The Cool School

by Glenn O'Brien

  A toddler of about two came to the door, pushed it, and fell out into the dirt. The baby started crying but nobody in the yard noticed. The baby got to his feet and stopped crying when he picked up a piece of car tire and put it in his mouth. He was teething, I guessed.

  The woman grabbed the shotgun muzzle. “Put that fucking gun down, Henry,” she said.

  “Leave goa dis gun, woman,” Henry said and shook her off, aimed again. She jumped for it again, and in this moment the three of us, Mink, Susan and I started diving out of the car windows. Mink and Susan got out but Mossy Teeth, El, grabbed my thigh and held me fast. Merle spun the car around and we took off, making corn dirt dust in all the faces of everyone who was standing there in front of the house.

  Susan and Mink tried to run after the car, yelling to me to jump. I couldn’t now. It was too late. We were burning rubber up the gravel path while Merle and El were pulling me back into the car. They got me in the front seat with them. I was straddling the bucket seats.

  I wondered what was going to happen to Mink and Susan, but I bet they wondered more what was going to happen to me.

  What happened was this: I began to feel the mood change. As they were talking to each other I noticed that they sounded scared; El even wanted to get out and go home.

  After a lot of fighting, Merle finally did let El go. He let him out at a backwoods package store.

  Now Merle and his little brain began to wonder what to do with me. His buddy was gone. Who would fuel the fire?

  I assumed that he would rape me. He wouldn’t let me get away without that at least. Of course I didn’t want to get raped, so I began to think of a plan.

  I have always been an astute observer of sexy women and unsexy women, and in all my years I’ve never seen a crazy woman get chased by a man. Look at bag ladies on the street. They rarely get raped, I surmised. And look at burnt-out LSD girls. No men bothered with them much. So I decided that I would simply act crazy. I would turn the tables. I would scare him.

  I started making the sounds of tape recorded words running backwards at high speed. This shocked him a bit, but he kept driving further into the woods, as the sun was setting and the trees were closing in.

  “What the fuck are you supposed to be doing?” he asked me nervously. “You a maniac or something?”

  “I just escaped from a mental hospital,” I told him and continued with the backward tape sounds, now sounding like alien UFO chatter.

  I think he was believing me, anyway he pulled off into the bushes and unzipped his pants and pulled out his pitifully limp wiener. He tried to get it hard.

  For a second I saw him debating about whether or not he should force me to give him a blow job.

  “Ya devil woman, ya’d bite my dick off wouldn’t ya?”

  He tried to force his semi-hard pee-wee rod into me as he ripped my tights at the crotch. I just continued with the sounds of the backward tape as he fumbled with his loafing meat.

  This infuriated him. “I’m going to ask Jesus to help me on this one. Come on, sweet Jesus, help me get a hard on. Come on.”

  He was very serious.

  This struck me as deeply hilarious. Praying to the Lord for a hard on was asking for the ultimate Bible text rewrite.

  Not waiting to see whose side the Lord was on, I pushed his wiener quickly aside and threw open the door and dove out into the darkness. I ran faster than I’d ever run and I wasn’t a bad runner.

  As my eyes grew accustomed to the half-moon light, I saw that I was running into very deep woods. Aggressive brambles grabbed at my thighs, poison ivy licked at my ankles and yearling trees slapped me in the face.

  After a long time I decided to stop running, so I got under a bush next to a pile of rocks. I felt a bunch of furry things scuttle away. Rats, or possums or raccoons, I guessed.

  I laid there for awhile trying to see things in the darkness. And then I heard his voice.

  He was far in the distance yelling, “Girl! Girl! Where the hell are ya?”

  Did he think I was really going to answer?

  As he got a little closer I saw that he had a flashlight and I got scared again. If his light found me there would be no hope. My white skin was very bright in the bluish flood of the half moon.

  I had a black velvet jacket on with a black lining, so I ripped out the lining in two pieces and wrapped one around my head and the other on my almost bare legs. Those brambles had shredded my stockings.

  No light would bounce off me now.

  I was awake for a long time and then I just fell asleep, sure that he had given up the search.

  At sunrise, or thereabout, I woke up. I didn’t even have a hangover.

  I felt very proud that I had melted so well into the underbrush, just like Bambi.

