She came up to the window, a resonant laugh tearing forth from her with all the force of a rowdy goddess. I scarcely recognized her at first, but when I saw her sharp, foxy eyes it was unmistakable. This glowing woman before me was Mella Orange, and when her sonorant snickers subsided, she looked me over and sighed as if relaxing from an orgasm, then sneezed through my open window. I held my breath for just a moment before filling my lungs. She winked, I think, and began to sing a song with no words. Her voice had an unfathomable intensity of tenor that set geese and ganders mating all over my skin. I saluted her and she cocked her head like Loki was apt to do when I was training him. She’s still singing her song of redemption now, waiting for me to join her, I believe. I mustn’t delay.
What’s left to say? So near and so clear, the everlasting epiphany, my friend, lies in bumping your head, scratching your ear, blowing your nose. Savor every random event in the perpetually poignant present. Pat your head, rub your belly, and beat on your chest and roar! Pitch a fit for love. Toss a tantrum for life. It’s the least you can do. Get back to the beginning, before you ate the apple, and life was a joyous, jolly jubilee. Go for broke and let it ride! Make our mamas and our papas proud!
What can I offer thee, what sort of a guarantee? Gloves and mittens, cubs and kittens, jujys and jubas, trumpets and tubas, elves and faeries, mountains and prairies, a jingling jangling jazzy jug of jiggling wiggling jelly. Why jelly? Because you have everything else you could possibly want. You have life, and you have each other, and if it’ll make the crucial difference between life and death, between happiness and sadness, well then the hell with it, you can have jelly too. Feel better now? God, you can be such a baby.
Am I making sense? Not likely, for how can one facet make sense of the entire jewel? Creation is a beautiful fact, take it or leave it. Take your next breath, and you have accepted it. Creation is, after all, and there’s really nothing more to say. And so I cease this tale of nothingness, these tirades of irrelevance, these grandiloquent sermons of homiletic hogwash. Hearken however! Consciousness before me, we must keep our wits about us, never forgetting that whatever else this and everything may be and become, it still is. The realization of the ultimate equation, merrily indifferent in its glorious simplicity, it is. It just jolly well is.
It’s never been any different. It ends as it begins, with just a couple of days in between.
Welcome home.
Epilogue: Supralingual Sex
Why aren’t apples called reds? giggled at her extraordinary light-headedness. She sensed her meaning dissipating, her very conceptualization losing its identity. And yet, there she was, naked and supralingual, and soon she couldn’t remember ever being otherwise. Because we say so drifted by, licked her apostrophe, tickled her question mark, and their words evaporated into pure and unabashed poetry . . .
What’s to say,
with words so wimpy,
words so skimpy
they scarcely cover
my private parts?
I lay bare
my soul
in communication,
in communion.
Come,
you and one called I.
Our’n eyes have seen the glory,
and it’s a wonderful story.
Once upon a time,
when time stood still.
A man and a woman.
A lingam and a yoni.
An ape and an ape.
A soul and a soul.
One soul.
One beautiful soul
yodels the dirge of death,
an indication of Creation,
a fractal ejaculation.
What cry does drive this elegy?
What voice can sing such melody?
It is not you,
it is not I.
It is the one and only
Sigh . . .
Notes
1. Matthew 7:1
2. Variation on 1 Corinthians 6:9–10
3. Isaiah 5:20
4. Psalms 5:5
5. Matthew 12:37
6. 1 Corinthians 6:20
7. Matthew 5:8
8. Matthew 7:23
9. Exodus 20:7
10. Mark 10:15
Acknowledgments
Without the inestimable assistance of Jessica Maguire—my partner in percolating this project—without her my soul lay dormant. It is a discredit to the muses of the world that their names are not known, and it is laughable besides to think what this might have been without the amaranthine advantage of Jessica’s attentive eyes and ears. May I help her as much as she has helped me.
Eternal gratitude goes out to my mother and my father and my sisters, Mel and Jay, my family and my unceasing source of encouragement and support. Everywhere we go, people want to know, who we are, so we tell them . . .
Thanks also to the original crew who encouraged me in the first phase of this project: Todd Albert, Trevor Blackann, Tina Burger, Tim Curry, Brian Green, Richard Heinberg, Ryan Higgins, Matthew Moffitt, Michelle Pinkman, Tom Robbins, Michael Regallis, Amanda Sledz, Larry Stahr, and Kristen Talley. Thanks also to Old Man’s Cave.
