For punishment, June played her husband, accordion that he was. Of course she had first had to flatten him into that little lump of tidily flexible compartments, what had appeared more difficult than in the end it had proved. Boom! She smashed him once on the head with her colossal mallet, and the job was absolute.
On the operating table Franno would flatline four times before they proclaimed him “out of the woods.” They’d have his rib cage open and all of his organs and a goodly portion of his intestines too on the table beside him.
Later he would speak of the wedding he never attended. Mostly those gathered there had got lost in their cups, as goes the wrinkled saying, but there were some who kept their heads, and these were by and large folks, as they also say, who didn’t hit the bottle, codgers and diabetics and regular old teetotalers, not to mention the rugrats and such who had spent the day on their knees beneath the tables, tying peoples’ shoelaces in knots and looking at the shapes of their genitals behind their clothes and in one instance a lady’s koochie that didn’t have any underwear to speak of; it was hairless, with a tattoo of Tigger from Winnie the Pooh in a cleft a little higher up. Every time Franno looked at June, a faintly serene smile had illuminated her face, one like Venus’s there on that giant clamshell with the cherubs and favonian winds. Outside, in the rose garden, a woman he had met once or twice as a child was sitting alone on a bench, crying. The unkindly sky had been overcast, though, now, kindly, it was clearing. There were sparrows.
Franno, Timothy, Gentry, and June were in the ditch. Before marching away on this pollywog safari, Franno had gone into Timothy’s room and found him singing to a clutch of dolls. Each doll, the two on hand at least, had a name, the girl doll Frankie, the boy Severine. Tell me the name of my true lover! Franno told him their father wouldn’t like to catch him like this, he had already caught him like this and told him as much, more than once, a bunch more times really, he didn’t want to see it again, goddamn it, son, it breaks my heart. Someday, though we don’t know it now, nor, for that matter, do they, June will marry Gentry.
Timothy said, “But why?”
“Go get the nets,” Franno said. “I’ll get the jars.”
“But why?” Timothy said.
In the ditch, in the shade of a culvert, each child would recite as though some vulgar incantation the graffiti on the walls.
“Fuck,” Gentry said.
“Fuck,” Franno said.
“Fuck,” Timothy said.
“What does it mean?” June said.
“It’s what the toads are doing,” Gentry said.
“Fuck,” June said.
They made a row of bottles at the top of the ditch, clambered down one embankment and up the next, and began to throw rocks. After a while an old man stepped into the yard against the ditch and told them he had better not catch them messing with his pug. The pug was pretty old too but not old enough that he couldn’t hobble through the ivy to bark at the kids.
“My cherries too,” said the old man, “or my plums. Go on,” he said, “go make trouble somewhere else.”
“Up yours,” Gentry said.
Timothy had appeared on the driveway slathered up with lipstick, rouge, mascara, and the like, and moreover he had adorned himself with one rhinestone gorget, one pearl earring (clip-on and fake), one blond wig in the style of the icon Marilyn Monroe, and the red leather pumps his mother had on a whim in Capwell’s found adorable only to relegate to the dark of her overflowing closet. He was holding a net with a long wire handle. Frankie he had stuffed into his shorts so that only her blond head was peeking walleyed from above the waistband.
“Ooooooo,” June had said.
Franno picked one of those spiny pods from the maple tree and hucked it down the street. Gentry snickered.
“You look like one of those ladies on Saturday Night Live,” he said.
They caught toads, pollywogs, snakes (a garter), mice (one), dragonflies, lizards (bluebellies mainly though also they broke off the tail of an alligator lizard just before it had got into a crack in the rocks), carp (one, a baby), guppies, and lots and lots of crickets. They found eleven empty cans from a twelve pack of Olympia some teenagers had drunk a day or two before, and a whole bunch of cigarette butts, mostly Camel Lights but also a Salem, that was the one with lipstick on it. Plus an apple with two holes carved into it, one on top and one on the side, and some burned up stinky tinfoil, and a bunch of burned up matches. Gentry had a box of matches. Momentarily he would take a toad from the bucket of toads slimy with their own eggs and toss it into the air, whence, he did not know how or why, Timothy would clumsily catch it, his fingers trembling, shortly to see a wick hissing with fire and smoke trailing from the toad’s puckered anus. A second later the toad would detonate. A second after that Timothy would find himself slick with guts and brains and little bulging eyes, splintery pieces of shattered bones. He’d still be wearing the blond wig in the style of the icon Marilyn Monroe. Gentry, by the way, had nearly ten packs of firecrackers got from his big brother Harry, who had bought a brick of them off some thugs in Chinatown the week before. June will not have been there, having been sent home by Franno because they were all supposed to be home by then but Franno didn’t want to get in trouble, June would tell their mother they’d be home in time for dinner, everything was fine, they had caught lots of stuff, it was totally, majorly boss.
