Candy (19 page)

Anyway, I just wanted to put you in the general picture here in Racine. Do let us hear from you, Can-baby—all the best, and don’t take any wooden organ!

A
UNT
L
IVIA

With the letter’s early reference to “menstruating,” Candy had been sharply reminded of her own problem in this regard and hardly took in the rest, skimming it with disapproval because of some of the questionable phrases. She put the letter away and had a few sips of Coke before opening the other. It read:

Caught up in the sickening coil-spin of this lewd city—the waiting in bistros, the feigning, the crooked smile and the cold gray winter of sodden remorse, the bone-dry jacked-off emptiness of everything—hardly the trappings for a frothy letter of affectionate concern . . . and yet, with a nightmare grimace of hilarity frozen onto my heartbreak, do I take pen to hand and say how very much I would like to have some of your snapping-turtle puss.

F
RIEND

Candy read and reread the letter. Was it from Derek? Parts of it, of course, were pure poetry, and Candy wondered if it hadn’t after all been written by Jack Katt or Tom Smart, perhaps the only persons in the Village capable of real poetry. And yet, it may have been automatic-writing or stream-of-consciousness from Derek! She was terribly excited at the idea, and finished her Coke in two gulps. Then she got up and went downstairs and out onto the boulevard. She had just begun walking along when she felt a sudden damp warmth down inside her little honey-pouch, and she knew her dear period had finally come! “Thank Goodness!” she said, and looked at once for a drugstore where she could get some junior Tampons. She finally spotted an herb shop and went in. The ancient native keeper was squatting on the floor smoking hemp and could not understand her at all. Candy, the shy precious, would not make the necessary gestures to convey her meaning, so at last had to leave and go back to the American Express, where she borrowed a Tampon from one of the secretaries. It was not a junior-size but a regular, and the adorable girl fretted about whether or not it would go in—but she did finally manage somehow, and then, happy and secure, she was off to the great temple at the end of Zen Boulevard.

On the way she passed the ageless “holy man” who had been pointed out to her already as being one of the most advanced of India’s mystics—an ash- and dung-covered old man wearing a simple loincloth, he seemed in a state of complete oblivion as he inched his way forward. Evidently, he was going to the temple too. A number of American tourists were following him along, taking pictures of him, trying to get him to pose, smile, or react in some way by offering him money and bits of bread. He seemed quite unaware of their presence however, shuffling along like a man in a trance, and when a cute little girl of six was sent up to him by one of the mothers to get his autograph, he appeared not even to see her. This caused a certain amount of bitter feeling in the crowd of tourists.

“Well, I think
that’s
taking it too far,” one woman was heard to say with indignation, “to just
ignore
that cute little child like that! ‘Holy’ or not, that’s just plain
not nice!”

“
Hole-in-the-head is more like it if my guess is any good!” said the little girl’s father, trying to comfort the child now. “It’s all right, Doreen, he’s just not a nice man!”

It made Candy furious to see these tourists wandering around, gawking at the temples and the holy men.

“They advertise that they want tourists,” one of the men was saying, “they tell you you’ll be welcome in their country—then we come over here, pour plenty of good dollars into the economy, and what happens? We get the cold shoulder from a bum like that! If it was the cold shoulder I was looking for, I could of gotten that in Newark! By gosh, somebody ought to punch the guy one in the snoz!”

“Oh Tom,” said his wife, touching his arm, “he just doesn’t
know
any better! Didn’t you see how he refused the money?”

“Well, he’s not too old to learn, is he? He’s a
nut,
if you ask me!”

Candy wanted to scoop the holy man up in her arms and run to the temple as fast as she could. Fortunately though, at that moment the tourists began turning away toward one of the picturesque side streets.

“We saw the Hindu rope-trick this morning,” one of the women was saying, “a little boy climbed right up into the sky and out of sight—Goodness, I’ll bet he hadn’t had a bath in a month! Why they let their children get so dirty is beyond me!”

