By
David Gottfried
Introductory Note Regarding Bigotry and Prejudice:
This material is from a novel I wrote. Hopefully, you will find it uproariously funny or spiritually salubrious. If this doesn’t hit your funny bone, smoke a joint and re-read.
Some readers might find sentences, language and stereotypes in this material indicative of prejudice or bigotry.
May I remind these readers:
What a novel’s narrator says is not necessarily what the author believes.
Likewise, what a character in a novel says is not necessarily what the author believes.
Sometimes, the author will put certain words in a character’s or a narrator’s mouth to mock the point of view expressed by those words, to demonstrate the pervasiveness of certain points of view or to incite people to rebel against the point of view expressed by those words. For example, the Book of Exodus recounts the slavery of the Hebrew People. The fact that it discusses bondage does not mean it advocates putting people in bondage.
Cocaine and Clotted Noses
After about twenty minutes of walking around the nightclub in circles, the gang of three, Andrew, Richard and Ethan, lit-up cigarettes and downed glasses of whiskey in an effort to calm down and counteract the fiercely stimulative effect of the cocaine. Andrew took a deep, supercilious drag of his cigarette, in his best Bette Davis manner, and opined on the proper manner of partying. When Andrew did cocaine, he became quite long-winded, and tonight was no exception:
“Like I always said, you gotta party in the proper way. You don’t want to drink too much or else you could puke and that like wouldn’t be chic. Just keep it to one glass of scotch every half hour. If you have more, this will counteract the cocaine too much. Besides, you want the cocaine to really take over, and to dominate the alcohol, because the cocaine is your real ace in the hole. I think it sort of tightens up your face muscles and makes you look younger. You should only drink enough alcohol to take the edge off the cocaine, you know the real racing, paranoia, speed aspect. Besides, the thing to do when you’re nervous isn’t more alcohol. Instead, smoke lots of cigarettes. And breathe the smoke in real deep and hold it. That’s the best way to calm down.”
At the mention of cigarettes, Ethan had to offer his own bits of wisdom:
“Cigarettes are perfect because then you know what to do with your hands. Like if you aren’t smoking a cigarette, you don’t know where to put your fucking hands. Like when I was a kid, they always said, ‘a gentleman keeps his hands folded behind his back.’ But you can’t do that nowadays, or you’ll look fucking doofish. I mean Bob Dole; he has it easy. His hands are fucking crippled so he just clenches a fucking pencil and looks literary and decisive and shit like that. And then when I walk, I get really nervous because I am not sure how I am supposed to move my arms. It’s like this: I know you are supposed to swing your arms when you walk, but the point is, how much. If you don’t swing your arms enough, they’ll say you’re wooden, like Al Gore. If you swing your arms too much, that’ll look doofish too, like you’re some kid in a fucking parade for Fourth of July or some other junk.
“The other really great thing about cigarettes are like they give you something to do while you’re putting on your face mask. You know before I go out I always put on a beauty mask for about twenty minutes. It tightens up the face and makes you look younger. The thing is, you can’t do anything while you got a mask on. I mean you can’t drink any beer or shit like that because you gotta leave your face perfectly still while the goo and junk get inside your skin. But the one thing you can do is open your lips just enough to shove a cigarette inside and inhale. If you do that, and you look in the mirror while you got your mask on, you can sort of feel like Bette Davis in the beginning of “All About Eve” when she’s at her dressing table with her Cole cream on. Man, that’s really cool.”
Andrew, a life-long smoker with the raspy voice to prove it, wasn’t about to let Ethan dominate a discourse on cigarettes:
“Honey, don’t fucking tell me about cigarettes. You got that. Don’t nobody know cigarettes the way I fucking know cigarettes. I been smoking them ever since I was twelve fucking years old. I’ve smoked four packs a day ever since then. Four packs through high school, four packs through college, four packs through law school, four packs all the fucking time I’ve been working and making fucking millions.”
