1 comments/ 19314 views/ 2 favorites I, Globerapist By: rosco rathbone Prolog I met a borracho in a bar and we fell into a deep discussion of cosmic matters. He claimed to have exhausted his funds on a one-way bus ticket into town. For many years, he’d been promising himself a trip to our little city, apparently. Why anyone would want to come here-anyone not an engineer or bureaucrat affiliated with the aerospace contractors that make their home in the industrial parks in the suburbs-is beyond me. We don’t even get many tourists out at the Astronautical Training Center run by the government. This burg is just too small and out of the way. It’s quiet and nothing happens and that’s exactly how we like it. I’d been starved for intelligent conversation. You know I’ve always been a reader and even a thinker, and you know what it’s like to work with salesmen and account managers all day. Sometimes I think I’ll “go postal”, as they say, if I hear one more basketball game recounted in full detail. I kept buying this fellow drinks just to hear him talk. He was fascinating to me: widely read and cosmopolitan in his opinions; strangely so for someone who looked like an unwashed drifter. Few are the subjects we failed to touch on that evening. He was thirsty, too-kept putting them down about as fast as the barkeep could pour, but I didn’t mind footing the bill. Yes, we talked about everything under the sun, and I admit that I had a grand old time. Finally, as the barmaid was wiping the empty tables and the parking lot was emptying out, he started to mutter under his breath, something about “seeking employ as a spaceman, in order to inseminate new worlds”. Anyway, I had no idea what he was talking about, and as it was getting to be pretty late and I was afraid the wife was worrying, I told him that I had to go, but I’d be happy to give him a lift to wherever it was staying. Turns out he had a room in one of the drifter hotels out by the switchyard. I pulled up in front and said goodbye and good luck and thanks for all the good yarns. I was waiting for him to get out, but he was fumbling around in his satchel for something. Finally he produced an oilcloth packet of dirty papers-it was this manuscript, which I’m sending you, Wilson, because I know how fascinated you are by any thing of this type. Told me he was going away for a long time, maybe forever, and he was real thankful for my hospitality and wanted me to have something. Then he got out of the car and disappeared into that old bum hotel and I never saw him again. Frankly, I just don’t want the damned thing lying around the house, but for some reason I was afraid to burn it. Anyway, have a look at it and tell me what you think………. Youthful dreams As long as I can remember, I have dreamt of fucking the world, or worlds like it. Orbs, worlds, planets, spheres, globes, balls…. these have always hypnotized my sexual eye. When I first read that scene in Robert A. Wilson’s “Illuminatus” books where the initiate inseminates a giant golden apple, I felt a powerful deja-vu. There ought to be some way to put my finger on the root of all this. I know that as a youth I was obsessed with cosmology, astronomy, celestial mechanics and whatnot. I often lay awake at night, masturbating at my leisure beneath the constellations of glowing star-stickers on my ceiling and feeling myself afloat within the bigness of the void. Like many people, I had a ritual I needed to perform in order to fall asleep. Quietly, quietly tugging my ten-year-old pod in a soothing rhythm, I would visualize those astronomical comparisons designed to give a sense of the size of outer space …. the Earth is a grain of sand at the second base of a ballfield in Brooklyn….the Sun is a grapefruit at home plate…the nearest star is another grapefruit in Green Bay….and the next nearest a Ping Pong ball in Peking….. and a rushing, vertiginous, almost nauseating ecstasy would shoot through my stomach. To be a dot was pure joy. To be relieved of the responsibilities of size. After all, what harm could a dot do? What black act a speck perform? At large amongst the insensate, crushing grandeur of those impossibly vast balls as they rolled along their tracks, I knew the freedom of tinyness and insignificance. Others have reported the same feeling at that age, but always described as terrifying and bewildering. The sensation, however, was the same-suddenly conscious of the Earth’s rotation; one is flung off into emptiness; where one disappears. So it would appear that my obsession with the celestial spheres is grounded in ecstatic feelings of tinyness, perhaps learned in the womb, where, after all, we float. I’m sure that psychological science, aided by myth, would have the World represent Mother, that big blue ball which birthed us and nursed us and whom we can never outgrow. Tied always to the apron strings…at first we love her and her largeness comforts us, but at puberty something happens, we rebel. It was around then, at age 13 or so, that my innocent desire for the cosmos, which was, I’m sure, in its way sexual in an infantile, all-consuming fashion, changed and became lust. In the difficult teenage and early adult years to come, lust would curdle in frustration and become venom and my weightless visions of the void were replaced with black daydreams of cosmic rape. I’m well aware that I’m skipping over some important history here, but suffice it to say that those were dark and pimply years and they made me a venomous and unpleasant man. Janitor in a gentleman’s club Let’s skip forward now. The story of how I, a boy with such promise, grew to be a scrawny and unshaven man, living in furnished rooms, eating soup unheated directly from the can and reading the Russians while making marginal notes in red ink such as “That’s me!” and (triple underline) “I’ve SEEN this bastard around here somewhere” will be told elsewhere; or maybe it will never see the light of day. In order to learn how I found my calling and my obsession, we need know no more than this: I was a young underground man, nursing frustrations in my funk-hole, frequently masturbating, furtively coveting the round buttocks of girls. I smelt, was usually intoxicated, and was quite unemployable. Thus, the downward slide in prestige of employment: from cake-decorator in a lesbian-owned-and-operated bakery to surly used -bookstore clerk to the final rung, where I made a stand and clung. Thinking to turn my