CHAPTER ELEVEN: THE KINSEY AND MONEY CENTER FOR MALE UTERINE DEVELOPMENT
This is a chapter from a novel I wrote many years ago. It is a science fiction nightmare of emasculation. It’s a really weird book. I like to think part of it sparkles with a paranoic imagination and lively writing. At other times, I think it might be too perverse. I am providing you with the second half of chapter 11 not because I think it is better than other portions of the book but because it isn’t as crazy as the other chapters which I am too uptight to share.
CHAPTER ELEVEN:
THE KINSEY AND MONEY CENTER FOR MALE UTERINE DEVELOPMENT
By David Gottfried
Dr. Lysenko then took Andrew into an adjoining room. Dr. Lysenko told Andrew that Richard had to learn how to stop thinking:
“This isn’t the time to ride Richard too hard or he just might get up the gumption to stage an exodus. We have to proceed with finesse, and this isn’t the time to slap his balls around just for the fuck of it. Also, Richard is bright, aware and his mind is able to question our shenanigans. We have to make him stupid. In a word, we have to make him more like an American and less like a New York intellectual. We have to give him the disability that makes most white Americans like George Bush and makes most black Americans like Jesse Jackson. We have to give him hyperlardinemia, or a condition in which the body is freighted down with too much lard, and a person becomes morbidly stupid. And I mean lard. Literally.”
“Get out of here, I mean I know most Americans are just a bunch of fat assholes, but I’m sure they got human fat on them. You can’t tell me it’s lard fat,” Andrew retorted.
But Lysenko was adamant: “No, they have pig fat in their bodies, and this has been objectively proven. We decided to ascertain whether Americans had animal fat in them because we were struck by the way they looked when they were eating.
“More specifically, we conducted the Mc Donald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken Fat Shmuck Observational Project. We examined the facial features, posture, breathing sounds, rate of eating, and general demeanor of fat assholes in fast food restaurants. We noticed that when they ate they resembled a pig or a dog. They did not engage in any conversations. They did not read anything. (Although they did look at TV screens to observe Monica’s Lewinsky’s beret for the ninety-ninth time.) They never paused in their eating. They ate rapidly. A glazed, wholly stupid look came into their eyes. They sweated profusely. They were in rapture and it was clear that they lived to eat and that for them eternal life with Jesus – and the lion’s share of these people were ardent devotees of primitive Christian cults, baptism, Catholicism, etc. – was envisioned as nothing but a succession of repasts suffused with the same fried food shit again and again. In any event, the marked stupidity of these American gluttons, in conjunction with their predilection for inane pastimes – the idea that there is something inherently macho and challenging in sitting in front of a TV and watching football and eating for hours on end, until one gets man tits and has a body with the consistency of creamy grits – made us realize that they must have animal fat in their bodies.”
“I always knew that being a coke addict had its fringe benefits,” Andrew interrupted.
Lysenko continued: “And so we cut up the bodies of scores of fatsos and low and behold we found pronounced deposits of lard and bacon fat on the carotid arteries of these sorry, baboonish American twirps. The carotid artery is the artery which nourishes the brain and so it was clear that pork fat was depriving the brain of nutrients and making Americans stupid.”
(Yes, America was once a great country, but it became a great country in spite of its people, not because of its people, who are no braver than the starving Jews who fought the Nazis in Bialystock, Sobibor and the Warsaw Ghetto; no more virtuous than the Danes who saved the lives of Jews by smuggling them to safety in Sweden; no more intelligent and proficient in science than millions of Asians who in a hop, skip and a jump went from being illiterates in rice paddies to engineers; and no more democratic and independent in spirit than Europeans who have no electoral college, benefit from a press that does not ask moronic questions in the manor of a Larry King, and whose public discourse does not revolve around Anna Nicole Smith and Gary Condit and Bill Clinton’s penis.)
“Of course, these Americans got carotid arteries laden with lard after half a lifetime of fried chicken dinners and an inherently stupid cultural climate – situation comedies; politicians who answer questions about health care by telling us a teary-eyed story of a single mother without health insurance and not offering a single, specific remedial idea; the sight of a fat woman in a shopping mall in skin tight pants eating an ice cream cone and screaming at her toddler which, in its obstinate, insistent, nauseating physicality, is antithetical to the cerebral and the sublime.
