused for a monumental moment as I considered having the violin reworked into a fine Stradivaricaster guitar, but didn’t; its notes might always bear Yiddish overtones and I certainly didn’t want that. But ike a pop radio bonbon, This is the Fawning of the Rage Stradivarius, I sang as I smashed Louie Louie’s expensive fiddle over the cracked egg of his bald head.

Exhilarating, like peeing through somebody else’s dick.

My dad was supposedly long dead, so from whom did I learn all my rage? Like Mikey in the Chomps, always my behavioral model, I began bashing Louie Louie on the head with my luger, harder and harder. I would've stopped—as Mikey always does—had I heard a plumbing noise. But I didn't, just a sort of soft, wet crunch as his baldness sagged. A bad tomato or red bell pepper caved in. Louie's Skull cracked like a coconut and was similarly shredded, which people thought was his shock-corona of hair.

Seized with rage and worry, I strangle Louie with a pillow, suffocating him in his wheelchair, his eyes reddening, fighting me off as if I were grouchy Mikey in a gorilla suit. To suffocate one old Jewish comedian is to exterminate six million? I could see a liberal high school teacher asking me that, point blank, in a class last Fall.

Now will I find a place in the New Joke Book Report Papers’ pages? Cry of the provincials: Destroy All intellectuals!

Under the pillow I thought I heard him gurlgle Wait! I'm your father! Hah, nice try old codger. Face your doom, your maker and reward. Louie Louie, maybe you fathered the TV most host Nixonson too! And Coral! And Horace Mars! Ha ha ha! Upon reflection, maybe I just always wanted to hear some elder gurgle that. Like destroying the father. Should've crushed all authority figures’ noggins like a yard mushroom or sporepowder-spurting puffball. But I didn't, I just pushed the pillow down over the flailing frail fun-fink. Gasp, choke, chortle.

His last words gurgled out, "Remember, don't stop fucking".

Don't get personal. That's what I hate. Old people, always to the point, are no fun.

Then a final aspirin of aspiration, asphyxiation, expiration. It made sense that the hospital was Brutalist architecture too. OK, maybe it wasn't, but I'd read the term in a newsmagazine in the lobby.

Hey, like a newborn baby, it just happens every day.

Yes, I did that. Am I proud of it? Good question.

OK, my homicidal action wasn’t as heroic as that drunken, debauched party just before the end of the War when local prostitute, twice-vetted and carefully researched, slit the throats of all the impending-defeat-besodden Wehrmact officers and Fascist officials when atop them (or wait, was that Aimée Fink in matted hairy Mata Hari disquise?). Or was that an afternoon movie “Project Holofernes”? Louie Louie Chomp was the afternoon movie host, and frequent guest on Nixonson Movie Time, or talk shows, so therefore had to be destroyed cinematically? But for some damn psychological reason, it felt good.

And somehow they didn’t think Tippy was Jewish when admitted to hospital. So in anguish, note how he (Tippy did it) kills stroke-broken and babbling Louie Chomp. The Germans have some kind of word for it that literally means Hell-Comedian-Murder. And I'll bet Louie even knew what it was, as it was probably much like the shtetl Yiddish of his grandpa. Louie Louie, disgraced impotent father figure, henpecked by shrewish male-Mom Mikey Chomp. After all, in most societies, you have to kill the father to win the bride, no? I couldn't exactly harm ol' Horace, so this was the better or best, bestest or best-esque, thing. Coral will be impressed, will thoroughly like me.

I thought of something I read in CumOn!, that Louie was the

father of the Fishbrain brothers, now guitar and bass in Aldebbie's band. Poetic justice, I’d say. They’ll be distracted from the fop’s projects, having to change plans, travel to attend the funeral.

Attribute his death to old age, despite my fingerprints on his neck.

After murdering Louie Louie, this isn't so difficult, maybe like the vengeful Old Tenement Yaweh, mebbe I should massacre one more innocent, that Egyptobaby Tippy too. Put him out of his misery. Or I could plant a bomb under the stage beneath Tippy, and am confident it will be blamed on Peoples' Puma Party radicals. They'll probably be caught fleeing up north to some university liberal family's fishing cabin. Haw! Score!

That was enough. The Louie thing will cause a ruckus once it’s discovered, and hospitals are the shits anyway. I'm busting my friend Tippy out of here in a hurry.

When I returned from Louie's lair, nurse-nuns and nurselings tittered the musical question Who'd Pay if Tippy died in the hospital.

Who’d pay funereal incinerator expenses? Christ's Last Fiduciary Responsibility. I suppose we could send Tippy to an Old Parasites' Home. Instead, out of the goodness of our hearts, we wheeled him out of the hospital on a gurney with a sheet over his face like a stiff, (learned that from the Chomps Trio! Thanks, you too Louie Louie) to prepare for what would prove to be our last gig.

I adjusted my sunglasses. Went back into the hall, resumed pushing Tippy in the wheelchair out to the elevator and out the door. I put a fake beard on him and bottlenosed glasses like in another Chomps Trio episode and rolled him out on a desk chair. My white slacks and shite-white leather shoes made me kind of look like an

orderly or intern, my insouciance and nonchalant swagger kind of like a doctor. I could get used to this.

I really like to think killing the old Hebraic comedian will impress Coral. Or perhaps more importantly, my mother. Or would've impressed my stern father, had I known him, I conjecture. Maybe that old Jewish comedian is my father, none of this legend of the Celtic President stuff to throw me off. One more fathead father eradicated, leaving more son-government to rule the world.

Look at me, I’m a strangler in paradise.

A couple Filipina nurses I bribed with backstage passes for each aided me by injecting poison into his intravenous veins. One of the nurses may have been named Carmen Monoxide, or Concepcion Moon Moxie. Those same nurses liked it so much they later arranged for the poisoning of a dozen veterans. But that's OK, for Tippy and me were just leaving.

The Mayonnaise Clinic medicos decided they'd done all they could for the little ingrate, so Tippy was discharged from the hospital and sent the cleaning bill. Tippy sees his physician pedalling away on his bicycle. This old football team doctor didn't even have to pretend that he saw Tippy, whose daughter probably has her room covered with posters of the Rock Star, or at least of Aldebbie. Her arm may be even covered with tattoos of me. O me, O mind. Crime, crime, crime. For crime out loud. For curing it out loud!

There's even a hint of effeminacy in Louie's screen persona, so maybe in offing him I'm really killing Aldebbie, that pecan of precosity and preciousness. Killing not the befuddled father, but the amscray wabbit in the opera. Not the father but the temptress Fortuna's

demon brother. Interesting, hmm...

But no time to think about that, for we've got to get Tippy home.

Vrroom!

What was it, a week now? A fortnight? A month? A season?

Thump wanted to get him, and the rest of us night visitors, the hell out of the infectious, inhospitable hospital. He had already grown fistulae on his fists, clenched impatiently and angrily. He didn’t think they were doing Tippy any good, and we were wasting time hanging around there. It made him recall our Veterans’ Hospital gig where the flammable Xmas decorations caused an immense tragedy, tinsel garlands arranged in the shape of an electrocardiogram that flared up in a heartbeat. Maybe we could put our cigarets out on it, I dunno.

Or were aimlessly fooling with our lighters, flicking them. Whatever, the conflagration was probably not our fault. But those old guys will all get their posthumous Purple Hearts or something, won't they?

Where World War One finally ended in old, smalltownly Aleppo. Let's make drugs out of Veterans' Day poppies.

Oh, your grandfather and father are veterans too? Nice.

Patriotic, yes. I dunno about the troops in Vietnam though.

Doctors were deteriorating. Doctors were despairing. Nurses, weeping in the hall or running from the building, rushing headlong, in their stocking feet, into moving commuter traffic. An east Indian one prematurely threw herself upon a pyre in the furnace room. Others resignedly checked into hostels for wayward girls until their "confinement" passed, by secret birth or natural miscarriage.

Lying in the hospital Tippy resolved, upon his cure and release,

to become a trapper in northern Michigan, or become a frazzled World War One veteran (those we saw spending their last days in hospital) like the one in the children’s stories, fishing to find solace.

Like the veteran, he was shell-shocked by all those girls, perhaps the drugs, rock beat and amplification too. Dumbfounded dreams of the dying. More likely, I'll be the one who’s the up-north huntsman, the post-rock sportsman. Or a university instructor somewhere, the common dream of the discouraged.

In his delerium, Tippy spoke of a planned future performance called "Feast of the Circumcision," a ploy to get young groupies to fellato-fluff him onstage for his now expected grand finale.

Yeah, yeah Tippy, I'll wear Goering's Field Marshal's uniform for it, extra extra large, I swear. How thoroughly lame though.

Tippy had sung in Rock's great cathedrals, now he's whimpering to catheters. Fuck this “cured” shit, I’m not waiting around. I'm going to play rock n' roll. Did Tippy say that, or did I? Doesn’t matter, we’re agreed.

The next day, they hadn’t changed him. Still wearing yesterday’s hospital suckcloth. Looking up from his sickbed, as if awakening from a dream, Tippy sat up with a fierce determination and resolve.

My friends, get me out of here. We have a concert to play.

C’mon you guys, help me get him ready for tonight.

Wish we had a girl like you there to help us.

I had hoped the Chomps would be asked to play for Horace Mars' City Council campaign, and Coral had made a poster in Art

class announcing us, put it up in the halls of the school. When Daffie saw it, got excited, thought it was the celebrity Chomps Trio, still doing State Fair appearances, car wash openings in their dotage, actually just Mikey and two other roly poly Borschtbeltless-slacks comediansters with same haircuts as dead Cutey, ailing Louie Louie.

She baked a creampuff’d cake with bacon-guava frosting for Horace in her delight.

No, Daffie, not them. Just us.

That night we slunk back into Aleppo, one year older. It was late and we had keyholes for eyes. Maybe I remain in the pink of being newly sexualized, courtesy Coral, but am I the only one to attribute Tippy's fall to disease? Me and my brother visited the fickle Coral. Yellowing two-year-old magazine ads for the first album were just barely still taped to the wall of Coral's room, showing a glossy magazine picture of the band's crotches illustrating an article about the goings-on within, captioned THE FUTURE OF ROCK IS GATHERED HERE, as if something were there yet to be revealed.

It's the bottle that holds the ink. Climbing onto her bed I suggested in a fatherly way she study some antedelluvian tracts I brought over with me. I can't tell about your baby, Coral, but let me tell you about the precise differences between idiots (mental age under two years), imbeciles (mental age two to seven years), morons (mentally seven to twelve) and the subnormal variety below average but still custodial cases, as my brother and I sat upon her Elvis bed and smoked a joint. I warned Coral how wrong semen had killed a family of four or five in Satanic malfunction and organic dislocation. Gossipping tall tales implying what Tippy did would paralyze the comprehension of

even a morals policeman, but I slyly added that mischief and miseducation were his true crimes. One of our constitutional inferiors. A breast vampire, using somebody else's blood. Clue you in Coral as to how hysterics and feeble-minded peacocks denied the secrets of manhood were polluting the channel of descent, resulting in amorphous babies and destroyed minds or was it destroyed babies with amorphous minds?

Look, at my mother's house I saw a TV special on this curious ailment. It first ocurred under bad astrology, and the first syphilitic in Europe in 1484 was Durer's friend and model for "Melancholy turning Men into Monsters". Columbus inferred that Pinkey Pinzo the Pilot— perhaps the prototype for Slipeye the Sailor—jumped bail with it and died in a fit of anger. SYPHILUS SIVE MORBUS HUMANUS was written across a lot of drumsets and later twinkling straightjackets.

The motto on the coat of arms LICOR Y VIOLENCIA. The Menace of Saint Denis, the patron saint of syphilitics. Ancient doctors called their Chomps Trio by the names of Phrenitis, Mania and Melancholia.

Syphillisms were thought to come from a New World forest nymph.

Women urinating in bad woods, cooks, waiters, barbers and manicurists, chiropodists—Chi Ro, or Christ Pods—masseurs and Turkish Bath rubbing masturbators. It has been passed upon a pipe, a cigar, knives forks spoons, sponges, razors, tethers and rings, bandages pencils and speaking-trumpets, been spread by lavatory seats, cricket balls, civet and camel bites. How it's said camels carry syphillis in their saliva, spit at opponents, drivers who overload them.

How Prester Johns got it from being fucked by ancient Egyptians’ cats. The hidden disease, the udder disease, a result of distant

earthquakes. Infection from babe to wetnurse, from wetnurse to wetnurse, then wetnurse to father in an immoral household. Father to son, teacher to pupil, so-called "uncle" to music teacher. Midwives infected upon the little finger. He stuck his fingers in a poison girl on a beach and now he was stuck with that worm-eaten thing, that piece of driftwood full of seagull dropping. The case of the small Scandanavian auto infected with syphilis. Was it from the undue sitting on a cold stone, putrefaction and fermentation of the seed, multiple semen on a public woman? A leper, white cloth on lips, crying "unclean!" like a dead man is supposed to. Harm-colored lesions on French sexual organs, proper kinds of food and universal coitus from lascivious hirelings. Some fishermen get it from coelecanths. Black hair becomes white round the yaws of exotics and African slaves. Maybe Tippy got it from a dope-pipe. It has you in a clinician's purgatory, theo-erotic with autoshame and incoherence. You get chaud-pisse, anticlimactic buboes, framboesiformis like a raspberry and wasting phthisis. Skin screams.

Scott and Janis Joplin planned to write a syphilitic blues opera "Treponemoma" but died first. A Vincent VanGoghburg-voiced narrator cooed "It was clear they hoped their rivals' amours would founder in infection".

Look, Coral, I want you to listen to this because I looked it all up in the University medical library, all the classic volumes on ego-form syphillis on the library shelf. I followed the progression of Tippy's case closely and drew up my own charts predicting its inevitable conclusion.

I would've sent them to the Syphillis Museum in Liverpool, to display among its "endless display" of the withered organs and diseased tissues yanked off of shriveled corpses of men and women who flirted with sin to the grisliest of ends, if it hadn't been scoured out to become the Cavern Club, septic birthplace of the Beatles. A small, dried-up object, Napolean's penis, was boxed and auctioned off for $40,000 just a little while ago. Winner in the Show category of a Dog Show featuring syphillitic species of dogs, white shivering shorthaired, nervous and blind and nearly crazy.

If you'd chased out all the other students in school and locked all the teachers in one night, one of them might start us lecturing on the horrors of venery, in oral tales of promiscuity and decalcomania and the wrong-chooser who threw it all away for a piece of ass. Coral thought that was the silliest idea she ever heard. My brother was starting to get bored. So how many U. S. presidents were syphilitics?

Can you name them all? The Phantom President did the Black Tango. Chanchre chameleons. Third degree burns from a sixty watt bulb. A white buffalo sick with syphillis. Young men setting sail, looking for work and sexually-transmitted diseases. A house built on gonorrhea cannot stand. I presume there are very few mortals in Aleppo who are not in danger of waking some morning and finding themselves in syphilitic vacation homes Up North. Nonspecific Arethaitis around Motorsburgh. Blues Syphillis. Sometimes venereal disease was just nostalgia, a great tic or an embarassingly wide necktie. It must've been something like disease that killed off all the hippies, right?

Sort of glazed and Goebbels-eyed I started to break my second wind and speak very quietly to Coral, lying there on her back like a microphone. Listen, Dangersheets, I began very softly, we often meet syphillitic individuals who talk through their nose because their solf palate has been destroyed by the eating fire. Invalid wives who moan "I haven't been well since my marriage". Now, general paresis loves a shining mark, it so often reduces the individual of brilliant mind to a state of helpless, hopeless dementia. As secret and treacherous and heartless as the submarine. Coral didn't seem to quite understand so I barked that "thinking below the belt" is a cesspool and not a reservoir and no immoral girl or person is "safe" and with that gave her a knowing little wink. In regards to Tippy and Aldebbie--and here her interest sparked back up, for she had records by both--medical science is mobilized against them. Women who lived like widows in the wild war were no more than ventilators of their Rock n' Roll in village after village. In an emergency, departing troops often stuff cutoff female breasts in their knapsacks. We need gendarmes, coeds and nurses of the Sanity Corps to help us fight the stink, cut off the words to the misspoken song of life. As surely as sabrecut abortions. War is a steel bath, and orgasm a great slaughter of the scope of Karlsruhe or Skagerak. On the tinnitus radio the Suprematists sang how V.D., much like Rock itself, was "an itch and I can't scratch it", though those young housing project women often had to get themselves a fingerhold in their recording careers.

Hell, the nature of unchallenging easy victories, social security, comfortable sophistry that passeth for intellectualizing, mixed drinks

and snackey hors d'oeuvres, anticipation of promotion, sedentary cynicism at others' expense, dissatisfaction and backstabbing, worry about and overattention to fashion and protocol, competitive gluttony, feast-or-famine celibacy contribute to the syndrome, this Galaxy of Syndromeda! The decay wish, our self-congratulatory fascination with mummies, farm kids' weekly Dances of Death at the Grange Hall, weekend drive-ins full of deliciously macabre, brackish wasted bodies, the dark mercury faces. The burnout as something divine. A new social life in the bosom of your anachronisms. I'm waving my arms around.

Tippy just had to die. I didn't mean it.

Whew, this dope. Harsh hashish. I bet she's gonna be shaking and ready to fight and kill the Tippy she loved as I was ready to come and squeal my vast and secret pipe dream plan for the disinfection of cities from the air over blaring sirens of Rock n' Roll music. Reaching the repugnant moment in her gift, at the moment of artthrob her pussy was 1,000,000 degrees Farenheit and weighed as much as the Brookln Bridge on me. I'm pretty sure she's going to take off her clothes and let me do it like we did that time before. Check intently her recently silvered vagina for smoke damage, her latent fires kindled by alcohol and overindulgence. It'd be truly the fuck of evil, the fuck of love. Germs are ornaments upon our friendship. I pulled my brother off of her. Stop it. She looked at me like I was getting boring, not scary, so I promptly left.

Rats. A rat’s gesamtkunstwerke. Not sure I fully understand.

This was supposed to be fun. Allegedly.

Now, this is where it gets dicey.

Guys started listening to

bands who, though they had groupies just like anyone else, didn’t really try to appeal to women. The husky voice of the Grand Wheeze himself introduced the Icy Stomachs, the Pain-in-the-Veins, the No Nose Doctors, the Yaws, the Gorged-with-Blood Band, the Blind Kids, the Psychotropics, the Pox, the Free Clinics, Messman the Human Compost Heap and the Is There a Doctor in the House? You had degenerate dwarves with scrotum-length hair and foot-and-a-halfhigh platform shoes the Decadence Monsters of Filmland and Soil All Mattresses. "They always have to wash their clothes, that's why they like fashion so," effused Threadbear. Some bands were just yellow skeletons up there, their speaker columns and amps the coffins they should be sealed in. Lost memories like the Sick Men of Europe, the Half-Lives, the Barium Treatments. The distant Disinfectants. Softcolored men the Pestilents, the Soft Palates, and the screaming Japanese reggae band Itai. After completing psych tech training, the Demerol Cameras, the Percodans. A hydrant-and-hose parade of the Dear Lues, Lord Bone Rabbit, the Nervous System Midwives, the Contaminated Utensils, the Spirochetes and the torturous Hot Syringe. Whew! The Bigheads, the Hairheads, the Cuntheads, the Skullfuckers, the Droning Pallettes, the Offals, the Used Bandages, the Forceps. "Scorn for the World" by the Goddamnits, the Guilts, the Cock Roaches, the Golden Psychopaths, the Coprophagi. A band or concept album named Acedia, Malady of Monks.

The Spermicides, later known as the Spermicyanides.

Sebastian Wound and the Swords accurately changed their names to

become the Sores. The Phlegmatics, the Peculiarities, the Exhumed.

The Impertinents faced the music and became the Imperfects. The Lesser Men always said their name fast for they wanted you to think it was Laser Men. The swampoid "Bayou Degradable" by the Flies in the Ointment. Nothing healthy about the Black Vitamins' "Negro Growth a-Go-Go". "Serums and Membranes" by the I Can't Read the Label. The Biohazards' "When Dating Didn't Have to Mean Sex". the Blood Donors' "Blood Donuts". The Peristaltics, the Unwise, the Underdead, the Reproductive Saw. Groupies clustered around the mouths of the These Are Just Cold Sores. The Incurable Displays, the Cesspools.

"Hosanna parties" were held to introduce the Stillborns, the French Ungratefuls, the Devil's Own Medicine, the Ghastly Jokes, the Aneurisms, the Ulcers and the Measlettes to the record-buying public.

"Bummer Buffet" by the Idiosyncracies (idiot-sin-crazy) sounded to me a whole lot like the No Mores who were originally the Sin No Mores. Denounced from the pulpit were the Suicide Sinnerz, the Transgressions, the Imprecations and the New Heart Angels. The Platelets, the Caterwauls, the Death Rattles. Gluebabies like the New Blue Babies, a foetal band of fellows. The Shuttlecocks. The Diuretics. The amazing longevity and popularity of the band the Genital Dead. The Morning Sicknesses, the Zapruder Phlegms, the Doldrums. The Bifurcations, the Chess Pains (on Dead Man's Chest Records), the Coagulators. the Saltpeters, the Good Stopping Points.

The Unreplenished. Somnambulant, middle-sized Ceasar and the Ceasarian sessionmen the Sectionmen. The Ailments. The Dubious Antacids. Dr. Ivan Nourishment and the Cures for the Common

Colds, the Anesthesiologists. The Spots Before Your Eyes. A band the Soap and Warm Water. The Underaged, the Mindlessnesses, the Sarcophagi, or Fergus and the Sarcophuguses. The Scarejimcrows, the Imprecisions, the Impertinents, Incompetents and, wetly, the Incontinents' "Message to the Continent's Incontinent", who started the fad for rubber pants. The Stretchparts, the Wretchpants or later Retchpants. The Euthanasian lotus-tones of the Euthenthusiasticks. The Paranormaltones and the Unfit Husbands.

The Discomfitures, using big ampules for amplifiers. The Punctured Wrists and the Wheelchair Wheelies, respirators wheezing and glucose solution catheter tubes coming out of their amplifiers. All those IV bottles onstage and tubes in wrists and noses may have accounted for the success of the Hemorrhages, the Diptherians' "Where to Put the 'H", the Diabeatees (those diseased Beatles of the Dia-Beat), the Fleshstockings, the Old Football Injuries, and the morbid Yet to Die. The broken Ankles made whimpering apologetic noises on their ankh-shaped Anklyoses double album, but meanwhile we were listening to the Mastectomies, the Boneheads, the Borndeads, and the Bloodmobile Guillotines. Premedical bands like Tetanus and the Tongue Depressors, the Tourniquets, the Kwashiorkors, the Lockjaws with their mumbled bawdy songs like "Infected Whorehouse". Badly mauled artists like the Dysfunctions, Dirty Susan and the Mated Moral Defects, the Motorneurons, The Macabres (four monster-makeup’d brothers named Macabee), the Pelvis Heads, the Eyedroppers, and an evening of psychokitsch by the Prosthetic Devices. The Pungents, the Urgents, the Beach Sublimations, the Repressions who were dry ballad analysts flashing

their dry angst. The Kidneystones, the Nutcrackers, the Repercussions, the Desipisers, the Filthy Comments, the Night Creditors, the Hateful Miseries, the Impotents.

A band called the Hurts When I Pee. The Inner Workings, with metaphors for car engines and politics in the album's liner notes.

Young doctors like the Bone Spurs. Rock n' Rorschach from the Throbbing Temples. The Uh Uh Never No Mores. The thawed-out sound of the Unfinished Mummies. Henri and the You Old Heart Attacks. "Cup of Longevity" by the Drugtaking Virgins. The Feverblisters. The Exhumations. The Soiled Trespassers of Soul!

The Truther Consequences, the Narcolepts, the Nightbeaverbeats, Johnny Thistlecomplaint and the Bed Soars, the Fatal Flaws, the Kill Blue Eyes. The Cysts, the Winding Sheets, the Germicides and their reddened, gnawing guitars. Monsters-in-trances like the Remonstrances. The Growing Pains, featuring Keith Deadgirl.

Bands got sicker till all responsible members of the Rock press thought they'd break. Witness the Old Drug Addicts, the Peons and the Pee'd-ons, Bastinadoface and the Execrables, the Bootlicks, Lickspittles, Invasion of the Saucermen and Massacre of the Innocents. The sugar-swilling Arterisclerotics' hit "Mrs. Hamburger".

"Bulemics Adored Me" by the Bodewells. The Miscarriages and the Mismarriages, persuasive extreme sensualists open to suggestion.

The Current Afflictions. The Free Kittens, the Forcekittens. The Birth Traumatists. The Forcepsbirthkittens shaved off their hair so their pushed-in heads would look even clunkier.

The mood-elevator music system in the big record company building in Big Joke City was playing a strange band called the Saint

Josephus Mercy Hospitals, named after the sanitorium for cuckolds whose significant others haunted the abortion clinic across the street.

The name had nothing to do with getting kids into the habit of taking chewable orange aspirin.

Meanwhile, Rusty Sacrificez formed the Lymph Nodes. The Lumps in Her Breast were not reassuring, on any album cut. The Smokers' Coughs met the Surgeon Generals' smoldering wastebasket of sound, followed by the Foreign Lesions, the Blues Catheters, the Hysterectommies, the Eye Openers, the Endocrinologists and the Hypothalmusmen. The Hay Fevers' "Sufferers", the Rockin' Barfin' Lockjaws’ instrumental "Assbackwards", later covered by the Black Asterisks. "What I Cannot Tell My Mother is not Fit for Me to Know". The most ambitious rock opera was probably the Appendectomies' Appendectomiad, with a real operation performed onstage at each performance. The Acc-U-Men, with implications of acumen, accuracy, even accusation. The Lobotomy Trust, the Bones of the Foot. A band called the Fucking Spree, the Fuckin' Tracheotomies, the Kid Kidneys, the Bursting Lung Bubbles, the Pundits' "You're All Paranoid", the Tiny Scrotums, the Universal Taboo. The NeoEmergencies, playing out of the back of an ambulance, sirens singing. Artificially inseminated bands and their groupies the Technosperms, the Laetriles, the Cortisones, the DMSOs. Line dances with the Walking Sticks, the Quadripeds and Pseudopods (false feet) and a band of men with tails. The Poorhearts. The Do Drop Deads. The Herbicides, the Burning Victories, the Unalloyed Guilts, the unconvicted Unconvinced, the White Kanes' "Blind to the

Possibilities", a song based on the movie character "Condomfinger", even songs like "I Scratched It and the Infection Spread" by the Between Before and After. Bands that used a dripping faucet for rhythm, who used their own dripping V.D. as rhythm, heavily miked.

Sore stoppages of sound like the Enlarged Pores. The Prescriptions' fans were writing the band's "Rx" logo everywhere. There's always a story interspersed between the names.

More? OK. "Walking on the Dead" b/w "Ignore the Warnings" by the Leucotomes, interns who actually used that wicked wire as slide on guitar. Some of those guys kept their pricks on reels like the wire between army field telephones. The Vile Phantasms and the Hideous Wretches. The Succinct. The Sentimental Vesicles. The Biological Clocks, the Old Places. The Skin Grafts' political masterpiece "Honest Graft"; I had to look up why Threadbear termed it “George Washington Plunkett Rock”.

Rock was Rot. It was on TV and radio, all day long from now on, a telethon on every channel, on airport loudspeakers, bands windy enough to blow a small boat across the Potowatomi River with their musical farts. The Smells' "The Smell of Music" soundtrack.

The Bulemics, svelte girls with the hint of vomit upon their lips. Those avocado-suited Californians you saw were from the Lower Abdomen.

The Stomach Pumps, I always assumed that referred to some kind of shoe. Intestinal Fortitude, the greatest hits compilation by the Intestines. The Daily Bowelmovements. The unexpected "Shitcake" instrumental by the Shitake 'Shrooms. "The King of the Ploopfarts" was Johnny Boilingpoint. "Rock is not sick—it's just going to the

bathroom" said the record-company billboard that healthy kids chopped down in the country Michigan night. Bands that sounded like they were sitting down to dinner when they should've been sitting on the commode. Sometimes I think I shouldn’t be telling you about bands that couldn't wipe themselves straight like the Doody on my Hands.

The Washroom Attendants and deceptively-named groups like the Restrooms for Customers Only. Shysters of Soul like the Shitstirrers. The hot- and cold-running hoarfrost sounds of The Solemn Doody. Not-very-deep albums like the Turboturds' "In Punchbowl Crater", where the natural acousitcs had a large hand in making their college humor sound significant. "In the Latrines of the Supernatural" b/w the moody instrumental "Laetrile" by the Use Too Much Paper. Shit bands like the You're Out of Paper In Here. A band called the Take One: Press Here and Pull Down, who had as their symbol a little hand with a pointing finger on a tab on the paper towel dispenser of their drum set. The FlipOffs, you can guess what their symbol was, and their compelling instrumental "Middlefinger".

The Suckfarts, no better than their name permits. Bands like the Fuck This and the What Is This Shit? After the Execrables came bands with names like God Shit Fucking Damn. I was disgusted.

These aren’t lyrics, it's lallocropia. By this time rockers on both sides of the Atlantic had names like Penis Urinal.

The Abandonmen, in their Abandonwagon, thought they'd sound more sang-froid as the Abandonments, but ended up getting their butts kicked by the Wild Abandons. Michigan band the Heated Sidewalks, recorded for Clamchasm Records beside the stormy lake

up north.

Whew. Let me wipe my glasses.

Outer Michigan's own Mickey and the Whirlpools "The Mysogynist" album, the cover showing the male rock star giving birth.

The Hysterical Pregnancies and their overblown concept album The Hysterectomiad. The Clitoridectomies in their bloodstained minks.

The Here, Take This Potion and even the concept album "The Abortion" by the Insensitives were deliberately insensitive to girls' feelings.

My brother and I were wearing out the grooves by playing over and over again "Children Discover the Masturbating Fathers", some debut indeed from a band called We Masturbate Because We Fear Women. Another band, obviously stern churchgoers from Michigan’s Big Toe, called We Hate Women Because They Abort Our Children.

The Silver Suicides, the Silver Masturbations, the Silver Abortions.

The Browbeaters' "Final Sex With Governor Reagan". Finally a band the Syphilitics, and they were just gods.

The Great Hagiographer. That's what some pompous brat from ComeTogether magazine called my stories about Tippy. So I've stopped telling them, but for you, baby girl, I'll make an exception.

Still, I don't praise this Caesar, I bury him like the Russian bossman did the U.S. when he banged his shoe.

The pool-party proof was in the pudding, and the rest of the band was getting sick of it. It's like he felt he had to jack off even at rehearsals, which was a major bummer and a time-waster. C'mon Tippy, knock it off. The rest of us were supposed to vamp and jam on

a single electrodroning chord, but mostly we took break and went outside for a cigarette or for more beers while he did his thing.

Uh, was he trying to prove something?

Poor Tippy, he could barely walk, his legs were in a three-way race.

Stud in the mud. Stricken, befuddled with Ballsheimer's Disease.

What's worse, word was out that the Firehouse had become quarantined, that we could only listen to our own records there. The entire band felt horrible guilt at the thought of the young girls, preteen girls, who had visited there spreading the disease to their highschool football player and Marching-Band-Captain boyfriends, insuranceagent uncles, their fathers' friends of the family, brothers, sisters, deep etceteras, throughout the entire community. Maybe this is pumping or dry-humping to conclusions. We embarassed Rock.

We'll haunt your brother's house. Clues of mortality crept into our songs. Dead damn, mad damn and drunk damn. These might as well be the names of the three supporting members of the band the Chomps. Things are progressing towards something.

When Threadbear was drugged, drunk or otherwise indisposed, groupies often got to pen articles for CumOn!, for they were enthusiastic and chatty, shared their pearls of experience and spilled the intimate beans on the cheap (for dope, lunch, attention). One described Tippy's current performance—romantic, not stage capabilities—these days as "a snake made of bleu cheese".

Snicker. Think about it.

That night we had a quotidian gig, a small club. Originally just for a few friends, word spread so there was a crowd welcoming us with good-natured anticipation. We were bison back in town.

From the start, Tippy didn't sound good. Swallowing like a bristley hairbrush turning in his tract-house trachea. He couldn't sing.

His throat bubblepiping while the rest of us pretended it was only the music, only a loose tube or reverb spring or something. Blowing a conch shell full of song sounded more like it was full of mermaid come, or sand. It was only trachea tears. A man without a voice is a man without a voice. Before he'd felt fine, felt cracklin' fire, felt the felt lining his throat that the billiard-balls of his songs had rolled out upon.

Now strabisimus of the voice gripped him, like two dogs that got stuck in mounting, constricting the passage of his good ideas. Nothing is more public, more audibly involving, than the sounds of a man vomiting, retching, hacking and spitting. If Tippy’s stage performance involves these now, we need to make some catchy radio-friendly pop songs that implement them too.

Well if I can't sing straight at least I can do the body song. The special effect. It is the lonely one who masturbates best, and here Tippy goes making it a public act. Craving that oceanic feeling of dissimulation, what Rock n' Roll's all about. As he stood there he stirred his pud and cods like cake batter. Elephantisis of the hand, the mouth, the bowels. His crabs played on the front lawn, more than insects. A ring in his scrotum by which he pulled himself along, towed like a trailer by a truck. Cut himself on his own prick, sharper than you think. Entire groin an aching road map. Hand on cock is dismemberment. Nothing was happening. He was singing "In Love

By Myself" and people just thought he was snapping his fingers on his pants. Look at him up there, dancing all glass leg. Small as the wing of an atom. Ptooey on that sperm chicken. Men are birds from some parts of the country. The part of the arrowhead that flaps; his advertising arrow, small pointing hand with bit of sleeve, cuff, cuff link.

The Health Department looked everywhere for him, but he was so small, so far away up there on the stage. Bloody bones the ninth step, Brain splatter, Butt splatter, Ghoul! Piss! Flies! That was the jumprope song high on the charts. It had been like the appendix of a favorite book. "Don't Be a Drop-Out Dick" AM radio kids in the ghetto sang, playing hopscotch in Motorsburgh basketball courts. Hell if Tippy couldn't dance anymore, this leadfoot, clubfoot, hardonfoot.

The Minister of Vas Deferens leapt about horribly, firing missiles of nagging pain. His shoulders drooped and he was dancing like a caveman. Would it be better if you normally do this much? Why two legs? Because one is better to do one thing, one is better to do the other thing.

Frustrated with inability to say his peace, he yanked Coral—or some similar girl, it doesn't matter—up there with him. Clothes ripped off, he splashed her on the nearest table, whose legs went screech screech scree under their combined rollicking weight. His scratching fingernails were garden trowels, turning over skin's topsoil. Hands that had left snail paths from girl to girl. He rubbed and he rubbed as he rolled on top of her. It all got harder and harder when that should've been getting harder and harder. She grinned at the role of a farmer riding a sick tractor, fiddling with the engine, a Mid-western farmer's daughter confronting a salesman with an empty sample

case. He swam that girl to save his life. The dragon coiled at the base of the spine yawned and stretched, then fell back asleep.

Propagator as floppagator. Energyless guy going uphill like a sexual Chevette. Now he's a fixed-wing aircraft, grounded. A rope swing. The hairline difference between omnipotence and impotence.

He was having tree-trunk trouble. His cock was pokerfaced.

Everywhere boners broke, snapped and crumbled to the sea. The tell-tale dick. His firemunchkin. Impotent eagles. Albatross pickles.

Winged testicles. Lumbering pants bison. Cold as a whale. Sexual debilitation debris, fallen from his wuthering heights. Kundalini melancholia. Venereal garden irrigation-drips down Tippy 's legs.

Total eclipse of the pud. With every beat of the pud. Sexual telescoping. Impotence as a leading cause of death. Impotence as condition of the spirit. Impotence as nothing to give. From penis to penitente. Disintegration of ego, of the self, like successful sex.

Awareness of the whole process, not just the final conclusion of impotence. Impotence is otherwise caused by lack of purpose, inspiration. And the band's music without Tippy's results was about as interesting as watching someone mentally count sheep to go to sleep.

It was stopped clock o’clock. The Imp was doing badly, impotently, onstage. The impetus of impiety gone gone gone.

Retrograde motion of that purgatory pump. This sawed-off Shogun.

What's the matter, is gum stuck in the gun barrel or is it somehow sawed-off from behind the hammer? You're a metaphor for boredom.

Solvents in her cunt dissolved your hard-on, you could feel 'em in your hangnail when you stuck your burning finger down there. The

ditch he dug with a woman. An unattractive crisis. Mummy love.

Ever glancing at a ghost's watch. Had animal problems, became her little wounded animal, fractured blistered giant. Dragging his tail and back wheels like the damaged axle of an ant. Now he knows why there are no genitals drawn on Saturday morning cartoon characters, why he couldn't go out on the street in what Donald Duck or Yogi Bear wears. So Donald Duck on ya. And here we thought we were the baddest cheesegraters-by-night. Crammed with mushrooms.

Skipper Tippy lost his compass, his sails ripped. Dead dick. The pubic dilemma. Auunnghhh, his nation was going thru a sexual energy crisis. A salinity crisis, like so many people breathing into the sea, salt genocide. Fish eyes slam against him. Sex like a horse with nowhere to gallop towards but the glue factory, a tired old horse put out to pasture, or shot for a broken leg on a pitted track. A horse with measles. This overripe banana, spotted like a gopher, would have to be made into bananabread soon. Somebody said five deadly prayers which sounded to me a lot like our songs.

A beatnik girl

stepped out of an Italianate campus coffeehouse, sanapped her fingers and said Real Gone Boner! Daddy-O! Something a professor’s wife had read him out of the Evaporata. That which turns man into an autistic child, kissing his own lips. City woman forfeit.

Unlucky time, just combing the same hair. Voting for himself. Oh, the minibikes you'll ride. Turns Man into Mono. Turning the blind eye to the universe. What they call the French Heart Attack. He was lower than a dachshund, and that's even a dog's hound. Useful as a wooden leg to a lion. Like crying "Watch out" to a swimming-pool diver in midair, or "Wait up" to lost helium balloons. Saying to a

watch "Keep on Ticking". His watch was unwound. He said to his dick "Rain Rain Go Away". Urine dribbled like sedimentary rock.

Fingers like condoms. Became like money on a desert island. Old Man Equality. Cock like a pair of crossed fingers, because someone's fibbing.

It soon became obvious to the more savvy and observant women in the crowd that Tippy'd hit his favorite thumb with a hammer, that his white hammer was no longer thumbable. They got up from their tables disinterested, retreated to the powder room. An obstacle to smugness. Drowned otter slippery in its own phlegm.

Theatre legs and a barbecue head. Biology is all that's really important, the passing of a generation. I mean, in the old stories a nobleman or knight would commit suicide if he couldn't please a woman, if he thought he saw a dissatisfied gleamlessness or cloud in her eye. To be called "inadequate lover" was his greatest horror in life. He just couldn't happen. Maybe he had a hernia from lifting those amplifiers high over his head. Maybe a hernia high over his head. Suddenly nine hundred years before his family coat of arms had the single word IMPOTENCIA. By this time Tippy was just a rubber stopper. Little racoonpaws in his booty, a tarantula lived there. Worms boiling in his balls.

His Indian impulses had dried. From inside out dirtying yourself.

Everything else was sticky but impotence won't wash off. He'd decayed the Royal Tooth. Fell down and broke his crown. What he signed his name with in girls was now like a dried Chinese mushroom, usuable maybe for soup but scarcely little else. His cock was made of melted snow. He was just felt, washingmachine lint.

Like Lymph Man in the comic books. He broke the sexuality bone.

Deep on the surface of the skin of his nude brain. His so-called sexuality was poking a Yeti with olives. Like pissing on a cold construction site. No signs were sprayed from his male stencil. He missed the sneeze from the hips, the sneeze of the sun, the laughter from the base of the spine. Death by circumcision. Death by circumlocution. Laughing till his NSU hurt. The Human Life Circus, the Rock n' Roll Joke. I guess the robot was rusty. His construction equipment lay unused under tarpaulins because of a strike or the high lending rate. No way he could go like a spoon without a handle into the pink night. Thrusting in Hell. Into the Valley of Debt (I owe her this orgasm). Time stretched before him the way you'll have to eat breakfast tomorrow morning and the next and the next, again and again.

Now a lodestone in Tippy's belly made him impotent, was breaking up our band, that girl's tampon string got wrapped around his dick, strangled it and cut it off. Actually by now his most and least important parts had just shriveled and dropped off. Sometimes it came off in his hand. It grew little arms, found itself a knife or razor, I think it was an old-fashioned straight razor that Tippy had been snorting cocaine from and applying it to his gums with, that it personally whetted, stropped and cut itself off! The cocklet then ran down the street like a tiny circus freak to the pornographic bookstore crying "Now for some real exercise". Michigan’s first giant lumberjack Paul Bunyan's old motto: sometimes you got to chop what you got to chop. Guess Tippy thought he'd grow another pecker like a starfish's

arm, an axolotl's milky tail, a basilisk thrown into a fire, an angel's wing after a hard night of carousing.

First impotence, how romantic! A cigar smoking itself. He missed the point, didn't want to be pointless. An empty Christmas stocking, empty bag from trick-or-treating. Finders Kewpies losers weepies. Thought of the concert, all the mice in their traps laughing at me. She's trying to feed a dead man. His pecker his grim weeper.

Pecker's Bad Boy. Tippy simply didn't get enough sleep, and it was a school night. He must've smoked a poison cigarette. Red thing, a kidney-shaped piece of rubber, Southeast Asian jungle fowl the ancestor of all chickens. Did you ever see a headless coffin?

Impotence is a pipe which won't stay lit, a TV signal not coming in, drifting, drifting. He was full of oopsy daisies, the bumbler in bed.

It was the same old thing with his nose all over again. He wanted to start all over again, maybe with a band called "Puberty". Felt like a vile creature half-bat, half-cockroach, or a dalmatian dog with a head on both ends that bobbed up and down. Tippy's old chestnuts stopped reciting themselves, no longer the rapin' raconteur.

Chestnuts stopped roasting over an open female. Disabled lingam unit. Water sausage. Milk train angst. Sad ascent. Telephone poles on the moon. Danger in the desert of desire. Too pooped to pencil.

By that time he had become just a naked Greek statue, but more lifeless. Just a vegetable in a bottle. The Old Card Shoppe. The white ladle. That phantom bantam phenomenon. He might as well start calling his "penis" his "perhaps". The Fallacymaker. His Fifth Beatle. His snowy owl. The birthplace of Herbert Hoover. Sky penis.

Girl paste. A New Crotchless You!

Impotence is a funeral, his longfaced undertaker in a frock coat foreskin. His broken column. He had coconut crabs in his crotch, fish nibbling his balls underwater. Minnow man. A fly with a broken heart. His pecker went peck peck peck. Or didn’t. His ostrich neck, turkey wattles and wart on top of the beak (there must be a name for that). Have to bang on the pipes for the superintendent to turn up the steam, send up some heat. Hard collapse. Limp red unionsuit hangin' on the clothesline of conciousness. Out of ardor. Booted out that cardoor of ardor. Lost in depression passion. This man-soup.

His Hollywood hardware now barely Halloween hardware.

Impotence must feel like a record slipping down the charts. He needs a crotch proppin'-up, a splint on his breakin'est shin. The closing off of an elephant's trunk. Undercondoms with outer sheaths of a fine metal pipescreen mesh. A scabbard, like Charge of the Light Brigade, with Tippy not fit for the Night Brigade or even the night-lite. But every dwarf is a patriarch in the right light. These aeolipile-balls, even Zeno's Paradox couldn't explain why his dick wouldn't go up anymore. Thought you could buy your way into celibacy, eh? Thought you could shave Nick the Barber? His silencer silenced. His hushpud. Don't want to be the so-so man. No time for this game of Uncle Wiggly. Face it, he's totalled his car. We say car to mean cock in Michigan. You could say he reached the next stage of circumcision.

