The Freewayfayers' Book of the Dead

by John Okas

  What happens next, the transmission of the lives of the errant Poongi saints and migrant miracle workers is meaningless to anyone who has not tasted life on the fruited plane and beyond. Inner vision is figurative, and yet cannot be conveyed by words, only by experience. Before releasing them from his charms, the Lord urges the women to secrecy, warning them that gratuitous explicit revelations might cause physical or spiritual harm to unauthorized persons.

  When Sarah, still slumped on the ropes, comes out of her trance, she looks over at the clock. She cannot believe only an hour has passed. It seems as if she left this world a lifetime ago. Her sisters lift their heads, exchanging knowing looks. Because they all got a piece of the action, not one of the nuts is an empty shell in the aftermath. Everyone, most of all the haggard peach tied to the bedpost, swears this skein was more eye-opening than anything she could have envisioned. In the broadcast, Sarah tasted the grain that makes the loaf of life and now feels as satisfied as if she ate a hero made out of meat.

  In the Wake of the Broadcast

  In the wake of the broadcast and fresh out of fruits and nuts Sarah lies alone marvelling how similar being stuffed between the ears is to being stuffed between the legs. The feeling she had while it was happening left nothing to be desired, and the afterglow is sweet. Her mind continues to rise on its own leavening. She is full of healthy longing, awake with excitement; this remarkable night is not over yet. Her life’s dream still remains her entry into the measureless music of death, but—praise Lord Z!—her despair is less life-threatening. She has an appetite for food, and when she rubs herself, she feels herself swell with self-love and desire. She licks the fresh fruit nectar on her fingers. Yum!

  Mentally, at least, she can begin to accept that Corn Dog is gone forever, and that there is nothing she can do about it but make amends to the living and try her best to be grateful for her own life such as it is. She understands Keinar’s warning: the hot, heavy, meaty body of her Hero must remain off the air, period. She will get it in the ear only at Friday night meetings: complex chatter, multi-crescendi, and the faintly saintly rhythms knocking on heaven’s door. And if once a week is not enough the Lord commands her to seize the day as best she can, to eat, drink, and be horny herself, and take an ordinary man or two to represent the Horny God within.

  Any man will do, not for who he is, but for Who he represents. Who is there to fill in, then, to stand as a physical representative for the men in her life who have no body? The spot goes to her husband Harry. He happens to be handy, an ironic twist to the notion that their marriage was one of convenience.

  In the gospel according to Bharavi, on the higher plane, all fruits are not created equal. One might be naturally riper, sweeter smelling, more colorful than another. It is the nature of fruit to make itself attractive, digestable and delectable so the seed will pass on. There is no democracy in nature, but rather a hierarchy that swallows its own tail.

  She tosses off the old bathrobe and takes a bath. She combs her hair, puts on makeup, and goes deep in her wardrobe to find something which escaped the ravages of the Hairy Tuna. The evidence of her self-destruction, the soiled, singed shreds on the hangers, speak volumes to her of her obsession. But now she is less demoralized for she is resolved to change. She finds an untorn silver lamé nightgown Harry bought her, and a white fox screen goddess stole. The gown is cut in two vees in front, one to bring it above the knees, the other to show her white neck right down to the area between her breasts. It clings revealingly, flattering her despite her thinness, and it sweeps the floor behind her elegantly. The stole is for her back, hiding the signs of having been under the grill of Lord Z’s hot rod. She puts on a pair of silver sparkle high heel slippers and sets off to find her husband on the material plane.

  She knows it is his habit to snack in the midnight hour, and comes upon him in the kitchen, head in the ice box, picking at a cold breast of Laudette’s fried chicken. She clears her throat, prances a bit, and nuzzles her cheeks against the soft-fur collar, looking delicate, unstable, careless, and expensive, using all her weaknesses as her allure.

  “Well now, what’s this about?” Harry has no idea what to make of her appearance, yet he finds her starved figure rather appealing.

  She skates slowly over to him, palms on hips. “May I join you?”

