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SOFT WHITE UNDERBELLY At an age when most young Scotsmen were lifting skirts, plowing furrows and spreading seed, Mungo Park was displaying his bare buttocks to al-haj' Ali Ibn Fatoudi, Emir of Ludamar. The year was 1795. George III was dabbing the walls of Windsor Castle with his own spittle, the Notables were botchings things in France, Goya was deaf, DeQuincey a depraved pre-adolescent. George Bryan "Beau" Brummell was smoothing down his first starched collar, young Ludwig van Beethoven, beetle-browed and twenty-four, was wowing them in Vienna with his Piano Concerto no. 2, and Ned Rise was drinking Strip-Me-Naked with Nan Punt and Sally Sebum at the Pig & Pox Tavern in Maiden Lane. Ali was a Moor. He sat cross-legged on a damask pillow and scrutinized the pale puckered nates with the air of an epicure examining a fly in his vichysoisse. His voice was like sand. "Turn over," he said. Mungo was a Scotsman. He knelt on a reed mat, trousers around his knees, and glanced over his shoulder at Ali. He was looking for the Niger River. "Turn over," Ali repeated. While the explorer was congenial and quick-to-please, his Arabic was somewhat sketchy. When he failed to respond a second time, Dassoud--Ali's henchman and human jackal--stepped forward with a lash composed of the caudal appendages of half a dozen wildebeests. The tufted tails cut the air, beating on high like the wings of angels. The temperature outside Ali's tent was 127 degrees Fahrenheit. The tent was a warp-and-woof affair, constructed of thread spun from the hair of goats. Inside it was 112 degrees. The lash fell. Mungo turned over. Here too he was white: white as sheets and blizzards. Ali and his circle were astonished all over again. "His mother dipped him in milk," someone said. "Count his fingers and toes!" shouted another. Women and children crowded the tent's entrance, goats bleated, camels coughed and coupled, someone was hawking figs. A hundred voices intertwined like a congeries of footpaths, walks, lowroads and highroads--which one to take?--and all in Arabic, mystifying, rapid, harsh, the language of the Prophet. "La-la-la-la-la!" a woman shrieked. The others took it up, an excoriating falsetto. "La-la-la-la-la!" Mungo's penis, also white, shrank into his body.
---------The Road to WellVille
CHAPTER 1: OF STEAK AND SIN Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, inventor of the corn flake and peanut butter, not to mention caramel-cereal coffee, Bromose, Nuttolene and some seventy-five other gastrically correct foods, paused to level his gaze on the heavyset woman in the front row. He was having difficulty believing what he'd just heard. As was the audience, judging from the gasp that arose after she'd raised her hand, stood shakily and demanded to know what was so sinful about a good porterhouse steak--it had done for the pioneers, hadn't it? And for her father and his father before him? The Doctor pushed reflectively at the crisp white frames of his spectacles. To all outward appearances he was a paradigm of concentration, a scientist formulating his response, but in fact he was desperately trying to summon her name--who was she, now? He knew her, didn't he? That nose, those eyes . . . he knew them all, knew them by name, a matter of pride . . . and then, in a snap, it came to him: Tindermarsh. Mrs. Violet. Complaint, obesity. Underlying cause, autointoxication. Tindermarsh. Of course. He couldn't help feeling a little self-congratulatory flush of pride--nearly a thousand patients and he could call up any one of them as plainly as if he had their charts spread out before him . . . . But enough of that--the audience was stirring, a monolithic force, one great naked psyche awaiting the hand to clothe it. Dr. Kellogg cleared his throat. "My dear Mrs. Tindermarsh, I do thank you for your question," he began, hardly able to restrain his dainty feet from breaking into dance even as the perfect riposte sprang to his lips, "but I wonder how many of those flesh-abusing pioneers lived past the age of forty?" (A murmur from the audience as the collective image of a skeletal man in a coonskin cap, dead of salt pork and flapjacks, rose before their eyes.) "And how many of them, your own reverend forebears not excepted, went to bed at night and had a minute's sleep that wasn't racked with dyspepsia and the nightmare of carnal decay?" He paused to let that horrible thought sink in. "I say to you, Mrs. Tindermarsh, and to the rest of you ladies and gentlemen of the audience, and I say it with all my heart"--pause, two beats--"a steak is every bit as deadly as a gun. Worse. At least if one points a gun at one's head and pulls the trigger, the end comes with merciful swiftness, but a steak--ah, the exquisite and unremitting agonies of the flesh eater, his colon clogged with its putrefactive load, the blood settling in his gut, the carnivore's rage building in his brittle heart--a steak kills day by day, minute by minute, through the martyrdom of a lifetime."