chief pastime to gold, as it were, I sought and gained employment as a janitor in one of the many gentlemen’s clubs in our metropolis. A peep-show palace where men came to masturbate at the spectacle of Live Nude Girls There, finally, was a dark place where I could skulk and sulk, unwatched, unwashed, with holes and rends in my garments, minimum wage almost too good for me. I had only to endure the brusque and dismissive managerial style of the Iranian family that ran the place. I did a good job, too. My duty was to remain in constant movement between the various floors of that place, pushing a mop-wringer brimming with piney suds. Dark halls lined with narrow doors. A green light would go on above the door, indicating the “all clear”, a spent client would emerge, fiddling with his zipper, avoiding eye contact, and hurry to the stairs, and I would slosh my mop and shuffle into the spermiferous and reeking compartment to swab the decks. Indeed, the nautical metaphor comes easily to mind, because in those long, closeted and red-lit halls I often imagined myself a third-class steward or messmate on some infernal tramp freighter, all holds loaded to the hatches with a full cargo of spunk, all hatches battened down for a one-way cruise to the slimiest depths of the underworld. Geometrical obsessions In those days, I had a curious tic of constantly drawing, on any available surface, small doodles of three-dimensional shapes, be they cubes, pyramids, or more complicated forms. You may be familiar with this sort of thing; in the language of draftsmanship and mechanical drawing it’s called “isometric representation”. The form is shown from an above and side angle of 45 degrees each. All hidden lines are dotted. One day, killing time, I discovered how to represent a sphere: first a circle is drawn. A small ellipse near the top of the circle represents the visible Polar Regions, a dotted ellipse of the same size near the bottom; the invisible antipodes. The lines of latitude and longitude are then filled in, in the same fashion . I was entranced by this new method of depicting spheres and one day, after mopping a unicellular blot left high on a cubicle wall by a client of above-average ejaculatory force, I took out my Magic Marker and limned an inconspicuous yet pleasingly orbicular globe in an out-of-the-way corner of the booth. Not long after, I had cause to revisit the same booth, this time to mop up a widely scattered pattern of small droplets that, to the trained and professional eye of a cumhouse mopboy, bespoke a particularly frenzied and vigorous style. I couldn’t resist leaving another sphere next to the first, and that’s when my secret mark was born. Like a fighter plane crew chief painting dead Zeros on the fuselage of an ace, I left my sphere in the corner of every come- compartment in that place, one per ejaculation mopped. That camaraderie which supposedly exists between the downtrodden I should say something here about that camaraderie which supposedly exists between the downtrodden. Although I had something in common with the girls who worked in that joint, viz., that our paychecks all depended upon the ejaculatory urge, they, burdened with the insufferably humiliating nature of their job, needed someone to look down upon with scorn. Unfortunately, something in my physiognomy, spirit, or job description nominated me for that unpleasant role, and so, instead of the foxhole solidarity one might expect to find amongst the footsoldiers of the ejaculatory trade, it was strictly a case of me against them. In a word: they hated me, and for them I reserved an especial spite, which they returned, with interest. How could they not hate me? And yet, mopping the dark halls, confronted at every turn with fat bare bottoms and breasts, masturbation my only friend, how could I not look upon them with lust and lust’s black brother, spite? They obviously knew, with the sharp sensitivity to insult or scorn of the lowly, that I saw myself as better than they, and I imagine that I became something of a stand-in for, and reminder of, the clientele- a regular face to put upon the faceless masses of furtive patrons. I was, in my lust and spite and skulking nature, Everyman who had sneered at them as he gaped, called them foul names as he spilled his seed, and slunk away, head down, ashamed of his lust, leaving a paltry tip and a few blots of sperm on the glass. I never even tried to be friendly with any of the strippers save one. From the beginning I despised them for their idleness, their vanity, their petty jealousies and rivalries. As far as I could tell, their conversation consisted of nothing but complaints about their cretinous paramours and fights over small personal items such as lipsticks and hairbrushes. Every once in a while, for variety’s sake, they would engage in a spirited debate over which neighborhood thug drove the most expensive automobile. Their leader was a half-breed Latina named, incongruously, “Jenny”, and her, I wanted, with all the venom at my disposal. Jenny Jenny was a very pretty girl with a spoiled and petulant face, the thick body of a peasant, and wavy black hair, pulled tightly back from her low forehead into a cascading topknot. Her lips were outlined in black pencil, her ears adorned with giant gypsy-hoops of gold. Her outstanding feature was her ass, which was very large and round, and which drove me to redouble my masturbatory efforts. Scarcely a day passed that didn’t find me in the stinking employee toilet, bent over an erection like Portnoy, imagining squeezing a ribbon of seed like toothpaste into the crevice between her hemispherical assets. I was so starved for attention that I ran countless errands for Jenny just to talk to her. Pregnancy testers, red Twizzler sticks, Benson and Hedges cigarettes (which she thought were classier than the Newports everyone else smoked), buckets of chicken from Popeye’s, tubs of diet sodas, dime bags of alternative tobacco. I was willing to be her factotum, her man on the street; whatever she wanted me to be, though it availed me not. Standing in the doorway of one of the little cubicles, which smelled like nail-polish remover, cum, and cigarette smoke, I was always awkward and horny. I would try to lock eyeballs with her tits (which were quite small and out of proportion with her heavy-duty chassis) as she bent over in her terrycloth dressing gown, which she wore when she wasn’t working the