Why Are We in Vietnam? Page 3

  Well, Tex Hyde, he’s a mother fucker, sell you pot was grown on human shit, and he nothing but D.J.’s best friend. And they are terrible together. Listen to Halleloo. Her tone is full of hell right now, Line It With Hot Bugs is shifting in horror in his seat, cause Halleloo is talking in her bitchy boozy voice which means don’t come near unless you can steer your prick like a whip and French tickler all in one, worm! us women know which man has got the spring and who and which is the unfortunate dead ass, here is her words, “Tex Hyde is the son of an undertaker, I mean think of that, a Montesquiou Jellicoe Jethroe a-whopping around with a Kraut mortician’s offspring, and all that bastard Indian Hyde blood in the background, firewater and dirty old Engine oil, Indians unless they’re descended from my daddy’s line, and never you mind what it was, don’ ask if it’s Navaho, Apache, or any of those Jew shit questions, you anthropologist manqué, you fuckless wonder listening to the sex’l habits of all us mule-ass Texans, ought to get your ears wiped out Dr. Fink Lenin Rodzianko whateva your name is, an Indian don’t tell the secret of his name in a hurry to strangers like you, Clam Grits from Harvard Square, why, honey, that Tex Hyde don’t have Eenyen blood like my daddy and my Rusty’s daddy’s daddy, no, it’s just the sort of dirty vile polluted cesspool Eenyen blood like Mexican—you know just a touch of that Latin slicky shit in it, vicious as they come, and mated up, contemplez-vous, to fatty Bavarian oonshick and poonshick jawohl furor lemme kiss your dirty socks my leader, can you imagine? the filthiest of the Indians and the slimiest of red hot sexyass Nazis fucking each other, mating and breeding to produce Tex Hyde who grows up in his daddy’s big booming business which is stuffing corpses and doing God knows what to their little old pithy bowels and their dropped stomachs and whatever else corpses got which must be plenty or why pay thousands of dollars for a funeral unless it’s a fumigation, hey Tonto? and that boy growing up there comes out like a malevolent orchid in a humus pile, or a black panther, that’s what he is, black panther with all his black panther piss, I’m dreaming of him, Linnit, and so is my son, the black puma, he’s got my son who’s just as beautiful as George Hamilton and more clean-cut swearing by him, the puma and the panther, I think they took the vow of blood, cut their thumbs and ran ’em around the rim of some debutante’s pussy, after the way these kids now live there ain’t much left for them but to gang fuck tastefully wouldn’t you say, speak up, Linnit.”

  “Now, Hallie, I know you’re not going to listen to me.”

  “But I am, my dear. I fully intend to, Linnit?”

  “Yes, milady.”

  “Tell me I’ve been ladylike. I know I haven’t. I know I’ve been outré and spouting great clouds of baloney from inner space, I mean you might think my language was the proper vocabulary for a roughneck or a driller, but I adore you, Linnit, cause you got a kind Jewish heart and I always said when Hitler killed the Jews, half the kindness went out of the world.”

  “Now tell me he shoulda killed the other half.”

  “Heh heh, heh heh. Gallows humor, Linnit.”

  “Hallie, are you saying you’ve got to separate those boys?”

  “I know, I know. But they’re stuck to each other like ranch dogs in a fuck. Hunting together, playing football together on the very same team, riding motorcycles together, holding hands while they ride, studying karate together, I bet they can’t even get their rocks off unless they’re put-putting in the same vaginal slime, I hope at least Ranald has got the taste and sentiment to be putting it in the young lady’s vagina rather than going up her dirt-track where old Tex Hyde belongs (after all those bodies he helped his fat growing rich daddy embalm, baby) but kiss the lint from my navel, Linnit, a mother can’t even be sure of that anymore, because, tiens, mon amour, I even heard of a debutante knock-up case where the boy who had to accept the onus of parenthood was one who had addressed himself to the fore, his buddy’s lawyer got him to admit that cardinal fact by the following examination, ‘Would you, Son, be so filthy and so foul as to address yourself to a young lady’s dirt track.’ ‘Of course I wouldn’t,’ said this idiot called Son, ‘do you think I’m a pervert?’ ‘Well, my client is, would, and did,’ said the lawyer, ‘so you are the proud papa, the Brains rest,’ end of case.”