  Harry is delighted, overjoyed that she actually initiates a conversation, and thrilled that she expresses an appetite. He quickly seats her, sets her a place at the table and serves her, keeping his fingers crossed as she, lady-like as can be, helps herself not only to the chicken but to what is left of Laudette’s lard bread, buttery beans, and a bowl of Thursday night’s seafood gumbo, crayfish in a slick, thick red-brown mud. She eats, mixing the food with thoughts of Harry’s manflesh in her. She drinks two pints of ale getting it all down.

  Calmed by her full stomach and steadied by the Sage’s mediated message she says, “I’m sorry about the trouble I’ve put you through, Harry. No doubt, you could have found a wife with fewer problems and, because of the money, your father’s will being what it is, I guess you’re stuck with me. But from now on, I promise you, I’m going to try to make the best of it, and do the things for you that a better wife would.”

  Harry still does not know what to make of this: it’s the first sense she’s made in months.

  Over the years Sarah has gotten clever about men. She knows they would rather be fooled than know the truth, that they don’t want to think you are thinking of someone else when you’re with them, even while they are making love to their own fantasies. Another thing she learned is that to make them want you, you must be difficult to capture and that, when caught, your basic nature is virginal but with him alone you just can’t resist giving in. Men! Give them an inch and they’ll take ten yards. Why should she be the one to make all the submission gestures? Instead of getting angry, she works on getting equal. She doubts Harry will mind when she suddenly, boldly grabs him by the lapels of his robe, and says, “Ooooh, all that beer made me crazy. Harry, darling, I want to give ‘us’ another chance. You’re all mine. I’m going to take you upstairs and fuck the pants off you.”

  Bull’s eye! The great white hunter had almost given up the chase. Ah, but he knew she’d come around. Indeed, before he married, Harry Swan thought he knew all the vagaries of women, but this one, his wife, is a case study. In ten months of marriage her vee has stood for vacant. Then after one night of drinking beer with some screwball women the sitter dug up, here she is, begging for it. Figure that!

  The experienced man relishes it. Harry adores the sound of dirty language coming from a sweet lady’s mouth. And he has never known one who made this type of rough advance. It could be jolly fun. He puts his hands into the stony-faced beauty’s night dress and feels her breasts, a little less full than before her starvation but creamy nonetheless. But with nothing but the missed shot in the Dark Continent to tally, the gaming man thinks twice about betting on the action in the future. The odds seem against it. “I love a woman who likes to play games. Your assertiveness makes me weak, Cupcake, but I hope you’re not starting something you don’t intend to finish.”

  He feels further for an answer and finds the wet glow of warm peaches in her source. “We’ll see which one of us lasts to the end,” she breathes heavily, grabbing at his testicles with a claw grip. “Come on up to bed.”

  Blissful are they who in the sex act make no distinctions between a substitute and the real thing. Although before they were married Sarah had attained some sense of emotional satisfaction through Harry’s adoration, she has never had an orgasm with him being in, on, or anywhere near her body. But now that she has been spiced by the Sage, she knows how to handle herself in bed like a seasoned witch as well as a whore. She uses the bedtime story she heard as a model to help her use her husband the way he uses her, as a stand-in for the Ideal. The Horny God within her urges her to get on top of her husband. She takes Harry the way men have taken her. Anything goes! Any part is fair game! Sh
e pokes, pinches, tickles, slaps, scratches, and bites. She squeezes his trigger until he shudders and trembles so that his teeth rattle. And, yes, yes, yes, she wants to consummate the marriage fully.

  Before they were married, when they had sex, the split pea would assume the position Harry asked for. Often, like Lord Z, he would steal in on her, a ransacker who takes her against her will, but tonight she turns the tables, gets on top, and reaches ecstacy with her husband lying beneath her, standing in for the Lord of her father, the brave buck, and the Monkey on her back.

  Harry is thrice conquered. The sizzling flashes in his loins detonated by Sarah jolt his heart and head. The playboy goes love-mushy on her afterwards: nerve-racked skeleton or not, she is his ideal woman, a picture-perfect goddess, a perfect bitch.

  “Tonight I had the most remarkable experience,” she says with a blissful faraway look in her eye.

  “Didn’t we both! You were magnificent!”

  “I received Lord Bharavi within me in a metaphysical way and for the first time had the perception that my real nature lies on the fruited plane and beyond. I took you as a physical body to stand-in for him whom I adore.”

