Guide to Animal Behaviour (14 page)

We passed the mission, which was only three doors along from where Mr. S-G lay in the street. I tried to get out, but a Yellow Cab prevented me from opening my door.

“Why don't you say something?” asked the red-haired woman (pretty, eyes the colour of blue stick 'ems; only my dedication to the LOAT Concordance and a certain ratine — of or relating to the genus rat — toy drummer stood between us).

Hester's name
her breasts, her heart, her dear heart
were on the tip of my tongue, but the curse of silence was upon me. (Ed. Note:
Supra.
)
Speech — evanescent, hasty, unconsidered, polysemous — evaded me; far more did I trust the written word which had a tendency to stay put (unlike women,
viz.
Stick 'em #128777:
A woman's words are as substantial as a ferret's fart. Trust them not.
)
—
grapheme over phoneme, those were my watchwords.

I wanted to get back to my box, to lose myself in my work, to drug myself with the infinite and loving analysis of the notes, signs and commercial hieroglyphs which festooned the walls of my corrugated home.

(We had, by this time, crawled through the car windows and retrieved the dirty, bearded man — a.k.a. you-know-who — much soiled by his recent proximity to the interior of the city sanitation truck. We helped him pull up what was left of his pants — all sorts of surprising and interesting reading material falling out of his clothes as we did so: several issues of the
GUARDIAN,
a December 12, 1989,
PRAVDA,
sports pages from
RUDE PRAVO
and the
FRANKFURTER ZEITUNG,
and five identical copies of the
PARTISAN REVIEW
dating from the spring of 1984. This sanitation truck incident had revealed new qualities to me; already I liked him better. Several of the stick 'ems, I was certain, had been written in a little known Croatian dialect. Now I felt sure the dirty, bearded man was just the person to help me decipher them.)

Ed. Note: I had a dream last night. I dreamt that the elderly black woman wasn't: a) elderly, or b) black. We were making love in the box next door, this Cyclopean woman and I. She was about twenty, with one eye like a green grape and the other normal. Her lustrous red hair seemed to wreath her head in flames. As time passed, I became aware that the blackness of her skin had nothing to do with her pigmentation. She was covered from head to foot with a tattoo. Upon closer inspection, the tattoo resolved itself into incredibly tiny letters, words, sentences, paragraphs and chapters. I took out my magnifying glass — having lost interest entirely in our love-making — and began to read her body. I read and read. It seemed as though it would take a million years to read the whole book. I was only down to her left nipple (an amazing spiral nebula of a tone poem made up of concentrated miniaturized letters totalling upwards of one hundred thousand words) when I woke up. I could remember nothing of what I'd read, except that it was wonderful, better than the best sex. When I woke up, I felt as if everything was going to be all right, as if, finally, I would be happy again. I thought, She is the Mother of the World.

2

It did not fulfil his goal of translating the Croatian stick 'ems with Prof. Schalck-Golodkowsky's help. Old S-G returned to Wandlitz, but he had clearly lost heart after his accidental run-in with the city sanitation truck.

Constipation was perhaps his main problem.

His wife, growing less and less articulate, began to beat him mercilessly with old shoeboxes.

Eventually, he abandoned his surface home altogether, went to live in the subway and was heard from no more. He had tears in his eyes and stopped to give It a fond little wave of farewell as he staggered out of the alley the last time.

The elderly black woman pined for him (this is one of the mysteries of human existence: how a woman can hate a man, beat him mercilessly with shoeboxes and then dwindle as though she had a tapeworm when he is gone). She and It had a brief, frenzied and melancholy affair, a relationship they both regretted later.

It probably summed it up best when he wrote in LOAT
#2073:
We were both lonely, sad creatures. We had both suffered grievously in life, had both felt love and been abandoned. It was natural that, without thinking much, we should lurch toward one another in the hour of our need. But she was not a reader, and we both soon realized there could be no lasting attachment.

Eventually, the elderly black woman left Wandlitz, too, heading, she said, for El Cajon, a San Diego suburb where she believed she might have family.

