Bad to the Bone (11 page)

The challenge? To manufacture a bait that attracts the goldfish without interesting the piranha. Ordinary human beings (as voracious as piranha—just ask any dolphin) would be a constant source of friction and dissent. My vision was of obedience unto death.

The classic answer, of course, has always been ‘esoteric’ religion and the search for ‘enlightenment,’ but can you see me as Guru Davis?

Perhaps I should change my name. Swami Rumphump. That has an esoteric Indian ring to it. What Poochie could resist Swami Rumphump?

Simple truth, boys and girls: I don’t know a chakra from a mantra. Worse still, it has long been my opinion that religion is the most pitiful of all human endeavors.

Nevertheless, I spent the month following the Jonestown massacre in the library, researching cults. All were based on religion. Even the ones that encouraged the use of drugs had some spiritual message at the heart of their bait. “Trust in me and I’ll set you free.”

I imagined myself in white robes. My followers sat before me (in full lotus position, of course), begging for spiritual enlightenment.

“Enlightenment? That will come in time, my little butterfly. First you must cast off your ego. You must remove your inhibitions. Along with your panties.”

I might be a Christian or a Hindu or a Buddhist or…

After a month of intense fantasy, I was forced to admit that I could not be a priest. Even if I learned to bring off the role, it would take me years to gather my disciples. The admission depressed me and, as compensation, I seduced Marilyn.

It came as a surprise, even to me. Such a mousey little woman. She moaned slightly when I cupped her tiny breasts, but she didn’t resist. For all her talk about sexual repression, she was near to being a virgin. When I laid her out on the bed, she (just as she advised her clients) lost all inhibition.

Marilyn was the first poochie. Perhaps I should have had her stuffed and mounted. With her short, straight butchy hair and her uncorrected rabbity overbite, she would have done well in a display case.

No bait was used, of course. We were thrown together by circumstance and once Marilyn set me free, I simply lacked the inhibition to keep my hands to myself. I wanted her and I reached out. Later, I discovered that Marilyn, from the psychological security afforded by her profession to the greedy wet nature of her sexuality, was a very typical Poochie.

Instead of a post-coital cigarette, Marilyn began to talk. Lying back on the pillow and seemingly oblivious to the wet sheets beneath her butt, she outlined her ‘dream.’ She had developed a unique therapeutic method and was in the midst of writing a book outlining her theories. Her method involved intense interaction between therapist and patient. Patients, she insisted, would become therapists themselves, creating a mutual interdependence that would eventually counter the damage done by the nuclear family.

That was her bug—the nuclear family. She blamed all the ills of the world on this ‘unnatural relationship.’ It was certainly unnatural in her case. She’d been molested by
both
her parents. (A fact which intensified the sexual fantasies that allowed me to match her sexual ardor. I imagined her, five years old, naked in front of her naked mother. She lies back on the bed and…)

What did I know about psychological theory? Not a damned thing. I’d been training to be a chemist when my crime occurred. Therapy was a condition of my probation. Far from choosing Marilyn, I had been assigned to her by a computer that keeps track of analysts who accept Corrections patients with no resources beyond medicaid.

Of course, I made the cult connection immediately.

Here’s my crime. See if you think it reprehensible.

I killed thirty-six rabbits in an unauthorized experiment at CCNY’S College of Engineering.

Rabbits! For this slight indiscretion, I was expelled. (I love that word: expelllllllled. As if academia decided to shit me out.) I was also charged with breaking and entering, destruction of school property, cruelty to animals and assault.

(Here’s an interesting notion: human concern for the welfare of other species can be seen as a measure of human evolution. By this standard, I am a throwback to
australopithecus
. I have no concern for
any
species. Especially my own.)

The university’s chemistry department had received a shipment of neurotoxic venoms for an experiment on the use of poison in the treatment of various diseases.
My
experiment, which I intended to write up for my biology class, concerned the speed with which these venoms dispatched rabbits.

I think I had the faculty convinced that my experiment was sincere. Until my roommate, Bernard Epstein, brought in the video tapes.

