New York's Statute of Lady Diana
This is an excerpt from chapter 7 of the novel referred to in my immediately preceding post.
I want to advise the reader to remember that neither the narrator nor the characters in the story say things that I necessarily believe in or agree with. Rather, I am voicing the wails and weirdness of people who sometimes seem to live among us, who may populate our cities in the near future and who accost me, like phantoms, in my dreams. Or as that blunt and acerbic analyst and critic, Eric Fromm, put it: Art is regression in the service of the ego.
Excerpt from Chapter 7 of my Novel. The Chapter is entitled “New York’s Statute of Lady Diana, Enacted for the Benefit of Crazy White Ladies.” (I have not yet selected a title for the novel):
……
Of course, in all the basic things he felt indisputably male. His penis was as large as ever. His testicles were still in fine working order. He was capable of fine and proud erections when confronted with the proper sort of homosexual pornography or manually stimulated. He did not detect any enlargement of the mammary glands. His need to shave had not in any way abated.
However, he felt as if he had missed his period.
Now, do not misunderstand. He is no hermaphrodite, and as a proper and fashionable upwardly mobile homosexual, he worked-out with great regularity, and this gave him a musculature that would be utterly inconsistent with any sort of ambiguity as to his gender or suggestive of an insufficiency of virility. Rather, he felt as if there was something in his smelly, ugly, amazingly perverse and otherworldly asshole that needed to be expunged and that had to be expunged. Also, he felt as if his ass were becoming cosmologically complex, and privy to issues of life and death and birth that were traditionally the province of the bloody but spiritual, oracular vagina. His ass was no longer something as mundane as the end point of his gastrointestinal tract. His ass was very wise and was trying to tell him something.
And his ass told him that he had missed a period. All of this would be more easily comprehensible, and more amenable to treatment, if he simply viewed his condition as constipation. With such a conclusion, he could purchase laxatives until he shitted to his heart’s content, and he would not risk incarceration, in a mental ward, after telling a doctor that he sought an abortion.
And so he got dressed, put on his coat and proceeded to do the very commonplace and ordinary thing of going to his local drug store. People went to drug stores all the time in Manhattan. They went there to buy facial creams and cosmetics, because vain and fashion conscious Manhattanites were obsessed with the beauty of their pampered, smug mugs; they were all buying cholesterol-lowering drugs so they could eat bigger and more cholesterol-ridden meals while people in the Sudan and Darfur and much of the world starved; they were all buying antacids to obtain relief from their gluttonous repasts; and they were all buying viagra and testosterone so they could have more sex and more anti virals, spermicides, and condoms to prevent them from the ravages of sex.
All Richard wanted to do was buy laxatives. Since he wanted to exorcise himself of some tenacious little beast which seemed to be clinging, most persistently, to the walls of his intestinal tract, he was not opting for anything mild. He wanted to buy lots of stuff, lots of pills, and liquids, and things to insert up the ass, and things to take before retiring, and things to take when arising, and he wanted enough purgatives and laxatives to create a venerable party of expulsion, and to have one sweet day to himself of unrelenting shitting and rejecting of everything that had wormed its way inside of him.
Richard nonchalantly walked into his local Duane Reade’s. This was a chain pharmacy that had replicated itself all over Manhattan with the speed and abandon of bunny rabbits. Sometimes there were up to two or three Duane Reade’s within three blocks, and the manner in which they clustered suggested that they were enveloping New York like microbes, making everyone sick with the adverse effects of their drugs and compelling return visits for medicines to cure such adverse effects.
Duane Reade’s, for all its chain store vulgarity, had a certain pleasing predictability. It was massive, and its aisles were brimming with pastel-colored plastic bottles which promised panaceas for all diseases, aches and of course anal discontent. The anal department of the store was situated not far from those aisles which were brazenly and arousingly denominated “feminine hygiene” – oh, what a pretty two-word combination, suggestive of a woman who is so very, very clean, who shaves her legs and smells of perfume and perhaps a few fragrant traces of pure and wholesome ivory soap, a woman who is proper and demure and wears her hair up high in a nice Texan beehive, a woman that is so unlike all the other women this little narrative has had occasion to discuss – and this reminded Richard that his anal difficulties did seem to verge on the vaginal.
