The Unwelcome Guest Plus Nin and Nan (5 page)

I’m tired of bringing English to the nonbelievers. I am working out here on the backwoods mission, Green Acres Community College, and am forced into reading yet another batch of freshman composition essays. We English teachers must, on a very deep level, be coprophiliacs. Why else would we subject ourselves to such misery?
They stare at me with stupid bovine faces and tell me that they just
hate
English.
I tell them to learn another damn language, then. French is easier—only a tenth of the vocabulary. Spanish is pretty easy, I’ve heard. If they don’t want to learn their mother tongue, they have plenty of other languages to choose from.
But instead of giving up, like a carpenter who only knows how to use a hammer, they give me their "in today’s society" and their "needless to say" and their lame "in conclusion" and stupefy me—they bash in my brains with their misplaced modifiers, random punctuation, and ignorant disagreements.
I’ve been dreaming about another school—a huge urban research university, with buildings the size of cathedrals and castles. I am called to the central cathedral for faculty orientation. The cathedral has dozens of entrances and exits that lead to stairwells and passageways that criss cross like in some MC Escher drawing. People are filing in from all of them. We assemble haphazardly, still milling and babbling, and are told where our classes are and when. My first class is to meet in a half hour. I have never heard of the building I am to teach in. I head towards a stairwell and walk down it to an exit, open the large exterior door, only to discover a narrow field that stretches off to the left. People are filing that way, but a few hundred yards down, marauders appear out of the woods and begin slaughtering everyone. I escape back into the building and try to find another exit. Instead, I am back in the cathedral. I see a colleague I recognize from last year, which had been my first. He begins heading down another stairwell. I ask him if that’s the way out. He says that he’s convinced that each leads down into some sublevel of one’s own consciousness. He’s gone. I return to the cathedral to get my bearings, but then decide to follow him. When I retrace my steps, I find that the one stairwell is now four. I descend one, but end up at a train station. I get on the train, thinking that at least once I get downtown, I’ll be able to get my bearings. The train descends, and its tracks lead us over and along a slime-green river. We descend into the river, and I realize I am not on a train anymore. I hear a voice saying that that had been a difficult shot to get—that he’d had to suspend the camera from a helicopter by wires and then lower it into the river as it was moving. The view comes up out of the river, and I am deposited in the shopping district. Here I find the underground mall, which leads me to an exit near the school. I need to climb up terraced slumyards unnoticed to approach one of the school’s peripheral buildings, which happens to be the faculty dorm to which I’ve been assigned. My colleagues are inside smoking and eating silver hot dogs. One, an older man, is surprised to see me. "Aren’t you supposed to be teaching tonight?" he asks.
I am decommissioned now.

Edwin Lubjec Thoth reported my existence as a government operative to the school newspaper, a psilocybin-run experiment called
My Colle’ Tree
. Being whacked-out kids, they bought the conspiracy theory wholesale. I quickly fabricated a family emergency and resigned.

The G-men said, "Move away from there." They said, "California is the place you ought to be, so load up your truck and move to Menifee." They figured Thoth’s arms didn’t reach this far west. Just to be safe, though, they kept me far away from L.A. and San Diego. I was moved into a new subdivision in what once had been wine country. Of course, with me there, it was still wine country, but that’s irrelevant.

I was given a Stewart tartan tie, but I wasn’t sure if I should tie it in a Windsor knot or not, and the only knot I know is the double Windsor, so I was dubiously dumbfounded.

Thoth, I was told, tied his in a Gordian knot, which was a clue that would allow me to see through his Protean projections.

The question was raised by some asking whether or not Thoth was
the
Projectionist. No, the reply came—he was merely
a
projectionist. However, from what I was told, I surmised that tangelo was one of his preferred colors for his ties. I knew what to look for, but I wasn’t sure whom to trust. I wasn’t sure how Lubjec had escaped the police shooting that had allegedly killed him. Perhaps he’d gone on some Möbius trip and survived his sundering by becoming twice as large. Of course, if he’d become stronger in some ways, he must have correspondingly become weaker in others. I had to find those weaknesses.

Thoth had a habit of showing up where I’d least suspect him, so I decided to "cut him off at the pass," as they say in Westerns. I decided to first look where I’d least suspect. Remembering Poe’s "Purloined Letter," I decided I should first look in my home.

