There was a so-and-so Mr. Famous Poet, who had a bad reputation around the country for sexually harassing graduate students. The usual fare was that he would go on a college book tour, get stark raving drunk and chase dark, exotic-looking female students (yes, he preferred the exotic ones) and try to lure them to his hotel room. He was as well known for his gluttony and voracious appetite for gourmet food, drink and lechery as he was for his poetry, faux pastorals with shepherdesses and wooly sheep all over the green hillocks of Arcadia. Because he was so famous, nobody bothered to tell him that groping female graduate students was no longer cool. Nor in his acclaim did he realize that policies had been put in place in universities for such behavior. He could actually get fired. Likewise, nobody bothered to tell him that his poetry was no longer relevant. The great Norton Anthology in the sky had already replaced his entries with a younger, hipper Croatian Navajo surrealist.
One day, he was on the last leg of yet another reading tour. He landed on a Midwest airstrip near a famous writing program surrounded by bean and corn fields and majestic hog-feeding operations. A young graduate student on a research fellowship was assigned to drive Mr. Famous Poet around. She was to pick him up from the airport, take him around town to get his fill of peanuts and Bombay gin, deliver him to a local bistro for supper with other writers and graduate students. Finally, her last task of the evening was to deliver him in one piece, drunk or sober, to the university to give his poetry reading.
The graduate student was a little Chinese girl born in Hong Kong and raised in San Francisco, around five foot two, a bit thin but spunky, with a confident spring to her walk. Presently, she was writing a critique on Brecht’s “Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting” and was finalizing an experimental poetry thesis filled with reverse fables, in which little girls speak in the personas of the most hapless and vilified of animals. With activist zeal, she wrote compassionately on behalf of the pea-brained stegosaurus, the doomed dodo and common roadkill. She mocked up an entire new vocabulary to sustain the wealth of sounds and utterances foreign to human ears.
Almost as soon as she introduced herself to Mr. Famous Poet at the airport, he grabbed her breasts and said, “Why don’t you and I ditch the rest of them and go to my hotel room?” The student turned beet red in the face and said, “Okay, Mr. Famous Poet, whatever you say, but in exchange, you have to pull some strings and get me a tenured teaching job preferably in California.” He said, “Of course, my influence is long and wide and reaches all the way to even California.”
But as soon as they both entered the car, the girl started yelping and shaking as if she were possessed by a demon. Her long black hair volumed up into a fluffy red coat. She grew a perfect little perky pink snout and a huge, magnificent tail. Before his very eyes, she turned into a beautiful red fox. She quickly leapt onto his lap, rubbed against his chest and climbed up onto his shoulders and bit his ear with a seductive little growl. He was mesmerized by her. Her wild fur and musky perfume gave him an urgent hard-on. A violent rush of passion shot into his groin. He was so turned on that he could already feel the sperm percolating on the great bulb of his penis. He had never fucked a graduate student fox before. Never a wild animal—a few tame lambkins and his own cocker spaniel—but never a wild animal. So he said, “Hold on, hold on, little red fox,” and went to the trunk to get condoms from his briefcase. One cannot know what kind of sexually transmitted diseases are harboring inside fox vaginas, he thought.
When he got back into his car with his ribbed Trojans, the fox suddenly transformed into another creature. Her beautiful red fur suddenly turned stark black. In one bold stroke, a brilliant white stripe raced down her back as if it were a dividing line on the highway. The fox on his lap had suddenly turned into a two-hundred-pound gargantuan skunk and before he could throw her off, she raised up her skirt-of-a-tail and sprayed a foul yellow varnish all over him.
This poet really stinks. I am not being so much literary but literal. He smells like he hasn’t taken a bath for months. He professes that he is writing an epic, not just a personal epic of the likes of Whitman, which he deems as an inferior kind, but a classical epic of the likes of Homer, filled with gods and heroes in full regalia. Henceforth, he has no time for taking a shower and doing things that ordinary mortals do. He shall, for the rest of his life, traipse around his apartment wearing a tattered, terry-cloth robe, inhaling hand-rolled cigarettes and drinking endless goblets of Bombay gin spritzers. With such modest talent and penis size, he shall spend his last days wrestling the ghost of Homer.
The revelation of the poet’s putrescence soars all the way up the hierarchical food chain. First the small magazines reject his poems. Then the poetry society rescinds its invitation. The Ford Foundation formally withdraws its fellowship money. His putrescence can’t be masked by huge emblematic perfumy flowers or grandiose adjectival phrases.
Much sadness befalls this lecherous poet. He can no longer partake in groping young females because none could stand to be close to him. Nobody invites him to give readings because his epic is boring. The Pulitzer Prize shall elude him. The Nobel committee shall opt for a mesmerizing lyric poet from the sub-Saharan desert who writes in Swahili.
One fine day, as he is contemplating a poem and delighting in a jar of sweet pickles and as he is looking out his office window to the lawn, a beautiful little fox saunters by, her fluffy tail arches way up, like the headdress of a proud warrior. At first, he feels a small renaissance in his pants; then he is stricken with an overwhelming fear and repulsion, putting to flight the triggering aftertaste—weirdly sweet and bitter—of nostalgia.