Red Meat Cures Cancer (14 page)

20

The Standing Stage

“Truthfulness. Benevolence. Forbearance. These are the things you should be focusing on.”

King had not given up on my Qigong training or me.

“Even a chi as wayward as yours can be channeled.”

“I don’t feel well, King.”

I really didn’t. And not just physically. The strain of the last few months was undoubtedly taking its toll on my body, which ached in ways that were difficult to describe, but there was also something wrong with my head, maybe even my soul or my spirit, or that part of me that flowed around and made me feel bad or good. Dare I say, my chee.

“Perhaps your yang heel vessel is blocked.”

“I don’t know what’s plugged up, but something’s not right.”

“Well, that’s why we’re doing this—to get you unblocked— to allow you to reach a state of inner harmony. Now I need you to focus. We’re going to start the standing stage today. Are you ready?”

“Sure.”

I didn’t tell King, but I was breaking another of the twenty-four rules of Qigong training by failing to regulate my mind. Although I was supposed to be avoiding miscellaneous thoughts and “cutting them off at their origins,” I was having a hard time reconciling my chosen descent into the world of pornography with this meditation process and my life. It didn’t sound like such a big deal at the time, but now, having done it, I questioned my moral rooting. And it made dealing with concepts like truthfulness and forbearance, and the pursuit of inner harmony, more difficult, if not impossible.

“In the standing stage, you learn to take the energy that you’ve built up during the sitting stage—your chi reservoir—and move with it.”

“Move with it?”

“Channel it from your Dan Tian to your five ancestral organs: the brain and spinal cord, the liver and gall bladder, the bone marrow, the penis and the blood system.”

“That’s more than five.”

“Some go together in pairs.”

“Oh. Well, what kind of chee comes from my penis?”

“That would be your essence chi, but it doesn’t come
from
your penis; it flows
to
your penis.”

“I really don’t feel like doing this right now.”

“Don’t doubt your training and become lazy.”

“Let me guess. That’s another of the twenty-four rules.”

“Yes, it is. Do you have any idea what a privilege it is to be able to freely practice Qigong? If we were in China right now, you’d have an electric cattle prod poking at your genitalia.”

“I bet that gets the essence chee flowing.”

“Can we focus? Now as we begin meditating today, I want you to reaffirm the values of morality espoused by the Falun Gong: doing good works, speaking honestly, believing in extraterrestrial life . . .”

“You mean like aliens?”

“Breathe. In and out. Warm your Dan Tian. Imagine fire in your belly. A flowing river of vital energy.”

“Got it.”

“Okay, we’re ready for some backbends. These are going to energize your yang. Place your hands on your hips and . . . starting slowly . . . lean backward. Can you feel that?”

“I feel something.”

“Good. The mind and the body are acting as one.”

After finishing my session with King, we sat outside with a couple of Frescas and let our Dan Tians cool down.

“Have you ever thought about a more conventional existence, King?”

“Oh, sure, I’ve thought about it. In fact, lately I’ve been thinking about getting my Ph.D.”

“Your Ph.D.? You need a college degree before you can get that.”

“Not for the school I’m looking at.”

“What school is that?”

“E-Tech University. It’s all Web-based. You hunker down in your bedroom and six weeks later, you walk out with your degree.”

“Six weeks? What kind of degree can you get in six weeks?”

“Any degree you want really. Ph.D., J.D., M.D. I was thinking of becoming a surgeon.”

“In six weeks?”

“Well, no. Not just six weeks. There’s a residency period afterward, which is another four weeks. But I’m more inclined to go the Ph.D. route.”

“In what?”

“Paranormal activities. (Pause) Poltergeists, specters, apparitions, the whole
Ghostbusters
thing.”

“You want to be a ghostbuster?”

“I think so.”

My conversation with King confirmed everything I already suspected. I wasn’t cut out to roam the world the way he did. Thus I arrived at work resigned to riding an American wave of perversion into retirement and my pension. Six months and two market share percentage points away from finishing my twentieth year at Tailburger, I couldn’t let anything, including my chee or my ghost-busting brother, get in the way.