"But we don’t have time to remake Richard’s life. So we may just have to transplant some pork fat into his carotid arteries. I have vats of lard from Harlem Grocery stores – they are the best for our purposes as they are sometimes contaminated with mouse droppings, and this gives the brains of our victims just a little bit of a more raunchy and animalistic character – so we can do the surgery whenever you want,” Lysenko concluded.
“Well you certainly are on the ball. We just may take you up on your offer and have Richard’s brain neutered,” Andrew appreciatively replied.
When the doctor and Andrew returned to Richard, the doctor smiled and said, “That will be all for today. You may get dressed. We don’t want to put you through too much.”
After Richard got dressed, Richard, Andrew and Horace hailed a cab and went to Andrew’s apartment because Richard’s apartment had not recovered from the pounding it had received when Hadie Johnson, in her inimitable way, danced in the apartment and smashed most of Richard’s furniture. Indeed, the only working piece of furniture in the apartment was the sofa that Andrew and Horace had been sitting on when Richard returned to the apartment from the bar Cowboys and Roundups, also known as Panties and High Pumps.
Andrew’s apartment was much more opulent than Richard’s abode. It was situated not far from where Richard Nixon used to live and Andrew, who had the sort of eclectic political orientation that could at one moment hail Bella Abzug – for her feminism – and at the next moment hail Milton Friedman – for his economic conservatism which exalted the rich and hence was so elegantly aristocratic and queenly – prided himself on his proximity to the home of the former President, whom he adored for his ruthless machinations.
The apartment building, like so many buildings in New York, looked like a grand and great ice cube -- it was, after all, nothing but an enormous rectangular prism – and the chilliness of the people in the lobby, of the ladies clutching their poodles in the elevator, and of the people working-out in the building’s gym, seemed wholly in harmony with the building’s architecture.
Andrew lived on the 10th floor, in Apartment 10Q, and he took pleasure in telling his guests that this signified that he possessed a maximal amount of Queenly Bitchiness. It was a two bedroom apartment, which was quite lavish for Manhattan given the exorbitant price of realty in that elite borough. After all, this was a town in which college-educated people commonly doubled up in one-room apartments on the fifth floor of walk-up buildings. But Andrew, as mentioned above, never wanted for cash. Where it came from was never clear. Whether it was from the Law, or from the entertainment industry, was anybody’s guess. He simply conjured and wheeled and dealed, and he sucked-up loot as naturally and as reflexively as a spider’s web enveloping insects.
And Andrew’s wealth was majestically displayed in his apartment. First, there was the sheer immensity of the space. To describe it as a two-bedroom home understates its size. In addition to two bedrooms and a living room – and the designation living room was too pallid and common a term for such a vast room; exhibition hall or throne room would be more apt – there was a dining room, a library, a solarium, a few corridors between rooms and a terrace.
However, the apartment was more than silver-spoon rich. It gave off a whiff of something resplendently sinister poised to make you swoon in the devil’s arms. The dining room table had a black color that shined so brightly and seemed so deep that one got the impression that one of the more elegant regions of hell were glowering in your face. The chairs around the dining room table aspired toward a sort of industrial chic and had a wired, cabled, metallic look that made them reminiscent of electric chairs. And although the lighting fixtures had no shortage of wattage capacity, they never seemed able to make the apartment truly bright and emitted only a hesitant orange glow that was swallowed up by the ubiquitous sense of night. At best, they looked like torches in some tunneled and cavernous dungeon.
After Andrew, Richard and Horace entered the apartment, Andrew let out a “Home sweet Home” in a voice he used to express his womanly feelings. His womanly feelings were most pronounced when he was in his home and could imagine himself the mistress of a great English Estate.
He immediately examined the freezer section of the refrigerator to ascertain if his colored maid had stolen any drugs. She hadn’t. Then he lazily scanned the other contents of the freezer and refrigerator which included, among other things, champagne, beer, vodka, Filet Mignon Steaks, Sirloin Steaks, truffles, and a plethora of itty bitty jars of condiments with an average price of about thirty-three dollars. Most impressively, the kitchen contained an aquarium which enabled him to savor fine, fresh seafood whenever he wanted. At any given time, about five to ten lobsters, along with numerous shrimps, scallops and other swimming prey, were incarcerated in the tanks. Andrew, incidentally, did not know how to cook.
