Strategies Against Nature

by Cody Goodfellow

  The geek and the manager said nothing through the negotiations, except their names: Joe Sudweeks, unemployed exterminator, and Arlo Clemons, former police officer. She didn’t ask any personal questions, and they agreed to every term. Lena used ten sheets of motel stationary, front and back, before her vision blurred, probably from shock.

  Her infested hand trembled and tried to clutch at her blouse like a baby bird, but she knew what it was up to. She held her arm out and walked out of the sunlight.

  The manager tried halfheartedly to grab her, but one look at her eyes shut him down. She went over to the table and reached out for the violet lamp.

  Only a few stray fleas bounced around the light. There were no ashes or tiny carcasses from the ones that burned when she opened the window. The microscopic motes of animate shadow in her hand ached like rusty slivers of uranium, pining for the light, but they were trapped in her tired, arthritic old meat. They would slowly gnaw their way to her brain, devour and somehow replace it, but the joke was on them. If Lena had learned anything in show business, it was how to deal with parasites.

  The light was cold and dry, and hundreds of degrees colder with every inch of space she crushed in her clawlike hand. The fleas vibrated contentment at the proximity, but their joy quickly turned to alarm. Tantalizing shadows, raw and dripping dream-stuff, fluttered out of her brain and danced in front of her eyes, but she reached through them and grasped the light.

  She could see right through her hand, see the bones and tendons and nerves and veins, arteries, and little specks of incarnate, idiot darkness quivering in her muscles and marrow, hundreds of them, promising greatness, she could run the show without these fleabags—

  She wrapped her fingers tighter around the light, crushing it out. The deep violet energy shining through her transfixed hand cast anatomy shadows on the walls.

  It stopped hurting almost in seconds as her nerves flash-froze, but she could not remove her hand. She lifted the lamp off the table and jerked it free of the jury-rigged cables rooting it to the controls mounted under the card table, and dropped it into her canvas tote bag. Her fingers broke off like cigarettes left burning in an ashtray. Her hand split open just beyond her wrist. Crackling, freeze-dried flesh squealed as the parasites died in the severed limb.

  The limb did not bleed a drop, quite cauterized. Lena rubbed her stump. The doctors told amputees about phantom pains, but she did not feel an intangible hand. What she still felt was the phantom sensation of those ravening shadows gnawing on her flesh. It tingled in her tapered wrist and forearm. It would shrug off Vicodin and vodka like jellybeans, and it spread with every breath, an atom at a time, eating her. She could get used to it, but she would always look too long at fire axes, chainsaws and cutlery displays. She knew she was clean, and she would not give in, but if she believed it would shut the itching up for good, she would gladly give up the rest of her arm.

  The itch told her she could finally step out of the wings and be something remarkable, step into the spotlights and entertain the world. They wouldn’t see a bony, aging spinster with bad teeth and a grating voice. They would look at her, and see magic—

  Prosthetic hands were miraculous, these days. They cast your good one in articulated, battery-powered rubber, and you could even paint the nails. She researched it all when she recruited Rolanda Flip, the break-dancing human caterpillar.

  She shook their hands, then picked up the bag. Her clients moaned, but stayed well away from her as she strode purposefully through the dark. No hands pawed at her as she reached the door. Nothing so articulate as words pleaded with her to return the light.

  “I’ll bring it back when it’s time to start rehearsing. In the meantime, think about presentation. Your setup sucks.”

  It was all about showing them who was in control. Sooner or later, she knew, bootlegs or copycat acts or random infections would spread, and she would lose her hold, but you had to ride the horse until the music stopped.

  She had landed a spectacular live act, something that people would get off their couches and come to see in the flesh, and lose themselves in wonder. Her grandfather would be proud.

  And if the bastards didn’t appreciate it, she would book them on Letterman.