When Andrew started to talk about making millions, and his glorious acquisition of same, Richard became more pensive and downright agitated. Richard never quite understood how, exactly, Andrew made his money. First, Andrew alleged that he made his millions through the practice of Law. However, he was not admitted to the bar of any state in the Union. Also, over time, Richard discovered that Andrew had no fewer than four alternative names, replete with four different sets of credit cards, ethnic backgrounds and socio-economic conditions. In any event, the very concept of real work seemed utterly alien to everything in Andrew’s life. He arose at noon, proceeded to scream at his colored maid until three in the afternoon about all manner of imagined insufficiencies in the rendition of her household services, and then, until 6 P.M., he telephoned various merchants and business associates, screamed and raved and ranted and threatened lawsuits, incarceration and a wholesale, across-the-board raising of Cain, and managed, call-by-call, intrigue-by-intrigue, to amass a plentiful supply of capital. Such was how Andrew spent the daylight hours.
Of course, Andrew was not the least bit attentive to Richard’s unease at this recitation of his ascent to financial stardom, but if Andrew had been aware of Richard’s discomfort, he would not have cared. And so Andrew proceeded to regale Richard and Ethan, as usual, with tales of his brilliant legal and financial machinations.
“When I was a lawyer at Beagle, Buggers and Quartz, I did a lot of bankruptcy. Chapter 7. Chapter 11. All them fucking chapters. We did a lot of Jews in the garment industry claiming bankruptcy and eating 30 million dollars of matzoh balls in Israel. We did ‘em, baby. We had all the fucking ginnies too. And you know I fucking know the ginnies because I am a fucking Italian. Yeah, Geraldine Ferraro is in the mob and so is Alphonse D Amato. We did all that fucking pizza, gambling, cement shoes trade. I fucking went to bed with Steve Rubell and some of the biggest, hottest, fucking faggots in New York City. Got my start with Roy Cohen. He was an ugly son of a bitch, but he was a faggot like me and he got me started in this shit.”
Andrew, whipped-up into a screaming lather, exploded, “Man, I’m fucking flying high with this fucking coke and I shouldn’t be telling you this shit. If you fucking say a word of this to anyone, we’ll fucking kill you. Tie your balls to cement shoes and throw you in the East River. We do it all the fucking time.”
Although the gang of three was engaged in distinctly criminal and wholly nefarious talk, such foul things were supposed to be far from the mood and the object of the affair. This was, after all, a fundraiser, for the scions of some of the most upstanding, glorious old families of the nation. This was an affair meant to revolve around Barbara Bush and cotillions and persnickety old money and mothballs in Connecticut. This was George Plimpton without the liberal proclivities. This was Millicent Fenwick arisen from the dead. This was Clare Booth Luce taking a butcher knife to Harry Truman’s balls. This was the cast of characters of Henry James’ “The Bostonians.” This was the old North, the North before the Jews and the Catholics and the Kennedys took over the place. These were the frigid, icy Protestants from hell who loved William McKinley and Calvin Coolidge. They were as elegant as hell. These were people who, in the words of John Lennon, knew how to smile as they killed.
And now a raised stage on the east end of the hall became illuminated by one thousand track lights. And with this light came sound: “It’s a Grand Old Flag” barreled through the hall like logs rolling down the river. And from the left and right wings of the stage a group of chorus boys swung their arms, shaked their asses, smiled obscenely and sang in totalitarian unity:
It’s a Grand Old Flag
We’re a great bunch of fags
We got stocks and bonds and cock
We eat caviar, kill the Serbs
And got nice houses in the burbs
We have cash, cash, cash
And we’re still smoking hash
We’re rich, spoiled and quite crass
And if you dare make us blue
An army of lawyers will pursue
You
The verses continued in much the same vein, and to the left and right of the stage, and in various places all over the hall, movie screens appeared with a motley assemblage of images: On one screen, one could savor films of Thanksgiving Dinners and great roasted birds tended to by buxom, white-haired grannies. Another screen featured boys, boys in all manner of dress and undress, boys as boy scouts, boys as altar boys, boys as participants in vaguely and subtly sado-masochistic affairs, boys in private schools in blazers and shorts, boys doing push-ups, boys being bellhops and waiters and doormen in absurdly cute uniforms, boys as ballet dancers – boys as sweet and as pliable as cotton candy -- old ladies’ inventions of boys. On another screen, the boys were all grown up: Boys in harnesses and ropes and assorted leather gadgets, boys mad with adulation at concerts for Bette, Barbara or some other goddess of fag-hagism, boys teeming down the streets in gay pride parades in New York and San Francisco, and boys piling into Starbucks and everything new and modern and sleek. Finally, another screen showed the Bush campaign: Bush sledding with children at a Hallmark Card worthy photo opportunity; Bush receiving endorsements from innumerable, interchangeable, faceless rich men in the Republican party; Bush’s Mommy, her lines and wrinkles as regal and as intimidating as the lines on the library lions on 42nd Street, praising her Husband’s character and wimpy mannerisms; and Bush Junior dancing at balls, throwing soft balls at ball games, eating hot dogs at cook-outs, and looking, all in all, incessantly, ridiculously, friendly.