floor in a white bikini looking for customers, but she was unavailable to the male janitorial gaze. Her lip would twist and she’d hiss“The fuck is you looking at, flaco? Get your skinny pendejo ass out of here before I smack the shit out of you!” (The “oo” sound in “looking” pronounced to rhyme with the “u” in “ukulele”.) There was no way for me to stand my ground in the face of that kind of blunt scorn. I’d tear my eyes away from her large bottom and focus on my pool of piney suds. Her G-strings were unbearably stimulating. She had a different one for each day of the month, sometimes two a day. There was a strange difference in texture between the skin of her rear and that of her face. On her ass, the skin was rather coarse and large-pored, with a greyish tinge; overall reminiscent of new-plucked chicken flesh, while her face was smooth, youthful and pretty. This discrepancy seemed to point at something larger- metaphysical even. After a while, I started to get a bit obsessed with Jenny’s ass. If one needed me to perform an errand, I could reliably be found shuffling around the neighborhood of her cube with a hangdog expression, trying to catch a glimpse of it. I wanted to fuck it, although Lord knows I hadn’t the solidity or the force to deal her the pounding I dreamt of: my little noodle would have been completely lost between those twin medicine balls and she’d have shaken me off as a baboon shakes off a beetle. All in all, I felt an aggrieved sense of being dispossessed of something that was rightfully mine. As a private dancer, she was, in fantasy anyway, the property of anyone, and my constant exposure to her milieu served only to erode in my mind the barrier between the fantasy and the reality; where I should have grown cynical I grew soft. No doubt she WAS a whore, to the last bone in her body; all women are, but since I had nothing she wanted she was as off-limits to me as the moon and the stars. Watching her perform day after day for any hunchback in possession of a picture of President Jackson aggravated my sense that I’d somehow been ousted from my rightful position as regards ownership of her, and that only spite prevented her from reinstating me. Perhaps it was ammonia fumes that were responsible, or that hyperactive salsa music that used to blare from the speakers at all hours; or maybe excessive masturbation had perturbed my equilibrium. Looking back on the events that set me upon my path, I discover upon introspection that practically any stimulus would have served. If I seem to be regarding Jenny as a bit of an object, it’s for this reason, although admittedly, a person as self-centered as I needs little excuse to view his fellow man as cutouts moving stiffly in his own private puppet show. Precipitating events A Rum State of Affairs After my sheepish non-courtship had been limping along for some several months, Jenny seemed, overnight, to tire of my presence. For a while she’d apparently been amused with an errand boy who read big books on break, and tolerated, or at least ignored, my feeble flirtations, but at some point she seemed to get wise to the malice and contempt underlying my fixation on her and my person abruptly became noxious. Maybe she’d caught me unawares, peeping at her with malevolent cow eyes. Whatever the explanation, she no longer summoned me to run out for her lunch and cigarettes, and when I tried to inch up to her as she leaned on her high stool between clients, she sneered at me and drove me away with personal remarks and an imperious flap of her well-manicured hand. I persisted: gazing hungrily at her buttocks had become a habit I couldn’t do without. If I couldn’t pilfer my daily eyeful while performing as her stooge, I’d just have to take it, boldly. Her loss of all tolerance for me actually put a bit of steel in my backbone and I took to parking my wringer bucket at the end of the hall and leaning on the mophandle, arms akimbo, staring at her body with a naked need. Needless to say, she didn’t put up with this for long. Before the day was out, management had informed me that I had better keep in constant janitorial motion with my gaze fixed firmly upon the floor; and if I was spotted irritating the dancers by touching their asses with my eyeballs one more time, I’d be out on the street. I pulled myself together and managed to play the part of model mop-boy for about a week, but all the while I was seething inside. I can’t tell you how bitterly annoying it is for a man of my education to suffer insult and scorn from a near- illiterate; who probably moves her lips while reading the “TV Guide” listings, a completely materialistic sow who keeps herself in gaudy jewelry by witnessing the ejaculations of sexually frustrated strangers. Her non-tolerance of me, her open disgust for me, went straight to my gizzard and started burning me up from inside. I masturbated more, not less, but thoughts of lovemaking turned to thoughts of violent, forceful intercourse. The problem is that her ass seemed to grow in my mind, the farther I was driven from its presence in the real world; and the angrier and more lustful and resentful I became, the larger it seemed to swell in my masturbatory fantasies, to the point where it was capable of absorbing, insensate, all my malice and force. In my own fantasies, I could inflict no damage or pain upon it; I was as puny as a bug raping a beanbag. Behind my eyelids, I clambered upon it, flung myself upon it, flailed at it frenziedly, all to no avail. I tried my hand at every method of self-abuse, hoping for a different outcome. No dice. A Fateful Day On a fateful Monday, I spent morning sloshing about, eyes swollen from lack of sleep. My penis was so sore that I’d had to swaddle it in lotioned tissue to prevent my drawers from irritating it. The entire previous night had been spent writhing upon my cot, praying for sweet relief from the fantasies that tormented me. I’d squeeze out orgasm after weakening and belated orgasm in search of sleep, each requiring more effort than the last, until I was completely wrung out and exhausted and fell into a hellish doze populated with unbearably gigantic entities like those postulated by Mr. C.S. Lewis in his “Out of the Silent Planet”, communicating nonsense from one end of the ether to the other in a hideous booming drone. I’d have called in sick the next day and taken to my bed, but with rent overdue I needed every last kopeck, drachma and shekel. By