  WISHING WELL

  Obviously, nobody ever recognized me on the street as one of the original Golden Class kids. I’m forty-three now, and haven’t aged well. But whenever I get cornered by some trainspotter of ancient local daytime TV or introduced as Tardy Artie by a tactless acquaintance, I have a ready stock of cute stories when I get asked what it was like. “I grew up with that show,” they always say, and “Miss Iris was my other teacher, my real teacher.” Some of them can’t quite contain their nostalgic jealousy.

  “What was it really like?” they ask, and I tell them one of my carefully made-to-order lies. The truth, if I could somehow make them believe it, would crack them in half. I don’t tell them about, for instance, the time I tried to take off my mask on-camera, or the day we poured a whole packet of rat poison into Miss Iris’s tea.

  Words can’t contain what it was like to be in the Golden Class. What it’s still like, if I may make so bold, because every time I close my eyes, I’m back there in the corner behind my mask and dunce cap, and I’m tardy, and in a world of trouble.

  The truth is that I didn’t know what it was like, I didn’t remember anything that I could say for sure actually happened to me from before age seven, until I got the package in the mail.

  My hands shook as I ripped the butcher paper from the box. If my fingers had found a mound of rusty razors buried in the Styrofoam packing peanuts, I would’ve been less unpleasantly surprised than I was, when they touched the jeering contours of my old mask.

  There was no note, only a tape—I had to rummage in my storage closet to find my old VCR. There was no return address, no label on the tape, but a faint logo embossed on the black plastic, which I could only see when I held it to the light. The art deco three-leafed flower symbol of Golden Class Productions.

  The panic attack was already beginning before I plugged it in and watched the tape. It was a first generation transfer from three-quarter inch video, jaundiced but painfully sharp. After thirty-seven years of seeing the copies in syndication, the colors bleeding into each other like a dementia patient’s watercolor, it was a shock like suddenly recovering from a stroke. The curdled blood drains from ruined cerebral tissue, and memory and perception come flooding back.

  The theme song played and the title dissolved to the familiar master shot of the Golden Classroom. As Miss Iris told the class that this was a special day, the last day of school, I realized that this was an episode that had never aired, and that my therapists and the shrinks at Norwalk assured me was only a figment of my imagination.

  They said it never happened, they said I made it all up, and they drugged me until I couldn’t remember anything. But it played on my little TV and it wouldn’t stop. I threw the remote and then my mask to smash the screen. The audio track continued to hiss out of the tiny speaker. “And do you want to know why today is a special day, children? Because today. . . we’re going to put on a play.”

  I don’t need to bore you with recounting the show’s familiar tropes. Everyone who didn’t see it growing up know what it was like, but I happily defer to its brief, oblique Wikipedia entry:

  [edit]

  Although this daily children’s television program shot in Los Angeles lasted only one season (99 episodes) in 1972, it was widely syndicated and gained lasting notoriety for its rigid yet bizarre rituals; hypnotic organ-and-Theramin score by exotica godfather Korla Pandit (loosely adapted from the jazz standard “Yellow-Belly Stomp” by King Leopardi); and its oppressive post-psychedelic art direction. Accused by some critics of borrowing heavily from rivals Romper Room and Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, the anonymously produced Golden Class was at once more authoritarian and more surreal than either, and was accused by the Christian advocacy group Action for Family Television of pro
moting “druggy imagery” and “occult/witchcraft themes.” Jean Baudrillard observed in an interview with The Psychedelic Review in 1973 that the program was a “crypto-fascist dialectic posited to undermine the counter-cultural paradigm,” and derived unsettling resonances from the notorious French Decadent play The King In Yellow*.

  Under the magisterial presence of Miss Iris Moll, the class of twenty-three five and six-year old children were made to wear bizarre expressionistic masks (to protect the identity of the minors, but also to make them easier to replace) and participate in weird rituals involving meditation and playacting alongside lessons in grammar, geometry, philosophy and etiquette. Dominant themes of the lectures included the value of conformity and the danger of unbridled imagination.

