The Good Humor Man

by Andrew Fox

  “What do you intend to do with it?”

  “I’ll bury it later, before the sun sets.”

  “Oh.” I’m not surprised, but I am disappointed. In some dim corner of my mind, I’d hoped she might let me keep it. To distract myself from such thoughts, I prepare the dressings I’ll apply to her affected regions, while launching into what once was my standard post-operative monologue. “Leave these elastic dressings in place for the next three days. Don’t get them wet. You’ll experience some soreness over the next two weeks; stick to non-aspirin pain killers…”

  Her emerald gaze is transfixed by the part other inside the canister.

  “Margo. Do you have any questions?”

  Her eyes widen before focusing on my face, as if she’s startled to see I’m still in the room. “Will I still be able to gain weight in my rear end?”

  Already she’s thinking about her next procedure? “The number of fat cells in your buttocks has been significantly reduced. Any weight you gain in the future will likely tend to accumulate in other areas, your abdomen, hips, thighs, or upper arms.”

  “How long might it be, Doctor? How long before I’m ready for the next operation?”

  “I — there’s no way of knowing. You’ve already learned that, given your genes, weight gain is an up-hill struggle.” The air feels thick in my throat. Will she never be satisfied, never know peace? “As you continue overconsuming calorically rich foods, it’s very likely your metabolism will begin slowing down, helping you to gain.” My first real lie to her — there’s a good possibility Metaboloft won’t let any of us grow older, much less allow our metabolisms to lag. “In the meantime, it’s best that we not overdo the liposuction.”

  The eagerness disappears from her face, quickly replaced by cold calculation. “I could always go back to Dr. Trotmann, reconsecrate myself to his church…”

  “No!” I’m losing it, letting her play me like a tin flute. Or are we playing each other? “Margo. You have to promise me never to go back to Trotmann. He’s never to lay scalpel or cannula on you again. Promise me that.”

  “Promise me you’ll build me a church,” she says.

  I don’t know how to answer her.

  “I don’t mean a physical building,” she says. “At least not at first. When I say ‘build,’ I mean build it in your head, and in the heads of other people — the women who are still involved with Dr. Trotmann. A church without favoritism, or cruelty, or pain. There’s so much that’s good in Dr. Trotmann’s church, but there’s an awful lot that’s bad. You could be the man to make it all right. The good Reductionist.”

  When I still don’t say anything, she blushes slightly. “You don’t have to give me an answer right now. But think about what I’ve said. Because I know one thing for certain now. You’re the one who should have the Elvis fat.”

  My heart stutters. “So you’ve seen it? You know where he keeps it?”

  She nods her head. “I’ve seen it. Lots of times. He usually takes it out during services. Between services, he keeps it locked up.”

  “At his church?”

  “Yes.” She winces slightly; the anesthetic cream might be wearing off. “But there’s something else you need to know. It’s not just locked up. It’s guarded. By a ghost.”

  “What kind of ghost?” I smile. Maybe Trotmann has hired an Elvis impersonator and coated him in luminescent makeup?

  “I don’t think he’s a ghost, myself. That’s just what some of the other women call him. He’s too solid to be a ghost. Dr. Trotmann performs a reduction on him at every service. It’s part of the liturgy; the whole wall behind the altar is lined with jars of his fat. He’s enormous, the biggest man I’ve ever seen. Dr. Trotmann says he’s the resurrection of a famous man who died in a fire during GD2.”

  Suddenly, this isn’t so funny. “What’s his name, Margo?”

  “Uh, Walter… Walter something…”

  The remnant of my smile dies on my face.

  “Hud Walterson,” she says.

  What should I make of Margo’s revelation? Hud Walterson hasn’t been a widely recognized public celebrity in almost twenty years. Even then, it wasn’t his name that people remembered, it was his body, that great, lumbering mound of televised flesh, expanding and deflating like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon.

  I’m sure the women in Trotmann’s church, if they’ve seen Hud Walterson at all, remember him only from vid-9 documentaries. If Trotmann’s been able to locate a man with Hud’s congenital condition, the same type of glandular mutation, it wouldn’t be hard for that man to pull off a convincing impersonation. He wouldn’t have to look much like Hud at all. If the lighting is dim enough, even a prosthetic fat suit might be passably convincing.

