HEY, MAN, WANNA GET HIGH WITH THE COOL GUYS
CHAPTER SIX:
DREAM SEQUENCE:
HEY, MAN, WANNA GET HIGH WITH THE COOL GUYS
By
David Gottfried
This was written several years ago when my outlook was more uproarious and religiously radical.
PREFACE:
Someone advised me that no one will read my material because it is far too long.
Please read a little bit of this really hot dope. I promise you won’t get hooked. In this chapter from my autobiographical novel, you can read groovy passages like this:
1) Lesbians adored Richard, and Richard, for some reason, could not break away. Maybe after listening to his sarcastic barbs, and espying his penis, they concluded that he was Virginia Woolf with a big dick and wanted to buy him drinks and bear his children.
2) Richard decides to ditch the lesbian oligarchs of luminous lesbininity, the halos of the hallowed vocation of the lick of the clit and the debonair dildo.
3) And as he worked for his Aunt Gertrude, he decided that he too was a hard-boiled, oppressed Puerto Rican, bare-chested, carrying enormous bags containing the sugar that would eventually grace the tea services of obnoxious matrons in New York. And one of these days, he knew he would lead a slave revolt, be an honorary Puerto Rican, smoke hashish and wear his hair long like the Beatles in Sergeant Peppers. And, in the course of becoming a Latino, Richard fell in love with Robert Kennedy, a blonde-boy Jesus of the Puerto Ricans.
4) He gets off at the station, a lively stride in his step, a youthful Christianity emblazoned on his unblemished heart.
This is the chapter:
Rich dreamed of the days when he got high with the cool guys.
Danny looked like a Monkey. He wasn’t an ugly guy; he was fucking gorgeous with the Jewish-Italian looks of Massapequa, Long Island, a New York suburb that used to be called Matzoh-Pizza because of all the Jews and Italians in the neighborhood.
But Danny had the amused indifference of a Monkey, slyly making hapless humans slip on banana peels, and his air of swarthy machismo made him as feral and ferocious as a beautiful ape. He was tall and strong, and although Richard doesn’t quite remember if he was hairy – perhaps Richard was too frightened to really gaze upon him and take him in for all time – he seemed like he had to have been a hairy guy. And when the Stones did “Monkey Man,” Richard was ready to suck on ape cock.
But most of the time Richard wasn’t getting high with cool dudes like Danny. For some reason, he seemed perpetually betrothed to vulgar lesbians in sexless and indissoluble marriages. Lesbians adored Richard, and Richard, for some reason, could not break away. Maybe after listening to his sarcastic barbs, and espying his penis, they simply concluded that he was Virginia Woolf with a big dick and wanted to buy him drinks and bear his children. In any event, they adored Richard, abusively and zealously.
And the things Richard did for fat lesbians! On a freezing night, when he was about 20, Richard, who had just met some of the hottest, macho, rock and roll faggots at New York City’s rock club Max’s Kansas City –guys who wore pants with zippers in the rear and had the confidence of men who hit home runs, guys who had the luxuriantly girlish hair of Brian Jones and the laser eyes of Son of Sam, guys with the Rosy, pinkish, ass-bud tenderness of “Ruby Tuesday” and the Steel and Fire of “Street Fighting Man” – is driving his ancient jalopy for hours looking for some supposedly really great Quaaludes for his lesbians. And, from his lesbians, he derives the misery of heterosexuality: The whine of women. The temperature is 3 degrees Fahrenheit and the heater in his car has failed and the connection in Glendale doesn’t have the drugs. He telephones his lesbians and asks to come home. The lesbians, in voices so proper they should have been named Leslie and attended clit classes in Wellesley, did do disagree, most disagreeably.