After about five minutes of chorus boys prancing around on stage, the boys scattered, and the master of ceremonies materialized. The master of ceremonies was, of course, a black woman. Many gay boys loved to be whipped by women, so their MCs are always women. And to maximize the sense of being whipped, what better choice than a black woman.
Very simply, there is, in America today, a certain type of black woman who is a conservative’s best friend. Every time white people, and quite possibly many black men, see her, she induces many of them to vote for conservative Republicans. She is the personification of gaudiness, noisiness, vulgarity and egotism. She is a rollicking mass of fat, guffawing and blustering and bantering her way across the American landscape. And the MC at the Lube Yourself with Saudi Oil Ball was no exception. She wore a tight, short dress that lavished attention on her prodigiously fat butt, totem pole thighs, and heaps of hips that ringed her waist like Saturn’s saucers. Also on display were the obligatory and enormous tits, double chin and flabby upper arms of washerwomen fishwives the world over. But of all her body parts, none of them starred, none of them were as conspicuous as, her butt. Her butt was, in a word, massive. It was a butt of countless, unhealthy fried chicken dinners. It was a butt of endless evenings of doing nothing save sitting on the sofa and eating chocolates. It was a butt of lard, of chitlins, of mashed potatoes with heaps of gravy. It was gravy on rice, gravy on bread, gravy eaten plain.
Her body, in a word, was one enormous, bursting globe of lipidic substances, and her buttocks and breasts and hips and double chins were globular emanations of lard from her inner, fatty being. However, there was one emanation from her body which did not in any way resemble the spherical or the curvaceous. That emanation was her voice. It zinged and stinged with darting, angry spikes of angularity and chutzpah:
“Hey, all you pretty little boys. Come on and give it up for me, Big Bitch Momma Hadie Johnson Thornton. Now you all know that I am here to tell you to vote for Bush. I mean ain’t he a pretty little boy. He so much better lookin’ than that John Mc Cain, going and boring everybody with his white hair and talking about issues and stuff with a bunch of lumberjacks up in New Hampshire. Man, what a sorry-assed campaign Mc Cain has. I don’t want to be talkin’ about no issues. They all boring and complex. I wanna have some fun, ‘cause girls just wanna have fun.’ And when I see George W and his cute smile, I just wanna be singing “It’s Raining’ Men,” from the Weathergirls, and I tell you I should have been in the Weathergirls and would have too if it weren’t for that Bitch Cherise, down at the record company, and her faggot boyfriend, that didn’t like me and my big fat ass. Well, I’ll tell you this, my ass is big and it’s fat and it can fart and I’ll be farting all over Cherise’s food, and I’ll stand on and crush her boyfriend’s cock, and I’ll be the biggest, baddest, big, bad, black girl in the whole wide world.”
At this, the gay boys were swooning with masochistic delight, and Momma Hadie Johnson Thornton saw this as an opportunity to launch into a series of pop-feminist anthems of inner-city Black Girl Brassiness, including that well-known standard that featured the lines “We are family, I got all my sisters and me” and suggested a human family depleted of men by castration or the cloning of women.
