The Müller-Fokker Effect

by John Sladek

  Honey suck my nose

  Lick between my toes

  Drool upon my underclothes;

  You’re disgusting goodness knows

  Honey-bucket Rose.

  Colonel Fouts, neat and suffocating in his dark dress blues, complained to the art dealer. ‘What do they think they’re trying to prove? Supposed to be the toughest oufit in the services, and just look at them—that eyeshadow and lipstick!’

  Drew, who hadn’t noticed the makeup, looked again. ‘I don’t know…just kids fooling around, I guess. Like those others over there, heiling their little fuhrer.’

  At that moment Myra, in black, came over to ask Drew if he noticed anything different about her.

  ‘Ears pierced?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not another nose job?’

  ‘Like it?’ She presented her profile.

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t say I exactly—hey, who’s that nun I just saw running around here a minute ago?’

  ‘That’s Dr Feinwelt.’

  ‘Feinwelt? I didn’t know he was a transitive.’

  ‘He works with this group,’ she said, shielding her nose with one hand from his inquisitive looks. ‘Transvestites Anonymous. I asked him about the habit, and he said it’s the only decent black suit he’s got. And this is a wake.’

  ‘He was treating Glen before the…um?’

  ‘Yes.’ She caught sight of the skinny figure in black, talking, hand on shoulder, to one of the Pink Barrettes. ‘Oh, I wish Glen could have gone to someone else. Someone, well, more responsible. Just look at him, swishing around here…calling himself Mother Superior Feinwelt…not kidding anyone but himself.’ She sighed. ‘I hate drag queens.’

  Fouts, who had been trying to get in on the conversation, blushed and changed the subject. ‘I do too. Say, you know a funny thing happened to me on my way to the living room a few minutes ago. I opened this closet door by mistake and here was this old guy in wrinkled dinner jacket.’

  ‘Playing sardine?’

  ‘No, he was up on his toes, doing wee wee in the pocket of somebody’s raincoat. Said he was from Interpol.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s funny at all,’ said Myra. ‘You might try and show a little respect for the dead.’

  What was there to answer to that? Fouts turned away and started watching Wes’s autograph party.

  The author was wearing a white denim suit created by a famous Paris designer to imitate his prison uniform. Copper rivets had been replaced by gold, and it was otherwise complete—even to Wes’s old number stencilled on the back. He paused in his autographing of One Man’s Fight to shake hands with Senator Vuje for the photographers.

  ‘Is it true you’re running for president, Mr Davis?’

  ‘Just call me Wes, boa, unless you’re black. Well, if my country wants me, I won’t say no.’

  ‘Do you think you have any chance against the established parties?’

  ‘Let me put it thisaway: My chances don’t depend on “statistics” and public opinion polls. I’m casting my vote for the average, honest, decent, Protestant, gentile, American, Anglo-Saxon, hard-working, God-fearing, not overly intellectualized but clear-thinking white man—and I know he’ll be casting his vote for me!’

  ‘And do you really think there is a Negro conspiracy?’

  ‘Do you think there ain’t? Can you really afford to go on thinking everything is okay when thirty per cent of our army is black? They could strike any time, any place. That “harmless” old darky sitting there over by the door might be a spy! He sits there, all eyes and ears for everthing that goes on in this very room!’

  Feinwelt was walking over to have a better look at Wes when suddenly someone seized his beads and swung him around, slamming him up against the wall.

  ‘Foutsy!’

  ‘Surprised to see me here, are you. Mother? You did invite me, you know.’

  ‘You almost wrecked my wimple!’ Feinwelt busied himself with black pins.

  ‘What about me? I listened to all your crap about clothes making the man. I even gave you my Miss Columbine outfit to lock up safely out of temptation’s way. And what happens? You invite me to a drag party! Half the people here swing that way.’ He gestured toward the Pink Barrettes. ‘And here am I, Feinwelt you mother, here am I in this—this stupid mufti! And of course here you are, scoring all over the place.’

  ‘You don’t understand) Foutsy. Listen, I know it looks bad, but I’m not hooked.’

  ‘Tough. I’m sure as hell not going to fasten your…’

  ‘No, I mean I can quit this anytime I want. I’m really straight. I just put it on to talk to those soldiers—they need help, Foutsy, and how can I get close enough to help them unless—believe me, this habit isn’t a habit.’

