Terra Insanus Read online

  Not exactly the kind of gal you’d want to bring home to meet mom and dad.

  Boo-Boo’s: The illustrious New York City again. In an hour of traversing this sick-fuck bung-hole of a city, I thought I’d seen everything, but, boy, was I wrong. I walked into a peep-show booth, and here’s one called “Boo-Boo’s.” What can this be? I wonder as I drop in my tokens. Ah, people having sex but with a twist: all the participants possess some variation of at least one sexually transmitted disease. A pretty girl smiles, showing off the reddened bulbs of the oral herpes on her lips, while her erect suitor squeezes gonococcal pus out of his penis before he puts it in her mouth. When she’s finished, another erection rages into the camera’s view, the glans of which sports two marble-sized syphilitic knots. A fingernail breaks the crust off the pustules, and then the fellatio continues. Here’s another girl opening her labia with her fingers for the camera, to display the thin white coat of chlamydiosis before yet another girl who lowers her tongue to probe the cheesy mess. And the final shot: a man is vigorously copulating with a sleek blond girl on what appears to be a kitchen table. He withdraws to ejaculate on her belly, then the camera zooms in for the revelatory close-up. The penis is so inflamed with herpetic boils it looks like a glistening, blood-red Pay Day. The girl leans forward to take it in her mouth, and I throw up before I can even get out of the stall.

  Long Jean Silver: The woman’s name is Jean, and she’s about as cute as they come. The-Girl-Next-Door type of looks, honey- blonde, slim and trim, and a peaches-and-cream complexion. She was probably a cheerleader in high school. She’s wearing a nice floral-patterned dress, fern-green, pretty. She quickly kneels before the other woman whose legs are thrust apart on the couch. Jean performs deft and thorough cunnilingus, and then—

  Slicks her elegant, well-manicured hands up with some nameless lubricant until they shine like wet lacquer, and then—

  Puts her oiled palms together and inserts both hands at once—that’s right, both hands—into the other woman’s vagina at the same time, until they’re buried an inch past the wrists.

  But is that all?

  No, no, that’s not all.

  Jean stands up, sheds her pretty dress, and sits on the couch, chatting silently. Nude now, her beauty is even more apparent. Her flawless skin glows, her perfect blond hair seems to shimmer along with her smile. Her breasts, too, are perfect, not too small, not too large, high, firm 34B’s. But—

  There’s something...

  What the hell?

  ...wrong.

  In time, the incongruence becomes noticeable. Jean’s left leg is artificial. From the knee down, the flesh tone plastic shines garishly. And then Jean lifts her leg out of the prosthetic column.

  What she withdraws is a long skin-covered bone. There is no foot on the end of it, just a tiny nub. Trace hair darkens the atrophied limb, which is also pocked by diminutive red sores.

  She raises her thigh, wielding the emaciated lower leg dextrously, like an insect foreleg. Then she begins to slick it from knee to nub with the oil after which she unhesitantly inserts it into the other woman’s vaginal cavity, to a depth of more than a foot.

  ***

  Seen enough, seer?

  Hmmm? Have you, seer?

  ***

  But seeing is what he must always do. It is a curse. He is helpless.

  He has to see.

  He has to see what the world is.

  [-west street whores-]

  It never fails. Whenever the protagonist leaves the Ram’s Head Tavern, the light at the hotel turns red, and out they come, like pus being effused from cankers in the night. A black pimp stops short, jumps out of his beat-to-shit Camaro, and hauls a white redneck girl by the hair into the car. His fist behind the windshield rises and falls for what seems minutes, and then the girl is thrown out of the car. She staggers away in a daze, her face beaten to pulp.

  tap-tap-tap, a finger on the glass. The protagonist rolls down his passenger window one inch and a skinny white hooker grins in with broken teeth. “Fifteen bucks for head,” she promises. “And no rubber. How about it? I’ll suck your peter so hard your asshole’ll inhale.”

  “Uh, no thanks,” the protagonist replies, thinking, Jesus Christ, is this light ever going to change!

  “All right, ten. Or maybe you wanna fuck me. Twenty to fuck me, and you ain’t gotta use a rubber, either.”

  “Uh, no thanks.”

  “Come on, let’s party. How about an ass-fuck? Forty bucks. You wanna ass-fuck me?”