HALLELUJAH!
Until now, it’s been an endless source of wonder why you guys have never given Timothy Donohue a spread in your magazine. I thought he’d either snubbed someone on your staff or failed to grease the proper palm, since you’ve never even mentioned his name in your events column. Anyway, I’ve been following this prodigal son since his first shows up in the boondocks of Petaluma/Santa Rosa. First time I saw his stuff (over at Pops’s Old Socks, now defunct—bummer), it felt like maybe I’d just opened the Ark of the Covenant or something. But with work like his “Fire Iron,” “Dynamite,” “Felinus Thaumaturgus,” and “Internal Combustion,” it’s no surprise he’s finally gracing the pages of your most excellent publication. In my opinion, there are only one or two others in the genre who can stand by him today, Zokosky and possibly Swihart. Maybe next time around you’ll do us all the favor of putting him on the cover and quit wasting copy on the likes of Coop, PIZZ, Shag, Von Franco and the rest of their lowbrow (with a LOWer case “l”!) ilk. Praise be the day, and keep on truckin.
Jose Inagaki
Novato, CA
>> Talk about greasy palms. Sheesh.
The man, wearing a sheer white jumpsuit, shot Timothy’s brother twice in the chest, point-blank, then fled on a rickety bike. Witnesses confirm both, the jumpsuit and the daring escape.
In her old age June would confess her inability to fathom the day-mares she had known all those years. She swore she had never loved Gentry one whit less than she did that day. He was her dreamboat, her hunka chunka hunka, her Pumpatron baby in the Muzak dusk. He always had been, and always would. “That is why I just don’t understand,” she said.
Timothy couldn’t do more as his sister spoke than watch his sugar dissolve into the oily brown of his ten-dollar espresso. And rightly so. From then till now, true love had eluded him like words on a Morbot’s tongue.
“He still webs me gifts,” June would tell him. “Little bottles of exquisitely distilled Cocotabs, opera tickets with seats on the Gravitational Mezzanine—even codes for those new UltraDio Laser Peels and DermaPass Tan-Thrus. However could I have thought of harming him?”
“They’re only just fantasies,” Timothy would say.
“No,” June would say, “but you don’t understand.”
It was most always dark in there, even though the old gal had gas, I guess she didn’t want to pay for the stuff, which I guess I can understand, and I was always just waiting there in the gloom for old Abe Lincoln to come around and spill his guts. I don’t know how I knew all this, I just did, like any memory I can remember right now, like right now I can remember the time me and my pops went out to Sears at the mall and saw all these undercover cops wrestling with a man who my pops said must have shoplifted something while the man’s own son stood back on the walk, kind of trying to hide behind the leaves of those big old plastic looking bushes in the planter by the door. That kind of memory. This time, though, when old Abraham appeared, he told me he was tired of spilling his guts. He said it wasn’t worth it anymore, he was just going to do himself in. He had a pistol there to prove he meant business, too; it was in his hand, right there, a big old revolver-type monster with a six- or eight-inch barrel, big enough to do whatever he wanted to with. Then, instead of me looking at Abraham Lincoln with my own eyes, the eyes of John Wilkes Booth, I mean, I was looking at the both of them from the ceiling of the hallway outside my room. I know that sounds cheesy. I would change the story if I could, but the point of all this, why I’m putting it down, is that I have to tell it the way I saw it, and that’s how I saw it, no matter how cheesy.
As a child, Magritte had seen his mother dragged from a river after having drowned herself among the logs and moss and reeds. The image that remained with Magritte all his life was that of his mother’s body, naked save her face, horribly enshrouded by her own tangled dress. Henry Darger had painted nothing but watercolors of naked she-children, some frolicking in meadows, others warring among themselves with hatchets and sticks, primitive bows and arrows. Eric White paints grayscale scenes of holocaustic sadness viewed through the lens of LSD. What majestic visions, do you think, purr beside him when at night he lays his head to rest?