But there were lots of people like Andrew in New York -- people who had food they did not know how to cook, and cars they did not want to drive, and children they were in no mood to mind, and children they were in no mood to bear -- and there were services galore which would do, it appeared, everything for the inept wealthy but wipe their asses after they took a shit. And so Andrew called Gourmets on Call, a twenty-four hour service which dispatched highly proficient cooks to peoples’ homes. Of course, cooking a fine meal was contingent upon having the required food stuffs in the house, but the sorts of homes served usually were sufficiently stocked to produce almost everything within the realms of French, Italian, Chinese and Japanese cuisine. And so when a demure, frightened Spanish woman entered Andrew’s house, and Andrew barked, “Cook us Lobster Neuberg and Chicken a la King,” a quick examination of the kitchen showed that Andrew had all the ingredients and utensils for such a delicacy and such a commonplace dish.
Andrew immediately explained, for the benefit of Horace, Richard and the Spanish woman, why two very different dishes would be served:
“The Lobster Neuberg is for Horace and me. Horace is a big, strong guy, and he can use the filling luxury of this dish, and I am only accustomed to the finest foods so that’s why I’m eating it. Now, Richard, well Richard is another story. Richard is pregnant, and so I really don’t think he should be eating anything too rich or complex. I mean really, lobster is elegant, but its shell and its tentacles and its mean-spirited look just don’t seem very maternal. But chicken ala King is the sort of thing that a lower middle class woman, who is very fertile and has eight children, might have, so I think that’s just perfect for Richard.”
Richard was not terribly keen on chicken ala king, and he made his discontent known. Andrew, oddly enough, did not vigorously oppose Richard’s rebelliousness on this issue; perhaps he was beginning to learn the merits of tactical concessions. And so, after making perfunctory noises about the high cost of lobster, and the health of the unborn child, he affected to have a big and warmhearted side, and he told the Spanish servant that they wanted three Lobster Neuberg dinners instead of two.
As they waited for the food to be prepared, Andrew instructed Horace and Richard to clean the apartment. The apartment was not really the least bit dirty, unless of course a few cubic millimeters of dust on a rug and the slightest streak on a medicine cabinet mirror can suffice to make an apartment dirty. For Andrew, any dirt discernible to the naked eye was cause for alarm for in each errant crumb of dust he glimpsed rebellion against his fastidiously Ordered reign of shimmering jewels, glimmering crystals, and jubilant wealth.
But Andrew not only Ordered his serfs to clean; he joined in. The film “Mommie Dearest,” and its portrayal of Joan Crawford as a film star who was not afraid to get on her hands and knees to eradicate every last speck of offending grime, made a deep impression on him, and as he scavenged his rugs and carpets for stray bits of string, miniscule bits of cigarette ashes and the white droppings which were always immediately recycled with a quick snort into the nose – they could have been the finely granulated remains of scraps of paper or poisonous precipitates from the numerous aerosols used in the apartment, but because of the possibility that they were cocaine, they merited an instantaneous and grateful inhalation – he saw himself become more like a diva every day.
After they had vacuumed rugs that had been vacuumed only a few hours earlier, and scrubbed and scoured pots and pans in the kitchen that were only inches away from those pots and pans simmering with what were to be the constituent elements of their Lobster Neuberg dinners, Andrew finally granted them a reprieve from their cleaning, claiming that they had a fine and demanding athletic work-out which merited a luxurious meal.
As luck would have it, the food was ready shortly after Andrew proclaimed the cleaning job done – of course he qualified this announcement by stating that cleaning was a perpetual job, by looking at Richard and saying “a woman’s work is never done,” and by reminding his crew that they would have to clean all the utensils used in the making and consuming of the food as soon as they completed eating.
Andrew’s cleaning dictates reminded Richard of Bruce, a faggot he met at the same semi school and quasi mental health facility for teenagers in which he had met James Clenton. Bruce was also a neat freak, whose idea of dinner conversation was telling his table mates that after his Mother had completed cooking dinner he would insist that before they eat a single morsel they clean all the pots and pans used in the preparation of their food. Richard reflected that perhaps he had allowed Andrew to become his friend, and then to invade and ruin his life, because he was reminiscent of people he used to know – people like Bruce -- and, since he knew so few people from his earlier days, he yearned for some continuity with the past and sought out people who would punish him like the people who had punished him in the past.