  “No. No, thank you.”

  “All right, I can tell. You want the special, huh?”

  “Nnnnn,” the protagonist begins, but then he stops. There he goes again, with his cursed curiosity. Suddenly, he has no choice. He has to ask.

  “What’s, uh, what’s the special?”

  “Usually I charge fifty, but for you . . . thirty-five, ‘cos I can tell you’re a nice guy. What I’ll let you do, see, is you can fuck me up the ass, but before you come, you pull out, and then I’ll suck you off. We call it the Shit Stick Special.”

  The protagonist’s mind reels. He floors it through the red traffic light, and gets pulled over by a city cop at the next block.

  [-pronouncement on a wall-]

  “YOU KNOW THAT I WILL DO IT AND YOU DON’T GIVE A SHIT SO FUCK YOU BITCH, I’M NOT GONNA DO IT! DO IT TO YOURSELF INSTEAD.”

  (A graffito found on the wall of the ladies room in a New London, Connecticut bar, June 2002. It appeared to have been written in blood.)

  [-lst street and 14th-]

  A bum pisses himself in the Kojac’s Sub Shop, gurgles phlegm, then dies as you’re holding your half-eaten steak, egg, and cheese. A black woman taps at a vein in her corded elbow, then injects heroin whilst seated on a park bench as you and your pals stroll casually by. Mental invalids and epileptics jabber at you, rail convoluted obscenities from foaming mouths. In an alley behind the Roy Roger’s, three teenagers chuckle as they urinate on a swaddled homeless woman trying to hide beneath cardboard. The city percolates, an asphalt abscess. In the stygian dark of Dave & Lee’s Parking lot, a man is defecating on a car. On the corner by the liquor store there is a bloodstain shaped like West Virginia. A sound gets closer—WAP-WAP-WAP!—as you turn the corner. One man is hitting another man in the head with a two-by-four. WAP-WAP-WAP! Rats the size of puppies eat voraciously at a puddle of vomit by a dumpster. From the dumpster, a man emerges, rubbing his eyes. A short burst of machine-gun fire rings out, then a car speeds off. “Ice, Frog, Cokesmoke?” a black guy asks at the corner by Capital Books. “Tits, clits, and ice-cold Schlitz!” promises the barker in front of Benny’s Rebel Room. “Seventeen tits, nine cunts, and nine assholes!” Another barker in front of a porn shack proudly announces, “Brand new films just in today, guys. Check ‘em out. Fisting, shit-eating, animals. We gotta great one where this really hot chick sticks sewing needles in her tits and squeezes out blood. Come on in and get your rocks off good.”

  And when you’re finally leaving this abyss, this canyon of human refuse, the guy is still hitting the other guy in the head with the two-by-four.

  WAP-WAP-WAP!

  [-a sequence of graffiti-]

  “Rippy sucks.

  Rippy eats shit.

  Who’s Rippy?

  I hate Rippy.

  WHO THE FUCK IS RIPPY?

  Rippy is dead. I killed him.”

  (A sequence of graffiti found in the men’s room of a St. Pete Beach, Florida tavern.)

  [-summation to a philosophical query-]

  Every time I look out the fuckin’ window I could just bend over and throw up, more from my heart than from my belly. Yeah, I’m a seer—what a joke! If I see one more thing—

  If just one more crackhead tries to mug me, if one more bum tries to shake me down for cash, one more scrawny junkie hooker tries to hit me up for a trick, if one more sociopathic white-trash Maryland redneck motherfucker in a pickup truck tailgates me for driving the goddamn fucking speed limit...


  Oh, I’m sorry, pardon me for being politically incorrect. Pardon me for being insensitive to others. Pardon me for ignoring the fact that I’m to blame for every whore and rummy and drug-addict and criminal and overall amotivate that all of history has produced. Pardon me for failing to realize that it’s my fault every one’s so fucked up.

