by Martin Mundt
Spivey, of course, went first and fast; clutched in anti-toxic, yellow-rubber fists, my entire collection was pitched straight into the double-strength, double-sanitary, double-plus-good garbage bag. Mom never once turned her back on Spivey’s works.
She knew all my hiding places, as well as every Spivey title, like he’d been ratted on. The NKVD had nothing on my Mom once she got going.
She checked under the pillow, inside the pillowcase, under the mattress, behind the headboard, on the closet shelf, in the drawers, under the drawers, inside Dad’s old army footlocker, under the rug, inside every box and bag in the room, and even between the pages of my books. She rattled my crank ukulele for loose contraband. She checked the shadows thrown by the light fixtures. I didn’t see an x-ray machine or Geiger counter, but she moved fast; I could have missed them. She tossed my room like a twenty-year vice cop operating on a grudge and a hangover.
“There will be no more of these disgusting comic books,” she lectured as she worked. “No more disgusting spaceships or disgusting monsters or disgusting scientific fiction.” She picked up a copy of Incredulous Digest, with an Andromedan hyperbrain being assaulting a Vargas girl on the cover. She stared so far through me that she saw my ignominious jailhouse future, like I was the leering Andromedan, or at the very least rooting for him.
“There will be no more of this disgusting por… no… graphy. There will be no more looking at, touching or thinking about these things anymore ever again.”
She opened my bottom drawer and froze.
She picked up my last piece of fresh Pink Menace in the tips of her trembling yellow fingers, never taking her eyes off the bright waxed wrapper.
“And especially,” she said as she swung the gum around to the garbage. “There will be nothing, no toys, no games, no pornography, and absolutely, positively, no more bubble gum or anything else you can chew, eat, swallow or otherwise fit into your mouth that is produced by this… this… Spivak person.”
She dropped the gum in the garbage bag, sprinkled my childhood and imagination with a thick layer of rat poison, and then tied the bag shut.
“This kind of filth will rot your brain. Do you understand me?”
“But, Mom…”
“DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?”
Understanding in this situation was a shallow concept. I was expected to understand NO, yet I was not expected to understand any of the complex logical processes leading up to the NO. But it was 1953, and she was my mother, and that made for swift and complete acceptance of shallow concepts.
“Yes, Ma’am,” I said.
And so Spivey’s wonders were slung into the trunk of Dad’s Ford. The yellow gloves sat on top of the bag, because they too were now infected by having touched Spivey paraphernalia.
I went too, sitting next to Dad.
Dad kept glancing at the rearview mirror the whole way.
We dropped the bag off at the armory, where Mr. Green, the pharmacist and local National Guard commander, waited in his uniform. He talked to my Dad in whispers while Mitch Kelly and Billy Horgan, also in uniform and wearing stiff rubber gloves, tossed the bag into a 55-gallon drum, and some red liquid like ink splashed over the rim and onto the concrete floor before they sealed it. There were about a hundred other sealed drums stacked on pallets in the room.
My eyes scabbed over for weeks, it hurt so much to watch Spivey’s corpus thrown into the garbage.
Spivey was never discussed again, despite the peculiar waste disposal techniques. My few questions met with an invincible adult phalanx, and Spivey formed ranks with the taboos of Dad’s “social” drinking, sex, female anatomy, sex, masturbation, sex, the opposite sex and sex.
I never believed the rumors that Spivey’s secret Pink Menace prizes were dosed with polio virus, or strychnine, or some North Korean brainwashing drug that was infiltrated into the Free World through NKVD spies.
I never believed that the police from fifteen states were on Spivey’s trail for sex crimes so horrible that they could only be described to Middle Americans with the word “lewd.” I never believed the rumors of Spivey’s arrest and voluntary radical psychosurgery.
“Shock treatments were invented for people like him,” Mom had said as the trunk slammed shut, and that was that.
But I didn’t believe it.