Maybe his cock is the most firmly-drawn and sympathetic character in this book, I should give it even more dialogue.

Emotionally he's just a skeleton, turned oblivious at that rock n' roll wilt, loving the detachment. Could write a song in emotional

snapback after a fight or displeasure with a girlfriend and barely mention it.

This was the concert where the crowned heads of Europe, or at least the popstars with interesting haircuts, were all assembled to see this phenomenonman. Of course Tippy would want to be at his nowritual manliest.

A nurse, enjoying cocktails in the audience in her party dress, was called to the stage. Dutifully priming the pump handle for diagnosis, took Tippy's scaly putty-colored prick between her fingers, covering the carapace of the sex exoskeleton with two painted fingernails. His sperm emerged just hard-shelled brown scurriers, literally cock roaches. No, those were just vermin insects taken residence there.

False alarm.

More pressure on the nipples, suggested Dr. Sylvia Laetrile in a magazine article someone read. A collective cholera of ennui spread through this credit union. People felt a mild nausea, headed home.

I looked across the stage. Dink was drinking Old Torment, a crueler, foul-tasting and rougher stuff than I've ever seen him choose willingly.

Coral shook her head, lovingly but knowingly, called her lover’s onceproud protruberance his impo-cellulite Like a soul brother attendant bringing Soulman Dynamo his cape, I helped Tippy depart the stage exhausted. “And so to bed!” enthused a girl poet, but for her it was not to be.

Only a week before he had been studied and pondered, hmm’d and harrumph’d, cooed and marveled over at the Sexual Medical College.

He said Here, let me show you, and launched a test masturbation for her. What the fingernurse called his Prostation Approximation. Not since 1863 have so many sperm been liberated in a single stroke.

Manumitted by that Michigan boy's man-mitten.

Wait, maybe that was a year before. Sometimes I can’t keep track of exact dates. Usually, though.

There had he stood, performing his pud opera. And the fat lady in his hand simply wasn't singing. Could not raise the cross wee bear from hibernation.

In sadness and worry about my dear friend and undoubtedly first-among-equals leader of our band, I took a break, went outside in the wintry see-your-breath cold, stumbled into an old Motorsburgh eastern-Euroethnic church featuring, as relics, Jesus' large intestine, rectum and anus. St. Chitlin's across the state had the small intestines. The Virgin Mary's vagina hung on a nail where no one could reach it, students rub it for good luck, in one country church, formerly set in a golden jewel-encrusted torso.

"I don't think I want to show you" she appeared to me to say. Damn.

My mental health break now over, I went back in, strapped on my guitar. By now Thump was in his thirty-first minute of an interminable drum solo. I had to restrain myself from making meaculpacetic apologies from the stage. This was Tippy's problem, not ours.

What impotenced Tippy? That he broke the potency laws, was bored with ghosts and their grimaces? No more secretaries and their

shades, secreting their shadows as they walked into their thighs. once had a dollar in his pocket but it felt like a dime, nevermore to give him a real cool time. Impotence like a little cartoon cop character climbing up there, snapping on the cuffs, ball and chain on his balls and a black-and-white striped prison uniform condom he can hardly fill. The sealing over of Nature's Own Condom. Dying of loneliness. Fudge factor of his fuck factory. Insects flying up from his dick, moths in the wool. Will this holy youth be beheaded? Pud of clay, loins of clay. Trapped like in a glass hat. His Most Important Attribute like a foot asleep. Ghost glands. His wooden anemone antenna. One, two, three, many impotences, like Vietnams. All dairy products curdling in the sun, everything runs together sooner or later.

All cavaliers become creamed spurs. The Golden Backache indeed.

The Great Squirt-Gun. The secret stump. Seriously, nobody would manufacture a guitar called The Broken Twang-Bar. Posessing the puzzling gentalia of childhood. Quarters on his balls like pennies on a dead man's eyes. A hassled gambler. A hundred-year-old threeminute egg. In the dark impartiality of impotence. The enormity of his deformity. Scary, like the skull of a worm.

Who killed macho swaggerdude Swissfamily "Cock" Robinson?

A girl with a red breast had lured Dillinger to his doom too. His chest had turned red like the State Bird from huffing and puffing. Sparrows of disease in his tiny arrow. Suddenly he was a moose with rubber antlers standing alone in an icy pond up north. A ludicrous chihuahua named "Bluto". He could hear no loons in the predawn. His wooden third leg, his thud leg, full of hate for being lame. Beatleworms in his crotch-cocoon. A pelvis of parsley. A crumplebum. His lightbulbs

burned out, his wifebulbs, his life, bub. He needed the element Kundalinium to give him potency. That's just horseshrimp down there.

Impostertance. Finally attained the unity of the eunuch.

Serpentcide. The penis falters. Moments of broth. Cock switches, off/off. A roll of pennies that had come open. Pocket dramas. The girls don't know but the little men understand. Shrivelled down to bones and foreskin. His cock lost its sense of smell. Putrid weekends. An ice cream cone with bandaids on it. Lost its firing pin, its blasting cap. A burned out building. A fallen-in shack by the railroad tracks that an overimaginative child would call a haunted house. His drawers knife. A pair of insect cutters. Felt like napalm must at its moment of body-contact ignition. Futile like a flamenco dance in stiletto heels. When a sperm takes a shit. Dead, diseased and in a decadent form of disuse. When the worm dialateth not, the fire is not quenched. Yarrow stalk? It was barely a marrow bone filled with human grease, a ticklish marabou feather to her. Is there something warm there in that body?

God in shit! God excrement! He swore by all the swearwords under Heaven and above Hell. The crowd roared in recognition.

What is his God-for-fucking in this good-for-fucking world? A capon for Christ. A church without a steeple. God says "See Ya" to the guy who says "See Ya" to God. Rock n' Roll Quaker, Rock n' Roll oaf.

By now his invective was verbally shooting a staple gun at the audience. He got the swearing sickness, his lallocropia made him say "shit" and "fuck" onstage. The Chomps had become just spray music, spraying not singing, by the time we played that Soap and

Fingers Club. The heavy mental music of the dithering ward. Chain me to the gods. Widened eyes, agape mouths. He started to sing "There's a Treadmill in her Tank Top" but then felt embarassed, realized no one was listening. In a boat onstage, crashing upon a reef.

The remnants of the crowd was semi-amused. At one table someone was reading Keeping Awake While Masturbating. The tables were populated with young Michiganii from voyageurs to voyeurs, that was actually soon to become the name of a book the former University president was working on late in the Library that very evening. More interesting than what's going on, or failing to, right here. As a band, we'd stopped playing and started to put guitars in their cases and pack up the drums. Tippy was still rummaging on top of the girl, who'd fallen asleep from too much Rock and orangejuicey Tequila Wisenheimers. As he lay on top of her bathed in the amplifier hum his sex was a clown deathshead grinning up at him. Penis broken on the wheel. That's OK Tippy. Better luck next time. He kind of grr'd as I told him we'd swing by to get him for the big arena show in Motorsburgh tomorrow night.

Meanwhile, magazines were ready to go to press with Tippy on their annual "Out" Lists. "Ain't that a bite to a boy conditioned in whims" sniffed moralists in the Rock press. Tippy'd been so far out, to cold outer space where he couldn't even hear his own echo. Like the smartest little boys in the class who inevitably accidentally lock themselves in the refrigerator to see if the light really goes out. In bad yoga, a yoga of suffocation and dread. This pud was passé.

Might as well make pudding of this pud.

Times were tough. The newspapers whispered "recession"; Nixon was eating us anyway. You need a note or a page from a book to buy a pack of cigarettes. Money was printed with pictures of U. S. Presidents even before they were re-elected or assassinated, pictures of their effeminate sons. By an Act of Congress ads began to appear on the tinfoil coins. Words as currency still cheapens and debases an empire's coinage. “In God We Trust” is the literature of children who lie. A Tippy and the Chomps cover story with the magazine retreating from under his nose, the letters on a page looking blacker than they are. Words in all magazines were constantly changing, even the names and hometowns of the girls.

Weird UFO noises from his stereo. Coffee voices after instant coffee from the bottom of the ocean, from instant coffee girls.

Horselight

means someone had turned on the television screen without tuning it.

She blamed herself, and we started to too. How did Coral drain him so? How'd she empty that rocket bone dry? That girl was a sausage thief. Coral had given him his best applause. Reabsorbing him and his personality like a mother. He was her only child so she did him in. Coral was the potato field he'd cavorted about in. Sex ran away with him like the Dish ran away with the Spoon. He musta been cuckooloaded, cuckoo n' cuckolded, though I never would've called Aleppo cloud-cuckooland. A Republican legislator did though.

Coral was sad. Crabby in school all week. Elvis lumps in her breast. Coral on life: I expected at least a miniseries.

Whenever the US President is impotent, all the flags in the country spontaneously, mysteriously drop to half-mast, a fact that frustrated

the Hell out of Richard Nixon. General Einsteinhowitzer never liked how the anniversary of his ineffective date with his secretary Kay (to her Cheka handlers, K.) in his battlefield tent, impotence despite seven lucky coins in his pocket, was commemorated with the dipping of flags, all too reminiscent of his own. But he put up with it, and his wife Mamie's ire from dawn until dusk that day. One radical campus historian sought tenure on the supposition the custom began in the Wilson administration, his wife signaling to the Germans that the weakened President could not press his Fourteen Shiatsu Points upon the victorious Allies, due to his debilitation in his trousers. What she affectionately called his teapot dome.

A Midwesterner journalist, a Threadbear wannabe making up stories for the student daily, heard about the concert from a friend who'd gone and embellished the story to make Tippy's momentary limpness a portend of the end of all student revolution and sexual liberation. This was picked up by a late night DJ on the FM station, and girls began calling in mentioning other creepy occurrences when they'd recently been under him.

Bone-chilling radio. We began to see "Tippy's Rod is Dead" graffiti around campus, around Aleppo, even Motorsburgh suburbs.

He was on the cover of INTERNATIONAL IMPOTENCE magazine, even found in pediatrician Dr. Frank Wagon's waiting room. What Coral's mom and dad, sniggering with comeuppance, referred to as Tippy now beating off a dead horse. Oh great, now even Horace and Daffie Mars have an opinion on his onion. A unicorn with merely a eunuch horn.

Tippy castrated by impotence, forced to use the restrooms

labeled Unisex. Ha ha, those won’t be standard for fifty more years.

I had just learned the word Unisex from the article about the topless swimsuits.

Yes, dear, it was pretty bad, pretty disheartening.

As a band who had a living to make, we poo-poohed and wrote off all these complaints as the normal wages of the road, especially to road wags, the confrontational critics. No, I don’t mean you, kiddo.

But then the final thing worried everyone, made Tippy un-Tippy. The sports arena concert where he couldn't fly the flag, erect the historic Ypsofacto water tower onstage. He peeled his potatoskin pants off, treated the thing lovingly like a waist-level microphone, to no effect.

Soon the feminined titter of laughter and young men’s gasps of horror became uproarious laughter, ready to bring down the roof. If there still had been a vaudeville hook there to yank us offstage, we would have welcomed it.

A young liberal in the state legislature, concerned at the local celebrity's tribulations, considered a motion—"for the kids"—to change Michigan’s state motto from TUEBOR to IMPOTENCIA. Then thought better of it, didn't, perhaps under pressure from Motorsburgh car industry money. They didn’t think it sounded muscle-car young, fast, sporty.

All his high school classmates, drafted by the military, damp and stationed in lonely Vietcong Mekong Delta rice paddies, heard their bugler in the hot sunrise blow: He can't get it up He can't get it up

He can't get it up in the morning... and that was tossed into the chorus of the FGNS’ new song, its cruel dig at Tippy unmistakeable to all who listened and heard.

It didn’t even seem to work with girls. The labia of screech-owl lamia, weird female flyabouts, biching and mosquito-valved. Relentlesssex.

Lost upon the burning sandy clitoris. Lost upon the urinating sands.

Less-than-up, on cripple’s creek she sent me. The moving picture camera at his crotch was just Hollowwood now. Beheading a Pope.

Petitions to protect endangered sperm.

Neudsch called it Peenemundain, meaning as everyday as the German rocket facility. Tippy had certainly never been all of that.

After all, Napolean once declared he was going mad when he heard his favorite Italian castrato. Tippy could probably still have a career in powdered wig, ruffles, breeches, silk stockings and buckled, heeled shoes for authenticity—after all, Aleppo was a Big Bone University town—and women still swooned at castrati's forceful warbles. His hair flapping in the breeze like an American flag, or a Confederate battle flag, or the swastika ensign at the stern of a UBoat in Baltic port. But to Tippy, the thing flapping down in front was only a flag of surrender.

"You don't wear aviator specs to see better in sunlight, you wear them to amplify your farts" snapped Tippy, in an ungenerous mood. What's that about my faults? Why is he in a badly-bathed grandfunk, ragging on me? Oh wait, right.

Crass and venal, ass and penile. Why are we even in this game? How could an impote imp still sing rock n' roll without a functioning—nay, exemplary—cock o' manhood?

And what will become of the band?

What a weekend. By noon the next day Tippy was walking around. To clear his thinking he gorged on about sixty hits of LSD. He stood in the middle of the road and flagged down a passing motorist, a couple on their honeymoon. They got out of their car, handed Tippy the keys and went to spend the night in an old dark house. Tippy went driving out in the Michigan sunshine fields, humongous Motorsburgh sedan roaring out in the country, full gas tank as the radio assembled a vile "History of Aldebbie" medly.

Eyes open, windows open breeze, attentiveness upon every pore. He wanted to form a band of all the road kills, dead skunks, squirrels, racoon and opossum on the highway. A polecat following his pole star. Woods, mysteriously always out there just beyond the burbs. Where trees were ovary-green. Out past one, two, many old girlfriends' houses, naturally. Upon female freeways.

The church spire as glimpsed from far-off, bells are doves that ring in the breeze, that fly south. The Principal of Peace, though Principals have had bad luck with us. Vegetable stands, estate sales and summery combinations of the two. An automobile graveyard where Motorsburgh boys often choose to be buried. Death like the changing of a truck into a car.

Michigan skies like Swiss cheese, somehow. He came to realize something about Michigan as he thought about speeding Up North, where they're closer to the early history. Campus revolutionaries hightail it up here after planting a draftboard bomb.

Where you can watch old whittling Indians in souvenir store windows

smoking poson sumac, dark red crinkly berries making similar configurations on their lips. Their diseases spread on their peacefully passed-around pipes. With such ailments Columbus conquered the Nude World. Sly, dapper French explorers often bringing around a lipless leper just to infect or "spike" the pipe, portaged all the way from the cellars of Versailles. Hunchbacked Parisian Quasimodo had happened to be lucky enough to be one, bellowing over the rail the duration of the long sea, and later canoe, voyage; when no longer useful they buried him in what's now the base of the Maxigood bridge linking Michigan's two peninsulas. Michigan, headlong into the faceless forest, wet and smelling like celery. Michigan pinesense enjoyment, thing and not-thing. Things become shapes, shapes become real. Just missed hitting a windjammer moose around a mountainous hairpin turn. The monomaniac's Michigan.

The smell of Michigan fields in the summertime, simmering and heat-shimmering licorice weeds. Smelling of wild menthol, smells like Halloween candy. He'd never noticed them before. Stop and take some time to smell the Reaper. Wildflowers turning to windfire.

There was no drug to make the world a flower now. The smelly utopia, the sweltering utopia. Eye of the summertime. Wake up those smelly eyes! He was between two skies. Under the macro sky. Kind of a meta-selfhood. The birds were naked. He was out in the country, caught in a corn-on-the-cobweb. Cigarettes reappear. He sucked on an atheist cigarette, a mucous stencil. Thoughts pissed on his face, pissed on his tonsils, like coffee in the wind. Like when you go into a bathroom and turn on the switch and the light doesn't go on you're obviously transported to another dimension.

He heard dogs barking a mile away, some farmers' dogs. Dead bulldogs that died and went to hell. An eleven-legged old lost dog. A werewolf with porcupine quills coming out of his face. Women are cats, men are dogs, men are like Gerald Ford. Perversion can be defined as when men are cats and women are dogs who like to leave their calling-cards, pass water, everywhere. Looked like a cat and walked like a dog, a catdog, a cat eating a pig. Tippy realized like any man he is a dog who shits, passes his water, drools and fucks everywhere. Droppings in the dog dish. Whining, limping whelp.

Dog gone bad. Dogs are never sloppy-drunk, out of control.

Yesterday was a dog religious holiday. Dogs know where it's at, that people are laughing at them and they love it. The Russians employed dog cosmonauts, we attempted several dog Rock stars.

Dog parties along Florida beaches. Dog lipstick, footprints painted on their backs for fashion. Drinking dog beer, I don't think, I get animal, I animal. I'm a bit of a man-dog myself, be my dog friend. Dog action, the doggie's got talent, the doggy's got style. A dog, like a travelling salesman, sniffs and says But you've got to know the territory.

Physically, men are messy in many ways women are not (like in masturbation) and vice versa. They always want sex and are always hungry. Something about being a dog. You call that an epiphany?

That's just common sense, not something you learn. Lie down, dog.

Stay.

A dirigible passes across the hazy Michigan sky. Those grand suburban streetsweeper vehicles of the solar wind. Clouds giant white combs, going for the neck. Airplanes calling "Didja See Her Breasts?" Bigger than boners. The clouds became skulls, a skull like

a butt, he saw buses full of skulls and a truck labelled "Harm's Way".

The trees laughed with the wind HA-HA HA HAAA... A chorus of mandrake roots shrieking. This runny movie. Kites of grinning faces.

The ghost of something made out of wax. His hat's even wearing a ghost. What? He doesn't wear a hat. More things to be aware of.

Tippy thought and paid attention. A frog scratching his butt, a dragonfly with a hardon, a firefly farting. Folding the bees. Appleeating rats. Apple, Summer, butter, Hollywood, whatever you say is true. Spazzattack as a spaceship. Mirage and marijuanage.

Hanging from a tree like a magic uterus, a magic placenta. Heard a hummingbird snort like a bear or lion. A skin bear. Tiger saws, tigers seated in chairs like teeth. A dollar turning into a stretching snake.

Red rubber squids like the plastic souvenirs of the Michigan town called Hell. Sins appear in black and white on color TV. Bad luck misunderstood. The charm of the guillotine, the cannibalism of the guillotine. The torment of the week. Hell's happiest moments. Diane Linkletter flaps her wings. Like a church under construction. Rain piety. Chocolate V.D. Following the Light of Fools, Halloween flashlight-noses. Amid rippling insanity like outright swarms of mosquitoes, he'd see afterimages, phosphenes, blood trails running down the street, bloodscreams rolling drums in his ears, the voice of a thousand violent voices. A bat-tree. A bat that can suck a new suit dry. Batwings as splayed umbrellas run over by monorails or snowmobiles, umbrellafoot skateboards, pressed between the pages of thesauruses. Octopus-grey shadows, oddly in slowmotion, explosions in the milk of cannonballs. Plankton hovered, perfume capsules, acrylic whatnots, menacing tiny orange propellors like

skeeter-nosed shrimps with big barber-pole spikes out the back, shaped like pill boxes, spiky caltrops, ribbons of asterisks or just mineral colors. A sample gift from a profligate. Dirt first base smears where you slid. A watch on his arm with needles coming out of it.

Lap gun, robot paper, lotus filth. Egyptian machines. Like communion bread fighting the leavening, spirals of brass. Flying candy canes. A tree with leopard heads and boar heads growing from the ends of the branches, emeralds on the trunk. Barechested Toulouse-Lautrec heads on long black wings waddling down Capitol steps in the sun. Men with bird beaks in Florida, fat and naked in their overthehead crow masks with cigar butts held on toothpicks, pulled down nighttime streets by huskies. Girls with horrible Halloween-faced babes in arms, babies going to the movies, open mouthed fish as purses. Pinkfooted mice in racoon masks. Make the dead come in their sheets. A human head on a deer's body. People with telephones for ears, bighipped women with shrunken heads, snakes with girlfriend faces or human breasts pointed poking out from their jaws. Bison with the faces of highschool jocks. Bison in the fields, skinny as basilisks. The eagle and the guillotine. Satanic elk.

Fly math endtable. Spider bathroom breadbasket. A tiny hausfrau spider. A bat with tampon wings. A sick sphinx puking. The way a snail will eat the remains of another snail crushed by a heel. Why snails leave dotted lines. Smile lines, fed up on a human face. Red ants, red cats, red rats twirling and nibbling hair on a stick. Fat gelded tabby cats with little staircases in their backs, lifesaver earrings. A lion's mane on fire and a tiger with his tail on fire. Saint John eating locusts broiled over a fire, Saint Jack the Heretic passing

the canteen of rum. He saw out of the corners of his eyes the ghosts of bugs, from the same place dust comes from. His insectesticles, those two bugs hanging there. Balloon vampire. Just a skull looking for a momento mori. But you can't wear an octopus on your head for very long before it'll suck or nibble into your brain, it's ideas and opinions.

Tippy, all too Tippy.

Thought Fever. Psychosacroiliac, mind-on-its-back. Cast-iron conciousness. The punconcious, or punkconcious. Hatband noise.

Fields of ambiguity. Atomic quicksand. Gnomic gnosis. Walk with time. Explode your world. A mind named Jeff. His self-abyss. An auto-Charybdis. Having plenty of epiphanies, as if "Bucket o' Epiphanies" was a leisure service of Truth- R'-Us. The soft sea of ego. Let's start a religion which worships the day, the night, late afternoon, early evening, etc. Rich thoughts. His mind went out for cross-country, ran furlongs on its sprained fetlocks. I wuv my widdle thoughtsies. Tippy was hallucinating, he'd flashback as something that's trailing a hook on a chain falling through, catching something.

Not insanity but a kind of hypersanity. Whew, they must've slipped something into the drugs. My vision hurts, the part of the body a later U. S. president called his "vision thing". His War at the Back of the Eyes. A mind too terrible to waste, in the grip of Cutey, the sumowrestling Chomp. fever.

Here's where the strong explode. Hooked on a

Hallucinations becoming more intensely baroque, and

what is the 20th century style besides rolls of barbed wire covering everything? We frequently see impotence-based hallucinations of this magnitude in patients of this age and importance. Especially with

such a voluminous sexual history. Miscarriages of the mind. Stereo became stethescope. Reality is a pus. A warning on him like a package: Does Not Contain Self.

Of course I personally have never hallucinated. Sounds scary.

A human cumulus. An imaginary Freud. A proposed corpse. Not insane but inner-sane. The lonely beat of my head. The Pampas of the Moon, the Rat Baths. The Pseudoworld. Cryptology will long mourn the passing of this Dying Fauve, this wiseguy Fauvist. Tense floatations upon greenish-gold eyes, decalcomania of white stares.

Uncold heat. A nice desensitizing experience. Tippy had ideas bean-bouncing around his maracas head. He spent a lot of time thinking of a French verb meaning "molasses". Heard yellow pianos.

Stumbling around the sanity projects, desperately afraid of his own biofeedback. Getting to be as smart as a child. Senility premature by sixty years. Standing in the shadows of lust. Deep in the whitebrain.

Seeing scars before his eyes, ill-mended rips in the fabric of time and space. Kahoutek-comets spinning aimlessly at the edge of his peripheral vision. Walking in thunder and rainstorm, lightning struck my eye. It reminded me of the Chinese water torture. Illness was crosshatching his cortex like knife cuts, every move. Playing with the devil's Play-Doh. Pelted by bong water from the sky.

In his well-steamed poet's mind Honeymoon Hell was his horrible fear of sex right now. He was fed up. I hate my women and I hate my face, the only place for me is outer space. He buried his teeth secretly out back. He was sex sick. Cunt had become for him a grinning skull. A watched boil never pops. Sign up for a place on the food chain, congratulated by plankton. Tippy transcended eating

and sleeping. He cried, his back shook like in a movie. What ever are we coming to, when our words are old, our bodies new? Hey, I won't even have to tell you a Rock n' Roll joke. He didn't know whether it was life that drove him crazy or the fact that he couldn't live it anymore, unselfcaringly, with aplomb. The closer your lifestyle gets. When I die I'll go to Heaven and be there with my old girlfriends. Woman normally burns off the excess, like the plume of flame atop an oil refinery. So he just walks around in an epiphanous fog. Head spinning like a Psychoaeolipile (you can look it up).

Bright-eyed as color film. Gloved face a cuckold clock. We are but stolen submarines. Having premonitions of the rest of this book something fierce. Edgar Cayce in Edge City. Out in the grinding woods. A little putto flying alone through the woods. And I could see 'em, Tippy said, all our abortions' angels, buzzing around our heads like the Three Chomps--or yours out of Coral, Roque, as a new giant gorilla Chimp Chomp that climbed up the University's Burgomeister Tower, clutching Coral and battling Absent-Minded Professors' flying cars. Thank you, Tippy. The Angels' Consensus. Putti come flying out of Tippy's nose, as masturbated little personality-sperm with cherubic wings. Full-blown cherubs shooting out of the dick, it was like Italian art. A Renaissance fart. Churchy n' fey. The chicken livers of conciousness, the hard knotty gizzard that is the soul. His missed chances, his latest songs, his crazy ideas. Tremendous nonsins. Just a vegetable failure. Repentance may be possible.

Reminded him of the story of the American G.I. who, when bankrobbers put a gun to his head and the trigger pulled, went to heaven because his last thought was a guilty feeling, sorry for the

Vietnamese women he raped and interrogated at gunpoint over there.

What made him think he had something in public to coo about? He had cuts and bruises he had to sing. He could've been a great presidential assassain or something. Living in the dishonor of knowing he'd been a virgin for almost the first thirteen years of his life.

Beatle boots crossed at both ends of his legs. Smashed in the dirt he found Coral's band's self-produced 45 record, doting daddy Horace's latest gift for his little girl. What does So Big They Bonheurtz mean?

He was ready to return home. But wait. What if…?

Naah. He jumped out of the car, ran across the field and leapt on the ground belly-down to try and fuck the good Michigan earth.

The pillbugs rolled up under his caresses, earthworms wriggled under where his foreskin should've been. He pumped and pushed the dry clay to exhaustion and abrasion, dirt clods sticking annoyingly. For like the nose of an airplane heading west lit up by the sunset he so loved the land from whence he sprang from between the legs of two oak trees, loved it back to its early settlers, its mound-building Hurons and Potawatomies, all the way back to its archetypes and Bisons painted in the caves and basements. Gondwanaland trilobites and Petosky Stones way before being reduced to serving as cowpoke string-tie clasps.

Sparrows came round to voyeur what he was doing. Phones ring and birds answer. Birds flying into picture windows. Birds wearing glasses. A shirt-white dove, wings as a bow tie flapping. A flock of robins landed in a barenaked tree. Heiroglyphic birds. A birdomancer. Wish I could talk to the birds and their eggs. If I had a

bird's beak, or a ship's windlass. The Michigan robins are laughing at me. The brats in the trees. The derision of the bluejays is overwhelming. Gone to guilt. Birds as loudmouth abortions, fetuses grown wings and won't shut up. Three Chomps birds in the trees going "Nyuk nyuk nyuk—woo woo woo woo".

A shudder as if the whole tree flapped its wings and took off.

Hunh, here he could get it up, be firma to the terra. He hadn't really been outside this much as a kid. Furthermore, he'd play again, do one critically acclaimed gig tonight, soon.

Tippy rolled over onto his back, looked up. Every glimpse of sunlight sparkled magic happy with LSD flashback spectra, trails and sky-crystals. Hypnostratus clouds. A clear day with a sky in the sky.

Barely noticed the sex of the sky. Sky like a pinhead. Under the soapsky there, the stratosuds, he was looking for a rope tied to fact.

Those clouds in the sky, pretty as they are, don't care a shit about me. Mackeral sky, and you know what smells like fish. White elephant hides, spattery textures, beersuds visions of blobbered white ink on azure paper, an onionskinned flower's blossoming sea, armadas of smoke, smokus pocus like the threads through blue vellum. He gave names to all the clouds, expected them to visit him again and again. By this time there was a kind of cloud in the sky named "Elvistratus", supposed to resemble his sideburns. Looking up, I'm stoned on sky. I pledge allegience to the sun. Sun, dreams, surrogate. The only child is the the only cloud in an otherwise sunny sky. The Mama Sky. Mistmining the Mistral Mind.

Late afternoon spun-sugar, silver and rolled gold. Sun sugar. The light looks like it does one mile from here. He saw different colors of

green, almost black, of the leaves in the shadows of the woods and thought it was almost time to get cold. A shudder passed through the county.

Tippy tried to de-think, mind as a fogbath. Buying a ride on the synesthesia train. Pee-brained. Don't go around thinking there's a moral in the sky, that anyone crazy should die. Hey, who goes crazy in this story, Tippy or me? Sorry folks, but no refunds. Tippy'd been wandering around for hours. Finding that he'd walked back from out of town, he sat down on the suburban edge. Mosquito-bitten testicles on the concrete curb. His sunburned dick, must've thrust it too high into the air, too near the unremitting sun of Coral's butt. Into the rarefied atmosphere of those girls, the heavy and oppressive celestial rose. Something was resolved.

Maybe I was wrong. If Tippy is Christ we’ll have to crucify him, or rub him out some other way. The erasercrhist.

We were all back in Aleppo, waiting to see what would happen.

As I lifted Tippy's emaciated legs on to the ottoman, I reflected on how, in the popular press, the Ottoman Empire had been called "The Sick Man of Europe". And now Tippy was the sick man of Rock, the sicko of Aleppo. Subconsciously we had absorbed all the cramped, crabbed, crimped and cribbed university-town attitudes, its smugitude. And we grown up thinking there'd never be disease in America again!

Tippy told everybody he was trying to feel at one with his spores and roots here. A Moebius strip's return to itself. A hit play's relationship to its backdrop. A big noise in Motorsburgh might be

about to happen too. By this time Tippy was an orphan, but he got a lot of crank calls mostly from an elderly couple purporting to be his parents. His late parents' mobile home was consumed by an electrical fire, and consulting engineers from the University promptly swarmed around as expert witnesses. He wished he could talk to his parents, for they too had sex once, or so he tended to believe.

The next morning Tippy woke up stut-stut-stuttering. He woke up dreaming. Power dreams. Tired dreams, dead dreams. Bad dreams! I swallowed my pillow! Nonmedical dreams, dreams of disenchantment. Headlines hollering the arrest of Mr. Sandman, who grants sleep to little boys who fall asleep with their peckers still in hand. Dreadministered. Dreams are just little old ladies, fussbudgets and flibberdegibits. The flippin' gibbet they're setting up for Tippy to be hung by the neck until dead upon. He dreamed of the band's van crashing into a giant cow's udder filled with paint. Aching like an axe crashed down between his testes while he's lying on his belly.

Daydreams of a masseuse with a table with a hole in it below the waist when the client's face down. Dreams are made of water, of smoke. Dreams are a waste of water. No more dreams. Bubbles are nice but I'm forever blowing minds.

Tick tock tick tock. A laboratory of moments, time snapping like the winding of a watch made of feta cheese. Cock as a watch telling what time he is. A watch with an inflamed, zitty eczema'd face, the sourhand on a clock pointed accusingly. A five o' clock shadow is inevitable as it nears five o' clock. The face in the mudmirror.

Covered in sleepshit. When a window smokes. Tippy found Hebrew lettering or math symbols in the mist on his shaving mirror. A

headache held him in a hammerlock. A Death's Head Ministry.

Skullstorms, hairline mental fatigue. Morbid state of mind's orangeade glow.

Skin in the shower feels like lizard's leather. Have I become a snakeskin boot? His gaunt face castrated. If fucking is like voting, then disease is the polltax. Hush money to Priapus. Unlucky turn of the NSU wheel. The croupier's scratched stick. Keeps turning up like a shitty penny. Just a venereal cold. Syphilophilia or syphilomania? A doctor's apple laughing at the various illnesses that cross his desk. How to hit a golf ball that's laughing at us. Science fiction, science fuck. The kind of cold you don't get shaking hands.

Like a hit record that you find yourself humming at the oddest moments. No more tracks recorded for an album, only junkie tracks recorded on his spindly possum-tail arms. Not a record player needle at work here.

A burning mind was a preoccupation with him. The kisses of the disease itself not bad for its destruction but because it obscures the memory of the beloved, diminished humanity for the abstract idea. Spiritual love as the hangover. The kiss, the silent tap of conscience that insures you from having too good of a time.

Grabbed some fruit-of-the-refrigerator then looked sad and anomied "This orange has a headache". Sleepy hurting knot in his head, a dark spot, a smoke spot. No farther from sanity than the skin of a grape. A skull grinning, yellow teeth like an ear of buttery Summer corn. Insanity brought on by mustard and ketchup. One week the first thing he saw was a hearse, the second time he thought he heard a gong. Piston visions. Bowls of steam. Voices in teapots,

talking dirty. It's only mailmen burning. Ghosts in the drapes. Heard clothes scream at night that aren't hung up properly in the closet.

Over the parapet into the pit.

That girl like a tourniquet around his dick. So he consented to go, at my urging, to the Aleppo Freek Clinic.

But Tippy kept postponing it. Aldebbie and the damn management company somehow persuaded Tippy to go into the studio one more time (“It will help generate interest for the Goliathdome concert”), where he recorded an uncharacteristically plaintinve ballad, a paen “To Every Sink I’ve Masturbated in Before”, which Threadbear and the feminist press lambasted upon release as a thinly-veiled uncomplimentary reference to girls, especially “white as porcelain ceramic” Michigan ones.

Putting on the shoe leather. He walked out the Firehouse and blocks and blocks, slowly down Washmepocahontas Ave. by the chains of francised V.D. clinics nestled deep in competing shopping centers, between fastfood restaurants. Passed a billboard "When I'm omniscent and omnipotent I feel very good" for a sex aid caled OmniPotent. Thought it advertised a bank. Buying hypodermic needles called Acc-U-Punctures by the carload. On the street he nearly stepped in some cum, and the street cried Don't step in my turpentine!. Children's hands in slow motion, flippers waving at the windows, a key to a train. Tippy's mind was at sea level. In many ways still in school. His heart clacked like boots in the maple. There wandered a vaguely human Momo Monster, blackened by the Midwest summer sun and tornados that mussed up his hair. Huge and Christlike though only five feet tall. Pissed off and burnt out.

Tippy stopped into a church, or maybe I did. Country churches built to Saint Lukewarm, along with Big Daddy Joseph the patron saint of impotence. A turd floating in the bowl of Holy Water at the front of the church, somebody's brown business. An embryo floating—like St. Brianjones in his pool—in a baptism font, birth-blood spreading from the tiny corpus, staining the water like a raw steak dropped in. The Pope just happened to be there on a goodwill mission, horrified, arms upraised like the audience crying Boogie! and Hey, this would make a good album cover.

Perhas in solidarity with the injured and infirm Tippy, my incessant poo was just pink dust, like the ruddy dust that Louisiana was once terrified world blow across the Atlantic Ocean from Africa.

Saliva of the desert. Searching for Buddha and water. A slice of the Buddha's wives. Angels in wheelbarrows, murmuring Heaven language. Angels with wings brutally torn off by bikers or the guys who killed Vincent Chin. God's consumption, the headless limits of Christ. Madman of Blood. Strangulators. There's nothing to kill for anymore. As the cartoon graveyard skeletons used to sing, the boner is connected to the pelvis bone, and it throbs to the Word of the Lord.

Coldweather again, dark and smarmy night. Sometimes Thump would find a pet that had been left outside, boil it and serve it up with plenty of salt and pepper. Catsup'd cat. Dog drumsticks; he tried to carve the dried legbones into a pair of functioning Rock drumsticks too, that resourceful craftsman tool. I visited the Museum, where the gila monster consoled me, nose to the glass whisperhissed greeting-card words of sympathy. Or, probably wanted a

cricket.

Tippy asked Thump if the toolbox was in the truck, thought of taking a screwdriver to his lymph nodes, staples in his gonads, testicles held in a vise or pushpinned down to the worktable. Tippy waited under the pliers. Sometimes he wished he could reach into his groin like the motor of a car, pull out handfulls of telephone wire there, spray the burnt insides with a special lacquer that would make everything OK. Pain like a can of spaghetti writhing, secretly roasted.

Bubbles rising like a picaro goat wineskin full of champagne. Pushpud felt like it'd been hit with a ninety-six pound hammer. A dick hardening like cement, in ancient midwest moundbuilders' shapes.

Blowing out his CO2 and acid blood from his anatomic dead space.

The decomposition of violent coitus, of patchparts catching cold, Tibetan tetanus toxin flowing in his veins like sesame sticks of destroyed muscle fibre. Sludgeblood. Chance becomes chanchre.

Burning like Hitler's house. The Stiff Man Syndrome, except where he wanted it stiff, now winding him up like a catapult, onager or giant crossbow. Love is killing you. Like a napalmed poodle whose flames spell "promiscuity". Dry ice and wet gangrene. Tippy was usually so tired after this ritual that the rehearsal ended early, not particularly advantageous to our sound.

Tippy must've been trying to snitch some eggs from a farmer's field like the weasel he was, snagged himself on barbed wire or got buckshot in the seat of the pants, yeah that must be it.

Was there ever a presidential candidate who specifically appealed to people with V.D.? What's the sexual equivalent of eating a blintz, putting on an Indian headdress? The Academy in Vienna

would say it antedates the womb, his problem had root before being conceived and he was born under a toadstool. The friendly doctor said it was like trying to heal the Cross. Burned with the Sterno of the Holy Ghost. You know Tippy blew smoke in the face of Christ. God would cough a defense against debauchery. Or is God in the gonorrhea?

You know, it's ironic, Tippy had vowed upon the surgical distortion of his nose never to see another damned doctor—which he may have confused with psychiatrist—only proving it never occurred to him to get the disease cured. There must've been some miracle recorded of a "virgin infection" where a celibate got V.D. For some reason, stuff like that too rarely hits the papers. When that five-yearold girl in Peru gave birth and broke the world's littleness record they never thought to interview the father. Tippy asked himself "Why worry about Venereal Disease when people's cars are being towed away this very moment?" Here he was worried about painful impotence when some people in the world don't even have cars in the driveway that run, for Chrissakes. There may have even been a cure for the disease in those days, for there was still science and the University mind. Maybe he's not really going mad from venereal disease, maybe he's just growing up. Of course everything could be cured, but this way makes a better story. Bear with me, dear, if you’re going to understand Tippy and the Chomps’ complexity.

Really.

A gold pastel sherbert chiffon haze passed over and settled on his, and the band’s, life. Tippy fell out of an airplane onto his head.

Creamy iridescences of which his discharge was only a microcosm, weird punk pinks and syphilitic rainbow oranges that were not so much a part of the sky as refractions of the curious poisons bubbling in the tunnels from groinfactory to brain. Sweet LaBrea tars and ancient mammal oils, surging beneath subway trains.

When the sky is as pink as a girl's belly magic is in the air. Not one of those ugly Michigan days when the trees are just too dark for the sky, like black shoes with a light suit.

August, dusk. Bluejays in the leafy trees, arguing. Cicadas like castanets. Jungle noises. Michigan's a jungle, but they don't call it that because it's mostly white people.

Summer birds that nyuck-

nyuck nyuck at dusk like that fat team comedian Cutey of the Chomps. That's a horse of a different nocturnal, flypaddies steaming underneath.

Summer sound of a cicada impersonating a rattlesnake or a spinning toy; imagine an animal impressionist on the Sligo Sunday Night Show.

The last summer sun falling really looks like woman's butt. The English might call it the Bum of the Sun Fireflies were invented for such LSD evenings.

Tippy’s disease was a stray hunter's bullet in the woods which kills a game warden. Shot a gun into the sun. He'd loved a cactus somewhere along the trail. Lovers had slipped in and out of his life like money. One more crowded thought: what made his shuffling conciousness think of things he didn't want to think? Can a blind man smoke a pipe? Just an eggnog-head, the spookiest internatural

harvestman. Little epiphanies of the haunted patio. He switched his brain to "Sputter". Like the Halley's Comet said by the grocery-store magazines to have brought and taken the space alien Mark Twain, needless to say there was a saucer flap in Aleppo when Tippy was crazily dying just as there was when he was born. A security guard or off-duty cop trying to make his daily ticket quota before nightfall— on the detail that investigated not cattle mutilations but reports of billboards chopped down by youth, Christmas decorations pierced by crossbow projectiles—threw the book at that UFO hovering outside that offered to take Tippy away, driving it shamefacedly into the stratospheric ozone. "In supreme irony" said the newspapers in their year-end summing up, peacefully and in a state of grace. This sky was like scraped, hurting flesh. Moments that really meant it. Where you could surf on the fire. Tippy would often have staredowns with the setting sun in the hot immoral Michigan Summertime.

TV weatherman Orange Julius had predicted a bright orangeade sunset that evening. Orange as earwax, conveying the true meaning of the guitar's sunburst finish. Tomorrow's sweet smell of a shingled house burning. Aromatic pollution, for the Ecology symbol like his favorite letter, the Everyman schwa. The clouds formed themselves into dark lakes, islands, and he counted no less than six tiny fissures caused by jet planes in the sky, jet trails like runny sperm. Looked up, saw two airplanes fucking. Only an optical illusion. Tippy would probably panic at my knowledge of disinfecting cities from the air.

Glue-impregnated cigarette stuck to the rim of his mouth as he kissed no one at the time. Burned lips from kissing the mouth of Hell, or at least his breath smelled that way. Telling his fortune by the white

clouds in his fingernails. He thought he saw a godess in a car, so devotionally sat on a pillar overlooking the highway for, oh, thirty-nine days or so. Sullen denim like a pouty acromelagous jaw. A lion’s pullover on the hiway. A straw in his eyes as the sunset all lit up, pushing him even further back into himself. Little rocks on the road, if only they could dance. Some oxen pulling cars tied to their horns.

Some dogs leashed or sewn by their tails together. Overhead squirrels sharpening their teeth by gnawing on telephone and power lines. The sun turns to a glob of shit in the sky, a turdball, a dung Beatle rolls over it with nonchalance. The sun enters a thick part of the sky. Where God is my tobacconist Like the slice of a razor blade into an aluminum ruler, the shock of realizing you're someplace you weren't supposed to go. Tippy's tempesttime was over, but so were the days when everybody could be pleased. Never had there been a failure like the future.