the time my lunch break arrived, I was so cranky and sore, physically and metaphysically, that I went straight to the liquor store and spent my lunch money on a poorboy of Tokay, which I drank straight off in a phone booth. Somewhat refreshed and feeling that I was onto a temporary solution to my misery, I returned to the liquor store and spent my carfare for the rest of the week on a pint of the cheapest vodka. Which likewise I did drink down posthaste. It was a different mop-boy that staggered back to work late, under the glaring Islamic eye of the manager. I felt aloof, expansive, and indifferent to the petty scorn of the insects with whom I- temporarily of course, due to a slight detour taken on my road to better things- was forced to associate. I, Globerapist Empty out the morning’s mopwater in the big sink. It’s black and smells like chemicals. All those wasted gametes, down the pipes. Not one to cry over spilt seed, but sometimes I wonder, as I’m sure you can imagine that one in my profession must, about the collective spunk of the metropolis at large. Fill mop bucket with fresh hot water. I swear I’m not making this up: I read somewhere, perhaps in “Harper’s Index”, that if you collected all the semen ejaculated during one night in our city- just one night, statistically selected for average frequency of sexual intercourse and masturbation-you’d have enough to fill a tanker truck. My mind then pictures the exact tanker truck-one of the big rigs hauling a huge, gleaming stainless-steel cylinder on the back, festooned with running lights and those diamond-shaped D.O.T. placards required by law to warn passing motorists to steer clear: Hazardous Materials coming through. A very well -cared -for vehicle, the cab shiny with wax, the chromework mirror-bright. Obviously belongs to a proud owner-operator, yes, he’s behind the wheel, a tattooed and suntanned arm hanging out the window…Can’t find the ammonia, must remind Mohammed to order more…wait, there’s some left in this plastic jug. Into the bucket. Pine Sol. Don’t get it on my pants. Slosh slosh. Time to go and meet the masses-it’s the weekday lunchtime masturbation rush. I worked my way along the line of cubicles whistling an air, my mind much occupied with various speculations. Perhaps the mayor ought to appoint a commission of some sort…a body of men to go to and fro and canvass the metropolis from one end to the other and back again, in order to discover the dollar cost, in lost productivity, vitality and man-hours, of the masturbatory habits of the citizenry. Blue –ribbon panel of experts issues thick report that languishes unread on dusty official shelves. Columns of figures and testimonial interviews, all for naught. The men of our city continue, lemminglike, to spill onto the stony ground their life-essence, the very best of themselves. And one man remains behind to mop up the mess: me. Slosh. Slosh. Blue water turning grey, then brown. No matter how diligently I clean these cubicles, a filmy scum always remains behind. Don’t touch anything in here, Miss; you may become pregnant via osmosis. I keep my eyes on the floor as I move between cubes, seeing only the thick-soled fashion-sandals of the hired help and the seedy shoes of the clientele. It’s amazing what you notice when you start looking at people’s footwear. Many men, for example, who take the trouble to costume their upper bodies in clean, tasteful and well-fitting suits, completely overlook the importance of shoes to their ensemble. This is something women know about, but men don’t seem to think that anyone will ever notice that their shoes are in bad taste, scuffed, and in need of repair. This is neither here nor there, however. Black Activity Before I knew what I was doing, I had worked my way right up to the top level and Jenny’s hallway. I felt lightheaded and yet, strangely heavy-bellied, as if I’d swallowed, in pill form perhaps, a massy plutonium sphere that had sunk promptly to the exact core of my body, somewhere in the vicinity of the transverse colon. Thinking back, it’s the exact sensation one gets before one’s body commits some sort of act seemingly without the approval of the brain. Yes, that’s it exactly. The light and giddy head combined with a sinking and yet pleasurable fullness in the lower gut. The real danger signal is the sensation that one is observing the action from above, enjoying the puppet show without participating, as it were. At the end of the hall was Jenny’s booth, in a choice position for spotting clients climbing the stairs from the mezzanine. I saw that the red lights were on over both the doors of the cubicle-each painted with pastel enamel and bearing a star like a Hollywood dressing room and the legends “BOY” and “GIRL”. This meant that she was busy with a client, which was just as well since it meant that I wouldn’t have to endure her glare as I worked my way along the rows of booths. A six-foot transvestite in a teddy and stockings with garter straps theatrically indicated the empty “BOY” part of its booth, several units down from Jenny and gaping a gold-toothed smile at me, said “Mop up real nice in there now, honey, I don’t know what that nasty man was shooting out of his peckerwood, but he got that stuff all OVER my window!”. I shuffled in to oblige, towing my wheeled pail of suds. When I was done, I emerged into the hall and all was still. I was so used to the constant loud music that I no longer heard it, and at that moment everything seemed silent. The transvestite stripper was back in its side of the booth with the door closed. I tottered across the sticky floor like a somnambulist. The light over the “GIRL” side of Jenny’s booth was off, but the “BOY” light was still on. That meant that the mechanical shutter had gone down over the window seperating the booths, and the show was over, but both parties were still inside straightening their clothes. Sometimes, clients stayed in their booths for a long time after the window went down, dabbing at stray filaments of spunk on their garments, or, for all I knew, translating the Talmud into Esperanto. It was one of my duties to hustle them on their way by thumping on the door and intoning, “Mop boy. Gotta clean up”. Just then, the “GIRL”-side door of the booth unlatched and pushed open a bit. I quickly lowered my gaze, the better to avoid her insolent and hateful stare. There was a bustle from inside and, hazarding a peep, I saw a bit