I Smell Esther Williams (8 page)

I precipitated the disco wave by using a bat bone on a woman’s ear as a sort of musical dildo. The song went like this:

Ah … if only nuptials were Sally’s bag. Perhaps she’s too much of the whore.

The sheets smell like Sally, There’s snow on the mountain already. Is Sally alive? Has she been driven to resort to cannibalism? Has she simply been driven to a resort—perhaps Steamboat Springs?

I attended, uninvited, a soirée in Louella Menzies’ smoky trailer. Nothing had yet been served and during a lull I fairly burst out, “Did somebody say dinner was on? What is the conventional wisdom vis-a-vis dinner, because I need the sustenance to make way like a smitten red-man into each valley and canyon where I’ll cup my hands to my mouth and call, ‘Yoo-hoo … Sally … yooo-hooo!’ ”

Close to the field of battle, they await an enemy coming from afar; at rest, an exhausted enemy; with well-fed troops, hungry ones. This is control of the physical factor.

What is called ‘foreknowledge’ cannot be elicited from spirits, nor from gods, nor by analogy with past events, nor from calculations. It must be obtained from men who know the enemy situation.

— SUN TZU

THE DAUPHIN

VERNON
, the Dauphin’s chamberlain

LUCAN

JUDY
, who feasted on exotic bird’s nests for days at a time and dressed her Pekingese puppies in vests made of costly imported fabrics

VIC PIANO
, owner of SIT-Siemens electronics plant and Pirelli rubber factory; Lucan’s ideal

DEBORAH

THE TIME
: 1973

A hubcap-shaped Connecticut gymnasium.

LUCAN
: I appreciate it even more—the mildness is terrific. Is your telephone still hooked-up downstairs?

THE DAUPHIN
: You know it’s not the same number as when you used to call all the time.

VIC PIANO
: Why don’t we just make this easy for both of us?

THE DAUPHIN
: This is strictly business then.

LUCAN
(nibbling at roast guinea fowl in a veloute sauce): Strictly business.

VIC PIANO
: Is there a tape running?

THE DAUPHIN
: Yeah.

LUCAN
: You better catch it. I’m not the only one to believe that a deaf-mute girl read the lips of a Las Vegas entertainer planning to bomb a famous UFO museum. How do you like my striped suit? If you do anything to jeopardize this program, I’m going to get you!

VIC PIANO
: You want this excitement … this … this action—just as much as I do!

THE DAUPHIN
: No one lives to violate my wife and talk about it!

LUCAN
:
I
live to violate your wife and talk about it!

VIC PIANO
: It sounds like a woman.

THE DAUPHIN
: How did you know that?

LUCAN
: Instinct, I guess.

A conference room.

LUCAN
heats a pan of quartered tomatoes and sautés shrimp. The color change in the shrimp can be seen. When they are done, they curl up.

LUCAN
: The chimes ring, the dogs bark. Cheese sandwiches in a panel truck. And oh … the violins! The lady says “May I have this dance?” I would be most delighted …

THE DAUPHIN
: You’re dreaming, Lucan. It’s never going to be that simple again, that … that safe.

VIC PIANO
(chewing a piece of truffled sausage encased in piecrust): But for you and me, Dauphin?

THE DAUPHIN
: Can’t you see? We’re dying … we’re dying in time to our own beautiful symphony of parting chariots.

(They impulsively embrace and kiss.)

LUCAN
: …cherubs beneath an extinguished lamp.

THE DAUPHIN
: I remember a baseball called a nickel rocket, men.

THE OTHERS
: A baseball called a nickel rocket, sir!

VIC PIANO
: How is Judy doing?

LUCAN
: As a matter of fact, very well. She’s even beginning to think a little like the old man.

THE DAUPHIN
: What do you mean?

A congressional hearing room.

LUCAN
: … she said she wished she could have spent an evening with the jailhouse rocker.

THE DAUPHIN
: The action would include some inspired pussy humping and crotch rubs that would burn your eyes out.

VIC PIANO
: Right off the bat, people will say “there’s good fucking and bad fucking.” Why let them go on and on and on and on and on and on, their penises sliding into their vaginas. Fucking.… there are so many ways of thinking about it. Here’s the worst fucking list of doctors I ever saw: Dr. Bernard Schulman, Dr. Irvington Solomon, Dr. Theodore Martens, Dr. Craig Bushel, Dr. Sally Bloom, Dr. Richard L. Lumis, Dr. Peter Sibel, Dr. Theoharis Ariola. It’s always, “Dispose of his body, Ginger, and for crisakes Let’s Fuck!” They always want media attention.

THE DAUPHIN
: You put the carrot before the cart—my father used to promise them a girl-packed UFO show.

VIC PIANO
: These orchids I discovered nearly thirty years ago in certain forests of Burma. They occur at extremely rare intervals—traditionally only once in a century. From these orchids I have at last obtained, after twenty-five years of study, an essential oil which completes a particular formula—the formula elixir vitae for which the old philosophers sought in vain.

THE DAUPHIN
: What a story! A beautiful stranger warns the 100 that she intends to track them down single-handed! What a scoop it would be to discover who she is!