But Richard was not given much time to reflect when he was in the presence of Andrew, and tonight was no exception. Andrew had said far too many cheery things over the past hour or so – he had permitted Richard to have Lobster Neuberg, complimented the boys on their cleaning, and even told them that their cleaning constituted a good work-out -- and this proved too unnerving to his naturally hostile disposition. And so he started barking. He started by berating the Spanish cook:
“The seasoning is all wrong. It has this Mediterranean feel, this Latin feel that is all wrong. Now I know you think that Spanish culture is very big, and I will grant you that some aspects of Spanish culture are good – you got the guys in the tight bull fighting pants that look good on their cute, hot asses – but there are times when Spanish shit doesn’t cut it, and Lobster Neuberg is one of them. This is supposed to be French shit, and that has a sort of grace and beauty that you guys with your fucking Tacos and Cucarachas just don’t understand.”
The Cook was aghast, but she should not have taken his comments to heart. For all his scathing criticisms, Andrew greedily devoured the items on his plate, and his ravenousness was quite at odds with his normal eating patterns, which tended towards cocaine-induced anorexia. Besides, Andrew did not know a thing about cooking, and he criticized simply because he thought it his duty, as a Proper Park Avenue Matron, to criticize the lower social orders as often as possible. Also, she had no need to worry for her job; her employer was well-acquainted with Andrew’s belligerence, which the company always appeased by automatically discounting its charges. Actually, Gourmets on Call did not mind Andrew’s protests, and the ensuing price discounts, in the least: The firm respected Andrew all the more for being a bitch, and the price discounts were of no moment because its charges were ridiculously inflated to begin with. But that is the way most New York Pricing works: The prices are exorbitantly high. Some purchasers, who tend to be rich and mean, have the sense to knock the merchant down in price. In this way, the purchaser tends to get richer and is quite happy at what his avarice has brought. Other purchasers, who tend to be poor and nice, are too timid or polite to knock the merchant down in price. The merchant will have contempt for his failure to assert himself, and this contempt will prompt the merchant to render shoddier goods and services. And this will make the purchaser meeker still, and this will make the businessmen more contemptuous, and the purchaser may soon become so lacking in self confidence that he loses his job. The purchaser will get poorer. He may die young, because he has become so poor and endured so many of the toxicities that the City abounds in – crime, rats, industrial pollutants, miserable doctors who don’t speak English and inflict gratuitous harm in municipal clinics and, most of all, a supremely sadistic, avaricious temperament that makes the market place an arena of murder – or he may become insane, which of course makes the doctors very rich when they make all sorts of insurance claims for medical tortures used to pacify and control him. If he has sense, he will simply attack wealthy people, at random, as they flaunt their ill-gotten gains while they smugly saunter down Fifth Avenue.
The cook, however, being very adept at cooking, and not so skilled at conning or conniving, did not know any of this. However, Horace was used to seeing Andrew shock and stun people, and sometimes get into altercations, and so Horace took the cook aside and presumably told her to take no notice of Andrew’s explosions. Shortly after Horace’s confidential little chat with the cook, the cook departed and the boys resumed their meal. Andrew, having forgotten his earlier denunciation of the meal, now saw cause to rave about it in the course of telling Horace and Richard how lucky they were to benefit from his saintly generosity.
As soon as Andrew had taken his last bite, he snapped at Horace and Richard, “Okay, lazy boys, it’s time to get back into maid-mode. We have pots and pans and plates to clean, and we are going to do it pronto.” Although Andrew had a state of the art dishwasher, which did not require the user to first presoak or lightly wash the dishes before placing them in the dishwasher, Andrew took a dim view of such labor-saving technologies. Of course, he bought them and used them as would any self-respecting dowager. However, he was not at all enamored of the idea that people should be liberated from cleaning, and so he insisted that before the items be placed in the dishwasher, they receive a rigorous and complete cleaning. And so, within moments of putting down his fork to enjoy his last bite, Richard was busy attacking grease encrusted pans with steel wool soap pads.
Finally, the evening’s cleaning had come to an end. Only someone subject to blatant and stark visual hallucinations would believe more cleaning was required, and although Andrew was tyrannical, compulsive and exceedingly neurotic, it could not be said that he saw visions. He might make people see visions, he and other people of his injurious ilk might drive people into frank and fulsome insanity, but he and his confederates never went completely over the edge.
So now the three boys intended to relax for the rest of the evening until they retired. Of course, relaxation is not something that comes easily to them. Like little rats gnawing at floorboards and plaster -- or the bigger rats in the body politic who, out of sheer boredom, decided to create a national crisis over the Monica Lewinsky affair -- they could not sit still. They always had to make some sort of trouble.
