CHUCK BERRY,
WON’T YOU PLEASE COME HOME
June morning 5 a.m. Orpheus comes wimping boing sprong onto the bed—me still drunk pissing Li Po fashion out the back window onto the feeding bullheads. Sweet Kate the possum and the false dawn. Behind him Morpheus (“Fatso”) mudcaked carpstink and justplainfat. The usual—Orpheus luxurious sensual and stupid, Morpheus fat and guilty. But like the man said: “This day was to change my life”—Orpheus has this big gray tick on his ear twice the size of an M&M. Usually I’d ease the fuckers out and grind them into the floor, but I held back, watching. The Tick. He fell off and was crawling just as my chick Nancy came back from working the grave shift at the paraplegic ward of U. Hospital.
“Hey, Nano, what do we do with that, baby?”
“Feed it, ya douchebag, or it’ll die!”
If ever there was a witch’s tit, she was it. She always got me off my ass, tho. I’d been finished school a year and on the lam until she picked me up and decided to straighten out my head. Got me a job as a panhandler and everything. Thanks, Nan. Well, this tick. Late to work myself. Threw him into my patching kit and split to work on my ten-geared Raleigh. On the way, thot “Lightbulb! The Stiff, in Serology.” Almost creaming the Chairman of Otolaryngology I bashed into the cycle rack, grabbed the container and jugged into the Lab. “Stiff . . . I need some blood.”
The Stiff—6'2", 113 lbs, olivedrab skin and eyes as big and bad as oysters. The Stiff reaches slow like a robot turns with a test tube, slips it to me and sort of winks. Now what. Methinks “He needs skin thruwhich to drink this shit.” So into the lab of my sometime chick, Large Marge. Pour the blood into evaporating dish, grab a surgical glove and stretch. Tight over the dish. The tick was getting kind of wrinkling-looking so I thot he might be getting ready to o.d. But I set him over the reservoir. And sat. After ten minutes I noticed he was pumping, eversoslightly, the way a cat nurses. And now he was back to his turgid self. “Wow, success!” I put him in an empty aquarium at the back of the lab and went to work really flying. He had enough to last him til lunch at least.
At lunchtime I checked on him. Unk! Bigger and better. I called home, my head wackoed with the possibilities . . . how big could he go, would The Stiff keep supplying . . . Johnny Carson, Scientific American . . . and strange bad fantasy flashes of Them, The Beginning of the End, The Tick Who Sucked-Off Brooklyn, Tomorrow the World!
Now it may sound weird that I’d go for a thing like this but it was nothing new to me. I started as a prepster. The first thing I got into was raising a herd of jumping spiders—that busted out one day in Bio Lab. “Bugeye” reaching and swatting and nothing there. Everyone reaching and swatting. Ten demerits. Then the wasps. They get so hard-up for grins around an all-male boarding school that when the other dudes saw me flying a wasp with a piece of thread around his thorax it became the thing to do. People nodding to each other in the hall, their wasps on leashes tugging them gently along. Wasps in guys’ rooms at desklamp hitching-posts. After several accidents the school nurse ratted on me to “Cretin” the Headmaster. More demerits. In college, tho, I had privacy. Had a single in the dorm where I worked and finally got to the point where I successfully swapped left rear legs on two mice and the legs worked—on one of them. So I knew what I was doing; what I was up against.
After a few days of just freaking and watching the bugger I checked in the Med Library and found out what I suspected—that judging by his coloration he had only three more months before he’d croak of old age, and that he could only grow so big before he either exploded or o.d.’d from a coronary or something. Ticks have what they call chitinous exoskeletons—no bones on the inside, just a shell of sorts holding them in, like crabs have, for instance. There is a law which states that an animal with an exoskeleton can have a surface area equal to no more than the cube of his volume. So this tick, Dermacentor reticulates, a male, I named him Chuck Berry, could grow as big as a small dog, but he wouldn’t be able to get around at all at that size. Like Haystacks Calhoun times three, frothing at the hypostome.
Nano and I started staying in a lot, and keeping the dogs outside. The Stiff kept the blood coming. Quiet evenings at home—I’d get out the slide rule and work out the dose of whatever Nano and I were dropping or shooting and slip it to him. It was really a strange trip trying to pick up vibes from a beast like that, a real Charley Gordon gig, but he was ours to turn on with and we dug him.
After about a month it got to the point where there was a real rapport between us and Chuckbear. We’d sit with him between us on a stool—him as big as a pincushion now—and that feeling at the back of our necks would spread, grow into a diaphanous caul that hugged our heads, our arms, our chests . . . our fingers just touching, hovering over the beast, and something seemed to lock our elbows, our wrists, the joints of our fingers, and our eyes—as his body started to quaver—drifting, drifting—something out of him, felt it leaving him—felt it wisping in through the sutures of our skulls—spinning into the gunk of our brains and arching both our bodies off the floor. Something oppressive, but then my sight left me and I could feel only my body spiraling upwards through clouds of woolen light. And it still leaving him, but now soughing back . . . and leaving again: systole—diastole—systole . . .