  Without too much trouble I found this little dirt road and I started walking to the right.

  “All roads lead to Rome,” I told myself.

  I guess I was walking for almost an hour when I heard a vehicle rumbling up behind me. For a second I thought maybe I better dive back into the woods, maybe it was Merle again but I turned and saw it was a little country school bus, a sixteen seater, a miniature version of the long yellow city buses. I stood in the middle of the road and waved it to a stop.

  A woman was driving the bus and there was a load full of kids. I stood in the front of the bus and whispered my predicament; I didn’t want to alarm the kids. She drove me to a ranger station and the ranger’s wife gave me a cup of Lipton’s.

  I told my story and they were really peaceful sympathetic people. The ranger called the police station and I found out that Mink and Susan were there.

  The ranger’s wife liked me, I could tell, and they both drove me to the police station.

  When they let me off the wife kissed me and said, “I hope everything goes well for ya, honey. That’s a nasty thing ta happen. Watch yasself round these parts, there’s some hanky panky round every corner here abouts. I know. My husband deals with it everday.”

  They drove off. I liked her.

  Inside the police station the police weren’t so nice, but they were patient with my story. They knew the guy. It was a small town.

  “He was just released from Jessup’s Cut,” they said. “He’s a bad ass for sure, always in trouble.”

  “His daddy’s a religious man, though, had one hell of a religious upbringin’,” one of them said.

  Don’t I know it, I thought. He believed the Lord would raise the dead even.

  It was good to be reunited with Mink and Susan. They told me that they were beside themselves with worry until about ten o’clock. That was about the time I was finally relaxing in the bush, I told them.

  The police brought Merle in for questioning. They wanted to hold a kangaroo court right there in the next building. The law is quick in Elkton, Maryland.

  In the courtroom I didn’t press charges. That would mean lawyers and coming back there and a whole long drawn-out scene. I would lose anyway. I just wanted to leave that town as quickly as possible; anyway Merle was going back to jail for a false insurance claim, or something like that.

  The cops then drove us to the bus station and told us that they better not ever see us on a highway again.

  While we were waiting for the bus we decided to go to Washington, D.C., to the airport where we could maybe hitchhike a ride on a plane.

  “Let’s go in style,” I said. “No more cheap highways.”

  At the airport bar we met a marine biologist who was working in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

  “I’m flying back to work. I’m working with endangered bass,” he said. “But my buddy’s flying right into the P-town airport. He’ll take you there. No problem. He should be landing here in about twenty minutes.”

  In mid-air we told them the story. We laughed a lot.

  His friend flew us right into Provincetown.

  “Wow, what luck!” Susan said.

  I didn’t think it was luck. Innocent people are sometimes rewarded
.

  Anyway, after everything we’d been through, we deserved it.

  Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, 1990

  Gary Indiana

  (b. 1950)

  Born Gary Hoisington in New Hampshire in 1950, in New York City he became Gary Indiana, a name with superstar overtones. He has lived up to the star billing, emerging as an important American writer as well an intriguing actor, performer, director, and artist. He has written and directed many plays, and has published seven novels, including the riotously funny Resentment, loosely based on the trial of the Menendez Brothers; six books of non-fiction, including Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story (based on the murder of Gianni Versace); and Last Seen Entering the Biltmore: Plays, Short Fiction, Poems 1975–2010, from which the monologue “Roy Cohn” is excerpted. He teaches literature at the New School in New York and recently organized a re-enactment of his marathon group reading of the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom.

  Roy Cohn

  Roy enters, or if stage is set as though it were after dinner at a banquet, stands up from his place, reacting to the imaginary applause of the audience after an extensive introduction with the usual gestures of fake modesty “Please, that’s enough,” and a crooked little smile that says, “Well, I gotta admit, I’m a pretty special guy.” Nods, tamps down the applause with his hands, the twisted grin if possible resembling the ones of his late performances on 60 Minutes. Finally, satisfied that he has everyone’s attention, he speaks.

