Terra Insanus Read online

  And she waited and waited, until....

  Clicking sounds and a metallic snap! woke her from a throbbing sleep. The door was opening.

  “Help! Help me!” she wailed as best she could, pounding her scuffed and bloodied nubs on the door face. “Let me out!”

  In her zeal, though, in the rigors of this exciting and even angelic revitalization, she lost her balance, canted up on a hip, and—

  “Oh, shit!”

  —wobbled back and tumbled down the stairs.

  Some god. Nevertheless, Priscilla could hack it, couldn’t she? After being raped by vagabonds, pissed in, starved, and divorced of her extremities? Disallowed to bathe, forced to watch underground pornography, threatened with the murder of her only child, and coerced to lick fecal residue off her husband’s rectum—for six years? Certainly, a spill down the stairs amounted to nothing compared to that.

  She thumped down head over stumps to the bottom, groggily rearranged herself, and focused her sunken Dachau eyes up the flight of stairs. A timid, hesitant figure lingered—

  “Help me!”

  —then began to come down.

  Then this person, this angel more resplendent than the Archangel Gabriel Himself, stepped into the fetid light. It was Ricky.

  “Are...are you...are you all right?”

  Priscilla crawled forward on wrist-nubs and knees, her matted hair shaking white flakes, her gut sucking. “Ricky!” came her parched scream. “I saw the wedding on the news, the heart attack! I know what I must look like but don’t be afraid! It’s me! It’s your mother! Fenton cut off my hands and feet and has kept me down here naked for six years!”

  The figure above her stood poised. “Ah, well...I know.”

  “You...” Priscilla swallowed her perplexion as surely as she swallowed so much feces, semen, smegma, urine, and—of course—spaghetti, in the past.

  “Dad told me all about it,” her son affirmed, “while we were upstairs watching the videos. Great stuff, huh? Especially the snuff. But I just want you to know that everything’s fine.”

  Fine, she thought, staring as the dead might stare up out of a corpse-pit.

  “Fine?”

  “I even came down here some nights, when you were asleep in your chair, to look at you. You really are very beautiful, Mother.” Ricky then set down two opened cans of spaghetti. “Sorry you weren’t fed for so long, complications, you know, with the wedding and Dad dying and all. Wendy’s wonderful. Wendy DePiester? You remember her. You used to go to bridge club with her mother. She’s so beautiful, Mother, and—well, I didn’t tell Dad this but—she’s already pregnant. You’ll have a grandchild in eight months!”

  The word burped from her soul. “Fine.” Then two more words. “My. God.”

  “You’ll do it, right?” Ricky politely inquired of his mother. “I mean, you know, if you don’t, I’ll have no choice but to kill the kid. I’d have to rape the baby to death and film it, to make you watch. You don’t want me to do that, do you?”

  Priscilla simultaneously vomited and shit bile when she saw what her beloved son was doing next.

  He’d dropped his trousers, sat on the toilet, and was quite loudly moving his bowels.

  Then he stood up and turned, leaned over, and spread his buttocks with his hands.

  “You’ll do it, right, Mother? Like you did for Dad?”

  Priscilla, then, out of no other recourse but instinct, began to crawl forward on her nubs and knees. After all, she had the baby to think of now, didn’t she? Yes, she crawled forward and began to lick.

  Shit-House

  [-the final edit-]

  “The world,” the protagonist whispers to himself. It’s a very intent whisper, and a focused one. He is gazing out the window. It’s so black outside. Surreally black, like anthracite in bright light. He thinks of some Lovecraftian excrescence summoned by occult science. The blackness is all-pervading and unutterable. A luminous abyss—

  Yes, I think. The world.

  In your head, you hear Howard Devoto’s greatest words:

  “This is forever, the final edit...”

  [-delicate cutters-]

  It’s a song by Throwing Muses. Perhaps, one day, he’ll start his own band and call them Throwing Up Muses, because that’s how he feels most of the time, whenever he dares to look out his window. Music is a muse. Oh, Sisters of the Heavenly Spring, assist my verse and arm my prose, so to let the word be the mirror of the thing. Dante molested.