I found crumbs on my kitchen counter. The shoes in my closet were mismatched. One of my t-shirts was hung up inside out. I couldn’t find my paperback atlas of the world. And a match was missing from the matchbook in my bathroom cabinet drawer. I became suspicious that Thoth was somehow coming into my home when I was asleep or gone, so I changed my locks.

I had heard from an investigator once that he’d remembered that Thoth was in Mansfield Penitentiary. "You can get ahead at the Mansfield Pen," he said. "A decapitated head."

I wondered if that was how Thoth had escaped. Like the obscure version of Captain Marvel, he’d just say, "Split!" and his body would separate into five parts: limbs, head and torso. Each could find its own way out of the pen. Like Cistern Tawdry. Like a rolling stone. Like effluvium. Like a siamang. Like bebeeru. Daffy Dean. Matt Helm. And Bozo. Dig it. No weed like you do with angels coming. Your finer self is full of crap, and Mothra comes to exterminate you, grubs spraying, worms of wisdom—shut up, you! Shut up, you! Shut up, you! Shut up, you! Shut up, you! Grubs spraying, worms of wisdom. Shut up, you! They were just crumbs in my kitchen, crumbs in my kitchen. Open my vein! I’ll bet you’ll think I’m betting against you. Won’t you? Won’t you? Mothra went up to the Mansfield Pen to see the total éclair of the shunned. I had whipped cream for their coffee, but they were just crumbs in my kitchen, crumbs in my kitchen.

"All right! Out, you crumbs! You heard the lady! And Mothra, don’t forget this grub of yours. Where’s the other one? Hey, anyone? Has anyone seen Mothra’s other grub? Ah—there it is, snackin’ off the kitchen floor. No surprise there—there’s a week’s worth of food spilled all over the floor. It cost over a thousand bucks. Why should mere mortals consume it? Oh, no—let’s give the good stuff to the grubs!"

Like the leeches in the hospital whom we feed precious human blood all in the name of the reduction of swelling, we don’t care about the reduction of swelling. We just want to feed the leeches. I found that out as a young orderly. I had no where to go—I was homeless, but the hospital staff did not know that, so I would find odd rooms to hide in and sleep or shower in when I was off duty. I was able to find a forgotten engineering room behind a false wall. I brought a perfectly okay TV up from the repair shop and was able to stay there undetected for a long time. During that time, on a nocturnal scouting mission, I found the leeches. They looked like they’d been placed in tanks with amputated limbs and freshly removed internal organs. I would have done more to investigate, but that night a medical delivery came to the hospital—an enormous truckload of drugs and supplies. An intern went from department to department, cleaned out all the tills, and paid the trucker for the delivery. Cash. Almost a quarter of a million dollars. Can you believe that? So the clamps came down. Security swarmed the building and found my nook but never connected me to it. But I could no longer sleep there, so I also lost interest in working there. I just stopped showing up. I knew of easier places to live.

The library, for example. Except my son could be a problem. One time I was in a hurry to get to the main floor and leave, so I took escalator after escalator from the living quarters on the top floors past the restaurants and stores on the middle floors to the second floor exit in the library, which one would walk through to get to the final escalator down to the street. My son, by going slow, got lost behind me twice. The second time, I went back to look for him, without success. He could have been outside alone for an hour and I wouldn’t have noticed. I’m not always observant when I’m in a hurry. He finally came back, but I was scared. So scared that I had to find a secluded spot in the upper floors of the library to have a beer to calm myself. No sooner had I found that spot, in a corner of never-read antiquarian phonetic texts, then someone remarked, "Look! They’re fighting!" and pushed past me to look out the window in that corner. On the adjacent rooftop, a couple of stories below, five or six women were arguing. One, with enormous sores on her face, yelled at another about "stealing" her "man." The yelled-at one was the flabbiest of the women and reached over one of her two defenders, who were also yelling, and landed a fist in the face of the one with sores, who dropped to the roof tar like a bundle of shingles. A crowd had gathered by the window. I wouldn’t be able to drink my beer there. Damn! Come on, I said to my son, and we went to the literary criticism collections to see if I could drink my beer unnoticed there.

Then I wondered if Thoth might not be that shared man the women were arguing over. I smiled. That’d mean that he was diseased and dying already. That he had a penchant for gummatous women was interesting. A weakness I could maybe exploit sometime.