“We bid that thee not come home now. If thee doth return at only early evening’s hour, we will decree thee a pussy of arch and odious pussydom. We beseech you to further your sojourns for drugs just as Bette Davis in “Elizabeth the Queen” made her hot studs, who wore tights, start a war with Spain to get some loot.” And so Richard, who had, at Max’s Kansas City, become an amalgam of Mick Jagger and Brian Jones, quickly became a very different sort of Englishman. He became Leonard Woolf, the shleppy Jew who was Virginia Woolf’s slave.
“Man, enough of the faggotty name-dropping. If you have the guts to really write properly, you won’t tell us who they looked like; you’ll describe how they looked. And when you tell us how the guys looked, you will take off their fucking clothing. Cut this shit. We know how you want to undress them. Pulling down their pants, savoring the shorty shortness of their fucking shorts. And, while you’re at it, why don’t you shove a dildo up your butt and upload it into the document. Take literature to its ultimate calling: The abolition of the abstract and the communal with the actual. With pictures. And with people. And with fucking all the time,” declaimed one of the nameless people inside the narrator’s head.
Realizing that the car was ready to drive off a snow embankment and into freezing Long Island Sound, Richard, in the nick of time, regains his equilibrium and tries to decide on a course of action. Or, in other words, he woke up, and now the dream begins:
Richard decides to ditch the lesbian oligarchs of luminous lesbininity, the halos of the hallowed vocation of the lick of the clit and the debonair dildo. He pines for the being with things to shove into holes and holes as well. The only human that is fully, beautifully sexual: The male. A man can be masculine when pounding with his prick, and a man can be feminine when opening up his asshole. But a woman can only be masculine by acting like an angry bitch.
So he drives west. He goes West Young Man, west of Long Island, New York. He takes the Long Island Expressway, the L.I.E. of Suburban contentment, west toward the saloon besotted wild land of cowboys, the West Village, burgeoning with big men’s worked-out butts screaming for release from super tight Levi’s 501s. Richard’s pants are so tight that every time he steps on the pavement or gets out of his car his organs are massaged. And his leather bomber jacket doesn’t look bad either. (And before he got AIDS, his balls and his butt were so much bigger, and a pair of tight pants squeezed his balls and butt and gave him a hard-on which made everything tighter still, which made him even harder, which made the jeans even tighter, which made him even harder -- and walking down the street in Levi’s 501’s was always so much fun: It was like whacking-off in public.)
And that dream was stilled decades ago and can’t be rebirthed decades after the fact. The only thing left to do is to vandalize the graves of the people who destroyed your brain and ensured that you would never live. The only thing to do is to drive to those secure, peaceful suburban cemeteries where so many dead relatives lie in magisterial repose. Life lost cannot be gotten back and the joys of old age are pathetic joys. Richard would rather be dead than be old and supposedly happy because elderly people, when they purport to be happy, are so pathetic, so embarrassingly pathetic.
Richard would rather be dead than age, especially in the United States, where elderly white men go to hospitals to be ridiculed by behemothic black nurses. Or is it all nurses, or is it one nurse. Is it his Aunt Gertrude. The evil woman who made him clean her apartment, and her body, in the years after his Father died, when he was six. The evil woman who never disliked anyone; she only wanted to kill everyone, roast them, broil them. In his simmering psychotic heart, he knew the carafes of red wine under the haunting Orozco reproductions in Gertrude's apartment contained the blood of her victims.
Orozco was a red, hot, Spanish social realist who lauded peasants and workers, and the reproductions in Gertrude’s apartment were all about hard, lean men toiling under the summer sun, their faces bitter and harsh and poverty stricken. And as he worked for his Aunt Gertrude, he decided that he too was a hard-boiled, oppressed Puerto Rican, bare-chested, carrying enormous bags containing the sugar that would eventually grace the tea services of obnoxious matrons in New York. And one of these days, he knew he would lead a slave revolt, be an honorary Puerto Rican, smoke hashish and wear his hair long like the Beatles in Sergeant Peppers. And, in the course of becoming a Latino, Richard fell in love with Robert Kennedy, a blonde-boy Jesus of the Puerto Ricans.