The neighbouring box fell into decay, and It had to take special measures to ensure the structural integrity of the common wall.

But Wandlitz had lost its Weimar Republic charm for him. The fruitful period, when moral decadence strode hand-in-hand with intense intellectual activity (like Nero fiddling while Paramus burned), had given way to an era of stagnation, cultural anomie and mounting anti-Semitism.

In this atmosphere of malaise, It quit his job as a human sign and began to take money from the red-haired woman and her toy mogul boyfriend on the condition that he make twice-weekly visits to Dr. Elkho Reinhardt, a prominent Upper West Side analyst. For a month that spring, It sank so low as to impersonate Tom Wyatt, the red-haired woman's former husband, in order to encourage the doctor and extort additional funds from the guilty (if deranged) couple.

This time of drift came abruptly to an end one afternoon when It (who never lost his native fastidiousness) adjourned to the mission for his monthly shower. There, for all to see, wrapped around the broad buttocks of a fellow mission client in sixty-point type, was a
NEW YORK POST
headline: PARAMUS TOY STORE FIRE BOMBED/MANAGER DESCRIBES BARBIE DOLL “HOLOCAUST.”

He knew at once this was the proverbial writing on the wall, though how he knew he could not tell. Only, the sudden and mysterious linkage of the words “Paramus,” “toy store,” “fire” and “manager” — words which had hitherto appeared exclusively within the confines of his box struck him as evidence of a disturbing synchronicity, a gathering of
her breasts
forces (Lance, dark matter) bent on his destruction.

Alarmed, yet lucid, realizing he must somehow save himself, he went underground within hours — first sealing his box with duct tape and mailing it to himself under an assumed named (Leffingwell), c/o General Delivery, El Paso, Texas.

Such practical action on It's part may surprise the casual reader. But he had always possessed a special affinity for the phrase “parcel post,” and the sight of a Federal Express truck parked in the street beyond the alley never failed to inspire in him the frisson of adventurous anticipation other people feel at airports and train stations.

(Also, he had eaten a Mexican orange that morning, which he regarded as a sign. From his investigation into the disappearance of Pancho Villa's head, he knew El Paso was on the way to Mexico.)

It took two weeks to make his way across the country, travelling at night on Greyhound buses, using money he had saved from his therapy job for food and tickets.

In El Paso, he collected his box, then slipped across the border in the back of a crowded cattle truck.

Changing his name yet again (A. Negril), he journeyed south to the village of Ococingo near the Guatemalan border, where he now resides in a small, rented room above a brothel that goes by the name of a large American battery manufacturer. He earns his living as a letter-writer among the credulous and illiterate Chiapan peasants, while continuing his boxological research.

It is neither happy nor sad.

The passions of his youth are spent. He has to wear eyeglasses to read and make notes.

The brothel denizens regard him as a harmless and amusing eccentric and delight in spending a restful hour or two sitting in his box (it just fits inside the rented room, with space to spare for a hotplate and icebox), listening to Julio Iglesias tapes and sipping iced tea while the old man scribbles on his little yellow pads.

Sleeping, he dreams tropical dreams, full of talkative parrots and red-haired women.

And if, by chance, some distant night sound disturbs him and he wakes, It will step out on his tiny balcony, wipe his glasses and peer upward, marvelling at the innumerable pinpricks of light which spangle the firmament. At such moments, he feels the deepest peace. For in his heart, he knows that what he sees is nothing but the ceiling of yet another vast and mysterious box.

Edward Note

Calle Borracho

Ococingo, Chiapas

A GUIDE TO ANIMAL BEHAVIOUR

I
am in bed with a woman who looks like a movie star, and I have lost my memory.

The movie star woman is asleep, which is lucky and gives me a chance to try to remember who I am and how I got here. She is evidently a person of low virtue. I can see she is shamelessly naked, as I am myself, I might add. And she is snoring. I find the combination of her beauty, her shamelessness and her snores moving in strange and delightful ways.

When she wakes up, she is almost as suspicious of me as I of her, though she has the advantage of knowing who she is.