Driving down the street, I saw his name on a marquee: "Lubjec Live!" He was singing pop songs and playing guitar in a seedy redneck bar in Macon, Georgia. He covered his balding head with an oil-stained seed company baseball cap, wore rubber flipflops, and stomped his flipflops as he sang lovely country and pop standards like "Either a Redneck or a Deadneck," "I’ll Push you Down into Low Places," "Oh Why Oh Why Ohio?" and the sure-to-get-’em hootin’ crowdpleaser "My Baby’s Been Knocked Up, So I’m Gonna Steal Me 800 Bucks."

The whole fucking bar starting singing the song, and then, on cue, they all turned to me like zombies and when they sang "800 Bucks," they held their hands out and started walking towards me.

"I’ll be your friend," said one. "Give me 800 bucks." "I’ll be your friend," said another. "Give me 800 bucks." I didn’t know these people at all, but I had once loaned

Lubjec 800 dollars for a demo he was going to cut with a band. Ironically, he used it, instead, to cut his unborn son out of his girlfriend’s womb. Just like the song. And then the band broke up, and he never repaid me. He wouldn’t even return my calls. Nor did he continue to pursue my friendship.

When he saw me walking in, he must have told these zombies I was an easy mark. If you’re ever in Macon, be careful. The zombies live in the sewers, and Lubjec’s people are the gatekeepers. Don’t plumb to
their
depths.

Now that I think about it, I wish I had given them all 800 bucks so that they could have eliminated an entire generation of themselves. Someone needs to break the chain of two-faced back-stabbing thieving conniving sneaky manipulating weasels most of them are, spewing, "Oh, ain’t you just
so
nice" in your face while they hold their pointed tails and pitchforks behind their backs where you can’t see. Lubjec’s their new hope, or was at least. They killed off Otis Redding and Duane Allman and Berry Oakley. They ran Little Richard out on a rail. They threw James Brown in jail. And then, all of a sudden, booming international music metropolis Macon, who’d hosted Cher and Iron Butterfly and Martin Mull and dozens of other internationally known artists, given them homes and recording contracts and made them stars, was suddenly empty. Real estate tycoons brought in cherry trees and paid for huge birthday parties for themselves in the city streets, but ruses and rubes couldn’t replace what had been lost. Macon lost rock and roll and became a city of beasts that fuck themselves. And they have barbed pricks like raccoons, so you can hear them scream. And the screaming sounds like 5000 Chuckie dolls all singing in unison, "Whatcha gonna be, either a redneck or a deadneck? Yew got no other option round here. You gonna be a redneck or a flyspeck? If yer the ladder, stay out of my beer."