  I WANT TO thank Dr. Brenner for that warm introduction and Reverend Neville whose work with the victims of child pornography we’re all familiar with and Mr., uh, Mr. Jorgenson from the Coors Company for sponsoring this evening’s, uh, festivities, to thank them, and you, for the invitation to speak tonight and to say how pleased I am that I could be asked here tonight to talk about the city council hearings on the gay rights bill . . . (he takes a pen from his inside jacket pocket and holds it in one hand) among other subjects, and the dangers this bill represents to traditional values . . . I understand that this organization, which is dedicated to upholding family, family rights, protecting morality, that this organization for example has backed up Anita Bryant down in Dade County, reversing the trend towards a, what could you say, a Sodom and Gomorrah atmosphere, which is literally what prevails in every city in this country where the so-called gay rights movement has gained a foothold. These people who want freedom of expression so badly have launched a witch hunt against Anita Bryant to the point that she’s losing thousands of dollars in concert fees every week, but this is an old story where the American left wing is concerned. Many of you are here in New York from smaller towns and cities and if time permitted and we all had strong enough stomachs I could escort you on a tour of some places on the West side of Manhattan that would send any decent person into shock, where you would witness the kind of unspeakable behavior that’s become part of the Roman Circus of the homosexual underworld . . . and I don’t mean in the questionably sacred privacy of people’s homes, but right out in the public domain. I won’t get into it more than I have to, but to give you an idea of just how low things have sunk, you’ve got celebrities pulling up to places with names like The Toilet in their limousines in order to observe various sexual rituals that would’ve been called criminally depraved if not downright satanic in any other period of history except for the late Roman Empire . . . I don’t say this for the shock value but only to indicate the irony of these people crawling out of bed after two hours’ sleep, having spent the whole night ingesting every drug they could take to heighten their orgiastic revels, some of them involving, and my apologies to the ladies in the audience, but among today’s homo set, evidently the most popular sexual practice involves penetration of the rectum with a fist and sometimes an entire arm (he accompanies this with a gesture of the hand/arm), unimaginable as this may seem, and I ask the ladies in the audience to forgive the need for graphic detail, but I think we all need to know the extent of what we’re talking about, you’ve got these very shrill inverts that are down there at the hearings every day, screaming their slogans, in their respectable clothes, when only hours earlier they were prancing around the West Village in Nazi uniforms and chains, or hanging from a torture rack in a dimly lit bar . . . believe me, this kind of thing has become so commonplace you can even see it creeping into fashion magazines. Maybe some of you saw that movie The Eyes of Laura Mars? Anyway, not so long ago some of the crème-de-la-crème of New York Society showed up at a bar called The Anvil to watch a young man eject pool balls from his rear end, another one who pulled several yards of thick chain out of himself . . . Well, I’m going to spare you more of the details.

  This (holds up pen) is a pen, ladies and gentlemen. I guess you all can see it. The new Mayor of this city, Edward Koch, is a liberal Democrat from the hub of today’s gay world, the West Village. Koch won the primary over a lot of opposition that used the cautionary slogan, “Vote for Cuomo, not the homo.” Now, I don’t pretend to know the Mayor’s sexual orientation, nor do I care about it, but if I had to speculate I’d say he hasn’t got any, but I find it symptomatic, either of some type of offbeat personal quirk or his own blind obedience to certain pressure groups, that the first thing the Mayor does, the first signature that goes down on a piece of paper is an executive order, barring, in his words, discrimination on the basis of sex, sexual orientation, race, religion, and national origin, everything jumbled together like peanuts, bananas, and oranges (gestures with pen, puts it away), with one stroke of the pen. But. As we know. What with your own experience in Dade County. And as we’ve seen around the country in recent weeks. One of the primary virtues of a democracy is that when radical measures such as this are imposed on people by fiat, they can also be rescinded when enough people stand up and say, “We’re fed up, some things ought to be against the law, enough already.” That’s democracy and that’s what makes us different from Russia.