“There’s a guy down this street supposed to have a ‘flying-carpet,’” said a big-stomached man wearing a floral sport shirt and smoking a cigar, “. . . gives six rupees to the buck too—I don’t like the black-market idea myself, but with these prices, who’s gotta choice? Know what I mean?” All this sort of talk just made Candy wring her hands in grief—she only hoped that the holy man hadn’t heard and become upset. She wanted to kiss him, or in some way reassure him, but was uncertain whether she should and so merely walked along slowly behind him.

Although they were only about a block from the temple, the holy man’s progress was so astonishingly slow that an hour passed before they reached the great steps—whereupon the holy man, like a snail coming to an impasse, merely turned away and began to inch along in another direction. He wasn’t going to the temple after all! Good Grief! thought Candy, and at just that moment the temple clock sounded three and she remembered her appointment with the travel office—where she was to complete arrangements for her journey to Tibet—and she had to fly back down Zen Boulevard to the American Express.

A week later, Candy had gotten herself a little attic room in Lhasa, the holy center of Tibet. The American Express in Lhasa had been extremely helpful in finding her a place where the landlady would bring Candy a bowl of porridge each morning in exchange for the girl’s assistance two hours a day in winding yak-yarn onto a spindle.

The house was only a short distance from the fabulous temple of Zen-Dowa, and Candy went there every day for meditation, sitting before the huge image of Buddha and focusing all her attention on the nose tip of the great idol.

When she arrived at the temple this afternoon, the sky above Lhasa was overcast deeply to the hue of rich slate, and Candy paused on the steps of the temple to look out at the snow-peaked mountains against this backdrop of foreboding; the white-top mountains appeared to her allegorically as the bright pinnacles of hope in a trouble-darkened world. She was extremely happy in her new life and did a little twirl of joy now on the great temple porch. The precious girl was still wearing the simple Cracker garment, which, as she twirled, billowed out to permit a glimpse of her darling dimpled knees and a marvelous and tantalizing bit above. It was then that she noticed, sitting in the corner, the holy man she had seen in Calcutta. How on earth had he gotten to Lhasa! Had he inched his way up the Himalayas? It looked as though he might have—he was enshelled in a crust of mud, dung and ash, his hair so matted that it was more like clay than anything else—and Candy was sure that he was in the coveted sixth stage of spiritual advancement; she herself was still always fresh and sweet. . . she had had six more of the simple Cracker shifts made and so she had a fresh change each day. She could not help staring in awe and reverence at this holy dung-man, who, as in Calcutta, seemed entirely unaware of her presence, either now or earlier when her twirl of joy had flashed a dazzling stretch of superb ivory thigh.

Then it suddenly began to rain. The holy man was sitting near the edge of the porch, only half sheltered, and drops of rain were falling on him. Despite her shyness, Candy couldn’t bear the idea of his saintly dung-crust being damaged and she rushed over to him impulsively and began to pull him up and away toward the temple door. He was quite thin and pliable and made no resistance whatever, allowing himself to be taken inside the temple, and then seated beside the girl in front of the great image of the holy Buddha.

Candy began her meditation at once, concentrating all her attention on the single spot, the tip of Buddha’s nose. It was wonderful for her—all her life it had always been
she
who had been needed by someone else—mostly boys—and now at last she had found someone that she herself needed . . . Buddha! And yet, because of her early orientation, of always being the needed one (except by Daddy!), there was something vaguely dissatisfying and incomplete about it. If only the Buddha needed her! But she knew of course that this was a silly feeling and would in time be overcome. She had already begun to think of the Buddha in a personal, almost human way. “My big friend,” she sometimes said to herself. She glanced at the holy man sitting beside her. He seemed to be paying no attention to her or Buddha, but was simply gazing ahead, into infinity it seemed, while on the roof of the temple now the rain beat down terrifically and an occasional gigantic clap of thunder seemed to make the huge structure shudder to its foundations.

Candy returned her thought and concentration to the Buddha’s nose, and put every last ounce of her little meditative power into it—and at that very instant a fantastic thing happened: an astounding crash of sound that seemed to split the earth itself and a tremendous flash of fire which filled the great vaulted roof of the temple while everything around seemed to sway and crumple as though the end of the world had surely come—for the great temple had been struck by lightning! Above them the huge Buddha loomed uncertainly for a breathtaking moment, then, in monumental slow motion, it toppled forward, pitching headlong to the temple floor in a veritable explosion.