Twang twang twang twang. Scream!
You’d think they’d go through a ton of Excedrin in Macon—I did—but apparently they have no actual use for it there.
Amid the exhaustingly sweet-glazed billboards between there and here are interjected proclamations of transcendence: Biblical warnings, certainly, but others much subtler: "The last umbrella you’ll ever own," for example.
Why? Will the rain cease to fall? Will I drop dead when I open it? Unwilling to broadcast my ignorance. I try to avoid what I can. I imagine these transcendent proclamations a type of alien creature sent to disrupt our freeways. The proclamations begin to address this concern: Remove the feathers from your eyes! Use these coins instead. They grow into enormous unstable currencies. Don’t end it with humor, no matter how the highway howls. The rain falls only on the highway. Climb the hills. Look out on the land. When it looks back, you’ve reached your destination. Don’t be late for the time-share presentation! Employment is shifting away from the highway and heading for the caves. Blast ’em open! Why not? Your head is your leader. The leader wants more coins!
Chevy Chase picked up the beers and Dan Aykroyd Tim Robbins brought the weed. We drove to the lake, got drunk and stoned, sat in the trees, threw rocks into the water, and did nothing. They, of course, knew each other better than they knew me, though I’d become a good friend recently.
Chevy’d pick me up and always had beers for the drive and then we’d get Dan Tim. Dan Tim would roll a bomber one-handed and we’d smoke it in the car on the way to the lake. We found a service shack and stored more beer in there.
They’d jab at each other a little. Chevy would make fun of the time Dan Tim was married to Farrah Fawcett. Or maybe it was Dan Tim making fun of Chevy. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t serious. No coins were blasted here.
During the cocaine era, Edwin used to call himself "L.T." for "Lubjec Thoth" but also in homage to his favorite cocaine-snorting linebacker. Briefly L.T. was big in celebrity circles and was even Bill Murray’s ex-roommate. L.T. and I were living and working in an enormous space inside a mall. The space was filled with what we thought was a mall. The space was filled with what we thought was a Flavors shop, and our selection was only slightly more extensive. Mostly we sold bestsellers on discount.
We needed the rest of the space for our elaborate living quarters, with its wine cellar and separate suites. We had a large communal living room across a small false hall from the store’s false back door. Here we’d relax and entertain while one of us minded the shop.
L.T. was a tall, balding classical guitarist with great talent but an insufficient sense of vocation to go anywhere with his music. His gawky awkwardness gave him a fragility on stage that would have translated into great success had he used it. Women saw this in him and surrounded him eagerly, hoping to be the ones to loose his potential. None of them did, and he never to my knowledge took unfair advantage of their enamorations.
The store was ostensibly owned by St. Izzy’s High School, but was ignored by it for the most part, except when semesters were beginning. A trade bookstore in a mall receives substantially higher discounts on books than a text bookstore does, so the school was able to profit sufficiently from the discount difference.
That all these women would come in to see L.T. and he wouldn’t do anything about it would bother me. The prettiest of them, Angie, was always hanging around. I liked Angie, but her sister was more interesting. Whereas Angie was perfect in every regard except she was somewhat shortchanged in the thinking department, Amelia was funny-looking, with a big nose, goofy hair, and Mick Jagger lips, but she was smart. She read William Gass and could hold conversations about real writers.
Unfortunately, Amelia was dating a low-life named Vlad, whose greatest ambition was to take apart a carburetor and reassemble it, and who treated Amelia terribly. But he took her attentions, and I was left pretty much unnoticed. Which meant I stayed at the register more than L.T.
Well, one day, while L.T. was in back with Angie, probably just talking, the fool, Duggan came in the store, right when it was really busy and I had a long line. Duggan was a bad boy legend from St. Izzy’s. As a senior he had set off a pipe bomb in a bathroom and had blown off half of the face of some freshman. But Duggan’s dad was a congressman, so nothing ever happened to Duggan.
It’d always been my instinct to hate him. This time, he picked up seven or so books, piled them on the counter and said to me he had a faculty discount. I almost choked. I knew there was no way in Christendom that the school had hired him as a teacher. I couldn’t imagine Duggan ever even finishing high school.
"No," I said to him, staring him in the eye. "You’re not on faculty."
He was about to argue, but the line of customers was so long I took the next one over him and rang her up. Duggan picked up his books and backed away to make room for her.
Two customers later, I realized Duggan and the books were both gone. I told my customer and the line to excuse me, and I went back to get L.T. to cover for me so I could comb the mall for Duggan.
L.T. went out front, sniffing about it, but, just as I was about to leave, Amelia came into the back area. I thought she wanted to see Angie, but Amelia pushed me right back into my suite. She started telling me about how she knew I’d always liked her, and she took my head in her hands and tried to kiss me. I had no idea what had come over her, but the idea of Duggan's getting away crowded her out. "I have to go," I told her. "I’ve got to catch a shoplifter. Wait here." I headed out toward the exit, hoping to find him, and there was Duggan, detained in conversation. Just then, I saw another St. Izzy’s alumnus coming into the mall, none other than L.T.’s old roommate and Duggan’s old classmate, movie star Bill Murray. "Bill!" I yelled. "Get Duggan! He hasn’t paid!"