Sundrop. The first sudden hushed vacuous moments after sundown like moments after sex, bursting swash in a certain grim peach heat and the confidence that comes with it. Strange irresistable langour dusk. Night curtained on down. Clouds at night like skeleton bones, a big piece of pelvis floating by. Clouds in the sky like piles of skulls. Cloud cuckoo land. A ring of a dove in Ringolove. Finely tuned like the rings around an onion. A landscape so vague it makes you think about things. Two Night Hell. Full moon shines like a lunacy clarion, and Michigan lunacy is the highest form of that condition there is. Tippy was still out there. Under that shaghaircut moon. The Earth was epileptic on its axis, wandered confusedly its rotation around the Sun like a beaten-up teacher who'd

lost his glasses. Outskirts of town, in these moonlit backyards the beasts hung their breasts, slunk under station wagons. Doctors in the moonlight this acupuncture summer, cancermovers. It's been a full moon for almost a month now. Butt-naked thoughts, shooting the Moon inside the Mind. Shooting the Mom. A monster called the EatYour-Mother. Tippy had literally fucked all the girls in the world, and now he was comin' on to my Mom. Still living in your mother's womb, eh, Roq? The moon is God's girlfriend. What God did was took a bit of fire from his face the sun to use as a lubricant, then threw a bit o' semen into the sky to cool in the reflection of the seawater and that was her. But that was winter, the cold moon that drifts by, an aesthetic of dead trees and impending ice under the silvery girl-full moon. You know, those days of Coral and I. That minute Tippy may have actually thought about Coral. Did not know her loveabouts or whoreabouts of her jar, the whoreajar. Tried to apply a halfremembered Beatles song to the occasion, but it didn't fit. She knew me when I had the erection, he sighed. Talked you into kissing my brain. Now I have to shoot her. It got through the psychological cotton. Tippy's heart all wound up, hanging on its rubber bands like the motor on a propellor'd balsawood airplane, going flap flap flap around like a broken window shade, like the spring pulled out and stretched from the old kind of ball-point pen that went click. Across town Coral felt a pang of the old destruction in her abdomen. She harrumphed, mascara'd and perfumed and continued to ready herself for tonight's big Tippy and the Chomps concert.

Mind in a ditch. Trigger brains on rodent wavelengths. Boxing the unconcious or merely boxing with the unconciousness?

Confused his unconcious and his unctuousness. Losing his balance on the slippery shelf of the self left Tippy cool and impure.

We don’t have much time for the interview, so why don’t you ride along in the van with us. So, you can because you’re wearing two pairs of tights? Ha ha, that’s rich. C’mon.

Engine rumble clattered at the other end of the bridge, and it was us, adrenechromed and ready for the Rock n’ Roll rumble.

Thump was driving the van, snarled We’ve been looking all over for you, man. He pulled up and hornked, honkied the horn and Tippy kind of dazed, wobbly, half-jumped in.

Seeing my friend before tonight’s musico-gladiatorial combat, I reflected upon Tippy's astounding growth from 1) violence against the audience, throwing himself and leaping upon them; 2) sex with the audience; 3) self-sex onstatge, playing with himself until release: a perfect Ouroboros feedback loop.

Oh wait, that wasn't the order, was it?

The rest of the band are both his smart gift-giving Magi and the bumbling, egregious instrument-smashing Trio of Chomps. We were fortune's criminals, fortune's clods on LSD horses. Entropy poppies, sniffed by a gibbous God. The Dreaded Think Big. Webelos, Manitou, Ice-floe Bison, Wendigore or Waligore, something is slouching towards Bethlehem to be born here. Should I have been skeptical? Muttering to himself, Dink nursed a marlon brandy. Thump stomped the equipmentful chugging van onto the expressway that'd take us to our triumphant homecoming at the

Motorsburgh Goliathdome, which area churchgoers liked to call The Golgothadome.

My incessant lists, you say, a Temptation of St. Dog-andPony show. Through it all, the grand Kabuki of Rock continued with a band that brings small dogs onstage, squeezes them to make them squeal, cry. Another band that burns puppies’ feet onstage, to make them jump through hoops, and girls’ feet to make them dance. For a while there was a child—a band that brings children onstage called the Must We Watch...? Finally, masquerading as a group, just a human face up there. I’m not quite sure what I think about the Versimilitudes, the so-called Epitomes, or the Contradictions who sang with such terrible diction. The Ideas, the Impersonals, the Truculents, the Censurers, the Expatriates, absinthe divorcées the Absentee Ballots, the Moderately Well Offs, the Astrays, the Routines, the Questionnaires, the many Viewpoints. Roque Rumraisin’s big Latin band Los Flan. “Hydrogen Mind” by the Artificial Memoes vied for the number one slot with the Genetic Engineers’ “Electrogenetics”. The Alembics’ “More Hiroshimas” album and tape inched out the Patricians, the Polemics, the recurrent Themes, the Appurtenances, Abcissa and the Fat Girls, the Bulletins, the Bores and the Under Milkwoods. According to Mom, Suzy and the Pimps broke up and reformed as Peter and the Prostitutes. By this time I could barely listen to the Hyperorganizers, the Catchwords, the Recent Essays, the Researchers, the Library Bindings, the Forms, the Manuscripts, the Wits, the Vocabularies, or those art school bands the Mere Facades and the Tabula Rasas, more tabula than rasa. Shakespearian band called the Ay There’s the Rub, falcon

boners straining their codpiece breeches. All-ventriloquist groups like the Dummies. An album “Songs As Yet Unformed”, by the As Yet Unformed, whose lyrics had characteristic false starts, hummed passages and “da-de-dums” or “lu-la-loos” for long stretches. A tour more boring than a bad basketball game or book promotion tour, by singer Johnnie “Frankie” Brillbuildingsroman.

My radio was getting such poor reception when the charts were filled with with the Tempters, the Temper Tempers, the Icthyologists, the Panderers and (from Chinatown) the Pandas, roly-poly dance band with bamboo-shoot amplifiers and snow onstage. The Rock of Iraq album from the Tomb of Mausolus Band, originally pariah dogs fighting for scraps of offerings left by visitors at the wondrous and holy site, now suited up properly.

It didn’t make much sense for the Litmus Papers to bill themselves as the World’s Only Hydroponic Band but they did anyway. The What’s the Big Idea? A band called, or that plays for, the full Twenty-Four Hours. A Rockstar who never opens his eyes onstage. Airport bands whose haircuts resembled White Courtesy Telephones. Music made by hitting neutron-coated cigarettes together, or using said cigarettes for drumsticks. A band looking for a lost watch or contact lens onstage. A band of men made of sand. The telephony music of the Long Dissonance Operators. Nevertheless, they lacked the essentials of Class, Pull, Charisma and Sex. For that matter, could Rock be termed a discipline? Judging by the bands’ names, it’s inclusive enough. An argumentative band the First Principles, I mean what kids would call their band the Principals?

Obviously, college students. One night I saw the Circumlocutions fast-talk the Eloquents right off the stage, the Mispronounciations playing the opening set for comedy relief. The Algorhythms.

Academic novelty acts like Abie Dee. The LSD Brothers, three twins named Larry, Ben and Roger, each with a different-sounding version of “Message to the Toke World”. The tithing Laughingmatters’ Tacky Phil Axis album. Black Pigeon Productions. The Klein Bottles. The Prime Numbers Divided, the Takeaways and the Remainders, the Splines, the Mail Order Misfits. The Interestingmen. The Superassumptions' Superassumptionsuppression album.

The Electroplantagenets. Guys, especially thinking ones, liked the electronic weirdassness of Robotsex, its synthesized blorps and bleeps provided by young but professorial-looking Ozobe M. Ebozo, whose name was a palindrome. But girls figured the band's name prefigured rapidfire lack of romantic sustain and rhythmic variation, so avoided them after concerts.

Bands with obscuro poetry-book names like the Dishes Need Rinsing—now damned if that’s Rock n’ Roll. I have to take some credit as band names got more complicated, ha ha, it’s me and my pernicious poetry influence. The Several Good Ideas, the Thoughtprovokers, The Reductioadabsurdummen. A band of highschool journalists called the That’s All We Knows. You know those guys? Cool. Bands with names like the Things We Forgot to Do. The I Wouldn’t Hazard a Guess. The Headscratchers were baffled by the contortionist chords of the Backscratchers. I’m really tempted to play something by the The Ends. “Shiftless”, a pretty

good mood-shifting instrumental, by the Paradigm Shifters. In one of the last bands everybody had a Ph.D. The band-qua-band the Eternal Verités, which nobody in Michigan understood. Bands with erroneous math formulae for names or names of songs like /x+2/=/x-2/.

Ultimately, a Rock star called ___, just lines of implication.

Heading to the gig in a bucket of night. Under a sacrosanct sky. Grey and windy nocturne, Kahoutek weather in a dog doo universe. A night of cloudless crimes, of offbeat cloudlessness. A night as black as magic markers. No, there were some opossum clouds that drifted across the night sky. Debris of the night.

Tonight concert marks our first anniversary as a band, and what a motherfucking year it's been. Tippy has gone from pupa of Rock to its most impressive butterfly monarch. A befuddled Tippy couldn’t comprehend how the car radio just kept playing his songs without him producing more or even listening.

Three times recently Threadbear thinks him the Rock (or possibly Mock) Christ, dismissed Tippy as washed up like Saint PeePee did our Lord, in print. Used the same Scriptural metaphors, writing his fervent Gospelography of Rock.

Tippy began to write even darker songs, about cumstained shadows and the like. The final songs were just lewd, as if Tippy’s pud had run away with him: There’s something about her underpussy

Something about her underpussy There’s something about that underpussy n-n-now.

Not a hit parade. I came up with a convincing riff, but it wasn’t our best. He was no longer our best brat, our golden magic beast.

Just another roast pig with an apple in his mouth.

Tippy played a gig under an assumed name at Doctor Mudd College, founded by the personal physician of John Wilkes Booth.

Not where Lincoln went to college! Voice like a vaporiser in a shutin's sickroom, drapes pulled and softly, clinically dark. It was the sound of blowing one's nose with a mouthful of ice cubes at noon in Beverly Hills. Oratory as slapstick. His voice had a trace of the fossil about it, a mystery Bronx cheer. Part of his native tongue shot away.

Flying blind and ugly as an unborn bat. He was swollen, gray, blindly and aimlessly moving from side to side like a piston-eating shark from the bottom of the Motorsburgh River, that Old Man River. The set was largely mad up of Tippy’s late simpleton songs, hoarsely croaking You better run, like a runt, to the cunt… which Threadbear accurately called back-to-the-womb lyrics.

Our cry for help.

No, none of this was true. Threadbear just made it, something to write as the world waited for Tippy’s return, subsequent redemption. I worried too about the singing part though.

And the Beast Goes On. The way of the samurai is death.

This coughing, wheezing may have been the pneuma of the Holy Ghost, but I doubt it. The last note Elvis sung onstage in Vegas,

the amplifier hum that remained as he strode offstage (though he’ll never die). That aeolipile wind, turn turn turn, diesel humping. You can bet Rudolf Diesel disappeared to the same place Jimmy Hoffa is; find the truck and you'll find the driver.

I was determined the final concert would be a good one. All the German words I knew, ein Gotterdammerung, gesamtkunstwerk, kristallnacht and walpurgisnacht all rolled into one. As it turns out, this was Devil’s Night and all over Motorsburgh kids were celebrating with mischief. We’d barely turned off the freeway when fireworks lit our path. Or were they riots? Will a wildcat strike butane? Thump pulled the van up to the stage door of impresario Estimado el Doctor Rough Grate’s latest venue, the pompously named Palazzio della Michigia. This place used to be a showy car dealership, I remember the ads on TV. A diminuitive fan Judessa—that’s the female form of Judas—ran up and kissed Tippy. She kissed him like a glove full of teeth, so to speak, and for once he didn’t look glad. Motorsburgh, by the way, had just come out with a big car called the Iscariot; I think they thought it sounded like the French Riviera way of saying “chariot”. On the front of the Palazzio the pillars’ marble pattern was turning into pizza, largely from the drips and layers of hastily spritzpainted graffiti. Chiseled from a rock that George Washington had kissed, a baloney stone that sat in the center of the university campus for many centuries accumulating layers of student pigment, polychrome and fratboy piss. There are salt mines under Motorsburgh, like the catacombs of Paris, and the dressing rooms

were down in them, two tiny stalls, toilets removed. Tippy, fatigued, looked at a piece of plywood and thought it was a mirror. Before the show, down there Dink poured himself into cheap button-down bottom-shelf worrisome whiskies like Crystal Solace and House of Integrity. Meanwhile I quaffed, nay, scarfed down a family-sized bag of potato chips and a couple bottles of ranch dressing, safely coating any strong emotions, filling the eternal well of angst from being weaned too brutally early.

Shivering with premonition: this was not going to end well.

My stomach churned like Molly Pitcher’s 18th-century butter.

Looking for the Men’s Room, I opened a door, and there saw Coral pleasuring the rest of the band. My orgiatrix was running the proceedings, while serving as the hub of a great roiling, rolling wheel of humping. Or maybe it was another band. Or maybe the plump, shaghaircut girl wasn’t Coral. Sorry, just looking for something! I hastily shut the door, proceded down the hall.

Tippy announced he decided we'd perform a new song-cylcle ritual called "The Disemboweled Child", expecting me to stormtroop around in a full Fidelio Fidel’s Field Marshal's uniform onstage. But was he only making fun of me, and my queasy guts, at the same time? I didn't think it was a very good idea, but went along with it and changed clothes backstage. Perhaps in unconscious protest I farted like a vaporetta across the length of the Venice lagoon-of-avaudeville stage.

We peered from behind the scenes. The stage curtain was smoldering hemp so the crowd mellowed, remained in their seats.

Young women in dresses designed by firemen, pea-bra’d girls, who’d

hitch-hiked all the way from Santa Vulva, NM or Placenta, CA to see Tippy in his element, his natural habitat. Faint copulations going on in the corners, but nothing like us in our heyday. Children were tossed to the fierce guards, “Here’s some rape candy”. Storm policemen. Guys who raped the Buddha in prison shouting “You’re an arhat, or what?” Somebody in the audience was dancing with a bleeding sacrificial lamb or goat, like they used to a beach ball or sagging helium balloon. Some kind of concept, like antientertainment. Filthpuppies of the audience, spies in microfilm condoms. The football-playing Four Horseman of the pockmarked lips. For I had told the police to be there, having socialized with them on the rifle and pistol ranges earlier that day.

Tippy looked out over the audience of botulous tots and confused spotty kids. The simple, sad, frightened faces of nineteenth-century syphilitics caught in the act. Children plump at birth who promptly withered, though such births rarely occur, as the mother is excused—given a corridor pass—from that pregnancy. A baby half-cooked, gums turned to werewolf pus and spiny “test teeth”.

They waved and chopped the air with weird fanning nails and cut piano-webbing hands as they so-called danced. One finger like a ring itself, or fingers burned off like styrene plastic monster models touched by flame, a blackened bubbly mess. Hands like garden tools or feet like socks filled with falling sand or billiard balls. Mirror people in fly fights of self-sacrifice, blackened by radio and the popular press.

Their buboes had resulted in extensive destruction of fact. Yeah, that’s our crowd.

Girls like patchily furred birds now. Clown women. A horrible old hag woman catcalled from the laughing, gurgling audience, “I fucked too much when I was little”. From the stage you could smell the orchiditis in her old milk. Speaking of which, Coral was in the audience too, plumply grinning in the front row. Coral was sixteen and extinguished. Tonight was her birthday so she was celebrating by coming to the concert. No longer stray cat age but a grown up, in dog years. She looked more like the Devil in widows’ weeds, a shredded designer’s devilswidowsfood dress. Still hot, Coral, it’s you not Tippy whose mirror should be everyone else’s face.

Tonight the moon is Mom’s powderpuff floating in a sea of dark whisky. A bar undersea where octopii drink fermented ink. Under a big lager moon, rye liquor lagoons, Dink dashed down to enjoy a couple of Drug-and-Beers before the show. Dink drank his way into and out of sexuality, and that included musical stage performance.

The Chomps were supposed to go on soon but where was Dink? As an April Fool's prank (for Devli’s Night), Thump had put shards of glass instead of crushed ice in Dink's drink, but by this time his stomach was so messed up he barely noticed.

Dink's delerium tremens, early death. Given wine infused and fortified by Satan himself.

Dink's horrible death when he tried to drive a truck full of nitroglycerine dynamite over a rope bridge on an epoxy mountain pass. No, that was Thump. I’m getting ahead of myself here.

He was found in the store parking lot by several of the former college students—now assistant professors—that he used to ask to go in and buy booze for him. I’m not going to Alcoholics Ominous, drooled Dink, then whimpered he just wants a happy lifetime drunk and disorderly. Plum-colored nose like a bursting grape, like a turgidly veined dick. Dink was already dead drunk, asleep in the night snow never to wake up. I hadn’t realized, this was the day Michigan lowered the drinking age; Dink turned eighteen, gave up drinking, died. His body shriveled up like a white raisin or piece of chalk under a blackboard. Liquid justice.

Poor Dink. He was driving the truck—Thump was abusing a schoolgirl in the back, so of course we let the drunkest guy drive— and he didn't notice the railroad bridge was low, for he was amusedly admiring how some prankster wag had painted the logo of his electric train set upon it instead of seeing the warning sign. He smashed into the low bridge, and his liver—already softened to goose paté by alcoholism—went splattering out of his ripped bely upon the pavement like savory spread upon a cracker. Police sealed him in a can—thump offered one of his drums—as toxic waste for disposal. If they had not, his corpus would literally get the ground drunk.

We were glum that night in the Firehouse.

We lost the best bassplayer in the band.

There was no widow, even informal fave groupie that we had to inform and console. As Dink said, with drink man doesn’t need a woman, cradling his bottle of vodka the way other men his age cradle their toddler sons. Dink fathered no kids but he might’ve found

homunculii at the bottom of some of those bottles. Mezcal worm as human embryo and hey, human fetuses and their little brothers look like pink elephants, right? Thread alcohol. The d.t.’s of orgasm. His bod-alcohol level was over 100 percent. Mudlavender face twisted into a parody of a smile. Dink always figured when he didn’t want to be a bassplayer any more he’d turn in his Zoo Key, put his hands in the lion’s cage at the Motorsburgh Zoo at feeding time. Bassplayer’s block, as big as the Chateau Marmoset Hotel, where he fell out of many windows (while Tippy fell out of merry widows). Dink died at a Mexican volcano full of wine called Muscatelpetl, had nursed plans to go to Jamaica to record an album Electric Rum, sing “Gonna Rock You Like Your Favorite Beverage”. When word got back to his booze buddies, they planted a tree outside the bar exactly where he pissed when he came out of it drunk and bladderful. Those days he went around with a hovercraft-sized hangover. He was drinking Grand Finales, toasting memories of tying one on. A beer cocktail made of alcohol, tobacco and firearms. Satin hangovers. He drank a lacy port. Dink, drunk as the crown jewels. The fizziness, fuzziness of drunken sincerity. Beer tastes like an animal, sweaty sometimes. I’m only sincere when I’m drunk. A booze star he’d become, one of those human flames living on the edge of conviction.

I had warned Dink about drinking Old Flatulence before a gig, especially onstage in white pants.

Could barely get the band jobs—or credit—in bars like the Vomitorium towards the end. A vomiting corpse. A skinny Mexican dog tried to lead drunken Dink home safely, but he ignored it, shoved

it away, got lost and cold, died. Evidently he just couldn’t handle success. May have muttered something about fun. Everybody returns to the fetal position in death and Dink was no exception.

When they pumped him full of enbalming alcohol the peace returned to his face, somewhat. In death Dink the drunk’s skin, already tanned from the liver outward, was stretched into a drumhead. Boom ba doomb-a doom.

JesusMaryJoseph! cry the Irish when they drink. Dink the drunk probably asked on his deathbed are there any religions where you have to drink to see, or talk with, God? knowing there are several where you can’t drink alcohol, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, etc.

Anoint me about a bottlesworth from those. Here, hava nagila.

Christ’s heavy drinking, wine was flowing, man. I guess to Dink booze was the Iiquefied form of God. Drank a mitred litre from a hollow archbishop. Opening a jar of Jesus. For others, Drink equals forgetting God. . The expensive stuff tasted the same as the cheap.

Still, I would like to know every cell of myself. Angels borrowed money from him, saying “God needs it”. At death, they offered to pay him back, and that’s when he knew something was wrong. “Guess I ain’t been washing in lucky suds” he mumbled, then softly died. An ego passage into the earth. Where Dink had been standing was only a tiny steaming puddle of piddle. Piss’ delusions of the deluge, the power of the universe harnessed in his urine. He had pissed his life away like water on the ground, pissed on the canvas.

On Dink’s death I stood up and said, Hey, consecrate that beer for Christ! When Dink died we didn’t save and eat his liver, which was a

shame for it would’ve been a good classy wine-flavored paté. He gave up, hence died. Why, these aren’t tears. Somebody was throwing eggs, must’ve chucked it to hit my eye.

For this final gig, we enlisted a substitute bassist, mysterious government provocateur? Aldebbie himself? as substititue at the last gig, perhaps an assassin. All murky, unclear.

Oh wait, I stepped over to the bass.

Too band about Dink, but that’s OK, somebody in management said, because we’ve brought over this guy from Aldebbie’s band to handle the guitar, and so you can play the bass tonight Roque. Just for this one gig. A repulsive idea, from my point of view. Demoted to Gravitas, I guess. Low muscular masculine rumble. That's good, right? I’m Thump's worthy brother now.

Guitarist? That’s Swill Fishbrain, who used to sell Tippy strong drugs. Son of Louie Louie.

No, that doesn’t bother me. No Sir. I’ve always liked the sound of that instrument. This was the most embarassing moment in my life, second to when I wouldn’t go onstage and had stage frights, staying in my hotel room for that big famous New Joke gig everybody wrote and still talks about. You knew that was when the roadie, now also deceased, assumed guitar duties, didn’t you?

You didn’t? Aw, I shouldn’t have brought it up then.

Evidently this changing of the guard had been contemplated by Aldebbie and the Megamanangement business staff for some time, and Dink’s demise was just an excuse to implement it, now, tonight.

Supposedly Swill had better leadership qualities, which meant more

complicated, “more contemporary” lead guitar stylings. Despite his eye makeup and marabou haircut, he reminds me of the academic, scrubbed and beard-trimmed “hippie” who teaches guitar in the high school, Barry Dismantleman. The guest star’s dressed in black. This idiotic hired gun now on guitar, me demoted to secondary bass—like second banana Louie Chomp!—to replace the beloved sound of the shambling drooling Dink. I was basely snookered over to bass guitar and the other guitarist brought in. A mini-crisis from which I never recovered. This was Aldebbie’s idea of a “Motorsburgh Sound”.

All right, damn it, I’ll play the bass. Dink’s bass had been as sweet as a dead drunk’s vomit. Press-ganged into it, my bass playing is all notes like little thumbnail morons. Seminal thuds, thuggish and plodding as Thump’s drums. Thump drummed grimly, admirably, wheels of experience. I mean, can a bass line be considered a body of literature?

Sweat on my gingerbread forhead. In Vietnam when scared like this the junior officers would pray Father Frag Us. In the excitement I let out a terrific fart, a sickly green glow enveloping my legs, everybody’s legs, rolling out of my rear loins like it was dry ice fog under colored lights or something. Belch dreams. Bass guitar farts. Can music smell foul? A song “Lunatic Attack” only underscored the ugly orgasms in the music. The other guy birdhanded, behindhanded, evenhanded on guitar but that’s not the idea. People unclear of the concept of a band. Wrong path.

Perhaps I’ve already plotted my revenge for this outrage. Or, perhaps maybe not.

To break the icy mood paralyzing the room, I made some kind of vaudeville-quality Jewish joke. Tippy kinda looked at me quizzically, "Dude, you know I'm not Jewish, right?”

Silence. The gaping maw of the universe, and all selfassurance within, opens up.

“Yeah, Roque. Midwesterberg is an old Norse, a Vineland Viking, sailed up into the heart of the woodchopping northern midwest. Like, haven't you noticed, I'm not even circumspect, when I've whipped it out and waved it from the stage?"

Naw, I haven't noticed, I'm now embarrassed (when you’re bare-assed) to say. I always averted my eyes, uncomfortable if I hadn't looked away. Some things you just don’t look at in your band.

This is confusing. I turned away, started fiddling on my unplugged guitar, playing the song Shoot Everyone on TV which Tippy always takes as a personal insult, lampooning something he believes in, and he snaps back “Well I don't think there ever was a Hitler”, which hurt me as he ran away laughing. Tippy your father teaches at Gipetto Gestapo Ghetto University, nyaah nyaah. Tippy had never been any help at all in our kid cruelty and elitism. Didn't believe, didn’t share in our great worrisome concern about our sensationalist ghost-andgolem stories, tales of wailing walls, the shul in the stables and forelocks on the final Four Horsemen’s fetlocks.

Tippy said he didn't want to be a racist but only rascal-ish. Hey, you're not being fun.

The guy doing the light show during the final performance was a longtime acidhead named Todd Liebstod. Not like the "happy

death" of a million thousand orgasms oceanically dissolving into those fructose girls, though he tried his trippy level best to approximate the experience with transparent colors, heat and wobbly fluids on the hot projector plate. All some kind of metaphor for our state of minds, our collective emotions. Or not.

May Dink’s death be the happiest, any place on Earth, tonight.

Yes, we had succumed to the temper of the times and resorted to one grand stage prop. The great blue aluminum swimming pool Tippy had ordered constructed onstage was supposed to facilitate his comeback, his supposedly “Pop” single “Do the Dolphin”, yet it could be just as easily be primed with electric cables, electric hedgeclippers dropped in or filled with pirhanas. The pool was a septic sludgepond, certified a federal unsanitary evil by the Wartenhog County Soiled Pants Abatement District. Something about Tippy’s soul was like the lakes you’d skip the last sunny days of the school year to visit, clear on the top of his deepdown slime, sticky green toehold at bottom.

The green rainwater the pickles live in. His straining heat-oxygen soul, and its supersoul. Consequently his best songs had their origin deep in the psychic sludgepond, creatures of the crankcase-oil depths; the sound of the floor of garages across America.

Tippy knew he’d do his last show naked to show he had nothing to hide. Dressed like a cloud, nude of honor because he saw so honest. Disguised as a barefact, the madam-I’m-Adam of Rock would go out of this world the way he came in. This show would come off swimmingly. As the surface of the Earth is three-fourths water so is the human body, but Tippy was up to about ninety-nine

percent that evening. Hey, how sweet, they’ve drained the pool and refilled it with amniotic fluid, thought Tippy. Wearing just a starfish onstage, you know where. Barnacles on his face, a seagreen massage reflected in my own coralesque brilliantined hair. His heart was putt-putting like an outboard motor, propelling him around with little duck-noises. I could never understand how he was weightless.

Me at the side of the stage, stern and expressionless behind lifeguard sunglasses, my bass the trident in my role as the Poseidon of Rock.

The audience roiled, anticipation, impatience, obeisance. Front row girls like Goering's new bison enclosure on his hunting estate in 1934. Guys who had made fun of our penis sizes in fourth grade Boys’ Gym showers were now serious State Senators, Insurance Agents or Realtors. Who had paid serious money to scalpers for tickets to our show. Haw! Score!

Horace had paid exorbitantly to get a pair of catbird seats. I was surprised to see Horace Mars there beside Coral, but since improper drugs were found in Coral’s bedroom hope chest, he insisted he chaperone this event. Or, to apologize for parentally losing his temper, in child-rearing neuroses in these changing times.

During the sound check he sauntered up the steps at the side of the stage, he took me aside, and now asked if I thought she should attend an expensive eastern arts-and-finishing school, or instead should endeavor to be a big-city call girl with a prestigious area code, try her luck with impressive clientele of men of consequence.

Moments before, calm and philosophical Coral tried to dissuade him. “Oh, daddy, Roque wouldn’t remember me. He’s a famous Rock musician, he’s had millions of girls by now.”

No, baby, it’s Tippy, and Rock n’ Roll, that keeps the abortion industry humming like Harry Fuct’s factory assembly lines and foundries, affectionately porking the millions. And it’s you, imprinted like a towering scientist upon a hatchling baby duck, whom I’ll always, always remember.

One morning I had bought a consecrated host at a garage sale (someone snitched it one Sunday morning) and brought it into the hospital, hid it under Tippy's bedsheets, though I knew the soiled, drenched things would soon be changed. Just as I had slipped one into the back pocket of his silver plastic stage pants the night of the final concert. The night he exploded onstage. I hadn't told you that?

Sorry.

Tippy was feeling understoned. And he looked pretty bad.

Tippy’s face had changed, his maxillaries were downright military.

Monstrously imposing, like a Humanitou up north. The reincarnation of a carcinoma. A nervous stork-looking bat. Better say an epoxy Doxology. Why do you think they call it a Passion? Eyes gleaming like horses’ genitals, those rubbish eyes. In Michigan Chief Joseph and Pontiac beat him up. Masturbating with his stigmatized hands and feet, though it was Oedipus not Christ who died of astigmatism.

That’s cruel, like making fun of Judy Garland or something.

The last Tippy and the Chomps gig of the summer was to be in sports area called the Golgothadome. To a certain extent, every concert had been a Gologotha, a Station of the Cross, a Trail of Tears. He remembered the story I told him about the captured soldier who committed suicide when he pulled a hangnail tearing all the way to the vein in his wrist (some accounts said neck). Tippy had only just recently started calling his nuts his devils’ dice. He was just singing graffiti-words, stiff everywhere with that exception. A cockroach with no arms or legs on its back in a coma at the bottom of the sea, that’s what all this was worth to him now, the sum total of him.

Before the concert I ran into the fetid washroom, shitted thunderously and shudderingly. You’re too young to have hemorrhoids, they all said.

OK, I'll admit, I was nervous as Saint Peter shaving three times before the cock crows. Splashing extreme unction on his skin afterwards. The opening band was in devil suits, cloven hooves, horns and pointy arrowhead tails. Devils in ski masks wheeled onstage like decomposed corpses frozen to guitars. Peasants in Parliament, I had on a hemorrhage-color turtleneck, over bleeding penitente guitar. Creaky as a big buzzing freighttrain’s genitalia, the fraudulent bass guitar thrumbled like a big dark squid moving, octopuissant inky chords. We were the loneliest band on earth.

Tippy thought I was going to like his idea of making provisions for the rest to the band to die with him in the Hindoo wives’ custom of suttee, that I’d relish poison gas rising out of the stage. Or he could do a ballet in a car onstage and then run all over us, innocent priests

under the tires gaping with surprise. As every Tippy and the Chomps show was as passionate as seeing a dog run over by a car rolling several furlongs more on the autobahn, or one dog excitedly biting off another’s paw. Tippy had of late—our last concerts before his hospitalization—been punishing himself by rolling in pushpins onstage, rolling into cubes of shattered windshield gllass. Came out once with his arm both swarming with pissed-off bumblebees.

Tonight he’d be cutting into an elephant’s trunk for sure.

First power chord. He bikini’d, bimini’d onstage, a human heart dancing on rusty nails, dancing on a lie. A nervewracked dancer.

Candylegs dancing. Cadaver dancing. Who’s kidding whom? Who is the whore? Velocity with horns. Horns that pop. Ready to call out final words to the department. Sweat flowing porifically, through his pores. Force-feeding himself the microphone. A hat woven into hair, tea for hair, teats for hair. Fists holding teeth, teeth in his sweetstomach. Now he was waving a loaded gun onstage, at least a derringer. Perhaps he’d kiss it passionately, perhaps he’d seen that Saturday morning cartoon show about crotchety bearded Hemingway, ketchup all over Idaho. Talking gun to gun. Some cowboy lassoo’ed him, roped by sweet swivel heart in his tennisracket chest. The Roaster, the Hot One. A sword or dinner knife without much blade, a silver knife. Maybe stardom had always been a subtle form of death and the more famous you get the more enbalmed, limited in choice of action by myth, the more you are dead.

Maybe he’d set up a long picnic table onstage and eat until he dies there, I could relate. Or have an operation that wasn’t a success, a funny celebrity revealed at the end to be the surgeon! Tippy wanted

to have a mature death-out. He would leave rock n’ roll to talented young men whose lives end up working for shoe stores or as carpenters. It must be the Apockalips because I saw the car with “LIPS” stencilled on the door drive by. Milky chrome and still alone.

“Alleluia” is Catholic for the Negro sprituals’ “Hallelujah!” y’know. Yet Satan must demand that crowds keep shouting “Boogie!, which never made sense to me.

Showtime. In that light the band looked like Jesuses with his Dad’s Divine Powertools. The Baby Jesus everywhere, and putti with tuxedo wings dancing up a very choreographed routine. Crowd a population of rubies, red and hard and sharp-edged. People in 3-D glasses ringing the stage, staring in Arthur Bremer amazement. The roar of the graveyard. We appeared with a contingent of huntsmen blowing hunting horns and duck calls. Guards with drawn revolvers ringing the stage, hired gods ringing the stage like phallic herms.

Great amplifiers shaped like swans, groupies shaped like swans even. Everybody in the country had gotten fired from their jobs that day, told to pack up their lunchboxes, clean out their desks or lockers but hightail it, so they came home mad and were ready for capital-E entertainment. Nobody sleeps tonight. Especially Motorsburgh.

“The Mask of Twenty Ferrets” tightened on his face. Nervous to the touch like a sock full of nettles. Wheezing police sirens in his throat. Shake shoulders. A shipwrecked sheik. Poor polluted shagsoul, speckled with sin shit. A fly is quite a peacock to a shit, shimmering blue wings buzzing with pride. Microphone equals Cross, and that’s Tippy hanging himself upon it up there. Give him

enough microphone cord, his own petard hoisted by his own declarations. Give him a gibbet! Give him back his own giblets, and vas deferns. The mic cord his hamstrings, and vice versa. Let him stew in his own juices. Like a dog, stage-manged. Tonight we’re makin’ razorblade sauce. The cat-in-the-kibbutz, the cat o’ the woods, a cat on a pole who doesn’t really need to be rescued by firemen. The decorum of a scorpion. Christian Science Monitor lizards. All the self-knowledge of a snake. Tippy continued to delight, and for a while we called him The Ego. He was the passenger pigeon of Rock, the last of a dying new breed. The only child of God, that is, God. God was such a brat spoiled by omnipotence, cool stuff like bullying Job, catastrophes. A lucid beast. The Devil and Daniel Boone, both of whom muttered Cops and robbers, Egyptians and Jews Little to win and nothing to lose…

I mean, how could you trust a guy like that? Always flying off the handle, always the handle himself. Still, it was a good concert so far, Tippy’s voice sounding like the roar of the crowd. Echoes in the plantetarium. Love in a state of disrepair. His voice never sounded better, he scared dogshit right off the sidewalk in front of the theatre till they took a spatula and smeared it around the back of his throat for septic protection. “Lemme hear ya say HELL”. This grand Blasphemicon, accurate in its blasphemetrics measuring exactly, to the nth deree, the distance from the swearwordster, the curser, to God. The crowd cried back, “Pay Attention”. Minimalized men and membranes merely hissed. This guy stands up, gives a speech so

his wife can remain perpetually in promiscuity. The audience laughed, roared with chainsaw teeth. Tigers in chairs like teeth, with choirlike teeth. A sacrificial village. A kid shooting a staplegun at the stage, at that folded piece of paper, his exposed cock, dancing up there. I think that little Rock acolyte might’ve been at the Science Fair gig, learning his violence at the very root from us, now here to reduce the favor. The kid with him hurled a beaker of LSD, which burst against Tippy’s cranium and horribly disfigured his face, which later appeared on billboards with a glowering, judgemental cop looking down at him asking rhetorically “Why Do You Think They Call It Acid...?” Scarred yet aristocratic as the Phantom of the Operation.

We played "Well-Muscled Eye" and "Devil in Her Room". A good version of "In Your Face's Mind's Eye", my guitar alternately morbid and mordant, the aforementioned Wagnerian and vaginal. Big mounting crescendo, like from Von Antisemitte's opera "Der Menstruationsingers von Nurd."

Plenty of sparkmuscle, at least from me and Thump.

Tippy sang: I hate to be the human toilet Ain’t gonna be America’s toilet with all the agonies of the Vietnam War, race relations, the generation gap or something.

Now a stumblebum stagefright. Corpse-footed, whereas once he danced.

When the Presidential assassin-wannabe wrote "Mars is getting closer every year" I perked up, thinking he meant Coral Mars

and myself. No such luck.

A new song "Crawlspace of Love", about squirming beneath the mobile home he grew up in. I'd never heard Tippy almost nostalgic.

The Michigan animals in the little zoo were let out and supposed to be shot or euthanized with gas, but the assigned sloppy sentimental grad students failed to do te job. On the prowl, they were hungry for revenge, especially after Tippy's (and, in fairness, other high school jocks) abuse of them unforgotten years before, their pack led by the gila monster on the Museum mezzanine, now grown to Quonset hut-size and ornery as Hell. I sure hope they don't find us tonight, storm the stage.

Or, the animals all forgave him. Which story do you believe?

The band? We were expendable. He glanced over at me, shovels for hands on that graveyard of a guitar. I answered with a sullen bass line. Was this Rock’s Life Crisis Ritual? Suddenly we were both pretty scared, as if every loyalty between him and us, the guys in the band, was broken, like the labels of 45 r.p.m. records that dissolve when left out in the rain. No more building bridges between Scylla and Charybdis. We’re stoned on Hell. But for just a moment we sounded real good; whoops, it’s over and we’re just playing.

Tippy cut off our tails (guitar cords) with a carving knife. We must’ve been sounding too refined by that point, the guitar a moth rubbing its wings together. Drums sounded just like a moth shitting undigestible

steel wool. Did you ever think about what if all the pop songs with the word “night” in them were changed by one letter into the word “knife”: Dance the Knife Away, Are You Lonely To Knife?, etc.

Tippy refered obliquely to ill-health when he sang I don’t want to seem entirely thankless But your chancres aren’t the answer…

Five or six retarded people got up, did things like open their umbrellas thinking they were on the bus, etc. An important event which no one remembers. A party to which no one was invited. He practically came onstage with a KICK ME sign on his back.

Coral was in Hitler's makeup. No she wasn't; a shadow over her upper lip.

As Aldebbie, in the audience, watches Tippy self-desrtruct he mutters Happy Birthday Mr. Bra. Then he hurriedly disappeared, and I wondered why.

Aldebbie wanted to test his seven-headed city-destroying Gorgonja— the Japanese movie monster—costume before his tour, so he came out onstage in it when Tippy and the Chops played the Royal Prince Albert-Upon-Pecker Laudanumerium. Quimshare designed it based on prints Aldebbie owned from 1500 of the Whore of Babylon's pet Great Beast—drawn from life, but now made so its heads looked like the Chomps. But Tippy, tripping on tetradose bisoncyclobine, thought it was the real Gorgonja so grabbed my bass, swung it and knocked Aldebbie off the fourteen-foot high stage. I heard delicate bones

cracking, and his injuries were the cause for his decade lost to, or creatively hobbled by, opiate addiction. He made sure Moloch Management company promptly dropped the band, billed us for our debts.

Fans at the concerts were looking weirder, homely baloney.

Wan, watery wastevirgins, and several stout milk bison. Other girls shaped like St. Bernards, while some bearing what the real St. Bernard described as shapely mis-shapenness or mis-shapen shapeliness. Guys with their girlfriends like birds and their eggs, like jars and their lids. Mousefire. The mice from the Frehouse weren’t invited but they came anyway, swarmed the stage, underfoot. Up there Tippy was coughing up promises, coughing up his love. You could see all the way down to a little bit of his heart when he gasped, words stuck to his throat. Tippy had thought of having a one-inch diameter hole drilled from one side of the back of his hips to the other, a rope passed throught his pelvis so he could swing down onto the stage by it. The snotty kid shooting the staplegun hollered “Hey, Fertilizer!” at him. Another kid hollered “Damn! There’s a Christ up there on that Cross. Nyaaaahhh...” and rolled his Chomps Trio of eyes for a laugh, like something out of the Nude Testament.

Meanwhile Tippy sweated blood like before a real big exam. He screamed “CAN’T YOU PEOPLE SHUT UP—IT’S MY BIRTHDAY AND I’M TRYING TO HAVE A GOOD TIME,” a midwestern jock on a European train. It wasn’t, but he said it as show business. Got noncheers.

Said to himself You will no longer exist. The microphone stand was a gallows. Maybe we can get a live album Ego Death out of this mess. Someone will capitalize upon it; the grandsons of Motorsburgh whisky bootleggers now bootlegged badly-recorded record albums to head shops. Or Aldebbie’s lavender mob is recording it, probably.

The last show, this final fuck, this final erection and bloodstains.

A balloon about to break, burst hot water blood; the sticky octopus sound of a grand fried syphilitic. My cumberbund of stars, a cumberbund of pain. One joker hollered “Hey hemorrhage-head!”

Shadrach, Meshach and Abendego-a-Go-Go, out of the firey furnace of their crotches or hearts. Rejection tumors and congenital anomie.

Hoofing about like a rabbi longlegs spider. But he keeps bumping into walls. Like a white-hot car crashing through a Vegas sidewalk crowd, spun like the wild laughing, limping dance of a crippled, wounded fat child.

I'm sick of treating Tippy like an absent father. Trying even slipperier, sillier, more extreme guitar leads just to please him, win a smile of approval. I had just wanted the rock n' roll life to be like celebrities we saw on TV. Who knew we'd encounter the machinations of the villainous Aldebbie? For all I've done to help Tippy in the band, hence his inevitable Aldebbified, Aldebbimanipulated solo career, I deserve a "Righteous Gentile" plaque in that Israeli magic black forest they're growing up there, right out of the sand. Full of cedars of Lebanon, Emmanuelschivitz vineyards and Al Jaffe oranges I guess.

A bisonswarm of girls out there, many-colored, many colored.

At the final concert, girls who'd had his babies anywhere in the last successfully-touring year hurled and tossed them up onstage.

As we plug in guitars, test our weaponry and equipment, Tippy introduces me as “Our fat Hitler”, as if I’ve got an Oliver Hardee Har Har double chin beneath a toothbrush moustache. He poetically calls Thump “Smegma-lava Thumpasaurus” and Dink “The Beverage Dispenser”. It’s all there, on the live album. Oh wait, maybe Dink was dead by that point. Every band had to use hard drugs to please the ghetto and the Vietnam veterans though, so that’s what the new guitarist was for.

We proceed to rock. Because we’re good at it.

The Golgothadome’s concessionary was run these days by Rough Grate, former high school teacher or Principal, somehow disgraced by scandal. The concession stand was an old-fashioned soda shoppe, where stoners would truck on up and say “Hiya Moms, me for a shake! Chop chop!” with a cheery wave. So I bought a cherry phosphate and used all the phosphorus and phlogiston in it to make a detonator that ignited when it came in contact with the air in Tippy’s lungs as he screamed into the microphone. White phosphorus, like in Viet Nam. Deadly, but it works.

We began playing “Clovis Clovis”, the first song the band ever learned, a ninety minute feedback-obscured version. Clovis the Hatter (using "Clovis, Clovis" song on radio) advertised his special sale of fedora brims cut into pork pies in time for late-summer

funerals of Motorsburgh men you knew from church, killed in poolhall shootings or by police. But the drums were in Tippy’s head as he moaned into the interior microphone. Listen to That Geek Beat. My brother, he makes any other drummer sound like a mouse trying to open a cottage cheese container full of sugar. The drumheads were great bat wings. Motor lizards, monitor lizards crawling out of the stage monitors. Electric sparks flew from the amps. Heard other people’s phones ringing in the amps. I told you to turn that radio off.

The musical notes on the staff fell off when it was no longer music, just a whiny buzzing up there. Toothsaw guitars. Guitars sounding like Chinese as spoken by a child. The hangman’s hangnail impacted how I played that bass. I had champagne filters on my bass, playing it through intensified benzene rings.

I was wearing these special sunglasses I had made that were really floodlights. Fantasy customs. My baleful gaze like a scythe, sweeping the audience, or passersby, and cutting them down on the spot. Clad resplendently in my distrust. Tippy was too busy to have a gaze. Eyes like the dying flickering of a tiny bulb, fluttering moths around a backyard bug-zapper. Expression on his face when mosquitoes drink coffee. Suicidal scarecrow up there. A home grave. Acid thanks.

The song began as a sort of an unpleasant earwig serenade.