Franno grew up to be a big strong man. He became obsessed with martial arts flicks, a lot of Hong Kong stuff, Bruce Lee mostly, though it’s fair to say too he did rather enjoy the bardic loveliness of Akira Kurosawa’s sweeping vistas, and the struggles that played out in those wondrously forbidding castles. Also, being a big strong man trained in fighting ways of his own, Franno found himself drawn, as an eye to beauty, to underdogs. In his presence, the Fragila Faint-lightlys and Puny McWeaks o’ the world need not have feared, for he, Franno, would no sooner see such a one in plight than he was sure to pulverize and crush and rip and tear any such bully who had so unfortunately determined these meek should be lain low, limb from bloody limb, alas and alack, thou villainous fiend, the hero hath arrived.
“Once,” June will have said in the year 2042, “I imagined he was a beautiful sculpture carved in ice, a beautiful diving eagle. We were still young then, just after the towers had collapsed. Exquisite delicacies had been arranged all about him, beautiful, lovely morsels really, bouche de l’homard et crevettes, gougères avec crème frâiche, caviar osetra. You see? Our guests were having an immensely good time, good gracious, really, the soirée was a tremendous success. But then a wind swept up and destroyed them all, and I became a garden hoe. I hacked and hacked until he lay in pieces, glittering among the dainties.”
… but a review of Donohue’s oeuvre could as easily begin with “Countdown” as it could with “Batrachian Love Nest.” On the surface one might suggest that the only correlation between the two is manifested by the crudely imbricated, if not wearisomely tautological, thematics of sex and death. Indeed, where such a claim would not be counted as wholly inaccurate, it could not be helped but to regard it as the product of a certain moral shortsightedness. In “Countdown” we see depicted a smiling and voluptuous seductress whose vagina has been packed to an insupportable degree with a sheaf of dynamite the fuse of which, not incidentally, has been lighted, while within the creamy penumbra of the woman’s open thighs a deeper, limb-shaped shadow suggests the presence of an unknown voyeur (here one is reminded of Bouguereau’s “The Nymphaeum”). With “Batrachian,” on the other hand, the viewer is confronted with the hideousness of a mire of quasi-frogs copulating over a store of ticking bombs. Quite clearly, the mythical implications of each are as resonant as are the religious (e.g., Leda and the Swan, Pasiphaë and the Bull, Exodus 8:1–7, to name but a few). But this is just to start. When one begins to interrogate the Marxist/Feminist repercussions of each in light of the manner with which the entirety of Donohue’s work has been operating within a definitive counter-sexual/cultural matrix, one sees …
Snapshot #127: haploid disembarks from late-night jitney; haploid fumbles in pockets for jangle of keys; goon emerges from alley with blackjack at the ready; goon pummels haploid thrice on head; goon rifles pockets of KO’d haploid; hero rounds corner; hero lands mighty blow to ear of goon, powerful kick to liver of goon, awesome knee to teeth of goon, devastating jab to eye of goon, and then, for good measure, doubtless, yet another, albeit doubly powerful, kick to liver of goon; hero carries haploid to tenement, then vanishes into soup of foggy night.
Franno really had grown up to be a big strong man, and yet it wasn’t until he had fully recovered and begun giving talks to groups of victims who had survived gunshot wounds, cops and ex-gangbangers and such, that he had been able to record in his diary the dream he swore to have had just minutes after falling to the nightclub’s sticky floor. Only it wasn’t so much a dream as it was what he had heard so many of those boneheads on shows like True Stories: Psychics Tell All or Tales of the Other Real call “an alternate reality.” His reluctance to grapple with the thing stemmed in part from his disdain for such “jerks.” He couldn’t remember how many times he had heard someone say, And then I floated to the ceiling and looked down onto the scene below me. To my surprise, I was staring at myself lying peacefully upon the bed … The boobs he saw on these shows were the same boobs who stumbled through the world believing Snapple was “the best stuff on earth” and Wonder Bread the “Greatest.” More than once Franno would refer to them as “fucking vampires”: Dracula sucked blood from Lucy; they sucked meaning from life. He had spoken of his “experience”—he hated calling it that, but then again there wasn’t another word for it—just once, however briefly, to his sister. This, too, plagued him. She never had been able to handle these kinds of things. He remembered her reaction to the scene where Bambi’s mother gets whacked by a hunter. For months afterward she insisted on going to the zoo each weekend. She had to see with her own green eyes that the mommy deer were all okay.
I can assure you that this won’t be anything like Augustine or Rousseau. It’s not a confession. I have nothing to confess. I simply wanted something on paper, to prove that I had done it. Words, not paint. I don’t know. Perhaps I shouldn’t have winked at him when I saw him staring. Isn’t that what had started it? Or would he have found another reason to do what he did? Either way, he shouldn’t have been staring. This is the City. He can’t say he hasn’t seen enough of that before. Or maybe he hasn’t. I don’t know. We were only kissing. I suppose it’s that I wish Franno hadn’t been there. Well, that’s stupidly obvious. What I mean is, I wish it hadn’t been where Franno works. That evil little man.