I knew it was the slaves of Maniac Worm that had gotten Spivey. He had said that the Worm was true, and I knew that the Worm was behind it all. I thought it might come for me too, in the night, in my bedroom, in my sleep, and that the last thing I’d ever feel would be a moist tentacle around my throat at midnight.
But the Worm never came, and I grew up, and gradually I came to know better, and I forgot about the rat poison and the 55-gallon drum and Mitch and Billy in heavy rubber gloves.
Spivey just wrote chills, but I still loved him.
It seems, however, that Mom and Spivey both knew the Truth after all. The Worm was real and inside Spivey’s brain, forcing him to spread its pink spawn as prizes inside Pink Menace bubble gum. Maybe the whole comic-book invasion was real. Maybe a shadow war was fought and won outside the bright sunlit aluminum and Formica of the 50’s, the U.S. Army and the CIA fighting shoulder-to-shoulder against a lurching horde of squooshing, vicious hunks of bubble gum from outer space.
Spivey warned people as best he could, even as the Worm squeezed his brainstem and forced him to mail-order space creatures disguised as bubble gum to unsuspecting, trusting pre-teen comic fans. He warned us through his heroic, counterculture heroes, for those who could read between the thought-balloons.
Spivey committed suicide in 1957.
I guess Mom was right.
The Worm rotted your brain.
The Worm stirred on the floor.
I clicked the standard-issue space-bayonet onto my rifle and tensed for an assault.
The Worm extended tendrils and nuzzled the foreheads of my glow-in-the-dark, Roswell alien heads like they were spinach. It pulsed slowly like an exposed lung.
I pulled my legs, but it tightened on me like a Chinese finger puzzle. I pulled harder. It squeezed harder. I looked around for a better weapon, but I couldn’t see anything likely to be more useful than my plastic space-rifle.
The Green Golem, one of my favorite non-Spivey heroes, could have killed the Worm with only a popsicle stick and fifteen of his sixteen prehensile tongues tied behind his face, but I wasn’t so lucky. If I could only generate a fraction of a percent of the violence drawn on the covers of my comics, I could blast the Worm to charmed particles, but I didn’t have anything better than a plastic toy. Sure, it was good enough to put out a kid’s eye, and maybe the paint was toxic, but making the Worm’s babies retarded didn’t help my immediate problem. I was going to need better than a space-rifle.
The ultra-violence was just never around when you really needed it.
The Worm stopped pulsing and rushed me with about a thousand tiny tendrils like needles and threads, unweaving themselves from each other, reaching for my head, circling and swaying like a hypnotist’s words, aiming their pointy tips like syringes at my nerve ends.
It was down to just the Worm and me, and may the better genus win.
I slashed at the tendrils, severing a few, sweeping most to the side. The survivors swung wide around my flanks, and I rolled, twisting them around my legs like spaghetti on a fork. I rolled, back and forth over magazines and toys, and I rolled, flattening the tendrils and slamming the Pink Menace against the floor, and I kept rolling, until ink from all the comics rubbed off on the Worm.
Whole pages of bright superhero mayhem transferred onto the Worm’s skin like a huge Silly Putty roller, smeared and blurred like Hieronymus Bosch without his glasses. I stopped rolling and brought the rifle up in order to club the tendrils again.
But it wasn’t turning itself into tendrils anymore. It stretched itself into one giant, toothless mouth, gulping me down whole, starting with my legs. It inched its way up to my chest, and I could read pages of V
irus Boy, and The Purple Head and Maniac Worm itself copied backwards on its skin, like stained ooze in the Cathedral of the Holy Superheroes. All Spivey’s nightmares that had muralled the inside of my skull for decades came melting out all at once.
Then the Worm began unraveling, sending skinny loose coils of itself spilling across the floor like the tangle of a broken pink cassette tape. It lost its grip on my legs and I scrambled free.
It quivered and spasmed, like an entire skeleton full of muscles cramping, like some kind of seizure.