Then like a vacuum cleaner at Bock Beer Time in a big vaulting beer vat. Music more anathema than anthem. I had put down my bass guitar and was setting up a field telephone to talk to somebody offstage. The lead guitar raged like a burning Ceasarian. A

magazine reviewer mentioned the devil with a guitar, asked Hey, where’s Roque? Everyone noticed the electric guitarist’s horns and hooves, that was very observant, yes. How could I have “stabbed him with a toaster” like one reviewer said? Apostles n’ disciples there, wating for a real dropdead miracle. A bomb in a suitcase under the stage, with Aldebbie’s monogram on it.

Revenge dancers and mojobius strip dancers whirled around.

My glasses blew off, Talkin’ bout my defenestration. Tippy might’ve been planning to yank off my glasses and sneer “Look everybody— they’re WINDOW GLASS! NO LENSES! ALL EMPTY FRAMES!” Hey give those back! Goddamn it. But he didn’t get half the chance.

I stood at the right side of the stage where God could smile upon me, naturally. The spotlight reflecting off my guitar sent a gleam of evil eye across the stage, freezing Tippy like a deer on the road in the headlights.

I was onstage, but I was sitting in the front row too. Too big for my Expandex britches, and not in the mere corporeal way Tippy was either. This is the place where they listen to the chest, to my heart beating like a drum. A very private beat of my heart. My huffing smokestack. Coagulating my assignments The professionalism of confession. Coral muttered to me, You look like the cop that swallowed the canary. Passersby taking a turn on a pretty crash victim by the side of the road. Move along folks, there’s nothing to see here.

By the time of our final performance, people were coming to see a live sex show, the big sensation coast to coast. It was Tippy and a

random audience girl, or else he'd maul her like in a pro wrestling match with himself, except those weren't blood capsules but real blood, like other self-indulgent rock stars might hog the stage with an effulgent, booming guitar solo. Not that I would like to.

Sometimes it went badly, like rape during wartime where the soldier untested, unsatisfied and unsatiated, becomes angry and all (the village, the audience) are thus at risk. From the stage Tippy leapt upon Aldebbie, Seuss, the marketing and record company executive staff, Rough Grate, the Museum’s giant gila monster and Grandma Mars (who never liked Tippy), as he took each in turn like a rutting baboon, made each and every one of them his bitch in a great flurry of spirit and spunk. No, not really, he was only capable now of smiling at them wanly from the stage.

Smek. Whak. Blup. Eggs were being thrown. Tippy was being egged with indignity. Immobile as a house, he swung at those eggs with his limp dick like the toy most popular that summer, a goofy plastic head mounted on a spouting garden hose, batting few.

Somehow that seemed appropriate, a baseball game composed of the male bat and eggs. Waved Beelzebub’s boomerang. The comic character Solomon Serpent in 666-land. In that year they sewed the balls back on all the boy sopranos in the opera choirs, whom the University Music School was built upon, due to a State Supreme Court ruling. Poor pureboys. He felt like the celebrated castrato who toured Michigan in the 1860’s, whom the Indian sweat-lodges loved so much. When they’re throwing eggs they’re throwing me.

Strapped to a chair, the old cliché of giant eucalyptus-like hypodermic needles seemingly springing from nowhere thrusting themselves into his arms. For this, Aleppo elected a Mayor named “Pierce”. Is Tippy a minotaur? Because bullfighters came out and hurled their decorated pokers. Tippy was acupunctured onstage, with necessary needles, with collective drumsticks then with his own needs. Like Alexander the Great Tippy was struck by almost every available weapon known to an enemy, absorbing sword, lance, dart, arrow (through breastplate into lung) and catapult missle.

Surely a man bleeds to death when it—Tippy’s testicles too—is torn off by the jaws of the bikermeister's bitch rottweiler pit bull. Bad dog! "Rot writhing" is how Threadbear had described our previous gig, and now the horrible prophecy had come to pass, bloody fruition.

Quick-thinking roadies tied a chattering ape over the wound and where the cannon once was, but unconvincingly, for its own erection was unimpressive and insufficient to convince anyone that was Tippy.

Suddenly it was Twirl Time Wrestling, and a biker remarkably resembling Arf-Arf Argentine dashed Tippy to the stage, spun him above his head and hurled him into his part of the audience where his gang pummeled the skinny, tiny Tippy mightily.

Beneath my ice cream glare, there beats a heart that can like his friends. Fishbrain was oblivious, chattering away on an unnecessarily long and complex guitar solo, so I took my hands off the bass, a roadie tossed me a rod and reel, and with 40 lb. test line I reeled Tippy in, to resume the song.

They say Death Rides a Mini-Bike—like that fat brotherly TV cowboy—but the bikers in the audience set up catapults and onagers at the edge of the auditorium, hurling filth, smoking bales of marijuana, trashcans full of soiled disposible diapers, battering rams knocking over amplifiers, my bass stack. Guns made out of leather and rope, zipper guns, staple guns. Tracer shells were being shot at and from the stage. A riot in Hell. An earful of tears. Bikers played bombardment with full beer cans, chains and kickstands, auto parts like brakeshoes, hubcaps polished and honed on a lathe to knife edges hurled like vicious flying saucers at the vulnerable players stage. Bikers with tattoos DISHONOR BEFORE DISHONOR and RAPED MOM & DAD enclosed in a bleeding heart, or twinned skulls.

Motorcycle and auto parts—chains, pistons, carburetors, wheel spokes, gears—were embedded as jewelry in their skin, muscles, sinuses.

Bikers? Why would we ever be afraid or concerned about them? Squint-eyed reindeer-eating Siberians who swam across the sea of Oshkosh B'gosh, reeking with the smell of alcohol leather.

Outside the ballroom, each leaning on her man's motorcycle, chainsmoking or troweling on more mascara, big girls were kept by the bikers as their concubison. Several biker women had fled Bitch Run, MI, a tough town for a girl to grow up in. Now each was finally wellfed, decolleté-shirt dripping with bike chains and auto-parts jewelry cast in silver, studded with stolen turquoise. Lug nuts carved into netsuke sookie sookie skulls. One woman had her trophy

MIDWEST'S MOST RAGGED BIKER GIRLFRIEND, awarded three years ago, tucked into her cleavage. Cemented there by three years of fun-earnerd sweat and road dirt.

As journalist Threadbear was a fan of bikers, their motorcycles, their weaponry and their pharmaceuticals, he sidled up to their group clustered in the back of the ballroom, suggested to the assembled hearty fellows that he do an article on them. A momentary pause as they looked at each other, and the interloper was promptly and unmercifully stomped.

When the bikers, or one of their acolytes, began the assault, a pack of dogs—ironically, some of them hunting dogs beaten, run off or abandoned by the very bikers—protected the band, our equipment and fallen singer, while roadies hurried, scurried, nervously packed our gear into the van. No they didn’t; we played on.

Tonight would be different though. The Road Bisons of Motorsburgh's southwest side intended to show the Hell's Mongrels of the east side who was tougher by eviscerating Tippy, quartering him on choppers going up different avenues from the radiating hub downtown, stretching him over many city blocks.

The nerve of those bikers, those bums. Despite the proximity of the University, it was unlikely you’d find a bike gang with a name like the Neutrinos. The Michigan beastiary, Momo Whitefang Wooly Webelos Bullies—plenty of ‘em!—except in addition to fangs and fur and bison jowls and antlers and rhino horns, they had their motorcyclery, the gang colors, on. Mastadon shouting. Eyeing us hungrily, they planned after gorging on us to pick their teeth on the

clasp-pins my Third Reich insigniae, and pin ‘em on. Hey! I didn’t mean it! Tetched hydra cannibals, hopped up and inspired on tetrahydracannibinols.

Could feel the porcine crackle of bikers’ pregnant guns out there.

The liberal mayor of Aleppo’s own son was starting to ride in the Hell’s Fuckers and his initiation assignment was to kill Tippy during the recording of a live album. A decapitated pirate in the audience, riding with the Road Bisons and who’d briefly worked construction building the very Goliathdome Arena we were playing in tonight in order to get on unemployment and methadone, had brought along a pneumatic drill and rivet gun which he carried to the side of the stage. The gun hurled red-white and-blue-hot rivets at Tippy, dancingly gyrating gingerly pip-pip-hop to avoid ‘em, zinging by to plunk harmlessly on the sweat-dampened stage behind him.

Fortunately none of the band or road crew wore sandals or flipflops—laugh at my high leather cavalry books now, will you— projectiles zipping by to plop with a sizzle into the stage pool, hisss...

Meanwhile a full packet of Bonnie Sprout squad cookies was hurled at us, shattered its cellophane ad scattered black crumbs and frosting all over, underfoot; perhaps Tippy once had the uniformed, melancholy litltle Bonnie Sprout who hurled those. A birthday cake came crashing onto and skidding across the stage. The overweening tense atmosphere was getting on God's nerves. Tippy glowered. He was liveblood angry. His John Adams' apple bouncing in the ruffled eighteenth century skin collar called his (now turkeylike) neck. I

blithely suggested that perhaps the phlegm that had Tippy spasmodic with coughing fits was just Aldebbie's spunk coming back up.

Horrified, insulted, angry at the suggestion, Tippy punched me in the eye, shattering one lens of these mirrored aviators. I yanked them off, but a young fan quickly scooped them from the stage.

The brake shoes and manifolds hurled at the band were bad enough.

When the engine block crashed into the stage, rolled and tumbled over Thump's tom tom drum, Tippy began singing, operatically the old Broadway show tune "If Ever I Was Loathsome".

Full bottles began pelting us. Big bear cub-sized beer bottles burst beside me. Dink would have been impressed by so much access to alcohol until he recognized the danger. As word of Dink’s death earlier spread around the auditorium, the bikers sang Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Rum! Because of the metals in the Motorsburg river water, all the bottles from Schtroganoff’s Beer hurled at the band fell into the magnetic field from my instrument and were drawn to it. Still, it was my guitar even if it is only a bass guitar. Full of spleen, I launched into a mindless medly of Wagner overtures till a decorated beerstein snatched from a shelf in one of Aleppo’s old German restaurants came whistling through the air to crash upon my bass guitar. I won’t stay on this stage very long if detritus is going to hit my machine, my utensil.

Bikers pulled out macheteguns, serious gangster massacre firepower. Bad enough, but a biker whose father was a braumiester distributor for Schtroganoff’s beer—so his Nazi regalia had a root beer root in his family tree, forming a circuit with his Teuton ancestry and

Wehrmacht-occupied distribution territories—picked up a full aluminum fifty-gallon Big Boned fraternity keg and, tapper and all, built like a barrel himself, hurled it from the balcony to the stage, hitting me smack-dab. Bursting like a refrigerator dropped from a small airplane by an irate customer into the sunny parking lot of the store from which it was too-hastily purchased. Bursting with the sound of the aluminum piano from the exploding Hindenburg immolating the smiley cabaret fop seated at it playing show tunes, heard in the background over the radio sentimentally triggering the news anouncer’s tears.

I staggered, reeled back, almost lost my balance on my ironic early-‘60s Cuban-heeled boots.

Fuck this. I quit.

This is bogue, the douse. This was supposed to be fun.

He reduced my bass guitar and fingers to sticks. These fingers would never type again. Wouldn’t you know it, that afternoon I’d seen some of that Film Festival on campus that seemed to feature all those movies where the gangster hero sees a tattoo “MOTHER” on his henchman’s arm—or even his own—so picks up his gun and, hating his own Mom, blasts it off, ruining the arm so crucial to the getaway.

You can’t play even a bass guitar with crucified hands, with bleeding stigmatzahs, the torn flesh lowers the action of the strings but cause them to buzz the holes like little soundbox speakers, resounding like the hole in an acoustic guitar. Like agape onlookers at a UFO touching down, like women in significant orgasm, like Great Lakes lampreys, like the kisses of open-mouthed teens, like the O-rings in a Jeep. These hands smelled of onion. Hands upraised in what the stonedest of hippies just might call a peace symbol. Bongo drum

palms.

I threw down the kindling of my instrument and goosestepped off the stage, never to return to play with Tippy. I sturm-and-drang’d down the aisle, spleen inflamed like the dome lights on the ceiling of an unmarked police car. The crowd chortled some applause, thinking it was all part of the show.

That does it, now I’m mad, really mad! But before I could even dimly plot revenge...BOOM! Aldebbie had planted bombs under the stage. How did he get them into Tippy’s body? That was their conspiracy? Whose side are you on, Tippy? Oh, it’s all just for show.

That was vulgar in the jugular. Tippy you think you’re the king of the gods, stop Zeusing around. After intermission Tippy was wheeled out on a big wooden cross. KKK squadrons still smoky but refreshed from burning schoolbuses in the desegregating suburbs ran onstage to ignite it, but Black Afro Puma snipers beat them away and began a conga riot with duelling, battling horns and trombones and dashiki’d horizontal dancers with Arts Council grants, but this is as political as it’s gonna get.

That mudfucking biker hurled that beer keg over his head and hit my Flabbergaster bass. I was saved by it, but the beautiful guitar was ruined, ruined. Now I’m mad. Fuck and shit this.

“Aw, yer father’s Christmas!” hollered a biker, hurling a pickax at me. We expected bikers would storm the stage, begin stomping Tippy, but instead the frenzied girls rushed in, started tearing him into souvenirs, the size that could be pressed into scrapbooks, affixed to

the page with cute stickers. Several bikers then let out hyenas, set afire, bark-throated howls as they ran about the stage.

Just then Tippy let out a styrofoam scream, like a picnic cooler being wrenched into pieces. The old Michigan Militia cliché of guitar chord a fusillade of a phalanx of rifles, enhanced by all the fuzz effects they can pry from my cold, dead fingers. He swooned upon the stage. I think he fell into a female sleep.

He’s up. Voice no more prominent than a late-summer cricket’s clitoris. Sucking in his breath with that total voice control his shit goes back up into him. He literally sung shit. Chain offal. That Cadillac cough. Spun around doing a JFK dance. He danced right into the Tarantella Nebula. The Crap Nebula, Nembutals like space dust. Floundering onstage like a pregnant jogger who had just that moment lost control of her inner ear banging on the pavement. Like the guy on the window ledge whom the crowd is addressing “JUMP!” “What do you want? Blood?” Tippy asked, and the crowd roared “Please”. He decided to committ this suicide when he thinks people don’t like him anymore. Pirhanas in the pool churned up a puddinglike froth. The flaming churchyard. Vanadium wind. Strangling a young light bulb in the lamp. He was trapped inside a single atom of Coral’s butt. “It’s crystalline, I wonder why?” The sky came, the sky farted, it rained and she gave him a thunder clap. Tippy was stung by the swarm of killer bees on his arm. Honeybees on his arms, waspwaised with a boner. A bee beard. Ant mounds. Cops with beauty marks. Girls with purple genitals versus the man as red as a berry.

He saw a black cat wearing only one contact lens walk across the

stage. Lightning struck the stage, and there was a big flash when a load of phosphorous fell into a tank of water behind the drums. To be in the audience that night equals a form of martyrdom. Mars gets closer every year. Late shift at the Concentration Camp. A lion in the arena made the Sign of the Cross. Unsentimental bikers were hurling onstage the corpses of Tippy’s gradeschool teachers, or worst of all, mine. OK, if not now, then a half-century from now.

Tippy then launched into “Lothar, Lothar”, this song which anybody could play, dedicated via a nod to me to the late Louie the Chomp. Look at Tippy up there with just bass and drums (junkie guitarist had nodded out), like Christ on the cross between the two thieves, a gangster boss shouldered between two bodyguards or better yet G-men or copppers hustling him into Court. Some kind of debased Trinity or the Three Chomps? He was the only rock star who could get away with being crucified onstage, a disappearing Jesus. The world’s most precocious person, veteran of Coral the world’s most precocious whore, was crossed out between two thieves, me on bass and my brother Thump on the drums. God put himself to sleep after having had his pup put to sleep at the Pound on Golgotha, the Humane Society of human society.

Tippy was now a Temptation-of-Saint Tony’s pizza, pepperoniholes of scabbed wounds, tomato sauce all over flowing from cuts.

Wait, that’s Sebastian, mister-frenched and massaged by Interpol in Sebastopol, in all the spy movies. The big Job, for all his troubles.

Tippy’s bitter song "Circumcision", almost a round. Bearing normative scars, his third leg went limp, crumpled to the stage. Steer

your balls, Tippy!

Tippy angrily spat out what was to be his last song, “Hey Bitch, It’s the Rubber Making Me Soft!” with his withering “It’s definitely you, It’s definitely you” refrain. He started singing the old Welsh foolsong, as we provided a man-to-his-execution dirge “Before I was bentbacked, my spear was in the van.” Sad. Crooked. Wretched.

Wrecked.

They wanted him to poke out his eyes, too, crying “Give us Oedipus!” (for looking at all those girls?) as another crowd had cried “Give us Barabbas!” And I may have told you, Dionysus Orpheus Oedipus Barabbas was a black kid in my elementary school, who later played in a garage band with two folk-rock ofays. He implored us to remember how one rakish 17th c. French voyageur called his riverside camp Dionysus, which later became the city of Motorsburgh. Later Dion (pronounced Die-On, “Like Love-In”) turned up as the only colored person in the People’s Puma Party. I saw him out in the audience.

God explained nothing. No magic Hitler will come to save us.

No Holocaust gnome.

That last show was like the party part of the Mass called the Whoreatory, the part that that Mary Magdalene—“Oo, Jesus, let me write it!”— wrote to include a lot of sensual body and blood.

Meanwhile, ringed around the stage spun Book of Revelations girls, Babylonically perverse and celestially whorish. After all, Adam's exwife Lillith was a school lunch lady now, giving us the glaring eye through rhinestoned spectacles. Likely it was her daughters brazenly

bashoogling down in front of our stage, open shirts aflutter, ecstatically, mmm...

Like Jesus, Tippy was a Jewish standup comedian. Not borschtbelt but blood-belt, like the jab in the waist by the Roman soldier’s exploratory appendectomy-spear. Was he he regiment chaplin, wanting to test the Lord’s power, like the sucker punch that killed Houdini, just how strong the muscles of the solar plexus of Faith actually were? Maybe that magician was an honored Magi anyway.

Blindly smack open the pinata for the grapes and oranges of Jaffa to come spilling out. Maybe the soldier was the company cook—what’s Latin for the nickname “Cookie”?—who wanted to serve the boys liver well-marinated in wine. He should’ve tried Dink, too late now.

The nails in the Cross are hypodermic needles. Just to rouse him we pierced his side with vinegar-soaked electric bass and guitars, prodding him to get up, or to Get Down! Some Roman-nosed Security soldier poked at him, or maybe it was just a kid in the front row shooting at him with a staplegun. That cop or biker was a direct descendant of the bad thief on the cross, the Roman soldier who pierced Christ’s side with an electric guitar. What soldiers used to call the Big Red Can of Ravioli. A page in Hell. Tippy shoots up Hell. An audience of winos giving blood, unattended tubes spurting from their arms. When Jesus really cooked. Security guards cut the crap and started shooting craps, gambling. The Corruption of the American Crucifixion, how those guard-gambled garments ended up in the University museum collection. Considering he wasn’t wearing anything but a clip-on microphone cord. The stage doctor, the

promotor’s ne’er-do-well brother, shoved a giant Quaalude, a soprific Sweetart, soaked in vinegar—like a kit-colored Easter egg—into his mouth to revive him.

Tippy was splattering and Christ-headed. Tippy’s onstage performance now like Jesus Christ’s most pagan parts. Despite diagnostic assuraces, he’s a Christmas tree, he’s a burning Yule log, he’s a dreidel spinning, he’s a crash-broken dying reindeer, tumbling from the roof. Everybody out there tabula rasa chickens-on-ahotplate, while Tippy’s thinks he’s dancing rabbit-footed on the lucky stage. Roasting like Milton in Hell.

His crucifixion: I must climb upon this Cross, like the Holy Moly Week Jerusalemartyr. He got crazy ideas form the Gidget Bible placed by his hospital bed by a stormsurge preacher who toured the hospital like a prison warden, making rounds of the various wards.

His favorite ward to visit seemed to be the Venereal, when he always seemed to find suppurating wounds with his fingers "like Our Lord would," then, absentmindedly or thoughtfully, place them in his mouth.

Over the stage cross, instead of INRI we had a sign scrawled in crayon by Dink last week on paper towel (Quentin Quimshare was busy, or we would’ve hired him, given him some dope to draw it) the word SPRGNW, which is the Vice President’s name with all the vowels removed. We thought it would be respected as more “political” by the Pumas and other Aleppo cultural rads n’ reds. After all, critic Threadbear who’ll probably write about us is a card-carrying liberal.

The especially Roman demise of being "crucifired", where they hang you up, build a bonfire underneath, and a tough boss or Sheriff

Percheron hollers “Tippy, you’re fired!” Yow, pack-o'-matches "Hotfoot!" Tippy, aren't I the good guy thief, hung beside you on the crossbar of my guitar neck? Already Threadbear, that prelapsarian Catholic, has called tonight's performance our loosy-goosey crucifixion, zealot on a rubber Cross.

As we aprroached the final song, he bellowed This is my BLOOODDD...and opened (with my help) several spouting veins AND THIS IS MY BODY and several girls leapt to the stage, fellated him all at once, tussling and shoving each other, petting the Easter Bunny on the Cross, erect and ready to hop out into the crowd like a rabbit.

Humping that last girl who jumped onstage while he was nailed to the Cross like that, revving up their cruci-friction; all fuck, fustian and fruition.

He turned into a tree up there, struck by lightning, limbs cracking off in a storm.

O Aldebbieship Records, why have you for-fuck-saken me?

Thump got in a beef with the bikers, probably lost, succumbed.

As in ancient Rome, where epileptics waited in the cold Colisseum's wings to rush out and suck the blood from the wounds of gladiators, groovy groupies—some in wheelchairs—moved onstage to sip, to sup, to feast upon the carnage. A girl bound for Bible college said she heard that his death was already on the Heaven O' Clock News. The funny weatherman wept.

Of course Aldebbie wanted to stick his cocaine-and-exoticfoods-sticky fingers into Tippy's stigmata, hands and feet and especially gaping side wound ("Feels like treacle!") as soon as they

sprung open. Eeuuww...

An untoward intimacy. It’s all too much.

Suddenly the sound man got mixed up (or too high, or both) and through all the loudspeakers came Rev. Fr. Cough-in-aCarload's evening radio address. And he was talking about our goddamn concert.

We caught something about the only child’s Ego as God's own counterpart. The only child is inevitably weighed down by God, that branch office of himself. Christ as metaphor for psychological as well as physical masochisms, dominated by mother, ineffectual father, "Why have you abandoned me?" of disapproval 's brain-gnaw.

Naziism and Christianity are both just mom-craving sexualities, aren't they?

Thought I heard Cough-in-a-Carload lower his voice to ask the rhetorical question, can God be fun? Allegedly fun? The Holy Spit, Sprite and Halloween Ghost, the much-worshipped kindergarten ghost from a ball of twisted paper nosetissue and sheet-over-thehead trixietreateur. Impulsively I snapped the arms off my expensive collectors-item swastika neckchains jewelry so it looked like a cross.

Got a bendable G.I. Jock action figure at JMJ-Mart's toy department and bent his arms back around it so it looked like the Cardinal's own Power Crucifix. Not a cross, more like an X of Sex, man snoozing lazily afterwards upon the splayed woman. An ankhish ampersand.

The Chi Ro of Cairo.

Warm golden light inside, a homeowner who hears kids crying in the house, or crossbowing his Christmas decorations. The Easter eggs

actually rolling thru their stigmata hole in Christ's hands and dropping to the floor. Christ couldn't egg a house. The vinegar in the sponge the Centurion offered--the ancestor of Sinatra, by the way--is now used with food coloring and astringent in dyeing the eggs of Easter.

The only mortal sin besides murder being vandalism to a church said a priest, nervous as a middle-class homeowner. Egging houses is seen as a parody of that. So much for my Devils' Night idea of flying overseas to chuck rocks thru the big rosycross window of Charles de Gaulle Chartres Cathedral.

The radio priest droned on, about a bouyant Christ, thighslapping at the hearty jokes told 'round the Supper. Judas, you're a card. Lying like a supine Christ. A Krazy Khrist Dragster, the cross as a gearshift that our bugeyed Lord's arched hand is nailed to sticking way out. Christ gets up to Rock but sits down to pee, so bully beef, baby, bully for Me! Jesus squeezes. Judas loagied a honker of snot at Christ then said What, I didn't egg that house. With insights like this I could start a parochial school for paranoids. Look at me boppingly punching away at that Fathead God. Like beating up God. A prayer-book slam. The leviathan of despair. Relentless insight.

Snuggled up next to the light. Isn't God weary of pious people all wanting things? They spoke lamentingly about their innate condition, in the contradictory, self-conflicting prayer we were taught in childhood: Good God, Happy God And me like a baby stretching out my little arms Give us this day our daily squirt, our daily dump, our daily drunk, our daily stomp.

World without sex. Christ's suicide. See Ya. And Tippy lay down to sleep.

Then Motorsburgh’s biggest, blackest preacher Reverend Friendship came booming through the hall's sound system, with yet another version of the story.

Christ is returning and boy is he pissed. Christ keeps knocking politely but one of these days he's gonna get so pissed at me he'll kick in the door like police in a drug raid, ruin the door and, guns drawn, mess up the place in the search. The Christ Police. Lifting a shade, peer into my life, make an appearance in my dreams. Now I lay me down to creep. Now I am a battery in the flashlight of God, no longer responsible for the assault and battery of God, not mentally competent to stand spiritual trial, like the guy on the motorscooter who killed all those coeds. A sheriff appointed by God. Ending up in a heavenly gaol. Hurled from Christ's parapet. Guy who walks into a bank looking like Christ and says, "Hey, give me all the money—it's okay, I'm Christ". And it worked! Jesus' delinquency. Jesus Motherfuckin Carbine. Johnny the B's zip gun of prophecy, knuckledusters of the Apostles. Give us the fingerprints and we got the Gods! Dead Christs don't fink. He said "I am the Resurrection and the Assassination". Revolutionaries shouting "¡Viva Jesus!", nails and pieces of the True Cross stuffing their gunbelt bandoliers; you saw a lot of Chi Ro Guevaro, spiritually kickass imagery like this in the underground newspapers at the time. Kalashnikov Christs.

Deliver mine enemies up unto me, hollow them out and gut and wire

them, use them that they may sing with my own fucking voice as new Magus Amps.

The Reverend, sweat pouring through the radio, stirred his congregation with musical metaphors. My people, I really want a Bible, but all we've got are these records. The host turns out to be a 45 rpm record, I'll be darned. Pop it in, tastes like licorice rhthym n' blues. Interfaith Council for Funk.

No more playing Atheism-and-Roll, its anthems of anathema or merely anthems of asthma. You got to play God's drums. God in a miracle creates something, whereas the wiseass trickster Satan destroys stuff, gets murals painted over, even misplaces things like guitar picks, car keys etc., causing the frail human puffing on the creative God-spark to lose his train of thought in the inconvenience.

Christ as the last great individualist. The last solo Christ act.

As even Jesus had overstepped the rules. This is God's mini-series.

Christ's most memorable performances. His publicity photographs on the wall dramatically lit by Good and Evil.

Elvis was like Christ because they talked more about him after his death. Prayers as inconsequential as the murder of an Elvis impersonator, and an Elvis Impersonator’s songbook is The Imitation of Christ. Exorcists of the ecesses of Elvis, the torture and martyrdoms in the prisons of Elvis. And deliver us from Elvis.

Jesus splendly dressed like the later Elvis or Liberace, pimpin'.

Jesus' outlandish costumes, Christ-clothes with "INRI" and "IHS" in diamonds, rhinestones or cut glass, some with the traditional SPQR crossed out. Just like it was some wag's idea of a joke to write "Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews" on a piece of paper tacked

over the Cross, like a bar band's songlist or something. The entertainment of the Cross. In the joke called life God is the punch line--it's just too bitter without that ending. God, I was just Godding around. Let the wicked forsake the wisecracks, the damned fools.

Hecklers ejected from Heaven. Cuttin' up like the night of Jesus' autopsy, Jesus' biopsy: Hey, this God was really Man after all!

The Holy Groove is one in the records, where God and Devil strip down, grease up and rassle in those grooves. There's a fight for souls, when somebody self-destructs that's like the Devil grinningly popping a ball in the corner pocket and God mutters "damn". A record—just try playing it backwards!—like Sinatras' "Something Secret and Sacred" about Satanic masses performed on the bikini'd body of his sugary daughter. Drank blood out of her white go-go boots. Aleister Crowley was working as a British headwaiter in that Vegas hotel, he told me.

Remember, before the Fall Lucifer of the leader of the grand honking big-band in Heaven, he was cast out of his garments ripped his vents by less-than-fans. The minions of Heaven, finally Gods crawling out of my skin. The subcutaneous God of the Cretaceous.

Christian crustaceans, rosaries clacking made from lobster claws, clamshell. Swaying undersea nuns. Uncapitulating rhythm, incapacitating rhythm.

Leapt from the stage, sputtered like an Icarus rocket to the pavement below. A Portugese fado, Cajun fais-do-do Phaedo death scene full of Play-Doh. Cripete, the crybaby Crito. Crimineteles! Tippy had made his exhausted, theatrical, daring dive, whirled and flopped into

the deepwater pool installed onstage precisely for this purpose.

Diving a suicide submarine, hellfish with hellfins swimming down there. That umbicillus of an electrical cable—the first place it touched and created, completed a circuit was his tongue, his nose or the tip of his dick? They said his tongue of course was of the same stuff as his brainstem, that’s why he sang those crazy songs.

It was a skeptical audience, for Tippy had been gone so long.

Comeback? Yeah, sure. Eyes like dog Weimaraners. I looked out upon the throngs in the Golgothadome You know that massive building, the Great Hall of the People, that Albert Speer designed with the biggest dome in the world? My dad's squadron bombed that, his plane releasing the bomb that caused the roof to collapse, killing all 180,000 Krauts inside. My dad did that.

That concert a monkeypocalypse. "Twisted Thanatos of Rock" harrumphed Threadbear, always underfoot but looking ever more pharmaceutically ragged. An Engineering student exclaimed that perhaps Tippy would better be called a Thyristor, though by this time it was pretty much too late for all.

The big chandelier crashed down, crushing and killing many like an operatic phantom.

Tippy carried a little metal box to the final concert in which he keeps his evening's pills or capsules. I saw his little metal drug box had tumbled to the edge of the stage. I kicked it into the audience, and it bounced of an upturned face. Oh wait, that's not what happened. As the medics furiously worked away, pushing and pummeling on him, I only surreptitiously slipped it into my jacket pocket.

If this was a Civil War story, there'd probably be a tiny keepsake picture of Coral within it. Nope. Inside, a single blotter tab. As Jesus said, Take this in memory of me.

A lady in Roman collar and vestments started performing Viscous Unction on him—hey, you’re not a Priest for real, get outa here!

ComeTogether’s local stringer (covering entire industrial midwest) erroneously reported that like Julius Caesar, Tippy’s body burst into spontaneous flame, as he flew like a big bronze pinecone to stop up a hole in the leaky roof. Enbalmed in honey, he soon succumbed to bees, ants and bears.

Instead it was the record store where we all met that burst into flames, and the firemen who rushed to save if couldn't, perished in the melted vinyl, felled by the fumes.

Glaring at Aldebbie, who stood in front of the stage in a tunic hung with red syringes, I thrashed my single final chord as I turn my Megaron Mammoth amp up to eleventeen, destroy all the Faustian fustian that the bastard Aldebbie constructed around our music, the fey foppish floppy music-hall theatrical blather n' greasepaint supposed to bring us lasting global success and influence beyond our Great Lakes State. An electronic bleat to blur your precision marketing.

Well puff on this, pompus pud. With Tippy's explosion, your castrati full o' spermacetti is now confetti.

Contrary to the item in the British Rock press saying I voided myself, both bladder and bowels, at the the moment of Tippy's death—inserted by that little snit Capricciodentata—I instead I

hurriedly left the horrendous stage and departed by holocaust helicopter, the emergency one from the University Hospital, borrowed for the night. Its Stasi markings flatly grayed out, fooling no one.

Someone proposed a hearse within a hearse, pulled up inside like those car carriers you see on highways on the way to dealerships.

But as there was no money left, spent all on drugs both recreational and therapeutic, we left his body, or what was left of it, on to steps of the University Autopsy Dissection Lab, where they'd be sure to find it.

Witnesses say right in the midstt of his self-salting, Tippy was shot from the rafters by a sniper with a 1903 Selbt-Beflecking machine pistol. Witnesses saw one gunman that looked like Aldebbie, or a lithe but blowsy gun moll like Nembuthalia or Neuda, though they were squinting into the stage lights so the police merely shook their heads in their caps. Instead of a squad "Danger: Men Cooking" aprons in a traditional barbecue setup, women's dressing tables were piled high in a Bonfire of their Vanities. That was one of Aldebbie's effeminate ideas, but admittedly, it made an attractive conflagration, perfumed pink kindling and swirls of aromatic fire.

This is a new decade: no longer a wolverine puffing a hookah, the new symbol of college is a dog with a bandana, catching a Frisbee. Tippy aimiably, with his last breath of courage, wanly sang "They Call Me Doctor Velvetbone", a song learned on his blues pilgrimage years ago to Sap Sago, Illiinois, industrial "cheese-cutter of the big table" said the poet in 1900, when the mercantile "City of Milk-White Shoulders" preferred its socialites, hair pinned high on haughty heads, bejeweled necks over silvery dinners. We went when everybody was black. But that was OK, they were kind, pitying and

mentoring him there. He wished he was back there right now, young acolyte back then, rather than dying up here in snowstruck, hostile Motorsburgh.

Famous groupie Neanderthalia, glimpsed from the stage, glowing like she was made of the element Neanderthalium. Maybe, after all other Rock stars are dead, she'll be my girlfriend someday.

Timid girls went up and sprinkled orange Saint Lawrence Seaway seasoned salt in Tippy's wounds. Hangmen playing flibberde-gibbet. Tippy had always laughed that suicide was his faithful little brother, that every only child felt and believed that in order to cope with parental domination. So I guess the lil' fratricide turned on him when his own body started to fail him, his cock and Rock voice, the little brother like the hara-kiri seppuku assistant who, after you've disembowled yourself into a short sword, chops off your head for good measure.

Horace Mars still had a row of honorably surrendered Japanese officer's heads atop his office cocktail sideboard, dessicated souvenirs of his wartime service.

That University-read audience was shouting the Horror! The Horror! Hooray! Hooray! Hip! Hip! Boogie! There must have been a big contingent from Aleppo out here. Innacurati rushed to the phones, spread entropy and chaos via the rumor mill. A nonprofit riot ensued, spelling dead policemen. As Christ spits on mankind, the crowd wised up and began to holler “Defile him before he’s dead.”

His throat was cut and he was beheaded, a symbolic castration, by the School Board Decency Committee. “That’ll show the liberals,” said the pro- business Mayor, Sheriff and pediatrician.

A cop ran onstage to arrest Tippy and the music did smite his ears, one ripped off and it took a miracle to heal it, to really hear it. In

response Security then cracked his forehead like the Pantheon, broke the bridge of his nose, burst his eye, his throat cut to tatters, his wrists cut in a warm bath, huge growths sealing off his bladder, Tippy gamely kept on dancing. His guts, like the heavens, opened. Tippy’s flesh on his legs hung in strings like a buffalo attacked by wolves, tongue chewed off, eyes completely blind and gone, entrails hanging out, hindquarters battered and broken. A caterpillar stung by wasps.

Mr. Sex meet Ms. Death. Perhaps you were just caught in a mongoose-snake dance. Convicted to bits and pieces. Call an annihilambulance.

His coach climbed onstage, blew whistle and tried to get him to do a hundred sit-ups, rolled him over with a kick and ordered a hundred push-ups.

When a cartoon character runs over a cliff, keeps running, bongo drum sounds of his feet before he realizes and falls. Wild animals were sad. Zippers wouldn’t go up. It was a joke which nobody got, no one thought was funny. They all agreed “He never cooperated with anyone”. All went mad. People’s hats got loose, went flying thru the air. The sound of a broom. His exploded chest looked like pizza. Red Pizza Smoke from a musical oven. The rotting fire. Well at least he didn’t die of cancer from smoking, that would be inexcusable. Police began arresting everyone, mistaken identity. Nobody asked me if I cared. The Midwester’d became the Easter. Tippy tried to be the youth of truth and ended up the guy of the lie.

Immediately as all this was happening I felt only nausea, like the nausea before history, the nausea felt before growing up. This was an awful lot to happen in the time it takes to pack up my equipment and head home. Suddenly I felt nothing, and I felt everything. I had an apotheosis, I didn’t have to do this anymore, to play these silly songs with these guys only if I wanted to. Back in Aleppo I stayed over at my mother’s house that night. A couch that thinks.

When Buddha died I'll bet a great gong was struck, sounded throughout Asia. When Pharaoh died, they blotted out the Sun. The moment Tippy died, every woman he'd ever had fainted, or at least swooned. OK, blinked. Several high school classrooms thus had to be evacuated (upon my own gross evacuation), aired out for an hour.

Overseas, Aldebbie’s heart palpitated, and he rolled his eyes, too, in the middle of a TV interview. The host giggling, he claimed this was only coincidence. Yet it caused the monitors at the edge of the set to feed back. And monks in some monateries to pause—or redouble—their prayers. All the dogshit of an aerial dogfight. Others say girls' heavy, sweet perfume or deodorant smells filled the air.

Deodorant smelts? Deodorant smiles, yes.

So who are you going to believe?

The roadies and stage staff tried rubbing Tippy with Lazarus Balm, a product advertised on late-nite TV. The lunacy moth's singed wings bring it fallen to Earth. As he lay there girls spit into his

adenoidally stupid open mouth as they slowly filed by. He gagged his last stuffed-up sniff, then experimentally expired. Violently, he reposed. Or, more smugly like a king or prince, was deposed. Mere cargo in the depot; luggage and baggage, unclaimed freight and lonely bag circling the airport.

His death, like his life, was pissing people off. An unctuous death. Blue handcuff burns. He was shot outside the Biograph Theatre by a woman dripping Red. Broken on the wheel like a killed swastika, fallen off the ferris wheel, got rolled over by the great Fireconekun tire. He was pop music pulp. The bran of the brain spilled everywhere, crows circled overhead. Died from the bite of a monkey. Human landminepersons. I’m going out of business with myself. Into the ego of the sun. He died of youth. I don’t think he actually intended to do himself in, just kinda scare himself, try something different to see what’d happen. The Audience Inferno.

The audience infers that he miscalculated, that’s all. The Emergency button at his bedside was never pushed. The World’s Most Giventhe-Finger’d Boy was fingered as the crowd, this neon jury, examined the site of his execution by electrocution. Shoulda used a pocket calculator setting those pyrotechnics.

One kid ran up on stage doing a Tippy imitation, sang: Death came like a TV Repairman A Good Humor man in his little truck The jingling bells mean he forgot to pay his bill All he liked to do was fuck fuck fuck.

I mean, what is this, amateur night? There was no lucrative army of professional Tippy imitators, mouthing the words to his songs onstage, except privately. The balconies sprinkled kids with bricks.

Just then fire alarms sounded and the sprinkler system went off, ruining my hair.

Tippy was cut into pieces but ultimately came back together finally when the music was essentially no longer that but magnetic fields clacking. The last fifteen minutes were very beautiful like a string of pearls. Tippy heard phosphorescent saxophones, sperm razors and penis drums, saw white spiders swimming in enemas, tigers spinning into antipizza. The sound finally made firecrackers go off in his nose, cherry bombs in his ears and crotch like when flushed down the rival Kohlslau Junior High School boys’ washroom toilets.

Preoccupied with World Castration, Tippy harikari’d himself with a sharpened microphone. He consequently gave birth to his intestines.

Thump walked over, stepped on his intestines lying on the floor and out squeezed that afternoon’s burger and fries. A string was passed through him under the front bone of his pelvis and tied by which he was hoisted aloft, tearing tissue exposing his packaged inside.

Sensorially it was like playing bombardment. He was one giant nerve. He pulled out a knife, an electric guillotine, and began mutilating himself, not just whittling his sticks but lopping off his limbs and hurling them at the audience. Powdered up with a rosin of obscenities. Tippy was hit by a car onstage and stuff like the carwash kept washing off the blood, fluid, muck which Dink thought was probably bourbon. Court reporters in the audience kept time like

a click track, like silverfish swallowing print. Black pen-point nipples dripping ink. There’s a prowler in the house. He’s on the hammock.

He’s in the back doing something. Sweat glistened his brow like Oil of Pediatrician.

Tippy’s face imploded like a U.S. President’s often does on television. His eyes burst open. Tippy came in his eye ear nose and throat, tore his teeth with the microphone, tore his tears out of his eyes. Orgasms burst like sores, anemones all over his legs and body. Cock burst like an exploding cigar. It got night and his bladder burst water balloon, his gonads puff piff like champagne party poppers. Tambourines full of urine splashing every time those girls slapped them. Circumcised by circumstance, everybody just dance dance dance. I believe those were the words to the last song of the evening’s performance. The last drug Tippy got was a whiff of the toxic fumes from a room full of burning long-playing records.

I farted onstage, loudly and smelly, a big liquid sound just as Tippy exploded, so fortunately not a single member of the audience noticed. Critic Threadbear of CumOn! did, made a snide remark.

Who give that jerk a ticket for the front row anyway? Plato thought that. after death, souls camp out like at a Rock festival, the good over here, with a good view of the stage, the bad ones over here under the speakers. Women were giving birth to dead cows in the fields, among broken cornstalks in the moonlight. The sad and mournful sound was lost in the rush of cars, tractor-trailer trucks on the virginity highway nearby.

Nerves are shot, shot silk. Amused by his own dying. A corpse propped up by candlelight. Lost quicksand. A wailing and a gnashing of teeth. Everybody burning, melting with V.D. like plastic army men. An event like the rotting of the sun, the rotting of the cunt.

He saw blood-red asterisks, looked over, saw fingerpink spiders, giraffe-neck guitars extending way out to here. His childhood diseases all danced and frolicked before his eyes. He had a memory about his first and last haircuts. Laugh laugh, I thought I’d shit with laughter, useless laughter. A catharsis that might fill a void, or it might just step on a caterpiller. As boring as watching photographs.

As if we’d been in a torture chamber for centuries. The rape of the flower by the garden, or vice versa. The Tomb of Venus. The Grave of a Flower. The All-Souls’ Grave. Adam and Eve’s death by disease, that’s entertainment. All the women Tippy ever had danced before his eyes like they’re supposed to. A British wag wrote “He didn’t care a fig for the little parrots” meaning those girls crowding the stage. One line of Tippy’s own lyrics triggered a kaleidoscope of all the girls he ever had, but they must’ve been wearing horrible Halloween costumes (all rubber mask and rubber prophylactic) for a party or something, for he hardly recognized any. Debutante eyes big as opera glasses, yet ironic in their detachment as lorgnettes.

The lenses of Mackinaw lighthouses beckoning ocean-going ships.

Demons brandishing a Tippy Saw. Upon his death a hateful rock-ribbed church (where we'd actually onece played, for petty collection-plate cash the ingrates) rounded up all the girls at their teen party, pressed onions to their

eyes, and if they didn't cry, while hearing news of his death, were put to death by fire as witches. Stern times call for stern measures.

Supposedly Aldebbie was, at this very moment, as we speak, being fitted for a pair of Tippyskin boots, the body having been spirited away after his death. Or Aldebbie's management agency put that rumor forward, hot line to Threadbear at the CumOn!, and his next concert he'll be sure to wear some faux-skin platform galoshes or something-jodhpurs that everyone will assume to be Tippy.