“You pussy-ass little snow queen,” he had said to Jorge. “Why you with that little faggot gringo, anyway, huh man, when you could have a vato like me and shit?”
Actually, I’d completely forgotten about Franno, that he was there, at least until the man had begun to run his hands over Jorge’s legs and chest and face, not lovingly or sexily, but brutally, with hatred and spleen and, and, I don’t know, with just plain evil. He had wanted to hurt Jorge, I think, more than he’d wanted to do the same to me.
“Go get your brother,” Jorge said, slapping at the man.
Franno was across the room, by the stage. I couldn’t call out. The music was too loud and people too many. But he made it easy. At least I had thought he had. He had simply taken the man by his shoulders and led him from the room. I don’t know. Perhaps I should’ve told him, Franno, what the man had said to me, just before Franno whisked him away, when he squeezed my balls the way he did.
“You better run home now, you little faggot-ass bitch. I come back and find you here, you going to be like one dead little faggot.”
Perhaps it’s because I didn’t believe him that I didn’t tell Franno. So many people never do what they say.
… I opened my door. Across the hall, at a table in an alcove thick with webs and dust, there he sat, sad old Abraham Lincoln. His arm had been blown off. There wasn’t even a stump, just a mess of cartilage and muscle and oozing, gluey blood. He heard me open the door and cocked his head. The look of sadness was still there but the nobility was gone. It was the saddest, most pitiful look I had ever seen, just this shy of weeping maybe, or maybe unbearable shame. Or maybe it was both. He gazed at me that way for a moment. His cheeks were empty and dark, and so were his eyes, the air was still, the hall was silent as light or dark. I was helpless to touch him, even to reach out or speak. His arm was weeping blood, down the shirt that minutes before had been crisp and white. And he never spoke, only turned back to the alcove. In his hand he held a broken vase. It was full of wine gone bad, you could smell it there in the dryness, potent and rank. Then old Abraham took up the vase and rammed its shards into his mouth. His face split open, I could see the wine spill out and mingle with the blood from his wounds, the ones he’d made and the ones he’d had. He didn’t stop, either. His arm had just been blown off, but he didn’t care, he was still alive, a failure it must have seemed, he just kept on drinking. The blood and the wine continued to flow, it was endless, he wouldn’t look at me, he just kept on drinking from his broken vase, sad as a man who’d never made the grade. Was I me, John Wilkes Booth, or was I him, sad old Abraham Lincoln? I couldn’t tell, then. Maybe I was both …
The ditch narrowed down as it filed into the culvert where Franno and Timothy and Gentry and June had gone to rest after so much time in the sun. In the culvert there were little pockets of dirt and sand on either side of the stream. They were totting up their catch, comparing what they had caught to who had caught it. Timothy of course had caught the most, the mouse, for instance, and the lizards, and the single baby carp. He was wearing the wig, platinum blond, in the style of Marilyn Monroe. The Fourth of July was only days away. Gentry had wanted to go back to the row of bottles they had made and blow them up with firecrackers. But it was nice in the shade, cool with a breeze, and the others were so tired.
“You’re going to get it when Dad sees you,” Franno had said to Timothy.
He hadn’t said any such thing all day long, he hadn’t even thought to say it, there was too much to see and do, the way it is when you’re a kid, when it’s summertime and everything’s sunny and warm and there’s soda in the fridge and cake in the cupboard and pillows on the couch where you watch TV, All in the Family and Adam 12 and Wild Kingdom and Starsky and Hutch, when you’re full of homemade enchiladas and rice and beans and Mom and Dad are in the yard or maybe just dozing in a chair with a magazine on their lap and wine on the table beside them.
“He looks like one of those fake ladies on Saturday Night Live,” Gentry said. He wasn’t looking at Timothy, just staring into the stream. “He looks weird,” he said.
Timothy had a tree frog lying on its back on his palm, stroking its belly with his pinkie. The frog’s throat was gently pulsing, like maybe its heart was there and not its breath.
“I think he’s pretty,” said June.
“How would you know?” Gentry said.
“I just would,” she said.
“Maybe she would,” Franno said. “How would you know?”
Timothy slipped the frog back under the netting they had stretched across the bucket. “But I am,” he said, and you could see he believed it. “I’m pretty.”