  ‘Save it, Mother. I want the key to my stuff, right now!’

  ‘No, wait. Listen…’

  ‘All right, forget it. I’ll go over there to TV Anons and bust in myself—and get my gear!’

  Feinwelt started to follow him out the door. Myra stopped him to ask how he liked her Dutch nose.

  ‘It looks like a snowplow!’ he snapped, and bolted for the hall.

  ‘Dutch nose?’ asked Mrs Grebe, raising a jeweled eyebrow at no one. ‘I thought there was something dykey about that girl.’

  ‘Too many operations,’ said someone else. ‘They say a reliable doctor wouldn’t touch her with a ten-foot bone chisel.’

  In another part of the room a girl was making a reading list of books she’d just heard were ‘serious’:

  ‘Daisy James, by Henry Miller,’ she wrote. ‘Austen Park, by Jayne Mansfield. Bonjour Sagesse, by Franchise Tristan…’

  A youth in a copper shirt was trying to interest one of Wes’s ‘White Shirts’ in the story of Wilhelm Reich.

  ‘They hounded him to death,’ he said. ‘The Federal Food and Drug Authority.’

  ‘Talk about food in drugs,’ said the White Shirt, whose name was Skeeter, ‘you oughta hear about the peanut. OI’ Wes wrote it all up in his book.’

  ‘Yes, but Wilhelm Reich…’

  But Skeeter wandered away. He wasn’t much interested in any Reich but the third.

  Having lost his audience, Wes was drinking himself into a fury. Now and then he shouted some obscentiy at the old Negro sitting placidly by the door. Senator Vuje was confessing to a model that he wore nothing at all under his caftan. Someone compared the party to a Hay Wain.

  Drew was now trying to interest MacCormick Hines in Ank’s paintings. He described visiting him in Assholtz, and explained his work in terms of Freud, Marx, Spengler, Lévi-Strauss, Konrad Lorenz, L. Frank Baum, C. Wright Mills.

  ‘One thing I was curious about,’ said the old man. ‘When Mr Bullard left for Europe, did he take much luggage with him?’

  ‘Beg pardon?’

  ‘What I mean is, did he take any large pieces of equipment with him: machinery, electronic devices, etc.?’

  ‘Only his paint-mixing machine, but…’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Moody. We oldsters keep infantile hours, you know. I fear I must be going.’ He fitted on his homburg and touched the knob of his cane to its brim in salute.

  ‘Where’s that TV psychiatrist?’ someone asked. ‘I wanted to ask him if he wears a freudian slip hahahaha…’

  ‘A television psychiatrist? Wild! How does it work?’

  Wes suddenly screamed and threw his drink on the floor. ‘Just who does that old coon think he is? Sitting down while white folks are standing up!’

  ‘Don’t pay him no mind, son,’ said the senator soothingly. ‘He’s just some old janitor…remember, you got your reputation to watch…’

  ‘Just the same, I hate to let a boa like that get uppity.’

  The Pink Barrettes came in from the den just then, and covered the general embarrassment of the company by breaking into a slapstick routine. As they came through the door, one tripped another, who bounced up swinging at a third. The two fought furiously for several seconds, without landin
g any blows.

  The tripper then tripped himself, somersaulted, seized a glass of soda from a tray and drained it, and mimed hiccups. The fourth man separated the two combatants and made them shake hands. A ‘sticky-hand’ routine ensued, continuing until long after everyone else had grown bored enough to take up their tired conversations.

  Drew began telling Dr Fellstus about his trip to Assholtz. ‘Odd thing happened on my way over there. I broke my flight at London; thought I’d stop and sweeten up the Tate.’

  Fellstus moved away, but it made no difference, the tireless art dealer was too far into his anecdote to quit. Pivoting to face the man from Interpol, he said: ‘Do you remember the kid Bates, who always used to hang around Glen’s parties? Always wore English suits: wicker plus-fours and stuff from Halibut’s and All Saints’ Road—you know him? No? He was on the plane…’

  Interpol lurched away scratching at his fly. Turning to Mrs Grebe, Drew went on: ‘This kid was on the plane too. I always thought he was English, you know, but I saw his passport. Anyway he didn’t have his wicker suit and English gear any more, said he sold it all for his passage. This was Bates’s first trip to England.