VIC PIANO
(pouring the men hefty glasses of local cognac, giving them steaming bowls of homemade soup, and heaping their plates with meat): You’d only be writing her obituary! She hasn’t a chance against the 100! Those hoods have a finger in every racket in the area!

THE DAUPHIN
: Simmer down! Johnny Adonis, the convicted
murderer scheduled to die in the electric chair tonight, wants you to see him in the death house, immediately!

VIC PIANO
: Can’t understand why!

THE DAUPHIN
(covering the microphone with his hand): It’s those little things that nag you.

VIC PIANO
: They nettle at you.

The setting is the same as Scene 2, though the sound of mopeds is not quite so thunderous.

It’s about four o’clock in the afternoon. Shadows begin to worm their way across the stage. A $600 stallion belt buckle holds up
VERNON
’s trousers.

LUCAN
: I look older when I smoke. Don’t let my age fool you.

THE DAUPHIN
: How old are you?

LUCAN
: I was launched in ’51.

VERNON
: You’re jerkin’ him off, toots.

THE DAUPHIN
: No—how old are you?

LUCAN
(heatedly): 22!!

A hotel lobby.

DEBORAH
sits across the couch from
JUDY
who is folding a section of newspaper. The couch is badly in need of reupholstering.

JUDY
(reading from the paper): Octogenarians “Die” in Crash. Peter J. Reichwein, 82 years old, and his wife, Lois, 82 of Wayne, were “killed” yesterday when their car crashed into a slow-moving train at a crossing. Due, in large part, to the miraculous speed with which they were delivered into surgery, doctors were able to revive the New Jersey couple after two hours of confirmed forensic “death.” Interest heightened amid reports from attendant hospital personnel that a voluble and robust Reichwein later recalled the experience of participating in this exchange at the instant of “expiration”: “What do you mean bringing a platinum cutie into a respectable establishment like this?” “Platinum cutie!!! Men, surround this oaf! Make it so champagne bubbles will never tickle his nose again!! Fix him so another wax dame will never make him balmy!” “You will do no such thing, Captain!” “Draw your weapon from its scabbard!” “You are about to become extinct, Captain! Never again to strengthen alliances or encourage troops to succor the poor!” “You’re a shit, sir … a real shit!!” “I’m going to cleave your brains in two—I hope they don’t regenerate like worm-parts, Captain!!” “It is you sir, who will soon adorn my hook !!!” “Your fish-like countenance strikes me as familiar, Captain—have we sparred before?” “You too ring a visual bell, sir, but I too cannot locate the source.” “Let us agree then that the survivor of this skirmish trace the wellspring of this faint familiarity.” “If it is I, sir, I will employ in my investigation every possible means—electronic bloodpressure units, calculators that are as thin as credit cards, wrist microsplit stopwatches.” “Taste death, then, Captain!” “Taste death then to you sir.”

Sun Tzu Drilling the Concubines of King Ho-lu

Shivering Beneath The Blue Clouds

Having An Aperitif With A

Name From The White Pages

Reading about nitrogen fixation, that process that lays the foundation for the synthesis of proteins, the sadness of my friends popped into my mind and I admitted the possibility that I had read instead of the authoritative text, Speer’s memoirs entitled
Inside The Third Reich
.

Here’s to the syphilitic world and its sullen lugubrious days and the recrudescence of family turmoil in pockets across an individual’s map—and I am not the individual and things cease being what they are not, and I stop
this
here,     and sip

To ask, once out of the bar mitzvah brunch, is our convivial relative waiting, like Vitamin A in the retina, to be discovered
or is he making profit out of sacred things or is he too much the naif for simony; or to accept someone who says, I saw him before picking his nose at a red light—and to ask, who is this splenetic image deflator. These treaties exist in name only. And, under the circumstances, they doubt him “stalwart” enough to resist the temptation to flee, but only one burro has the energy to bray for him.

How bummed, to be fuelless in these futuristic boondocks with this synesthesia of some before and the taste of this medium point like a dentist’s finger in my mouth.

I drew my shades a crack (life’s been good to me so far) (Everyone thinks orange juice is good and cigarettes are bad—but I like both of them) and poured a glass of orange juice and looked for a cigarette (“If only I could find one!”). I don’t remember anything after that. Let’s see, I opened the shades a tiny bit … I got some juice … or maybe made some and then had it, I couldn’t find my pack of cigarettes … nope, I can’t remember a thing after that.

Isn’t so and so a snob? She won’t even admit she liked
Grease
. I’d like to empty out her tube of Ortho cream and fill it with Oscar’s guacamole dip.

When I was looking at the quart container of milk I’d gotten that morning, it reminded me of when I was a boy because it’s so little and skinny compared to the half-gallon we usually buy. It led me to think about glandular disorders and growth dysfunction—I was perusing the label on the bottle of Topco Multiple vitamins. Topco Associates, Inc. is based in Skokie, Illinois which, of course, had gained recent notoriety for the Nazi-Jewish controversy. I looked at the clock and bolted. I
quote what’s-her-name verbatim on the issue of promptness—If you don’t pick me up at 5:30 on the button, I’ll beat you and beat you until even your colleagues at the university won’t recognize you. This shows how inhuman she is because everyone knows how ignominious it is not to be recognized by one’s colleagues.