  Porn flicks, piss flicks, animal flicks, Long Jean Fuckin’ Silver and her hairy skin-covered bone, herpes, AIDS, hepatitis-B, junkies, pimps, dealers on every corner, pederasts teaching junior high gym, daycare centers where they sodomize four-year-olds, skinheads with swastikas tattooed on their chests, evangelists busting virgins, United Way execs taking the Concord to have lunch in London, murderers sprung from the pen after doing three years, burglars bust into your house and when you shoot them, they sue you—and win. Liars, thieves, con men, everybody out for themselves and fuck everyone else, North American Man-Boy Love Associations, satanic churches where membership requires one ounce of your first-born’s blood and KKK and L.A. riots and it’s okay to rape and kill and loot because four asshole cops beat the shit out of some asshole with a mile-long rap sheet who was driving drunk a hundred miles per hour down a residential street and serial killers cooking biceps and crack addicts getting pregnant on purpose to get more welfare and gang bangs and nail parties and nerve gas and 5kt nuclear warheads the size of a can of Coke and people pissing and shitting in the fucking street and jacking out ninety-year-old ladies for their social security and then raping them to boot and S&M support groups and rehab for killers and Sex Addicts Anonymous and “fag-bashing,” and gay Maryland congressmen who pick up sixteen year-old boys at night and vote against gay rights during the day and senators taking dope and writing call girls off on their taxes and judges taking graft and still more congressmen fucking kids and staying in office because it was only an “error in judgment” and lobbyists selling the country down the river and state legislation banning the dispensation of free condoms in high schools and the CIA buying heroin and log- rolling and deficits and cops on the take and nine-year-olds with MAC-10’s and three-hundred-pound women in Safeway using food stamps to buy better steaks than I’ve ever eaten in my life and still still still more congressmen missing votes in the house because they’re out raking in honoraria at speaking engagements since they can’t possibly live on $180,000 per year and newborn babies left in dumpsters and do-it-yourself abortion kits and how-to-make-two-step-explosive-devices-with-common-kitchen products manuals and psychopathic war vets and baby-stealing clubs and guys fucking pregnant girls till they break their water and killers for hire in the backs of magazines and hot shots and street gangs raping nuns and priests sodomizing boys in the confessional and death camps and rape camps and Shit Stick Specials...

  So allow me now to unfold before you the summation of this inquirous philosophical manifest:

  The world is a fucking shithouse.

  [-the final edit-]

  Yes, the Devoto song again. The protagonist is driving through the dank, rank, ever-familiar night. It has just rained; hence the black streets glitter like a strange, otherworldly frost. The State House dome glows blue in twilight, an azure skull. A redneck in a pickup truck tailgates him for driving the speed limit, and at the light a black kid spits on his car, and says, glaring, “White muv-fuck,” like it’s the protagonist’s fault that the guy’s ancestors were slaves, and then a hooker breathes “Fuck you” into his face with corpsepile breath when he informs her that he is not interested in her proposed exchange of currency for sexual services.

  But now the protagonist shrugs and smiles. He’s cool, he’s together . . .

  He looks out the windshield and thinks, The world...

  In his trunk is a brand-new anodized Colt AR15A2 semi-automatic assault rifle with three forty-round clips and several hundred rounds of Winchester 5.56mm full-metal-jacket ammunition, not to mention a Zeiss low-light 3.5x scope.

  Yes, the world is a shithouse, he acknowledges. Am I’m going to start cleaning it up right now.

  Then the light turns green, and the protagonist drives on. It shouldn’t take him too long to find a nice, dark alley where he can lock and load.

  The Ushers

  What...is that?

  A figure in the dark?

  Footsteps?

  (-paramental entity-)

  They are the protagonist’s worst fear, his phobia incarnate.

  The ushers.

  His ultimate fear of going to hell.

  Sometimes he thinks he can see them. In snatches, in glimpses. In hallucinogenic blinks and visual shivers. The pretty British girl in the Goth record store turns momentarily monstrous. That was twenty-five years ago, and there are no more record stores anymore because there are no more records. But you’re pretty sure you just saw that same pretty British girl last week one a bus to Pinellas Park; she grinned at you with monster fangs. The figure in the dark, non-descript yet, somehow, disturbingly familiar. Or he’ll glance into the next car at the traffic light, and the occupant will point at him with a fat, taloned hand.

  Sometimes he sees them in his window at night . . .

  ***

  What you fear most of all are the ushers. An abstraction, really—an aesthetic one.

  After all, you’re a horror novelist.