  “Take the undertaker out of it,” said Linnit, “that’s what disturbs your sense of peers and social compeers. A mortician is at a social disadvantage in stable structurification of society, but it’s not to be calibrated on a final scale. If Tex Hyde were the son of a normal occupation father, for instance if Gottfried Hyde Senior was straight corporation exec like Rusty.”

  “No, no, no, Rottenbug, you’re thinking like a tick again.”

  “If the boys were the same in the back room, so to speak, sotto voce,” said Lenin Fink, “in the easy come and go, the rhodomontade—if you permit me—of similar breedings and backings, would you then object to the highly cathected vectors of their friendship?”

  “Bless you, but I would.”

  “Tell me why, pie.”

  “Because Tex grew up a undertaker’s son, fool! plunging his hands into dead people’s vitals, picking up through his fingertips all sorts of black occult steamy little grimes of things, swamp music and black lightning and soundless thunder—purple wonders, it’s like sleeping the night in a rotten old stump—who knows what song the maggots sing, and what aromatic intuitions inflame the brain. Herbs are the nerve to a fearsome underworld—listen, baby, I didn’t get fucked by Aleister Crowley for nothing, those passes at the Black Masses,” said Hallie, putting a gloved finger up to her dear chin—she is incidentally now lying her ass off because she’s too young to know Aleister Crowley, but she’s like her son, D.J., she’s got to brag, better believe it.

  Well, this has gone on long enough. Cause you ought to know who had produced this material. Color it rainbow. This has been D.J. presenting to you the private scene of his mother being psychoanalyzed by that clammy little fink, and if the illusion has been conveyed that my mother, D.J.’s own mother, talks the way you got it here, well little readster, you’re sick in your own drool, because my mother is a Southern lady, she’s as elegant as an oyster with powder on its ass, she don’t talk that way, she just thinks that way. Do we understand each other now, son? You’ve had fun long enough. The serious shit soon starts. You’re contending with a genius, D.J. is his name, only American alive who could outtalk Cassius Clay, that’s lip, duck the blip, Orlando, it’s right on your radar screen.