When Richard entered the anal aisle, he wasted no time. In his professional work, he was accustomed to doing a lot, and so he proceeded as purposefully and expeditiously as any self-respecting yuppie. To appease his goddess of speed, he quickly picked up three purgative elixers, each of which contained polyvalent salts which should make shit catapult out of his ass like cannon balls; two palm-sized plastic bottles that were to be inserted into the ass, and squeezed, discharging some diarrhea-inducing fluid; three boxes of ordinary laxative pills; and one large, old-fashioned enema bag with a hugely elongated nozzle.
It is a bit awkward to carry so many different objects, of varying sizes, with just two hands, and Richard seemed perhaps a bit strange as he hurriedly walked to the cash register trying to hold individual objects with just one or two digits of a given hand and become, functionally, more like an octopus instead of the two-handed human he once thought he was. Perhaps, this was what caught the notice of Duane Reade’s personnel. Perhaps it was the generally frenetic manner he exuded. Perhaps it was the sense of evil wafting in the wind all over Manhattan.
In any event, his gastrointestinal tract now had the notice of Duane Reade’s, and a buxom, jolly, black clerk proceeded to interrogate him:
“What you doing there with so many laxatives. You done have gay ass disease or something like that. I mean while you at it, why don’t you buy some damn tampons. Shit, your jeans do look cute hugging your white boy ass.”
With that last comment, she pinched his ass, he dropped his laxatives and purgatives, he bent down to pick them up, and the clerks were duly impressed by the sight this produced. The clerk who had just pinched his ass proceeded to note that although his ass was, perhaps, far too thin for black erotic ventures, it was endearingly round and that this gave it a certain submissive charm.
After he picked up the purgatives and laxatives, he was, quite mysteriously, told that he could not buy them. This admonishment was made by another clerk who was somewhat older and more angular than the woman who mocked his attempted purchase of laxatives. This clerk was not a laughing, fat black woman. This was a clerk who laid down the law:
“You can’t be buying all these laxatives. It’s against the Law. The purchase of all these laxatives contravenes the Statute of Diana.”
Now although Richard was a lawyer, he did not know what the clerk was referring to. He was sure that the clerk was making stuff up out of thin air. There was no Statute of Diana. It had been centuries since statutes bore the name of famous women or men. That was something that harked back to the old English Aristocracy.
“Now I say” – with the insertion of the superfluous “I say,” he always felt that he managed to appear vaguely British and hence more intelligent – “I am a lawyer, and although there is an old and fine statute known as the Statute of Anne, named after Queen Anne, who, I might add, Winston Churchill claims was known as ‘the good Queen Anne’” – he loved to quote Churchill, to listen to documentaries about Churchill while suffering from insomnia at 5:00 AM after a night of sexual debasement at the baths; it made him imagine that he was not a decadent faggot – “and although this statute pertained to the ownership of real estate, there is no such thing as a Statute of Diana, the time when laws were named for stellar personages has long since ended, and I assure you that there is no Statute of Diana in this country and that we would not name a statute after a Greek Goddess.”
The clerk rebutted Richard with the aggressive determination of a nurse shoving a catheter into a penis:
“I ain’t talking about the Greek Diana. I’m talking about the English Diana. You know, the hot bitch that that faggot Prince Charles couldn’t tie down. This statute was enacted because Diana suffered from bulimia and other illnesses that crazy white women have to keep thin. And so this law forbids you from buying too much stuff that can make you shit and too much stuff that can make you throw-up. Also, this Law obligates us to call the Community Counseling Cooperation Police, or the CCCP, when people break the law. So the police have been called and they gonna take you away. Yess’m, they gonna be taking you away.”
Richard was aghast. First, he said something to the effect that he had no time to be bothered with the CCCP because he had to be in Court the next morning. The Duane Reade clerk, with all the arrogance that only a fat clerk in New York can muster, then said that he was not much of a lawyer, that real lawyers did not have the sort of anal problems that could have only resulted from anal intercourse, and that he was just another faggot white boy who would soon get his just deserts: A severe fucking from a black man who would infect him with AIDS.