of flesh through the crack in the door, which suddenly banged open, and I saw that she was bent over in the cubicle, wrestling with something in her bag on ther floor and cursing to herself. She’d kicked the door with her heel in order to back out partway into the hall and have more room for whatever it was that she was doing. She was trying to fit something stiff and furry-either a dead golden retriever puppy in advanced rigor mortis or a fur coat stretched across some sort of trapezoidal frame-into her fake Dolce &Gabbanna carryall. I could see through her parted legs that whatever it was was refusing to accommodate itself amongst her spare high-heeled shoes, blowdryers, lubricants, cell-phones, toiletries and whatnot, and she was cursing under her breath. I stopped dead in my tracks, leaning against the wall for support, clutching my mophandle. As she furiously shook her bag, her ass-cheeks jiggled before my very eyes, split by the strand of a white G-string. She was completely oblivious to my transfixed presence and continued to struggle, like a shoplifter cramming goods into a purse in the dressing room of Macy’s. The plutonium pill in my belly grew and became an ominous sphere, like a small cannonball, with a deadly mercury shine to its mirrored and liquid surface. It seemed to be pressing right down on my prostate gland, at the very core of my bodily being. The astral spectator in the private box above my head stretched his legs as if preparing to enjoy a show. But the physical me that is really me, like a wight with guts and brains disconnected, removed the mop from the bucket, and heedless of the foul water dripping on the floor behind, stalked on stiff stilts towards the open door, the black mophandle extended like a probe or wand. All I could see at that moment was that greyish-golden ass with its white equator, jostling before my eyes like the demonstration of an obscure principle of surface tension or Brownian motion. No doubt you’d like to know what I intended at that moment. Part of me wanted to ram the mophandle to the hilt into her rectum and begin to churn her like a cask of buttermilk. I can’t be sure what I meant to do, but I think, as I recall how I began to carefully prize her buttocks apart, that what I really wanted to do was insert my probe a fraction of an inch into her, just to push at her nether entrance, really, while keeping my eyes fastened securely upon the global sight of her entire rear end, like a drunk driver struggling to keep from seeing double, lest it expand like a funhouse whirligig and become a inhospitable and indifferent world. A Fracas The moment the cool wood touched her skin, the spell was broken and the inevitable transpired in short order. All’s a blur, but when I came to, I found myself face up on the floor, writhing about, defending my ribs from a furious fusillade of kicks dealt by her pointy fuck-me shoes. I was clutching at her legs in fear, which drove her even madder. “Jose! Get your ass out here! This little faggot cocksucker tried to stick a broom up my fuckin’ ass!”. With that, the “BOY” door banged open and a Puerto Rican thug, whom I’d often seen hanging about the place, answered the call to arms. He was as fat and greasy as I am pale and skinny, with a perfectly spherical head upon which were dotted childish, pretty features radiating confusion and idiot malice. He had a beard, shaved to a perfect 1/8th of an inch line, running from one ear, across his chin and up to the other ear, like a chinstrap, or an indication of “here is where my jawline would be, if I had one”. His bulk was draped in a bright yellow jersey bearing the heraldic emblems of a professional sports team, which hung nearly to his knees. In a panic, I kicked myself backwards across the floor, away from the vengeful duo. With my back against the wall, legs all a-spraddle, in a pool of foul mopwater, I seized the mop with some idea of keeping them at bay, like a cornered samurai, one leg lopped off, facing down a hemicircle of oafish ronin. With shaking hands I menaced first one, then the other. Jenny began shifting her weight this way and that, hoping to catch me off balance and make a lunge. Her eyes blazed with the desire to sink one of those pointy-toed shoes right to the instep between my ribs. The ball-headed chap shuffled nervously from foot to foot, jiggling fatly, arms waving like a trained bear imitating a boxer; for all the world as large, round and yellow as an indecisive Sun on Groundhog Day. It was apparent that he wanted a piece of the action as well, if only to stay in the good graces of the snarling she-hyena who had me up against the wall. “GRAB the cocksucker!” she screamed “you my fucking cousin, Jose, GRAB his skinny bitch ass!” It was only then that the plutonium cannonball contracted to lozenge form and the astral spectator tipped the usher and hailed a cab. They split up and began to approach me from either side. Drunken and shaken though I was, I knew that if Jose got his hands on me, all was lost. From the corner of my eye, I could see a crowd of spectators filling the hall. Thinking only to clear a pathway between myself and the stairs down to the mezzanine and thence to the door, I laid about frantically with the mop, like a desperado, and connected with the cousin’s kneecap. He let out a squeak and went down on his knees into the suds like a torpedoed freighter foundering in a flaming oil slick. I scrambled past him on hands and knees, trying to find my footing on the slick linoleum, covered head to toe in reeking water, but not before I’d collected a high-heeled kick to the cocyx that still sometimes pains me when the weather changes. Down the stairs went I, a ghoul surprised by sunrise, making haste for the grave, my janitorial career in ruins behind me. Interlude If I were writing a novel here, this would be the ideal point to go check up on how some of the other characters were doing, in order to provide the reader with a breather after a climactic point in the action. Unfortunately, there are no characters in this tale. There is only me, the inside of my head, and the ghosts I see when I walk the streets. Sometimes they hail me in greeting, beg for alms, or inquire as to the time of day. It’s no problem for a man as average in appearance as I to lose himself in the swirl of a crowd, even when pursued by avenging Furies and distinguished by the smell of spermy water. Many are the lost, the