Eyeheart Everything (17 page)

LONG WALKS — romantic? or compulsive? Informative videotape explains all! Cult Awareness Associates, Box 1709.

LONG WALKS sought by long-legged SF, 24. Stamina a must! Respond to box 2828.

LONG WALKS — why ask why? George, 3318.

MASOCHIST, 41, seeks sharp/hot objects for hurting self. Please forward to box 3688.

MASOCHIST seeks anaesthesiologist for experimental relationship. I will go deep if you will go slow. Alan, Box 1967

MASOCHIST seeks dental assistant or chiropractor for serious relationship. Massage therapists need not apply. Marge, Box 3091.

MASOCHIST sought by acupuncture student. Mutual arrangement, possible renum. Cy, Box 2772

NO WALK TOO LONG for this rugged 45-year-old BM. Can you keep up? Chad, Box 2424.

OH GOD YES OH GOD — Christian SWM seeks non-smoking WF, 30-45, busty, for platonic friendship only. Christ is the answer — are you the question? 4090, please include photo.

ONANISTS NEEDED — undergraduate thesis project — no payment, but possible TV appearance. Contact Brian at box 2282

ONANISTS REQUIRED by large marketing firm. You could be a star! Respond box 991

ONANISTS SOUGHT for major motion picture. Send portfolio with photo to Box 2988 for more information.

ONANISM — IS IT FOR you? Illustrated booklet reveals little-known facts. Send VISA/MC with exp. date to box 3077.

ONE-LEGGED 6’3” ALBINO male sports writer, Latvian, seeks same. 1004. Serious please.

ONE-OF-A-KIND GUY seeks 1-of-a-kind gal for 1-of-a-kind fun. Respond to Dave, Box 3381

ONE-OF-A-KIND GUY seeks 1-of-a-kind gal for 1-of-a-kind fun. Respond to Mike, Box 2390

ONE-OF-A-KIND GUY seeks 1-of-a-kind gal for 1-of-a-kind fun. Respond to Steve, Box 4029

ONE-OF-A-KIND, WF, 33, seeks intelligent, handsome WM artist, 25-35, for long walks, moonlight, the usual. Elaine. 3423.

SAFE SEX — GET PAID! Men! Eager ladies in your area will pay you for intimate services. Illegal? Degrading? One way to find out! Box 1779

SUBMISSIVE AM, 23, seeks submissive W/BF, 20-25, for clingy, codependent relationship. You call me — EYEHEART Box 2117

SUBMISSIVE WM, 35, seeks pain, injury, possible death at hands of WF 20-25, busty. Box 1104 for more info.

TWO BUSTY BLONDES sought by slob. Sex, possible cook/clean. Bruce — box 1918

UNIQUE INDIVIDUAL: WF, 32, one of a kind, seeks arty hunk for whirlwind romance. Laura, Box 2931

UNIQUE INDIVIDUAL, WF, 34, seeks hunky artist for fast times & fun. Loni, Box 1019

UNIQUE, INTERESTING WM, 29, seeks gorgeous intellectual WF, 20-30, for intellectual & erotic pursuits. Respond to Mike, Box 309

UNABLE TO SUPPRESS my strange craving for long walks. Please help! Karen, box 3883.

WEALTHY BLONDE seeks busty older man for mutual arrangement. Please respond to 2900

WEALTHY, MATURE, SPIRITUAL W/M, 57, looking for an affectionate companion to share good times, shower with adoration and gifts. Must be a good listener. Please send photo to Box 2388, John.

WEALTHY OLDER MAN seeks usual. Enrico, Box 2114.

WILL WORK FOR FOOD — please send job descriptions, food photo to Gus, EYEHEART Box 4661

X-RAY TECHNICIAN seeks masochist for experimental art project. Tattoos OK. Box 1663

X-RAY TECHNICIAN sought by curious, trusting masochist. No long walks! Nina, Box 1849

YOU: HOMELESS BM, 45-50, blue jacket, at park bench downtown. Me: handsome WM, 27, lawyer at prestigious firm, brown hair, blue eyes. Give me back my briefcase or I will sue! Larry, Box 2101

Fitness Goddess Grace Grimes.
Fitness Goddess Grace Grimes.
Fitness Goddess Grace Grimes.
Fitness Goddess Grace Grimes.
Goodness Fatness Grace Groans.
Fatness Goodness Grease Grimes.
Gibbous Fibbous Gribb Globb.
Oootness Oddness Arse Arms.
Arse Arms Gobness Flabness.
Fartness Fatness Gobs Glum.
Fibness Flobness Garp Goo.
Arbness Ibness Oof Arf.
Fitnit Gobgib Grass Groans.
Goodness Godness Garf Glines.

