UNTITLED, CRABWALKING

ME:

I was listening to President Reagan's obie-winning rendition of Paradise Lost and it struck me: Milton's notion of God is that of a creator-battery whose juice expended upon the universe. Humans, then, were harvestable bits in God's odd garden below, and in the story Satan's master plan is to co-opt these energy bits to somehow escape from hell's reaming flames and regain heaven's joyful mouth.

GERALD:

Fuhst off, I don't follow the bible. And secuhnd, I don't appreciate no classical works dictating my ideas of heaven-n-heck. If there was supposed to be a God, he'd 've turned 9/11 into a giant candy and hot dog factory explosion where only a brave few died but his power's 're such that he'd make it rain. Candy. Raining Candy and Hailing Hot Dogs, and we'd all be terrible sad about the factory workers and their families, but good'd be our common grief to throw afore the plight of low-income wastrels, uneducated folk with the fear of God in their roots, Americans who vote against their economic interest as long as the candidates supports whites and guns and God - and shame on those thick-smarmed liberals, decrying decent folk who forgo Mammon for the supposition of a higher power worth upholding - but economics were damned anyway when the exploded victims' relatives got rich themselves, considering all the the book deals and suing deals about the Candy-Hot-Dog-Gun factory bust-up; hunger impossible with gift baskets for the bereaved, filled with comfort foods, toys, and liquor, some baskets consisting only of gold whiskey bottles sprouting from within like Sex herself!


Uncle Fuck went on CNN with Wolf Blitzer and spat fire about the miles of red tape he faced when filing his grievance claims from the fed's CHDG Factory Fund, and the white Wolf howled like a heated bitch dripping something journalistic, though Uncle Fuck didn't explain that the main problem was his lack of understanding the written word, but by then it didn't matter. Well, you can guess that the tape was played the next morning in the Oval Office, and the president put his commander hands on that broad wood desk and shouted "C'mon guys, let's help Uncle Fuck out," so loud that everyone's hair blew back in a wicked gust and the room smelt of early-morning coffee breath for days.

So Uncle Fuck got his money. But a few months later an underage prostitute with the nomme de hooker of Crystal Amy Roughton comes shuffling in to the local precinct with a battered face and broken wrists. She's wrinkled red like a dry cherry, but manages to drop a man's wallet with one of her dangling swollen hands, and before she falls to the ground, she points at the wallet and mutters: "this muhrfuckeh smashe muh faish ups". Arrested and investigated, Uncle Fuck, turns out, was a professional huckster who ran with Smyrna's elite, themselves a bunch of nouveau riche real-estate developers and perfume barons (or so I thought from their smell, because even at home they reeked of cheap sleeze while watching their dull shows that rivaled even my own dullest deeds. If they ever made a television show about me and my own, they'd realize that sitting around and smoking weed is boring as hell, although we'd probably be laughing all the way to Vegas 'cause by then we'd be mingling in tit bars with the relatives of dead factory workers, drinking liquor made from jew marrow and other delights). Rattled, they disowned the fallen rebel and local politicians were quick to return most of the campaign money that he'd dropped off over the years, an amount not enough even for a bucket of gasoline. After the CNN appearance he had become a hell of a celebrity, encapsulating the anger of his time, but the arrest ended that with as much certitude as God's final fart on the seventh day. The news reached the world in one great chattering inflow, like mothers at a baby convention shrieking about formulae or tender aureolae, and I'm sure some such gets said at these gatherings but you can't claim they care about all them babies that aren't their own.