He first saw Robert Kennedy, on TV during his 1964 New York Senate race, when he was seven. He was speaking in Spanish Harlem. The people filled the street, sat on the lampposts, leaned off of roofs, were ten on the fire escapes of the huddled tenement slums. RFK was kidding with the crowd: “Viva Lyndon Johnson,” he roared enthusiastically. “Viva Hubert Humphrey,” he shouted admiringly. And then, in a sheepish, quizzical tone, he asked “Viva Robert Kennedy.” And the crowd shouted back the fullest extent of their love.
Robert Kennedy was an affront to everything his Aunt stood for. His Aunt, and his Mother as well, said that Robert Kennedy was stupid, but he was brilliant, at least when it came to understanding Richard’s relatives. Robert Kennedy once said that educated, liberal, Jewish women in New York disliked him, at root, because he was an Irish Catholic who had nine children, and Kennedy may have been correct because Richard very clearly remembers his Mother, in the course of giving the usual liberal reasons for opposing Kennedy – his anti-Semitic Father, his prior sluggishness in supporting civil rights – suddenly screaming that the real reason she hated Kennedy was his Catholic heritage and the many children he had sired.
But Kennedy, in addition to being such a prodigious progenitor, also seemed to be such a sweet guy. Of course, he may have been a son of a bitch, but those of us who didn’t know him only know what we have read and what we have seen, and although written accounts are generally thought of as possessing greater validity and intellectual heft than the ephemera of television, there are things that we can see on the TV screen that we can’t see on the editorial pages of the New York Times. And when we looked at Kennedy on television we saw a searing sensitivity that stunned. A face that was so strong and so hurt and so beautiful. A voice infused with a quiet, manly sadness that seemed more spiritual than any minister’s sermon. An attitude that wanted to enact a constitutional amendment endorsing love. The eyes that seemed on the verge of tears, but would never, ever cry on television. He had all the classic grandeur of Marlon Brando doing Marc Antony in “Julius Cesar,” and he makes today’s pols seem like eight-year olds on “South Park.”
Kennedy was more than Richard’s Aunt could take because she knew that all men were scum and users and that his shtick --- that he had nine kids and was a nice guy – was a fraud perpetrated on the country. And when he came out against the Vietnam War, Richard’s Aunt couldn’t take it anymore. She loved that war. The war took unruly young men – black men, Italian guys, guys who weren’t in college; men who wouldn’t defer to a woman the way college-educated, Jewish schlemiels would -- and put them in a teeming, toxic jungle where their insolent balls could be blown to bits by Bouncing Betty land mines that would soar, three and a half feet off of the ground when stepped on, and explode. And in 1968, a year in which thousands of nineteen year old American boys lost their testicles in Vietnam, the women’s movement, premised on the idea that women are always shafted by men who always have all the luck, got off the ground.
And in 1968, Robert Kennedy died. He seemed to have been killed by Richard’s Aunt. Who had told Richard’s Mother to put ground glass into Richard’s Father’s sour cream. Who had killed his Father and had seemed to kill President Kennedy, two days later, in 1963.
And in the Summer of 1968, after Robert Kennedy was killed, Aunt Gertrude went to London and considered herself quite chic, resplendent in the bitchery of a big black dress, shining with pearls that adored her like little girls curtseying before a forbidding and ominous teacher.
But, thank G-d, eventually Aunt Gertrude died. At her funeral, Richard was unashamedly happy. He was twenty-two, had recently been graduated from college summa cum laude (and his relatives thought that they had gotten rid of him for good when at the age of 15 they had sent him to a psychiatric hospital) and if he was a queer he was one goddamn gorgeous son of a bitch queer, and at her funeral he looked great, and he gazed and glared at his murderous relatives and seemed poised to interrupt the boring Jewish liturgy by doing his Mick Jagger imitation and singing “Sympathy for the Devil.”