ill-favoured, the gaunt and poorly-dressed, one more grain of sand won’t bring the termite colony tumbling down. As soon as I set foot upon the street and the masses closed ranks around me, my fear drained from me and was replaced with a combination of shame, anger and bitter self-scorn that caused my limbs to tremble. I wanted to go back in there and slap that cunt to her knees, I wanted to shrink to invisible dothood, nevermore to be seen by human eye. I found refuge in the cool darkness of a drinking establishment. Lonely are the sputniks that peep and chirp in the void. If one had the highest of high-speed elevators and means to ride it all the way up to the sky, it would take days of constant travel to reach the orbit of the lowest man-made satellites. This is a fact I remember from boyhood, when we used to lie on the rooftops under the approach path of homeward-bound jet airliners, listening on shortwave radio for the voices of the pilots and discussing matters celestial. From that height, several hundred miles up, the world still appears almost flat, spread out below like a blue desert under black and starry skies. It’s not until one is incredibly far away that the globe assumes its proper ball-like aspect. I sat hunched on my tall stool, spending the last of my funds on a series of cheap house wines and whiskies and absent-mindedly eating the free lunch with a tongue that could not taste. Drawing listlessly, circular shapes on the old bar with the condensation pooling on my glass. Linked rings, perhaps Pythagorean. With increasing inebriation came strength, courage, focus, and the usual sorts of self-mocking existential self-criticisms that tend to overtake me in restaurants, cafes and bars & grills, especially when liquor is present. Why, I kept asking myself, should I not take this situation as an opportunity to break my mold of passivity and convert shame to triumph through concerted and daring action? After all, I’d already precipitated a radical break in my usual pattern by assaulting Jenny, however gently, with the end of my mophandle. Perhaps, had I only the moxie to up the ante, a chain-reaction of circumstance might be initiated, one that would free me from my lowly status. Speculations and a Plan of Sorts It’s really a horrible thing to be broke, unemployed, humiliated, poorly dressed, self-concious, cursed with unpleasant bodily odor, possibly sought by the Law, or worse, by hoodlums bent on revenge-and yet, with all that on one’s plate, to also suffer the type of consciouness that makes one sit drunk in bars and kick oneself mentally for lacking the Nietzschean wherewithal to, with one bold stroke, pull a reversal upon the forces arrayed against one and uproot all that is weak, indecisive and fearful in one’s character. The desire to do something, anything, in order to wriggle free of the frightful burden of shame I’d brought on myself (not in the eyes of others, but in my own eyes, for having been “driven from the field of battle”, as I put it to myself) collided headlong with the sensible terror of consequence and the collateral urge to flee home to my furnished room and bury myself in the shelter of my books and my notes. Though my exterior self remained passively slumped over the bar, betrayed only by a slight restless tangling of the interknotted fingers, my soul was jumping like a Mexican bean. Desperate fantasies of rape or assault were uppermost in my conciousness, alternating with despair and fury at my cowardice. Though I longed to somehow puncture Jenny’s ass and deflate it down to size, to crush and humiliate her beneath me, I knew that it was no more possible for me to demonstrate such piratical flair than to eat a bowling ball. I reviewed the options and opportunities for action. More liquor was certainly the thing, but my funds were completely gone. I thought of sabotage, and of various plots to defame her character, possibly by posting scurrilous flyers, containing lies and half-truths, all over the neighborhood. Though reasonably safe and certainly not beneath me, these schemes, fantasized, left a taste of toast in the mouth and a painful hollowness in the spiritual belly. What was needed was some sort of confrontation or at least contact with the object of my turmoil, during which I could exorcize myself. I decided to follow her home after work that very evening, which would provide me with at least the illusion of action. I knew she usually left by an anonymous rear door and then boarded a city bus bound for the Latino ghetto crosstown. I hadn’t the nerve to actually follow her onto the bus, but I had in mind an alternate means of transportation. Heaven smiles on the bold, we are told, and it just so happens that one of my stooges, a Pakistani exchange student named Achmed, worked nights as a bellhop at a nearby hotel of the faceless sort that caters to conventioneers. With luck, he’d have arrived to start his shift just as Jenny was leaving for home and I could commandeer his moped, carry out a black plan (which at this point was only half-formed, at the subverbal level of my psyche), and return it to him in time for the shift change. It didn’t take long to accomplish this, and as the skies over the city turned toxic yellow and green with twilight, I was idling on the moped in the shadow of a taxicab parked on a side street, watching the employee exit and fantasizing myself to be something along the lines of a French Resistance operative preparing to assassinate a colonel. Right on time, the door banged open and Jenny emerged in her street clothes, lugging the knockoff carryall and talking into her cell phone. I ducked my head and watched her through the cab’s windows. I thought she’d walk down the block and I’d follow at a safe distance, and then wait for the bus while keeping an eye on her. I anticipated no problems tailing the bus, since it would be slow and make many stops. The only difficult part would be spotting her when she got off without revealing myself. Things didn’t go as planned, however. She stood on the sidewalk, still talking on the phone, agitatedly it seemed to me, and a minute later a car pulled up and she got in and zoomed away. It happened so fast that I was caught by surprise and almost lost control of the moped trying to catch up before they turned the corner and dissappeared. It was a late-model American sedan, bright yellow, covered with louvers, vents, detailing, and all sorts of other