It was the ink.
Maniac Worm had been killed in a vat of boiling ink in Maniac Worm #8: The Worm Burns. Sergeant Warmonger had been poisoned by the ink of endless paperwork. Mordred Darque had been done in by a poison CIA fountain pen. Spivey provided the knowledge through his comics. The Army had figured it out back in ’53, I guess, since they were dumping Pink Menace by the hundreds into drums of ink. And now I could see it working right in front of my eyes.
The comic book ink was toxic to the Worm, sending it into shock like an anaphylactic blob. The coils all turned black on my floor, shrinking as dry as old paper. They crumbled when I poked them with the space-bayonet, like a mummy had unspooled its wrappings, revealing only emptiness inside.
I sat back against the counter. The store was a wreck. Half my comics were torn and shredded like the NSA had had their way with the place. No one was going to believe that I had killed a space monster, that I had killed Maniac Worm. No one was going to believe that Arno Spivey was a hero in some cold, shadow war that no one had ever heard about.
The dry coils melted into dust and started floating around my shop, so there wasn’t any evidence.
Worst of all, and this struck to the heart of my professional pride, no one was going to believe that comic books had just saved the world.
My Love Is A Dead, Dead Rose
May 5
Dear Editor, Weekly Global Spectator,
I have a celebrity body.
I do not mean to say that I am a Bruce Willis body-double, nor that I have baked a burrito in the shape of Madonna’s figure, as desirable as either of those things might be as feature stories for your fine publication. No, I mean precisely that I have a celebrity’s corpse sitting on the couch in my living room.
I cannot yet say which celebrity. I must gauge your interest first. I am sure you understand. Do you wish to do a story about us? With pictures? For a substantial fee, of course. Our life together is quite fascinating. The hilarity that ensues when I attempt to vacuum near her is, by itself, worth a story.
Yours truly,
Rex (not my real name)
PS Please run the following lines in your personals if you should decide to proceed, and I will contact you.
“I go where only a mortician goes,
becausemy love is a dead, dead rose.”
May 26
Dear Editor, Weekly Global Spectator,
I have not heard from you.
I am the person who dug up a celebrity. I didn’t intend to dig up a celebrity. Any old body would have sufficed at the time. Well, any old female body. I am not ‘that way’ if you understand me. I am a regular churchgoer, and some things, after all, are just wrong.
She is not like she was in the movies. She is much less perky and animated than in life. There is no glamour, no pedestal, no isolation. There is a very real earthy quality about her.
She can be stubborn and close-mouthed. It is difficult to open her up, but once, during a particularly emotional plea on my part for understanding, she just fell to pieces on the couch in my living room. She is fragile, and putting her shattered self back together again was the work of an afternoon and most of a roll of duct tape. But now she is again as beautiful as a dead, duct-taped butterfly.
Perhaps I could arrange a regular seance or channeling for your fine publication. Would you care to buy the rights to any such interviews? They would be exclusives, I guarantee. Think of the headlines: “Celebrity in Limbo!” “Rich and Famous Repent at Leisure!” “The Purgatory Diet!” The possibilities are endless. But of course I am not the professional, although I understand that your circulation increases whenever she is on your cover.
I remind you of a series of covers exposing her lesbianism a few years back. Quite lurid, and very successful, although I must say, factually speaking, also quite false. I may with some pride confess that I have heard no complaints from her regarding my prowess.
She is a quiet, open girl, amenable to all sorts of sexual experimentation, insatiable in a passive sort of way, and with an exceptionally sturdy skeletal structure, but she is definitely all woman, especially once the sutures were removed and she loosened up a bit.
And a damned fine listener too.
We await your answer.
Yours truly,
Rex (still not my real name)
June 10
Dear “Ask Doctor Dixie”, Weekly Global Spectator,
I badly need some guidance.