And so Andrew simply got on the phone and started calling various business associates – what his diverse and convoluted dealings consisted of was never clear – and proceeded to ball them out at the top of his lungs. When he barked, he did an exquisite job of merging the hard-heartedness of Richard Nixon suggesting that nuclear weapons be used on North Vietnam with the demanding fastidiousness of Bea Arthur, as Maude, claiming that a dinner party will be all wrong. And he screeched:
“You just don’t fucking know how to deliver...You’re fucking shit...It’s basic Uniform Commercial Code you asshole.” (He never explained how anyone contravened the Uniform Commercial Code – whether he had read the Code was entirely a matter of conjecture – but his allusions to this legal tome certainly gave him a sort of jurisprudential luster.) “Don’t give me no more of your sorry assed excuses for non contingent breach.” (The juxtaposition of legal terminology with bad grammar, he thought, made his intelligence seem conjoined to the stuff of the street and not at all effete.)
While Andrew assailed different people in a succession of phone conversations, Horace got on the internet where he cruised gay web sites under the screen name “Black Sadist.” In this capacity, he was always certain to attract flocks of self-effacing and masochistic white males who pleaded for the sting of his whip and much, much more. While online, he made appointments to meet his victims, and when he met them, he almost invariably gave them more than they had ever asked for.
Richard was mettlesome and obnoxious too. However, unlike his captors, he directed his aggressive energies against himself. Although he was, it appeared, pregnant with a baby that was undermining his manhood, rearranging the architecture of his gastro-intestinal tract, and holding him up to scorn and humiliation, he was staring at the mirror and wondering if the lines in his jowls were any deeper than the day before yesterday, if he could see an incipient double chin breaking through like an egg coming out of a bird, and if the bird were becoming a weary middle-aged Mother with crow’s feet to mar the eyes. Finally, he hit upon something constructive to do: He decided that he would kill two birds with one stone: He would do sit ups, and this would attack incipient fattiness and, perhaps, if they were done with sharp and furious vigor, abort his pregnancy. He got on the floor and, with martial resolution, did the sort of angry, hard sit-ups that, he hoped, would make his gastro-intestinal tract shape-up, start acting like a man, and expel his unwanted fetus.
But Andrew, perpetually craning his neck around the room like the periscope of a German submarine in pursuit of prey, spotted Richard as he began his offending exercises. He promptly summoned Horace, and Andrew and Horace proceeded to restrain and immobilize Richard.
Andrew shouted, “You stupid faggot. There you go again, trying to lose your Baby. Well we ain’t gonna let you do it, so you just better get used to being pregnant, comprende.”
Richard refrained from what he knew would be futile protests. Andrew and Horace then dragged Richard to the second bedroom of Andrew’s two bedroom apartment, which was the room used exclusively for Andrew’s sadomasochistic fancies. The room was larger than many ordinary bedrooms or living rooms with dimensions of about twenty-four feet by twenty-two feet.
The aesthetic inspirations were Dracula and Frankenstein movies. It’s existential inclination was distinctly funereal. The room was dark, and the predominant tones were those of a blood-clotted, encrusted maroonish brown, a hemorrhagic black, an hypoxic blue, a death’s door gray and a slicing-sword red. There were a variety of candles in the room which illuminated the room in only the most feeble and forlorn capacity. At best, the candles were as frightening as the candles in a catholic cathedral may be to Protestants and Jews, and at worst they resembled phalluses that had been ignited and were slowly being incinerated and destroyed. The gruesome feel of the room was accentuated with a panoply of imaginative touches that only the most wicked minds could have conjured, and these included a medieval rack; a wall on which a variety of devices, to torture penises, testicles, asses, and all other body parts, were hung; and something which proved that the realm of torture would extend beyond the metaphysical and the manmade and would encompass the crawling, creeping stuff of the natural world: A cage, which included bats and rats and other odious beasts.
Richard was not subjected to these tortures because Andrew was not interested in having fun with Richard; Andrew had one interest and that was to harvest the stewing fruit of Richard’s bowels. Therefore, Richard was merely tied-down and restrained with a variety of clamps, handcuffs and metallic implements which prevented the movement of his limbs.
After Richard was secured and immobilized in the torture chamber, Andrew and Horace smoked some marijuana, and took some sedatives, and soon all three boys were asleep. But while Andrew and Horace were able to sleep the undisturbed sleep of the contentedly cruel, Richard had the strangest dreams.