automotive accessories. The back window was dominated by a huge decal of a flaming skull with crossed axles on a field of cogs and camshafts, bearing the enscolled legend: T.W.C. AUTO CLUB-“Together We Chill”. A Dominican-flag bumper sticker identified the nationality of the owner, the outline of whose prize-pumpkin sized head I could make out even through the tinted glass: Jose, the cousin, recently wounded by me. He drove with aggressive Latin flair, blasting through through yellow lights with a blare of glasspack mufflers, and I was hard-pressed to keep up with him on my underpowered mechanical steed. The taillights of cars went zapping past me like rogue comets. I followed them across the city into the outskirts of town, finally trailing them down a dark street that bordered on some kind of City Park. It was a dirty and neglected neighborhood. They stopped outside a big apartment building, parked the car, and went up the steps and into the building. I Peep with Impunity I ran up after them and pressed my nose to the glass of the vestibule. There was a long hallway with doors but they were nowhere in sight. Since I’d been right behind them, I figured that they must have gone into one of the first-floor apartments. I crossed the street and squatted in the shadows, where the shady trees blocked the light from the streetlamps. The shells of burnt-out cars lined the curb like Salamanders come under the knacker’s hand in some elemental stockyard. From down the street arose a noise of loud talking, and a band of miscreants or ne’er-do-wells came shambling along, arguing and laughing loudly yet mirthlessly, and took up residence on the stoop of the building I was watching. There seemed to be about six or eight of them, by all appearances elderly folk. I, Globerapist It was at this time that I resolved to act. I walked around the block and approached the front door from the opposite direction taken by the gang of noisy stoop-sittters, who were lolling all over the place as if each were unable to support his weight unaided. They didn’t seem to have noticed me at all. Acting inconspicuous, I dragged a garbage-can under the first window and clambered upon it. The blinds were pulled down and I could see nothing, although I could make out a murmuring and the glow of a TV. The next window over looked into a pitch –black room. There might have been anything at all going on in there-or nothing. I moved the garbage-can over a ways and tried again. Now I was looking into a room where an aged crone sat in a wheelchair under a picture of the Virgin Mary, one of those vocoder devices they give people with tracheotomies pressed against her thoat like an electric razor, saying Ave Marias in a mechanical monotone, like a robot replica of an old woman alone. She looked me right in the eye and didn’t seem at all surprised or scared, but kept supplicating the virgin, as if the apparition of shades was commonplace during the telling of her rosary. I sunk down and out her sight and she held my gaze until the window-ledge seperated us. The next window contained the scenario I was looking for. Through a gap in the venetian blinds, I could see a bedroom with a big frilly white bed. A large TV was playing a game show. Jenny was lying face down, wearing nothing but a man’s T-shirt, watching TV, painting her fingernails and talking on her cell phone. The fat cousin was sitting on the edge of the bed, rubbing some kind of cream into her bare ass cheeks, which filled the room like a ball in a box. Occasionally he’d bend over and actually kiss them like a supplicant, and she’d wave an annoyed hand at him behind her back. I clung to the edge of the ledge, entranced. Peeper’s revenge. I pulled my penis out of my fly with a gritty palm, and grimacing, began to jerk it furiously and silently, with my toes curled in my shoes and my teeth set. It was the most malevolent masturbation of my career. Boldly taking what others paid for every day. I could practically feel an ectoplasmic extension of spiteful force reaching through the window from me to her, to coil invisible tendrils around her ass and then to constrict, to bite her like a viper, to puncture and deflate. It was a fast and purposeful jack: bold, commanding, direct, competent and pro-active. An executive jack if you will. As I set off down the slippery slope towards conclusion, I had a momentary vision of myself mounted on her rear, pounding it frantically, and I knew that in a second or two, as I ejaculated, that her ass would finally pop like a balloon beneath me, with a “bang” I’d never even been able to dream, and I’d sink to the comforter with the tattered fabric beneath me hissing out the last of its inflation and sleep as if cradled in a cloudbank. Please don’t let fat Jose look up and see my ecstatic gargoyle’s face at this crucial moment! I threw my head back, every muscle in my body starting to go rigid and…. BANG!!! But not the right bang. The bang of my garbage can being kicked from beneath me, leaving me on my back on the sidewalk with my erection straining at the night air for all to see. One second on the wrong side of release and sweet relief and blessed vengeance. I was circled by a ring of stupid, evil faces-the elderly good-for-nothings who’d been on the stoop just a few yards away, forgotten by me in my desperation. Beaten By Outcasts The shock of slamming into the ground brought me out of my tense sexual reverie and I realized that they weren’t “elderly” at all…they were all junkies. I had once lived next to a methadone clinic and I knew the type anywhere. There was that weird remblance to Viet Nam veterans-the faded tattoos, the outdated styles…. long ponytails, bandannas, cast-off clothes, piratical jewelry, about 10 teeth between the lot of them. Some of them were possibily women, or of some indeterminate sex found only amongst the damned. The same Viet Nam Vet combination of a shell of macho menace and an exhausted infirmity. Every man jack had a cane, a crutch or a hospital bracelet. They were so skinny and worn-out looking that even I, one of the city’s least physically imposing specimens, could have given the whole pack of them a drubbing had I been of sound mind and body and compos mentis. They were gathered around my erection, mouths agape, like fiends around a Maypole. One of them was disentangling a wheelchair from the garbage can. He yanked it free and pushed his way into the circle, the wheelchair