“How did this happen?” I say.

“You were cute,” she says. “When I asked you your name, you looked at your watch and said, ‘Seiko Quartz.'”

Her name is Tracy Mondesire — used to be Tracy Gittles from Boogie Ridge, Levy County (the only county in the U.S.A. named for a Jewish person), Florida. Her family were Flat-Out Baptists, but died young, and she was brought up by Grammy and Grampy Gittles in a car-part heaven outside Ocala.

Grammy and Grampy Gittles were fat and blind and stood four square for the Bible and segregation. Grampy Gittles swore he'd die before they had a “coloured” TV in the house. He wrote verses for the local paper and communed with the dead with the aid of a hollow cow horn.

Several strange men interfered with her while she was growing up, but it was nothing she minded.

Glitter is the only life she ever wanted.

They tell me we are living in Bel Air. Does Washington know about this place?

Our swimming pool has an undertow.

I have set off the burglar alarm eighty-two times since moving in.

She sells real estate to Arabs, nothing under a mil and a half.

She can suck air into her hole and blow pussy farts. It is the damnedest thing to see.

She reads pornographic books to raise her spirits and sometimes will sit home of an evening with a stack of filthy cassettes as high as your elbow. I am not much for seeing it on the screen myself.

Wherever you go in this house, there is odour of muff.

One morning, I tackle Juanita, the maid, out of pure aggression. Evidently, Juanita has had her eye on me as well. We do it in a chair until there is nothing left of me but a little pool of sweat. I wake up on the living room floor, with Tracy trying to get my thing between the blades of the garden shears.

She fires Juanita without notice, then hires her back a week later because she cannot bear to be cruel to anyone who makes less than two hundred thousand a year.

After a year or so, we get married. It is a clamouring and tasteless affair with eight hundred guests and house ads in the toilets.

“Eat me,” she says, lying on the bed with her legs in the air. This is an inviting subject for the Old Masters, let me tell you. I am not certain it is the manly thing to do, but I love to mumble her pussy, and it drives her wild.

I read in the
ENQUIRER
that I once flew DC-3s up from Colombia, but turned for the state after crash-landing three tons of high-grade in a peanut field surrounded by federal agents. I fingered Richard Estramadura, arch-international crime kingpin, before he went into hiding. He has taken out a million-dollar contract on my life.

I ask Tracy is this is true. “He made it up,” she says, pointing to Don, her publicist. I do not know if I should be upset that this over-sedated weeny is inventing my life.

To keep in shape, I do daily workouts with an S&W .357. Nights, I do speed and sneak up on coyotes in the backyard.

I drive a pink Fleetwood with zebra-skin seatcovers and an oog-gah horn. She gave it to me for my birthday. How do I know when my birthday is? I don't. But she says I must have had one some time.

Ten years have passed. I have learned to walk sideways in the street to cut down wind resistance. I have only strayed five or six times, that Tracy knows about.

I don't know how this happened, but we are having one hell of a time together.

A woman stopped me in the street the other day. I was wearing aviator shades, eight gold chains, a button that said “Drugs Saved My Life” and expensive white shoes made by poor people in Brazil. She said she was my wife. She said she had married my brother Daken after I left like that. She and Daken had just flown in from Kentucky to be on
Wheel of Fortune
. We have three children, all brought up Christian.

I, A YOUNG MAN CALLED EARLY TO THE WARS

First Years

E
veryone seemed bigger than me. Mother, Father, even my little brother. We had a pet Alsatian called Norris who kept knocking me over, especially when there was mud on the ground. We also had cows and horses which, like the dog, had four legs. I don't believe I saw the top of a horse until my fifth year, they were so huge. I was always worried about keeping out of the way of their feet.

Another little brother. Where did they come from? I worried about being overrun, but at least they were getting smaller. Mother told me I came out of her stomach through a trap door during a snow storm. This seemed incredible even then. One day Norris came limping home, covered with blood and dust. Father said Norris and some other boy dogs had been fighting over a girl dog
in heat.
What was a girl dog? How hot did they get?

