Benny was so overwhelmed with nostalgia that he decided to go visit his mother at the Brooklyn Senior Citizens' Home, even though the old lady had been a bit neurotic ever since she was knocked on her ass by a pursesnatcher three years ago on July 23, 1981.
AMERICAN HAIKU
The only one in New York who really grokked Benny Benedict's column about the pretty little birdies was Jus-tin Case, a mild, fortyish man who looked Gay but wasn't. Case wrote excruciatingly intelligent music criticism. Since he read about this example of American folk haiku while very, very, very stoned on Columbian Gold, he immediately conceived that it would be even more folkish and beautiful if recited with an old, Dark Age Brooklyn accent, viz:
"Pretty little boidies
Picking in the toidies!"
He was so enamored of this that he quoted it, whenever he was drunk or stoned, for several months. The whole winter-spring season of 1983-84, if you mingled with the intelligentsia in Manhattan, you were likely to hear Case declaiming, in a style based partly on Orson Welles and partly on Charles Laughton, "Pretty little boidies/Pickmg in the toidies!" This finally found its way into Case's NBI file-"Subject is inclined to quoting obscene poetry in mixed company"-and was even fed to the Beast.
The NBI had a file on Case because one of their informants had stated that he was a frequent associate of Blake Williams. In fact, Case detested Williams and only was seen in his presence because it was impossible to go to the best parties on the Isle of Manhattan without encountering him. Oddly enough, the informant knew that quite well-but she also knew that her fees depended on the number of new suspects she reported each month.
Case's NBI dossier remained always small. As a Congressional Medal of Honor winner in Vietnam, he was not the sort of man the Bureau cared to spy on too closely, since it would be embarrassing if they were caught. Besides, they couldn't make head or tails out of his phone conversations, which were all about such inscrutable matters as whether Beethoven's obsession with his nephew represented repressed paternal impulses, latent homosexuality, or the desire to be a mother, and whether all three elements were expressed in the tonic chord of the bassoon under the dominant chord of the tutti in the opening of the Ninth.
Justin Case's god was a dead Irishman named James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, who had been the greatest tenor of the twentieth century. Case owned every record of every Joyce concert preserved on wax, and regarded the man as having the most subtle musical sensibility since the great Ludwig himself. If only he had been a composer instead of a singer, Case sometimes thought, with that ear…
Actually, Joyce had considered the priesthood, writing, and even medicine before settling on a musical career. His voice thrilled audiences in Europe and America for nearly a decade before the famous Joyce Scandal, which destroyed him. Case always fumed with anger when he read of the great singer's last days-how concerts were disrupted and ruined by moralistic hecklers howling "Garters garters garters!" till the shamed man left the stage, humiliated. It was known that he died of drink, often comparing himself to Oscar Wilde and Charles Stewart Parnell, and cursing the Christian churches bitterly.
Case once had an affair with the anthropologist and sexologist Marilyn Chambers, just because she shared his passion for Joyce's music. Due to the receptivity of the postcoital male, he had even allowed her to explain the parallel universe theory to him once-something he always dismissed as rubbish when Blake Williams talked about it.
"You mean," he asked, "that in another universe Joyce's thing about girls' undergarments might never have been discovered and his career wouldn't have been ruined?"
"Even more," Dr. Chambers said. "If Wheeler's interpretation of the state vector is true, there must be such a universe. Also, a universe where Joyce did become a priest instead of a singer."
"Far fucking out," Case said. "I wonder what you'd be in the universe next door…"
NO WIFE, NO HORSE, NO MUSTACHE
What is certain is that in countries like Bulgaria, where people live on- polenta, yogurt, and other such foods, men live to a greater age than in our parts of the world.
–furbish lousewart V, Unsafe Wherever You Go
Justin Case heard about the man with no wife, no horse, and no mustache at one of Mary Margaret Wildeblood's wild, wild parties. Joe Malik, the editor of Confrontation, told the story. It was rather hard for Case to follow because the party was huge and noisy-a typical Wildeblood soiree. Everybody was there-Blake Williams, bearded, beamish, bland, the inventor of interstellar pharmaco-anthropology, Gestalt neurobiology, and a dozen other sciences that nobody understood; Juan Tootreego, the Olympic runner who had broken the three-and-a-half-minute mile; Carol Christmas, blond, bubbly, and possessed of the greatest bod in Manhattan; Natalie Drest, chairperson of the Index Expurgatorius in God's Lightning; Marvin Gardens, who had two best-selling novels and seemingly owned 90 percent of the cocaine in the Western world; Bertha Van Ation, the astronomer from Griffith Observatory who had discovered the two new planets beyond Pluto. Hordes of other Names-maxi-, midi-, and mini-celebrities-swarmed through Mary Margaret's posh Sut-ton Place pad as the evening wore on. There was a lot of booze, a lot of weed, and-due to Marvin Gardens- altogether too much coke.
Basically, Joe Malik said, his encounter with the man who had no wife, no horse, and no mustache had been part of an experiment in neurometaprogramming. Case had no idea what the holy waltzing fuck neurometaprogramming might be in English, and the story came through in a kind of polyphonic counterpoint with the other conversations swirling around them.
Joe Malik, known as the last of the Red Hot Liberals, was half Arab, of course, but-as he himself liked to point out-he had been raised Roman Catholic and became an atheist in engineering school (Brooklyn Polytechnic) and nobody could detect anything Islamic about him. Yet he did talk rather oddly at times-especially after his melodramatic adventures with the Discordian philosopher and millionaire Hagbard Celine.
"No wife, no horse, no mustache," Malik was saying. "Oh, I think President Hubbard is doing a great job," Blake Williams was telling Carol Christmas. "The solar energy we're getting from the L5 space cities is going to triple and quadruple the Gross National Product, and the way she abolished poverty was brilliant."
"But Hubbard is so damn technological," Fred "Figs" Newton protested piously. "There's no spirit no sense of tragedy no gnosis anywhere in the administration…"
"I can't get used to Mary Margaret being a woman," an Unidentified Man said.
"No wife, no horse, no mustache," Malik repeated. "That's all it said."
"I beg your pardon?" Case asked, intrigued by something nonmusical for the first time in his life.
"I still say fuck 'em all," a drunken writer howled somewhere. "Bastardly thieving…"
"It was in the Reader's Digest," Malik explained, trying to clarify matters but not sure how much Case had already missed.
"The Reader's Digest?" Case prompted. "That was the whole point," Malik went on earnestly. "I was stoned on Alamout Black hashish, the best in the world, and I sat down to read a whole issue of Reader's Digest all the way through and become one with it."