As Momma Thornton continued to sing and jest and strut upon the stage, dozens of white-haired Barbara Bush drag queens poured-out of various alcoves and trap doors from the periphery of the stage. They all wore blue silvery gowns, blue silvery pumps, and heaps of their own real pearls. Their make-up was exquisite; their faces had the dead, white, lifeless quality that suggested seven decades of ravishment by New England’s frosty winds. Their gait was princess perfect; they could have balanced books on their heads. And they were an absolutely mad, shrieking cacophony of sounds. They were screaming, squealing and screeching like a subway train breaking in an emergency. They screamed “Darling,” “Diva,” and “Divine” with the religious regularity of a Jew saying the Shema. They imagined that they were Barbara Bush hosting an affair for haughty old ladies in Connecticut, and they periodically exclaimed, in their best Grande dame voices, “My caviar is sublime.” The content of their speech was, of course, meaningless and had no relationship to any thoughts which they may have wished to communicate. Rather, their speech was a form of orgasm. It was vocal masturbation, and they fucked your ears with sounds that seared like hot spunk.
Having found Hadie Thornton and the Barbara Bush wannabes a tad tiresome, the gang of three required some more coke.
And their obsession with coke entailed on obsession with their noses. They were obsessed with their noses. They continually breathed deeply through their noses to sweep wayward grains of cocaine up the nasal canal and into the sinuses. Whenever they could, they tilted their heads back and breathed deeply to maximize the chances for nasal ingestion. They fretted over the burning sensation in their noses. They looked in the mirror to determine if their noses were speckled with powder, marking them, for all to see, as cokeheads.
Finally, they decided to go to the bathroom to do more cocaine. Of course, it wasn’t necessary to go to the bathroom, to snort cocaine, at a place like this. The Lube Yourself with Saudi Oil Ball was fully infested with drug users. However, the bathroom enabled them to employ the warm water method of rapid and devastating cocaine intoxication. The maneuver was simple. First, large quantities of cocaine were snorted into the nose. Then, one quickly raised cupfuls of warm water to one’s nose, tilted one’s head back, and inhaled. The cocaine, propelled by the water, then ravaged the brain with greater intensity.
And so the gang of three commandeered a sink, identified the hot water knob (cold water could constrict the sinuses, and retard absorption, and was avoided like the plague), and proceeded to enjoy their own Hades-like water of Lourdes.
This nasal onslaught soon provoked a cerebral firestorm. The three were simply mad with mania, their eyes popped-out of their skulls like cherry bombs exploding on the Fourth of July, and their faces were as taut and as tight as frigid Alpine peaks saluting the sky in Nazified rigidity.
Since they were seething with all the mindless energy of automobiles going ninety miles an hour and heading over a cliff, they charged onto the dance floor.
At first blush, the dancing in such establishments often seems supremely graceful and musical, but anyone with a little scrutiny soon finds that most of the dancers have the grace of wooden wind-up toys. The flashing lights never give you the opportunity to see a particular person over a continuum of several seconds. Instead, he is illuminated in fragments which may allow you to see him at one moment, and then a few moments later, and then a few moments after that. With these convenient disconnects in viewing, you never get the chance to see what an awkward, apish idiot he looked like in moving from where he was in the first second of viewing to where he was in the third second of viewing. Also, the sense of grace and beauty is instilled by the colored lights, and the leathered or lacy or shirtless bodies, and the idea that this is Manhattan, it is the middle of the night, and only the elect and exceptional could be in a place like this.
But the grace was all a fabrication, and the case of Ethan, Richard and Andrew was, if anything, the antithesis of grace. Rather, it seemed as if all three had descended on the dance floor like inmates from “The Snake Pit” or any one of a number of movies deploring the life of mental institutions. Their bodies did not dance; they convulsed. Their eyes did not shine; they burned like lasers. They did not exude energy; they exploded like car bombs.
After about five minutes they were saturated with sweat, hyperventilating like hounds in hot pursuit, and on the verge of some sort of a cardio-vascular emergency. So they sat down, ordered booze, and realized that the night was spent.
.Copyright, David Gottfried, 2007