My pension. Its importance to me had grown disproportionately large. There were good reasons, though. I saw it as part of my salvation. Sure, I’d have to give a big chunk of it to Trip Baden, but what remained would be enough for me to quit work and to do some of things I’d always wanted, like learning my neighbor’s names and fixing up the 1963 Austin Healy that currently sat in pieces in my basement. The pension money would also give me time. Time to spend with my kids, time to pursue a relationship with someone (possibly Annette), maybe even time to find and channel my chee. Time to get well in my own way. Life, I’d learned, was just one big accumulation of wounds. Now I needed time to heal.

The more I thought about things, the more I wondered why I felt the need to morally chastise myself. I’d never been any kind of saint, and today’s porn wasn’t the dirty business I’d witnessed in the days before the Internet. I recounted the positive attributes of Cal’s site in my mind:

It was a victimless endeavor. Nobody would be shedding any blood here. Just lots of love.

These women got paid for their performances. They were artists, and it was important to support the arts.

Both disease and the population were reduced. You can’t catch herpes off your hard drive, and perhaps more important, cybersex meant less actual sex and fewer babies, saving our precious natural resources.

Lustranch.com
provided a wonderful service for millions of chronic masturbators, sex addicts and the truly ugly.

My free-association session ended when the Link called me into his office with news about the SERMON suit.

“We’ve been served,” the Link said grimly as he pointed to a copy of the filed complaint on his desk. He was calm, all things considered.

“When?” I asked, incredulous we’d been sued.

“This morning. Just now. Some kid with a pierced eyebrow and a Marilyn Manson tattoo caught up with me in the parking lot.”

“Is the New York attorney general a named plaintiff?”

“Does a Tailpipe with cheese make you shit blood? What do you think?”

“Goddamnit! Thickens caved. He said he’d help us out.”

“Well, he lied. What a novel friggin’ concept—a public servant who’s a complete goddamn liar.”

“You know he’s sleeping with Muffet Meaney.”

“How do you know that?”

“He said so when we met in Albany.”

“So you’re telling me we’re getting sued so this guy can keep getting laid?”

“It looks that way. I still don’t understand it. If Thickens expects to run for governor and win, he’s going to need our money, and even more, he’s going to need Roxby. Burt’s the only guy who can deliver the upstate vote for him.”

“Call Roxby and tell him what this prick did.”

I pulled out my cellular and dialed Roxby’s private line. He had graced me with the number after a particularly large Tailburger donation to his last campaign.

“Hello.”

Roxby sounded nervous.

“Burt, it’s Sky Thorne.”

“Sky, all I want you to know is that I’m innocent. Completely and totally innocent.”

“What are you talking about?”

Roxby quickly became hysterical.

“I was set up. Governor Puma’s people heard I was backing Plot Thickens. You have to believe me.”

I appeased him for no particular reason.

“I believe you, Burt. Whatever you say.”

All of a sudden a voice I didn’t recognize came on the line.

“Representative Roxby will not be making any further comments to the media about his case. Good-bye.”

Completely perplexed, I flipped my phone shut and looked at the Link.

“What’s wrong, Thorne?”

“Something happened to Roxby. Turn on the television.”

The perpetual tedium of CNN’s
Headline News
usually anesthetized me. A continuous wave of interchangeable faces with fake names repeated the same stories over and over again at an octave below normal until the reported events were nothing more than background noise. Voices modulated little whether a cute cat had been rescued from a Memphis tree or Boris Yeltsin had been rescued from a Moscow nightclub. So I was somewhat surprised by the tone of urgency coming from the Atlanta news desk.

“To repeat our top story, Congressman Burton Roxby has been arrested on charges of statutory rape for his alleged involvement with the family’s baby-sitter. He has also been charged with possession of cocaine and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. The arraignment has just been held and preliminary reports indicate that Mr. Roxby has pleaded not guilty to the charges. When reached for comment, the president, who served in the House with Mr. Roxby, said that, if the charges were true, he was deeply saddened and, frankly, shocked that Representative Roxby didn’t have the decency or common sense to wait until the baby-sitter turned eighteen. We now go to a live press conference being held in Rochester, New York, with Representative Roxby’s lawyer, M.C. Shufelbarger.”