  Class activities were often interrupted by the intrusion of courtiers and royal family from the Golden City of Carcosa—elaborate marionettes and bunraku puppets that came to deliver songs and stories, but also sometimes to “ride” or possess the weaker students, driving them to harmless but bizarre acts of misbehavior. Miss Iris would order the students and viewers at home to look away from the puppet visitors, and created much unintentional humor with her shrill warnings that the Tatterdemalion would carry away any children who misbehaved to the court of the King in Yellow*. One especially well-behaved student at the end of each program was selected to throw a coin and a small preprinted note into the Wishing Well—a decorated trashcan—to make a secret wish.

  Never collected on VHS or DVD and barred from YouTube, Golden Class bootleg compilations are treasured by bizarro television enthusiasts, while images of the masked children were employed as background visuals in a concert video by White Zombie, and a particularly incomprehensible Miss Iris lecture was sampled in the song “Yellow Magic Enema” by the Butthole Surfers.

  *—This page has been deleted by the administrators because of serialized textual corruption.

  I had watched each of our episodes dozens of times, looking for answers. But I had never seen this one.

  I made myself eject it and I threw it down the trash chute on my way out. I packed an overnight bag and I charged a one-way red-eye to Honolulu out of LAX. I called Kelsey and told her I was leaving and to look after my plants, not to try to contact me. I was going to my island.

  I watched the cars on the road, sure everyone was following me. I parked on a residential street off Sepulveda. I left my phone unattended out front of Fuddrucker’s in the Galleria and someone palmed it before I had walked away. What a lovely town. I dropped my wallet on the escalator. No one called after me to return it. O brave new world, to have such people in it!

  I paid cash for a ticket to something awful at the Arclight and shuffled from theater to theater until after midnight, waiting for low tide.

  My plane would be leaving in an hour. They probably knew that I wouldn’t be on it. But if they knew me as well as I knew myself, they probably expected that I had completely caved and checked into the Encino Euthanasia Center under a fake ID, or snuffed it in some private storage space, my only trump card denying them the satisfaction of claiming my death.

  I knew they knew me all too well. I contained nothing they did not put into me.

  Maybe it was their idea, that I go hide on my island.

  My own Wikipedia biography after Golden Class would read Drugs, Failure, Homosexual Panic, Drugs, Failure, Drugs, Failure, Rehab.

  Mom had violently opposed my following Dad into acting, but after Golden Class wrapped, the bonus check went to her head. I auditioned full-time and landed a few commercials and bit parts in sitcoms and cop dramas until I was ten, and started cutting myself. When I flunked sixth grade and stole her sleeping pills, Mom blew my nest egg on therapy and increasingly abusive private schools.

  As a nominal adult, I kept trying to find other work, but there was nothing else I knew how to do. I did theater and the mystery dinner circuit in North Hollywood in between nervous breakdowns, and I cashed the unnervingly decent residual checks that came every month to wherever I happened to be living, even when I didn’t file a change of address, even when I didn’t want to be found.

  When things got really bad, Kelsey tried to lecture me about the cosmic ebb and flow. I was hitting bottom, and the negative flow was bound to reverse itself. Kelsey believed that when she lost a wad of cash, the city was redistributing the wealth to the nearest schizoid crackhead Brahmin in some kind of blind, karmic osmosis.

  But Kelsey had only repeatedly touched the bottom, while I had a standing reservation there. I knew what this city was, and that it had acquired a taste for me. To the casual observer, it might appear that I was having another nervous breakdown after losing a job and getting evicted from my studio in North Hollywood. But LA was eating me a bit at a time before I got the tape. That I had suffered a nervous breakdown would have surprised no one, but only Kelsey would be there to help.

  I would not die for them, but I was going to disappear in the most pathetic way possible.

  I was careful. I had no illusions about my ability to get away with anything. When you’ve been pinched for pissing into a storm drain on your own street at three in the morning in the pouring rain, you learn to take nothing for granted. You live in a world of magical possibility no less incredible for its being entirely fucked and out to destroy you.

  My island was the only place on Earth where I felt safe. Nobody would look for me here, nobody could trace me, and I could hide and freak out, and nobody would try to have me committed.