  The ushers are spirits, they’re ghosts. At least in this world they are. For there’s another world where they are solid flesh and bone, all hot skin, teeth, and ageless

  blood . . .

  The ushers, you think.

  An outland of your perceptivity, but rooted, of course, in your wasp faith, and your prevarication thereof. You put money in the Jerry Lewis jar and think that means you’re a good person. You’ll be on your way to the D.C. strip joints with your buddies and sometimes you’ll give a bum a ten or a twenty.

  You think that means you’re going to heaven.

  (–apparitions—)

  He wanted to kill his father.

  He came home from work one morning, trudging up the steps. He looks into his parents’ bedroom and sees his father adjusting his tie in the mirror. “Hi, Lee,” his father says.

  His father has been dead since 1986.

  ***

  You remember going to the hospital every day, watching your father’s muscles turn to pudding, watching his brain turn to puree. Each day, you swear you’re gonna bring your .38 to the fucking hospital and shoot the slack-armed thing in the railed bed, pop him quick in the head because you’d rather die yourself than bear any more witness to what nature is doing to him. Load up a Glaser Safety Slug, put the pillow over his face, and fire. Take your chances in court. If the shit-head Maryland judge sends you up to the joint, fine, then you’ll pop yourself too. No big deal really. Life ain’t that great, is it? A nightmare voice squalls a horror-movie voice distortion: “Hey, See-mo’! I’ll beat myseff off wiff my hand affa I woke yo’ ass. You MY bitch tonight!” No, you would not do well in such an environment. Better to be dead than a cellblock bitch. Fuck it.

  ***

  “That’s not my father!” he wants to scream at the nurse. “That thing is not my father!”

  ***

  The night after he died—Christmas Night—he saw his father standing in the living room, draped in white sheets like something Dickensian.

  Pointing with a bone-white finger.

  (-nutty girl you picked up one night in a bar-)

  “One time I had an out-of-body experience. I went to this horrid black place, and when I woke up, I was covered with tiny flecks of wet hair. But the hair disappeared in a few minutes.”

  “Hmm. Flecks of hair. I think I’ve read about that.”

  “Do you believe in genetic memory?”

  “I, uh—well...”

  “I believe in psychical residuum. I believe in ghosts, I’ve seen them. Ghosts aren’t always spirits of the dead, you know. Any kind of anguish, torture, or torment can leave a psychical stain.”

  “Psychical. Hmm.”

  “I mean, the pers
on doesn’t necessarily have to die. Why should they? The anguish is enough, to leave a ghost.”

  “Interesting, uh— Interesting point.”

  “Do you believe that you have lived before?”

  “Gee, you know, I really don’t think—”

  “Do you believe that you can be haunted in this life by someone you murdered in a past life?”

  (-midnight shift-)

  Asleep in the Lodge, always the dutiful security guard. After a 6-Heineken buzz, and several videos– The Bird With The Crystal Plumage, Three On A Meat-Hook, oh, and, Backside To The Future —you fall asleep and dream.

  the eye of your dreaming mind is like a movie camera. you are the eye roving through untainted Maryland woodlands in the early 1700’s of what is now St. Mary’s County and Kent Island.

  you are the killer. you are the destroyer.

  you are the Conoye warlock . . .

  women and children first, they’re much more fun to rape and kill. the thunder of hoofs so dense it reminds you of the surf. you and your tribe unleash slaughter with impressive dexterity. great waves of dust unfurl in the wake of your hundred horses. screams unfurl too, bright beautiful screams, bright as sunlight. into blissful pandemonium you pour into the horde, encircling them as they try to flee. like threshers and scythes, the warhammers serenely rise and fall, felling arms, dividing skulls. one man is running away with a trade-ax in his head, brains shining pink in the newly formed cleft. another man runs off in the opposite direction, waving gushing stumps.

  you’ve trapped them now, and cut them down like weeds. back and forth your squads of war-painted horsemen gallop over the dying and the dead, sewing blood and offal into the soil. then the dust abates, replaced by the wood-smoke of the pyres. the heavy aroma is intoxicating on the evening breeze, and you nourish yourself on the sapid and singularly savory meat, and fat around their liver, the wombs bursting with juice (and, sometimes, surprise nuggets), the ichor of their eyeballs...

  a job well done, all in a day’s work.

  it’s sacrifice, you know.