  I leave Margo to recuperate while I go in search of a cutting tool to liberate the Elvis. I remember passing a handful of pawnshops when I drove across the causeway that connects the Deco District to mainland Miami. I park in front of South Beach Pawn. The breeze whipping off the bay is cool and salty. Much fresher than the stale air inside the shop, a bouquet of dust, smoke, and sour body odor. The proprietor directs me to a shelf of industrial tools at the back of the shop. I pause next to a glass display case stocked with handguns. The Colts, Smith & Wessons, and Brownings are marked with small American flags.

  “You need a gun?” the owner asks. “Today’s the last day of our after-Christmas firearm sale.”

  A gun? Elvis was a gun collector, wasn’t he? He collected police badges and police guns from all over the country.

  “Which handguns do police use?” I ask.

  “Lots of cops still use Berettas,” he says, unlocking the case. “I got one of them right there.”

  “That’s a foreign make, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah. Eye-talian.”

  “I want an American gun.”

  “A cop gun that’s American made?” He reaches deep into the case for a black snub-nosed revolver. It looks like it was carved from a hunk of hardened lava. “Smith & Wesson .38 Special. The caveman of handguns.” He stares dubiously at my slender physique. “You ever handle one of these before, Pops? It’s got a kick that’ll take your arm off. A Beretta’d be a lot more manageable for a guy your age —”

  I shake my head.

  I leave the pawn shop five minutes later with a hand laser and the Smith and Wesson police revolver.

  Elvis used to shoot the screens out of television sets.

  What will I shoot up? Hud Walterson’s ghost?

  CHAPTER 13

  The Overtown building where Trotmann’s church has alighted is only a half-mile from my hotel. Thirty stories tall, a towering gray tombstone for the ambitions of the men who built this city above a city. Margo tells me the building was planned as a luxury hotel and conference center. The combination of space, obscurity, and cheap rent must’ve been irresistible to Trotmann.

  I wanted to break into the church in the middle of the night and be done with it, but Margo insisted that I attend a service before stealing the Elvis. Her logic, that watching a service will let me see exactly where the Elvis is stored, was undeniable.

  Wholesalers make use of portions of the bottom stories as warehouse space. It’s dark now, and they’re gone. Margo and I enter the building through a small side entrance, for which she has a key. She’s bought a white hooded rain jacket for me, identical to the one she’s wearing. Plenty of the other congregants will be wearing them; down in the Deco District, with its nightly condensation showers, they’re de rigueur fashion. In Trotmann’s church, the white hooded jackets are becoming a sort of sacred uniform. Maybe small golden cannulas worn on necklaces will be next?

  She leads me up two flights of stairs to the mezzanine level. Lighting is dim and distant, coming from a few auxiliary lamps in the seams between walls and ceiling. We enter the auditorium two minutes apart. I immediately head for the opposite side of the tiered seating area from where Margo has seated herself. I don’t want anyone making a connection between us.


  Only the first three rows are filled. I’d guesstimate about forty congregants are present. I take a seat on the edge of the sixth row, next to an emergency exit. The service hasn’t started yet. Apart from a hum of soft conversation, the room is quiet. No music. I smile when I realize I was expecting organ renditions of Elvis’s greatest hits; maybe a rousing choir version of “Burning Love.” It’s here. So close. My legacy.

  Dozens of reflective objects on stage catch glints of light from small revolving lamps. As my eyes adjust to the subdued lighting, I realize what I’m staring at. Glass jars. Row upon row of glass jars sitting on shelves arranged on either side of a tabernacle, behind the lectern and a waist-high, eight-foot-long platform. Vacuum jars, each filled with a yellowed mass of what is undoubtedly human fat.

  Two women climb to the stage and light a pair of large candles. I expect to smell some kind of incense. Instead, the scent that reaches my nose is gamey. The odor of — burning human fat?

