doesn’t have a gun,” she remarks somewhat disingenuously.
We look on as the colossal anthropoid speaks and his sonorous voice echoes off the brick buildings around us.
“Help me to understand,” is all he says as he produces something from the folds of his long coat. He holds it up at arm’s length so the streetlight hits it. It’s quite dramatic. And, again, it could only happen in Hollywood.
“Holy shit,” I say under my breath as light reflects off the raised object.
We both recognize it instantly. Magnificent Vibration. The third one I’ve seen today. This must be the best-selling book of all time, because everyone I run into seems to have a friggin’ copy.
“Mine has a phone number written on the inside, too,” says Goliath.
Horatio
I t’s late Friday morning. Both of my parents are at work and I’ve blown off school, after a shouting match with my mother, of course, who has stormed out of the house yelling back at me (and to the whole neighborhood) that, at seventeen, I am already a LOSER. Which I most certainly am not, having just bought myself my first electric guitar! My head is currently filled with visions of famous billionaire musicians who dropped out of school because the pull of the music was so strong. And how they struggled and fought, persevered and climbed until they finally reached the top of the mountain, where they plugged in and played their songs for all the world to hear, adore, and throw money as a result. At this moment I can play a C chord. Not well. And it hurts my fingers.
I can hear Mrs. Whiting reading to Josie. She is actually doing a pretty good job of caring for my girl. My sister’s hair is no longer matted, her nightdresses are clean, and she seems pretty oblivious as the Reverend’s wife sits with her and reads her page after page after page from the Bible. Although I still consider myself Josie’s main caregiver, Mrs. Whiting has lightened the load a little and I have begrudgingly accepted her. She is a wispy, almost ethereal woman with ivory skin, flaxen hair, and modest clothes that all have a hand-scrubbed, ultra-sanitary look about them. She seldom talks and almost never to me but when she does, although she may be looking toward me, her pale blue eyes have a downcast aspect.
It’s now early afternoon and I have frittered half the day away as we adolescents who have forever to burn tend to do. I am still lying in bed, daydreaming of the possible rock-star future that could very well become real once I get beyond this single, extremely difficult and pain-inducingC chord. The voice of the Reverend’s wife drifts in and out of my periphery as she delivers God’s word to what could only charitably be described as a captive audience. I am about to get up and give my sister a break from the holy bombardment when the words drifting in from her bedroom suddenly take shape. Mrs. Whiting is reading:
“Yet she increased her whorings, remembering the days of her youth, when she played the whore in the land of Egypt and lusted after her paramours there, whose members were like those of donkeys and whose emissions were like those of stallions . . .”
What the hell? What is this? How come her husband never reads that stuff in church?
This gets my and Woody’s attention—I’m lying half-naked in my bed as this ecclesial wife talks dirty just down the hall. I don’t even begin to wonder why it turns me on, but it does. I rise and head to the communal bathroom to start my day with a little healthy self-stimulation accompanied by confused and disjointed mental images of naked Egyptian priestesses mounting donkey-dicked men.
None of us has any idea why the things that turn us on do turn us on, and in our teen years we are mere puppets of the powerful sexual forces that will drive us into adulthood and consequently ruin our marriages and our lives but provide hours and hours of crazy, freaky shit to masturbate to.
So I am standing there, perched up on my toes
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