After our big, black clerk had finished berating Richard, the Community Counseling Cooperation Police arrived. There were four of them, and I won’t bore the reader with a detailed description of each of them; indeed, the general impression they gave, and the way they looked, was very much the same even if they didn’t look the same because they seemed so very much the same. They were not real police. They were fat women and fat men who dressed in blue. They were New York City municipal employees to the core, which is to say they were bureaucratic, bungling, mildly belligerent when asked to do something the least bit outside of their normal scope of duties, and decidedly left of center. They believed in the gospel according to post modernism even though they had never read anything about post Modernism because its ethos had so thoroughly permeated the air of New York. (Actually, your narrator doesn’t know that much about post modernism either, but since so many people have dared to tell me what makes me tick, even though they don’t know a thing about me, I believe I ought to return the favor. Besides, like the just-mentioned municipal employees, I can get enough of the gist of post modernism just from hearing the whiny way in which its disciples talk.) Their uniformity of vision and of mood was so complete that it appeared that the head of one CCCP member could be placed on the torso of another CCCP member without making much of a difference.
“You better come with us,” barked one of the CCCP officers.
Richard made some characteristically ineffectual protests, and he was handcuffed, and within a short while he found himself at the CCCP “Social Service Outreach Center and Aligned Therapeutic Stratagems and Interventionings Modes.” Richard breathed a sigh of relief. He was not going to a real jail. He was going to a New York City re-education camp. He knew that if he repeated the proper liberal social work nostrums, he could be assured of an early release.
First, he was given a bunch of pamphlets which praised safe sex and advised its readers that condoms would halt the spread of HIV just as certainly as the Maginot line halted the invasion of German soldiers. The pamphlets contained illustrations of a black man looking hungrily at a white man’s butt, while the white man, turning his head partially around, smiles sweetly at the black man; two Latin looking men, in skimpy gym shorts and sneakers, looking as happy and sweet and as excitedly, sexually stupid as two young mutts in heat; and a group of Latin, black and white men and women, all on a dance floor, moving around with all the girlish enthusiasm of Patti Duke, dancing to rock and roll music, on the opening segment of “The Patti Duke Show.” In quick succession, he was given pamphlets which advised women to leave abusive men, advised children to report abusive parents, and sought to explain and resolve all social ills and causes of discomfort in easy to read narratives, of less then a few hundred words, which made “problem resolution,” as it was depicted in thirty-minute situation comedies, seem intricate, steeped in intrigue and politically profound.
After he had some time to mull over the pamphlets, a large, smiling woman, who seemed to be a take-things-in-one’s-stride lesbian –just as some gay men seemed to mimic the quarrelsome qualities of affluent, pampered women, a certain tribe of lesbians seemed to behave like regular joe lumberjacks, never apt to complain about trivial matters, always ready to assist a male damsel in distress -- came over to talk to Richard. She was buoyant and cheerful and as robust as an actor perfect for a commercial for Swanson’s Hungry Man TV dinners. In no time, Richard was talking to her in the sort of expressive, rapid-fire, uncensored and slightly hysterical manner in which elderly Jewish matrons speak to young doctors whom they find attractive.
This large woman, who happened to have gone by the name of Alicia – and who Richard, because of his self-absorption and ever increasing battiness, alternatively called Alice, Charlotte and, in what he thought was the height of comedy, Alice’s Restaurant – told Richard that she had never before seen such a well-built, good-looking man avail himself of purgatives, and she told Richard that he did not need to use purgatives and laxatives to lose weight; she told him that he did not need to lose any weight at all. This was, of course, the message she gave to all people accused of violating the Diana Statute.
Richard, having built up a rapport with Alicia, proceeded to tell her all. He told her about his strange medical appointments, the herbal drink, his friend Andrew, and his strange premonition that he had missed his period. After conveying this information, Alicia excused herself, and when she returned, she suggested that Richard might want to take a nap. She gave him a mild sedative to help him sleep.