I noticed that although I was getting bigger, everyone else was getting bigger, too. For example, the neighbours' boy Petey. Petey would walk over to our house anytime he wanted and punch me out and take my toys. He was unstoppable. I lay awake nights worrying about whether Petey was going to come over the next day and punch me out. Finally I learned to deal with this problem by punching my little brothers and taking their toys. This worked well until Mother caught me. She said I was a bad boy, a trial and a burden, and that she didn't know what had gotten into me. I had to be punished. Father smacked me. It
hurt amazingly. Next to horses, Father was the biggest thing in the world.

Chaos. There are boy people
and
girl people! I had to have Mother point out which was which until I got the hang of it myself. Even then, I lay awake nights worrying about making a mistake. And for a long time, I avoided girls because of the heat problem. One day I mentioned this to Father. He laughed and told Mother, and she laughed. Apparently girls were somehow different from dogs in regard to temperature. Relieved of my anxiety on this point, I went over to Petey's place and asked his sister Diane, a girl about my size, to marry me. Diane's mother overheard this unfortunate proposal, called me a fresh little snot and telephoned my parents. I expected a smack when I reached home, but Mother merely took me aside and solemnly told me I was too young to think of marriage. Unaccountably, I felt humiliated by my ignorance on this topic. Who made up the rules?

Petey played with his wee-wee. He told me he had put his hand down Diane's underpants, and she didn't have one. This piece of intelligence filled me with unease. He led me out to the barn and into the calf pen. It was like that, he said, pointing at the hind end of the nearest bawling beast. I wanted to be sick. He took his wee-wee out and started to play with it. I had never seen anything so strange in my whole life. It occurred to me that this was how Diane had lost hers, and I ran home in a panic.

Later I experimented with my brother's to see if the thing was in fact detachable. I was informed on and duly smacked. Mother said I was a monster and nothing but trouble to her. Even at birth, she said, I had tried to come out the wrong way, causing her to be cut open like a bowling bag. I told her I would gladly have gone back if I could, for I had never intended to cause such ruin and shame. Perhaps, I suggested, I had been born too young and needed a bit more time before breaking into the world. That night I dreamed I was a horse, with Mother and Father and my little brothers running in and out among my hooves like rabbits.

Kindergarten

I lasted one day only. Had I failed? Later it occurred to me that Mother had withdrawn me from classes for sentimental reasons — she wanted to keep her firstborn by her side an extra year. She wept during the long drive into town. I steeled myself for some dreadful catastrophe. Perhaps they would never let me go home again. She led me down a dark corridor, with doors going off on either side like a hospital, and into a room of strangers. We were both crying by then, and I wouldn't let go of the hem of her skirt. The teacher smiled with a mouth full of teeth, making me wail even louder, for she looked just like the old crone who ate children in my picture book. She pulled my mother and me apart, and sent the light of my life reeling on her way. I expected the chop at any moment and spent the day skulking wherever the other children were thickest, hoping she would take someone else first. And when it was over, I ran screaming from the building in terror to where Mother stood, waiting bravely by the open car door. It took us months to get over the experience.

Meanwhile, she took it upon herself to give me the education I was missing. Numbers. Lord! When I got to fifty, I thought my brains would burst, and yet there didn't seem to be any end to them. I lay awake at night going over them in my head, always worried that the next day I would find out someone had changed the order on me. On the literary side, she taught me phonetics and printing, which I took to quickly enough, though I pretended to be slow so they would not send me away. School loomed on the horizon like a final separation. What was school? Petey said they gave you the strap at school, which was much worse than a smack. What for? Talking!