  The protagonist has dreams based on music, like the stuff Shelley sent back in the old days, or all those Fields of the Nephilim and Skinny Puppy tapes that Hodge recorded for him. Delicate nightmares which proffer a vision that—oh, yeah!—he can really relate to. It’s a cumulative process, you know. Music that taps the sewer pipe of his mind.

  It’s his sewer pipe, indeed, but it’s not his shit that flows there. It’s the world’s.

  Flesh melded to gray, stoic metal. Machine oil blood, ball-bearing joints, and metal-alloy bone. Time-drip iv bags droop to morphine/epinephrin needles genetically adhered to wormlike blue veins as the beat goes on...

  The clanging industrial metal beat of the delicate cutters in his head, boring down deep into the brainpulp.

  To get to the really good shit.

  [-news around the world-]

  A woman a former nurse in Rio de Janeiro knocked her ex-boyfriend out with sodium amobarbital when he awoke he was handcuffed to her bed she snipped his penis off with a pair of shingle shears injected him with Desoxyn so he wouldn’t lose consciousness and then she cut the penis up into little pieces with a knife and fork and made him eat it piece by piece.

  An interesting query at the very least...

  What does raw cock taste like?

  A heyday of cuisine!

  Cock Fondue. Sweet and Sour Penis. Spicy Cajun Pecker Gumbo. Cold Poached Dick Tenders in Mustard-Sorrel Sauce. Osso Cocko.

  ***

  A man in Seattle pretended to be elated when his wife announced she was pregnant when she was late in her third trimester two men pulled her out of her car at a mall drove her to a an empty office building that was scheduled to be knocked down they took her to the fourth floor and threw her down an elevator shaft then dropped cinderblocks on her belly until she miscarried and died.

  The husband paid them $250 each for the job.

  ***

  The Anne Arundel County Police will tell you that Davidsonville, Maryland, is “the best body dump” in the state.

  ***

  A Florida man got a 25-year prison sentence for raping a 15-year-old girl and cutting her arms off at the elbows. The girl didn’t die, so they couldn’t charge him with murder.

  He was released after 8 years for good behavior.

  Not long after, he raped, then murdered, then raped another woman.

  ***

  The Serbians killed close to 250,000 Bosnians and have raped, via military field order, over 60,000 women and children. Serbian guard squads that succeeded in impregnating detained Bosnian women receive commendations in writing and extra weekend passes. The Bosnians did the same thing to the Serbians for 400 years but that’s besides the point, and this was all 20 years ago anyway. ISIS makes them all look like amateurs.

  ***

  Trade deficit bedamned! Who says foreign countries don’t buy U.S. goods? The Chilean Secret Police once used, specifically, Black and Decker power tools with which to torture “political” offenders.

  It’s a name you can trust. Black and Decker.

  ***

  10,000 American children disappear every year and are never seen again.

  [-pedophilia party. rockin’!-]

  It’s okay for a Democratic congressman to have sex with 16-year-old boys but—goddamn!—if a Republican congressman has sex with 16-year-old girls, there will be hell to pay!

  ***

  In Nurnburg, Germany, you saw a porn flick where two German guys were having sex with 6-year-olds. They greased their foot- long penises up wit
h Vaseline, then went to work.

  Very gently, of course.

  After all, child pornography was legal then.

  ***

  According to an F.B.I. magazine that an ex-girlfriend gave you, there is an entity in America known as “The Circuit” which entails coded “mail-drops” and anonymous “points” through which child pornography videos are distributed to eager patrons. “Kp” and “kiddy” is what the feds call it. They’re not sure but it may be as great as a half-billion-dollar-per-year industry, and nobody knows about it. They snatch kids and “turn” them, put them in “the show” until they get too old—like about 12—then make them work the street till they’re about 18 and considered “beat.” Then they sell the kids to Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and Japan.

  ***

  Rocco “The Eye” Monstroni ran regional “point” for a Sicilian-based “crime-pyramid.” Someone dropped dime on the fuck and he pleaded for Federal Witness Protection and Identity Reassignment in exchange for turning federal evidence. He spun like a top. He sang like my fuckin’ green parakeet, and the feds buried half a dozen wise guys in the stone motel for life plus ninety-nine years.

  After the trial, the federal prosecutor asked Monstroni: “How could you do it? How could you perpetrate child pornography?”