  ‘On the plane he could hardly wait, kept going on about the real this and the old, authentic that. The first thing he was going to do was kiss the soil of Great Britain, and then he was going to ride on a double-decker bus, ask directions from a “bobby”, you know the whole business…’

  Mrs Grebe edged away. Fouts was coming in the door in a nun’s habit, bursting at the seams. Drew cornered him and repeated the earlier part of his story.

  ‘The plane landed at Foulness. I went through Customs and didn’t see the kid for awhile. When I went out to get a taxi, there he was, with two “bobbies” holding him by his collar and belt, they were marching him along toward the Immigration Office. I asked them what was going on.

  ‘ “Just helping us with our enquiries, sir,” says the one holding him by the crotch and collar. “With your permission, sir, we’ll get on with it, then,” says the other, who’s got, it looks like, a truncheon twisted in the kid’s belt and a hammer lock with his other hand. I realize that I’m wearing my ambassador-cut suit—doesn’t do to look needy with the Tate—so I figure I’ll do the kid a favor if I can.

  ‘ “What enquiries, my good man? That’s an American citizen you have there, if I’m not mistaken, and you seem to be shall we say playing havoc with the Geneva Convention rules and all that.”

  ‘They let go of the kid and start straightening their jackets and explaining to me what happened. The kid didn’t have enough money to be allowed into the country; while Customs were questioning him he jumped the barrier and took off. They’re explaining all this to me when he tries it again. “O England!” he moans or something like that, and off he goes, across the airstrip and off into this big green billiard-table meadow. Them after him.

  ‘He gets a pretty good lead on the fuzz and then he stops, drops to his knees and kisses the soil. And that’s not good enough for him, he’s got to beat his head on it a few times.

  ‘You wouldn’t believe it, but there was this old German mine right there, buried under that piece of turf. They never found all of him. I guess it was the oldest, most authentic thing he got near.’

  Fouts hadn’t heard a word, due to a maladjustment of his wimple. ‘Bates?’ said someone. ‘I seen a letter he got from his English pen pal. Addressed to “Master Bates”—no kidding.’

  The bedroom door slammed open, and Myra tottered out.

  Her rumpled hair showed one new, complicated ear, and just in front of it the almost imperceptible scar of a facelift. Her Dutch nose was red from crying, and her Finnish chin trembled. The dark fabric of her dress was torn, showing one creamy shoulder sanded free of freckles and one perfect breast inflated with plastic foam.

  ‘He tried to rape me! O God! He tried…’

  She collapsed into a chair. A mob of the curious and outraged guests charged into the bedroom. They found the other door locked from the inside. A few of Glen’s favorite hats lay on the bed. There was no one in the room.

  Wes Davis knew who the culprit was. Even as the Pink Barrettes broke into another routine to help calm the crowd, he walked over and kicked away Deef John’s chair. The old man collapsed on the floor; no surprise showed in his corrugated face.

  ‘Don’t play dumb with me, nigger boa. We got you dead to rots! Somebody get me a rope.’

  ‘Hey, that’s Deef John Holler!’ said one of the musicologists. He clapped hands on his pork-pie hat, as though excitement threatened to blow it off. ‘They’re going to hang him, it looks like. Gosh, Harry, this is something to see!’

  ‘The death of a major blues figure! Wow!’ They began frenziedly telling each other about the death of Bessie Smith, and about other details from the life of Deef John.

  ‘Went blind after his cabin was dynamited in ’08. Right after that he was accused of inverse mopery in Bean Talk, Arkansee. Walked into the Horse Dork Hotel with his fly open, right in the middle of a coming-out party for the sheriff’s daughter, Hattie Lou Daw. The governor commuted his sentence to life, because he was blind, and on the condition that he played harmonica in his cell all day…later they used him in a few movies…’

  The other musicologist loaned the watch chain (five and a half feet long) off his zoot suit to the White Shirts.