I snuffed out my smoke and sat up to watch our horny little House member. Out in front of the state courthouse, halfway up the marble stairs that led to its entrance, stood a gaggle of at least fifty reporters huddled around Roxby and his attorney. Shufelbarger was an old criminal law hack whose jowly face nearly eclipsed his bow tie. He’d represented every piece of human bilge that had washed up on Lake Ontario’s shore. As expected, Roxby stood to the side and indicated by his body language that he would not be speaking. Shufelbarger stepped up to a microphone resting on a makeshift podium.

“Before I answer any questions, I want to read a statement.”

The balding lawyer pulled a pair of glasses from the left breast pocket of his suit jacket and placed them on the tip of his bulbous nose, rife with broken blood vessels. He put a single piece of paper on the lectern and began.

“Representative Roxby is completely innocent of all charges leveled against him here today. Although he is quite fond of the young woman in question, and believes she is an excellent baby-sitter, he did at no time have any sexual or improper contact with her or encourage her to use drugs. We are confident that a jury of his peers will acquit him and put to rest these outrageous allegations that have no basis in fact and are extremely hurtful to the entire Roxby family. Burton Roxby is a tireless public servant who puts himself on the line for the American people every single day, and this is just one of the many risks such a man is exposed to in his line of work. Justice will prevail. I’ll take a few questions now.”

“How old is the girl?” a reporter from Buffalo’s Channel 5 asked.

“Twelve.”

“How
was
she, Roxby?” a cry came from the back.

Shufelbarger was miffed.

“People, please. Keep your questions appropriate and direct them at me.”

“Isn’t it true that Mr. Roxby was found alone with the girl up in a tree fort?”

“That is correct. Representative Roxby was helping the young woman with a school science project on leaves.”

“Why were his pants off?”

“People, I’m telling you. One more inappropriate question and this press conference is over. And by the way, they were not off. He merely loosened them for purposes of comfort and they fell down. Representative Roxby’s recent low-carb diet is the real culprit here.”

“How much toot did they do before fucking?”

“That’s it. This press conference is over.”

Roxby was led away by his attorney to a waiting car. My best hope for brokering a deal with SERMON was off to presumably post bail and plan for a life after politics and possible time in state prison. He would be useless to Plot Thickens in the governor’s race now, making the attorney general’s actions somewhat more understandable. Still, Plot had been a real shitbag to immediately abandon Tailburger, and if he thought he could quietly slip away without hearing from me, he was sorely mistaken.

“Frank, I’ll call Plot right away.”

“This means war,” the Link threatened as he began to ramble on. “I’ll put the bayonet up to their throats myself if I have to. We’ve got to pack the gunpowder tight and keep it dry, Thorne. Meaney and Thickens are fucking with the wrong burger brigade. We’ll get these fuckers to Appomattox yet, I swear. Now where in the hell is my flask?”

I retreated to my office to telephone Plot. His secretary answered and, to my surprise, put me through. Like the consummate politician, Plot answered the phone as if I were an old friend calling for a favor.

“Sky Thorne. What can I do for you?”

“What can you do for me? How about stop being a two-faced asshole?”

“Sky, that’s totally inappropriate. Is this about the lawsuit?”

“What do you think, blockhead?”

“I think you’re rude. What do you expect me to do? Roxby’s useless to me now. He got caught. As we used to say in the League, fifteen yards for illegal use of the hands.”

“Will you shut up with that? Nobody cares about the fucking League! I want you to withdraw from the suit. There’s a quid pro quo in effect here. We’ll support your campaign big-time if you get out now. We had a deal.”

“We didn’t have any deal. Anyway, I can’t, Sky. Chicken Hut and Pizza King have both thrown their support behind me in the past week. I’m going to have plenty of money. I don’t need Tailburger. Look, the political winds are blowing against beef. Back in the League, this is what we called fourth down. Time to punt, Sky.”

“I’m going to punt my foot into your ass. Can you grasp that?”

“Sky, I think that’s fifteen yards for unnecessary roughness.”