The Fan Man (14 page)

When the janitor walks in there, man, with his mop and pail and maybe an old cardboard box to sweep the dust into, he is astounded. He staggers, man, against the wall, thinking to himself,
I’ve seen it all now
. He is instantly illuminated, man. It’s part of my work as avatar of social consciousness. Once you have tried to clean up a Horse Badorties pad, man, nothing ever troubles you again. You have had the Great Death, man.

The janitor, man, when he goes in there will lug out old ripped rugs and rags and impossible-to-analyze black grease. And then he will pass into new and still deeper frames of old trash baskets and paper bags bursting with garbage. He’ll shake his head, man, and wonder. He’ll tell his grandchildren about it:
I saw a pile one time… .

Down the stairs, man, down the stairs, and through the hallway. There is the landlord, man, standing on the stoop, man, looking at me, and turning red in the face.

“YOU SONABITCH BASTAR’! You still here, I tol’ you …”

“Here are the keys, man. I’ve been spending the last few days cleaning up the pad, man, scrubbing down the floors and polishing the woodwork. I didn’t want to leave the place looking like a wreck, man, you understand. I figured I owed you that much. All the trash has been taken out, man. I worked through the night and the Sanitation Department came around with a truck early this morning and hauled it away, maybe you saw it.”

“Didn’t see nothin… .”

“Yes, it was quite early. Anyway, it’s all straightened up now, man, ready for occupancy by a little old lady. I had a chick come over and we hung a few curtains on the windows. It looks kind of nice, man, you ought to see it with the sunlight coming through.”

“Yeah … yeah, I’ll do that.”

“Right, man, it’ll make your day brighter. Well, so long, man. If you come across anything left behind in a cupboard or something, give it to the Merchant Marine Library. So long, man, stay cool.”

And that’s it, man. I’m straight with the world. I have left behind me a telephone bill of enormous complexity, man, with calls to Alaska, Hong Kong, Bombay, and the Fiji Islands. A clean get-away once more. I have only one problem, man, a minor one, and that is, where am I going to live?

Just walk along Avenue A, man, something will turn up. What is this, man, it appears to be an abandoned store with a
For Rent
sign in the window. Huge windows, man, right on street level. Look at all the room in there, man. My dorky-meter is registering an intensity of six on a scale of seven. “This is it, man! THIS IS MY NEW PAD!’’

“I am in my new pad, man, making the first tape in my new little home. I’ve given the landlord a rubber check for three hundred dollars, and now will ensue his long legal hassle to throw me out. But in the meantime, man, and until that happens, here we are–in the STORE! The store, more room to store things than I’ve ever had before. There is so much space, man, in my dark dingy store, I’ve got to call my printer right away and have him print up fifty thousand more sheets of music to pile up to the ceiling.”

And now comes the incredible long-to-be-wondered-at Horse Badorties miracle pile-up. In what appears to be only the passing of a few moments, the time of a mere afternoon, which flickers and jumps like an underground film, I, Horse Badorties, carry in, one right after another, boxes of sheet music, scattering them around. And then going quickly back out, speeded-up to lightning-flash intensity, I drag in old broken furniture found in the street, a ripped lampshade, a piece of an armchair, a disintegrating mattress. Trip after remarkable trip is made, in a brief interlude of magnificent collecting, whereby piles of grocery bags are brought in, stuffed with shiny new cans of food and cereal boxes. And suddenly, the cans are empty and thrown around and the corn flakes are trampled into the floor, and the cleaned-up store becomes covered with greasy filth-pots, and higher and higher grows the pile, up and up, filling in all the light spaces, growing with every flickering frame, and finally, suddenly, there I am—Horse Badorties, man, standing in the middle of another piled-up-to-the-ceiling immovable blobs postcards everything, filled-up STORE!

There is hardly room to turn around. How wonderful, man!

And now, man, it is time for my Love Chorus rehearsal. I am leaving the store, man, with the windows bulging out after me, and I am going up the street, man, toward St. Nancy’s where the Love Chorus has gathered for a unique musical experience. Here I am again, man, going into St. Nancy’s, down the aisle and up the steps, man, to the choir loft, where everyone is waiting, man, for Maestro Badorties, who must pause only briefly here on the last step for a beneficial herb-smoke, man, of Bugloss Root, to clear the Japanese beetles out of his Chinese shoes. How wonderful, man, to see my chorus again, I can hardly see them, man, my vision is going, man, the witch doctors have done it, oh no, man, wait a second, man, it is only because I am wearing my special Horse Badorties Corrective-vision Sunglasses, man, with the single peephole in the corner of one lens, man, so that you go boggle-eyed and blind from wearing them, man, how wonderful to take them off, man, and see again.

“Now, Love Chorus, it is time I introduced you to the final purification process in music. It is called Uncle Skulky and it goes like this–”

Now, man, I give them my face in three-quarter profile, in a brief tableau, man, and I roll my eyeballs into the corners of my sockets, so that I am peering at them from on high, sideways. And bringing my elbows into my chest and extending my forearms like an arthritic Polynesian dancer, I wave them, man, serpentlike and slithering. I am their insane Uncle Skulky, man, skulking through the attic, along the hallway of their minds.

This is a hideous face, man, and perhaps it is the most hideous of all my faces, man, because it is not something long-buried like my tyranosaurus-rex, but something which lived in my family tree not very long ago, man. Dear old Uncle Skulky, man, is the impossibly mad relative we all have sleeping in our souls. He would absolutely come up and claim me, man, take me over and drive me completely schizo, man, except for the fact that every now and then I take Uncle Skulky out and air him, man, let him run around and skulk a bit, after which he goes back down into his horrible secret chamber, man, and leaves me alone.