(Richard was for all intents and purposes a Jaggerist, i.e., he worshipped Mick Jagger. It came about quite suddenly. When he was fifteen, and thrown into a psychiatric hospital even though he was a high-achieving student at a special science high school, Richard decided that he needed a new religion. Something with a bit more pep than his older faiths, Judaism, the Democratic Party and psychoanalysis -- psychoanalysis had only taught him to doubt the validity of his penis by incessantly talking to him about castration complexes and other psychotic delusions that doctors foist upon patients to make them schizophrenic. He wanted a new faith, a faith that would scream and shout, belt him one, and then kiss him on the mouth; he wanted a religion vivacious and violent and filled with love, and with spread-eagled ears, he was ready to receive whatever special sound pounded its way into his brain.
And one night Richard wandered around the hospital’s recreation pavilion looking for his religion. He saw a room with a cooking class – nothing but fat women making cakes from store bought cake mixes. He walked into the television room – nothing but a bunch of Thorazine zombies watching “Hee Haw.” He walked into the gym – nothing but a bunch of scowling black men shooting hoops. But then he walked into a room with one boy and one record player.
The boy had long hair. The hair was as cute as David Cassidy’s, and the massive heft of the dark, thick hair made it seem like the boy and the hair had offerings as deep as the Atlantic Ocean. The boy had a good, manly build – he was devoid of the baby fat that still adhered to Richard’s body. The boy swayed to the music like a Jewish man praying. And next to the boy was an album cover. It was the cover of the Hot Rocks album by the Rolling Stones, an album cover that featured just one thing: The deep, luxurious hair of Mick Jagger. The waves of the dark hair looked like the angry waves of the Atlantic Ocean on a winter night, and he thought of how his Mother loved to go to Coney Island to look at the Atlantic Ocean, and now he saw the angry waves of the Ocean drown his Mother.
And the voice on the record player was ready to drown or dismember any obstructing force. It was the voice of Mick Jagger. The macho faggot rock and roll star with the queenly, kingly demeanor that exuded all the elegance of Lytton Strachey’s prose. The leaping, screeching, screaming primal beast that harangued, harassed and bit you hard on the neck. The macho faggot who walked into the offices of psychiatrists, in makeup and rouge and a handgun, and said, “Suck my cock.” The macho faggot who told Rabbis and Priests and Imams to bow to “His Satanic Majesty’s Request.” The macho faggot whose microphone was a bazooka, whose guitars wailed like Stuka dive bombers, whose drums were the angry boots of massive invading armies, whose light shows were phosphorus bombs illuminating the American prey that Jagger would ravage and ass-fuck all night long.)
Of course, he wasn’t interested in going back to a hospital so he didn’t do his Jagger act at the funeral. I guess he just conveyed an air of regal contempt, something he had studied for many years under the laborious tutelage of Madame Gertrude.
But he didn’t really want to be Gertrude the Second; he wanted to get high with the cool dudes. And he got high with the cool guys: He de-seeded the weed as judiciously as a Jewish mama cleans white fish and pike before making Friday’s gefilte fish. He rolled the joints as well as any housewife rolling pasta. He wanted to make sure not to lip the joints, or get them wet, when he inhaled on them because that blocked the passage of air (and if he wet the joints, he would betray his inclination to kiss the guys). And he did it all like a man, like a completely masculine, subservient man, taking orders from the cool guys. And when they spoke to each other, they got to the point. None of the la di da lady-like pussyfooting found in other parts of this document. He may have been smoking weed, but he felt as if he were tying knots for his scout master.
And, Man, why do they tie knots so often in the boy scouts. What the fuck needs to be tied all the time. You gotta tie your fucking shoes when you get dressed. That seems to be about it. Wanting to understand these deep mysteries of the male condition, Richard wonders if he can, well into middle age, join a scout troop.