  A pin-light spot pierces the dusty air. Eric Trotmann steps out from the wings. He’s much smaller than I thought he’d be. Bent severely with lordosis, shuffling across the stage with the aid of a wheeled cane, he’s not even five feet tall. Dressed in maroon robes and a golden sash, puffs of white hair like cotton balls glued to his skull, he looks like a small-town college dean gone to seed. What was I expecting? A Savonarola the size of a funnel cloud? Even my father, withering away, is a more physically impressive specimen.

  The two women who lit the candles now help Trotmann mount the podium. “Behold, my supplicants!” he says with a dramatic upward sweep of his thin arms. “Behold this miracle which my piety has brought to you this day!” His voice, unamplified, is surprisingly strong. The two women step away from him. “Sin which had been trapped, insidious, cancerous sin, now rises freely to the heavens, borne aloft by the cleansing kinetic frenzy of fire.”

  “Borne aloft, never to return.” The response springs from the combined voices of forty congregants. Margo included.

  Trotmann reaches across the podium, beseeching the women with his right hand, the hand that wields his terrible cannula. “Pray for the holy day on which your sins will be extracted from your body.”

  “We will pray for that holy day. We will strive to make ourselves worthy.”

  “No one can defeat sin by wrestling alone with it. Even the strongest among us, fortified by good intentions and good works, may easily go astray without the proper example to guide them. And such an example is here among us, eager to show us the true way.”

  He turns his head in my direction. Is he talking about me? Does Trotmann somehow know I’m here? But he isn’t looking at me anymore. The weight of his gaze falls on the opposite wing of the stage.

  “Twenty-five years ago, he perished in the inferno of his own tragic error — the error of wrestling sin on his own, of trying to starve sin through abstaining from the rich, holy bounty which God has provided. But you can’t starve sin! You can’t jog it away, ex-cer-cise or ex-cor-cize it! Sin, once entrapped in the fat of our bodies, must be extracted by the holy cannula. And this man made the error of running from the cannula. And so when the burden of sin became too much for him, when he hungered in his soul for his sin to be sent to Heaven, to be borne aloft on wings of fire, he had no choice but to consign all of himself to the cleansing inferno. In his zeal, he offered up the wrong sacrifice, a burnt offering whose savor was not pleasing to the Lord. And that was this man’s error.

  “But the holiness of this church is great enough to stir even the dead. Hud Walterson has returned to us for the great and holy purpose of renouncing his error. Of accepting the dominion of the cannula over sin. Of providing with his own awesome, blessed, and resurrected body a holy example for each of you to follow.

  “Hud Walterson, step forth!”

  The great shadow lurking in the far wing of the stage moves. I can hardly wait to see how good a fraud Trotmann has conjured up. The man who emerges is certainly gargantuan enough. He must be close to four hundred pounds. Poor lighting keeps me from getting a good look at his face. He walks haltingly, leaning on a metal cane reinforced by four heavy-duty buttresses; with each slow step, the folds of his robes sway and part, revealing quivering, pendulous masses of flesh drooping from his thighs and calves.

  A second spotlight brightens his bulk as he approaches the long, low platform near the center of the stage. Eerie — his skin tone, it’s jarringly similar to the real Hud Walterson’s, a ruddy almond tone that bespoke his mixed heritage as the son of Samoan and Jamaican immigrants. That heavily furred brow; the slight Hawaiian cast of his eyes; the long, straight black hair pulled back into a thick ponytail — either Trotmann has been meticulous with his homework, or, or…

  Or nothing. It can’t be him. The real Hud Walterson, if he’d somehow survived, would be almost sixty years old. This man looks to be in his mid to late twenties, younger than Hud was at the time of his death. I don’t believe in ghosts. And I don’t believe in resurrections. He’s an incredible doppelganger, but that means either Trotmann was amazingly fortunate in finding him, or he put all those decades of experience in reconstructive surgery to effective use.

  The doppelganger, with the help of the two women who had assisted Trotmann earlier, clambers onto the platform and lies on his back. The women open his robe, allowing his almost liquid belly to ooze out. The spotlight glints off the shiny, reddish-brown scars of dozens of prior incisions. The scars infest the flesh of his stomach, thighs, and upper arms like a multitude of bloated leeches.