I ask you: was it wrong of me to record the demise of my rabbits? Aren’t the convulsions of rabbits as relevant as heartbeat and respiration? I caught up with Bernard Epstein a couple of hours after my expulsion and beat the living shit out of him. That’s when the university decided to press criminal charges.

My attorney, court appointed, pleaded me guilty after working out a deal with the prosecutor. Naturally, my background was taken into account: my disturbed mother, my violent, long-gone father, my social isolation. The judge delivered a lengthy lecture, the gist of which was, “If I find your ass in my courtroom again, I’ll put you in jail for a long, long time. You need restraint, boy, and if psychology can’t provide it, the penal system will.”

Marilyn was delighted to have a collaborator who fucked her three times a day. And I was able to shape my bait with malice aforethought.

Marilyn thought of me as cured. I was the living embodiment of the efficacy of her theories. All that and an active penis too? Here, Pooooochie.

Those were wonderful times for me. Marilyn was very generous. She’d inherited money from her parents and could afford to keep me in style.

I lived without economic anxiety for the first time in my life. I moved into Marilyn’s apartment. I ate her food, used her credit cards for clothing, drove her car. After a few months, she listed me as a therapist and paid me a salary. My own therapy stopped and I began to see patients.

Meanwhile, she continued to write her book and I was able to manipulate her theories so that (coincidentally, of course) the dynamics of her therapy paralleled those of every cult I’d studied.

I cut the patients off from their families, drawing them into the bosom of the cult. I discouraged single partner sexual relationships. I separated children from their parents. I established a commune for advanced therapy. I found repressed, frightened little poochies and made them feel powerful. I took compulsive masturbators and let them fuck like bunnies and told them indiscriminate sexuality would cure them of their psychological ills.

Along the way, I invented a little method for separating the piranhas from the poochies. I called it confrontational therapy. The name describes the experience exactly. Therapists were trained to humiliate the patient from the
opening
session. Names were used: coward, wimp, faggot, pussy, bitch, cunt. The method was supposed to shock patients into receptivity. Here, Poochie, Poochie, Poochie.

The piranhas never made it past the first session. In fact, most of the piranhas didn’t make it
through
the first session. But all the poochies came back and as one session followed another, the poochies became poochier and poochier.

Here’s how it worked: we did a certain amount of advertising, but we didn’t accept referrals, either from other psychologists or from the various social agencies that plague New York City. Our patients had to seek us out at our Union Square offices. After a few sessions, assuming the Poochie returned for subsequent appointments, he or she was invited to join a group therapy circle. These circles consisted of six or more new patients led by an experienced therapist. Eventually, poochier patients were invited to become ‘part of’ Hanover House, the cult commune. Results: uncontrollable piranhas were eliminated before they got close enough to cause any damage, while the poochies were properly prepared for life on Ludlow Street before they came through the doors.

Here’s how it worked: Early on, when I was still a Therapist, a young woman named Marcy became my patient. In the course of our first sessions, she related the recurring dream which had moved her to seek therapy. The dream took place in a courtroom. She was on trial for something—she wasn’t sure exactly what—unrelated to sex. One of the lawyers called her to the witness stand and she was about to begin her testimony when the judge suddenly interrupted. He ordered her to remove her clothing, explaining that her testimony could only be delivered in the nude. The agony engendered by this experience was so intense that she inevitably woke up before her bra hit the floor.

I didn’t use the standard confrontational techniques on Marcy. Her poochiness was more than obvious. I was kind to her, instead, and she was properly grateful. She was a chubby girl (as are so many poochies), but she thought of herself as grotesquely fat. She hadn’t worn a swim-suit in years, hadn’t worn shorts or a sleeveless T-shirt.

When she admitted her virginity (in a halting, pitiful, poochie voice), I nodded my head thoughtfully. But I
knew
that if I managed to penetrate that puss, she’d be my slave for years to come.