  It’s Koch who’s dragged up the gay rights bill again, and I have, obviously, some very strong feelings in opposition . . . which I hope to explain to you in somewhat calmer language than I started out with . . . but with your indulgence, and as I’ve also been asked to say a little bit about me, and maybe you won’t mind hearing it since I’m not running for anything . . . well, Dr. Brenner and Reverend Neville asked me to say a word or two about Roy Cohn—(smirks) not my least favorite subject, I’ll admit—but anyway, to go back a little, when I was first asked to talk to the American Society for the Protection of the Family, I honestly jumped at the chance. I am and always have been a strong believer in Americanism, and the family unit, the strong happy family unit, is the seed at the root of Americanism. At the same time, I thought, “Gee what’ve I got to tell them? I’m not married, I don’t have a family.” My sainted mother just died recently, both parents have passed on, no wife, no kids, you know, to tell the truth, I always felt that being a controversial person (takes out handkerchief or pocket square, wipes his nose swiftly, puts it away), and being a person that people were always going to be fighting about and over, and always destined to be in some kind of battle or other, that I could go through it better if all I had to worry about was myself, not a wife and kids who are going to have part of the heartache pushed over them.

  (Big smile) Know what I like more than anything? Birthday cake. A big birthday cake with candles and little kids in party hats with confetti and noisemakers, and parents’ faces lit up with the joy leaping in their hearts at the sight of those little ones . . . (musing) those little ones. And don’t they get adorable when they come into their early teens and shoot up eight or nine inches in a year! I’ll tell you something, I don’t have a family, not yet anyway, but I do have plenty of godchildren, the children of good friends, and one of the happiest things in my life is what I can give to those kids. Mr. Steinbrenner’s a friend of mine, they can always get tickets to the big game. That sort of thing. And when you look at those kids, their innocence, you realize that the family
is the basis of everything. And it’s facing terrific challenges in the society we live in, the permissive society of 1978.

  I mean, to look around today you would start to believe the biggest evil in the world is the idea of having to work for a living. Sorry, that isn’t how Roy Cohn was brought up. And here we get to family values. I am rather proud of my family. My grandparents were born in four different European countries, and each chose the United States for a home. My father worked his way through City College and New York Law School at night while teaching during the day . . . Albert Cohn lived long enough to see his name engraved in the rotunda of the state courthouse.

  I grew up with the movers and shakers of the Bronx right at the kitchen table. It’s true what they say about Roy Cohn, I do know every circuit judge and every minor politician’s second cousin twice removed, known them all my life and breathed the air of politics from this high. Frankly, I was not a boy for sports and activities, although I am in good shape. I water-ski (makes a gesture of holding the tow-line), not that water-skiing keeps you in shape, I must have good bone structure or, hey, maybe it’s genetics, the old family again, anyway, I was a shy kid, not shy exactly, reticent, whatever, and became interested in the law and the justice system and how it worked behind the scenes—very honestly, from about the age of five. My father would discuss his cases with me. “What do you think about this, Roy? What about that? Is that one out to screw me?” Well, I didn’t necessarily have all the answers at that age, but my father always listened to my opinion. My mother . . .

  My mother was an intelligent and gracious lady, Dora Marcus (wipes his nose again with handkerchief), maybe I was a shy type or, as I say, reticent, the thing is, they both fussed over me a lot to get me out of there, you know, when I was . . . well, in the womb, because she wouldn’t, uh, they couldn’t, uh, well, they had to blow air up her fallopian tubes to get me out. So she wasn’t having any more after that. Unavoidably, I was the star attraction in the family. Dora Marcus of the well-to-do Marcuses of Park Avenue, married a little below her station, so the legend goes, good old Muddy, I called her Muddy, you know. But fuss, I kid you not, she had me at the dermatologist three weeks out of the womb. (At this point he wipes his nose again.) Anyway. I learned the value of a close-knit family. In the thirties you learned to stick together, those were hard times, regardless how I look at things now, back then Franklin Roosevelt looked like a savior. I think back to the apartment we lived in on Park Avenue, after we left the Bronx . . . we gave an enormous Passover every year, relatives, ward bosses, the rabbi . . . and Muddy . . . had a slightly hysterical streak when it came to large affairs, you know, she always had to be the queen bee, it came from that rich upbringing, and something always went wrong . . . and one year, my Aunt Libby got there early and wanted to say hi to the cook, and Muddy said No, Libby, I don’t want you going in there . . . so later when they got to the part of the Passover service where the question is posed, “Why is this night different from other nights,” Muddy answered, “Because the serving girl is dead in the kitchen.” She’d keeled over with a heart attack and they had to get the coroner in and that was Passover.