Faux-skin, not foreskin; we can assume Tippy lost that part long ago, little lady. Though Aldebbie once appeared in slippers made of those too. Oh, somewhere, a while ago. I've got a stack of rock magazines, we can look through these together some time.

Was I a kind of haymarket Judas, walking offstage signaling that the band was dissolved then and there in a huff of guitar feedback? It took a few minutes for them to notice, leaving Tippy at the mercy of the bikers and, worst of all, his microbes. And the Christmas bombing could begin.

Trunk-to-tail elephants marched around to a clownish oompah band, stepping on Tippy each time, shitting big dumps on their rounds until he was brought back to conciousness by the bristling sweep of the cleanup man’s broom that followed. Coach Sweatschurz somehow got control of Tippy’s head, amputated and put back several times, before he handed it to the elementary school gym

department for use as a kickball. It lasted through several good games of bombardment. Good ol’ Sweatbiscuitz.

The crowd a sea of lunchmeat. Organ donors crowded the stage. “Don’t you want to give his eyes?” they shrieked at the band.

A heartache passed through the crowd as Mayan priests with obsidian knife guitar picks had dibs on it. They were going to blow his heart up into a zeppelin for sightseeing trips over Motorsburgh, an idea sponsored by a radio station that couldn’t afford a traffic report heliocopter. After years of maidenservice and drugs, pachuco Aztec priests—hey, don’t look at me, I’m descended from Druids—cut out his heart. When they opened up his heart and examined it they found small dark marks on it which I claimed to be notes in my hand in magic marker for a song list for a gig, or a song-cycle or new project.

What the hell, I plugged my bass guitar into it as a wild new distortion device. From the cracked-open teapot of his ventricle a mouse ran out, probably from television, he’d worn that mouse club hat so long.

Turning the station, Tippy was beaten by a thousand golf clubs— even Gerald Ford got in a few good whacks—a crown of tees and the kilties stripped off his shoes. Clubbed to death by members of his inner circle. He ate two melons spiked with different poisons. Clouds of grey dust rose like the dust from two mummies banging together.

He’d never been flayed before. His body was dragged through the streets behind a garbage truck, disentombed and mutilated and thrown into the Urine River, like the murder of a shit-eating “Grinning Pope”.

The audience roared in sado-satisfaction. Satisfacto-sadism.

Azimuth children and zenith toads.

Who ordained Tippy to be a sacrifice anyway? The high priests of the body politic the Rock critics? And who reads or has read the autobiographies, prison memoirs, of all the sacrifices of the past, the virgins hurled into volcanoes, Issac (really killed up there by his dad) or the Aztecs whose hearts were cut out on those grim altars with obsidian knives? The Resurrection was a restaurant. There’s a devil hiding up in that Cross. What if nobody hears your famous last words? What if nobody hears your guitar? The Assasination as a Rock Festival that may have been held in Dallas or Sarjevo, the first unhappy Beatles movie. The Assasination of President Paul (Yoko left holding on the brain), George as the mute Oswald, Ringo as glum good sport Governor Conally. Recast it with the Three Chomps, then the real Chomps! Keep showing it over and over until every generation gets the idea! Not cast out of him seven demons but the Three Chomps, those Three Little Pigs, one of whom built his house out of rock n’ roll as his peter built a church upon Rock.

Tippy was found floating face down in the pool onstage, like his father the great comedian Abbott Costello. His stomach swelled up like a fish—like mine, hah!—and with a foul belch he floated to the surface. Aldebbie’s dolphin swam about playfully, leaping over him and through illuminated hoops, performing all kinds of tricks in unison with the taped music coming over the sound system. The roadies must’ve been napping. The surface of the pool was graced by Thump with old crankcase oil. Tippy was hung up, opened, drained

into it for hours, crying “coolant, coolant”. As a dog doesn’t die if he drinks from the toilet (Tippy had asked his father who replied “No”), Tippy drank from the toilet of life. He shitted his brains. Grinning in death, he’d made himself into a Halloween mask.

Some of these greedy little Michigan maenads wanted to tear him up for any rumored canoodling with Aldebbie instead of them.

But others saw this as a holy Catholic communion—me as kindly Irish parish priest, thank you—with little parts of Tippy placed upon their tongues (as he so often placed the big part) as they remembered their white Mamie Eisenhower gloves and little straw-brim girlbox (not mom’s pillbox) hats that each had worn at her First Communion.

No, that’s not the same as their first time. First Communion does not equal first copulation, fool.

The charnel house lights came up, the crowd turned around and put on their jackets. Somebody booed. One kid hollered “I don’t get it”. Some kids were left holding season tickets. The audience streamed out like New York cockroaches out the back of an overheated radio, the rats on their hind legs firemen encounter running out of a burning building. I hear everybody danced themselves right out of the theatre, into a waiting taxi and home. The crowd left with the headaches people get in Hell from the amplifier volume. Little children admitted they liked the show.

It was fitting that the doctor who signed Tippy’s death certificate is a colored man. For under Tippy’s leadership we had attempted a

post-Afro Rock music music, undblandfully Bluesless, that wouldn’t make our parents shiver at the the thought of open housing, a Police Review Board, colored schoolteachers in all schools, civil rights and treated as equals. The older generation heard violationsex in even the creamy romances in radio-affectionate overproduced Motorsbourgeois label singles. Maybe black guys who went to Viet Nam knew that the Sun is black.

Guess this is integration nation, even if Mom won’t have it.

Actually, I went to the filthy, decrepit ballroom restroom. Upon the wall the decrepit sign Endeavor to Always Empty Bladder Properly. Hah, as if Tippy would ever need that advice, even upon the stage. I found a stall and took a long, healthful, tension-relieving bowel movement. Messy and acrid, there was no paper, so I took off my leather jacket, tore out the satiny lining then tore it into strips to clean myself. I left the jacket there, crumpled on the floor, a souvenir of my now-terminated Rock n' Roll life duly jettisoned and abandoned, defiled.

Upon Tippy’s death the vermin crawled out of his cooling body, further proof of his coolness. Nerve gas escaped from his nerves, slaughtered several prairie flocks of sheep and their shepherds.

Hibernating bears up north rubbed themselves against a pleasant moss-covered rock or piece of wood in their caves. All the forest animals got off in their warrens, hutches and nests. Birds fell from the sky, exploded. Bands fell from the sky, exploded, faulty wiring in their planes’ altimeters blamed. Villagers reported seeing cats walking in circles. A crow fell off his perch. Switch on your auto

headlights at the first sign of the End of the World. Motorsburgh erupted in major riots, the National Guard was called out and Blue Ribbon panels convened. Police cars buzzed from the station house like bees from the hive. Searching for stolen suicides. Bob Dylan and the Beatles were tried in absentia as impostors and liars. A nationwide bisonlike stampede of 20,000 chaperones. The sea washed over Michigan and destroyed the temples of industry, all the ballparks. Snowblowers combed the stage where he lay dead like Winter. Lightning struck the very spot several times in succession.

Chimpanzees rattle the bars of their cages and those on television stubbornly refuse to perform. A sunny death. I’ll tread on your blisters. Shitting a perfect ouroboros, eating its own tail. I can't help it that my bowels voided, empties mightily at the moment of his death.

No rock journalists will mention it, I'm confident. It's immaterial, not the news.

As I was saying, Death is when the ouroboros-hoopsnake himself finally shits. Suddenly a turd exploded with violent unheard-of fury in the butt of every small dog on earth. It gives me doody-aches to think about. Death by rhinoceros, whereas we might've predicted rhinitis.

People started seeing weird stuff. After Tippy's death, Christ appeared to Pete n' Paul, those petri-dish patron saints, along with the Roman god of War, of Hallowe'en candy. Similarly, UFOs were sighted one night at Peach-Cobblertown radiotelescope dish north of town. Astronomy Prof. Susan Schwampgas tried to dissuade agape onlookers from trampling the cornstalks subsequent nights, to no avail. She trod away in her tennis sneakers disappointed, but eager

about the university football game that coming Saturday afternoon, where she was a picturesque fixture. Some people claimed to see Bill Haley’s Comet, but it was only that damn Kahoutek or a UFO. I’m on guard against false heresies versus my true heresies.

What makes telling Tippy stories so disconcerting and difficult. Which one is Come Together magazine’s tale, which one is the Cream City Cum’s version? Now the founding myth of out “Tippichigan”, sort of.

Visitations? Visions? Was Tippy himself sighted in a mall in the western dunes of the state, the one building covering the lawn where they held the Goose Turd Green festivities? No, that turned out to be a shaggy, yeti-like man even bigger than me.

Manatee, Manitou, Winnetou, MoMo Monster…

My muttered litany of scary.

People will come to other concerts at the Motorsburgh Bourgeoistorium, and might not even think of Tippy's girls, who now just want to dance in their spiky haircuts and makeup to Aldebbie's meaningless songs, ignoring the lyrics. Or that British jungle-fowl's legions of fey, fashionable epigones.

Those earth movers and cement trucks were rolling to the construction site of the big Tomb of the Chomps monument just outside Aleppo.

Clocks were set an hour ahead for Delight Savings Time because of the curvature of the Earth when it was surveyed and the Midwestern states laid out. Or they’d momentarily forgotten it was already Savings Time and set their clocks even a further hour ahead. Past, present, furnace. Smoke alarms beeped even after the batteries were removed. Automatic garage doors all went up, or wouldn’t go up, went on strike. Tiles fell from bathroom walls. The Earth wobbled slightly on its axis, and the next

as to why. The Nile failed to flood; the Awshit dam came crashing down softly. Alaska had an earthquake, Tsunami waves full of walleye salmon and railroad cars crashing down like a record producer’s wall of sound. A big wheel in the sky bursting like a rocket over the airport. Teapots whistled. Every can of lighter fluid in the county exploded in a squarish FOOMF! of flame in the backyard.

Husbands in chefs’ hats and Danger! Men Cooking aprons stood aghast, their eyebrows singed off. The funny weatherman cried on the Evening News. The Weathermen cried in their bomb-factories.

Meatcutter, butcher thyself. Serving up terror spareribs. Pimped for death, the dirty linen of the guillotine. Rock writers were castrated with a necklace of hatchets red hot from the fire.

The shade on

many windows rolled up n’ went flap flap flippity flap. Jocks drank beer from his skull. An old woman tore out anything male she could find. The drummer tore nails from his own hands with his teeth; I had never known Thump to have a bum trip like that. Fed to hissing snakes and rattlers, bred and raised young on feathers in earthenware jars. They burned the chiefs of various rock bands.

That moment Tippy heard Cutey of the Chomps, who’d died exactly twenty years before, go NYUCK-NYUCK-NYUCK to him, in his ear. Death came to him like Dan Blocker riding a minibike; he heard it from afar, clattering its squirrel-cage sewing-machine motors, rupp-rupp-rupping. White grey canvases of sperm crashing into brown female bulldozers. Tippy farted, burped, shitted, sneezed, spat, came, pissed, cried, snotted, laudged and bled at the nose, ears

and apertures all at the same time, and—sure as when you lift a Guinea Pig by the tail and its eyes fall out—he died. And wouldn’t you know it, somewhere on campus a scientist, this dufy guy with thick glasses, leaky pens in his shirt pocket and stick up hair, peered into a microscope and made a discovery. Death Beaver opened wide its gnawing teeth, animal odor and spiny fur crackling with fire. G-GG-GOLLY...!

He got off, got paid off, posthumously. Arrangements had been made and we drove off. He just stopped living, that’s all. I would like to say Tippy’s last words were “Mother”, gently tattooed in whispers upon his lips, but you know that simply wasn’t true. He didn’t drop to his knees in blackface to cant “Mammy”. Somewhere in the course of the evening he may have shrieked “I didn’t get enough sex when I was young”. Hey, I didn’t egg that house.

His thousand and one wives stormed the scene of his electrocution and consumed his pantsparts, eating it like it was library paste. His ribs were barbecued Motorsburgh-style, by some Black cook with his own well-regarded barbeque sauce. A large fire broke out onstage. Tippy became a deepfried guy, frito’ed like a paperback ablaze. The Parable of the Burning Cathedral re-enacted faithfully by the faithful. Live sulphur. Skeletons in a Stalag. The smell of burn like the inside of a basketball. A hot and cold running hot buttered boy. He was a shower where the hairball’s been collecting for 100,000 years. A grenade surgically implanted in his head. A pipe bomb went off in his aorta. Explosions ripped through the oil refinery of his body. A fun bomb. The black wine dripping from a wire

transmitting from hell. Felt like a smokin’ dog who exaporated. Fell out of airplane. A performance racked in quakes. It was like kicking a set-up monopoly board off the table up there. Death without embarassment. He was just like an orgasm. He had an atomic bomb dropped onstage by the Japanese, to blow up the world. The Sun’s genitalia. That was what fell on the stage in little bits. Rock into the Sun. It was cosmic.

Tippy’s final emission—the usual occurrence of a well-hung hanged man—caked upon his jeans as flaky, waxy round cinnamon communion wafers, and Catholic girls with heads covered pressed them against the roof of their mouths with their tongues. The starchy paste-taste delighting them one last time, or until the next rock star or whatever guy.

Oh wait, scratch that, he’d gone impotent. This never happened. My last chord fed back, whooped around the auditorium until it dissipated, dissolved, everyone began to exit and go home.

They say when Tippy died he went from lefthandedness to righthandedness. Long hair caught on fire. Christ’s dream upon the Cross. On the Cross equals Onstage. A sepulchre of sound. He said Goodbye God and God said Goodbye and retired, went fishing.

Like Saint Frankie, he took a heckuva long time to die. In the end all he had was his Rock band. All that remained was a cross covered with moths, seeking an licking up traces of the wool Christ. From the stage to the second stage. No evidence he either made nor married a female Saint. His cock roaches fled this condemned building. The

stage was filled with kittens lapping up his blood. He was spread on tongues after his death. He didn’t really die.

Many girls came down with a smudged heart. Orpheus cried “Oooff!” Tippy Icarus got too high, got burned up by the sun. He was just shooting at rainbows. Sex had finally scared him, especially the public. He’d had both feet planted firmly in the sexual revolution, firmly in posession of his genitals, but sex ran away with him like the dish ran away with the spoon. I said to Coral Don’t feel bad, souls should rise up like champagne bubbles, right? She rolled her eyes, groaned.

A massacre commenced. Guns full of cinders fired, left one grand scab that spread across the blackberry faces of the audience.

Women sponsors danced with spoons. Photoprostitues flashed and developed (sexually) before our very eyes. Another magic of Communism. Corpse of a boy dropped from the sky. A sulking skull.

Slouching skeletons. A hotter sort of Heaven, a wetter sort of Hell.

An audience of kings and newborn babies. One movie star had an abortion onstage, some kind of a fundraiser for him. The doctor practiced a urine/saliva extraction that did no good. He must’ve been a hundred when he died. An orange burning in baking soda. He was fructified. The splattered man was abolished, pulverized, creamed.

Maybe it was a hippy death. Not with a whimper but a KA-BOOM! or KABLOOEY! His soul fell out onstage, bounced off the drum with a thud.

That swimming pool he died in onstage was sold to the University for use as a substitute, back-up Swimming Pool Reactor.

Hey, the graphite rods down there are giving off a weird blue glow, scientists and grad students above jostling for a better look. Enrico Infermity! Tippy was irradiated but I was rather irritated. Tippy’s brain exploded in the exact shape of a cloud of mushroom soup from an atomic bomb.

I barely escaped by heliocopter, clutching a copy of Sex Life of the Lord and scowling at the remainders. I lurched forward and fell into the book like a church under construction. Thump, not so lucky, was trampled by the crowd and broken on the wheel of his drums. His last words were softly murmured to himself: Pain Sucks.

Thump was killed in an industrial accident like so many in World War II, his escape slowed and frustrated by the ballast of his drumcovered fingers. Actually he lived to grow fat playing in other bands, Chomps imitators.

The sky was rent by silence. The spazzattack of silence when a Rock concert momentarily stops. Motorcycle policemen were weeping. Whitesters crowded the stage, redcross hearts fluttering on their hackneyed hand-dyed cotton layered breasts. Broken membranes on the front of the amplifiers were oozing mothersmilk already soured in the teat. Brainsplatter all over. A boxer dog started barking at a fire. Coral, tired face like an old Volkswagen, and I exchange “You’ll thank me’s” and “I told you so’s” with our eyes.

Cops went around asking “Who started this?” The amplifiers, crackling and smoky like a burning thorn and briar thicket, vomited undigested pieces of song. The amputated stumps of electric guitars littered the stage. I’d like to say their souls rose up through karma

together like through big wet soft pingpong balls but I’m not sure I believe that stuff. Zapruder had made a whirring 8mm movie of it all but it was seized by the FBI and never shown on campus.

The hired guitarist tossed down his weapon in confused disgust. He went back to the suburbs to comiserate with his dad, the old comedian who played Santa in every Motorsburgh department store Thanksgiving Day parade, always afraid some nut would shoot him. Hadn’t I told you, he was really the son of Mikey Chomp, who had invented the pie in the face, so I don’t see what he was so steamed up about anyway. Heh heh heh.

Scan the morning Rock newspapers.

There were no

individuals then, only bands, but I worry that they were only hammering upon the empty husk of Rock, the cast-off scabs of scarabs, thoughtless hippie drum circle in the park. Scrambled somnambulists of sound, maybe, but certainly not of Soul, or the soul.

So how did I compile all these lists of bands? Not on paper, but in my tousled head. I had all the Rock magazines, but my mother burned them when she found I'd been with Coral, especially making the "Love that doth not dare speaketh its name" in several nonpregnantizing holes, which must’ve been why then and there she vowed to exile me. But I'm getting ahead of myself, a full head of steam, and I'm not that kind of head.

Getting head from you. Oh, nothing, you innocent girl.

To contnue: the Retroactives, and all other récherché bands, seemed to me to be stubborn and intractable lumps in the path of progress. The Disunited, the Vicissitudes, the Bubblebusters. The Delusions of Grandeur, the Self-Defeats, the Egomaniacs, Johnny Thingsapart and the Can't Do Thats. The Unsupportable Claims, the Insensates, the Idunnos, and the Security Gods. Deena and the Déenouments, the Kowtows, and the Satraps' "Unbeknownst to Me".

The Fog Lights. An eccentric electrical engineer, besieged by frugal conservation, started a band called Every Fuckin' Light in the House Left On!!!, exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point.

Failure of nerve bands like the Simply Cannots, the Cowards, the Disappointmentals and the Neglectors; the Indistinguishables, the Complaisants, the Inhibitions. The Chatters, the Inabilities, the

Singlemindeds, the Lamentables, the Unstuffed. It was in the University Morals Club that I first heard the Vicars' beery "Hail to the Vicars Valiant". The stereo then spun the Lost Contracts, the Sames, the Sooner-or-Laters, the Feel Sorry Fors, the Also Rans and the Grind-to-a-Halts. The Stumbling Blocks covered forgettable songs by the Slipshods, the Ennuis the Unessentials, the Irritants, the Timewasters, the Equivocators and Vacillators, the Obfuscations and the Pusillanimals. The damaged heads and hands of the Confidantes. A band called Don't Go Away Mad. The Deprecations, and the sensitive banalysands the Enemy Psychiatrists. A peaceable bunch of wimps called the Let's Not Quibble, whose teeny-tiny songs were summed up in the record jacket showing minutae with their fingers, like "The Sum Total of My Honor, Baby". Puer aeternii like the Pueriles, who even did an unauthorized cover of "Forever Young". The Infernal Objects, from a subdivision in the shadow of a billboard that said DO NOT THROW INFERNAL OBJECTS ON HIGHWAY. Pygmy band the Pygmatics, fresh from the bush and jungle undergrowth of the dancefloor. The Wouldn't Put It Past Yous, or boogie satraps like the Support Straps. The Sidles' "Sidle On Up", the Long Walks, the Mendacities.

The Illusions of Grandeur. "Blotting Out the Sun" by the Ungenerous. The Infastructures, the Infuriators. The Keepsakes, the Percussion Capons, the Inchworms. The Puff Balls, optimistically issuing demo tapes like spores of success, but they never got signed.

The Nap Dogs, the Windbags, the Windowdressings, Rex Avatar and the Broadways, the Dazzleships, the Ideologues, the Lagerbuckets, the Ignobles, the Squabbles' petty pot of grievances and grudges.

Club Happenstance featured the ICan'tControls, the Shrunken Headwaiters, and the Dynamic Autistics. An album cleverly shaped like a county-notarized death certificate by the Darkening NightyNites.

"Hey, No Offense" by the Leopardeaters. The Expulcators' "I'm Not Guilty". The Mindsweepers. Sugar-pale beatniks like The Diabetiks. Strudel-addled rubes like the Misconstruedz, the Adrifts, Johnny Breakingpoint, the You Did Whatever You Coulds, The Dilapadations, Depredations, Deprecators, Imprecations, Distraughts, the Destitutes, Mars Leper and the Shimmyulacras, MacBethy bands like the Out Damned Spots.

Meanwhile the True Youth had gotten long in the tooth. The Old Beach Balls, who built their career on surf music songs like "Under the Sex Sun", now reduced to covering the jailhouse ballad "Cuckolds' Blues". The Faultigods, the Last Minutes. The Executors' "Triumvirate of the Will" (named after a Chomps Trio short, y’know).

The Don't Bothers, the Prematurds, passivity bums like the Hopeless Odds. The Hand Movements, the Stingyminds, the Psychosurgeons of the Aeons. Watch band the Rewinders’ Abandoned Music album, produced by seasoned watchman Seth Thomas. The Moot Points, the Eventualities. "(You May) Void If Detached" by the Sounds of New Disappointment, the Unepiphanied, the PolyRomans. The Unexorcisable, the Excorciated, the Egregiouses and the Jejunes.

The Foibles, the Failed Chances, the Old Lifestyles, the Retrogrades, the Readjustments, The Stuck Numbers. The Preludes to Something, performing a lot of songs by Leonard Doldrums. The Row Row Rowyourboats played at the Merrily Down the Stream Club.

Tom Tuna and the Treadmills' "Ta-Ta, Baby", the Predestinations. A ninety-six guitar band tore it up. Ecch, I hated this era in Rock music.

On the morning after, Rock needed sunglasses; not the Structural Damages, the Senseis of Accomplishment, the Deepdown Insides, the Deep Six, the Prototownspeople, the Encoders, the WalterBrennanmen, the Ph.D.'s Driving Cabs, Johnny Frisson and the Unexploited Few, the flawed but valliant solo effort by The Man Who Manages Your Toupée. The theatricality of the Dead Understudies, the Undiscovered, the Defeatists, the Don't Drink the Waters, a prejudice against the southern states that were the fount of their music. The Berations, the Discredits and the Profundities.

"Waking Up with a Slimy Flyswatter" rode the charts all Summer long.

"An Angel Crisis" by the Samenesses, the Real or Imagined Slights, the Stumblebums, the Eunuckers, the Shoves "When Push Comes to", the Stickemups!, the Standalones.

A band called the Can I Help It? The Professional Jealousies and the Historianz. A band called Rape of the Intellectual. The Much Obliged, the Lichee Nuts, the Macadamia Men. Some bands prance up there like big Vienna-sausage horses that don't want you to know they're geldings, melancholy centaurs. The Teaspoons (heated over a candle, etc.). The Judge-Not-Lest-Ye-Be-Judges. The Unfair Comparisons, the Familiar Complaints, the Dislodgers, the Dishdrainerettes, the Handholdings, the Capsizers, the Goddamnability, the Hey Lighten Up Dudes. The Skincrawls "Skincrawler". The Truncated changed their name to the Pillars of the Commune, finally the Truncated Pillars. The Broken Popes. The Fulminators, The Flummoxes. the Sidesplittings, the Attempts to be

Godlikes, the Resounding Thuds and the Thudtones. The Idle Boasts, the Fill-Ins, the Hanging Ten, the Drindls, the Approaching Hoofbeats, the Pussyfooters. The Close Calls. The selfish SelfAccusers using everybody else's equipment, afraid of wearing out their own. The Typecast Toadstools, the Wrongful Deaths, the Masterpieces of Sorrow. Still got somewhere the Complete Disasters' 45 "Dog Furniture" b/w "Smoke that Telephone".

Fights were breaking out between the Changelings, The Eyesores and the Eversores, Miss Mistake and the Melodic Misprints, each believing the others to be usurping their share of a finite success. The Dream Journals, the Troubled Minds. The Negations' "Pemmican Envy", the Untranslatables, Pius and the Rolling Pins. A band of guys like me called the Wheelspinners. Dog-eared and motheaten, yep that's the Seedies. The WhenWe's, suffused and suffocating in their genuine nostalgia. The Expenses, the Snivelers, the Interregnums, the Erratums. The Not So Sures. "Impotence Blues" by the Saggital Crestfallens. The BonaFides (of jaunty instrumental "Bonerin'" fame) got sick of insisting “It’s fee-days!”, changed their name to the Horrifieds and began some concept album about fear of whores.

This year Rock fell on its face. The Grease Pencils. the Perfect Appearances' "Deception", the Might'vebeens, the Giveups, the Gave Ups, the Last Ditch Efforts, the Excessives, the Oversights. A bigger bunch of cliché-eaters you never saw in your life.

The Thumbsuckers. The Mental Blocks. The Dry Creek Beds, the Usable Past, the Offspring. The Skyleonards. The mournful crooning of the All Tore Up Insides. Autocatholics like the

Annulments, the Christstuffers, the Reliquaries, "Why God is Laughing at Me" by the Overcompensatyrs, the Single-Needle Tailors, the Ill-Fitting Suits, the Suicide Attempts, the Traffic Heliocopters, the Treadmills. One group agonized over whether to call their band the Purges or the Purgatives. The Dry Wells, the Poisoned Water Holes. The Meat Tenderizers' "Tendentious Rhizomes". Bands with dinosaur names like the Pleasedon't Lovemes or the Homing Devices were probably the most cynical, for who wants to go home to their parents? The Immaturers, the Justifiers' "Their Own Justifications", and "Efface the Music" by the Thought Padlocks. Frequent performances by moonlighting journalists The DeathofRocks —Threadbear himself was rumored to have ghost-written some songs.

Being very young, I thought the name of The Half-Days referred to school; later, on a tour of the University labs and reactors, they were exposed to so much nuclear radiation they became the HalfLives. The Half-Abortions’ plaintinve plainsong "Each Man Kills the Thing She Loves". Too clever and sentimental by half.

Electrostatic Rock, the guitarist rubbing his long hair against the carpeted amplifiers for further juice, drummer charging his stick on ruggy cat-scratch poles. Is this something that’s going to last? We shall see.

I'll say it in a foghorn voice: BBBOOOring.

They say in a little league sunset a Cub Scout let go of a helium balloon the moment Tippy died. All scotch tape refused to stick. A

miracle: split plastic was healed. A bus crashed going off the road in Guatemala, several Americans hurt and the girl who was p.g. wasn’t anymore when a piece of luggage hit her heart. Thought about the busdriver suicide who parked his bus on a big city river drawbridge, or the weightlifter jumping out of windows with his barbells mounted on his feet. An explosion of colored lights like two sheriff’s cars colliding. The toast weeping in the toaster. Tippy flew away on insect wings. It is said women undid themselves, voided on the spot and vowed never to do it with another guy. Explosion in a nursing school, the smell of burning peppermint. Man over Michigan! He’s a greensky guy waving a windshield snow-brush. A sacrifice to himself.

It was a funny day.

Suddenly, tomorrow. An omniscent narrator appeared in the sky. The Russians took all the Americans to bed. “With a wellplaced bomb” muttered a conservative commentator on radio. In New York his entrails were being stretched from the Ed Sullivan Theatre all the way down Fifth Avenue, and his spirochetes were hurled out of windows for a ticker tape parade. Rubber gloves used to handle his diseased confetti were sold out almost immediately in the immediate neighborhood. Transparent auditors leapt upon their books, “He can’t die—he hasn’t paid his taxes”. Mouthfuls of the city caught fire. Rivers ran faster. All traffic lights in Las Vegas turned red. All the books in the world got read again. The Aleppo Public Library, where I used to plot, study and work, burst into flames at about that moment in the concert, but it was also the last week of highschool and may have been a prank. In vicious, delicious irony,

while we were onstage playing, pogrommatic fire consumed the shtetl surrounding the Firehouse.

Upon his death a row of telephone poles out in the country took root, began sprouting. Kids fell off their bikes. In Scotland the golf courses flew their flags over the holes at half-mast. The government of Israel was toppled by being voted out. The United Nations listened to bootleg Tippy tapes on translators’ headsets. No poetry has been written since that day. Blackbirds wept, then went about their business. Chameleons all changed colors. Foods changed calories.

Somebody’s message beeper went off. Rents increased, food prices went down. Judicial death was toasted with champagne in prisons.

Prominent judges were murdered, but to the anarchist student to murder a pre-med student or future architect is a holy thing. The faces of the children on the United Nations stamps stopped smiling.

The hold on all airplanes leaving Motorsburgh Metro burst open and luggage snowed down on the Michigan fields. The water filtration plant near his parents’ home began pumping blood filtering it of plankton like an imbiber’s liver and kidney, overflowing its settling tanks and pools. The sludge pond near the school belched, clotted with cum, or phlegm.

Death proved to be a total political change, a stockmarket panic as a result. Everybody’s phones rang. The phones all went dead.

Mail in the postal system stopped moving. Phonies stopped chatting and bragging, cats got their tongues tongue-tied. Dinner forks all suddenly became razors in the middle of the meal, owww... The stars scalded the sky. Death as the pulling of the plug on a Rock

concert. How will people listening to all those records play all those instruments when the last electrical engineer who works in the powerhouse is dead or retired? Burned up! like all the letters girls send boys. All the words in all the songs—especially the ones I know by heart and can sing in the car or shower—changed irreparably, irrevocably. Irrevocally.

Somewhere a native woman scratches her breast. A girl screamed “They’ve killed the totem”. Nobody forsaw this happening! replied somebody. Somebody cried out his age, which was “21” like sthe restaurant. Countries got scared and nonagression pacts were signed. All the rock bands turned down. All the rockets in the world went. Bugs sang from a treasury of cicada favorites. Pinball machines all said “TILT”. Handfulls of turds dropped from the skies, filling diarrheac swamps, dire areas. On that last day everyone’s gonna cry, for at least one girl and her boyfriend died. Everybody in the world fell down. Coral’s bust fell out of her low-cut top, her mother’s as well. And yes, it was amazing his little heart could pump blood through his body like that, the doctor would be saying in his homily at the autopsy on satellite TV. Amazed professors consumed whole pipefulls in their briars. When he died everybody went downtown. Those few who didn’t just went downstairs. The newborn child was snatched up to Heaven. Placentas of remorse in the world of the animal killed. I just know Aimée Fink is probably salivating over him in Heaven, or in the institutional unventilated public school-like waiting room called Purgatory.

“Eat your heart out” cried the waggish son of the University couple who always shout “Jump” to any indecisive suicide on the edge of a building in every language they teach. The mice were laughing in their traps. The cigar had smoked itself out. God grabbed for him “But the devil NEEDS him in Hell” a girl shrieked. A dire emergency. The light that blinds albinos and darkens Negroes went on, the light that makes men and birds blink. A famous light went on and his eyes fell off like glasses. Ash is just incense turning out its lights. Did I say, Tippy nearly fell off the stage. Exploding, punctured, leaking like a menstruating whore. Death was duration.

Some say Tippy died on his thirty-third and a third revolution, but it was just like him to cram it all into a life travelling twice that fast.

Too bad we didn't have one girl-powered galley ship in which dying Tippy could be bundled up and rowed, out to sea, a burnt Viking burial. Perhaps some fisherman's rowboat, tied in the reeds down kupon the Uvula, could be stolen for that purpose.

Tippy’s nails grew, hair grew, duly noted by the rock press anticipating the next record cover. Posthumous Rock always sells best. After the suicide onions grew a strange layer, noticeable when peeled away like the habit of a nun. Everywhere they stabbed him snot came out on the cameras. The bandicoot of sex now just a mouth of abolished teeth. The Man Who Died When Kahoutek Came. When Civilization finally died and everyone moved on, all the kids snapped their records in half and kicked in their stereo speakers, disengaged airconditioners from windows and let them drop. People

will pay anything for a dead man’s record collection. Killed himself to avoid practicing.

So the remaining Rock stars all took teaching jobs. God, ambassador or meddler? Gut me, now he’s dead too, God’s best friend. They undid God’s haircut, pithed Tippy’s brain, scrambled his ham n’ eggs like a firstyear Biology student frog. His skull burst into flame, grandiose white chrysanthemum bloom in the night sky.

Reminds me of the story of the little kid with a human head stuck on a pole and all he’d answer was “I got it legally but I won’t say how”.

Motorcycle gangs’ colors all turned into soft pink baby blankets. His father came in the car to pick him up after the party. San Francisco had an earthquake of sex. With the slight crash of a poster falling off a wall, all erections in the world collapsed. Collages de-assembled and the pieces went home to their original magazines. Jackie O. had another miscarriage, the baby that was gonna teach the Kennedys to laugh at themselves again.

Upon Tippy’s death my mom baked an apple pie. Set it out on the window to cool and no blackbirds or bluejays flew out. She could’ve made tapioca. Wasn’t even part of the school menu.

A match drops into the audience, sets fires to not only the crowd but a part of the Firehouse, burning my collection of Third Reich memorabilia, documents, LP albums and 45s. Meanwhile a four-alarm fire, Tippy’s father chased the firetrucks and found out the band’s home was totally ruined, smoking skeletal matchstick cinders, must’ve been arson set by the doctor-landlord to get ready cash while the FBI was tracing his son to Haight-Ashbury. The turned-off house.

Used old bloody gauzes as the incendiary oily rags. Like the crimp in a tube of toothpaste, a door to be never opened again.

Tippy fell twenty-five generations to his death. It was later than it’d ever been when he died. The breakup of the world proceeded on time and it smelled of melted plastic, burning your models. He felt the breath of God’s dragon, angels crying “Hurry up”. Hotaches and life’s change of life. The peter of pain. God, Lord Layton of this world, for whom I am asleep. There’s a riot going on in my heart. Guitar-cases full of vengeance are mine! Barrels of vengeance. Throw myself at the dancing feet of the happy children. Garlands of flower power. Ivy in their hair meant they were hippie kids but nevertheless headed for good colleges. Little suckling devils. Mud christians. Mudpie hosts.

Pressed into the service of a volcano. Death was a bully that picked on me, threw down my books, stole my hat. A death packed with life.

Death like the closing titles on the best TV show, the Natural Anthem before the test pattern of a new day, red-eyed white and blue. Death like staying up too late. Death’s final farting. The Endless fainted.

Well, at least one highschool graduate tied his tail to the comet in this town. What a tangled web we weave when we practice, practice, for so many years, to deceive. I’m as guilty as the rest of them. He couldn’t walk on a sea of guilt, and even Midwesterners can’t surf on its waves. Oh well, I too am in Arcadia, but I mean Aleppo. The smile of the man who torched farms. What is Rock except Art in a Fraction of a Second. Tippy jumped off the shuttlebus of immortality—maybe just immorality—a fraction of a second too soon. must’ve been that new guy on guitar who betrayed him to the cops.

Somebody then discovered nothing happens elsewhere when you die. It In the languor that followed there wasn’t any noise. Big Bang theories just didn’t fit. People stopped fucking, not that they had to for any physical or political reason, but that it was too much of an inconvenience to extend oneself so, actually roll over and mount and insert, until finally, in exasperation the partners just gave up, get bored and go away until one submits to the languor him or herself.

All those showers afterward, the changing of the temperature of the water, just too much work. Besides, the verbal, tactile responses of mating keep taking just a little bit longer. Pickups succeed increasingly less, frustration rises in the breast but sooner falls. A residue of libido, or at least mere competence, reassures oneself that one is normal. When even to superfuck was superfluous.

Lassitude clawed the belly like shit in an animated cartoon.

Apathy is a too-tight hat worn on a shrunken, drowsy head. Why wave swollen ox-limbs over useful paper in only a mockery of true work? You’re letting me put some yogurt on paper. The vacuum of memory. My Three a.m. of the Soul all the time. Taking myself at floating face value. I am artifice, I am vapour, I am invalid, I am oaf.

Of course, I almost didn’t write this. The parts I forgot were even better.

Books get read, for they are a medium sufficiently languid to retreat into, and television attendance is up, its wispy ideas weaving feigned coherence. People just like the light though, test patterns or white noise are OK for a larger and larger audience, while other sets

just take longer to get turned off. Gazing at the sky becomes a popular pasttime too, not in search of the deliverance of space aliens but because there’s a mild pleasure in the vague cornflower-greyturned-whitish-yellow nonrepresentational cloud shapes.

Going to the bathroom takes longer, a solitary pasttime. Things fall into disrepair, but not the genteel nattiness we’re used to. We think we’re putting something over on someone. The only paintings we seem to see in magazines or storefronts are all titled “Unfinished”.

The philosphers defend Burnout as a valid human condition. Selfparody is the most comfortable of all. People grow insensitive to cold, forget to button up and sort of slip away on a carpet of pneumonia. Things sparkle in the sky more, while people look at things longer and see less. Everybody forgets nearly everything.

They leave their mouths open longer, subjecting them to the risk of diseases that way too. A bluejay looks at a nut or seed it wants on the ground a little too long, but the cat also takes longer to spring.

Tippy was crematose. Creamed. He was fricasseed. Drawn, then quartered by four vehicles: a band truck, a hippie van, a police car and a honky’s sedan, from each corner of the stage. All those Motorsburgh superlatives “killer”, “destroyer”, “bomb” had been applied to his ruined body.

My guitar solo spun and sprang hydra-headed mea culpas, each apology spilling into another. I helped those fathers, like Horace, hold Tippy’s head underwater. Until he repented, with an

ounce of sincerity. They thought I would tell, spill the beans and drop a dime, on them.

After Tippy’s death, Aldebbie appeared in a striking new stage ensemble his press release called “Tippy leather”, titillating the crowd of rock pundits by implying he had “the dear boy, whom we all cared about deeply” tanned and stretched and cut and sewn into arresting couture. Fucking faggottissimal baptismal font-drinking fuck, should I feel glad that fans soon tore it from his body, into tiny souvenir scraps taken home to pin on bedroom bulletin boards? I guess I do. That’s more in keeping with a Tippy gig. Smelling the last waft of money, Aldebbie had us record one of Tippy’s last songs, “Los Angeles Clitoris” while we were still pretty damaged by events and dazed by mourning.

Maybe Tippy, or what’s left of him, could be interred in that graveyard near Mom’s house.

Upon Tippy’s death, or maybe earlier that day so it dominated the evening news instead, a bolt of lightning hit a crowded outdoor swimming pool, blasting kids into the air, scattering them in a large circle, smelling of roast flesh. Any teenage girls present who were pregnant certainly weren’t any more.

Maybe a comet, Come-to-Get-Her. And her. And her.

Now I’m rusty. Haven’t played guitar since the band broke up.

Goat hands. I’ll find one of those villages where, instead of the landlord, the rock star (aged, bewhiskered and long-retired, but still

retaining the honorific) is the one parents send their young daughters to, in order to be relieved of their virginity.

Like rubbing against an erect stone herm in the park. The Marble Föhn, the puff of craziness from the desert south.

Death had thrown Tippy into a tizzy. Still can’t believe he’s really gone. An intolerogasm.

With Tippy’s brutalist assassination, I guess he crossed our Jack Rubicon, no turning back. The way the hippie Mayor of New York said “Kill Your Parents.”

After his death, Anthropology professor Tamerlane Zagnut was asked to contact his Amazonian Jive-o Indian informants, to shrink not his head as a trophy but his penis, to a normal size, so they could close the lid of the coffin. They were given university loincloths, shooting birds and squirrels from the trees with darts from their blowguns, as they roamed suspiciously about the campus. His body parts afterwards were collected, sold and shipped to UpyourmamaInthejohn Pharmaceuticals in Kudzu, MI where it was processed into pills, baked and powdered into capsules, as a mile psychedelic prescribed for women’s hesitation and low libido. The FDA bet the ATF would fast fat-track approve that one, just for goof. His corpse, or its remaining parts, ashes and bone fragments, was all tossed into the sludge pond.

Swans, graceful and peaceful, were spotted on the sludge pond beside the elementary school after his death. Upon his death/shortly

before his death twenty thousand bats awoke from their hibernation in the cave-like spillway at the new Tippy Hydro plant up north on the Manitoumomomonster River. To see that was memorable, creepy, kind of cool.

Like when Lucifer’s shimmering body fell from the cloud (was that when his wax wings melted?), was divided up, eaten or salted and pickled by Israelites for their later winter famine, a people famous for their holidays and rituals Aldebbie’s already telling reporters and concert reviewers to remember that HE’S the Lucifer, who brought light and sex from Europe to woodsy, industrial and suburban Michigan. In your dreams, Pumpkinbutter. Ptui! More like you stole all of Tippy’s best stage moves and witty ideas. You’re the Eve who ate the apple of the Chomps, whole, in one big chomp. And you filched our band’s rumbling sound, my razzing guitar. It’s obvious on your “Gas Lad” album. Your persona there, a superhero who could switch from steelcutting acetylene to showy neon, to hydrogen and oxygen mist, was a metaphor for your own unsubstantiality. OK, [critic] wrote that, but it’s true. Foo on you. Phooey and Ptui!

Aren't I answering all your "How did I feel..." questions? What you call "evasive," I call thinking through my answer to your complex question. I haven't had a lot of intelligent, provocative interviewers like you, y'know.

Upon Tippy's death, the neck of my guitar weirdly sprouted Wagnerian-Papal leaves. Also, Parsifal parsely. When I die of old

age, they'll display my boots, perhaps my severed hands.

I went outside, looked up and saw a spazzattack of shooting stars in the sky. Meanwhile, a meteorite tore through the roof of the Firehouse, another ragged hole for rain, the pleasure of birds, spiders.

Another Aleppo asteroid meteorite pierced the school planetarium, knocked over a bunsen burner some loverboy had left in there, decimated the school, dismissing the students for the rest of the semester, keeping them home or smoking in the streets.

Astronomical accidents like one of those cosmic, perfectly celestial Aldebbie songs. Bet he's grinning, laughing now.

On the radio, the song "A Pill Full of Mourning." But Suninterference, the same kind that burns girls' swimsuit shoulders irregularly, spotty, made my radio staticky. Bootleg records were made and pressed from the concert, no more likely than bootleggers distilling moonshine in the woods from Tippy's sweat.

Some tabloid newspaper, from out of the same floppy Florida town that birthed Coral, claimed Tippy had reappeared, sung the National Anthem at a baseball game under the name "Travis". But the photo illustration looked doctored, hand-swirled in the darkroom.

Perhaps Threadbear was moonlighting as a ringer for the rag?

I picked it up at a checkout lane manned by a rumpled old highschool English teacher, who had intended to be retired but no such luck.

Let that be a lesson to you young journalists.

On Tippy's death, they put his death mask in the University Art Museum, in a prominent place beside the big battlefield painting “The Death of General Werewolf” and one of a cavalry charge of suicidal

Hussars mounted on bison.

It was suggested Tippy be buried in a creamed coffin.

Fans of his distinct voice removed the chicken wishbone from his windpipe, making a wish, and a pimply stout girl won the bigger half. The ever-helpful People’s Puma partygoers present—working “Security”, hah—offered to flay, flense, butcher, salt and later barbecue Tippy’s flesh with us…but angrily called us ungrateful Honky Capitalist Pig Exploiters of the All-Atmosphere People when the band declined the offer.