Elementary School

Two-room country schoolhouse. I had my eye out for the strap right away, but on not discovering its location, concluded it was kept in the senior room where the bigger children were no better than wild animals. At recess, I trailed after the student body as it spilled into the yard like a swarm of locusts. Petey raced by shouting, “Don't go near Ted Binker. He stinks.” I followed the direction indicated by his pointing finger and spied a lone boy standing in a corner, talking to himself. Out of curiosity, I went over and stood beside him. He did stink. He had wet his pants. I ran after Petey, and someone knocked me down. A little girl in a frilly dress lifted its hem to show me her brown legs and underpants. I went back inside and sat at the wrong desk by mistake. Later I went to the washroom, but couldn't wee-wee because another boy was combing his hair in the mirror. That was my first day.

Miss Barton, my teacher, was young and pretty. I started to play with my wee-wee the way Petey had shown me, imagining that I had accidentally walked in on her in the bathroom. The senior-room teacher was Mr. Kennedy, a giant man with bristly red hair growing out of his ears and nose and on top of his hands. Whenever I saw his hands, I wanted to be sick. Mr. Kennedy gave people the strap. Some of the bigger boys he just walloped with his fist. Once Petey punched Brenda Blandford, and she came to class with thick blood streaming down her chin. Mr. Kennedy picked Petey up and threw him against the art supplies cupboard. Ted Binker wet the floor, but did not get the strap. Petey got the strap twice in one day, once for coming to school with dirty fingernails and once for failing addition. I forgot to do up my pants after going to the bathroom, and Miss Barton asked me if I could feel a draft. I said, no, I felt all right. Then she came over and zipped me up in front of the entire class.

Whaaaa! I failed printing! I connected the letters up the way I had seen Mother do. Mr. Kennedy made me lean against the blackboard on my fingertips for half an hour after school. The next day Mother had a talk with Miss Barton, and they moved me up a grade. In the new grade, everyone was bigger than me. Petey threw my Roy Rogers lunch box under a truck. Every evening after school, while my brothers played in the yard and Father slept in front of the TV, Mother helped me with my homework. I lay awake nights worrying about failing. I started to pray. I asked God not to let me die while I was asleep and to help me pass addition and bless my dog.

At Christmas, I played Tiny Tim in the school pageant. Father made me a crutch and a leg brace out of tomato soup cans and an old belt. Johnny Malchak carried me on his shoulder, and everyone clapped. Afterwards I tried to wear my leg brace to school so that Mr. Kennedy wouldn't give me the strap. When Mother stopped me wearing the leg brace, I limped.

I noticed that Norris had a shiny wee-wee that came out sometimes. When it did, Mother would hit it with a rolled up newspaper and call Norris a dirty animal. The horse had a giant wee-wee that hung almost to the ground. In my mother's
LIFE MAGAZINE,
I discovered large numbers of photographs of women dressed only in their underwear. I clipped several out with my scissors and showed them to Petey at school. He said that was nothing. In his parents' dresser drawer, he had found the picture of a
nude
woman, only her stomach was covered by a
safe,
I knew that a safe was an iron box where you kept money. I asked Petey why a woman would have a safe on her stomach. Petey said a rubber safe. A rubber safe!

Some nights I didn't sleep at all. There were so many things to worry about. One of the things I worried about was not sleeping. I would get up four or five times to pee, then stand outside my parents' bedroom door until they asked me what was wrong. “I can't sleep,” I would say. After I got up to pee and stand outside their door enough times, Mother would come to my room and lie on the bed while I went to sleep. She would be very angry. She said I was neurotic and should see a psychiatrist. She said sometimes she thought there was no hope I would turn out all right. I worried so much about having to see a psychiatrist that I pulled off all my eyelashes. Mother went to see Miss Barton. I expected them to put me back, but Miss Barton gave me a test, and they moved me up another grade. I didn't even know if I passed the test. All the children in the new grade were huge. Petey sat way on the opposite side of the room now. One more grade and I would be in the senior room with Mr. Kennedy.