There was no fear. I felt the rapport. And it was the time when I stood with a candle looking at the shadows on my face in the mirror, drunk, squinting my eyes and trying inside behind the eyes to change the features into some shrieking lupine monster and had to force myself to stop because it was not far away, because it started and was happening.
Now, my inner earbones jangled in a wind which knifed from out of nowhere. The air was filled with odors, heavy swamp odors, and huge shadows that made no sense at all. I fuzzed my vision but he brushed against my hand forcing a ringing through all my organs. It would go on—the ebb and flood—the shadows of the trees—the lakes of boiling muck—the thunder-wracks and the wails—the earth shifting—the rain—the crawling—the cacophony of wings in the lightning—the beaks splitting the eyes—and it was all happening. Swam in itchy waves of lava and my skin kept growing, growing and I spoke in words that I had never heard before. No eye games. No touching. It was like rapping with someone or something that had been around when there were still birds the size of DC-3’s in the sky and like way back in what there was of that brain was something he knew and would somehow pass between him and us. With Chuck Berry we were into something . . . precivilized—something we could lay on the world that would maybe straighten out some of the ugly machine shit that was coming down. No more bullshit—no more preachers teachers Indian chiefs—just cats sitting around vibrating with their eyes closed. And whatta gas to be tight with such a deep spiritual cat as Chuck Berry. Of course, he’d need bodyguards and a vet of his own. There’d be a fund to keep him going—hell with that—we’d start a clinic run off of subscriptions, with him in center ring. Man! it would be the New Religion—it would be quiet for once. And we’d be the ones back there calling the shots—or so we’d hope. (Trails of puckered white bodies in the gutters—break out the 6o-foot bloodhounds, bring in the jr. birdmen with their napalm.) But shit, when you’re messing in such heavy stuff you gotta take the chance of getting wiped out by what you done done.
Problems—The Stiff decided to take a job at the V.A. hospital in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. What a bummer! Not only that but I realized that in grooving on Chuckbear I’d forgotten we only had a red cunt-hair more than a month, by the book, before he croaked. We had to get the stud mated with something else big and keep working up. Nano, you hunk of vision! In she walks with The Stiff and says “Screw it, man . . . I’ve clued The Stiff in, and we need a vacation anyway.” The Stiff floats over to Chuckbear. “Draw out some bread and let’s head south.” So we did. The four of us (Orph and Morph with the landlord). The Stiff with his blackened egg yolks bathing in the essence of Chuck Berry.
My Uncle Clifton had this place over in Mississippi just north of Vardaman about 50 miles from Tuscaloosa. He was senile—the tobacco oozing out the corners of his mouth, and his dog Twister bringing him the paper he couldn’t or just never bothered to even look down at. Copping the place at the back of the property was nothing. The biggest cop of all—that I must’ve known all along—was Uncle C’s pack of big beautiful tick-infested coon hounds.
Every three days I’d make a run to Tuscaloosa and The Stiff would lay some more blood on me and a few fresh gloves. The Stiff would come on weekends—he’d always bring a bag of the latest goodies from Pharmacy to keep Chuckbear fat and happy. The cat would just sit with his index finger on Chuckbear’s back and nod. The Stiff had a pretty fierce smack habit. Well, one day he ups and says the only thing I can ever remember him saying. Looks at me and nods one eye and says “Like a rainbow pussy for a coffin.” Everyone grooving.
But I just couldn’t find a mate for Chuckbear—big enough, or even anything he seemed to go for much, and I’d make the rounds of all the hounds twice a day. Spring—it was breeding season OK, and he seemed to be fairly horny, but he wrecked anything he mounted. We had a stable of about ten prime bitches we were fattening for him but we were running out of time. And then that motherfucking shiteating scrawny snailbrain Stiff goes and blows the whole scene.
Nan and me get back from the County Fair one Saturday just about sundown, and there they are in the bedroom like Dracula and his gay bride; Chuckbear, his stinking bulk bloated to the size of a gray flattened watermelon, with his mouth clapped to The Stiff’s arm. I knew that was it for him. I kicked that cocksucking Stiff right in the head.
Chuck Berry died about two hours later. It could have been nothing but that bad blood running in The Stiff’s veins that did it. I took him and the other ten one by one out to the funeral pyre I’d thrown together about a mile from the house, doused the lot of them with gasoline and made a trail of gas away from the scene, lit the stuff and ran like hell before the explosions started. I won’t go into that. Man, when I got back to the house I just bawled my ass off. Yeah, over a tick.
We hung around for about a week, moping. I just sort of looked at the cows, listened to the sounds and thot about how short the whole thing was and whether anything had really happened at all. But things have been so much deeper for me since Chuck Berry. For Nano too. I heard from somebody, I don’t remember who, that they put The Stiff away. He did nothing but sit around and laugh a low wheezing laugh. Never said another word.
I think it was Melville who said somewhere that nobody would ever write a decent story about a flea. Well, a tick is hardly better than a flea, and I know no one who reads this story would believe it, but sometimes you tell people things like this because, well, whatthehell else can you do?