  ‘The way I heard it, he went deaf from this experiment at the Arkansee State prison. A sociologist wanted to find out if Negroes have an innate sense of rhythm or one that depended on their hearing. He had three groups: the control, the punctured-eardrums, and the removed-vocal-cords. It was a sloppy experiment, because they found out the group with punctured eardrums had an increased sense of rhythm. And before he could figure out the sociological implications of all this, the warden started killing off his control group, using them for target practice.’

  They took off their hats and sunglasses, anticipating the death of a blues great. Deef John stood upon a modern chair, the chain linking his neck to an overhead beam.

  ‘The way he finally got paroled was kind of funny. The governor on his death-bed signed a proclamation declaring that white prisoners and black were to be kept in separate but equal prisons. They paroled all the black ones until they could build a prison for them (rather than let them take over the facilities they had). But the taxpayers objected to forking over a lot of money for a Negro prison, and they never did get around to building it. Arkansee still depends on lynch law and county jails…’

  The pot-metal chain broke, and Deef John stood there, rubbing his neck and looking apologetic. Wes was furious.

  ‘Somebody get me a rope, god damn it!’

  No one got him a rope. The next instant, one of the Pink Barrettes, who was engaged in a four-way hat-exchange routine with the others, lifted Wes’s hair. As he gave chase, a second clown tripped him, and a third helped him up and dusted him off with a feather duster.

  When Wes tried to move again he discovered his belt was missing. Just saving his hipster pants from falling, he held them up with one hand and chased the Barrette who wore his wig.

  ‘Somebody get him a robe!’ shouted another clown, as Wes’s pants inevitably slipped down in back. The White Shirts stood like automatons, watching their leader. One of the Pink Barrettes slipped Deef out of the place while the other three played catch with Wes’s hair.

  ‘Give him a grope, somebody!’

  ‘GOD DAMN IT, GIVE ME MY HAIRPIECE!’

  ‘I thought he wanted a rope—now he wants a piece of hair!’ The clowns bobbed up and down behind various pieces of furniture, flinging the object back and forth and delivering one-liners at the same time.

  ‘What part does he want?’

  ‘There’s only one part, on the right-hand side.’

  ‘You know what they say: Hair today…’

  ‘Tomorrow the world!’

  ‘He wants a globe?’

  ‘Probably to keep his hairpiece on it.’
/>
  Peace covers the globe…that’s a nice idea.’

  ‘We’d be out of a job, though.’

  ‘We’ll become barbers…in Seville.’

  ‘Keep a Seville tongue in your head. And speaking of heads, this guy’s got falling hair.’ The wig was coming to pieces. Wes didn’t look too good, either. ‘What do you, as a barber, recommend?’

  ‘Give him enough rope. He can comb it over so it don’t show.’

  ‘What do the other barbers say? Take a poll.’

  ‘I don’t speak barbarian, how can I take a barber poll?’

  ‘Take a poll, any poll. This one’s getting worn out.’

  ‘So was that line. Speaking of lines, is anybody going to throw that guy a line like he says?’

  ‘Drop him a line yourself. I don’t write barbarian, either.’

  Abruptly Wes fell to the floor and rolled about, foaming at the mouth. There was one man in the crowd who knew how to take care of this. Dr Fellstus clicked together a syringe, sat on Wes to keep him still, and gave him a large injection.

  ‘Just a tranquilizer, folks,’ he explained. ‘He’s a bit snappish, better keep back.’

  He did not move his enormous buttocks until Wes was calm, but continued to pat his cropped head and say, ‘There, there, boy. That’s a good boy. You just have a nice rest, that’s the boy. Nice boy, now, take it easy. Good boy, Wes.’

  And in Wes’s dazed forebrain a feeble chain of thoughts switched back and forth, hunting vainly for the answer to this equation:

  The incident more or less finished the funeral party. Nearly everyone began looking for coats or at watches. The musicologist who’d contributed his watch chain was thoroughly ashamed of himself: now everyone knew it was cheaply made. His friend, taking pity on him, started a lively conversation about the Morris Nonette.

  Inexplicably a group of pleasant, middle-aged tourists came in just as everyone was leaving. Their leader, a man in a cardboard boater labeled BABEL TOURS, made an announcement: ‘Naked man in the elevator!’ he shouted, making a megaphone of his hands. ‘Naked man in the elevator!’ It seemed almost as if he were selling tickets. ‘Says he’s a psychiatrist.’