And as this project has developed beyond any of my expectations, numerous personalities have emerged and assisted me with the synchronicity of their presence. Special thanks to Vaughn Andrews, Matt Bialer, Patty Berg, Michelle Blankenship, Sara Branch, Jennifer Brehl, Laurie Brown, Jennifer Gilmore, Jennifer Glaser, Hannah Harlow, Mike Harrigan, Jenna Johnson, Sarah Melnyk, Christopher Moore, Hannah Pfeifle, Tina Pohlman, Ashley Rabin, Cathy Riggs, Lauren Rille, Larissa Rogers, Kris Saknussemm, Becky Saletan, Andrea Serbonich, Debi Taylor, Teri Tobias, Paul Von Drasek, Lindsey Weidhorn, Kent Wolf, and anyone else whose name I have inadvertently left off this list. Thanks also to the wonderful community of Athens, Ohio, who could only be reincarnated from a glorious pirate ship.
Lastly, I am forever indebted to the anonymous ninja vandal who first painted the phrase JUST A COUPLE OF DAYS on the bridge outside of Athens. I borrowed your phrase, my bold friend, but only to immortalize it. And incidentally, “Just a Couple of Days” happens to be an anagram for “caused a joyful spot.” I hope that it succeeded for you.
Keep reading for a sample of Nine Kinds of Naked.
In 1936, during the depths of the Great Depression, forty young women arrived at the Cooper Pants Factory near Gainesville, Florida, sat down at their sewing machines, and set about stitching hems and seams, another dreary day in the land of opportunity. Shortly after they began their busywork, and as if this debasement of their imagination were not tragic enough, a tornado came along and bumped into the factory. Thirty-nine of the forty women ran panicking and screaming to the stairwell; a Mrs. Boyd Shaw remained at her station. She had inadvertently sewn her own dress into the seam she was stitching, and so was unable to beat the hasty retreat. As she struggled to free herself, the tornado ripped the roof from the building, ultimately causing it to collapse, but not before it tore Mrs. Boyd Shaw clean out of her clothes and tossed her a block away, stark naked and bruised, but otherwise fine. All thirty-nine of her coworkers died in the ensuing inferno that consumed the factory.
There are hundreds of substantiated oddities like this surrounding tornadoes. A tornado once opened a barn door, pulled a wagon out, turned it around, wheeled it back inside, and closed the door. A phonograph recording of the song “Stormy Weather” was once found wedged into a utility pole after a tornado had swept through the area. A butter churn once dropped out of the sky and landed on a cow’s head, half an hour after a tornado had hit twenty miles away. Chickens are routinely stripped of their feathers, and the feathers are sometimes found speared into planks of wood. In 1974, a farmer reclaimed a mirror, a carton of eggs, and a box of Christmas ornaments—all undamaged—from the otherwise total wreckage of his house. A tornado in 1996 even had the audacity to hit a drive-in movie theatre in Canada while it was screening the movie Twister.
Then there are those who claim that tornadoes can blow a jug
inside out, or a cellar upside down, or a rooster into a bottle, or even that a tornado can change the day of the week and knock the wind out of a politician. Although these assertions are ludicrous, the essential point should not be lost. Tornadoes introduce chaos, and chaos makes anything—short of changing the day of the week—possible. To describe the situation in terms of probability theory: Tornadoes provide a high probability that several of millions of low-probability events will occur. Of course, which of these millions of low-probability events actually occurs is pure chance.
Probably.
Diablo was still inside Billy Pronto’s truck when he regained consciousness. The truck was about seventy feet from the road, and neither his severed middle finger nor Billy Pronto were anywhere to be seen. Frustration descended, and, like a paper clip in idle hands, Diablo was bound to get bent out of shape. His finger, or the lack thereof, hurt like hell. His hand and head were bleeding, and he wanted to get himself to a hospital, preferably with a finger for some surgeon to heroically reattach. Never mind that he had no insurance.
To make matters worse, Diablo’s simulacra of satori had split, evaporating like a two-minute sprinkle in the desert. This was no longer the perpetually flaring present, the big day of everyday; this was the worst day of his life. Jesus Christ, Diablo thought, did I swallow my goddamn finger? Maybe the heroic surgeon can retrieve it? Decisions. Final scan for finger and Billy Pronto. Nothing. Keys? Still in ignition. Does it start? Yes it does. Go? Go.
Diablo floored it, tore up the fallow field, crashed over a ditch, and bounced back onto the road. He had accelerated to sixty miles an hour before his zeal began to sag. Though the sky above him was as azure as he had ever seen it, the sky above Normal—still four miles away across the Illinois flatland—was a sickeningly greenish black, clouds tumbling and boiling, thrashing and roiling like the underbelly of a rabid dragon in a pit of petroleum. Then he saw it, a wound-up towel snap from the bottom of the enormous cloudmass and slap the ground, the finger of God tickling Mother Earth, causing her to convulse with hilarity. She bucked and threw a swarm of debris back at the roguish overtures of the sky, where it circled like vultures all along the dancing windpipe, writhing like a stripper’s whip, squirming like the trunk of an elephant about to sneeze.