  Monstroni glared and answered: “I didn’t perpetrate nothin’. The sick slimebags who buy the shit—they’re the ones who perpetrate it. If people want somethin’, and they’re willing to pay, then there’s always gonna be someone who’ll get it for ‘em. Frankly, the shit made me sick.”

  Interesting point, though.

  Good job, Americans. Real good job!

  [-be all that you can be, in the army-]

  “It tastes kind of like pork, when you cook it right. You grind it up and fry it, but always grind up some fat and wild onion with it,” Sergeant E-5 Sand told the wide-eyed, awestruck, young recruit.

  “When you’re in the bush, and you’re starving... You’ll eat.”

  ***

  APERS (anti-personnel) also known as “Beehive,” compliments of the U.S. Army Munitions Command. A 105 or 120mm tank projectile with selectable proximity fuse. The round contains 1500 “fleshettes” or barbs which are deliberately rusted, to incite latent blood poisoning. It’s a shotgun shell fired out of a tank.

  “Beehive, Westmore,” Sergeant Sand recommends. “If you ever go into combat, load plenty of beehive in your ready rack. One cap will clear a crowded football field, no lie. We nailed gook kids to the trees a dime a dozen with beehihve.”

  ***

  Bravo 1/83, 3rd Brigade, 1st Armored Division, Erlangen, West Germany. I was in our battalion maintenance shed, hand-polishing lug wrenches because we had IG inspection coming up. IG inspections are a bitch, let me tell you. So out on the pad an HE operator on an M88 crane was lifting a five-ton, 750 horse-power diesel engine out of a deadlined M60A1-series tank. The engine is suspended about seven feet in the air, and then some black batt mechanic walks under the engine to open the trans plug. A blue static premonitory chill runs up my spine as I’m standing in the shed, watching– He’s dead, I think—and sure enough, the operator’s hand slips, and that five-ton engine free falls right smack-dab on the black mechanic’s head. In visual shock, I call the post medical unit, and while I’m on the phone, my platoon leader, some Johnny Brown-Bar West Point pussy motherfucker named H——, who’s the commander of a armor platoon, mind you, but doesn’t know the difference between a tank track and a race track, he barges into the company maintenance shed, and orders: “Goddam it, Westmore! What are you doing on the phone! Get your ass out there and hose that blood off the pad ASAP! We’ve got an IG in less than an hour! I’m not gonna blow an IG because you wanna waste time calling an ambulance for a dead nigger!”

  [-the album of sergeant sand-]

  You know it’s all true, all the things he did...

  Sand’s victor, an M60-straight strangely with no bore- evacuator, backed up into a defensive position in the Vietnam jungle, a wooden stake jutting from the bustle rack. A severed human head on the end of the stake.

  ***

  Sand’s German girlfriend on her hands and knees, distending her anus to a round, empty hole the size of the top of a beer can, and Sand about to admit his fist.

  ***

  Sand smiling in the jungle, holding up a prize. A human arm.

  ***

  Sand smiling, sitting back on some crusty couch in a Saigon whorehouse. Other G.I.’s throwing U.S. dollar bills and MPC’s like confetti while a South Vietnamese prostitute eats shit off the floor.

  ***

  Sand’s palms opened, displaying two human ears and what is probably a severed human penis.

  ***

  Sand standing in the jungle with his arms crossed, looking down, and clearly waiting his turn, as an SSG copulates with the lower portion of a dead Vietnamese woman who had been cut in half at the waist when she tripped an M-18 Claymore anti-personnel mine.

  ***

  Oh, yes. You know it’s all true...

  ***

  Because you saw the polaroids in Sergeant Sand’s photo album.

  [-oblique girl on the phone-]

  “You don’t believe everything you read, do you?” she asked on the phone that day when the light was silver and the tick of the clock was strangely loud, and she asked this with more venom in her voice than a coral snake’s got in its poison ducts.

  The relationship was ending.

  “No,” I answered in a voice like crumbling rocks. “But I sure as shit believe everything I see...”

  [-seer-]

  Such a fine line between that which serves as a blessing and that which serves as a curse.

  I am a seer, you think, looking at the window.

