Impertinent

By Thomas Dietzel

When spring finally turns up in the Rose City, it’s with a vengeance. All those miserable months of ten kinds of rain plus sleet and snow and hail, and the ice storms that paralyze the city like a general anesthetic… and the gray phalanxes of clouds that guard the sky lest the barest tint of blue manages to find its way to the retina of one of the miserable vitamin-D deficient seasonally depressed wretches below and remind them that This Too Shall Pass…all of it is swept away like there has been a coup on Olympus and the kallipygic fertility deities have been justly restored to their thrones of yore and flung Zeus headlong like Hephaestus from the ambrosial peaks...because suddenly living in the Rose City is like living in some experimental terrarium where the intern has mistakenly overdosed the hapless flora with fertilizer by a factor of ten…and the daffodils go pop! and the camelias go pop! and the plum blossoms and the snow drops all go pop pop pop! and whereas just the day before in your yard there were just the usual scraggly looking bushes, veterans of the Deep Freeze, now there are - Christ, what isn’t there? There are narcissus and hyacinth and passion flowers in a blur of reds and oranges and purples and petals blowing around in the streets like tumbleweeds, and everywhere curious stalks and buds and God knows what else are poking themselves out of lawns and hillocks like parthenogenetic frogs…and the fluorescent green mosses and the lawns greener than Plato’s Idea of the Green – I mean, forget it! It is unreal, like there’s a Vegetable Midas out there who hitched a ride into town with his green thumb one morning while you slept…and touched everything he came across, and now everything is – alive!

So this is exactly the kind of morning it is, the kind of morning where you feel like Vegetable Midas was just here, and the birds are wailing on their various One Hit Wonders and the smell…the smell is like being struck in the face with a very expensive bouquet…on such a morning as this Marnie Gleason opens her bedroom curtains to fling (a spring fling, she thinks to herself) the window wide and catch that…some of that aroma and across the street, in her neighbor’s yard… and as she hurls the window open, there It is…

….and although Marnie Gleason knows exactly what It is, for some reason the word won’t hold still in her mind…it’s like she’s trying to corral a hummingbird with a enormous bubble wand or something, and she’s staring out the window at it, and her husband, Tommy Gleason, comes up behind her as he likes to do and grabs her around the waist and gently nudges her buttocks with the swell of his groin, not in an erotic way, exactly, but in the kind of familiar way people who have been married for forty-two years treat each other’s bodies…and then he sees it too, and they’re both staring – gawking, really, at – this Thing that has materialized on their neighbor’s lawn…and even though they both know what it is, Tommy Gleason says the sort of thing a sixtyish blue-collared red-blooded middle-class American male should say at a time like this, which is, “What the hell’s that?”

What it is, what it is: what it is is an enormous granite-colored phallus – a circumcised, erect phallus – it’s at least thirty feet high and five feet around, complete with a pair of boulders at its base looking very much like testicles, like the Big Balls of Uranus Himself. It has a gentle curve to it, a lilting curve like the way spacetime might curve in the presence of a black hole, and a glans and everything…and it is the boulders and the lilting curve and the glans that make it very clear to the Viewer that this is no mere obelisk, no flagpole – this is a very realistic scale model (45:1?) of…well, of a cock.

“I guess…I guess it’s a penis,” says Marnie Gleason, who ought to know…you wouldn’t know it from looking at her but Marnie Gleason was a guerilla soldier, part of the vanguard really, from a happy and delicious era in American history, an epoch that followed the pill and preceded HIV…and though she hadn’t been into…into gangbangs with the Hell’s Angels, for Christ’s sake, she had…well, let’s just say that even as a faithful partner in a marriage of forty-two years, Marnie is more of an authority on penises and related topics than she let on, even to Tommy, who likes to think that his wife was a virgin when they had met, an historical inaccuracy neither one of them felt particularly interested in addressing.