Would I have partaken? A bite? Who knows?

Threadbear wrote: Not since the hanging of the Kaiser, Wilhelm II of Hohenzollern fifty years ago has a public death generated this much interest. Not a bullfight, nor Guernicking (Guernica-ing?) of a Vietnamese village, nor the gunmen on the grassy knoll... More like that which sends marmots and turtles to sleep at the onset of winter.

The pretty daughters of the Dean of the School of Art, Architecture and Pose distinguished themselves by casting the erect cocks of various rockstars, and by now the Museum had a robust and historically significant midwestern-focused collection of them.

Perhaps Tippy’s most famous part should've been sliced and sectioned and carried off by souvenir hunters too. Like bearers carring off great white hunter’s freshly-bagged tusks, to be made into piano keys worthy of the most practiced arpeggios. Upon his death, an art-gallery performance artiste in Berlin died after putting an M-80 wrapped in razor blades in his penis, trying to hog some of the Arts

and Entertainment Page headlines too. Hype that Tippy so fought for, yes. But I salute you, schmuck.

Morning was as pink as the parts involved in giving birth.

Around dawn I walked around the auditorium. The parking lot was littered with dead princesses. Fallen nightengales. Thorough kids, not a stone left unthrown. The morning after I wish I could take a morning-after pill—the fabled Holy Grail of birth control—and make it unhappen. Coral, it's Roque, you got some? You have to get them from the Police Department...? Uh, thanks but no thanks.

Better shave, there might be photographers. I wore a greasy black armband upon my basic black leather jacket to the funeral.

You’re right, I has torn and gotten rid of mine, this one was borrowed I guess. As a pallbearer, I bore my own pall upon my scowling indoors-white face. Mourning mutes in sad silk hats. Hillbillys were praying the Our Pappy. Tough guys, greasers and men who were never virgins, held vigils. Polished deep oak, brass fittings. On closer inspection the brass handles of Tippy's coffin were saxophones and the fittings were fluttering trombones. Tears caught in a veil on his mother's hat. His mother was excited at the privelege of giving birth do him again. It was like the Pieta except no one ran up and broke her nose with a hammer. In Tippy’s funeral procession were several road-paving trucks. A coincidence, or perhaps they were just unable to accelerate and get past this chugging lone Volkswagen, containing my big bored brother and myself. No, they're probably on their way to the construction project where they're filling the sludge pond to build the twenty-four lane Midwesterbelt, to allow

freeway travelers can avoid our town if they don't like students, Democrats and Rock. What kind of late-model sedan, with Tippy's body in the trunk, should we torch, with a couple of tossed highway flares, as his pyre? Groupies piling in, playing Hindoo wives doing suttee.

Tippy was buried in Hell, grave dug with a hot diamond-cutting tool on the steamshovel. They buried him with an Arapahoe backhoe. Watching this process I guess I was suppose to I wish I'd gone to the University and become an engineer, but I hadn't and didn't. He wasn't buried in a famous cemetary like the Pére Noel de Paris, to which some Rock stars aspire. Instead his parts were scattered in the urine-smelling Uvula River and Plansky's junkyard beside it at the old railroad end of town. Ironically, some Forcefield Junior High School kids found some bone fragments and inserted them in a science fair project as remenants of Iron Age Indians.

A Michigan robin (his soul) flew away.

A support group was formed among bereaved and disconsolate fans, who were mostly young, female and pregnant or nearly so by Tippy, or retiring men who made their livings by writing about Rock (Threadbear) and selling off their stacks of free promotional albums.

Girls got anorexic since they couldn't eat him. In the highschool shrouds became fashionable, teenage girls smoked widows' weeds.

Mourning Has Just Become Electric! shouted the ads for the department stores' Juniors sections. They must've meant Eccentric.

After Tippy's performicide, a spate of copycat suicides. It’s as if every unhappy only child or nerdboy used the Entertainment Page news story as an excuse to escape their scary parents. A

bandwagon or a bandagewagon? Some suffocated in elaborate sexual harnesses on their way out, leather straps constructing an architectural lederhosen of ecstatic self-destruction. Congressmen thundered this new fad was "worse than the hippie threat" to our nation's youth, which they were only starting to understand and market for votes anyway.

Garden hoses turned off. And the demolition of the Firehouse.

The rest of the neighborhood (plus the mobile home park where his parents lived) was being dismantled by the Hurts When I Pee Moving and Storage Company. I thought the sign said Garage Sale but it was Carnage Sale, at the nextdoor neighbors’. Death always takes place in your hometown; when the crematoria crumble and vanish into the sea.

His Rock n' Roll pants were made into bookcovers, which I then donated to the Aleppo Public Library, expecting voluminous press coverage. He was routinely decapitated, like King Crab Louie or Jeremy Bentham, and his body impaled on a spike at the bottom of the ocean. His blue cornea eyes were removed and made into a pair of big mod sunglasses.

Tippy had hoped for stage pants (knowing him, streetwear too) of badgirlskin, and now he was a pelt himself, a hide to be dried, tanned and tailored in the mutton-chopp'd hippie's upstairs shop. Or Tippy the man was then tanned and turned into a leather jacket (like the one I befouled last night), his face features in a splayed pout distinguishable on the back like you-know-who’s on Veronica's sudarium rag. Like the time behind the Catholic hospital I found a

dumpster full of old sudaria, flash-imprinted with the facial expressionist yowl of babies as they each came out. Tippy’s skin stretched over a drumhead to animate highstepping supposedlychaste highschool cheerleaders (BUM-BUM-BUM-BUM BA-DA-DADA-DAH), or insulated sheathing for a microphone cord and cable. It could've been stretched into conoms like the little lamb of Rock he was! His parents almost named their little lamb Agnes, or Angus like a beefcattle calf, a veal.

Aldebbie who had long chattered about "dying"—more like swooning—onstage was furious, and desperately wanted to buy that jacket. I looked for replicas of it in JMJ-Mart and hip campus haberdashery boutiques. Aldebbie used Tippy's death as the inspiration for several concept albums. Evangelists burned all our records and fan magazines in an eternal flame. A band whose records all got destroyed in a fire. A thousand years later Republican senators' wives'd call for rating systems for the amount of Satanic posturing in each record. Letters went out all over the world.

No Winter cryogenics were used on Tippy at his death. Made into a crabby salad, macaroni and egg salad and old Aleppo German potato salad, German chocolate cake, his hair stirred for the coconutty frosting. This all made me supremely hungry. On his death I was tempted to take a little toasted cracker—bit of his tongue, just a slice—and taste it, see if that gave me the inspiration and the courage and the voice (of course that tongue rested upon so many girls') but decided against it, it'd be too much like the cannibalism of Christ. He was chopped up and served one day by the highschool lunchladies as Tippyburgers with special sauce, and a Tippy chip-dip

smelling of onions as did fine lovemaking. Surely that baby-stump of Coral's and mine was cooked into an omlette somewhere one Sunday morning, right? Coral might've liked his skull to use as a throw pillow or love-object teddybear on her bed, but didn't get it.

Who got his black carbon heart I wonder? Like the motto on license plates on old cars in Vermont, Waste Not, Want Not, where some old hippies made a fortune marketing an ice cream in honor of Tippy that was a mixture of dirty snow and maple syrup.

Scientists rushed on the Max Planck Express to a conference discussing and honing the borrowed thesis why Rock Stars selfdestruct. Morticians on minibikes were summoned. A basilisk or burning salamander was preserved in the bottle of his spinal fluid, a nocturnal nocturus. A theme park called Cystworld.

Roadside attractions outside of Aleppo on the country roads were displaying Tippy's skull and beside it, Tippy's skull as a young boy—except which one was smaller? A momento Morty. One enterprising Barnum lay a horse's spine on the table and tried to claim it was Tippy's boner. Tippy's skeleton vanished, probably into the University museum collections, used to prop up the furtherunwappable Egyptian mummy. Or the entire Tippy was mummified and used to replace the crumbler on display in the Ancientology Museum. His final stage a diorama crypt. Classical drugs, purchased on the street out front, were employed in his mummificooking. Tippy's Mummy resided up in the Treasure Chest Museum, Saint Ziggurat, Michigan, across the big bridge. SacherMasoch at Michilmackinac, where the massacre took place when a doctor put his finger in a hole in a furtrader's stomach to hear it

whistling that Mackinac Wind. Right next to Gerald Ford's car or something.

You should've seen the battle of the hospitals over who'd get his body; the winner'd get the south part, the lower half of the horse.

His leg bones were made into not Carib flutes but the neckstems of a doublenecked guitar, his right femur the bass and his left the treble, so other fingers could play up and down as Coral had done. This felt creepy to me when I tried it in the Guitar Shop. We Are the Stereos.

On death his testicles, shipped that night by a small private plane, were crushed by Native American women riding back and forth over them with a snowmobile in a natural rock quarry. On death, what can any artist be "made into"? They opened his scrotum sack— what'd they expect to find, gold nuggests or prospectors' gold dust?— and found it to be all dirt like a broken flowerpot fallen from a windowledge onto a passing head below. They stamped records out of his brains or the black baekelite of his ribs, hammered and wrapped around themselves like a Zarmenian cymbal, flattened his nerves into magnetic tape, wound into eight-track cassettes for an automobile tape deck. After a standard evisceration his bones and ashes were ground by a hippie organic gardening store—recently purchased by crafty Farmer Gregory—and sold as extremely natural fertilizer. Coral, and other bands, danced in our dust, in cumulus clouds of the cremated Tippy stirred up at the free concerts. Tippy always knew what was meant by his Waterloo Recreation Area. He was mortar'd and pestled into a pill. Powdered, Tippy was used by some as an aphrodisiac, a boy's own white rhino horn. Like the

ashes of a relative mixed into food for hallucinations, the way Grandma Mars was baked into an applecherry pie, or the Jews of Europe eaten by their tormentors, with the crunch of their unconfiscated jewelery in the teeth.

Threadbear was quoted as saying that Tippy was one of the finest performers to grease a stage. But AAARGH! BLEEP! FIRST SPAZZ ATTACK IN OUTER SPACE said the headlines, for a moon shot—starring an astronaut who attended our high school—had completely pre-empted any stray concert footage. America was on the move and there was more orbit than obit in this story, says newsroom. I first thought it might be some kind of pun on the Mars family, but it wasn't. Newspaper headlines said G.I.'S HEARTWARMING CRASH and SPAZZ ATTACK FIXES MILK, both of which had nothing to do with him, for there were other stories that day, in far-off places. The typical headlines appeared, about NUDECRAZED ELVIS' GHOST DETECTED IN UFO CELLULITE CANCER. The Aleppo Evening Adulthood anounced the pending closing down of the junior high schools, claiming an end to the Baby Boom. Tippy's classmate Throbby Thingamabob was now manager of a small TV station a few hundred miles away and still there was no mention of the fatal concert on the major networks. However all papers in Aleppo, even the underground ones published in headshop basements or in furtive lockers at the high schools, mentioned the benign death of Louie of the original Three Chomps a couple days earlier. The next day they were back to the usual stuff like BEES MAKE HONEY.

Certainly the cover typography on teen magazines would soon shout BIRTH IS OUT, DEATH IS IN! IN! IN! The press would gush, using Motorsburgh words like "all-time killer", “destroyer”, "cosmic" or “the bomb” and have little idea of just how right they were. In this case slaughter equals laughter. Deepfried for publicity. The world's most suspicious statement. Critics spoke out of the sides of their mouths of his quasi-sudden death. I wanted mass magazine special issues The Four Days America Stopped, backward horses in boots trotting on muffled drums.

They must be preparing the first of an eventual boxed set of albums called The Chomps' Golden Decade Volume I. No, it’s actually just a little past our first anniversary, I almost forgot. And the Chomps are no more.

Once he was dead the movie he made with Neuda was shown at the University as part of a back-to-school party and drew over five hundred people, for the free beer was prominently advertised. That skinny little death-ingrid tried to be a nereid and drove her European bicycle over a cliff, except she didn't make it to the sea below.

That spring purple squirrels proliferated. A bomb fell on Motorsburgh and you smelled BBQ everywhere. Not really, Motorsburgh shrugged its shoulders industrially, punched out of the factory and went home, and now people drive these upside-down cars that look like little cakes. An old car dealer named Kleverwitz turned his Rock ballroom back into an auto showroom again.

Sixth grade classes performed yearly plays based on the Chomps myth. The Student Council President always got to play

Tippy, it was a tradition. A professor at the University says in the future our records will be played by laser beams, without the ruby saw burning through the plastic.

Out in California, as a memorial to the people who died when we played Altarmint Racingcar Driveway, they put up a forest of giant windmills. The hippies all perished when arsenic was introduced into their ecosystem. Nixon sprayed paraquat, like a dog on their flower beds. They died with their hair fanning in burbling brooks. All that were left were street musicians in resort towns and on University campuses banging out Tippy's half-remembered tunes on old elementary-school desktops and tampon boxes.

The field where the rock festival was held is now the site of the world headquarters of a pizza delivery chain. Classic cars, a bison herd and a museum to the Motorsburgh Mutants ball team. Coral's highschool art class painted a mural in the petting zoo there, for which Coral tried to trace her plaster cast of that part of Tippy.

Thump tried out for the pizza company's asisstant franchise manager training school, was .06 seconds too slow grating cheese so didn't get in. So he burned it down. My brother became a huge pillbox of unhappiness, that gunner's nest of indecision. Like a bag of pistons. He's a pillow of unemployment now. A big bull Budhha, bullbogus bodhisattva, lollygagging bohumpus, Bhagavad Gator.

A million dollars of life floating away. The sludge pond remained. Every time I went out there I expected to see Tippy's body bubble up, or at least one of our Megaron amps. An ordinance came before the City Council to change the name of Aleppo's sludge pond to "Lake Pollution", for it would remain visible from the new—and

newly-redirected—freeway. The proposal was tabled, to the loss of the water table. Soon the ruinous Uvula River overflowed its angry banks and innundated the park where all free Rock concerts and festivals had been held.

Nevertheless, Aleppo has gotten so self-satisfyingly, irritatingly "hip", there's even a Hippie Strippie filling station, with bare-breasted and hirsute-bellied g-string girl gas station attendants and grease monkeys. The place used have a big sign of a red flying horse.

Maybe this town has gotten too big for my britches. Or I’m just bored.

Surprisingly enough, right between the next two towns over from Aleppo, Ypsofacto and Petulanti they built what might be construed as monuments to Tippy, a single giant water tower.

Postmodest and elephantophallic, big n’ girl-dwarfing, uncharitably uncircumcised, this was truly architecture from the lons. Bricks around it like a Rockstar's own scaly battle-calloused lizard hide down there. The twin towns sat to either side of the monument like gonads to the shaft. Always tumescent yet never set to really burst.

Flood control, they called it. Something fucky in Ypsofactucky. How could kids help but be influenced by a giant cock in the center of town? Girls would give their eye teeth—and you could find them sprinkled around the base like Civil War minnie balls—to try and live inside the water tower. Those that succeeded in hoisting their big brass beds up there soon drowned where they splashed and sunk.

Like the story of the guy who climbed the broadcasting antenna tower, not sure if he wanted to jump, thinking what if I die, people

have died here before. At the top he decides to let go only for a second, can't grab on, falls, laughing at the knowlege that History is a sum total of errors.

Actually, girls, those are cuckold's antlers on the boy's head.

So I paid a couple of energetic girl student athletes to shinny up the tower and stick a couple TV antennae into the top as the cuckold horns I put on Tippy. Rabbit ears. Rabbit test. Tippy, you're better but I'm best. Right.

Tippy was finally in the cut-out bin. Outtake examination lead off with Skin reveals no stigmata. Splatterhead. Braindebts. Autoautopsy. The verdict: Death by misadventure. Like he'd died of intimidationcide. Misused their free will. Dating after your death.

Prognosis normal; fun examination negative. Death: moderate.

There is no pathology, and his was no shining path. I'd seen prereleased coroner's reports that said "Death by venereal disease from another planet". Died from everything that's "known". In the Biblical sense, right. On all certificates and duplicates listed as selfabuse of the substantial. He'd punched his substance out of shape, substandard to begin with. Another county might've officially listed the cause of his death as a broken heart. Died of neglect, lack of "love".

No reason he had to die y'know, modern medicine could've made him perfect. He died wanting too much of a good thing, tried to make a good thing eternal. He wanted to feel like the Sun and Air (not son and heir). I've always like fireworks. In the Midwest summer the Fourth of July spells sex. A great feeling, having sex with America. Many babies turned up that season, fathered by Tippy in

unusually young girls. But why would a healthy humping Midwestern girl have an only chimp?

Maybe Tippy didn't die but after breaking up the band, went on to put out a series of slick Aldebbie-produced solo albums. Tippy barked out the same kind of couplets to a beat for how many years?

So what if he's learned guitar. That's zero threat to me. The scarcity of variety, endless similarity in what he does, certain foolishness.

And that spells success, time-lapse photography of the enlarging mound of his annual tax returns. Jealous of Tippy's newfound Chomps-less success? Should I come onstage in a gorilla suit?

Would he be fearful it was a real gorilla? He still displays his dick and sings about it as a mark of involvement and sincerity. I don't give a Flying Dutch Fuck.

It's been a full moon for weeks now since Tippy's death.

Inclined to stay inside at night, I've gone walking around in it, walking around the neighborhood, smoking like Daffie Mars in her kitchen.

My mother had always shut the curtains against the Moon, in case too much of that lunacy, that lunatic female energy—think Coral onstage—infected her sons, made us Italian spider-dance or something effeminate, sing castrato. Like back when the gods slain men wantonly.

Would I have ever done more than listen to records in my room, noodle indulgently on my guitar, without the inspiring bootkick of the band and its brightest boy?

Don't answer that. Not pretty.

All songwriting royalties were, naturally, assumed by me.

There were no profits to be snatched by producers, bad investment counselors, record company etc. We attained cult status only, found ourselves in the bargain bin for bored shoppers. Didn't even get the blue light attention that a police car gets on the highway, or the whirling lights announcing special bargains at JMJ-Mart.

A few critics waxed poetic upon the premise of us, merely a syntactical ruse for poetic sophistry and word decor. "Tippy was Nixon". "Tippy was a swinger." I saw somebody sitting in their subdivision lawnchair crying "Tippy where are you?" last summer.

Some reports had me appearing with a sharpening stone asking "Do you think I could sharpen my glasses". As the sentences progress the words turn opaque. Words slam doors, put on stern typefaces.

What I like best about me is my mock pomp. They never let me write lyrics, too pompous they said. The pen and the pus.

A picture of the Chomps flashed onscreen during a TV special about the decade that shot birth control to the Moon. I was really hoping photographers would still take my picture. Fanzines' Five Years Ago Today, Inquiring Questioneater columns. Tippy's miracles? Girls who grew up around here caught themselves humming and whistling those meaningless Chomps songs while ironing or typing years later. Hey, I guess I had something to do with that too. I just had a feeling, a feeling of great satisfaction to me. I made plenty of good suggestions for that band. Tried to keep the dialogue of rock and witsong alive. Now there's nothing left, like the poo of a breatharian. The Lost Community. Mother always told me I

was too smart to stay long in a band. Really, I haven't said a good "Hail Mary" or Grace since the band broke up.

Maybe our old records are favored by a cult of South American children, in a country so severe they have No Damning signs, jellyfish atrophied kids in a terminal funny mood, so drunk on aguardiente ice cream the earth wouldn't move their limbs, get washed out to sea the sunset before their twentyfirst birthdays. Bobbing around still humming that music ten, twenty, forty years later. I though Rock after after them would be the revenge of all the kids who had listened to Tippy and the Chomps, but it was as if we'd never lived, never played, never mattered. That might've been the hardest bitterest pill to swallow, even to youth experienced in the swallowing of many pills.

What the fuckhell. The little children mocking me, pointing at pictures of Tippy's crotch saying "This is where the fat one on the guitar lives".

The only safe place is the eye of the hurricane.

I hope I convey a sense of somebody really struggling for sensibility. Someone said Tippy's son had the same name as me. I'll have to murder that son of a bitch in the first degree. A hero we are able to understand elsewhere, anywhere. Only the bitter survive, my all-bile diet rejuvenating my cells by slippery chemical irritation akin to sexual excitement. So close to the action, the heat of the center, and I still don't get it. My prose purplish yet day-glo black. Always looking for symbol, analogy and allegory, allegorical allergy. I first wondered what Tippy exactly meant by his death. What if Tippy really did kill himself out of a happy sense of completeness? One that said even the impotence was OK? Tippy cared about so little, abandoned so much. The smiles of all the women he ever caressed now glinted by

the side of the road like beer cans, plastic cola bottles that were not biodegradable, but they'd grown older now.

I guess our story was like a 1940s show-biz weeper, where the Flying Ace or Gipper dies in the end. For a noble cause, to save Rock. Must be why we saw those movies on Ninxonson’s show.

There remains my confusion, amazement at Tippy's life, so different from my own. I lost a glove once somewhere in Michigan.

Repressed, who me? Several members of my family actually had their eyes burst out of too much politeness. Betrayed themselves, for politeness equals nervousness. My bandmates actually once caught me saying "Excuse me" to a dog. I write it because I don't yet understand it. A world of achievement or art?

No, of action, action that can't be measured by my posterity-weighted yardstick. Music and performance subvert my terrible intellect-driven quest for permanence. Rockabildungsroman music. Rock as Flesh made Spirit? No, I'm not sure I really know the difference yet. Oh, the horror of University-ethic Rock, honoring both sides of the fence!

I'm still waiting to be offered several tenured University positions— hey, I'm from Aleppo, you know! I expect to be asked to consult Encyclopedias, especially during the writing of the item on Rock.

Even with microfilm miniaturizing his now-completed life I can't understand how Tippy could've been so underweight, much less dead. His whole songwriting and performance career was but a tic, an all-encompassing coprolalia or lallocropia of verbo-sexual ejaculations he knew nothing about? Touring with Tourette's Disturbance? Riding that lallocropia llama made him say "shit" "fuck". Exactly the right thing to say in the circumstances. Someone

always knock knock knockin' on my phone.

I could've rotted over Rock n' Roll. Why, I too could've been killed by the wet parts of a girl, blown up like a paper bag popping it, or inflated condoms going frapbapbapbap jetting around the dorm room. Rock equals violence. Stardom is onanism. LSD plus syphillis is one cocktail recipe that comes out creative. Tippy was the fount of all V.D. in the world that decade. The mouth and sex organs are the capitals of Rock n' Roll, you could practically plug a guitar into them and play.

Rock n' roll sucks, or at least sucks the growing-up DNA in your cells out of you. Thought it was time to cast aside boyish things, but I find they're stuck to my hand, chained to my heart or head. We didn't mean to be lobbyists of immorality, sexual bike licenses and fake ID's, Hell's Firemen advocating international teenagerism. And what about all those women who lost weight, weight that Elvis found. But Elvis spelled backwards is Evil or Life, I can't remember which.

Gospel darkmen moan how Elvis' body lies mouldering in the grave.

Died from everything that's "known". Beware the unquiet, drug-filled grave, the neverending nervous night.

Here I sit in the judgement seat. Treating a band breaking up like an industrial accident with severe environmental, ecological, consequences. Tippy had called me a coward, a Lamb of God in the cowshed, a busy busboy bushbaby Jesus. Called me a "crowd", by which I guessed he meant conformist. But he was so angry, spittle at the corners of his mouth, I didn't ask.

Yeah, you really should have heard Father Cough-in-a-Carload describe the debacle in that radio tirade. As I listened to it

rebroadcast squawking over the crackling AM radio in the van, I wondered. What the faraway gooroo calls to meditate.

Woke up in horror to think that, with the now nearly-extinct "heavy petting"—which my generation of Rock musicians thought we could replace with heavy music— our parents might have been more sexually knowledgeable and un-genitally but athletically skillful about sex than us. Egad!

Look, I was the coddled child. My life hurt. Me, I was lied to ever since being told my first little plastic guitar was real. What if I'd tried out for the Aleppo Symphony Orchestra with it, been laughed at? I'd be holy holey homo homicidal by now. Or that I was a fullgrown man but a short man. Plenty of secret relatives who might've distracted me from loving my mother best. I never had permission to do all the things Tippy did, including fuck my Mom. Tippy died but at least he lived. I understand he had a real, really cool time. I'm prepared to deal with all that shit. Even after we'd outgrown our windbreakers of sound the shackles hadn't evaporated in my head. I got a big Haunted House in my head. The crisis entered a metaphor stage. Welcome to my circus. It's a long way from the Tippy-area, I sing like a troop train as I trim my nails with a Wehrmacht bayonet.

Tippy, I can't spend my whole damn life laughing at you. Disease and disillusionment was an assault on Tippy's Aquarian innocence, as demonstrated elsewhere.

And did I tell you how Tippy had

horns from me, sort of...?

Don't I get a prize for all the television shows I've watched? All the good records I've listened to? All the times I've conciously tried to

comb my hair like the guys on the album covers? Earlier bands had pointed their Triumph Spitfires at the sky. The second half of being no longer significant is knowing it. I thought I wanted to sleep but I really only wanted to get high. The poet of sleep, I’m almost ready to close up my accounts. I'm pissing time. Procrastination is not Rock n' Roll, is it? Sterile intellectualism is not Rock n' Roll and, ultimately, not fun.

How much Rock n' Roll has pervaded my thinking. The iron law of irony. I iron pants. Sure as a nineteenth-century surgeon, I just know there's a causal connection between masturbation and Rock n' Roll. Split-level guilt. Devil take the dumpster. Words or musical notes, which are more trivial? You have been but dishwater in this life. Hey, life's gone on around me, without me, before. Like the desert said to the tent, time to fold up soon. I'm happy because time has stopped. Look, a stand of lilacs a hundred years old. The smaller your lifestyle gets. Do what's prohibited.

My life has lockjaw. I'm a Soul Mask. Who is the wind? I am a mask but my face is a personality too. I was a hermetically sealed envelope for eight years, a coffee can. I want people to describe me as a sea behind closed doors. A medieval neon mind, eyes lit with the Lord. I would be spouting Latin now, were I not such a man of my modern time and place. I was forced to grow up and hide within myself. Retreat into contemplation of the spirit, whatever that is. My own melancholy was a certain learned helplessness, distressed, uncomfortable, pale, peevish and sleepless. Abnormal mopishness.

I need a pen that writes under tears. I'm a child prodigy who waited too long, waited for permission. I'm a remarkable man, remarkable in

my unhappiness. Faded man. A ruined man in my zen hindsight.

They call me the Idler cuz I believe in lies. Cut me, paste me, fold me upon myself. A logic-less life. Who needs your shiteffort? An evil brat and all my evil-brattish thoughts. Y'know I wonder how that mum multiple coedkiller is doing today. Me, I was born too near a TV station tower, too much interference. I jabber when I think. That ballyhoo called life. I was Rip van Winkl'ing for many years. A right to poach the endangered species called skepticism. The world's most bourgeois boy, the polyester hoodlum—burrs on my doubleknits—the bourgeois saint and the great insomniac. I'm just asking to be cold. I'm not in this just to make some money. The value of a dollar.

I'm playing you a song by telling you all this, a stool pigeon singing. Forgive me my hothouse diatribe. I am creative, though, y’know.

I'm still a little baby in his playpen, or highly supervised sandbox, selfconciously playing behind this balding forehead. I'm sorry I'm such a bummer, all I bring to tell you is death and disappointment. Disgusted how long it took for this tale to come out.

I died of cancer at age twenty because I couldn't push this book out.

Gaining an understanding why Soul Bother James Earth therapeutically says Unnhhhh! on every record.

Here, let’s pause for a snack. I brought this, will share. No? None? OK. I remain this big tankard of a man with this mammoth, swollen imagination. I grew the swollen bison jowls of a grand Republican Congressman. Cancerous Senator a tumor on the constituency.

Grown fat and overjoyed, too old and conservatively full of flashbacks to the crossroads, the could-have-beens. A bit of the bully, mine is the belly of the unwanted patriot, U. S. Grant or Boss Tweed. From what he was now to what he is then. I'm scared because no one has ever grown up around me before. Felt fat and useless as the dying Elvis at the end of his life. I'm wounded and winded. Now I'm in love with food, drunk with food. Like a nauseated Christ. Only wanted to smoke God's Kools. That Divine Nuclear Power. Learning not to signal when I turn. So maybe I'm nearing four hundred pounds, carrying a heavy hundredweight for each member of the band, but that's not too much for a monk. Church and Cholesterol. The best suicides are yet to be expected. Like vomiticide, slovenly, slobbery.

Spraying my message to girls, not saying it. Sputum, not songs, collected. Children who have resigned.

Parents reside deep inside every man’s fat. To lose some would be to flush them away, tighten up so there's no room for them.

Their jumble-sale basement, their overstuffed bookshelves. A swollen man, swollen with memories and chord progressions. My mind is overweight. My mind needs a garage sale of its contents, a spring cleaning like Coral. And my bulk is different from hers, stagnant clutter versus ripe fecundity. A jungle, a pathological thicket of selfishness inside me that I've got to clear, hoe and plow. Hey, if there's anything I want to be exhaustive about it's sex, drugs and Rock n' Roll. O “Obsessed with sex and detail” wrote Threadbear about one of my guitar solos once. A human basement full of pamphlet dust. Piggyback angel. Vast cellared archives, broken boxes under leakage from the rainy season, dry rot and a felt of mold

in the summertime. Comic books containing secrets of life, bagged and jumbled. Once I found a letter addressed to somebody in Pangaea, back when there was only the single supercontinent. Now I’ll have to clear out the Firehouse. Was I the methodical donkey of Rock to begin with? The stage or canvas where I wrestle with a gross angel. Minotaur-minded. The bison is the neo-American ox of St. Luke, patient and foolishly content and resigned. Not the symbol of painters but of sessionmen for the mad and inspired, as I was.

I'm overeating, calming the great beast by throwing a chocolate Christian to the lion within. A pasta Nostradamus, saying paternostrums with my mouth full. All my fat pulling upon the heart causes hallucinations, rumble up from the belly like dinosaur gases.

The beast in the belly, bellyology. A colossal colostomy.

Brontosaurus farts. Overeating a form of drunkenness in the distillery-coil of the intestine. Became an enormous bulk of a monk, having gigantic bowel movements, turds the size of Porsches.

Shitting a good shit like getting rid of your parents' oppression.

Guess I'll go back to shitting.

They say the coffee's good in monasteries, and they always keep that humidor full of cigars. A brand called Heart Rending Coffee. Morning drugs of coffee and tobacco. Coffee cuts thru the detritus. Coffee equals liquid rumor. Coffee equals Nietzsche's Will, Schopenhauer's Big Idea. Strongest laxatives you can buy without a prescription, both mental and physic. A coffee-wound spring laboring in his head keeping the memories of attitudes and insights of the golden days activities nevertheless, active, tireless, alive and openended thought. Continually sleepy, my blood felt like glue so I drink

endless coffee. Clicking on coffee like an electric ghost, student coffee made of roasted cigarette butts and cardboard, sweetened with gin. Nerves as jagged as the haircuts kids give themselves. As for hobbies, I drink it to get fat. I could be licking my lips and going to the bathroom forever. Filling my hungry stomach like filling an empty grave. The fat of a flabbergasted pig. When the storm sewers block up. Vomiting great tears. Tied to a tree with my tears of inexactitude.

Cholesterol and choler. I become dreamy and fat like a cloud. Took me half a day just to write and record my dream journals. The feminizing effects of fat.

I am the Alpha, the Omega, the Algorithm, the Alfred and the E. Neuman. Lonely? Naw, every Christmas I spend with the ghosts of abortions women all over the world had for me. From now on I'll only father stones, not babies. Fathers and Rolling Stones. Love can be like those eleven fans trampled a few years ago at that coliseum rock concert. The breath of death stinks. A life like some kind of insect, grow up, get famous, have sex, die. Freedom must be that same kind of thing as Rock or V.D. when it gets into your blood and won't go away. Little phoenix, got your laughter at my feet.

A sturdy power-chord guitar was manufactured in honor of the Chomps called the Master Beater, a signature model I had to sign and to claim a voice in its design for the magazine ads. It was prescored so it could be smashed onstage at the ending climax of a show, then the parts surreptitiously collected and successfully reassembled.

But now I’m like a priest from whom God has snatched away his guitar. Asking Has God filched something from my secretary while I was asleep? A euthanasiac God, post-frustration and moved on to corpsefication and corpsefiction, decomposifiction? The offal of the gods. Ants cling to your flesh, especially in death. Mud-headed.

The rationality of the dead. The moodiness of another stinkybutt Jew, Emo Lazarus, surfaced after his escape from the embraces of the grave. Must've been like the post-coitum triste, the second animal being the worms. Jesus was an expert at something. Death's dog doo, Bonzo dog doo bad. Dogs may drink from the toilet, or even eat their own poo, but the band—with heightened cock, boozehead, stomach, fist of violence—discovered the four corners of corporeal existence. Is the body the evil?

Coral had said I pretend to hedonism, am not a body person.

Do you believe that? I know, you don’t know me—in the Biblical sensorium!—like she did.

We are a bag of water called human, a hot water bottle pressed against a woman's side or the ice-pack on a hangover's head. The short part of life. Progress is the thaw of life. Weight is being lost all over the world. At the foot of my heart, my best work. My itchy mind like lots of bottles of ketchup stacked together. I had one foot in the grave once. The romance of quitting. Somebody had to design what ice cream looks like. Hey, humor was rarely the entire point of a culture.

Me, I guess I was pompous even when egging houses.

Dreams of the Tippy and the Chomps House of Aleppo Westside Culture. Life with heck, a nervous wreck. What, have I set myself up

as the unpopular policeman of the band, the hall-monitor or chaperone, the tattletale. Seven inches apart, please. Dial I-NFORMER and you'll get all the latest dope. So I thought of starting the Roque Rome Ashmolean Institute to study these bad vibrations.

Ashmolean, my museumy-sounding name. Anglo-Saxophonic. Call my museum the Ashmoleaneum, housing my guitars and all my favorite record covers. A rheumy museummummy. Centuries ago there were intellectuals in my family. If were the generation right after Napolean I'd obviously be lamenting that. Donated my entire collection of Tippyiana (posters, flyers, scraps of lyrics, unlabelled cassettes) to the University library. Plenty of scratchy 8 millimeter movies no one can watch anymore, trunks of 8 Track tapes and garage sale-safe 78s that can no longer be played on anything.

Some old woman yawned, barely feigning appreciation but the rest of the librarians didn't know what the hell I was talking about and summoned the security guard (whom I recognized as former drummer of the Roughernecks) to escort me out. Tippy for me is Yorick's skull, kept on the royal mantlepiece. Some of our songs started turning up on those late night compilation albums of You Get Hits Like These, records purchased by all the Ozzy Nielsen families watching TV. Well, songs recorded by others that sounded like ours, with similar chord progressions and instrumentation and all that. In all these pop litanies of mine I pray for all those old bands to intercede for me. The name-a-gogy of those bands, nomenclaturology and nomenclaturography, my own nomenclaustrophobia spinning round the Heavens in a form of

nomenclaturastrology. Names and titles like burrs in the mind, come up like cows' cud from the digestive system, one tummy to another.

My way of walking, my way of talking, a stilted Indian-in-aWestern movie talk, your highness, your hyphens, etcetera. The nervousest story ever told, by the spazzedest-out guy in the world.

This is my encyclopedia of the band, the hundred percently true story as I saw it, of that fun-loving Chomp told by his best friend, and the story of our lady love. The Fun. The story of the fun we had. End of the world or end of best friend? The grand noise that is death.

Restless fun. The great crying. A masterpiece of selfindulgence, our Tippy was. Maybe he died because he had too much fun. Caught in too much of a fun grid. Fun is what Tippy had, not me. He had fun.

Somebody had fun. There is a psychological aspect to fun. I am describing fun from the outside. Am I incapable of having fun? The fun ended here. It's better for me here. I'm better here. Whew, I've talked a whole day. I'll just shut this now, Goodnight. I think I've touched on all the important stuff: Birth, Death, Infinity, Fun. I too would like to be able to sit back and say well, that was fun. Would, but won't. OK, alleged to be fun then.

After the conclusion of Tippy and the Chomps the word was going around that I was really mad, had a mental or moral backsliding, a nervous breakdown. The way a lamp hurts when it's turned on, an electric burner or stove after the food's been removed from it. My mood crackled like Hitler's hose. America’s sickest bison, except I only fart a lot. It figures, I did carry a yellowish-black grudge.

Me, I felt like some guard in an armored car in Hiroshima who held his breath when the fireball from the Atomic Bomb rolled over him, managed to stay alive but disoriented by the whole mess, where to deliver the bank money. Or Werewolf Division brats hitchhiking, backpacking thru Nazi Germany in the last days of the War. I meander, woebegone bison. Herdless, prey to wolves. I certainly have tried to be 100% flawless.

I'm so young. Sort of true fan. Afraid all I'll be contained in an obituary titled "Tippy Went to His High School, Dies, Age 87".

Like the 1527 Pope holed up against SwissImprotestant mercenaries sacking Rome, I grew a beard as a sign of mourning. It wasn't much, scraggly under my chin, merely darkening my beatnikish neck. But it said something.

I miss her wet wisdom cathedral, the low sonorous chanting, the incense and stoned, stained-glass-colored light.

As I got better, less mournful, I was just mad at Tippy. Sure, I acted cool to Coral, nobody knew my marabout whoreabouts, smiled with a cigarette holder in my mouth. Kissed a lot but felt a certain inward panic. Mad at that fucker, needles-and-pins angry that the rug was pulled out from under my Rock world. Concerned with how I looked, ready for the part on the stage of History I hoped yet to play.

I dream of myself as a shaggy big creature, a polar bear with long golden fur. Nonexistent nose, airport runway jetty for a chin. Yet I was that rabbinical student, in my rock rabbi outfit with the goldilocks.

Who am I hiding behind my glasses, my hindsight moustache, all that hair? Staring out of eyes like the white X's on the window glass of

newly-built but unoccupied buildings that leapt out at you, literally leapt into the eye.

I want to be the perfect swastika, show my teeth and gorge myself with the blood of a female. I commenced to purchase a funny car to race on weekends in the Israel Hills, called "The Syphilitic Pussy", named like a big academic painting. As I like to say these days "Face It". Should I ask Coral to sing our orders. Girls still want to ball me because some of the things I say remind them of Tippy.

Someday I'll have a best friend.

You’re a girl. Younger than me, remember, with big rusting, trusting eyes. How could I ever lie to a girl, a female human? Can any guy?

Happy to appear busy, I dug out my hunting togs to appear in a low-brow low-budget horror movie set in a cabin up north. I don't know if the monster was supposed to be a metaphor for Tippy, for Aldebbie, or me. Or all three. And in this local production "Claw of the Clitoris", slated for the annual Snuff Film Festival, I've been asked to play a Sheriff Claude-like lawman, rotund and evil as Claude himself. From now on, I will be famous for being famous.

Nixonson called to announce he was going into movie production, lining up some backers, friends in the auto industry, and wanted to option the story of the Chomps career and Tippy’s tragic life, was told I was the man to talk to.

I told him to bite me, and hung up.

Theft by bikers backstage of nine of my ten guitars put a crimp

in any grandiose musical plans. After Tippy's death and the end of the Chomps, I could imagine dusting off my draft card, enlisting, going to Asia to kill, perhaps even get punji-stuck and dying of paddy rice infections. Imagine Coral, operatic sweetheart, burst into song saying "Oh, Roque, if you were a soldier, I promise I will pleasure your entire regiment."

I guess I dream of the fascism of the Rock band for everybody.

Far-out fascism. Every man a Reichsmarshal or General in the Army of a dad, I mean charismatic feuhrer. Goose-stepping guitar solos.

The meaning behind the Wehrmacht trapping and my costume was not merely Halloween but mid-century Weimar Walpurgis. Perhaps I could empty my closet of excess uniforms and regalia, organize and outfit an army or flying squad to conquer Ohio for the glory and Empire of Michigan or something. Could be an interesting lark, for war is allegedly fun. Aldebbie once said, in a boots and beribboned playing-army photo op, "Rock is war by other means."

Yeah, Coral left me feeling like a Nazi t-bone steak. Or the bitterly soulful man who was known as the Bootblack of Rock. When I mentioned Coral, the Priest at Confession whispered she'd been summoned to Rome to succor the Pope and Cardinals.

Nah, not really. I don't go to Confession.

Instead, I guess I squeeze out feelings like I rigorously, concertedly with great strain squeeze out turds, and seemingly disvalue them just as much.

Messianic, Messianistic or Monastic? Oh, which post-Chomps path shall I take? Seriously, I want your opinion.

There’s a reinvented motel called the Wagnerian near Mom's

house, grown over the years from a sleepy no-tell mid-day tryst cabins to modernist edifice full of Caligari-angular corridors, with only the barest evocation of Bayreuth or Neuschwanstein that the discerning guest might expect. Good-natured mutt Ragnor "Rags" Wagner was in grade school with me. Lost in my nostalgia mourning cocktail, I requested a Chomps medly from the tuxedoed beagle manning its piano bar, to elicit only a blank stare from the unhip, flummoxed pianist.

The girl Nembuthalia, seated at the end of the bar, is attractive, isn’t she? So perhaps, now that I’ve known woman, I'll make a play for her. Should I? What do you think? Maybe I should pursue her, though she's Jewish, would have to hide her from Mom. Oh, you are too? Sorry, hadn’t realized. Wow, you hadn’t told me all this time we’ve talked. No offense.

Days later I caught Coral reading a pamphlet from St. Venus of Willendorf women's college in Minnesota. How'd she get on that mailing list? Maybe from a sideburned school counselor that she balled. Perhaps now she was get-thee-to-a- nunnery flustered; in Tippy, Coral had set up a Christ she could hide in.

I don’t know when, I heard through one dubious goofus grapevine that Coral went on to marry a judge. He sits glumly in the corner while her band plays a gig, but the sexual experience she brings to their bed results in him passing gentler, more humane and forgiving sentences on defendants brought before him. They live in a house with a long drive lined with lawn jockeys, each one representing one of her past boyfriends that she could remember.

Some were left black, put quite a few were repainted pasty-indoor white, others representing the various ethnic peoples of the Earth.

She's had them all, foreign ships (and flags-of-convenience) in her port. Or maybe I just dreamed, or day dreamed, all this future for her.

Like a king's discarded mistress, Coral dies naked by the side of the road in a ditch. No, I don't know where I got that either.

Coral was the anti-Mom. Instead of expelling me from the warm place in her body and then obsessing over me, Coral welcomed me back in and then ignored me. So what else can I do but be chaste the rest of my monkish life?

How Coral must’ve felt? I wanted to hear it myself from the whore's mouth, hors de combat. When I went over there, she was half-reading a spiritual self-help book her mother had given her A Pud of Prayer. Coral was morose, moped around the house but her parents thought her black crepe clothes and black-edged blacklight posters were another fad, ripped them down when drugs fell out of her purse. Mourning Coral, in black muslin like a Black Muslim. Coral was his concubison, at least in her own mind. Tippy's death should’ve rubbed her with onions, made her cry, shot her running butt with rock salt soaked in bock beer. Naw. Coral didn't go off and join a psychedelic church or commune, though her mother had been an adept at the cult of a certain pre-Elvis Italian-American pop crooner, swooning on collective cue. For a teen to skip school and go off and see him sign autographs at a record shop was something significant in those days, the equivalent of giving him her virginity today.