  “Our Exemplar has shown his willingness to accept the cannula,” Trotmann intones, his right hand now holding his self-invented cutting cannula. He brandishes it, the wand of a pagan priest; its stainless-steel cutting heads click and whir like the mandible-crunching of an army of insects on the march. “How great is his body! How great the quantity of sin his fat has encased! So magnificent is his love for this poor, fallen world that he has taken on a triple, a quadruple, no, a ten-fold portion of sin for us. And now, in the sight of all this holy congregation, let us place the capstone on this blessing by extracting a portion of trapped sin.”

  Trotmann opens a drawer lined with scalpels and the other components of his cannula. Within seconds, he’s screwed it all together with a practiced ease I can’t help but envy. Then he dips several cotton wipes into an antiseptic solution and swabs down a small portion of the faux-Hud’s stomach.

  No anesthetic. I wince when Trotmann makes his incision. But the patient doesn’t even whimper. I watch his face as Trotmann inserts the cannula and presses the button that activates the cutting heads. This doppelganger’s tolerance for pain is extraordinary, almost supernatural. His broad forehead shines with droplets of sweat. I can see his jaw tremble, the tendons of his neck thicken like steel cables surfacing through the fat framing his face. I want him to cry out. What kind of confederate has Trotmann recruited who can withstand such torture, who willingly subjects himself to this?

  I tear my gaze away from the operating table. Many of the women surrounding me, and two or three of the few men among them, have looks of rapture on their faces. They’re hungering for what the faux-Hud is being given. But how many of them could stand for even a second what he’s enduring?

  The electricity in the air, it’s like what I remember sensing at the early Good Humor rallies, or at the junk food riot that erupted the night of Hud Walterson’s immolation. Finally, it’s over. Trotmann sutures the incision. He slips his patient a pill or two, hopefully a coagulant and a pain killer. He disassembles the cannula, and then the women help him back onto the podium, carrying also the jar of newly extracted fat.

  “This congregant has been cleansed,” Trotmann says. “Like a ripe olive squeezed in a press, he has surrendered his oil.”

  “He has surrendered his sins.”

  “For the fat is the gathering place of sin. It is the sponge that pulls sin into itself, gathering impurities and darkness from the innermost to the outermost, to a
place where they can be expunged.”

  “From the innermost to the outermost. Deadly mercury, once ingested, gathers in the fatty flesh of fish.”

  “Yea, and the pesticides of the earth are to be found in the fat of children. For the fat is the gathering place of sin. And now our Exemplar will lead us in the adoration.”

  The faux-Hud rises from the platform. I’m stunned — he should barely be able to move. But he grasps his cane and walks slowly to the tabernacle.

  He opens it. Sitting on a shelf of dark wood is the glowing, molten core of my childhood. The healing balm I used to banish my mother’s pain. My father’s semi-secret glory; the legacy he entrusted to me. My past, my present, and somehow, in a way I don’t yet understand, my future.

  The Elvis.

  It’s still in the decorative crystal vacuum jar, the one my father had custom-made after he’d freeze-dried the Elvis for long-term preservation. The crystal jar I spent hours staring at as a boy, reading the etched lyrics to “Love Me Tender” over and over, like a prayer, while I stared at Elvis’s etched visages. I used to think his still-beating heart was in that jar, hidden within the yellow fat and bits of partially digested food. The sacred heart of Elvis.

  The giant grasps the jar and lifts it high over his head. With each passing second, he seems to draw more strength from it, standing straighter and taller. He takes a great breath, gathering himself to speak:

  “Here is the beautiful one!”

  That voice —

  “Here is the father of us all!”

  My God, I know that voice, I remember that voice —

  “He was the man with the golden voice, the man with the golden body, beloved of women. From a willowy youth he built himself up, and the greater he made himself, the greater was his beauty. In the years before his end, even the sweat of his brow was prized. The most beautiful women of America fought and clawed for scraps of cloth which had been dabbed with his sweat.”