Last evening, I took advantage of… a houseguest. She was quite… stiff at the time, by which of course I mean quite drunk, not quite dead, and I could no longer contain my urges.
She did not resist when I arranged her limbs like X-rated origami, though she did not help either. She has expressed no regrets. She in fact expresses no thoughts at all. She does not speak a word to me. We pass the time sitting on the couch in my living room, sitting for hours, just sitting. She drives me to distraction, since her very immobility is an aphrodisiac to me. I tell her this, and, if anything, she remains even more obstinately motionless than before, as if to tease me.
If “no” means “no,” and “yes” means “yes,” then what does being utterly ignored down to the meaty core of my being mean? You are a woman; you must know. Is this a good sign?
All right, all right, I cannot bear your suspicions any longer. She is dead. Dead when we met. Dead during intimacy. Dead now. Dead, dead, dead.
Her sutured mouth, her provocatively decaying clothing, her little hands so twisted and brown, her duct-taped breasts, all conspire to arouse me.
My question is, was making love to her repeatedly too much? Yes, yes, you’ve caught me. I have succumbed to her limp charms repeatedly. You have the whole story now. Are you satisfied? You have all the grisly, rotting, decaying, putrefying details. No, I must stop. I am only arousing myself.
Please tell me, is the solution to my problem to have even more sex with her? In anxious anticipation of your positive response.
Yours truly,
Rex (a pseudonym)
PS Is the use of a condom absolutely necessary during such unusual intimacies? Please, please say no!
June 16
Calvin Klein Corporation, New York, New York
Dear Calvin,
May I call you Calvin?
I have been sitting on the couch in my living room, considering my love. She is as dead as a parrot, but she inspires me.
And the inspiration is this.
Have you ever considered creating a fragrance called Formaldehyde? Radical, perhaps, but I smell a real moneymaker. Who “knows” how big it could be?
Consider the advertising possibilities. “Formaldehyde, it fills you up with love.” Treat this slogan as my gift. No, don’t thank me. My reward will be the smell.
Yours truly,
Rex (a pen name)
July 12
Dear Subscription Dept., Refrigeration Technology Monthly,
Enclosed please find a check for $36.95 to cover my next year’s subscription to your fine publication. Also please note my change of address.
I apologize for my frequent moves, as I know this must complicate your record-keeping, but my neighbors hound me wherever I go, only because I am different.
So what the F–- do I care? you must be saying. And you are right to be profane, to be obscene, to curse me and spit on me, since my problems are of no concern to you, and why should you be any different than the rest of merciless humanity? “I only deal in
subscriptions,” you say, “so leave me alone in my cubicle.”
I feel, however, that some elaboration of my behavior is due. I can no longer bury my secret. I can no longer lead this underground life.
I have a corpse on the couch in my living room, and I love her. Yes, damn it, I love her.
My dead love does not drink or smoke or swear or take drugs or lie or cheat. She does not criticize or complain. She does not throw my shortcomings back in my face constantly, desecration this, micropenis that.
She can be inexpressive, it’s true. She is not always in touch with her emotions, with her inner corpse. But she is patient, uncritical, accepting, and limber enough for any stretch of my poor, lifeless imagination. She is so different from family and friends, who are supposed to supply this sort of support and love. Not my family and friends, of course, but families and friends I have heard of, the families and friends of my friends.
She is always there for me, right where I left her on the couch in my living room.
But to return to my address change.
The peculiar smells in my house, the unusual fluids, the odd hours I keep, the heavy thumping sounds of evenings, Bolero playing at all hours of the night. These things simply confound my neighbors, and so I must move often to stay ahead of the tangles of questions and prejudices that society unearths in my wake. It is not perversity, but necessity that forces me to force you to change my address so regularly. I apologize.
Thank you for your attention to this matter. Your publication is an inspiration, especially in the warm summer months, when a chilled couch in the living room is worth its weight in perfume. Looking forward to uninterrupted freezing temperatures.