  Intro Beep 2

  The fact of the matter is that you’re up tight with a mystery, me, and this mystery can’t be solved because I’m the center of it and I don’t comprehend, not necessarily, I could be traducing myself. Por ejemplo, the simple would state that Intro Beep One is a stream-of-conch written by me, and consequently commented upon by my mother up tight with her libido-drained psychoanalyst. But now you know Chap One with Fink Razzbah (rhymes with Casbah) is made up by me, D.J., alias Ranald such-and-such such-and-such Jethroe, Disc Jockey to the world (my mental connections are faster than anything afoot) and lightning which is a special case of light—how about that, Zack! is not proof against the rapidity of my investigations. For light is the content of a medium called lightning—Old McLuhan’s going to be breaking his fingernails all over again when he hears this. So watch out for D.J., muzz-fuckers. Gather here, footlings and specialists, hot shit artists, those who give head, and general drug addicts of the world, which means all you Hindus and professional football asshole buffs, and glom onto the confusion of my brain. It might be a tape recording, right? A tape recording of my brain in the deep of its mysterious unwindings. Maybe there will be a day when they discover how to dig it out, and then I will be the first living archaeological exhumation, the first documentary source of prime existence, Living Man, here he thinks, listen in, Humphrey! and then D.J. will be revered because documentaries are the bleeding-heart gods of the future out there in old electronic land. Did you ever know the seat of electricity? It’s the asshole. But what
then is the asshole of electricity? Why Creation, Catherine, that’s what it is. I mean just think of the good Lord, Amen, and all the while we’re sleeping and talking and eating and walking and pissing and fucking, excuse me, Lord, Amen! Amen! why, there’s that Lord, slipping right into us, making an operation in the bowels of Creation so there’s a tiny little transistorized tape recorder not as big as a bat’s gnat’s nut, why a million angels can dance on the idiot pinhead of that tape recorder, DNA, RNA, right? and it takes it all down, it makes all the mountainous files of the FBI look like paper cuttings in a cat-shit box, and so there is the good Lord, king of the Rat Finks, I mean, Sultan of the Wrathful Things, forgive me, Lord, yeah, yeah, there He is getting a total tape record of each last one of us, wow, double wow, rumble woof, beat the tweeter, Vera Elvira, everything you ever thought and your accompanying systole and diastole and pisshole and golden asshole all recorded, your divine intuitions and cloacal glut, all being put down FOREVER on a tiny piece of microfilm (or some such membraneous receptor) all of it being compressed by the Super File Compressor until the Lord wants to tune in on you and so presumes to press a Nuraloid button and all of you is transmogrified into one little beep the microfilm gives up, cause that’s it with sound, infinitely compressible—with smell you can waft your ass and nose from here to the black hole of Calcutta—but every sound in a symphony is contained in the bong of one gong, just as all Creation is heard and felt in the shriek of the tight wire in one pebble piss-or-pinch orgasm—weep for all of us poltroons who have felt such woe, Broad Lightning!—and now face your consequence, the Lord hears your beep, the total of all of you, good and bad, sharp and flat, chords, disharmonies and minor twelfths—wheeze! Give up the breath—one of his angels passes you on. To here or to there. Yeah.

  Unless you can put false material into the tape recorder. Think of that.

  It opens this hypothesis. I, Ranald, S-and-S Jethroe, working as D.J., may be trying to trick Number One Above, maybe I’m putting false material into this tape recorder, or jamming it—contemplate! Maybe I’m making cheerful humorous recs, belly laughter shit pressings when in fact I’m sheer fucked right out of my mind, how about that? Maybe all this humor here is absolute pretense, maybe—up your buns, J. D. Salinger—I’m coming on like Holden Caulfield when I’m really Doctor Jekyll with balls. I mean I got a horror in me, honey, I will not tell you yet. I will merely offer the clue—we have no material physical site or locus for this record, because I can be in the act of writing it, recording it, slipping it (all unwitting to myself) into the transistorized electronic aisles and microfilm of the electronic Lord (who, if he is located in the asshole, must be Satan) or I can be expiring consciousness, I can be the unwinding and unravelings of a nervous constellation just now executed, killed, severed or stopped, maybe even stunned, you thunders, Herman Melville go hump Moby and wash his Dick.

  Or maybe I’m a Spade and writing like a Shade. For every Spade is the Shade of the White Man, and when we die we enter their mind, we are part of the Shade. And when Spades die?—well, that depends on how you dig Niggers you white ass chiggers says D.J. Come on now, says D.J., what if I’m not the white George Hamilton rich dear son of Dallas, Texas, and Hallelujah ass but am instead black as your hole after you eat licorice and chew black cherries, what then, what if I’m some genius brain up in Harlem pretending to write a white man’s fink fuck book in revenge, ever see an old black man roll his eyes on a country road while some ice-green-eye redneck look him in and out saying what black thoughts you have Sambo ass, and Mr. Black he looking back and he see Whitey the Green Eye from Texas with his ears moving in circles like old wasp wings, zzz, and his sharp Scotch-Irish White White White Man’s Nose red as lobster is a-hovering and a-plunging like a Claw, man, look at the white-green snots way up high, Niggerman, this is D.J. broadcasting from Texas, maybe, Doctor Jek out on his frants again, sick with the tick, ex-acid is my head, Love iS Death, HelL iS Death, it’s square to be frantic, so bring in the cool, bring in the cool, D.J., tell the folk in the cool of the evening that they are listening to Mr. Big, Mister Big Blood, oh blood how rot is thy sting? So you can’t know if I’m true-blue Wasp-ass Texas even if I know and that’s a fact, cause I know I’d like to walk up to Jesus some day and shake ’is hand and look ’em in the eye, and say Son, Y’may have lost the law suit, but have no hard feelings and come around again soon—we miss Y’ down in this neck of the woods which ain’t got much woods, nor trees for that matter, jus mud and dust and cattle and cow shit in abunnance, but Y’re welcome, Y’re surely welcome, Y’re a man’s man, Y’re a peach, Y’re a peach of a little whining Jew bastard, Jesus, each time I go hunting my wife won’t fuck. That’s Christianity for you—jes insists on using shit for axle grease in the heat of the chase.

