Nine Kinds of Naked (15 page)

And so, like a junkie arranging his whole life around securing a steady supply of smack, the obvious solution was to spend his free time researching and modeling the social networks of every dancer, regular, and employee at Red's and cross-referencing this data against the social networks of his patients (which his nurse gathered during intakes). In his reasoning, as long as there were no less than three degrees of separation between the world of his obstetric practice and the world of Red's Cabaret, his lifestyle was secure.

Dr. Rip Blossom had tried asking Betty to collect some data on the seashell pipe vendor for his social network analysis, but she kept brushing off his requests, telling him to “relax” and “stop trying to control so much.” It was odd. Usually, she was happy to help. In fact, she was his primary informant, indulging his every inquiry into the local social world. After all, he'd been all but supporting her, throwing down a hundred or so bucks most days of the week for two whole years now. He
was her favorite customer, she told him so every day, but now she was being evasive. Didn't she realize her income depended on the validity of his research? If this guy were a friend of a friend of one of his patients, he would need to know, and soon.

It's fucking irrational, Dr. Blossom fumed as he drove back to his apartment. Can't she see that the situation has to be controlled? Relax, my ass. The next thing you know she'll be telling me to go with the flow. It's that Diana Duos, I bet, the goddamn hippie. She's the variable here. Probably drowning Betty's reason with her dreadlocked philosophies.

Dr. Blossom shook his head. No, he thought, now
I'm
being irrational. Clearly, wearing her hair in dreadlocks is just marketing, part of her act. They're probably just extensions, anyway. It's not like she's hirsute. The frat boys really go for the hippie chick fantasy, that's all. But why did I blame her, I wonder? I'll have to monitor that emotion more closely.

One two three four five six seven eight nine. Dr. Blossom counted to twenty-three before he'd calmed himself. He always did this. It was his way of ensuring that he was in control of his life. He counted everything, seeking to recognize every variable that might be influencing him. Twenty-three wasn't too bad. That is, twenty-three seconds until he recognized the intruding emotion as jealousy and deleted it. Fifty might have required further measures.

He once counted to nine hundred before giving up on pinpointing the emotion. It was the first time Betty Boobs had danced for him, and after two years and counting to a sum of over six hundred thousand, he had yet to successfully identify the feeling.

 

44
O
N TOP OF
all the uncertainty the seashell pipe vendor was creating in his fragile world, Dr. Rip Blossom was also troubled by a recent spate of ludicrous spontaneity sweeping New Orleans. Laughing Jim was one thing, and even he had gotten used to the incessant conviviality it brought forth, but at the grocery store the week before, the customer in front of him in the checkout line had very suddenly and for no discernible reason whatsoever whooped “Woohooooo!” as she picked up her grocery sack. Then, with her free hand, she swiped the side of her nose and pointed at the cashier, all in a single gesture. “Walk away,” was all she said, grinning, nodding, and exiting the store.

By itself, this should not have been so surprising, even for someone as pinched as Dr. Rip Blossom. This was New Orleans, after all, where women were apt to lift their shirts for trinkets long before Laughing Jim came along. Anything goes. But something else was happening here. Why, just a couple of days after experiencing the preposterous elation at the grocery store, he was on his way to Red's Cabaret when out of nowhere a passing woman reached over and shoved his head suddenly sideways. Turning in indignant protest at this horrendous violation of his personal space, Dr. Rip Blossom was rendered speechless as the beaming stranger swiped the side of her nose and pointed at him, all in a single gesture, and smiling simply, said, “Walk away.”

 

 

 

 

The First Knot: A Gentle Breeze

 

A
T SOME POINT
during the Oakmen's coronation party, while Clovis was sitting against the king oak, one of the gnomes ambushed his hand and poured a gob of blue honey into his palm. “Nectar of the gods,” the gnome assured him, licking his finger and sprinting away. Taken off guard, Clovis automatically caught the dripping dollop of honey with his free hand and immediately made an impossible mess of himself. He could have scrubbed his hands against the tree bark and washed them in the grass, but honey was such a rare treat that he couldn't resist tasting it, even if it was blue.

But no treat was so rare as this. Clovis had scarcely touched the honey to his tongue before it engorged every cell in his
body with exuberance. His eyes went alive as a silken sigh rippled throughout him, surging forth gladness and glee. Smooth and buttery across his tongue the honey flowed, sensual and succulicious, love pudding born of a band of mutinous bees seduced by the wildest flowers in the fields of Elysium. It was tremendously intoxicating, and when Clovis awoke the next morning with clean hands and a sore jaw, the only thing he remembered was one of the gnomes trying to crown him with a wreath of twisted raspberry brambles. He had managed to refuse this crown in drunken indignation, of that much he was certain, though he'd apparently been unable to resist the gnomes costuming him in the crusader's armor, which just so happened to fit him perfectly.

As for Attila, Clovis had no idea how her evening had transpired, but she seemed perfectly content, trotting about the clearing and surrounding glen, skipping through pollen-sparkled sunbeams and snuffling after butterflies. Still feeling pleasantly drunk, Clovis had nothing better to do than grin, and so he did, and so he still was minutes later when Attila abruptly ceased her prancing and perked her ears. Grunting nervously, she scuttled to Clovis's side, awaiting his assessment. Clovis, however, was drunkenly oblivious, and no sooner had he begun to wonder if he heard something than a swarm of Oakmen came charging across the far side of the clearing, yelling, “Run away! Run away!”