No crababble crybaby she, Coral said even Daffie Mars mourned, shed a tear for Tippy like she would at a wedding. They

say before he died Tippy made a workout video or exercise daytime TV show. Coral said she'd get her Mom and lunchlady neighbors all exercising in front of it, enjoying the bulge bouncing in his little cutoff pants, but she'd always have to distract them and forward the tape past the part where he whipped it out and made slender that certain squat muscle. Or maybe Coral claimed the exercise show just used a few seconds of our music once, that was it, because there was a buzzy guitar someplace in the background soundtrack.

Horace said: That damn Tipsy put all his money on a horse called Early Grave. But when he saw babygirl was blue, in consolation he bought her FuctMoCo’s smallest, sprightlyest, femininest Fuctitmouse sports coupe, in Kandy Kumquat metal-flake Private Parts Pink, with deep Hemorrhage interior, Paschal lambleather seats which soon got 98.6° in any spring or summer sunlight.

All the options, including five cigarette lighters.

The genius of old lovers would enter Coral's dreams, flying around and poking her with pitchfork guitars. Now memories congeal like cream in her womb, and she's vague when she thinks she's being so clear. I'll bet she still drinks Slovenly Comfort from the bottle like that Galveston gal, nostalgic for quality and transition. Someone said she'd literally fucked to death but I doubt it. Everything I say about her is written in cake-decoration language, flowery, meaningless candy, cormorant-talk. Like a debutante interred. A Presidential assassin-wannabe wrote in his diary "Coral Mars gets closer every year", or so he wistfully hopes.

Yet she soon stopped thinking about sadness when the dinner table conversation shifted and her folks mentioned they considered

sending her to the Beauty College advertised on the back of a magazine or Sunday supplement they saw. She resolved that if she went there, she’d call her dorm the Henhouse, would try to pattern it after our digs, and her life after his. "I'm the female Tippy, right?"

Right... She cried, stayed up late and partying to do it, till her eyes looked like two tired pussys. Fashion ointments' leaden blush over her eyes. School did not take to her, and her parents soon wheedled their money back as soon as she came home and came.

She walked down the street like a Santa Eater, Christmas on her face like broken glass. Santa's lump of coal in my danglestocking heart. I want at least an orange named Coral! Coral could not easily forget her relationship to the bye bye world of the worst genii of our age. Coral I lust for you instead of food. Actually, that's not true. There's only one organ in her body I'm still interested in, and that's her mind, because maybe it's polished sufficiently by me and all those other guys rubbing against it as to be a mirror I can see myself reflected in to learn something. I sipped Dachau Water grimly.

Coral, do I not know all your orifices and artifices?

One day that winter she coughed and it reminded her of Tippy.

She saw my concern, reassured "You weren't the eunuch for his harem, Roque, but the entertaining genii of the lamp." And you rubbed me, Coral! Despite all the times I was around when Tippy displayed and demonstrated it onstage, I never touched myself like that.

"And if you believe that, I'll sell you a bridge in Michilmilwaukee" you reply. Very funny.

I told her to use my love like a slide projector. I'll produce Coral Mars' Voices a Familiar Concern album, except she doesn't want to record it, won’t sing anymore, has proven that. She clouded over, gray gravely looked at me like I was a rape artist, getting mad and flushed like in an orgasm. A polluted wishing well, she washed her hands, distractedly rubbed some bubble gum off her silver belt from Mexico. Coral was one peeved pissed woman. She's going to get all the bands in the Top Twenty to beat me up. She called me all sorts of names, like a member of the New York Legislature.

I told Coral if she wanted suicidally to off herself it was OK. Dommina of Aleppo (the one in Syria) and her two daughters, all of them Saints, killed themselves. Coral looked at me funny, shook her head, said Roque stop with this fucken weird shit. Then she turned off her vulvavalve semi-permanently. "I hate you" she screamed, "I hope your nails never grow back Love YOU?" Coral shrieked. "Not for all the semen in Yemen!"

Now where did she ever get that? Well, if she said these things—and I'm not saying she did—it was only on a whim.

She would like to break up everything in my property and the small bones of my hand and leave me, retreat fully to her other love affairs and gangfights in the highschool parkinglot of love. Still, I let Coral screen me for colorectal cancer, for she wanted a Girl Sprout merit badge in that. She’s still pretty young, y’know. Clean bill of health! And fingers.

Witch on a broomstick, sensitive pie. That bitch can be a devil inside out. Look, churches now even provide God-dogs for the spiritually sightless. (I'll bet Coral would even) Fuck God for Money!

Knowing God in the Biblical sense. Her enchanted hotel red carpet had been my rail dragster's only asphalt. The typical chancroid bubo of the negligent wife, repudiating normal sex rhythms and the marital bark. She patted the deposits of mercury still in her body, on the fourchette of psychic harmony. Rock n' roll as your mercury'd salvarsan salvation. Bread discomfort from her yeast infections, Coral had bread and beer down there. Turn a woman into a beaver, whydoncha. A bit of vaginal detente. Vagina-edged furniture. Her breath smelled like old steel filing cabinets full of faded receipts, dated checks and invoices. The jagged edge of your lies. Actually full of rumors. It had been sex with devils, sex with an idea. Weird sex and drugs to squeeze the very last bit of inspiration out, like getting the LSD out of him. She kissed those pants goodbye. The war between pity and piety. Bring laughs to the glum, make the bad feel good. Revelry replaced by cemetary. Coral, they are unbuttoning you. Her feet were cold and indifferent. Haunted harlot gave me that haunted head and a hoodoo heart.

Every teenage girl nowadays who infects her boys with gonorrhea claims she got it from Tippy, making it all right, impressive even, and something the guy then brags about too.

Wouldn’t you say that’s the case in your high school now?

To cheer Coral up I bought her that boxed set of concept albums by doctors, physicians and psychiatrists about their romantic flings with patients. I told her Tippy was the only person killed in the Atomic World War III or IV or V. She'd head an astrologer on the radio say that Tippy’s heart had been turned into a mixer—not a blender in a bar for blended drinks, that was Dink's churning heart—

and that all the cables into it were painted red and blue like veins and arteries in medical charts, and plugged into musical instruments in a leading hit-producing recording studio. So she had faith there would soon be more records on her stereo turntable through which his essence flowed.

Still I can't stop thinking of Coral. It only hurts when I pray.

Coral, I'm your brains' father if nothing else. It almost battered through the successive layers of spiritual-psychological cotton. Or was it you who tore through mine? I can't forget your macrame face.

The cream curdled in your womb, the wind in my vast vas deferens.

There's a rubber band around my life. Stayed up all night just to catch my breath. Sometimes I wonder why I bother even going to sleep. I bother even myself.

I'll be your light-of-love. I want to be a high-intensity lamp. I think there's something I've been waiting to think of. Is there still so much to be done? What was I supposed to think? Me, I forget 1200 things a day. Spend my days in rapid contemplation, meditation with the loudest radio on. The fact that I'm spinning. I want to meet myself. Known by what I mean? There's enough for everybody.

The desolate man who hides behind poetry saying "I'll never find another you". I want to kiss your middle-class values. When I see high grass I think of how we could make love in it. When I kiss you I hear the theme from heroic science-fiction movies. I want a woman who'll chew my food for me. I suppose I should marry the granddaughter of Baldur von Shirach. As we walked by the car at the high school those kids were having sex for me. There is no truth in

the satrapy of youth. You can't be hetero if you don't have a sense of humor.

How many lonely boys have written "I don't get laid, I fall in love"? Well, I have. Our generation tried to deny people get lovecoughs, pee gee, have values. Everybody should have a sobering experience, but fear of penicillin is no substitute.

Procrustean values, stretch n' save. The athlete would risk being first on the field, but how about first in the kitten's tomb? You were the kitten that broke the boat. The baby says Grandson get me my walking stick, for I'm stepping out into the future. Bears fear tears, water from the eyes will cause them running, so a crybaby is always safe in the woods in Northern Michigan. Maybe there should be a brand of beer called Bears Fear Tears. In the future when all food looks like jello or icecubes and tastes like wine, when all the roadrunners start dancing in the street, I'll be there. For you, Coral.

There must be plenty of animals where the male of the species mates once then sulks off, a spider maybe. Coral got lost in the urine of my eyes, a beatiful poison monster. You priestess of medicine crime. I'm In with the In Crime. Divine lips kissed those glasses.

Coral, don't let the future take you from behind, don't let the future even pat your ass. Trust me like when the devil phoned up Christ and hollered Help! Hell's on fire! Relationship equals no relationship. Lions in the bedroom scenes. I've since met someone whose first name is Health. Sure.

When I was pissing in some bushes I saw a shooting star and thought of you, Coral, and this tirade of the parade. The moon reveals her nakedness unto me. Looking up the backside of the

spirit, white mooning disk, soft dark perturbations and nasty black streak. Ever open to dilation. As taste governs the free, fortune favors a boner. My own quest for eugenics and purity at the cost of experience. Switching from sexual excitement to pissing like switching from stereo to mono. My water harvest. At his most contemplative, Tippy sang Me and my girlfriends We’ve become just like a tree and its roots A sexual Buddhist, we have become like ashes falling upon the fire.

Everybody sleeps with everybody else sooner or later. Cars are downshifting in the night air. There's a cyst in the sky. The death of rain. I was red this morning, my mind was swollen, but sometimes you have to be drunk to see clearly.

I'm only drinking like this in solidarity with Dink, y'unnerstand (said in slurred voice).

If shy groupie mothers I have known inevitably raise a loud and bratty brassy lout of a child, what sort of hermit or monk would Coral's babe become? What happens in your Godpants when you say the Hail Mary backwards? You conjure up a whore, a whorecoral. Coral, I bet you screwed all the Saints in the calendar, all the stigmatics in the Catholic zodiac. I always wanted to commit an infidelity with Mrs. Santa Claus on Christmas Eve, when I could be pretty sure the old man was away.

Coral, I been depressed by the best. What Coral did to me equals feedback, loud hooting amplifier screech and hum throughout the rest of my life. There's no volume control on life, even less on my heart. Maybe this is just an elaborate charade by a literary pud to

woo you, Coral. I forget something about you every day. You can't hide from f-f-feelings, they're a thief in the night in a racoon mask, the Pope Burglar. Love's supboena to the refrigerator people.

I look out a window, see TV antennas way in the distance. I think that Coral is probably on the west coast appearing on some game show, having done it for money to cross the country or simply having asked her father Horace for the vacation. Not pretty enough to be fingered for a Vanilla White-type supporting role in any entertainment venture.

Coral, that three-hundred-pound Wasserman Test, asked me if I'd been the one who'd gone impotent. No, not me, I never had that much depth of feeling anyway. Not ready for Lennonhood. How did I become involved with these people? Maybe I was that abortion. Not sure I want to be coy. I am the self, I'd like to say I know what I wanted and it's crazy. I want too much humor like a liquor too sweet.

Coral, you're more than an animal's hindquarters to me.

Screw this Coral. I don't want to play sexuality anymore.

Oh wait, I’m sorry, I called you Coral. ‘Scuse me, my mistake.

Then whose baby was it? A special Christian immaculate birth, all clues aside? Was Tippy invented or just infected? Why would Tippy kill himself over the abortion of "somebody else's" baby? Oh Coral, we just woke up in ambulances headed for different hospitals I guess. I couldn't put up with her emotional pistachios. You left me childish again. She buttoned my lip. Left me eating turds and whey.

The total work of my heart. Hanging by a spider-thread. Can't help

failing in love. The only thing is, I've been in love, why would I fear Hell?

Coral left disgusted, and married a racing car driver. A life of nylon jackets with stripes and sponsors’ stickers on the circuit. This amiable test-driver at the Fuct Roadkill Rotunda, a country crash-test dummy. Marriages sometimes get annulled and it's similar to rock bands breaking up. One of our old roadies works for him and said she no longer looks sexually adorable. The dream diadem had slipped from her head.

Coral still wanted you to think she worked for a big leading pimp, high-crowned maroon hat and TV-antennae'd Eldorado—but she probably worked in a donut shop serving cops, or a sporting goods store at the shopping mall. For a while she clipped n' assembled an astrology column for a fashion magazine. All her old boyfriends did stuff like open bookshops, each one vulnerable as a small daylight owl. Like a band on the road pooling their money to open a lot, selling all the cars she had sex in. Maybe that's what got hubby into driving like that. Whenever a car accelerates, patches out I think of them, of her. We're not supposed to be able to hear cars here but I do all the time, I still hear the songs. I can pick them out from the thumping bass of their radios.

Filling this shelf here are all the memoirs written by psychedelic churchmen about a single glimps of Coral's cunt. Coral was my Mother Church. I think back on Coral Mars family, which had its own wacky cheerfulness with its own country God as well as sex. God and family are much too important questions to be left to rubes. 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 Joanne—Schmoe was doing what only Rock stars in the past had engaged in.

Now America is cold and foggy. A beachside Sea Shell City, where lonely old men would buy conch shells. To listen, to love. Old men who consecrate their donuts with Lottery tickets and coffee in the morning as Jews do their bagels. Off-panache. Quayside bronze statue of The Old Coroner.

Look, don’t put all this in your article, OK? I shouldn’t put all this sadness on you, your young readers. High school, rah rah rah, alleged to be fun, right?

At that big downtown Motorsburgh store’s Thanksgiving Day parade, I see a fat Roque balloon, holding a swollen guitar. Then a humorous, zaftig Coral, all bosom and butt, smilng kissylip’d face.

Then here comes the grand and grandiose, inflated puppet of Tippy, his dick handing down long and circumferential as his flailing legs and arms. A round of applause and cheers as he passes; newscasters comment favorably.

At the same time, on Aldebbie's misty country estate, the birdbaths filled with blood, and the fountains sputtered, shut down.

All the bronze Triton horns, the nerieid and mermaid breasts, piddling toddlers, were stilled and dry. In his final attempt to capitalize on Tippy's good ideas, Aldebbie put out the tepid album Dancing and Wanking. Yet it was his biggest, seller, with several radio hits, yet.

Royalties ahead, for decades. Reinvention, is the key to this, to his, or any, life.

This was the season of mystery cults springing up around the relics of dead rock stars, their dessicated penises in velvet-lined boxes, guitar-finger bones, or small fragments of a once-thrusting pelvis or ribcage, sometime wrapped in a scrap of his leather trousers or fringed suede vest. When a string of 1960s rock stars died one after another, Aldebbie paid coroners for access to the bodies, where he made guitar picks for his instrumental lieutenant Swill Fishbrain from the corpses' toienails. Fishbrain offered me one, but repulsed, I said no thanks.

Threadbear wrote a column, this time a guest editorial for the Motorsburgh daily (the Republican one) where he pondered if Tippy’s explosion was more a suicide than a tragic, unforeseen electrocution from faulty wiring onstage. Suicide? More like a servitude-icide attempt, freeing oneself from the bondage of responsibility, his frustration and fatigue being under orders to the record company, in Aldebbie’s service, to his squad and his moneymaking staff.

Soon after the untimely death, Aldebbie got a famous New York Polyp Artist to design the cover of his next record Tippy Flesh, a nightmare to print, the cardboard jacket inset with a little piece of what was supposed to be Tippy's flesh, actually just chicken skin or beefpork gristle.

But after he’d picked it up from a supersonic French airline steward, Aldebbie had brought Dildos' Disease from England to the US, infecting scores of young women and several notable men in the arts. Ironically, "Lyrical syphillis" in how our favorite critic Threadbear described Aldebbie's new album. And he wasn’t half-wrong. Side one of the record began with narration in God's own voice, and the

old Heavenly actor was pleased to participate, to be asked.

Stentorian tones unfurled a sort of science-futurist tale of an underforgotten boy crossing the great mid-American university's central Tesselation.

In other words, all Tippy.

"Yeah, right, I'll bet that's all he did to those corpses," growled the ever-skeptical Thump. Michigan’s Most Hostile, and proud of it.

"I'm a Christian" chortled Aldebbie, "Killing someone and not cannibalizing him is the grossest insult to the body." But I could see it was a ploy for him to finally, even in death, taste Tippy's flesh. Never a Chomp, but always a chomp.

They began filming Aldebbie's spy movie “On Her Maphrodite's Secret Sir Vice.” His manager cajoled, begged me to act as a jowly corrupt Police Chief in it. The money was tempting, but I didn't want to. Aldebbie then personally approached me about playing guitar on a rock opera version of Nietzchy's The Will to Pose. I think not.

In a Trilling Tone magazine interview entitled "Aldebbie Fesses Up!" he announced the homosexuality thing was all a hoax, a pose, and in his honor and recognition of the power of the middle eastern oil shiekdoms (manipulating global oil prices, and thus the price of album-quality vinyl, considerable investments Aldebbie held and traded) he was now taking a harem of family-arranged child brides, cowherd concubines and kohl-eyed young wives. Multiple women!

Another ideal the English wag stole from Tippy. The ladies were photographed, in the style of an old French colonialist painting, dancing nude before his divan in their nightclub-sized Turkish bath.

His next album cover, as a poster it was soon a dorm room favorite.

At the end of each show in his subsequent tour, Aldebbie was dramatically crucified onstage (in homage to Tippy, of course) but face down on the Cross, so his bottom would be accessible "to all my adoring fans". To kiss or whatever. In a cruel aside, he suggested I try it so I could fart on the audience. He'll never let me live down the time—OK, times—when I farted onstage, into Tippy's open microphone or violently enough that my guitar and Dink's bass both picked it up, violently amplified it.

Nuts. I quote (from the Latin) the gladiators: He who smelt it, we salute you.

There was quite a celebration at the dedication, with the Mayor of Aleppo, the rightly-proud Dean of the Univrsity College of Architecture, and of course Horace Mars. The Tomb of the Chomps was a great monumental architecture, in the form of giant black granite and anthracite-patinaed Megaron Matterhorn amplifiers set upon a commanding hill, with chambers reserved for Thump's and my own remains beside Dink's. Tippy's chamber was considerably bigger, the grandest, with enameled glyphs of dancing girls, animalheaded tour-bus groupies, soporifics and spangled opiates, and the like. The records company mogul Seuss thought it the least he could do, the Etcetera Records logo clutched by an imposing weeping bronze eagle, towering atop it all

There were still Rock n' Roll bands, all right.

The Up-All-Niters, the Dawnprocessors, the Sunshine Newnesses, the Watersheds and the New Tolerants. The Little Green Men, so young, all untested virgins. The New Brooms' "Sweep Clean" debut album. The Be That As It Mays, always said or sung with resigned acceptance.

The Silver Anniversaries. Sometimes I even found myself singing along with the "Dependable Rock" of the Gibraltars. An album called "Just add Butter and Sugar" by a duo called Butter and Sugar was a thematic meditation on cookies, instant as they may be.

It warms the heart to hear the cheerfully nostalgic family sounds of the Christmastrees. Ye Olde Timers, was that a band or just a record collectors' club?

The Peace Barbers, but that was a ploy that didn't work. God's brigands included the gospel-tinged Lordsprayers, the Bloodchrist Brothers, the Christ (later Straight Rizor and the Superchrist), and the Gill-Nets' "Fishers, Not of Girls but of Soul 1970". The Leapaheads finally met up with the Leap o' Faiths. The Apostles' Creeds, the Adoremus Te's and the Ex-Sword Plowshares all deserve mention.

A band was called the Imitation of Christ, meant sincerely. This time. That is to say, in fun.

Now, I'm not homosexual, I just want a Rock n' Roll band. You know that, right?

Dependency anxieties force me immediately into a group to make more music. Like Hitler said, "I didn't think I'd be making a career out of this goddamned Reich". I like that line so much I used it as the first line and title of one of my books and the last line of another. Thump, if not dead, would rather just work on cars. I want to write eager alien poetry, Rock. Songs are singing in my heart which'll certainly kill me if I don't utter them soon. Poison oak songs.

So I immediately formed a Nazi bruise band with some other losers, local industrialists, streetfighters and strepfighters and staph artists.

A band Roque and the Incredible Willpower—maybe you have to be fascist to lead a band, coerce men into music. My band played the Armory and I sat atop an armoire, thinking the crowd would get the joke but they bellowed "boogie!" I farted onstage and immediately Tippy's reputation for outrageousness was eradicated. Like a fireeater with a mouth full of vodka. Flatulence as fraudulence. It's time we stopped and had some lyrics we could trust. But like a bass line or lead guitar in its proper place, I can only comment. Can't even write a song, I fucking tried, I can't put phrases together tersely, magically, ritually as Rock demands. Can only tell stories, write selfeffacing memoirs, critique. Curlicues of writing. Relentless humor. If I can do all this decorative shit to words, why can't I write songs?

Some special magic or hormone I'm lacking, just because I started having sex late? Maybe if we just play real loud we'll get by with lines like "Baby! Yeah Baby!" I will sing a peristaltic blues for you.

After the band was no more, I was also asked to play with young art rockers, Jewish intellectuals, children of Motorsburgh builders of suburbs named Buckingham Palace, Stonehenge, Wife of

Bath, King John, Hamlet and Ivanhoe. Skeptical sons of the Orthodox Jews channeling, reconstructing in midwestern gnarlfields the Merrie Olde Englande they were kicked out of. No wonder Aldebbistolgia takes root here.

Maybe I should start a band with Chingacook, the black People’s Puma. Integrated, like the old jazz combos. If I don’t, our kind of buzzbomb Rock might be doomed to bland whiteness, forever. Though there might be bitter rivalries between the bands, in the future, men and women of all backgrounds and colors will play music in bands together.

I began writing songs for an album Renouncing His Nazi Past.

Calling my band either the Hitlers, the Silver Fascists or the Quakerflayers as the mood called for. So, what should I have called them the Multi-Year Writers' Blocks, motherfucker? No postwar German novelists or New German film directors were invited to be in it. We hired nude women with Hitler moustaches onstage and had songs with "Ziggety Seig Heil" as the chorus. For stage design we had rotting Kraut corpses—those pianowire-hung Wehrmacht plotters came cheap—up there onstage with us. They were really marzipan, but pretty convincing. No, not Coral’s Marzipans band, pay attention, wake up.

Poster-size blowup atrocity photos courtesy Israel made each concert a mad Mod museum. Hell is being forced to have sex with the decaying dead while your ancestors disapprove. We meanly threw poison pennies into the audience which burned holes in their pockets, into their legs and sterilized them.

The Silver Fascists were sort of a Klaus Barbie-shop quartet.

Many fans felt strangely unfulfilled. Others sought leadership. But we couldn't boogie, couldn't get down and credibly Rock, so the band stunk, the band wasn't working, it was like pouring money into a dead whore. Beating off a dead horse. Water over the bridge, water under the God dam. Waterdown, fuck. The band that accidentally played reveille. Ahh, the band that never was; I pretend I'm biased against that which never was.

I wasn't the one to break up the band, no Mercybeat mopetop singing Hey St. Jude for thirty pieces of hospital silver, thirty quaaludes. No John, Paul, Dragon George and Judas. Just like I sure don't want to be remembered as Tippy's slow-witted Judas Escargot. Haven’t read and compared Judas' big biography of Christ, and Judas' own autobiography. He edited Christ's letters and papers, and produced that expensive coffee-table photo-memoir. Judas, not just a lardass.

So this all proves, it should no longer be construed as some kind of jealousy on my part to confess I want to get to make a solo album now. Hands clutching my guitar like the schoolboard does its big computer, this was my last chance, last chancre. Album might be called Eat My Tongue. Killing cholesterol; my own performing cholesterol, some kind of flea-circus, more a coroner's voice than a crooner’s. I should do one solo album called Blue Bullshit. Me, I'm too grovel-voiced, too chummy to sing the blues. My voice, it's like Santa Claus being dragged through a tunnel by a subway train, a horny boar, moocow blue blat. More like a dog's bark, rough and scrapey, a chassis dragged over a greasy concrete garage floor, as

much subtlety as a chain dropping from a ceiling. I am but a mild laxative, my obscenity skull a ceramic bucket of filth. I'm full of disappointed morals. Maybe call 'em Wrong Songs, or My Songs Prove Me Wrong. A good name for a groundbreaking album would be All Self-Loathing is Behind Me Now. They allegedly have a machine on campus that can take your voice and make it sound like it's merrily singing, make your breath sound like you've been humping all night. Spoken worms. I wouldn't egg your mental house enough.

Why, I've written an entire song-cycle where each song begins with "It was a dark and stormy night..."

University presses don't press Rock records, do they?

Listen to this, here's a song from my solo album: Orfeo Oedipus, mother's obsession Suicided himself just to teach her a lesson Trigger fingers put his head to the gun His famous last words shouted "Fuck You, Mom" You shoulda seen his mother's hairdo Piled up like that reminded me of dog-doo Incest boy, his mother's own twin Death to the Mothereater, she's letting you win (Chorus:) She's a sick kangaroo, got diseases of a paranoid pouch...

Like it? I mean, what do you really think? I'll play it with my new band Civilization and Its Malcontents, or an instrumental version with the Amanuenses. I'll start a book band the Golden Collophons.

Wait! I'm full of ideas!

Maybe I could turn the story of Tippy's death into a rock opera.

The Sorrows of a Young Worm.

Many copycat suicides after Tippy's; "How can I get up in the morning now that the Chomps have broken up?" was a convenient, familiar excuse for homicides, stabbings, parricides, smothering of infant siblings, extortion, bank (and band) robberies, forgeries and the random hurling of tostadas and other greasy pseudo-Mexican fast food from car windows upon unsuspecting college students. Could it ever be a reason for forgiveness though?

There was a rumor that Coral had died, but she was only in a deep stoned sleep From drugs somebody else had given her. I hope my kiss would revive her from it, but Daffie said to come back over the weekend and she might see me. I did, and she was with some other, older guy.

Absentmindedly (of course!), I began to sing that old blues hymn Pontius Pleasure drove his Pontiac Pilate To the house of the doxy Shrinkwapped Violet Sang songs in a voice like Santa Claus From dreary bands like Dead Menopause Little Pontius, painter, tinker, spy Kissed the girls and made them cry I rhyme things, swap rhyming words, a cockney habit picked up from Aldebbie, I guess.

Were I to become a top-tier significant Rock Star, I suppose my public life—like my private one in its appreciation of Coral but lack of intimacy—would most resemble President Nixon's, immense public

distrust, a love-hate kind of relief that I was at the helm, on watch. I tried to get him as keyboard player for the tour but he politely declined, saying he had Presidential duties.

I considered, then rejected, the idea of emigration to Australia, evangelist Johnny-Appleseedlike spreading of the Michigablitzkrieg fuzz guitar sound that I, and my imitators in the FGNMs, perfected.

With no peculiar place to go.

I tried to get booked at a club the Philosopher's Stone—was that the Stone of Folly removed from Tippy's head or, later, cock? A lodestone that turned up in a Science Fair experiment, maybe Coral's child's...? I got called to write the soundtrack for a Midwesern University educational TV special on how whores save marriages.

Hey, they're only notes, like any other barbers' nightsoil. I don’t just play dog catsup. Composing hymns and incidental glissandos for films, hubris music and hybrid birdcalls. It's marvelous how, once your famous for something, everyone hires you to be an expert at everything else.

What I want to see is the workings of the record industry exposed for clarity like that old model kit The Visible Bison, all the departments of publishing and arranging and publicity and marketing and retailing like the plains ruminant’s four stomachs: the John, the Paul, the George and the Ringo.

I just know there’s money somewhere that I’m owed.

Then the phone stopped ringing. My hands started wringing.

I really should pick up the guitar again, exercise that music muscle. I should organize another band, if only as an investment.

After all, a man needs a garage band more at age thirty-five or fortyfive than at fifteen. The last thing I'd done was an obscure demo tape, only ultimately released in France, where they think I'm a genius. On a cassette with cherry-red tape. Spitting out in my bloodbreath the opening line of my first song: Christ died of boredom hangin' up on the cross Cuz he could not touch himself.

Monk Rock? I don't think so. Am I sure I still have the right sensibility for Rock n' Roll? Rock ages gracefully but old Rock n' Rollers don't. Another tale of Birth, Death, Fabian. I get winded playing those records nowadays. Oh how I try to reflect, but it just doesn't work. Rock has taught us to crow, to caw rather than interpret. After there's no more electricity there'll still be Rock as ritual. How many immeasurable volts of penance? Open-mouthed equals love and love is longwave. My friends never end. Roll ourselves into a ball and dance right up to the wall. Unable to shake Rock from my veins. I'm humming "Ax to Grind". Story of this boy who kept Rock n' Roll bands like others might tend sheep or the crew of a ship.

Actually, I called a bunch of musicians for a practice on this band, on a Sunday afternoon noon two weeks later, and nobody showed up.

Rock n' roll, like child-birthing, maybe it's not supposed to go on forever the way a kid without imagination keeps doing something over and over. Project a montage on the condominium of life. Like rain on the roof of the mouth of love. The O-sexuality of a leader and needer of no one. The clicks of suicex. Experience made finally continent.

Life speeds on. The gradual decomposition of a drowned sailor, puff and bloat then little pieces mush off to be eaten by the smaller fish, turtles, crabs and crawdads. The ambitious decay. All this amplifeedback had a result. I'm secretly deaf like the bully bull bison Beethoven I so resemble. I can only hear the muttering of my own prayers and anecdotes.

Maybe I don’t have anything more to prove. Younger kids have told me “These were our Bible, the Rock myths you were creating by living and playing” and I take that very seriously. CumOn! magazine as their foundational, tribal, Old Tenement lore.

Someday clever highschoolers will paint pictures of me, based on album covers and magazine photographs. Girls will write my name on their notebooks and binders, clasped to their bosoms as they sneer at boys their own age, boys wo draw our band logo too.

Mark my words, little girl.

Wait, you nearly forgot your notebook. I don't want you to miss anything. I know, I talk too much.

Sunday morning I heard distant church-bells ringing.

If he was my friend he musta been Christ. If Christ is only God then rain is Christ's tears. The kind of night weather where you can piss anywhere. When potted plants look like human beings. Raining beets. Raining cats and dogs, bats and frogs. Werewolves are still the dogs of God. An animal God. The death of a cow. The God that killed himself. A ghost or a muse tied town to the top of a car, flapping wildly in the vacationers' wind. Spattered like a bug on the windshield of God's car.

Now I run me home from school I pray the Lord I'm no one's fool Volcano, cyclone, hurricane, earthquake, I pray the Lord my drug to take.

I shiver and die before I shake I pray the Lord a great big snake.

Aww, that's just a little itty bitty teeny tiny Cross. The insensate Cross. In the catbird seat of Christ. Chi-ro-practice, stiffening your spine against, or backing you up against the wall of, Christ. The sweetwood--must've been marijuana--of that barenaked cross. That symbol the Christwastika, black as nails on Easter-lily white, on a bloody field. A psychoanalytic Jesus hung dead on the Cross of the heart. Have you ever seen a rainbow with a broken heart? It's not a pretty sight. A half-Christ. An adjustable Christ. A crucifixion where no one asks What's that guy doing hanging up there like that? The crow on the Cross. A wiseacre at the crucifixion hollered unnoticed "It was the CROSS's fault."

God ran for mayor of Aleppo, popularized the campaign motto Visualize Jerusalem!, lost, crying to the papers about the liberals' voting bloc. Blame is unbecoming in a God. Religion equals Reimannian mathematics, the grids of curved universes, Klein Bottles full of Faith. A Buddheo-Christian tradition.

Fortune theory. Compression logic and logic compression. I have glimpsed God's tax returns. Making my transactions with the Credit Card of Christ. Overextending my soul. Don't think of me as evil.

We could be facts.

Praise God from whom all alcohol flows, from whom all junk flows to the floor. I want God to flow thru me like Dink thought all that booze was gonna keep flowing. They finally closed the bars on Dink, the evening man. He was 86'd long before 1986. Catholic even sounds like alcoholic. Ptui! Feh! Like the violence that flows through Thump when he swings that hammer. Kicked the head of your God, your prostrate God. He has nuked God. Like that orgasm I had with that girl. Coral was her name, wasn't it?

Do my time workin' on God's Assembly Line. A wellupholstered God. God like Mr. Ford. Polishing my soul like the chrome on a big car. Ceasing the sin of pride proudly. Perhaps an automobile graveyard in my head. I mean, hey, God let Father Coughlin draw swastikas on his schoolbooks, and Henry Ford gave him a car for it. Gas stations of the Cross, manned by greasemonkeys of God. Early mechanics of Faith. Give this young homunculi a job and a rag to get started, won't you, Earl? The care and feeding of your soul--domesticated like a cow or caged snarling and angry? A bale of Gods, grace by the peck. The Farmer's Market of Faith. Hitch my mule to Christ's hay-wagon.

I like that, a very rural Michigan image. Small country churches so rural they use a cow's udder to take the collection in. The Milk of Human Kindness. Out on Silo Church Road, Psycho Church Road.

Addresses like 2120 Stone-the-Cross Road. How come my typewriter doesn't have a key for "Christ"? I want this to read like a lost book from the Bible, the kind you have to order from the tiny ads in the back of a comic book. The jargon of God. The pagination of

Christ. Christ as a critic. Bestseller The Indictment of God. Never again will I write God's name (in a swastika) on my notebook. Father, Son and the Holy Spritz, the Holy Goon. Extra Extra, Read All About, what was on the Bible's front page. Tearing out a page from the Bible to roll a joint, the old jailhouse trick. In my Bible it's always the Midwestern summer. Turn off that Bible, it's keeping me awake.

Which is probably a line from an old county-line hymn Feeling Christy, I stay in this procine Christ-sty (like the balance beam in my eye). Like Saint Humpty Dumpty, great egg-martyr who cracked open for Christ. I feel like Humpty, about to split my flippin' lid. And the O-Mind is the center of the egg. Man-as-a-Mood Ring. My emotions as the Mod Squad. At the elevator of the Host. The mood elevator that is God. Mock-sacraments like Rock n' Roll, Dope and Fucking in the Streets. Excavate the Sacraments. Liquer-filled chocolates from Jesus. Left the Eucharist sitting on the counter.

Play euchre with Christ via that Eucharist. But not too soon to become a creep of Christ, a Meatball Christian all Christ-creepy to rush in and fill the void of the voice.

Goddamn, why have you foreskinned me? He's saying it now, since he couldn't as a newborn babe in arms.

What was I doing, Bishop of this night-Christ, wet-dream-asapotheosis? What is this God thing anyway? Where do I get some?

How do they sell it, a penny a pound? You can't play Rock n' Roll on it, you can't fuck it, can't put it in your pipe and smoke it. What the fuck is God? The Law of the Overheated Icons or something like that.

With this band, as with humping Coral, I’ve gone from can’t decide to can’t Deicide. I’m not his Dr. Haigh Jude but his Judas.

Lord I am noteworthy, my heart a bag full of hate mail. Ego equals Media.

But in a way the audience was Christ too. Capacitor Christ on a high-capacitance cross, each attendee on little crosses of their own they bring to the concert till the deviltry of the band up there wins them over or they stonedly Ressurrect on home. Plenty of people now say Christ should've flung aside his Cross, said "I'm not going through with this shit."

I am really struggling to deal with this God thing that snaps you in the face like a broken guitar string when somebody in your band dies onstage. My small pleasure boat upon the choppy waters lacquered with the spar varnish of Christ. My bike tires pneumatic with the Holy Spirit.

I feel creature conciousness, the numinous sense of insignificance. I feel awe or dread and a sense of weirdness. I feel overpowered. I feel energy or urgency. I feel wholly other, incomprehensible and grasped only thru signs. I feel fascination with the demonically alluring. I'll plead my case before God Judge Father like a highpriced lawyer, rockin' erudite Dean of the Pantocratic Law School. Truth is stranger than Crucifixion. Here I go.

I have seen the Devil in a flashbulb, God in a heat-seeking missle. Heard from afar a twenty-one gun salute to Christ, as bursting Bibles dotted the night sky. Plowmen of God, at right angles to Christ, selling door-to-door the Super Thunder Bible; you’d have to

go to Horace and Daffie’s church to hear about that. The Devil's foul cheese, night thoughts, foul and stinking as dirt in the road, kicked with their spiritual feet, bound feet, unsavory blind owls that can't see well enough to catch mice because of their high horns. Cunt, the Devil's mousetrap vs. the Virgin Mary in a topless swimsuit before she died. Christ on the crossbow, target practice for crossboys and their christbows. Christ first crucified in the Oleolithic by cro-magnons or cro-manicheans in the John Baptist-posted wilderness, arrives riding upon an adz or a little piece of flint. Body language began when his body was lain in Altimira, under the hand-painted zodiac Sign of the Bison.

God the Bum. The Vanished Man, or Christ the Unruly. The envy of Christ. God a little dead by the side of the road, or floating down a river (used in a logrolling contest). Somebody call me a Samaritan. Aerosol can full of God. Christ and overeating. The devil would get to me thru the hole in the donut, not the hole in the girl.

God in the sky the same as God in a sandwich. He called them Apostles cuz they were so into pasta. Big gumbo angels.

Distracted by Christ. A black-and-white imitation of Christ in a borscht-besotted impersonator on Sligo Sundaynight Show, or at least somebody up there danced like Him. Live from St. Unified's Church, Saint Fix It, three nights only in the Comic Kingdom. The rickety porch of a Sunday house? More like the Center for God Control. Fantasy of when God was good and pure versus when Old Tenement God was pure greed. A prayerboat, an o-prayer-possum, s prayerchild, a prayer-peanut. A prayer cut off at the roots. Blast me father, this is my best obsession. Bugs of God. God-creme.

Christ as King Cobra. Christ-clatter. Sitting on a Christ-stool. A little crust of Christ. I want to be the Ace of Prayers. Come God with me.

Got Christ if you want it. Tested Christpositive. Such Christidigitation. Agitated by the Alpha and the Omega. In the Prison of Christ. A God of constant strangers, stratagems, motel clerk of salvation, these were road thoughts stimulated by all the Bibles in the nighttable drawers in motel rooms. Jesus lost in the Big Joke City hotel corridors for forty minutes, tappiing on all the wrong doors.

Open up God's contents, God's Christmas presents.

Christmas? Christ-Mars, y'know, like the Christmartians.

Christswimmers on the watery plain of Christ. Winterchrists.

Christmachinists, eating Christmasnuts. Church and Coven.

Christianauts. Astronauts who, when they reached the moon became saints and just wanted to meditate on its deserts there, cry out in its wilderness; remember, one Mercury astronaut returned to become a hermit monk. I don't want to be no Saint Sycophant, Saint Epigone.

Telling the taxi driver in the original Aleppo, Syria, "Take me to the Prophet". A bossy saint Saint Agony in ecstasy, Saint Apathy in whatever. Heresy as a higher honesty. Godeaters, Godbreakers, Godbusters of Belieficide. One doesn't want to embarass God. Blastoplasts of blasphemy. Obscenity is the best medicine but Blasphemy the best. My involvement in phonemes and blasphemes.

Blasphemiognomy, studying that rebuker's face.

Just as after Christ's death there were all these women claiming to have slept with him, the Curse of Christ (and Mary's "The Curse").

The Virgin Mary's tattoo "Born to Raise Christ". A sacrifice to strange

Mommygods? Nope, nice as he is, Christ is still the BOY god, descendant of the goat. Jesus was his own grandpa. After all, Jesus was a scarecrow in Michigan too, or under a tombstone in a tiny cemetary outside of Salinesolution, MI. No crisis of the Cross here.

Faith is friction in industrial Michigan, annealed in the Heat of God. Rusty prayers. The New Faith. Entering the vapidum. The Men's Womb. Getting Godism. The membrane between man and God, beyond even meta-understanding with the Ph.D. of the Cross. When you were young and agog, young and long ago; I've grown old and flammable. Rebuilt with guilt. Waterfalls of gloom. This life a glass of wine with dead flies floating in it.

So-called father forgive me, I don't know what the fuck is going on. OK, you the interviewer then. You’re right, maybe I needn’t apologize.

What, apologize to mailboxes full of piss, shit. Elgin Marbles full of that too. Shall I shit over God? He befouled God! "The Old Stuff", that Old Time Religion; Jesus as manure spreader. Heaven and Turd, uh, I mean Earth. Just like Joseph of Arimathea with your gonorrhea and your diarrhea, a rectal God. Sheepshit from Heaven.

The foot of Israel stepped in it bad. The sanitation of Heaven.

Sewage-treatment plants of the Cross.

No matter what they try to tell you Tippy's soul was worth more, worth more than any fucking astro-Faustrologer or Seventh Grade Science teacher and faculty advisor to the Senior Science Club. The subtlety we can't see because we're living in it. Because we're talking.

Christ is nutritional 12 Apostolic Ways. Church and atom. A dearth of Christ's girth, that skinny malink, that Malinché. The Big Christ. A Pig Christ. When Jesus was immensely fat. God's corpulence. God had a paunch. Jesus' amazing bulk, that obdurate Christ. The Lord's lard. A grossly fat and slothful Christ, God's ne'erdo-well son, like every US President’s dodgy, deadbeat brothers.

The Resurrection and the Resumé. A robust Christ. A cynical Christ, on a surgical steel Christcross. His brother Ernest Jesus, son of a chisel, circumcised mechanically. Did Christ have a dick and musical torment like me? His pipeline to the Lord or to flesh? How'd he keep it under control, keep spiritual? "Scholarly" is a poor imitation of either extreme for Every Little Christ.

A gripe-Christ in his suffering. A scrapeChrist. Jesus' spleen.

God wasn't listening. It's not everyone that gets punished by God personally. Bumbleychrists. Grouse with God. God walking down the road feeling bad. Wept the ninety-eight-point-six tears. Sixpointed tears like Israel. Bison doubt. "Bison" even sounds like "Vision". Fell into the Lake of Promises. Swimming in the undertow, Christ floating on a balsawood crucifix, a glider plane now downed and waterlogged when the rubber band broke. Man overboard, manon-a-Christ. The cold water of Christ. Hey, I'm under water. The coming crash of God. Jesus' nervous breakdown. God was not in his right mind. When Christ lost his marbles. God was whipped, God was whupped. The midlife crises of Christ. To the depths of God. I'll be darned, thy will be done. God overreached yet God overachieved.

Better paraclete than parasite. When Christ plays dead. No angels for him, only angleworms. Vampire bats hanging off his face by their

fangs. A correspondence corpse. How the Chi Ro--the graffiti of Christ--looks like a skull and crossbones, kind of. Corspsebones. All those people Christ raised from the dead, they were zombies then y'know. Were all Christ's fans zombies then? Were ours, well, Tippy's? Healing all those unclean spirits Christ must've had the first VD clinic.

I’m seeing all these manifestations of God unspooling as dramatic, tearjerkus movies on the Nixonson show, as cheerful vaudevillainous acts in procession on the Sligo Sundaynight Show.

Every shtick a little Bible story.

For except for the commercials, that’s all we know.

So that’s about it, as far as Tippy and the Chomps went. You're done? Na na na na, hey hey, it’s kismet kiss me goodbye.

That? Oh, nothing. Something I made up. OK, that came to mind. Bye. I suppose you kids could use this story, of the Chomps and what's-his-face in front of us, as a new and easily-digested ersatz Bible, a substitute until a bigger rock star writes one. Why? Well, you might need a Bible someday to swear an oath upon. In case President Nixon makes you a Supreme Court Justice or something.

No, I don't mean the Motorsbourgeois singing colored girls.

BeLabored Day. My God, it's the end of summer already.

Sunny lateplumber day.

What, a gift for me? Some expensve, high-quality LSD, just for giving you this interview? Oh, you didn’t have to do that. But thanks!.

I see that hit on my desk. I remembered that hit. Already I’m befuddled—too much TV?—as to its origin. From Coral, as a birthday (late August, my star sigh lionesque) present? Somebody else’s? That Goering-grain I was saving you-know-where?