  “Oh really?” says Harry a bit stung, disappointed she did not find him as grand as he her.

  “Oh yes!” she says with a tart smile, a deep sigh letting him know that he doesn’t measure up to the Horny God. “It’s too bad you’re a man and can’t come to our meetings. Then you’d see what sex could really be! Ooh, it’s been a night! Now I’m tired. Harry darling, please go. When I sleep I want to be alone in the bosom of My Lord.”

  She waves her bony white hand toward the door, and closes her eyes.

  This slight only serves to further revive Harry’s interest. He craves being part of any union which would not have him as a member. He has not the slightest interest in marriage in the conventional sense as long as he can have the excitement of the chase which he enjoyed before he was married. He has a moment’s misgivings about Sarah’s strange new assertiveness, her mystic approach, of himself being the prey instead of the predator, but, what the hell, for the playboy the play is the thing.

  If this keeps up, it could get really interesting, he thinks. In the end, who’s on top doesn’t matter a whit to me.

  He sleeps sounder than he has in months.

  Odds can change, and so can a man’s opinions. By morning the man who believes only what his eyes tell him has a different view of Madam Keinar and her ragtag crew. “Well,” he says when he bumps into broad-beamed Laudette on the stairs, “if there is any deception here it is certainly long overdue. What this medium is guilty of is nothing more than a little entertaining flim-flam.”

  “You see the light side, Sir Harry? Sugar used to be plain bothered, at least now she’s hot to go with it. It is just like in the movies, isn’t it? If you believe in miracles almost anything can happen.”

  “But hell only knows what she’s got on her mind!”

  “It could be worse, Sir. A week ago we thought she was a shoo-in for the sanitarium, a burnt-up vegetable. I told you this rare medium would help her to learn to handle her demon.”

  “You still believe there really is something? Outside of a hoax those silly women perpetuate in their imaginations, I mean.”

  Laudette does not need to believe or disbelieve; she has had the experience of seeing the amazing Horny God in both beastial and beatific forms with her own two reliable eyes.

  “You know what they say, Sir? ‘There’s nothing so real in life as dreams.’ Now come down to the kitchen and I’ll fix you some pancakes.”

  Fibrillating Cloth

  The hijinx, thrills, and spills last the whole weekend. Saturday and Sunday it’s more of the same: miraculous sex like a piece of cake, love made easily as apple pie. She would just as soon toss off a roll on Harry as drink a glass of beer. But on Monday morning the shot of love she got from Z the Friday before begins to wear off. And a feeling of falling from her Lord’s grace triggers a deterioration in her attitude toward her husband. On Tuesday, the Holy Hero loses freshness in her mind, and likewise the playboy seems old-hat and stale, someone she doesn’t love and has no business fitting in with. By Wednesday she is back to playing the part of the tragic heroine, raggedy, edgy, sad, guilt-ridden, her itch for sex evaporated. On Thursday she is plunged back down to the battleground where the conflict between good and evil rears its several ugly heads. Her guilt in denying Corn Dog grabs at her. She thinks of him: a beautiful, noble, savage boy in tight buckskins, with his golden ear of corn and silky pubic hair, and it is all she can do to resist calling on the dogs. The following Friday with its fix of blue material doesn’t seem to come quickly enough.

  Laudette can see the madness forming in Sarah’s dark eyes. “Hold on, Sugar! Remember what that old owl Keinar said, absolutely no one-on-one head-to-heads. The next one could be the last. Try to relax. Eat something, have a beer. Wait for the rest of the group. Tonight will be here soon enough.”

  It’s hard but Sarah does it, and learns the Craft is not all beer and snacks.

  At the second meeting Sarah does not have to be tied to the bedpost, but lies back willingly; she gives ear and becomes trance-posed, paying close attention to the rumbling voice, mouthing her garbled responses to that way-out wavelength.

  To think she thought these bedtime stories would be dull! Her visitor’s broadcast blankets are of the same scintillating, titillating, fibrillating cloth as his personal visits; they get under her skin with the same hard-core zip as when he gave her the gun with his souped-up hot rod. And, she has to admit, Laudette and Keinar were right, the heat is more fully appreciated doglegged through a medium and divided by thirteen, and in many ways more refreshing taken by ear than vaginally.