---------A Friend of the Earth
So Lily, she's giving me a long steady look out of the egg yolks of her eyes, and I'm lucky to have chicken backs what with the meat situation lately, when the pictaphone rings (think Dick Tracy, because the whole world's a comic strip now). The sky is black--not gray, black--and it can't be past three in the afternoon. Everything is still, and I smell it like a gathering cloud, death, the death of everything, hopeless and stinking and wasted, the pigment gone from the paint, the paint gone from the buildings, cars abandoned along the road, and then it starts raining again. I talk to my wrist (no picture, though--the picture button is set firmly and permanently in the off position--why would I want to show this wreck of a face to anybody?). "Yeah?" I shout, and the rain is heavier, wind-driven now, snapping in my face like a wet towel. "Ty?" The voice is cracked and blistered, like the dirt here when the storms move on to Nevada and Arizona and the sun comes back to pound us all with its unfiltered melanomic might, but I recognize it right away, twenty years notwithstanding. It's a voice that does something physical to me, that jumps out of the circumambient air and seizes hold of me like a thing that lives off the blood of other things. "Andrea? Andrea Cotton?" Half a beat. "Jesus Christ, it's you, isn't it?" Soft and seductive, the wind rising, Lily fixing me from behind the chicken wire as if I'm the main course: "No picture for me?" "What do you want, Andrea?" "I want to see you." "Sorry, nobody sees me." "I mean in person, face to face. Like before." Rain streams from my hat. One of the sorry inbred lions starts coughing its lungs out, a ratcheting, oddly mechanical sound that drifts across the weedlot and ricochets off the monolithic face of the condos. I'm trying to hold back a whole raft of feelings, but they keep bobbing and pitching to the surface, threatening to break loose and shoot the rapids once and for all. "What for?" "What do you think?" "I don't know--to run down my debit cards? Fuck with my head? Save the planet?" Lily stretches, yawns, shows me the length of her yellow canines and the big crushing molars in back. She should be out on the veldt, cracking up giraffe bones, extracting marrow from the vertebrae, gnawing on hoofs. Except that there is no veldt, not anymore, and no giraffes either. Something unleashed in my brain shouts, IT'S ANDREA! And it is. Andrea's voice coming back at me. "No, fool," she says. "For love."
---------T.C.Boyle Stories
Somehow, he doesn't feel hungry anymore. And then it hits him: something like anger, something like fear. The refrigerator door closes behind him with an airtight hiss, flies scatter, an
overturned cup on the floor spins wildly away from his right wheel, and he's back in the hallway again, but this time he's turning left into the living room. Bottles , ashtrays, crumpled newspapers, he ignores them all. On the far side of the room stands a cheap plywood door, a door he's never been through: the door to Ormand and Lee Junior's room. Sitting there evenings, watching TV, he's caught a glimpse of the cluttered gloom beyond the doorway as one or the other of the boys slams in or out, but thats about it. They've never invited him in, and he's never much cared. But now, without hesitation, he wheels himself across the room, shoves down on the door latch with the heel of his hand, and pushes his way in. He's no fool. He knew what he would find. But still , the magnitude of it chokes up his troat and makes the blood beat in his head like a big bass drum.
"She hated it. I know it. I know it." Albert rocked back and forth in his chair, his
face buried in his hands, the toque clinging to his brow like a carrion bird. I was
past midnight, the restaurant was closed. He sat amidst the wreckage of the kitchen,
the waste, the slop, the smell of congaled grease and dead spices, and
his breath cam in ragged sobbing gasps.
Marie got up to rub the back of his neck. Sweet, honey-complected Marie
with her firm heavy arms and graceful wrists, the spill and generosity of her
flesh-his consolation in a world of Willa Franks. "It's okay," she kept saying,
over and over, her voice a soothing murmur, "it's okay, it was good, it was." He'd failed and he knew it. Of all nights, why this one? Why couldn't she
have come when the structure was there, when he was on, when the dishwasher
was sober, the cream fresh, and the mesquite knots piled high against the wall,
when he could concentrate, for christ's sake? "She didn't finish her tripe,"
he said, disconsolate. "Or the grilled vegetables. I saw the plate."---------
"If the River Was Whiskey"There were too many complications, too many things to get between him and the moment, and he tried not to think about them.
He tried not to think about his father- or his mother either- in the same way that he tried not to think about the pictures
of the bald-headed stick people in Africa or meat in its plastic wrapper and how it got there. But when he did think about
his father he thought about the river-was-whiskey day.
It was a Tuesday or Wednesday, middle of the week, and when he came home from school the curtains were drawn and his father's
car was in the driveway. At the door, he could hear him, the chunk-chunk of the chords and the rasping nasal whine that
seemed as if it belonged to someone else. His father was sitting in the dark, hair in his face, bent low over his guitar.
There was an open bottle of liquor on the coffee table and a clutter of beer bottles. The room stank of smoke.
It was strange, because his father hardly ever played his guitar anymore-he mainly just taked about it . In the past tense.
And it was so strange too- and bad- because his father wasn't at work. Tiller dropped his bookbag on the telephone stand.
"Hi, Dad,"he said. His father didnt answer. Just bent over the guitar and played the same song, onver and over,as if it were the only song he knew.
Tiller sat on the sofa and listened. There was a verse -one verse- and his father repeated it three or four times before he
broke off and slurred the words into a sort of chant or hum, and then he went back to the words again.
After the fourth repetition, Tiller heard it:If the river were whiskey, And I was a divin' duck, I'd swim to the bottom, drink myself back up.---------