Wab-in-hapi

They sent me to summer camp. Camp Wab-in-hapi. I had to learn new words for everything. The toilet was outside, and it was called the
kaibo.
If you didn't use the right word, they wouldn't let you go. There were eleven other boys in my cabin, none of whom I had ever met before. We all told jokes the first night. A man and a woman are naked together in a bathtub. The man points to the woman's chest and asks, “What are those?” “Mountains,” she says. She points to the hair on his chest and asks, “What's that?” “Clouds,” he says. He points to her stomach and asks, “What's that?” “My cave,” she says. She points to his wee-wee and asks, “What's that?” “A little man,” he says. And that night the clouds go over the mountains, and the little man enters the cave. I did not get this joke, but laughed so that no one would think I was stupid. New words for wee-wee were
cock, pecker, prick, bone, dink
and
dingus. Fuck
and
hard-on
I didn't understand, but I found I could get by all right by laughing whenever anyone used them. I lay awake most of the first night memorizing words and phrases, so that the next day I could nonchalantly ask if I might go take a whiz in the kaibo.

Mornings, at Camp Wab-in-hapi, we lined up for breakfast and sang the camp song. No one told me the words, so I could only pretend I was singing. I was worried there might be some rule about not getting to eat if you didn't sing. Afternoons, the whole camp played War. One side had to capture the other side's flag. Flags were generally hidden deep in the woods atop rock outcrops with steep, dangerous faces. I found the best way to play War was to hide out somewhere until it was over. The third day somebody hit me over the eye with a rock. I found my cabin counsellor and told him I was too young for War. That night the counsellor told my cabin mates I had severe group adjustment problems. One morning I woke up to find that the boy in the bunk above had vomited all over me while I slept. At the end of the week, all the boys in the camp were ordered to swim naked and wash their wee-wees with soap. I have never seen so many naked people in my life.

On Parents' Day, Mother, Father and my brothers visited me. I told them all the jokes I could recall and about the nice counsellor who wrapped me in his blanket at campfire and nuzzled my ear. Father said nothing. Mother said nothing. “In foreign lands,” I sang, “the women wear no pants, and the men wear glasses to see their asses.” Mother said those were filthy, smutty words. She said I should have my mouth washed out with soap. Father waited till I packed my clothes and we were alone in the car, then he smacked me. “Don't ever let anyone touch you like that again. It's nothing but dirty monkey business.”

I told Petey my Wab-in-hapi jokes, and for a while we were friends again. He had taken down Diane's underpants. It was like a pocket, he said. My head whirled. He drew me a diagram which made no sense whatever, though I didn't tell Petey. I memorized the diagram and filed it away with the verbal description
pocket
in that immense portion of my brain set aside for sexual arcana.

At the same time, it occurred to me that many boys of my acquaintance had knowledge far in advance of my own, which they gleaned, more or less scientifically, from their sisters. I began to feel cruelly deprived. I mentioned this casually to Mother, saying how pleasant I imagined it would be when we had a baby girl for me to play with. Mother began to weep. It had been a true wish of her own, she said, to have a daughter, but after my little brothers were born, the doctors had tied her tubes so she would have no more children. The effort of bearing three boys, it seemed, had been highly injurious. I ran out of the house and sat for an hour in the melon patch, till the mosquitoes drove me indoors again. The world was a welter of ignorance, strife and decay.

Senior Room

There were nine boys in the senior room, yet because of my size and ineptitude they let Brenda Blandford play third base on the school softball team instead of me. The other
boys teased me until I lost my temper and punched Myron Solecki in the nose as hard as I could. This had no effect whatsoever, and I began to stay inside during recess. I played chess with a fat boy named Robert. Anytime during school hours, I could beat Robert handily. But after four o'clock, I would invariably lose. Since then, I have read chess literature extensively without finding a single report of a similar phenomenon. My grades were generally As and Bs, except for Writing, which was always a C. In his written comments, Mr. Kennedy would indicate that I had an attitude problem, which he characterized as, “Daydreams too much. Inattentive. Work sometimes sloppy as a result.” I recall that I was beginning to find the presence of girls with breasts disturbing, yet attractive. And I daydreamed constantly about the landing of a vast army of Martian soldiers who recognized me at once as their leader. With my faithful green troops, I conquered the known world and issued undisputed orders such as, “No woman shall wear clothes in the presence of the king.”