Nicholas was reading the paper, back to front, the dangerous way, and he found the place where you send in the form to win either a) a free six-month membership in an exercise apparatus holding company or b) a free 1999 Aerobics & Fitness Calendar featuring full-page spreads of Fitness Goddess Grace Grimes. Fitness Goddess Grace Grimes, I asked? Yes, he replied, Fitness Goddess Grace Grimes, of www.gracegrimes.com, who is apparently a Fitness Goddess, which is a job description I didn’t know existed. The title Fitness Goddess means something a bit less than Porn Star, but a bit more than Aerobics Instructor. You can buy photographs and videotapes of Fitness Goddess Grace Grimes, in her revealing Fitness Goddess Outfit. They may improve your circulation, they may not. Or you can fill out the form to win the 1999 Aerobics & Fitness Calendar. Or you can just do what we do, and simply say her name over and over until you reach The Zone:

Fitness Goddess Grace Grimes.
Fitness Goddess Grace Grimes.
Fitness Goddess Grace Grimes versus Business Goddess Kate Kleen.
Business Goddess Kate Kleen versus Bigness Goddess Bruce Brine.
Bigness goddess Bruce Brine versus Ignatz Podless Grease Jones.
Ignatz Podless Grease Jones versus 1998 Mr. Leather of Washington.
1998 Mr. Leather of Washington versus the Clark County Boy Scout Choir.
The Clark County Boy Scout Choir versus Two Dozen Muscular Shaved Greased Men.
Two Dozen Muscular Shaved Greased Men versus Sixteen Asexual Fleshy Globs.
Sixteen Asexual Fleshy Globs versus Fitness Goddess Grace Grimes.

Once there was a man who was born typing. It wasn’t easy on his mother, let me tell you, and the labor lasted thirty hours. Then out he popped, knibbling at the knobbles of a tiny bone-and-gristle Smith-Corona, and the placental sac was littered with tiny typed sheets of clear tissue. The doctors threw the sac away, but that was all right, because he kept on typing.

He kept typing as he teethed, as he suckled, through the acquisition of language, through the discovery of sex, he kept on typing, typing, typing, and when anybody ever asked him what he was typing he would reply “the story of my life.” By the time he was ten he had filled his family’s garage with neatly stacked pillars of typewritten pages. By the time he was fifteen they had to move to a larger house.

The man who always typed was too busy typing to spend time stuffing envelopes, filling out SASEs, reading rejection slips, so nobody published his work, and those friends and acquaintances who did read it found it interesting, but very weird and disorganized, and once or twice they even offered to help him with the organizing and the editing. But he wasn’t interested in re-typing, just typing, so he kept on typing and the stacks rose higher.

He went to college, where he wrote a lot of essays, and did well, and got into grad school and continued to type. The university published whatever he wrote, without really reading it, and they gloated over the volume of their chopped and bound output, so they kept him on. They wanted him to give lectures but he had no interest, so he’d go to the lecture hall, stand at the lectern and type, and then hand the sheets to a grad student who would read them out loud.

And eventually through sheer force of volume he got famous, a little, and some people decided they liked what he wrote, although they didn’t understand it, not at all, still, it was exotic. So they gave him tenure and an office, and young grad students would occasionally get sexually fixated on him and give him blowjobs as he typed, and he enjoyed them, but not enough to stop typing. And the consensus among those who knew him was that he was cold, distant, he never stopped typing when he talked to you and he never looked at you, even though he was an accomplished touch-typist. He’d just stare into the space in front of him, chin slightly raised, lips pursed in an expression of ecstasy. He was handsome really, but cold, and he had no friends except his bone-and-gristle Smith-Corona, his deformed twin. All day long he talked to it, and it talked back, and the clattering of its keys was like the chattering of old teeth.