Although it seemed to fall right on top of them, Candy and the holy man were miraculously unscathed, and were left bunched together, half buried in the rubble. In the tumult of the crash, Candy had been flung against the holy man frontally so that now they were pressed tightly together lengthwise. It was extremely awkward, for the young girl’s shift had been forced well above her waist and her shapely bare limbs now were locked about the holy man’s loins. She struggled to free herself but this only succeeded in agitating her precious and open honeypot against the holy man’s secret parts—which were now awakening after so many years and slowly breaking through the rotten old loincloth that swaddled them! Good Gosh, thought Candy, when she realized what was happening, and in fact, felt the holy man’s taut member ease an inch or two into her tight little lamb-pit. She quickly turned her head to see behind her and to determine what was pinioning them there. And she saw that a part of the huge Buddha had just missed them by inches, and was pressing firmly against her back; it seemed to be balanced in a precarious way and in danger of slipping—and, even as she thought this, she saw that it
was
in fact slipping, forward, and against her; it was a section of her beloved Buddha’s face—the nose! And a truly incredible thing was happening—it was slipping into Candy’s marvelous derriere! “Good Grief!” said the girl, half aloud, trying to move forward a little—which merely had the effect of securely embedding the holy man’s member deeply into her ever-sweetening pudding-pie.

Above them the lightning bolt had opened a sizable hole at the top of the roof and the summer rain was pouring in on them now in torrents. It had wetted the tip of the Buddha’s nose, which did seem, thus lubricated, to be undeniable as it moved slowly into Candy’s coyly arched tooky—the warm wet nose of Buddha, the beloved spot of her meditation! Not a wholly unpleasant sensation for the adorable girl as it gracefully eased into her perfect bottom; and it was then that she realized, with the same lightning force of miracle which had split the roof, that wonder of wonders,
the Buddha, too, needed her!
And so with a sigh of indulgence she stopped her shy squirming and gave herself up fully to her idol, one hand behind her, stroking his cheek, as she gradually began the esoteric Exercise Number Four—and only realizing after a minute that this movement was having a definite effect on the situation in her honey-cloister as well, forcing the holy man’s member deeply in and out as it did, and she turned to him at once, wanting to tell him that it
wasn’t
meant the way it seemed certainly, but she was stricken stone dumb by what she saw—for the warm summer rain had worked its wonders there as well, washing the crust of dung and ash away completely, leaving the face clean, bright, and all too recognizable, as the eyes glittered terrifically while the hopeless ecstasy of his huge pent-up spasm began, and sweet Candy’s melodious voice rang out through the temple in truly mixed feelings:

GOOD GRIEF—IT’S DADDY!”

A Biography of Terry Southern

Terry Southern (1924–1995) was an American satirist, author, journalist, screenwriter, and educator and is considered one of the great literary minds of the second half of the twentieth century. His bestselling novels—
Candy
(1958), a spoof on pornography based on Voltaire’s
Candide
, and
The Magic Christian
(1959), a satire of the grossly rich also made into a movie starring Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr—established Southern as a literary and pop culture icon. Literary achievement evolved into a successful film career, with the Academy Award–nominated screenplays for
Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
(1964), which he wrote with Stanley Kubrick and Peter George, and
Easy Rider
 (1969), which he wrote with Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper.

Born in Alvarado, Texas, Southern was educated at Southern Methodist University, the University of Chicago, and Northwestern, where he earned his bachelor’s degree. He served in the Army during World War II, and was part of the expatriate American café society of 1950s Paris, where he attended the Sorbonne on the GI Bill. In Paris, he befriended writers James Baldwin, James Jones, Mordecai Richler, and Christopher Logue, among others, and met the prominent French intellectuals Jean Cocteau, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus. His short story “The Accident” was published in the inaugural issue of the
Paris Review
in 1953, and he became closely identified with the magazine’s founders, Harold L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen and George Plimpton, who became his lifelong friends. It was in Paris that Southern wrote his first novel,
Flash and Filigree
(1958), a satire of 1950s Los Angeles.