  Nonetheless, if you are really reading this and I am really writing it (which I don’t know—it’s a wise man who knows he is the one who is doing the writer’s writing—we are all after all agents of Satan and the Lord, cause otherwise how explain the phenomenological extremities of hot shit and hurricane) but assuming howsomever that this huge metaphysical appropriation of the possibilities is valid that to wit that I, Dr. Jekyll, D.J. for genius, eighteen plus years old, is in fact writing this, then I better stop bullshitting the record and commit a few facts. Get set for my father in Chap Two. Release your horny masturbating hand. Engorge your lip. Take a fearsome trip.

  Chap Two

  D.J.’s father, the cream of corporation corporateness, Rutherford David Jethroe Jellicoe Jethroe, came back to Dallas after spending twelve years off and on moving around the world for Central Consolidated Chemical and Plastic, CCCP being what the boys called it till they found out the Red-ass Russians had their Communist Party initials CCCP, so they changed the name—look into the difficulties—an approval vote of the stockholders 1,178,008 to 241,642, change of listing on the stock market, reams of pure shit, reprinting of stationery, invoices, packages, loading, relettering boxcars—they a bunch of tight assholes running the inner mills of the mills, so guess the new name, you know it, they called it Central Consolidated Combined Chemical and Plastic, the new coagulation of title now being CCCCP or as the team began to say, 4C and P, which is an unhappy conjunction since how much can you foresee before you got—well, they say people in the Corporate life shoot their urine straighter than a ’03 Springfield, we ain’t Wasp-like for nothing, y’ hear Rangoon? So back came Rusty after twelve big years in the foreign ass vineyards setting up operations for Double CC and Plastic, as he called it, his other fond name being Central Consolidated, cause they call it that too out where the reindeer run and the flying fishes try out their flying CIA fucks past Mandalay, and he was brought back in to head a new division for Four C-ing the cancer market—big lung subsidiary. Whereas Foreseeing Plastic wanted to get in on the bright new fortunes being made along the rim-scab of Carcinoma Cruds and Craters which D.J. is here to tell you is America’s Last Frontier and Marching Estate, so leave Corporate Wisdom to its devices, they come up with a plastic filter for cigarettes which offers more pores in it than Sponge Valley, in fact if you perspire too much you can tape one of these cigarette filters to your armpit, that’ll absorb the Chinese cooking and general underarm funk; should a petting party hose-down and gism-shoot occur, as it may with the best of young friends and associates, why, stick our plastic filter up said girl’s tootle and all misdirected gism will be absorbed, no prononzo necessary here, but never, unless you’re the Earl of Roderick, try to proctate it up her ass or she will never again be able to tinkle and will die emmerdé!! Whang! Whang! this plastic filter—trade name Pure Pores—is the most absorptive substance devised ever in a vat—traps all the nicotine, sucks up every bit of your spit. Pure Pores also causes cancer of the lip but the surveys are inconclusive, and besides, fuck you!

