P.E.Z. (PEDERASTY EXCITEMENT ZONE)
by MAXIM BEY
P.E.Z. The candy comes out where the chin would be. Kids dig it.
The revolution is boys masturbating in trees by an airstream trailer which a timely trust-fund had enabled me to acquire. In the racially tri-isolated Pine Barrens, Youths with mangy chromosomes idly leafing through ancient comic books whose back page ads offer Rosicrucian initiation, x-ray specs and PEZ. Kaleidoscope of cornball queer nostalgia looted from the works of W.S. Burroughs...
Revolution has passed beyond the outworn charm of workers, demonstrations, effective action of any kind, protest, resistance or name-calling. Revolution is about me getting fed for free. Yum (as my Sufi colleagues in pre-Revolutionary Persia used to say. In Persian "Yum-mee!")
I (or We, as I - I mean we - like to say) first discovered the hypostasis and entropicalismo of encliticistic revolutionary praxis in Iran, where one such "upheaval" interrupted a very delicious meal in the palace of the Shah.
A learned Persian acquaintance, whose works now appear under my name, had been suddenly removed from the dining palace of the "Light of The Aryans." Agents of his Shah-ness assisted him catastrophically out for an editorial touching on the subject of human rights - a notion you all outgrew by the time you had your third scrotal piercing. The writer in question was whisked off to receive political illumination in the Shah's basement rumpus room.
His majesty cast a minatory (nice word, that) glance about the room. My background as master of the Mystic Arts (gained through long lone hours reading Dr Strange Comics) supplied me with the adequate response.
Looking up with the innocent eyes of a Lamb New Born, I asked: "Can I have his dessert?"
I was halfway through the marzipan minarets of that delicious treat when the Revolution broke out, interrupting my free feed, leading me to my critique of political action, and drawing me fatefully to fill my pockets with whatever came to hand and return to the US of A to scribble for your self-realization these
ASTONISHING INSIGHTS !!!
i Indolence. An ideal which can be reached only by standing tippy-toe on the necks of your friends - which you've made sure have been extended on your behalf.
ii
Literature. No, abolish that word. The idea of the individual writer is, well, revolutionary. The literature of the future is to be created by means of xerox and pasted in a different order under a title of one's choice - and one's own name.
iii
Boy-spunk. In some sense the essence of the PEZ, or at least the flavor. That's a good thing.
iv
Immediatism. I want it now.
v
Bathing. Or lack there of. Why not to. Find something good on this and paste it in here.
vi
Chins. And the evil thereof. Held to be a sign of character, and therefore to be avoided as indicative of revolutionary or moral (i.e., unhip) tendencies. Yucky poopoo! (I must consider my younger readers...the younger the better. And I do. Consider them I mean. But do they write? Do they call? I could go broke on candy. What's so unattractive about a chinless fifty-five year old unbathed naked fat man in a fez? Why should a new GameBoy tm outweigh the draw of a gamey old-boy? What kind of ageist horseshit is this?!)
vii
Pot. Got any we can smoke? I'm tapped out, man. Thanks, very revolutionary - I mean post-revolutionary of you. I'll remember this for as long as I can. Got any siblings? Who haven't started shaving I mean...legs don't count...
viii
Girls. Ick. Not in my PEZ, brother! Girls are a revolutionary invention, a bourgeois reactionary ploy designed to sop up our precious bodily fluids. Getting laid is over (Arabic: "oh-vuh") - at least for me. Why not for you? Spout this shit on a date and see!
ix
Funny clothes. The greatest cultural contribution of the sixties revolution. A fat stinkard in a dress with a fez on top his greasy balding pate! Now that'll make them stand up and take notice, no matter how incoherent the screed! or rant - essay's a good term - as in attempt - as in attempt to remember what I was trying to say.
x
Qadaffi - what a snappy dresser! If only he had a fez!
xi
Art Sabotage (if you've been to art school, skip this insight). Go to the Metropolitan Museum and pay less than the suggested admission. Persuade someone your six year old's paintings are really by Mark Rothko. Persuade Mark Rothko you're really six years old. Persuade a six year old you're six years old. Just act like you're six. Masturbate in a tree. Whatever.
xii
Poetic Terrorism. This is a real tuffy, 'cause what's more terrible than poetry? But OK. Terrorize poets. Take their work and print it under your own name. The old Moorish Orthodox "rule of three": read three books, write one. Use words that are fucking awful, especially all together:, e.g., "Hermeneutics applied to Paleolithic eschatologies of Wu-Wei chaote exegesic brownies." (English: "The brownies are stale and I don't think you followed the recipe carefully".)
xiii
Parasitic Drift. Traveling from apartment to apartment eating other people's food. An art perfected by the Medieval Sufis. If you knew Sufi like I know Sushi, Oh, Oh, Oh what a meal!
xiv
Tourism. The Parasitic Drift practiced by anyone else.
xv
Pseudonyms. If nothing you say's true, why should your name be?
xvi
Taqqiyah. What we Sufis call "permissible dissimulation" (Ar. "al-fib" or 'aw-wh 'ite lie" ---i.e., lies such as a white man would tell. In fact, lies such as this white man does tell.) An essential tactic when unveiling such esoteric truths as: Child molesting is a morally superior action. The Irish should be grateful to be called Niggers by me, who as a trust-fund sucking Mayflower descendant know what oppression is - after all, I've viewed it from above. Doing nothing but cadging free meals advances the cause of human liberty. Smoking pot makes you smart.
END OF ASTONISHING REVELATIONS
YE CONCLUSION NOSTALGIQUE
The rainbows and melting faces of the hashish dream fade in the desolate over-written-ness of these Manhattanite pages. The Old Man in the Mountain diminishes by the length of a lie into this sad shabby unfuckedness. The forty-watt twilight sky of a Deus Otiosus. A god who does no work. He doesn't have to. He has a trust fund.
Yet by the red ash-light of my joint a queasy blessedness bleeds the color back into the surface of things, and the most worn-out tropes of fin-de-siecle French Orientalism seem almost fresh when lisped back by 22 year olds innocent of syntax but tattooed beyond their years.
What Abyssinias of bullshit unexplored will they yet swallow? How many pages can I plagiarize from the living and the dead? What Iraqi tyrant will I call on them to applaud as a brother in the Struggle I simultaneously declare us all excused from taking part in?! How much wood would a wood-chuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? How many knees would a Negro grow if a Negro could grow knees? How now, brown cow (Arabic: AI-Baqara, and as far as I ever read in the Qur'an)?
Maybe Marxism would be cool. Retro-like, y'dig?
Where's that joint? Is anyone still listening? Someday they may not - and that terrifies me. But the message that selfishness is in some ultimate sense "with it" has always gone over with the college crowd, who can (as their professors well know) reliably be held in awe by long words, twisted syntax and obscure or exotic references. "Keep them low whom knowledge would exalt equal with the gods."
The Gods. I'm enrolled among the immortals - Burroughs, Bukowski - whose glamour endures like the vicious habits they glamorize. I win! Sophist to sophomores, Hack writer to hackers, Kochloffel to potheads, forever shall I splash fashionably in the shallow sea of Me.
I am the Revolution.
wa salaam.
- NY - Paris - Dublin - Sea of Tranquillity - Marianus Trench - Greenwood Lake - Dubuque Ramada Inn - and your apartment (the caviar in the fridge was delicious. And worth every penny.)