Stumbling to his feet, Clovis looked around amazed as a countless flurry of gnomes swept by, arms athrill. Slow to react, he merely balanced himself on Attila's bridle, calming her in the process. “Whoa now,” he said to the world at large,
just as the last of the gnomes had raced past. Facing the forest from which they had fled, Clovis spied a commotion in the distance, a tearing of twigs and a raising of dust, growing into a trembling roar as it approached. It was clear that it was another stampede, though the pounding thunder of vibration assured him that whatever was coming was a great deal heavier than the gnomes.

Attila began to pull at her bridle, and Clovis reassured her with a firm tug. Fixing a downward grip on his sword, he unsheathed it and held it high above his head, its tip pointed at the ground like a dagger. It never occurred to him why he thought to do this—it just seemed the obvious reaction—and so when the stampede of what appeared to be hundreds of wild boars broke the clearing, the next obvious thing to do was to thrust it forcefully into the ground in front of him while roaring “Whoa now!” As it turned out, whatever impulse had informed his actions must have had some experience with swine stampede management, for the horde of boars immediately skidded to a halt en masse a few feet in front of him. They were so close that he could see the humbled and humiliated looks on their otherwise savage faces—absolute mortification, really—as if he had just slapped the lot of them silly with a strip of raw bacon. And there they stood, snorting and whining, shifting uneasily, abashedly looking at the ground and at each other, and after an extended awkward silence, the vast pack of boars turned and waddled back into the forest from which they'd moments ago stormed.

 

45
D
IABLO TOYED WITH
the stub of the decapitated middle finger of his left hand during a lull in the pedestrian traffic on Bourbon Street. His wound had long ago healed, but the stump was his daily memory of that day over two decades ago when chaos touched his life. Immensely pleased to be alive, he wiggled his fingers and smiled as New Orleans washed over him, its indefatigable cadence of decadence marinating him in flavors of Cajun, beer, gumbo, and ocean, and drenching him in dozens of licks and harmonies competing for his attention all while the sea murmured its immortal mantra. Leaning forward, he grabbed a seashell pipe off his table and idly popped the stem in his mouth, sucking slackadaisically. Diablo, as it turns out, was the one thwarting Dr. Rip Blossom's social network analysis, and he was entirely purposeful in his disregard. “I'm the hidden variable,” he once explained to Elizabeth Wildhack. “And so are you, and so is anyone who defeats the expectations of others. It's only when we achieve this that evolution can occur.”

Evolution was Diablo's business these days. Indeed, “evolution for the hell of it” had been his daily meditation for twenty years now. It should have been twenty-five, he would sometimes regret, but he had gotten distracted for a few years after the tornado. It is to the story of his fall and redemption that we must now turn.

After driving away from Normal, Illinois—Joker in pocket and crucifix in tow—Diablo found that the serenity he'd achieved while tossing cards ia jail had faded like an appetite in an abattoir. His stumble into the muck of the mundane had begun when he crunched off his own finger, but he might
have bounced back even from that misfortune if he'd elected to become a hermit. But he had no hermitic tendencies, and attempted instead to find his way in the world of men, subjecting himself daily to a bombardment of rudeness, judgment, and rivalry. It was not long before the peace of mind that had embraced him for that day and a half became nothing more than a distant dream, a whiff of a revelation that left him helplessly hungry, picking his way barefoot through a world shattered by the vandals of avarice.

Diablo got a job. With laggard assistance from the Veterans Administration, he received a sinecure at the Food and Drug Administration and moved to D.C. Such a job would have been a delight to a stale loaf of Wonder Bread, but Diablo could never really get into the sloth of it. He spent five years assisting with the preparation of a publication called the
Food Defect Action Levels
, a food industry reference for how much filth is permissible in every conceivable category of packaged foodstuff. He learned, for example, that a three-and-half-ounce jar of peanut butter legally can contain up to thirty insect fragments and one rodent hair, as well as a bit of unspecified grit, before the manufacturer is subject to enforcement under Section 402(a)(3) of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act.

Aside from his daily dose of disgust, it was not an especially challenging job. Indeed, Diablo could have done the work required of him in a few weeks, but that was not encouraged by his superiors, who nonetheless demanded that he “look busy.” He did his best to look busy, arranging papers, filling out forms, chortling over coffee with those around him, and collecting his pay. He donated the tornado's crucifix to a local
church, parked Billy Pronto's truck, bought a Honda Civic four-door and a condominium, and settled in for the middle-class trudge. His neighbors nodded approvingly.

Diablo started seeing a coworker, Doreen, and after a few months she moved into his condo. His life was apparently complete: He was free to live out his years in the consumer fantasy, the debtor's prison of catalogs and credit, yet he remained ungratefully miserable. Doreen, preoccupied with looking busy and collecting Precious Moments statuettes, offered him little consolation. She suggested one night that he rent a movie, that would surely cheer him up, and before long they were renting a movie every night on their way home from work. They would sometimes dawdle for half an hour, wandering through the comedy, drama, and action sections once they'd exhausted the new releases, desperately seeking diversion. One evening, on their way home with two DVDs for the price of one, Diablo noticed something on the receipt. At the bottom, after the time and date stamp, the words
GO HOME HAPPY
were printed in all caps.

“Look at this,” he said. “It says
GO HOME HAPPY
at the bottom here.”

“Aren't you happy?”

“But doesn't that sound like an imperative? Look, it's all capitalized. It's practically an order.”

“What's wrong with going home happy?”

“Nothing, but why are they
telling
us to go home happy? If we go home happy, then by God, that's our business. But here, it's like they know what they're actually renting. They're right up front about it. They know they're not renting movies.
They're renting an evening of mediated happiness for every overworked and underplayed citizen. We may as well have just scored a line of smack. Doesn't that bother you?”