Murray looked around and saw Duggan. Duggan was trying to weasel his way out of there, but Murray and I were upon him in an instant. "Duggan," I said, "you have two choices. You pay for these books or you can go to jail right now."
Duggan paid and was on his way. Murray and I went out of the mall and sat on the lawn for a while and decompressed.
I asked him about his years at St. Izzy’s and told him about mine, about how I got a job on the radio station so I could get out of Latin and how I’d go up on the roof and smoke pot and listen to old Genesis and Martin Mull and Allman Brothers records. I told him about my novels, and he asked me which my worst was.
I told him about
A Million-Year Centipede
, my first, which was about my visit to the Morrison Hotel in L.A. on the seventh anniversary of Jim Morrison’s "death." I figured Morrison had thought of L.A. as "the land of the fair and the strong and the wise."
Just then, we heard a helicopter overhead. Murray’s mom, a helicopter pilot, was hovering over us. She lowered a rope ladder to us, and we climbed it up to the helicopter. This helicopter had a truck bed and auxiliary wings for emergency gliding, and it was to these auxiliary wings that we strapped ourselves.
She took off and spun the chopper. I was amused for a while, but then I noticed my straps were loose. I climbed out of my straps and up into the truck bed. Murray’s mom stopped spinning and took us back to the house/store/mall.
Some time passed, and I was in the living room with Amelia, holding her on the couch while we watched a movie on TV. L.T. and Angie were there, too. The store had closed for the night.
Murray was in the hallway, and we could see him. He showed us a blue steel plate picture he had of a dancing girl in a grass skirt. He began nailing the plate to the store’s false front. As we was hanging it, he began singing, "Oh, she’s come home, for she’s an evil sculpture! Ah, hah! Oh, she’s come home..."
Credits roll. The end.
Thoth is a bare-assed baboon whose name, ironically, means "the learned one." He’s learned how to show off his red ass, that’s all.
He was playing on our church-league soccer team once when he drew two yellow cards, both for smarting off at the referee. Of course, with the second card he earned a red card as well and was ejected. He pulled down his shorts and gave the ref his own red calling card. He was suspended for the season for that.
I wondered how he got it so red. Did he use sandpaper to wipe with? Was he still being spanked? He deserved a nail-studded two-by-four across the head, not a little paddling of the bum.
That little pudding of a brain that stirs around in Lubjec congeals itself around the topic of betrayal of a friend. Betrayal is his raison d’être. His sins are not important. They are ubiquitous. Whatever he said was too good for us. He tried so very hard to get us to see the truth. He endured us, we whose writing is merely means to an end.
Yes!
His
end! If you see this base turd on the road, squash him with your oxfords. How erudite he will seem then, Mr. I-Was-Too-Smart-to-Waste-My-Time-at-CollegeBecause-I-Had-Already-Been-Offered-a-Six-Figure-Job-Holding-My-Thumb-Down-on-the-Boss’s-Chair-so-He-CouldSit-on-It-Whenever-He-Pleased, Mr. I-Love-Big-BusinessEspecially-the-Big-Oil-Companies-Because-I-Suck-Too, Mr. I-Spread-Mayonnaise-on-the-Chrome-of-My-Car’s-RearBumper.
His biography will be entitled
To Please the Boss
. You’ve heard of people who don’t know up from down? I tell you Lubjec actually thought "the Netherlands" was a reference to Hell. As a Frisian, I have problem with that. And I presume his God is something like Ned Beatty in the movie
Network
. What seemed like impossibly strange prophecy then is our current commonplace reality now. The corporations control the nations, the media makes the news, and the corporations own all media. Everything is a commodity.
Lubjec worked as an advertising photographer for years. He created images on command, images designed to hoodwink the unalert. And who can remain alert for long in this world? Televisions, billboards, magazines, radios all thumping us, bashing our heads in until we submit, knocking us unconscious so we can be fed subliminally. And the controllers have us thanking them for having pounded us into oblivion: We foolishly believe the oblivion to be freedom, a release from their control, but even there they have lined the streets with their billboards. Dante is nothing more than a brand name now. Didn’t Dante write all the Archies’ songs? Ah, ha!
Maybe Lubjec is right. Perhaps there’s no real joy in life. Life is nothing but people hurting each other until they die. The only truly free person is the person who is free of hope. We are misery. Only the insane and deluded could think otherwise.
Should I cast my lot with the insane and deluded? Should I hold onto the iron life-raft that is hope? Or should I wake up and realize that the abuse that is heaped on me is more than richly deserved? I deserve worse. I am the miserable cretin. Lubjec is merely a realist. I resent his honesty. It interferes with my fantasy of a life that is worth living. I’m a chump.
I
am the em-bare-assed baboon. Do I now hold sufficient wisdom to survive this world? Or am I just another cracked vessel? A crack pot, as folks used to say before they meant different things by "crack" and "pot." Or did they? Thoth is truth. Thought is not. Blind obeisance and total resignation to the will of our corporate leaders is the only permissible response. Look around yourself— commodities are facing you right now! Rush out and buy whatever it is that’s being advertised! Now!
Or: reject the unwelcome guest who comes to occupy your head.