After a few months, I invited her to join a circle I was forming and she readily agreed. The first sessions passed uneventfully. The poochies were sizing each other up. They were afraid of rejection, but, later, when they were more secure, the stronger members would rip the weaker ones apart. Leaving
me
to pick up the pieces.

We were in the middle of our fifth circle, when I ordered Marcy to stand up. She complied, but she was obviously frightened.

“I want you to expose your breasts,” I said solemnly.

“Please…” she whispered.

I ignored her, turning back to the others as if my request were commonplace. She looked around the room wildly, but there was no way to get out of it. It was either bare tit or out the door. I didn’t particularly care which.

She finally did it. Her skin reddened from her waist to her ears, but she unbuttoned her blouse, removed it. Then her bra.

She had large firm breasts. I was glad to see that, because I knew I’d have my head between them before too long. She stood there for the remainder of the session. Her shoulders were slumped, but she didn’t try to cover herself with her arms. Nobody spoke to her. They thought I was punishing her, and they didn’t want to share her fate. Several potential piranhas kept looking at her. They wouldn’t be back, which was, after all, the point of the exercise.

I left as soon as the meeting was over. Marcy was buttoning her blouse as I opened the door. She was crying softly. An hour and a half later (after a decent supper in a small Italian restaurant), I knocked on her door.

There was no hesitation on her part. She bled so much I wanted to announce my triumph by hanging the sheets out the window. I told her that she’d come over an enormous therapeutic hurdle. She was light years ahead of the others, and Hanover House was open to her whenever she wanted to come.

She bought every word. Toward sunrise, I had her walk around the room, then pose. The poses became more and more provocative as she overcame her inhibitions. In the years that followed, she proved herself the most promiscuous of all my little horny poochies.

Here’s how it worked: Marilyn wrote a veritable tome.
The Human Reality: A Manual for Growth
. Five hundred pages of unproven speculation (supposedly based on the work of mainstream psychologist Martin Hanover) describing every aspect of human development within the nuclear family. And how to fix it.

Integrated Affect
.
Interpersonal Pathology Systems
.
Repressive Dynamics
.
Confrontational Therapeutics
.

It was all bullshit and the academic world threw up a shit storm of scorn. That was our second success. Religious cults are inevitably cast out by the mainstream. That’s why they can claim to offer the one true real knowledge that ordinary humans fail to perceive. That’s how they convince society’s rejects that they (the rejects) are the elect, the worthy, the saved.

How does it go? Blessed are the meek, for they shall have sex? No, that’s not right…

Our patients studied Marilyn’s book. They were invited to participate in their own therapy. Within a few months, the more talented were cursing back at their Therapists. Then they became Therapists themselves.

Two years after Marilyn completed
Human Reality
, I had a hundred poochies dangling from my belt.

Five years later, I convinced my poochies (Marilyn included) to buy three joined tenements on Ludlow Street, near Delancey.

Two hundred poochies—that was my vision and I had them.

I fantasized an apartment-cleaning business and my poochies put it together. They worked it, ran it, advertised it and gave me the profits.

I fucked all the women. The chubby ones, the ugly ones, the hairy ones, the dirty ones. I didn’t have to search them out. Contact with my penis became a ritual test of worthiness for admission to Hanover House. They came to us. They lived with us. They worked with us. But they were not
us
until I fucked them.

The men had to fuck Marcy, my first and my best.

I exercised enormous power in the lives of all Hanoverians, and I was arbitrary in my exercise of that power. I humiliated some and exalted others. My rejection was tremendously painful, but the most common reaction was a desperate attempt to understand the rejection in terms of
Human Reality: A Potential for Growth
.

Some days I humiliated every blonde I met. On other days I chose left-handed women. Or balding men. Or Jews. I was unveiling the putrid core of their psychological disease and they often came to thank me for bothering to show it to them.

The women had permanent beds. The men rotated on a weekly basis.
Everybody
got laid.

I encouraged them to have children, but kids were separated from their mothers shortly after birth and raised communally. Hanover House would command their deepest loyalties.