The man who always typed had one stack of papers he handed to the university, to publish as they saw fit or do whatever they liked, as per their agreement with him. But he had another stack, the secret stack, which was for him alone, him and his twin. People could tell when he was working on the secret stack because his visage would lose its calm and become inflamed, excited, emotional and insane, and he would scream and whoop and weep and wail as he typed. But what he wrote nobody knew. He locked the pages away in a secret location.

A cult formed, of people who supposed they knew what the secret stack contained. His public works, his official oeuvre, was so strange and convoluted, so chaotic — what could this secret work contain? Some thought it was the novel, his first real complete novel. Others said it was the key, the great philosophical index that would let the rest of his work make sense and not seem so weird. And others said they had looked over his shoulder and seen one word, just one, repeated over and over and over. They said he was mad, insane, a crank, getting worse all the time. But he would not confirm or deny such statements, and the only thing he ever said, when asked what the secret stack contained, was “the story of my life.”

Then people started to get interested in the story of his life, his background, his history, to get a hint at what made him so strange, and at what the secret papers might contain. Biographers went to his hometown and interviewed everybody, and came to the conclusion that he had been born with a bizarre appendage, and that his constant typing had by all means strained his relationship with his parents and with society, and that he had become an odd fish, stunted, socially inept, but that there was no root cause of anything he did or anything about him other than the fact that he was always typing, always always typing typing typing, and that he had been born that way.

He grew older, and as he did a lifetime’s typing began to take its toll on him. At only forty years of age his hands became knurled with arthritis and his posture seemed very much to collapse, and it was not uncommon to see him resting his head on the top panel of his typewriter as he worked, leaning on it for support as the rest of his body withered. And the typewriter, too, grew thin and difficult, typed more slowly, broke its L key, forcing him to use the number 1 instead. And the sound of his typing seemed to grow difficult, filled more and more with typos, jammed keys, backspaces and x-ing outs. But he never stopped.

And eventually one day he got very sick, and soon thereafter he died, and soon after that he stopped typing. The bone-and-gristle Smith-Corona, his deformed twin, kept on typing for a few slow minutes after he passed, its keystrokes more labored and painful, until it ejected its last page, which read: He typed a lot, he really did, that’s all he did, and now he’s dead.

And eventually society overpowered his estate and the wishes of his family, and discovered the lost crypt of his secret writing, in a dry corner of a self-storage outfit in Tempe, Arizona, on a hundred-year lease. They clipped the lock and pried open the door and there inside the vault they found it, the novel, the life story of a man exactly like he had been, in every detail, except that he had not been born typing.

More wine? No, I couldn’t, well, yes, all right. Fabulous. This is fabulous. You tell me that these vegetables grow in the ground? They just pop up? And you heat them in that pan and then ... this? Impossible! Fabulous! Such a world! And this is the sunrise? Every day you have this? What do you do when the sun doesn’t rise? Not once? That’s a pretty good record ... what do you call this? Ah! Delicious! I am amazed. No, really, you are too kind. Now we are going to see a movie, now we are riding our bicycles, now we are talking on the telephone. Fabulous! I have done nothing to deserve this world, it’s so incredible! I know there are places where nobody has anything but rags, rags and ash and dirt. How am I so lucky? Well, okay, but just one. Mmm! And a cherry inside?

Now we are racing our motorcycles. Now we are lying in an open field, the only ones for miles around, you my love and I. Rain falls straight up our noses. Clean rain! It’s a miracle! We roll and roll in the wheat and weeds. Everywhere there is food and everything is alive, and you are impossibly beautiful. Why me? Why not one of them? I’m no saint. I’m not wealthy in fat American dollars. Why is it that we are all so happy? No, please, no more tiramisu, I’m sure I’ll explode.

My friends. There are so many of you. I hope I’ve done enough to keep you happy and warm and alive. I feel so powerless to help. Who have I made happy who wasn’t secretly happy already? What have I changed? You are all so forgiving.

This life is exquisite. There is nobody I could be, no place I could live, and be happier than I am now. It’s absurd! There’s no reason, but I love you all so much. I’m a termite in a post, a nursing pig. I am drowning in my own pleasure. I’m laughing, I’m crying, I’m laughing. Why have you given me this? I don’t deserve it. Thank you. Thank you! THANK YOU.

I promise I will love this world, and cherish it, and stand by it until my dying day, so help me life.

In 1999 I attempted career suicide: I published myself.