  The last time I saw my father, he came to pick me up when Mom was still at work. Left a note telling her we were going camping, and the last eight months’ child support, plus the next six.

  Dad was an actor who got thrown off porn sets for trying to direct. Mom never talked about what he did or who he was, and she genuinely didn’t want to know. He got into some kind of cult, or he was mixed up in a pyramid scheme. He never had money, and when he did, Mom handled it with salad tongs.

  I wasn’t expecting to go camping. He didn’t have any gear. He’d clearly been wearing the same clothes for a week. We stopped at a park in the Valley, walked around a shallow ornamental pond and fed the ducks, and it was nice until he saw people throwing coins into the water.

  “Why do morons think any body of water too small to drown in is a wishing well?”

  I didn’t answer. Mom told me the only way to navigate one of Dad’s irrational rages was to be agreeable, but quiet. At six, I was already enabling at a high school level.

  “You want to see a real wishing well?” It wasn’t a question, but a command.

  We weren’t going camping.

  He took me to the Galleria and we sat through the late movie—Mephisto Waltz—twice, then ducked out and climbed over the wall of the structure overlooking the intersection of the 405 and the 101. He boosted me over the wall and dragged me across the forking, curved onramp. The pavement was soft and hot like chewing gum, even at midnight. It felt like running down the barrel of a gun, but then we jumped the battered guardrail and he was pulling me into a forest thicker than anything in the mountains, wilder than Griffith Park.

  The only sound was the rushing of cars, unseen through the thick undergrowth, bullets hurtling through curved cannon barrels. The freeway lights didn’t cut through the pines or the thick stands of pampas grass and bougainvillea. Only the silver-blue light of the full moon seeped down into the circular bowl-shaped glade, an enchanted forest of Christmas trees.

  “Used to be a ranch right here, before there was a city. Indians here before that. The old californios said the well here was a deep one. Indians said it went to the center of the Earth, to the First Water. Wishes made here came true. The legend spread and people forgot everything except maybe any deep hole in the ground could make wishes come true, and all it cost was a penny. They moved the well to another park in Tarzana and put a trash can in, for people to throw away their money

  . . . but whatever used to make the wishes come true stayed down in the hole. .
.”

  Pushing me ahead of him now, through the crush of untrimmed trees and scrub brush, through the wreckage of a transient camp to a hollow surrounded on three sides by clover leaf offramps. Looking up, you couldn’t see the cars, the city, the lights, anything.

  “I like to come here to think,” my father said, nudging me forward as if to encourage me to meet someone. “I like to come and ponder why none of my wishes came true.”

  He could see I was scared. He ambled around the bowl of a forest in the middle of the freeway and lifted a filthy plywood plank up off the ground, revealing a perfectly circular hole like a circular shadow.

  “It used to be here,” he said, out of breath, patting himself down for his precious Newports. “They filled it in with concrete, but we dug it out.” He finally noticed me backing out of the clearing, towards the guardrail and the hurtling cars. “It’s okay, I’m not going to throw you down the well.”

  That hadn’t even occurred to me. Most of the places we’d lived in were infested with rats, roaches and worse. I imagined everything in the dark coming out and dragging us back down. I wanted to go across the freeway to play minigolf, but was afraid to ask.

  He took out a silver dollar. Walking it across his knuckles, he flipped it into the hole.

  He shouted down into it, “I want to be the greatest actor in the world!”

  “It won’t come true if you say it out loud,” I said. I think I wanted to make him angry, but he just laughed.

  “It wasn’t for me,” he said. “It was for you. And wishes cost a hell of a lot more than a dollar, if you want them to come true.”

  His voice had that low, brittle tone, like a knife on a whetstone, that he got when he was going to cry or break something. I didn’t know what to do. I was hungry and scared, and beginning to think we were going to camp out on a traffic island on the busiest freeway intersection west of the Mississippi.

  But then he came over and sat down beside me, and suddenly he was dragging a backpack, a big one with a bedroll. He set up a little primus stove and heated popcorn.