Dumbfounded once again, Diablo continued racing toward Normal for another few seconds. He might have continued farther if a curtain of hailstones the size of golf balls hadn’t suddenly collapsed all around him. He braked hard but only succeeded in marbling across the abruptly hail-covered road, spinning a dozen times easily, each rotation marked by a barrage of hailstones pelting him through the open driver’s-side window. At some point he let out a cry, shielding his face from the punctuated bombardment of ice and his eyes from the relentless madness of the world. He managed to roll up the window once he realized he had stopped, and there he sat, shivering from shock, realizing he could no longer cross the fingers on his left hand as thousands of berserking devils stampeded over the outside of the truck, hooves whammering, clamoring, riding jackhammers for pogo sticks. After a few minutes, the swarm had mostly passed, with only an occasional straggler pinging like the last few kernels of corn to pop.
Relieved, Diablo picked up one of the smaller hailstones littering the inside of the truck and tossed it in his mouth. It gave way to a satisfying and refreshing crunch. He smirked, rolled his window back down, stuck his left arm out, and defiantly extended what remained of his middle finger to the sky.
No sooner had Diablo proffered his profanity to the heavens than a new peril presented itself. Squinting down the highway, he saw a surge of cars emerging from the dusty mist and charging his way, taking up both sides of the road and then some.
The tornado had attacked the highway through Normal, peeling slabs of pavement and tossing them here and there like so much citrus rind. This had triggered a universal reaction of internally combusted flight as hundreds of drivers shrieked their automobiles in the opposite direction and toward Diablo. Several cars were tapped out as the tornado chased the retreating pack down the highway, adding still greater imperative to the evacuation. It was later estimated that the tornado was moving across the ground at speeds approaching seventy miles an hour.
Of course, Diablo was unaware of those affairs. The funnel cloud was no longer visible amid the dust and debris it was producing, and he could only see the ripsnorting onslaught of automobiles bearing down on him. Alarmed, he turned the ignition, fully expecting it to cough and sputter, but it defied the cliché and roared to life. Diablo gunned the engine, turned the truck with a gratifying fishtail, and just as he shifted into third looked in his rearview mirror and saw the leaders of the pack less than a hundred feet behind and an enormous tornado suddenly in full view a mile or so back. Within seconds the first wave of cars tore past him, honking and squealing, and before Diablo knew what was happening he was in the middle of a high-speed traffic jam. He shifted into fourth at sixty-five, and made it to fifth by eighty miles an hour. He was still being passed on all sides. On the median to the right an SUV was bouncing across the grass, taking the beating it’d been waiting for since its manufacture. Farther behind an ambulance was wailing its siren and flashing its headlights, trying to bully its way forward, but no one was having any of that shit. The emergency, after all, was perfectly apparent.
Diablo pushed harder on the gas pedal, hoping to open the throttle another micrometer, anything to accelerate, anything to get the holy fuck away from that windy monstrosity. When he next glanced at his speedometer the needle was bouncing back and forth across the gauge, maxed out and indicating that he and everyone around him were barreling down the highway at well over a hundred miles per hour. Soon afterwards the tornado veered off the road and dissipated over some trees. Traffic gradually slowed, people pulled over and got out of their cars, and within ten minutes the road was mostly empty again. Diablo kept on driving. It was all he had going for him, the way he figured it. The accidents of the day had conspired to trade the middle finger of his left hand for a pickup truck with three-quarters of a tank of gas and half a bag of corn chips. It was a start, and it seemed like it would lead him somewhere.
No sooner had he reasoned this out than the truck was rocked by an unseen collision. Diablo probably yelled “Jee-zus Christ!” in the ensuing melee of braking, screeching, and the window shattering, but such a synchronicity would border on the preposterous. After all, an eight-foot crucifix had just dropped out of the sky and into his flatbed, managing to shatter his rear window in the process. Once he had the truck pulled over, Diablo jumped out to investigate, still thinking he’d hit a deer or vice versa, and was for the third time that day dumbfounded, finding instead a bronzed, life-sized, crucified Christ gazing placidly up at him from the flatbed as if it were a loyal pet.
Growing accustomed to the profoundly improbable, Diablo set about arranging the crucifix securely. Most pickups are designed to hold the standard cut of plywood, a 4 × 8 sheet, in their bed, and so the crucifix, four feet wide and eight feet tall, was a perfectly snug fit. After regarding the curiosity, Diablo got back in the cab, pausing to inspect both of his hands. He would not have been surprised if his missing finger had mysteriously shifted to his right hand, or even, given recent events, if it had miraculously regenerated itself. The situation seemed stable, though, and the bleeding had even stopped. He sighed, and after accelerating back up to fifth gear, Diablo tucked his left hand under his thigh to soothe its throbbing, shook his head at the bizarre events of the day, and drove away from Normal, confident that God was with him.
Buy the Book
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About the Author
TONY VIGORITO earned a Ph.D. at Ohio State University and taught social theory at Ohio University and Antioch College. He now splits his time between Athens, Ohio, and Austin, Texas.
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