  The Sisters of Bharani engage in interstate commerce, one-for-all, all-for-one. Things that were heavy on their minds before they joined forces with one another now seem lighter, easier to manage. Their guru-god is like their dog, he loves them no matter what. His love brings them relief from bad feelings about themselves. Once the Horny God starts tripping off the medium’s tongue, Sarah can let the good times roll no matter how shaky she may feel otherwise. She knows the Lord loves her because of, rather than despite, the fact that she is an all-too-human woman. And when the fireworks start she can answer with affection in kind. Sarah reaches into the Light, and finds herself in a different land, the fruited plane where matter is energy, energy is love, and love is magic, a land where the only Law is love, and love can be a tricky affair. The morals of the stories stretch the ordinary ways of looking at the conflict between right and wrong: no credit is given for altruistic behavior and no penalties are exacted for satisfying one’s deepest yens, be they for luxury or austerity. One bestows one’s own honors and imposes one’s own punishments on oneself.

  Curious about it all, Harry comes down and listens in on the party from his hiding place on the landing of the secret stairs behind the trick armoire. What he, as an objective listener, hears in the meeting is nothing but unmodulated mumbling and grumbling, a meaningless spew of the yeaouing vowels and static consonant clang. To him, it is absurd: the halloo of mystical mumbo-jumbo sends him back to the workshop. To the assembly on the bed, however, the outpouring is clear as crystal and as riveting as red hot nails.

  In the afterglow the sisters take a breather before they go home. Some light cigarettes, some open unsacramental bottles of beer and raise them to one another. Sarah, in the midst of feelings of community and sisterly solidarity, is seized with the compulsion to expose herself, and put her personal problems on the air before them, as she has to Laudette.

  “Thanks to Sister Klare and her ability to raise a broadcast body and channel these satisfying cock and bull stories and thanks, as well, to your strong weekly support, I see the way out of suffering. I will atone for the many sins of my past.”

  The Nussbaum irregulars will drink to that.

  “But some things will always haunt me, Sisters. Er, I’ve, er, been sic
k in, er, conscience ever since since since …” But when she tries to say it out loud, the incident that cut her apart, she can’t get to the point, her voice becomes a trail of tears, a broken record.

  The fruits and nuts are not her jury. She is one of them. They lend eleven sympathetic shoulders for her to hang her head on and cry.

  Keinar reassures her, “Don’t cry, Sister Bharani-Sarah, everything will be all right. Psychiatrists might call us sick, preachers might call us sinners, our boyfriends and husbands might call us simple, but our sweet Lord loves us anyway, no matter what we’ve done.”

  Again, after they go, Sarah feels her wild oats and, hot for the father principle, rings her ju ju bells to call her mate to her side in the bed she earlier shared with her sisters and the Z God. He comes readily, overjoyed to be invited to that busy mattress. She makes it clear to him that her mind is elsewhere, on the Killer of Death, but she is eager to have relations. Would he oblige her, stand up for the Lord?

  Harry, taut with desire, pays little mind to the substance of what she says. He has heard her talk of this Lord Z all week. While he thinks the fruit and nut meetings are utter nonsense, he keeps his opinion to himself. Sarah’s blather about her dream lover, the Horny God who comes among them, seems like some wonderful drollery, a welcome relief from the psychosis of a fortnight past. The playboy is thrilled to have his pretty young wife telling him her fantasies and he sees how much better she looks just since last week. It is not in him to turn down a woman’s offer. “Count me in, Cupcake, if it makes you happy, I’ll pretend I’m anybody you like. It’s my pleasure to be your boy-toy for whatever hocus-pocus you have in mind.”

  It’s a kick to the playboy that in these encounters she’s so aggressive. If she wants to do the driving, amen. He lies beneath her, his engine humming, his stick shaft ready to go. She rides him witch-like, as if he were a broomstickmobile, shifting gears madcap on the hairpin-curved way, up and down from peak to peak. The split pea, long cracked at the rift between her legs, laughs, not girlish giggles but full-hearted, bewitching cachinnations that ring with the ecstacy, delight, and divine folly of her orgasms.