empty in front of him. It was obviously he who had knocked me down; he was the only one of them who appeared to have even a vestige of physical force remaining. He looked like a Fidel Castro fallen on desperate times, with a blue tiger tattooed on his forearm and a matted beard. This flashed through my mind in a moment and then all hell broke loose. With screams of “Pervert!” “Fucking pervert!” “Peeping Tom!” “Call the cops!” “Kill the fucker!”, the posse attacked as one man. I took a blow across the noggin with an aluminum crutch that would have dropped a wild boar, had it not been dealt by a toothless 90-lb wraith with noodle arms, wearing a complete baseball uniform six sizes too large. Beaten by a mob twice in one day. All I could think about was getting my penis back in my pants before they delivered the coup de grace. Always wear clean underwear, you never know when you may be taken by surprise while masturbating in public and stoned to death by the dregs of society. Fidel Castro kept running his wheelchair, which he apparently used as a walker, back and forth across my lower extremities, all the while snarling curses, some of which were addressed to me and others of which appeared to be meant for the ears of a ghostly invalid riding there. It was a complete rout, and as the window banged open and I saw Jenny’s face I finally got my legs under me and fled the scene, crying in shame and rage. The Golf Course and what Happened There Into the park I ran, seeking the cover of darkness. Briars and branches tore at my limbs as I blundered full-tilt along a pathway. Finally I emerged into a moonlit clearing. A well-mowed lawn stretched away, with pleasing hills and dales dotted with copses of shrubbery. I was on a golf course, alone under the starry skies. Gasping for breath, I sunk to my knees and saw that my penis was still hanging out of my fly, semi-hard despite trial, tribulation, humiliation, insult and injury. The whole debacle had taken no more time than it takes to recite the preamble to the Gettysburg Address. Not far ahead, a tall slender wand arose, at the top of which a fairy pennant fluttered in the night wind. It bore the numeral “18”. At its base was a socket in the close-shaven grass. “This must be the Eighteenth Hole”, I thought to myself. The golf course was quiet and empty-just the place for a man to hit bottom. Far away, a garbage truck was digesting a washing machine or engine block, but I could hear crickets and toads calling each other in the underbrush and a calming wind dried my sweat. Who’d have believed it--an 18-hole golf course in the middle of a Dominican ghetto. A soundless jet airliner lowered itself to the crowded skyline far away like a fat and swagging shadow dissappearing against the dark sky, its multicolored running lights like the heads of flaming children chasing a leader along the rooftops. I knelt stock-still, as one who has figured out how to negotiate the dimension of time, but not that of space, then toppled over on my side and slowly sprawled face up on the grass, staring up at the celestial vault like a stunned animal trapped in the headlights of the oncoming stars. Remembering other nights beneath skies, like once during teenaged years when my brother and I lay drunk on the beach, out of reach of the orange glow from the fishing pier, watching for the first meteorite of summer. One minute—nothing, and the next, a shooting star drifted lazily past, from horizon to horizon in the blink of an eye. A drunken cheer had gone up from the dark where other sky-watchers lay, as if we were seeing the Grand Finale of a smalltown fireworks display, or a Little League homerun. Over the fence. Going, going, gone. I felt the gigantic swoop of the globe rolling beneath my back, vaster than vast, insensate, asleep, containing all things. Nothing could be larger than it-save the void in which it swam-and nothing smaller than I. And yet within me I felt a spark of vicious life, which could never be extinguished, but rather only fuelled by misfortune, disaster and my inescapable ridiculousness. I looked down along the length of my body to see that my penis was pointing straight up at the Pole Star like an axis mundi. A stiff, flexible, murderous erection. Well, who is to say that all life did not begin with an angry microbe, intent on inseminating eternity? To my feet, like Frankenstein’s Monster, I arose. Took three stiff steps towards the 18th Hole, like a dowser on the trail of an aquifer, and stood swaying a moment, looking into that smooth and shaded socket in the earth. Then I threw myself face down upon the greensward, arms and legs splayed wide in all directions of the compass, effected entrance with a grunt, and fell to with a will, humping as furiously as a hobgoblin. It didn’t take long. As my belated orgasm shook me and I stretched my outspread limbs even wider as if in a rigor mortis, trying to hold down the entire world and pump it full of poisonous venom, I seemed to recede from the back of my own head and spiral slowly outwards, while my body, still spasming, rotated and faded into insignificance in the distance below like a starfish revolving on a turntable. “The philomaths and advisors have measured with infinite care the waist of the world and found it to be exactly thirty-two and a half faces of the pharoah in circumference-an increase of over sixteen faces since the last full moon. Many goats and sheep are to be killed and eaten by the gods; and slaves given a day of rest; and all free folk also shall rest in their labors and feast and rejoice, for this means that Our Mother is newly pregnant with a monstrous child-or a baby god.” This was written by a nameless scribe in 3000 BC. I am also such a scribe. Now I move about from place to place, staying in cheap hotels under sundry aliases, my days of confusion and misery behind me. The news I bring is not especially good, but pay me no mind. I’m just a visitor here, as are we all. Epilog …. you know, Wilson, I wasn’t going to mention this, but you are one of my oldest friends and this story is just too bizzarre for me to keep it to myself. There actually WERE some other things in that oilcloth packet of papers he gave me. Polaroid photographs. These photos I had to burn, my friend, I’m sorry but they disgusted me and I destroyed them as soon as I saw them. God knows what the wife would have thought if she’d found them. I’d never have heard the end of it.