“All right, everyone, let us all take our places in the Uncle Skulky tableau.”

Incredible, man, twenty-five chicks rolling their eyes into the corners of the sockets, and putting their hands into the mad-creeping position, and now all of us together are skulking across the balcony and down the winding stairway, man, where we proceed to the aisles of the church, man, and go skulking up and down them.

“Excellent, now begin, one and two …”

Uncle Skulky sings, man, a song of weirdness unrivalled. Skulking past the flickering candles of the altar, we sing our Uncle Skulky music, man, making faces so fiendish and weird that any last inhibitions the chicks have about music is now being erased completely. We are totally cleansed, man. We have lived out the worst thing in us. From tyranosaurus-rex to Uncle Skulky to NBC, man, we are on the way. The Love Chorus has learned how to sing together, man!

It is nighttime on the Lower East Side, man, and having worked all day filling up my store, and all night singing Uncle Skulky, I am now having a piña-colada at a lunch counter, imbibing healthy vitality and digestive enzymes to digest the total emptiness of my stomach. How I wish, man, I had a dirty hot dog.

Wandering around, man, stumbling around hungrily through the Lower East Side night, searching for the ultimate hot dog. I’d better have a pizza instead with mushrooms. Wait a second, man, here is a place frying up sausages with onions and peppers, man, look at all those juicy pig intestines, man, crackling and bubbling there, stuffed with ground-up fecal matter and eyeballs, I think instead, man, I’ll go along here a little further, to a nice clean quiet restaurant, man, and order a cheese sandwich … wait a second, man, I HAVE IT! I will go to the macrobiotic restaurant for a plate of brown rice, with shredded apron in it, and perhaps some old dishrag tea. It’s a fact, man, I know a chick who worked there, and she told me she actually discovered one day, an old rag in the great Zen teapot.

Maybe I won’t go there after all, man. I could have instead, if I simply walk along here fourteen or fifteen blocks to the disgusting West Village, a sandwich stuffed with chick-peas and onions and sesame paste, called falafel, man, and if I eat one of them I’ll feel awful. No, man, I’d better think of something else. I’ve got it, man, I’ll just turn southeast here, turn completely around and walk back along Second Avenue, man, to the INDIAN RESTAURANT, man! That’s it. Have spicy hot vegetable curry, flaming tumeric coriander mustard powder cayenne pepper, inflame my stomach, make my eyes water, I’ll be farting firecrackers, man, I’d better not.

Relax, man, there is a simple enough answer. You’ll simply ride uptown on the subway to Fortieth Street, to the Blarney Stone bar, and have some home-fried potatoes and a glass of beer. And several slices of roast beef, running red with blood and probably kill me.

No, man, hold everything and start walking directly to the West Village again, to the health-food bar for a drink of carrot juice. Man, why didn’t I think of it sooner? A delicious cool orange-colored drink of vitamin A juicy carrot which will turn my skin orange and make me look weird on television. Cancel the carrot juice, man.

Instead I’ll have a plain old vegetarian cutlet at the dairy restaurant right down the block here, man, on Second Avenue once again, a vegetable cutlet, man, so heavy you think you’ve eaten sixteen hamburgers.

THAT’S IT,
MAN
! Sixteen hamburgers with onions on them, to go! Definitely, man, Forty-second Street, get out your token, we’re riding.

No, an onion roll from Yonaschimmel’s down on Delancy Street is closer, man, a hot freshly-baked onion roll. Impossible, man, I just remember Buddha advises against onions, they asphyxiate the thousand little gods of the body.

This is an existential crisis, man. My back is against the wall. I’m starving, man, and cannot find the perfect food. My all-important Love Concert is in just two more days. I must without further consideration go directly back to this lunch counter, man, and have another piña-colada, continuing my liquid diet.

“Piña-colada, man.”

“All gone, man, de piña-colada ees dry.”

“Good, man, I didn’t want one anyway. I’d better have
… wait
just a … see you later, man … I have to …”

Think it over, man. If this continues, man, I will still be walking the streets tomorrow morning at sunrise, looking for a hot dog. I’ll just buy a candy bar, that’s all, man, fuck it. No, man, candy sugar causes juvenile delinquency, don’t you read your issue of the
Weekly Compost Heap?

Walking along, man, working out the perfect diet. Old Chinese sages, man, lived on saliva. The perfect food. Only requirement is that you spend your entire life lying down, doing absolutely nothing. The Way Of Heaven. That’s it, man, that’s the diet for me.

I now know what I must do, man. I will fast tonight, and tomorrow night being the final rehearsal for the Love Concert, I will spend the entire day tomorrow in Van Cortlandt Park, eating leaves and berries and the roots of thistle bushes. I will soak up the energy of my childhood, man, and it will give me tremendous vitality for the concert on the following day. That is the program. It is sane, it is clear, it is efficient, it receives inner confirmation on my dorky-meter. My entire being responds to this suggestion, with a feeling of peace and contentment. Therefore, having solved the dilemma in a manner befitting an artist of my stature, I am going directly back to my store, to turn in for a sleep. Calmly and coolly with my entire personality reverberating, I will leave early in the morning on the subway for Van Cortlandt Park, and engage in vital meditation and nibbling shrubbery. Perhaps I will even take along a can of Beeferoni and cook it up on a fire in the woods, made in a little place of rocks. What a wonderful and well-reasoned program this is, Horse Badorties. You should be a college professor.