Richard does join the Scouts. It is not as hard as one might think. First, throw about fifty grand to the best Plastic Surgeon in New York. The orders are simple: Make me cute and young and make me look fucking pre-pubescent. After the surgery, he is almost there, but not quite. So he does more. He takes prednisone. This is a serious steroid, and he is taking it for one of its side effects: It can make you retain water, plump up and fatten the face, make you look younger, and increase your energy so you are soon running around like a normal little boy with Attention Deficit Disorder (Hyperness is the natural state of little boys, and if you give someone a drug for hyperness they will eventually need that drug even if they didn’t need that drug at the outset, and Ritalin and big pharma and cunty educators are conspiring to destroy little boys.).
After the prednisone and the plumping-up of his face, the real gay fun starts: A complete body shaving. There will be no hair south of his scalp. No hair whatsoever. When it is all over he looks like a twenty-four year old who hasn’t reached puberty. Perhaps he will pass. Then he gets some clients, who he defended in a criminal racket, to claim that he is their boy and to enroll him in Saint Joseph’s Boy Scout Troop, affiliated with a Catholic Church in Brooklyn, New York. He likes the name of the Church and boy scout troop as it reminds him of the delicious orange Saint Joseph’s Aspirin for children that his mother had given him when he was afraid.
He is so happy that before he leaves his law firm he changes into Boy Scout shorts, the time worn decades ago when the shorts were short and the socks were high, and he skips as he leaves his place of work, getting a special thrill sashaying past the senior partner’s office, the cubicles of the angry, single women paralegals, and he almost stops off at the coffee bar, to order a glass of milk and a chocolate chip cookie, so everybody will start to see him as a schoolboy and perhaps treat him with the attentiveness and kindness a good boy deserves.
He takes the subway from his law office to the Church for his first meeting with his new boy scout troop. In his right hand he is carrying his attaché case, filled with his adversary’s brief in a case pending in Federal Court, his rough draft of an opposition brief, and The New York Times. In his left hand, he is carrying a collection of strips of raw hide, procured from a store specializing in gay erotica, with which to practice his knot-making, and he is holding onto the handrail because he is standing on the crowded rush hour train. When the train stops between stations, he uses his cute, bare legs to hold his attaché case, and he uses both hands to make a new kind of knot.
He takes the F train to the designated station. He always loved the F train for obvious reasons that need not detain us here. He gets off at the station, a lively stride in his step, a youthful Christianity emblazoned on his unblemished heart. As he walks down the street, he sees a candy store. They don’t have too many candy stores nowadays because people want to be healthy. But when Richard was growing up it seemed a matter of certainty that at least once every twenty years America would be engaged in a big, big war (I am not referring to stuff like Iraq in which only discrete, small segments of the American population feel anything; I am talking about WW11 which killed over 300,000 American boys), and a lot of people would drop dead, and while you were alive you ate chocolate, smoked cigarettes and drank scotch. But in this dream of a second youth, the candy stores return and Richard is drawn to the sugared oasis. He buys sugar textured in a multiplicity of ways and dyed in all the colors of the rainbow. There are sugar buttons, and strands of sugar that resemble shoe laces, and sugar in the most delicate and girlish pink, and sugar that screamed “we are black and proud,” and the sixties returned, and his thoughts became more confused as his blood glucose levels soared, not only because he was eating so much sugar but also because he was taking prednisone, to puff up his cheeks, and prednisone has a propensity to raise blood sugar levels and induce diabetes.
His brain spins around like a cotton candy machine and swirls and churns with more drunken, disheveled thoughts. He dreams that his Mother, who had no husband and no other children, died and that on the eve of her death she allegedly revised various financial instruments to reduce Richard’s inheritance from 100 percent to about 5 percent. But oddly enough he was glad that his Mother had finally, fully shown her abiding hate. Because as long as his Mother loved him, he could not reject his Mother, but he could not live until he rejected his Mother.