  Well, back came Rusty to Dallas to head Pew Rapports—the filter with the purest porosity of purpose—and Rusty was a heroic-looking figure of a Texan, 6½, 194, red-brown lean keen of color,
eyes gray-green-yellow-brown which is approved executive moderate shit hue color for eyes if you want to study corporation norms mores and tempos of shift and success in massive organizational configurations, and since he was big exec, what do you think he look and talk like? Well, Clara, go to the rear of the line, he look like a high-breed crossing between Dwight D. Eisenhower and Henry Cabot Lodge, what the buns do you think a corporation exec is going to look like if he got the time to make his face grow the way he want it to grow during all the Fifties while he’s overseas, I mean what face did he ever see more of than Dwight D., and Henry C. working his axe, at the UN, these corporation eggzex are full of will, man, they’re strong as bulls these hide-ass Waspy mules with their silvy rim specs, I mean they go direction they want to go, their hair too curly they go bald, their nose too long, they sniff it up, their lips too fat, forget it, we’re talking about the wrong man, they tie that nice dry-oiled West Point ramrod to their back just like they’re a tomato plant on a stick, I mean they grow into a bat’s ass if it help our astronauts along, Rusty and his ilk is hard-working. He zip that corporation fly, dig, while working as executive, and/or director, and/or special adviser and/or consultant and/or troubleshooter and/or organizer and/or associate of, and/or paid employee for the 4C and P, the CIA, the C of C, the FBI, the ADA (yeah, he gives contribs there too right under the table—Rusty Jethroe and Letterhead America are Up Tight) the Policemen’s Benevolent Society, the John Birch, natch, the Dallas Citizens Council for Infighting and Inflicting Symphonic Music, the Benevolent Order of Oilwell Riggers Drillers and Roughnecks, the Warren Commission Boosters, the President’s Thousand Dollar Club, the Gridiron Club, the UIA and 4A of D, that is the Underwriters, Insurance Agents and Actuarial Agents Association of America and Dallas, the NYSE (that’s Stock Exchange, Skeezix) the Anti-Defamation League of the B’nai Brith, a passing honor they gave him, totally honorary, believe you, the RELM Cons—the Rotary, Elks, Lambs, Masons Consolidated for corporation studs who jes ain’t got the time to spread out so they put it all in one dead fuck building—and the Republican Party, not to mention the Second Congregated Anglo Episcopal and Conjoint Presbyterian Clutch and Methodist Church of Maltby Avenue, Dallas (that’s St. Martin’s, you faggot!) and the Gourmet Wine and Pâté Plate and Fork Society. Forget the country clubs unless you like to read lists, the Dallas Elm and Tree Club, the Dallas Cowboy Turtle Creek Cheering and Chowder, TCU Boosters, SMU Boosters, the Gala Ring and Ranch, Eddie Bonetti’s Country Club, take it from D.J., forget this shit. If Rusty was to run around all year, which he does, he still couldn’t get his dick in every door for which he’s got a card, you know, even Diners Club, Carte Blanche, American Express, Rusty’s a pig! he’s a real pig, man! It was all that dried-out sunbaked smoked jerkin of meat his cowboy fore-ass bears used to eat, I mean, man, they used to use that hide for everything before they’d eat it, they’d swab out their mare’s dock with it, wipe their own ass with it, pick up the pus from the corner of their eye, blow their nose, mop the piss off their boots, even use that dry old piece of meat to wrap around their dick for stuffing when they want to sodomize a real big fat slack cow, why they repaired holes in their chaps with it, they used to have to beat it with a hoe handle before they could even cook it and fry it in axle grease. I mean, man they were kind of tough. No Frenchy Montesquious them. Crazy as wolves. All greeneyed pricks. So, no wonder Rusty’s a pig. His cells are filled with the biological inheritance and trait transmissions of his ancestors, all such rawhide, cactus hearts, eagle eggs, and coyote. Now, Rusty rolls that Château Lafite-Mouton-Rothschild around his liver loving lips, and he can tell 49 from 53 from 59, all the while thinking of 69. He sings the song of the swine, D.J.’s daddy, nice fellow actually. Also forgot to mention he’s an unlisted agent for Luce Publications, American Airlines Overseas Division, and the IIR—the Institute for International Research—shit!, Spy Heaven they ought to call it.