Or wait, Mom had said there was package for me from Tippy, probably mailed by a nurse on his instructions before his death, or when when couldn't find him just before that final gig. Inside, a big colorful Meskin cactushroom, infused with blotter LSD and stamped with a slapstick Silly Bison…whose mane I first saw as Louie Louie's untrammeled meshuggemad-genius locks. And shivered.

No. In Tippy's pocket, rifled after his death, was a tab with a note, "Roque, take this."

All right. Let's drop.

Wow, good ol' LSD. I haven't had this in a while. Yeah, we used to have a candy dish full of hits, tabs, spansules on the living room coffee table. Didn’t everybody? But I could tell from the taste it turned out to be butternut buttstinky LSD-flavored hallucinodog-andpony tranquilizer manufactured 100 miles from Aleppo by Pharmaceutron Corporation. A generic ergot spasmatic, intended to induce convulsions in childbearing mares. I've been burned, I've been hoodwinked, too late to stop now, better hold on for Mr. Toad's Wild Guitar Solo.

Mom shows up. Hop in, Roque, we need to take a drive.

Hmm, that’s curious. Uncharacteristic of her, but I said OK, thought we were on our way to JMJMart for something like furniture she needed me to help load into her car.

I was already getting pretty high by that point, but not yet

peaking. Daydreaming on the drive. Is this a movie on Nixonson’s afternoon show, a biopic about us? The great love story of Roque and Coral, the noble hero Tippy falling on his swashbuckling sword, or—ouch!—his you-know-what?

Wait, what is the relation between this LSD and the wisdom of my mother? Is this an initiation rite of some kind, a placement test for the Famous School of Advanced Misogyny, like in that Chomps Trio episode they made when they were a callow eighteen? Was I seeing through her lipstick'd tissuography of lies, to finally understand her? I needed fucking Coral physically first of all to do so? Am I thinking too much, too fast, and haphazard scatteredly right now?

As Elvis sings in all those movies being projected at once, What is rea-a-a-lit-t-y?

Can't tell up from down 'cept for gravity...

Where are my sunglasses? Oh, OK, on my nose. Whew.

I didn't set out to be a painburger, killing parents with Rock n' Roll. My idea for the last concert had been for Tippy to shoot his parents onstage, scream "Fuck You Mom" (its acronym practically spells F.U.N., sort of). Pull out a service revolver, service them. Or blow up a ship they're riding on the Grandiose Lakes just as it's pulling away from the dock.

Tippy never got the chance to vengefully return to the Trailer park of Tears, to go back to burn his parents' house, to shoot the survivors as they waddled out. I don't think he sufficiently wanted to.

Only my mother was there, and instead I got roped into taking her shopping. They're building a covered mall—Aleppo's souk!—at the edge of town. Just a misunderstanding of our fun, the fine and

quotidian foods we have in our town.

There is, of course, a silly Michigan national rumor that Tippy isn't really dead, just slumbering in a cave somewhere, lying on his back, hand on his kielbasa-pink sword, a few oak or linden leaves falling atop him, waiting for a crisis in Rock to awaken him. Save us all from honkie pig death music war machine AM radio mediocrity!

That's preposterous; I killed him myself.

As I waited in the car in the JMJMart parking lot I gnashed my teeth, pretty pissed off at the world. I'd taken a massive amount of LSD but knew we'd get the errand over and the big Buick home before I started peaking. Psychology be damned! Full speed ahead.

Instead, Mom and I drove for forty days and forty nights, or it might've seemed that way that afternoon because I was so high.

Maybe fourteen, maybe four hours, though that seems low. I started peaking in either the town of Ontario, Ohio or Ohio, Ontario, one of those smarmy, farmy towns whose welcoming billboards seem so round. About halfway, Nembuthalia Falls scared me that this was a honeymoon with Mom! Still don’t understand why the tourist bureau motto is “Slowly I Turned” as the water seems to be falling down, in a straight direction, pretty fast.

The old school paper came out—I saw it on a rack at a gas station—and listed me as "Rogue A. Shmolean".

Just great.

No, that girl had called the house before we’d started out. She left a phone message with my Mom saying they decided last minute not to run the interview, but thanks for my time.

OK, maybe I wasn’t really interviewed by an attentive girl from my high school’s OPTICS newspaper. Maybe our band was not even noticed by CumOn! or ComeTogether magazine. I just wanted to think through all these things.

The general kaleidoscopicity of it all!

I see a stone, castle-like building in the distance. Now I know what my mother is doing, the scamp. She’s taking me to a monastery.

Since I have witnessed Tippy's—His—Passion, I shall become a monk. Spend my days in praise and contemplation.

No, not masturbation. I'm serious now. Though that might be appropriate for all of Tippy’s acolytes. Or some kind of group cult-sex, like in Satanic California.

"If Tippy is Dead, Then God Must Be Dead" said a mustachioed philosopher on a big billboard, Jerry Colonna or Rip Taylor probably, outside the monastic compound. Man, somebody (Mom, maybe?) must've slipped something strong into the drugs.

One feverish night a while ago I dreamed I was a monk in a monstery. Yeah, I haven’t told you about that side of myself.

I have seen the Michigessiah, the Michimessiah. Hey, they could name the big bridge up north that now. My songs imploring God like "Gimme Gimme Good Blessing, Every Night" didn't go over here, but maybe just as well. The dissolution of the band caused me to go into the monastery. My soul itched so I scratched it. I always hate it when anybody’s long shaggy story ends in a cheap Catholicism, for the "He became a monk" ending always struck me about as subtle as

"Suddenly I woke up". Other greasers, with a preacher tradition like the old fire-hellified rockers in the South sometimes, became smallchurch Baptists, buying groceries for evangelical suppers, running prison ministries and the like. But my destiny was a monastery, like the school library in which I once worked. Vox clamatis in deserto, a crying lonely monkism versus Horace Mars' Olde Tyme Civic Religion.

Monks are holy stay-at-homes. The Israel-elites. A place I’ll think and translate texts of old praryers, keep daily rituals, read and pp-pray. Rock critics wanted to visit me, break my concentration, my vow of silence. Like feedback, right?

I had once contemplated entering the legitimate priesthood, if only for the celibacy. What the Hell is a priest anyway? Not like I ever actually met or have spoken to one face to face. Disembodied presence behind the confessional wood speakergrille. Told I’d burn in Hell, Boy, at my last Confession before my Confirmation at about age 8, by a paranoid priest. The world throwing eggs at the house of my soul. The Milk of America. The universe as that omnipresent orphanage. Not having a yellowing family Bible, at a pay phone I picked up the yellow pages and I found the Peterites, that order of monks who pray till their weenies atrophy. An order of monks also called the Peculiarites. Not Russian chopping chop-chopski skopsi, unfun sex-skeptic dudes who infuriated Rasputin the Raper. Raspy that rapscallion would've been a good University of the Midwest fullback, for he once hurled a dog-turd out of sight into the sky and muttered to the Czarina "God took it". The Monastery is in the desert, or at least the next best Michigan thing, on Wildman Dunes. Tippy once came here with a bunch of girls that included Coral, camping out

for several days. Getting sunburned and making the sand sticky.

Mount Athos, Michigan is an island chock-full of monastery'd monks, as a Rock band is like the mouseketeers Athos, Portholes and Adonis (or Aleppo). Like the Rest Stops along the Michigan highways, no real toilets in there, they just hang over the lakeside dunes and Watch Out Belowwww... On tour I always had to be drugged to fly, could never fly home for fear the toilet on the plane'd be occupied when I had to go, then imagined the Kahoutek of frozen poo. Butterfly bowels in a sort of mongoose hypnosis. I hope I'll do all right here.

Monastery as a fort but not the kind for summer tourists. Fort Vatican, canons of cannon, guns bristling. I'm not a tourist here, taken by my parents on their vacation trip because it's "educational", something to write a report about in school next Fall. Old Indian Burial Dumpster, the Magnetic Mesmerist Mystery Spot, the Real Working Rock Mine, Giant Lumberjack’d Gifts and Fudge. Or Popeke's Papal Dinosaur Forest, weird concrete gardens with clean rest rooms, churchborne arguments against Evolution. We're not really near either of those, except spiritually. Ghosts of them pagan Indians nosing around at night like those outside Fort Michigilgamesh, that used a sandlot ballgame as an excuse for a massacre of its Michuggenehs. You can't buy a souvenir little iron cannon or felt tricorn hat here. Monks don't live on saltwater taffy or take-home-abox maple sugar candies. Faded events. I see monks wearing axolotls, gila-hide scapulars. One sported a feather from Christ's wing at a jaunty angle, called it macaroni. Warpaint’d wapiti wearing Christs’ thong. Still, I hope this proves educational.

Please, stroll around the grounds of the monastery. Flowers called Angel Strumpets. Even better than that mental hospital where the Chomps had played for kids who took one drug too many, problematic women, criminals who pleaded well pleading unwell. I'm the plenipotentiary in the penitentiary. This monastery I retreat to is called Saint Hernando the Fierce after the little brother who tends the gardens. Symbol of this order is the drum, because the Little Drummer Boy stretched the baby Jesus' hide into a drumhead to announce his second coming. Ba-rumba-dum-dum.

I want to hide in a Holy Motherfucker Church. Did I just say that? A sacred scaredy-cat. I want a church where they light the candles with a gun loaded with tracer bullets. P-kew, p-kew!

Revelation, Dead or Alive. Jumpsuit Jesuits, jelly Jews and a jelly Jesus gel cap. Saying a Hail Monty. A pastor-heifer in the Ronniestery. Dogma and dogmathematicians. But at this time of my life I'm ready to drink at the dugs of dogma. The brain is the Sea of God. Became a Big Bad Monk, like the conventially bad guitarist I was. The jazz-ignorant interviewer asks: Who is the loneliest monk?

The word "monastery" literally means "monk's hysteria", for we become about God like screeching teenage girls were over the Mercybeat bands, except in a quiet manly way. The monk's own Beatle wig. Make myself a covered creature. Hair lengths return as hemlines, hairlines recede, but I'm wearing tonsure. Head shaved I will look like Louie Chomp, dammit; we always become the member of the Three Chomps we most love-hate. There are several of Aleppo's exiles working here, childhood pals now technical writers. Monks in mufti, in rumpled suits. Bearded men dedicated to the Glory of God

like hippies danced to the glory of marijuana. Catacombs here like Big Joke sewers without the distraction of corpsemunching alligators, like the salt mines under Motorsburgh. Do monks wear wedding rings? I didn't think so. The solidarity of the monastery as the tempted, dameless society of the Rock band. Salt cellar full of noise.

Someone jokingly put up a "No Girls Allowed" sign out front like it was a tree fort; name of the Chomps Trio’s first musical. And monks like to joke about food, so I'm all set up here. The monastery is not just a place to sulk. Former castrati have a great acapella group that practice harmonies in the bathroom cloisters. Monks use books about God as amplifiers to play their prayers out of. A book—my Bible— became a place I could deposit all thoughts but hey, that life, that's a life. Copy epiphanies into its margins like a pioneer family chronicler.

Trying to plug myself into the monastic tradition like plugging my guitar into an amp. God exists here to amplify the Self? Turn Him on!

Undoubtedly you will write: he entered the monkastereo because I, I mean he, was fucking scared.

I get it, Mom has taken me to a monastery. The rest of my life spent in prayer and contemplation, since I’ve lived a thousand worldly lifetimes in my band, which freaks her out. Damn the torpedoes; I'm the torpedoes. Decide I'll move in with the Virgin Mary, not my mother. An antacid-Rock hit based on the Stentorian Chant "Dominii Mommy".

Blows his mind on the corpuscles of a Capuchin. Now I

know why my mother taught me how to use the washing machine and dryer. Cable address: FabSoft.

Maybe the monastery is just my mother's house. You can have your old room back. No, it’s the opposite of that: my entering the

monastery like a symbolic beheading. My mother is already lying to people that it's a college teaching job, so I must have the selfconciousness of a professor, and a monk is a professor who only talks to himself; that is to say, to God. Whew. Whew. The tiny gasps you make when overdosing on LSD. Wait, if not a monastery, is this a seminary, a yeshiva? Oh, that boy just joined the seminary because he wanted to play the organ and wear the gold robes, chuckled the women in the Mars family, only confusing things. Hey, I'm becoming an austere monk, not a mitre'd Monsignor! Princely, pricey things are behind me now, all vanities burnt. I'm renouncing worldly delights for the porridge of Christ, cruel gruel of a diluted ghoul. Me, a MetaJesuit like I am and I couldn't talk my way into tickets when Tippy's solo tour was in town, was forced to listen to the simulcasque, the simulacra crowcast on the radio, gritting my teeth with every gloat and chortle, to DJ's bragging about backstage partying, par-tay-ing! Or maybe that was just one of our old songs on the radio.

And your lawyer can eat; I will sign nothing, there is nothing I can be sued for now.

Rolling through glandular Olde Englande part of the U.S., I glimpsed the Havana Gila Monster, roaming across the forest hills, a rough beast slouching towards somewhere rebirthful. No, those are just farmy hillsides, license plate proclaimng the Green Pastures State.

I think the drug is conflicting with my digestion medicine. Plus

the caduceus cactus mushroom I took too, to fortify it. The spines still twisting through inelegant intestines. If only I could get a grip on the writhing snake, the seven-headed revolutionary cobra of what I was thinking. Isn't one of the Ten Commandments "LSD Never Lies"? Or izzat the motto on the Michigan license plate? If not, should be this summer. What “Tuebor” really means. Probably a slogan on a billboard I saw on tour, and one I angrily wanted to chop down.

Mom rolled us gently to a stop.

Pretty ornate. Hey, is this the Vatican she drove me to?

Maybe the Chruch of Rome is a big school or school cafeteria, vestigial wings on the lunch ladies and crossing guards. The Pope of Doggie Bags. A pizza-eating Pope, a mushroom pontiff. I don't want to be the Pope of Pie. A Pope with a past called Pope Innocent of Rape. The Pope of Perjury. The Pope of Paradise. Papacy as the Three Chomps. Papacy as a pap-test, smear of Veronica's rag.

Pope Tarzan the XXVIIth. Sounds like that disk jockey spinning "Shut Down the Pope" by Peter and the Prostitutes. A Pope in sunglasses, Pope in the long grass. This one is different. And this one, and this one. The Pope is the Poem when it ends.

A crazy wacky Jerusalem. The only part about sex that really interested me was cleaning up afterwards. Retreat from sex and music into the sanctity, afterschool milk and cookies, of a Mother Church. The marsupial cathedral. No longer reading human history in the stretchmarks.

Exiled to the monastery—like others were to college—when I said "Damn Tippy and the Chomps, I never want to hear the name

again." The Man Without a Something…

Gott in Himmel, she’s brought me to a college. Ho ho, it’s venerable old Wheytooth. She must have enrolled me here when I was onstage, wasn’t looking. Was it as part of an application form I was asked to write an essay (see above) “Memoirs of my Rabbinical Childhood”? Wait, maybe I dimly remember writing a very responsible and mature college application essay, on how American youth’s higher values and selves were expressed in Motorsbourgeois pop songs, enouracing and inspiring us of all races to get along.

Or, maybe I didn’t. But here I am.

Gasp. Someday I’ll get the hand of these mind-exploding drugs. A c-c-caca-caca-K-K-K-Kollege. Good Lord (choke)!

Quarantined with the college-bound disease, I lived in fear, for the whole answering-the-professor experience sounded too much like pleasing my parents.

I told everybody (whom? I didn’t see anybody today) that I was headed to a monastery, but it wasn't really. College? Oh wait, maybe that's why all my clothes, a guitar, cartons of my books are packed. Mom drove through three red lights to get me to this place before I could catch on, leap out of the car screaming before she even rolled to a stop.

An electrified abortion fence around the perimeter. Razor wire sharper than a serpent's Wheytooth. Perhaps my father had made her promise I'd go to this conservative bastion. A bit late to force upon me a traditional male peer group, no? Would they be going coed, admitting female students soon?

Hey, has anyone noticed how much the word “university” sounds like “virginity”? Will I be locked into celibacy’s shackles, its pillory of loneliness, again? What if the ratio and ration of guys to girls is skewed here or something? I fill with dread.

As the college had been founded and funded by an evangelistic Scots divine with a kingly royal grant for woodly lands two hundred-‘nzillion years ago, a motto from Scripture was engraved atop the central hall, about the Time to Put Away Childish Things. By reputation, this didn't apply to Dinkish excessive drinking or cruel and puerile Thumppranks and hijinks like kidnapping classmates, stealing freight trains, riding police and highway patrol motorcycles in dorm hallways, burning fields, lighting farts, deviating septums, etc.

Enough thinking about bad stuff. Fall means dried leaves like girls' blouses, like excuses, blowing gently back and forth in the breeze. In the trees, so many squirrels squiggling that were really abortions, extracted but escaped from the hopital bin before trash pickup, grown furry tails.

Wait a minute, is this posh college the one we played, where Tippy leapt upon Dean Provost President’s daughter? No, that was a little tri-county thing in Michigan. It looks like the Wheytooth College gate has pearls around it like Coral's split panties, but maybe those are just fog lights. Coral, 20, 30, 40 years from now, men who only fucked you once will remember you during every full moon. Popular Airmen. At the gate I suddenly had the urge to return to the womb, to suckle. Guess that's why they call it an Alma Mater. I've already begun receiving copies of their helpful newsletter Freshman Foreskin.

Who is that dowdy professor, strolling there with his elbowpatch

tweed, turtlerims, courduroys and pipe? It’s ol’ Nixonson, or a Kennedybrothersesque dead ringer like him. Sheesh. Is Nixonson a Movieology profesor here? Is Tippy? I forgot about all the chimpanzees, or is that how they're portraying our audience? Wait, those are my classmates? Monkeys in letter sweaters, okay.

Sweatervested and crawdad-cut. Nary a hip head of hair amongst 'em.

Reverend Father Claud Conservo ran out of an ivy-swirl'd brick building, said "Like all novels, at the end, he dies. God wins." Was he at work on a monograph about Tippy? Wait, Conservo teaches here? Is this old priest my father?

Under the seat of Mom’s car, an old and crumpled paper, where an elementary school psychologist wrote on a report "Fatherless Roque and Thump look to the Chomps Trio as models of adult manhood. Thump, for their casual violence, Roque for their acceptance of absurdity."

Damn, I’m higher than uterus. Cake batter and bowels like opening a field of blouses. There's Aldebbie, carving a fetus like a jack-o'-lantern. No, that’s just some skinny student, maybe English or English ancestry at least. Similarly fey and poetic.

The careening, caterwauling mind.

Then what am I doing at Wheytooth College in the first place?

Me, I'll retreat to read novels of women in illl-health and romantically dying, like The Moon and Syphillis. Of what they, the old-time judgementalists called infidelity, indecorous fucking. Is that what Coral and I did?

Life is one sensation after another. Alleged to be fun.

On the day I left for college, Nixonson was showing the 1950s Rock n' Roll comedy about the concentration camps "Rockstar in a Boxcar", starring Lothar Clovis, which was originally a campus romp rewritten (by a promising young Wheytooth screenwriter) with a social conscience. Critics said its songs broke the ice, got people finally talking about the Holocaust, their memories less happy than bittersweet. Chomps Trio did an autumnal cameo appearance in it.

I'd seen it a few years before on campus, but today am sorry I missed it.

I’m a man, on my own I guess. Though the tests showed I was that many years younger than manhood, than Tippy and my peers, in psychological years.

Rare ocurrence: Mom smiled. Roque, child, except for those useless Rock n’ Roll records and songs, you are an empty vessel, which Wheytooth will fill with knowledge, culture and ethics to make you a gentlemanly man.

Oh, and Roque—said Mom, or did I just imagine it?—I saw your old babysitter Coral the other day. The one who was a teenager that watched over you when you were little. That’s right, the plump one.

She asked about you, said Hi. Y'know, she still looks like a high school girl after all these years. And eight months pregnant too. I don't know how she does it.

Hey, Mom, I know how she does it! But I kept my mouth shut; hope Mom's not reading my thoughts Wait, did I just see Mom streaking across campus, nude as

Coral and those groupie girls? Are they all a projection of mine as well? Damn this LSD! I can't think straight on it. Alchemical, chemical, chimerical. The sky is full of lesbians. Apocalypse of the Aldebbie Christ.

Next she'll tell me I fantasized that girl I had named C-C-CCuntabulous, C-minus/B-plus, Carnal, Carnival, Carnivalesque, I mean Coral. Like she was made up, a will-o’-the-wisp.

Mom could be the Wicked Witch of the Midwest sometimes.

Now I was the sundered, surrendered pigtailed Dorothy, tornadospun down to this farm cabin, away from my friends. OK, away from my guitars. Perhaps a subscription to CumOn! will sustain me.

Or drink, like Dink. Wheytooth is famous for that. Or rage, like Thump. Or perhaps, despite the weird newly coeducational imbalance of the sexes, I will finally fuck, in abundance like Tippy, here. For college is alleged, in all the colorful pamphlets, to be fun.

Roque, you know about that time I had Tippy, right?

All of a sudden, out of clear—well, swirly and crystalline shimmery—sky she said "Oh, Roque, I only did it with Tippy once."

"Mom! You did it with Tippy?"

"He just looked so helpless, so cute, like a wet bedraggled orphan puppy, I just wanted to, well, MOTHER him. And got carried away."

"The Negroes have a twelve-letter word for celebrants and practitioners of that kind of mothering!" I sputtered and sloppily bellowed. And I could see the letters swirling around, orbiting, like on a game show or giant checkerboard, where it's the size of a farm field and the letters are now smiling and toothy farm animals.

Did Tippy make fuck with my mom or not? Should I be upset?

This is, after all, the decade of all those TV movies about homicidal killers who kidnap and torture their parents or other nursing home residents as an acceptable substitute. Makes work for the now elderly actors of our parents' youth, actresses we got to see in their sultry or bubbly or dignified wartime prime on Kennedyson's movie show. Now haggard, shrieking crones, old dodderers, suffering those sometimes violent, sometimes tender, extended scenes of rape and assault. The teary eyes of the old men suggest they know their fate to come. Parents as prisoners of the war they made upon their kids, now must suffer agonies of defeat.

Now am I supposed to worry about my mother getting whatever social disease Tippy enjoyed? I watched the medicine cabinet for evidence of strange antibiotics, but she was too clever for me.

Tippy saw his mother in bed with her lover, who climbed onto her and quickly came before she woke, but the lover—JFK? A Mercury astronaut? Hitler?—got angry so climbed on top of him, had the boy as his woman too, took control of the power relations. Or maybe that was Aldebbie on top. Or me. Wait, where in the story?

Whew. Deep. Deep purple double dose. I'm dosed, in all ways but one. The shifting subjectivity of the psychedelic experience, I guess.

Mom said "Well, I'm sorry my dating that younger man Tippy, who after all, is almost twice your age, troubles you so." Did she really say that, or was it something about "doting", on me, overprotective and intrusive?

Wait, did Mom just say she balled all three of the Chomps Trip, including the fat, talentless squeaky-voiced oaf at the end of their run

who replaced the third guys (Cutey, Mensch) when each of them died?

Every woman's had an abortion. It's just a part of growing up, a trial run, a do-over, for being a Mom; what's at bat in baseball they call a ball instead of a strike. Mom's must've had one. The Virgin Mary and every one of the female saints, you betcha. It's probably a sacrament for them, like menstruation.

Like the old Negro sings, "Sometimes I feel like a motherless motherfucker." Yessireebob. I'll say that around here to sound like an old-time midwesterner. I guess I'll have to start practicing the cornpone, since to these eastern seaboard preppies I am.

Suddenly I could hear people smashing their records, snapping albums in half. Were these our records, their protest against my matriculating here? Everybody hates Roque.

I could smell burning expensive stereo systems, smoke coming out of dorm rooms and frathouse basements in that late summer afternoon sun and lengthening colored shadows.

Well, Mom, at least you didn't exile me to the Catholic place as threatened, Virgo Intacta University.

So I guess she was horrified at what my friends and I had done, what Tippy had become, and our blowing him up onstage like that ("People could've been hurt!"). So I was exiled to distant, isolated Wheytooth College, Elba NH. Wow. Am I peaking or speaking? Somebody must've slipped something into the drugs.

Damn it, I'll start a band in college. Dedicated to the proposition

Destroy All Mothers' Influence, like the headless Japanese ghost I saw on Kennedyson's show. I wrote one song, with the refrain “I'll paint little swastikas/On every one of your tears" and I'm surprised it didn't catch on, get much college radio station airplay. But I'm not sore. Wheythooth supposedly had a prestige that would benefit me in later life employment. But haven’t I already found myself as a rock guitarist, not "becoming" anything? I’m fearful of inadvertant or accidentally-on-purpose injuries to my hands while tripping, like I should’ve been worried about injuries to my band. You think you can maim yourself for show, Tippy, well watch this. No, don’t even let thoughts like that take roost in the rookery of my head.

What if I die in college? "Without issue," like an unpublished copy of ComeTogether, or better yet, CumOn! that features me, cover story, not just Tippy? Or excellent guitar notes disappearing into space and stoners' inattentive ears?

Wheytooth College says the big woodenstone sign and we enter the verdant, stately grounds. So it’s not a monastery, it’s a college that I am now exiled to. Great. Just great.

Whew. I’m definitely peaking on this stuff. Sparklies everwhere. Everything visual, audial, psychic, is fragmented and shreddy.

The Wheytooth logo, or a grand smiling W, is everywhere, on everything, everyone. Students in letter sweaters, sweatshirts, in the irritating school colors.

A graying woman rides by on a bicycle. I recognize her. There was a happy ending to Aimée Fink’s story, for she survived the Dutch

oven, her bestselling diary bought her passage to the US and, with a few well-placed bribes, citizenship. She’s been teaching here fifteen years now, in sweater, wool skirt and comfortable shoes.

Does Mom even realize that some of the most distinguished professors at Wheytooth are Jewish, Class-of-'38 exiles, or others, well-schooled and shlepped into urban, even Ivory Leg, universities?

You know that term, how since nor’eastern whaling days, they've called the elite ones the Ivory Leg colleges, for they were often endowed with the whaling, rum-running and slave trading fortunes of frequently maimed captains, right? Now Mom wants the Ivory Leg to be my third leg.

"You father hoped to go here, but he had to go to war." Maybe she said that, or maybe I just made it up, it resonated so, loudly, luridly, multicolored.

Hey, was nice-to-me Horace Mars actually my dad? Mom, tell the truth, now. Well, but then he might not have wished me in Coral.

Okay…

In front of grim, carcereal-looking stone dormitory Mom stopped. Mom looked me in the eye—something she’d never done— said Honey, I just want to tell you a few more things before I go. One, I'm sorry if I oppressed you, kept you in your room, shielded and apart from bad influence. I was so afraid you'd have sex and take drugs if you were involved in Rock n' roll. Like that boy Tippy…I was so scared he'd get you trying drugs. If anything happened to that fine mind of yours...

It was because he's Jewish, right Mom? Little Rock, I'm so sorry you were an only child, but your birth

blew out my tubes, and the eager doctor yanked and scraped out the rest of the mechanism. You were a placenta perfecto previa, like you wanted to make sure your sleeping bag with a pattern of cowboys or bears on the flannel lining was tossed out before you, loaded for the vacation car called your life. Anyway, I'm glad the loneliness didn't destroy you—that you coped with your books and big imagination. I still soooo hope you never get into drugs and destable all that.

What had she run into JMJ Mart at the start of our trip to get?

One of those embroidered samplers, normally to reassure parents in their TV dens and living rooms but intended by her to be hung here or on the front of my guitar amp. In fancy Quimshare-type (sort of) lettering it said "We know we were repressive parents but we were so afraid you'd get into drugs". She’s really, really trying to drum home that point, isn’t she?

Two, promise me you won’t join a Jewish fraternity here.

She went on: I guess I railed against Jews all my life still holding a grudge from high school, when a pert little Jewess—so pretty, she didn't even look like one of them!—named Dana Silvergold beat me out of a college scholarship, that little snit, so I had to go work as a lunch lady for the school system...and here I am, a quarter-century later. My biggest worry was always that you'd be denied admission here if they thought you were Jewish. Silly, I guess. Maybe it's not so bad that way anymore.

What kind of otherness does Mom project on the local Hebrews? Family, hard work, support for the arts and social causes, sense of history and (though too often societally circumscribed) belonging? Is the band, the scene, my shtetl? The stage my

Synagogue? She hands over that metal box I recognize as the antiSem clerical demagogue's 1930s radio transcripts, perhaps her proudest possession. You can cite these in term papers.

No matter, I suppose parental prejudice is in my chromosomes, that no amount of LSD will modify. But damned if I didn't try.

Mom turned, fixed her incessant gaze on me and said I didn’t want you at a mammoth Ten Ton university. I was afraid you’d be swallowed up, all alone. I went to a Ten Ton university and, my head full of ideas, met your father...

And...?

She sees me as Jonah in the Moby whale, Doc Watson and the shark.

We were afraid at a big school you’d hang out with Jews, hippies and Jewish hippies.

Thanks Mom. Just for that, I’ll make a point of befriending all the leading Jews, hippies and Jewish hippies among the students here.

Think that in college I'll have a Jewish girlfriend myself, pert and quick and mercurial intelligent like those New Joke girls at DonohueDragon Hall. Maybe one with short boyish hair, who freaks everyone out at first with her striking good looks.

"The Midwesterbergs may not be Jewish, but I still don't like his bad influence on you" said Mom. Tippy not Jewish? Oh yeah, right, he told me that. But now Mom believes it? Believes me about something?

You mean I had to kill him, if only in my mind, for nothing?

Thinking him an escape from the people of the Book, those damn

books which imprison me and provide a too-easy retreat from action, I needed as an easy way to grow out of friendship. The anxiety of influence.

Now my mind will be filled with college. Ecch.

Mom turned to me, sincerity moistening and misusing her eyes.

"Your father's platoon at Inchon killed him shortly after you were born—in the way they call "fragging"—for being such a damn martinet."

That smiling man in the picture you tacked upon the wall of my room?

"Oh, that wasn't really your father. That was just a picture of General Einsteintower that was sent to me with a request for a campaign donation when he ran for President."

Wait, did she just say that? I thought my father was Louie Louie Chomp. Or maybe Mom was Einsteintower's wartime secretary, whom he finally seduced and purportedly couldn't get it up, practically all we know about the great General and two-term President nowadays. Like Tippy, except on the global stage, the theater of war. Or maybe she had just some serial sanpedro paramour—Father Cough-in-a-Carload? Harry Fuct?—I don't even know about.

Maybe she was a war bride, which is why I love regalia so. Do I detect a German accent? Or is that just because she's such a movie villain to me, like a prison camp commander or interrogator.

Will I miss Mommy, or will I miss trying to miss Mommy? With only much more stable and rational professors to please?

Did she hear that? Did she say something to me?

This is where the fun begins. Wait, who said that?

I do so want some fun in my life.

Students are lugging suitcases, duffel bags into their dormitories. A bustle of mid-morning activity on campus. There's the gila monster, now a tweedy tortoise-shell horn rimmed Professor here at Wheytooth.

Pay attention, Roque. Listen carefully, son, this may be the hardest confession of all for me.

Our family name used to be Asch, you know. What? Did I hear that right? Your grandfather changed it. Did I hear that, feel that?

The LSD had thoroughly, expansively and exuberantly kicked in, so I wasn't sure. Wasn’t sure of anything. A girl who'd been washing with Dr. Terence "Kaleidoscope" Lenz had given it to him, supposedly laboratory-pure pill they called Yellow Matter Custard Matter.

Anyway, what was she saying about me dancing the hoo-rah in the same tribe as Louie Chomp? Did she say that she'd slept in her bed, our bed, with both Cutey and Mikey and that either one could be my father? Or did I just hear that owl-hoot in my imagination?

Mom, that’s already four things! Or wait, the acid, can I tell?

How did I lose count? That’s the story of my life.

LSD then snappped back to tell me the boy is fat because he doesn't have a father.

Your father was Asch, a suburban builder-developer behind the Aschland Mall.

Huh? Solomon Anatole Asch, the funny TV weatherman, who

makes linguistic jokes about icy upnorth cities? My father???

It was originally Aschmoses, Mom said. Origin of the Greek “osmosis.”

What, did I hear that right? Me, half-Jewish? I'm Jewish?

Not what I wanted to hear. Not what I was ready for.

Solomon Asch was a bespectacled little Army medic when I met him. I always believed my father was a war hero, downed fighter Mustanger "Spad" Ashmolean, but Mom confesses it was Solly Asch, her college professor, and why she dropped out.

Well, then I was half-right in garroting Louie Louie Chomp.

Close enough, maybe. Every boy's first car has a license plate with the state motto Kill Your Parents. It's the law.

I'm the Moe, the Moel in the molé, the Schomoe, the spaniel Shmuel and the fiddlin' Louie Louie head rolled into one? Putting all my regalia to a lie?

Asch? Now I feel like the jackasch. Asch-Orca, cross between the Buddhist emperor of India and a killer whale. But every only child is a killer whale, and who among you really, really knows who his father is?

Asch? Not even Assurbanipal? In my mind I’m back to gradeschool, taunted as Ash-Hole Ian. Fuck.

Maybe I'm only one-sixty-fourth Jewish, is that still against the law everywhere? I'm flabbergassed, blobsmacked to learn of any of this.

I think I got this under control. LSDing merrily along, Mom said —or I think she said—"I'm sorry I said bad things about Jews—don't quote them to your professors or frat brothers—but I get mad at that

famous pugnacious Jewish WWII novelist who knocked me up, left me with you."

Suddenly I saw a WWII musical all singing all dancing, phalanxes in dinner jackets. But the tap-dancing spouse soloist was that little black Negro entertainer who converted to Judaism to marry a whitish wife.

Wait, I'm a black Jew? See this is why I don't get stoned, the ideas and self-awareness keys flaring, flowing rising torrent like this.

So I'm Asch. Isn't potash given to prisoners to make docile and impotent? Like pot to Asch. If Aldebbie lisped, he'd pronounce it Asp, like Cleopatra's breast-licker.

What? I thought we were neuropean nor’wester unlettered, naiive peasant stock. You’re saying we’re the self-conscious, metaargumentative, cosmopolitanly rootless People of the Book? Oy Fershlugginer Vey! Putz Schlong Gevalt! I’m free, white and won, high school graduate, now I’m gonna talk like this.

Everything flying, spinning like in that sitcom where Dan’l Boone takes a Medicine Man’s potion in the woods, hallucinates hillariously, the bright colors and Nepali swirls of early color TV. I’m Asch, I’m Asch, I’m Asch. Dust to dust. Dusk to dawn.

Maybe my dad didn't die in the Koran-readers' Korean War, maybe he committed suicide from stress living with Mom. Maybe Daffie Mars is really my mom, and Coral my secret half-sister. I'm all confus'LSD. Somebody must've slipped something into the drugs.

It's like Popeke's Papal Dinosaur Forest up north here in my mind, and these are not finely-chisled diplodocuses, stegasaurii and

triceraraptors, only college students. Finely-chisled too.

She turned off the car engine, turned to me. Listen, Roque, if I’ve ever said anything negative against Jewish guys, it was just because I missed Solly so, and was feeling blue.

You got your name Roque because your father’s brother was a Spanish Jew, a tireless Nazi-hunter in South America. All the memorabilia and regalia around the house that you played with, those were trophies, evidence he tore off uniforms by himself, or seized from hidden compartments in dresser drawers.

And all the time I was wearing those skull and eagle badges, boots, belts to win female love and approval.

Mom said—or I think she said, from a look in her eye—I'm sorry if I fawned over you. Like Elvis, Dali, Van Gogh, you had a brother who died i infancy, so I really wanted to see you grow to quasiadulthood.

Did mom just say Louie Louie was my father? Conceived when he swept through town on a USO tour, to raise money for War Bonds? A blitzkrieg bupkis bop-kiss? I couldn't have just heard that.

Wait, did Mom just tell me she bore grandpa' Humperdink’s baby at age 15, and that was why she was so sexually repressed afterwards?

Somebody else’s? One aborted? Or did I just hear that, emanating from the dozen tiny voices in the snake head of her Medusa hair, which now all became little dicks too?

I certainly should have my identity all down and solid before going off to college, shouldn't I? I've had the best education, I've seen the great rock bands.

Asch? Asch, like Von Asch und Bach, the distinguished

university music prof who fell head-over-Hegel for fey Aldebbie a decade ago, kneeling before him in the mudflats beside the Thames, or maybe over by the sludge pond by our old school? One rockabilly band from here moved to Asch und Bach, Texas where a lot of commanding country cowboy singers live. I'm confused.

She gazed in the air as her memories were recounted. Asch was not a professional soldier but a professor, a math major who taught in the business school, taught Tippy the numbers google and google plex over the back fence in the trailer park. I asked him never to tell you, and he demanded sexual initiation as his price of silence.

What could I do? I did it for you, Roque!

Hearing Mom say our family was originally Asch on LSD echoed when Coral revealed her gramps' name was Merz.

Hold it, did she just say Reverend Coughinacarload —in whose parochial school she worked as a teenage lunch lady—castigated her for marriage to Asch, shamed her on radio, relegated her to the same circle of hell as Negro jazz records? Or did I just extrapolate that from her stern, now closed, mouth?

I blinked. The LSD shparkles were disappearing from my eyes now. Maybe it wasn’t a monastery, but a posh, stuck up and expensive college. Is this the Wheytooth that mom muttered about?

Asch, Ashmolean, Aleppo, an oxybenzolmethyleneglycolanhydrite of difference it makes to me know now. I know, from mention in the Rock magazines, who I am.

Fuck those Nazis, whether the theoretical heroes of my youth or these smug cozy-campus conformograms.

Heard Mom say—or think I did—it's just stress, Roque, that makes your tummy upset. Maybe you'll like being in college better, make more REAL friends, and that'll make you healthier.

Now I imagine dancing the hora in a big shtetl peasant village, in a bund socialist solidarity ring with all Coral's old boyfriends, now bearded and pastoral.

Roque, darling, Tippy's not your bell-jar homunculus, especially not your golem. Nor is Aldebbie, "Mr. Artificial". It's all you, the pudgy stock pile hunka hunka burnished clay, created and enlivened by your own fantasy in order to project and protect them.

Huh? What? Did Mom really say that? Did her lips move?

Like the line in the old nursery rhyme, My mother comes to comfort me But she just gives me LSD...

"You've said your goodbyes to Tippy, thump and Dink?"

"Yeah."

I told mom that Thump could keep my guitars—meaning, sell them to support his now-ravenous intravenous drug habit, if he didn’t simply smash them just for the noisy fun of that. She sighed. Sat at the steering wheel for a moment.

"You're too big for me to get angry with you. But I thought you'd given up on all those imaginary brothers and band that never was. You’re too old to keep pretending in public. I thought that was just a phase, like the half-sisters, after your father left...uh, died..."

She trailed off, looked sad. I didn't want that, began fumbling with the seat belt. She brightened efficiently.

Whoa, woe is me, Mom has just revealed at the college (or is this a mental hospital? Hell, is every college?) that all my bandmates were imaginary playmates, figmental fingertips of my imagination.

No? Sometimes I wonder if Tippy was my active male side, Coral my passive female side, while I remain the all-seeing round man. A pox on both your houses, Tippy and Coral, a pox like the Plague of Eggs on your Father’s House in the Bible or in your mom's favorite cookbook. After all, the FGNM broke up when the smart one (surprisingly, the drummer!), dejected when his first novel was rejected, turned to religion. Lord, I will read your Book, most of it, or at least write mine in guitar riffs, into the depresso valley of all my days.

Hey, we can skip this part if you’re not feeling very spiritual, existential, agapé, awe-struck or whatever you call it. You’re getting a funny look on your face.

Mother, please! Damn, I guess I had to kill off the sex part of me—the Tippy—to pack up for college. Or Mom castrated me of it.

Almost Cut My Hair. Perhaps, like the drinky Dink aspect, college life will revive me like an upspringing Osiris Jesus…that is, if I don’t succumb to succubi peer-groupism, or muscular boredom like Tippy’s fabled semester. t just sunk in. So they were my creation, all in my head, eh? A melancholy mick’s band that never was, or my selbstsauffel, my selfstaff, to serve and succor the baloney child. Wit till it's shitty.

Will I feel cooped up here? It’s not exactly Aleppo in its plenitude. If one’s not happy ages eighteen to twenty-two, they’ll

never be happy. Like Adam and Eve, the Fall as optimism.

She said I didn't want you to go to college in Aleppo, for I was always afraid you'd become Communist, though I scrubbed floors on hands and knees in order to send you here. Wait, did I really hear that? Maybe you did other things on your knees during World War II, with sailors and airmen, and German prisoners of war.

Seamen. Seabug jukeboxes. ‘Shmen. Shmuel Chomp.

Where was I? "I hope that slut Coral doesn't try to pursue you".

Look, Roque, doesn't that girl look like your teenage baby sitter when little, Daffie Mars' daughter, Cofeve or whatever her name was? She must be visiting someone at this men's college, a brother or boyfriend. Do you remember her, the girl I'm talking about?

Now you can devote yourself to your studies, stop fantasizing about Daffie Mars’ daughter. Though she is peppy. Perhaps you can court her once you’ve gotten your diploma.

If Hitler refrained from masturbation as he claimed, and school chums later afirmed, then there must be something of the shtetl in the very act. As the popgum song goes, “Jewy Jewy Jewy Jewy out of my mind.”

But If I’m Jewish, then my Nazi purity of mid and unpolluted body was all a joke, in vain for nought, wasn’t it? Ecch.

Her parenting was nothing but keeping information—on my background, about sex—from me. Now I better find shit out for myself. All family secrets are untlimately—traumatically—revealed, eh?

Last of all, Roque—you needn’t explain anything. To anybody,

thank you.

"Well, we're here", and she kissed me perfunctorily, as I took out my backpack and full laundry bag full of clean folded clothes from the trunk. She had carefully written my name in permanent marker upon each one. Then Mom, a smile upon her lips, closed her eyes and died.

Yeah, so what, I muttered and opened the car door. It almost stuck, but didn’t. I'd help her unload my crates of records, books, trunk of clothes in a minute. Where’s my guitar? Damn, I needed to catch my breath, and she probably needed a cigarette after talking and driving. I blinked in the late summer sunshine, the crystals shimmering and geometric kites whirling in space, infinite and fragile and intricately crinkled like cellophane and the sparkling souls of snowflakes, brittle cetaceo-plasmic starfish.

Well, give me an authorized college logo t-shirt and call me the Jackal of Wheytooth. This place on weekends, football and all that crap, was alleged to be fun. I could survive this Napoleanic Elbaexile. I guess I can do this; after all, Christ was banished to college from age 12 to 33, and no sooner had he gotten out than...well, you know the rest. Perhaps I’ll look back on college like four years in a hospital, not my choice but supposed to be good for me. Fame, fans, and fallopian tubes had once been mine, ours (the band’s), briefly.

Or, maybe Threadbear and his mellifluous rave reviews, just like the band, is a piggy figment of my imagination.

What, you've never read him, any of it? You say no one reads him? Never heard the name? Oh. Would you believe it if I told you Threadbear was my own

pseudonym for rock critique that I sometimes write for the high school OPTICS paper? It’s a long story.

I began to unload my library crates from the Buick's back seat.

Unpacking my liberty. Burst of machine gun fire, or was that just the last sputter in my head of pschedelic fragmentation and folding of this one reality? My hippocampus throbbed at the hypno-campus. Oh well, four years of college exile won’t destroy me.

College, eh? This was alleged to be fun. Just keep repeating, allegedly, fun. Allegedly, fun. Allegedly, fun. You know—like the chorus of a memorable Rock song.

April 1, 2020 Bay City, MI 48706 USA