His Mother simply could not stand men if they were homosexuals or heterosexuals. (And if one is neither a heterosexual nor a homosexual, all one’s love will curdle to hate and one will be a schizophrenic.) To his Mother, every homosexual was a sick faggot, and every heterosexual was a macho pig. To his Mother, and a whole tribe of over-educated, nauseating Jewish women in New York, no one of the male sex would ever be perfect enough. And so his Mother proceeded to do all the things that supposedly induced homosexuality, entrusting Richard to his Aunt who forced him to clean her apartment and her body in the years after Richard’s Father had died, and his Mother did everything to make Richard detest homosexuality, spouting bastardized pop psychoanalytic sermons, about evil mothers castrating sons and turning them into queers, on a daily basis. And whenever Richard met a man, he always heard a tape in his mind, a tape of his Mother telling him that homos were nauseating faggots.
And all of this was made worse because his Mother had, supposedly, loved him. Yes, it is true that she thought that the author of this manuscript was not capable of going to college, let alone law school. But she came to this opinion only because she loved her poor little faggot son and did not think he had the stamina to conquer scholastic work. Yes, it is true that when asked if Richard had any interest in girls she laughingly replied, “Are you kidding. Any girl is safe with him. That coward would never touch a girl,” but Richard’s Mother was only rendering her objective analytic opinion, which she was fully entitled to proffer because she had gone to scads of seminars on developmental psychology attended by brainy Jewish women, who purport to know all about child rearing, who make their kids morbidly insane. Yes, his Mother was castrating, but the traumas of her castrating behavior should have been negated because Richard’s Mother had always advised Richard that she was castrating and had sent him to a shrink who constantly reminded him that he had been castrated. And the neighbors and the family always came to the same conclusion: She spent so much money on shrinks. Ergo she loved him. And her miserable love made it impossible for Richard to reject the sickness she instilled and to be a free man.
But finally she had died and upon dying had proven her hate by eviscerating his inheritance. And the demonstration of her hate makes it possible for him to reject everything that his Mother had taught him. She decided to negate his financial interests in favor of Jewish charities, those charities which had never done a thing for Richard after his Father, who had suffered combat wounds while serving in the United States armed forces and fighting Hitler, had died. (Poor Jews in Brooklyn don’t matter to rich Jews on the Upper East Side.) Richard knew that if Leviticus condemned homosexuality, he could damn well say a pox on Leviticus and never bow down in a synagogue again. Richard was ready to gorge on Kielbasa, mix meat and milk and oink and stink like a fucking pig.
And then Richard’s sugar levels abated, and a simulacrum of sanity temporarily returned, and Richard realized that he was not dreaming. His Mother had finally, thank G-d, died. And Richard’s Mother had finally, thank G-d, shown the fullness of her hate by allegedly revising financial instruments to negate Richard’s inheritance. And Richard, for the first time in his life, felt free. And so he went home, and he did the only thing he could do, as he rapidly aged and he contemplated the loss of his life: He wrote this book. And he had to write this book because he believes that his sort of loss is never acknowledged let alone discussed because no one wants to hear it: The Freudians are loathe to admit that they can drive people insane by incessantly telling them that they have been castrated, and the Gay crowd often refuses to admit that child rearing can have any impact on adult sexuality, believing that whether one’s Mother was more like Joan Crawford, as depicted in “Mommie Dearest,” or more like June Cleaver, in the sit com “Leave it to Beaver,” is entirely inconsequential. And he knows other people with his sort of loss: People with brilliant, liberal parents, who were fascinated by psychopathology, who drove their children stark-raving mad. And now people have the gall to argue that since their mommas loved them, talked about brilliant psychological stuff like castration complexes with them and proved their love by spending money on shrinks, the enduring sickness of the kids proves that it must be the genes and nurture is irrelevant.
Although Richard writes a lot, Richard is not the artistic type. He did not want to write a novel. He wrote this to exonerate so many buddies, badgered by the inept rendition of psychotherapy and blundering, brilliant mommas who read too much and were alienated from maternal common sense. He is writing this novel so the next time some educated cunt gets on TV to talk about child-rearing, someone else will ask: How did your kids turn-out?