Eyeheart Everything (3 page)

I ejaculated across a family photo of the incumbent, his family arms around his smiling wife Barbara and daughter Nancy. A thin string of semen separated his son Bobby, a young man my age who stood more off to the left. The layout artist had cropped the son’s shoulder. His expression seemed to say: please get this over with.

During the final week of the campaign, all citizens were advised to remain in their sealed rooms, and to keep their nerve gas antidote kits constantly beside them, and to watch always their TVs. But on voting night I ventured out with a small group of Bozo supporters from my block who were keen to assess the situation. There was me, Jerry from party headquarters, Sam and Mitch, a little shrimpy guy named Louis, two older women named Donna and Christie, another guy from the party named Anguello, who brought his three year old daughter Sue, a teenage hippie girl also named Sue, her boyfriend from El Salvador who’s name I forgot, my next-door neighbor Clay, and his boy scout troop. We met at my apartment, put on our noses and our floppy shoes, and piled into the Honda. Nobody spoke much, we were all too worried. The polls had Doubt at 37%, Hope at 36.5%, with the third-party feeling of Uncertainty trailing at 20%, and with 6.5% of voters undecided. Pundits predicted that for our side to turn things around we would need campaign donations to buy 720,000 more votes, or else the incumbent would have to throw up on another world leader. There was also a disturbing rumor in circulation that Bozo didn’t really like children. None of us knew what to think or what to expect.

The streets in our neighborhood were deserted. Every house was slathered with signs. Some people’s front lawns had been badly tilled in scenarios where lawn sign commandos from the warring parties had tried to crowd each others’ signs out of view. At the intersection of Placid and Liberty we saw a charred and bombed-out loudspeaker car, stalled and dead but still hissing static, a victim of sniper fire. It was so badly disfigured we couldn’t tell if it was one of ours or one of theirs. We left a rubber nose on the hood ornament and got away from there.

We decided we weren’t drunk enough, so we stopped by a bar that was known to be partisan, the Leaning Booth. The others crowded around the television, waiting for news from the front. The pope has endorsed the incumbent, it said, and Madonna has endorsed Bozo. I had a martini. I had another martini. I had a third martini. I thought about Trust, Character, Change. I didn’t like any of them. I had a fourth martini. Each martini olive had two spears — one sword and one American flag. I had a fourth martini, again. I now had five swords and five flags. Once upon a time we fought a war for freedom. When was that? Where was I? I had another flag.

Six Flags. The incumbent campaigned there just last week. It was on the TV, he addressed the paying audience and the elves. Talking about Freedom, Trust, Character, Safety. Bozo was to speak at Disneyland later that day about Happy, Friendly, Children, Wonderful. Mickey Mouse, employed by loyalists but sympathetic to the cause, was not allowed by his superiors to speak at the event, and had to introduce Bozo through mime. He had his little gloves on, he had another martini and he mimed a scene in the voting booth, where the lever was too high up and he had to climb on the shoulders of children. Mickey Mouse climbed on the shoulders of children. The children were not smiling. The children were forced into the scenario by their forefathers. What were they thinking? Did they understand why this is all necessary? When the bomb went off under the podium, did they hear the noise? Did they feel the impact? Did Mickey? Or did it all just wash over them like a bad but overpowering idea, like a loud commercial on a big TV. They didn’t ask for it. Who asked for it? Why can’t we get what we want?

I don’t remember where I voted that night, or who I voted for. I only remember the lever going down, the sound of the latch and my legs falling out from under me.

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I went over to Mark’s place to watch The Simpsons but we couldn’t really pick up Fox properly on his TV because: apparently there’s some new cellular phone antenna that they just put up on the roof of the church two blocks away, the First Chinese Mennonite, and it’s not supposed to do this but it ruins all reception of the UHF channels between about 14 and about 35, including of course TV20 which is where we get Fox. The neighbors have all been talking to each other about it, and to the cellular company, and I guess there’s supposed to be this technical grievance process that they have to go through before they can get it fixed They’d probably all be raising more of a shitstorm about it if it wasn’t for this sort of delicate side issue, specifically the Chinese Mennonites sort of feel like the whole neighborhood is against them ever since this really awful cross-burning episode which happened well over a year ago, and which everybody in town absolutely condemned, and which was traced not even to the local Klan (we do have one) but to a couple of junkie high school kids who had some incomprehensible personal beef to unfurl on the lawn of the First Chinese Mennonite. So now people are going over and talking to the old reverend guy who’s in charge of the place and who doesn’t speak English but communicates through his son, and they’re very nicely and politely explaining to him this issue with their TV reception versus the antenna, which the reverend kind of pretends to understand, he smiles, but he doesn’t even own a TV and probably has not ever even been exposed to that kind of audiovisual worldly temptation in the orphanage to monastery to ecumenical college in Bavaria someplace to boatload of Chinese Mennonites coming up the Willamette river like fifty years ago to buy some land and spread the word story of his life. At any rate TV is not a big part of this guy’s world, although he does seem to enjoy this new ultra-slim StarTac cellular phone that he likes to talk to people on, I don’t know who he talks to, maybe God. It seems that while he doesn’t automatically have the legal right to ruin local UHF reception from the steeple of his little white church there — said steeple now decorated with three white bulbous things with sloppy red Mennonite crosses painted on them but with the Motorola logo also still visible, and one blinking spire that goes up like 30 feet beyond the existing spire and certainly does appear to lend the building that extra little pinch of spiritual receiving power — but neither does anybody in the area have any right to do anything about it, and it’s seeming more and more unlikely that this issue will be resolved in our lifetime, but:

Mark said “Come over anyway” because what they now receive on the UHF channel is kind of weirdly interesting as well, plus we can always sit around and hit the bong and play guitar and generally hang out even if The Simpsons don’t show up. The weirdly interesting thing is you can hear the dialogue of The Simpsons pretty well most of the time, but on the screen — which is just has this little 13” portable job from the early 80’s, with fake-metal anodized case and huge rabbit ears and a huge UHF coil, such that it actually gets better reception than most modern TVs, says Mark, though he also can’t afford to buy most modern TVs due to a familiar wife kid car mortgage situation, but anyway — on the screen there seems to be, as far as we can make out, some sort of satellite pay-porno channel leaking over. It’s very faint and staticky. But occasionally, like if someone in another room holds a metal spatula in midair, cheesy music and loud moaning come blaring across, and it’s either bad synthesizer wallpaper music or else sad jazz fusion music, plus either sex swearing stuff or else just panting and wet slapping noises ... but Mark was quick to point out to me that there’s more than just this whacked superimposition of cartoons and porno that was fast making this his favorite channel (I was actually sort of wondering whether he was getting into the kinky aspect of this strange dialogue: Homer says some dumb Homer thing and then Marge says “well Homey, you could always just FUCK ME IN THE ASS IN THE ASS LIKE A MAN WITH YOUR FAT friends back at the plant who HEY BARB, THIS IS JOE AGAIN —”

To explain: besides the fuzzy pay-porno and besides the Simpsons, there’s also local cellular phone traffic bleeding in to this same channel, channel 20. And it seems for some reason that it’s always either voices in Chinese and with a lot of laughing, or else it’s this one particular guy. And Mark said that he sometimes leaves the TV on tuned to 20 just to wait for this one particular guy’s conversation, whose name is Joe and he must live around here, he makes six or seven calls every evening around the same time, and they’re to various different people but mostly to either this woman named Barb, who it’s pretty clear he’s somewhere in the divorce process with, or else to his lawyer, named Mel, who’s also involved in that process and with whom Joe’s (apparently) conspiring to get a really big, one-sided and unfair divorce settlement out of said Barb. While we listened to this three-way audio confusion field together, and these details of someone else’s divorce, and cartoons, and sex, I asked Mark if, like hypothetically, he thinks that it’s okay for a given person to be listening in on the private phone conversations of some other given hypothetical person, ethically speaking, but Mark did point out that a) these high-power waves of electromagnetic information were currently travelling through him, myself, his daughter Emma, and his wife when she’s home, actually penetrating all of our bodies, and nobody asked any of us if this was okay, and that asking us to, in effect, ignore these waves inside our own selves and not look at them out of respect for the privacy of unknown wave-generating individuals was perhaps unreasonable or unfair or un-something-else, and anyway the point is 2) they took away our fucking Simpsons.

And to make things even more entertaining, Joe has a speech impediment, a sort of a sloppy S noise that perhaps isn’t so pronounced in person but after he speaks into his (presumably) cellular phone and that gets amplified and transmitted and (presumably) re-amplified by the bulbous antenna nodules on the First Chinese Mennonite church which is only four houses down from Mark’s, and retransmitted, and then that signal invades the circuitry of this early-80s TV set that is designed to receive something completely else, and then gets re-re-amplified and run through the tiny TV speaker, by that time it sounds like a huge burst of square-wave noise every time he says the letter S, which he comically says pretty often. Some people who lisp avoid using the words that they can’t say but this guy Joe seems to overcompensate, for instance his pet names for his ex-wife-to-be Barb include: Sweetie, Sugar, babycakeS, SunShine, and (a favorite for some reason) SweetcheekS. Mark & I can’t imagine what it must have been like for that poor woman to be married to this guy and having him spitting all over her all the time ... he also has a bunch of irritating phrases that he likes to use, most of which have strong S sounds all through them, like “So what you’re Sayin’ iS” and “So here’S how I See it” and “So-So” and “I See, I See.”

After a couple of bonghits each you can imagine how funny this might get, even compared to the Simpsons. But last night it got sort of out of control, when we were picking up this conversation between Joe and Mel, the lawyer, and we heard the two of them sort of joking about how they were going to leave Barb penniless, with nothing, and never let her see her kid again and so on, and then kind of in passing they were talking about how happier everybody (but she) would be if something would go wrong with the brakes in her car. (Which is a Jaguar apparently — another clue indicating that Joe and/or Barb have a lot of money. Yet another such clue is that Joe for some reason prefers to use his cell phone even though he’s apparently calling from his house where he could use the normal phone and save a bundle.) Mark, upon hearing of this planned duplicity, got suddenly very pissed off and intense. Like night and day it was, one moment we were just laughing about it all and the next he was really wanting to find this guy Joe and ... yell at him or something. Me personally, I figured it would be a better idea to just tape-record some of these conversations and send them somehow to Barb, if we could figure out where she lived. But the thing is, all of these conversations were interspersed with dirty sex talk (mostly from these women who push 900 sex numbers in the commercial breaks and the one phrase that they seem to say over and over is STICK YOUR PHONE IN MY CUNT!) and also bits of The Simpsons (I think the plot was something about Mr. Burns regressing to a past life, while Homer gets involved in a men’s drumming group or therapy or something, but at this point I sort of lost track) and I don’t know if the point would come across clearly on tape. But anyway like I said we were pretty stoned ... and I forget who came up with the idea but before too long we had collected together all of the extension cords in the house and hauled the TV set out on to the porch.