  And I...see...this...

  [-the sound and the fury and the peep shows-]

  The protagonist has always felt that he is a very visual person. Seeing fascinates him. He’s a seer; he needs to see.

  And the world has never been stingy with its sights.

  The world, the protagonist thinks.

  Such a visual world—

  ***

  Doggone Days, Makin’ Bacon, Horsin’ Around: Women in sunglasses fucking dogs, blowing pigs, jerking off horses in barns. He saw them all, not surprisingly, in Baltimore. The pig bites one of the girls, and the other girls laugh. A German Shepherd frenetically humps a brunette who looks suspiciously like Martha Davis in The Motels. A dirty blonde frowns, beneath the potbellied horse, her hands jerking the lengthy pink rod until the copious release, into a plastic bag. After said release she upends the bag into her face.

  New York, 8th Avenue & 42nd Street: Fat, mustachioed bald guy busts his fat, sausage-sized piss-hard-on into the blonde more beautiful than any woman the protagonist has ever seen in his life, all perfect, honest curves, noon-blue eyes, and white- blond hair shiny as silk. She is indefectible, paragonic. The guy sodomizes her so frenetically that at least an inch of her rectal vault prolapses with each stroke. Eventually, her rectum begins to bleed. Some time later, the man withdraws, ejaculates into her face, then wipes his bloody penis off in her lovely, silken blond hair.

  Ron J. Extravaganza: Here he is, a kaleidoscope of sex with the same fat face, Ron J. slamming holes every which way, bending the gorgeous women in half, pushing their knees back to their ears, dog style, from behind, upside-down, one grueling flick after another. In one, Ron even blows himself—what a guy! And when the master is done he always obliges to charmingly release the seed of his loins into their faces or onto their backs, like someone taking a hock.

  Ron Fuckin’ J., yes sir. He sure knows how to treat a woman right—give yourself a slap on the back, Ron; it’s a dirty job, but someone’s gotta do it, so it might as well be you instead of someone with a life. This hair-matted, bulbous-bellied, indecorous slob’s got it all, don’t he? He gets to have constant sex with beautiful women, and...he gets paid for it. I read in the Adult Video Directory that Ron Jeremy has b
een in over 1000 x-rated films. Now that’s what I call a real contribution to society.

  If I ever see that disgusting, busted borsch-filled fat fuck on the street, I will throw the fuck up.

  Poppin’ Mamma: Two chuckling black guys with penises that look like things that should hang in a smokehouse take turns fornicating with a white woman who looks like about nine-and-a-half months pregnant. Eventually she breaks her water and passes out but the two guys masturbate into her hair anyway.

  Champagne de Toilette: “I—I just can’t help it!” she announces, stepping into the foyer. At once she lifts her skirt and urinates liberally on the floor. Washed out from a hundred dupes but still somehow glaringly sharp the blonde proves her diversity without a moment’s hesitation, urinating into a big brandy snifter and gulping it right on down. “I just can’t help it!” she reaffirms in a hot whine. Bright blue walls, like a Man From Uncle set, Aerosmith and Oingo Boingo playing from a boombox in the background. She couldn’t possibly appear more appropriate: white high heels, black stockings, light pink blouse, dark-pink mini-skirt, black roots, smudged makeup—a real prize. She urinates steady streams into the air, douches with 7- Up, arranges herself on hands and knees and then expulses wine from her anus like a water cannon. Every so often the cameraman steps into the picture, pulls five-minute beer-pisses into her face and mouth, then ejaculates onto the side of her face. Then she’s coming through the door, drops her purse on the floor, squats and urinates in the purse, then drinks from it. Next, she’s in the bathroom, and what is she doing? She’s inserting an entire banana into her vaginal barrel. When it’s all the way in, she stands spread-legged over the open toilet and, by means of some very dextrous pelvic muscles, is ejecting the banana piece by piece into the toilet. Plunk, plunk, plunk, goes each piece. Then she gets down on her knees, licks the toilet rim, and begins to eat the banana pieces. Eventually the cameraman returns (hey, when a man’s gotta go, a man’s gotta go), holds her head down into the toilet, and pulls another five-minute beer-piss onto her head as she enthusiastically laps up toilet water.