If Tommy Gleason didn’t have both arms wrapped around his wife’s waist, he would have scratched his bald pate, so complete is his befuddlement. Instead they both just stand there, immune to the grandeur of spring pop! pop! popping out all around them, so mesmerized are they by the sudden appearance of this enigmatic structure which someone appears to have erected overnight to steal some of the glory from Vegetable Midas’ crown…

…and then something truly astonishing happens, which is that at exactly 9:00 AM, Pacific Time, as the Gleasons stand there, a frothy white liquid erupts (!) from the top of the tip of the Big Cock, cascading in a sensual arc through the odiferous vernal air, exactly like someone has hidden a garden hose inside this Thing and turned it on, a garden hose filled with milk (or worse), completing the picture of obscenity. But they’re kinking the hose strategically, wherever they are, because there’s a hiatus and then one, two, three more eruptions, three more times that a glittering parabola of white mystery shoots up and out of the Thing, each burst coming down in a shower of neon white droplets to the lawn below, and then the Thing is still, and both the Gleasons think the same thing, which is: Did that thing just…?

So they stand there for another minute and then Tommy Gleason releases his wife’s waist and presses his brow against the window, peering at the Thing, and he stands up straight and turns to Marnie Gleason and shrugs.

“I guess it’s a piece of art or something,” he says, and Marnie nods. “What was the name of that boy? The one who lives there? Remember, we met him in line…Bones, I think?”

“Bones Frenetic?” he suggested.

…and then they turn away from the window to begin the business of the day proper, and the wonder of what they have just seen fades to a kind of vague bemusement, which they will carry with them through lunch.

Across the street, in the meantime, Bones Frantic is giggling and muttering to himself in his kitchen, having enjoyed a successful test run of the Lingam, as he calls the Thing. He’s rubbing his hands together like a cartoon cat about to devour some miserable rodent. It won’t be long now. He can feel it already – the Lingam is radiating offensiveness in concentric circles like an enormous stone chucked into the bland pond of this particular neighborhood of the Rose City, called Fieldtown. Fieldtown is one of the quieter neighborhoods around – there’s a little strip where there are some coffeehouses and restaurants but they’re generally stuffed with handmade cat-purses and stucco mugs dangling off of white racks, and precious photographs of yawning canyons or dusky lighthouses on the walls instead of the ironic velvet paintings and retro magazine covers favored by the boho spaces closer to downtown. In Fieldtown the domiciles are fairly homogenous – block after block of little pastel-colored postwar ranch houses with chain link fences and flat garage-sized lawns, none of them particularly stunning in their execution but not too shabby either. The sidewalks are usually empty – no one walks in Fieldtown unless they’re going to one of the dainty coffeeshops or one of the family friendly restaurants with the picnic tables and the disposable placemats for offspring to color and doodle on while the adults discuss APR’s and lawnmowers. The next strip is a mile or so down 39th Avenue in the Hanford-Abernathy neighborhood, which is a little less homogenous and – well, Bones hates the word, but honestly, it’s a little edgier there. There’s a coffeeshop there called Pingo’s where have live music once in a while and the barista wears tight red T-shirts with five-pointed stars or targets stretched over her taut little numbers…but then again, the Lingam too would be a little more accepted there and a little less likely to incur the notoriety it will (and certainly is doing, even now) here in Fieldtown, where the baristas tend toward the grandmotherly arts and craft delicate easy chair mode and the denizens are that much more likely to be Offended, which is the point of the Lingam…

He’s pacing around the living room, now, muttering to himself. Bones, is as they say, big-boned, and prone to corpulence…tiny chunks of fat depend from his jowls like gills and they quiver as he chuckles to himself…he has longish black hair that hangs in his face like a spiderweb…and yet his legs seem too spindly to support such a mass. And the spindly mass veers in peripatetic loops…

…and the Gleasons! The Gleasons have unwittingly been chosen by chance or fate (Fate!) to be the first to receive the shocking sight of the Lingam upon their bland Fieldtown maculae foveae and the first to participate in…the Chain Reaction…like free radicals or electrons shot out of quantum cannons the Gleasons will launch his career into the troposphere with an arc like the faux ejaculate that four times leapt from the Lingam’s mouth mere minutes ago (and will on the dot -en punto- every hour from here to eternity until the New York Times gets a whiff of the Lingam and the [imminent] bourgeois protestations and rallies against Free Speech and Artistic Expression and all the rest of it…and how long could it possibly take? He might as well go ahead and buy the plane ticket now…will Expo miss him when he moves away? Expo, the poor bastard…)…

Bones Frantic is 23 and though prone to corpulence, he’s leaner and meaner than a junkyard dog when it comes to aesthetic matters…he knows (he knows he knows!) how to strip the bullshit away from a subject and present it in its glorious and unabashed simplicity…how to make people see what’s really there…not what they think is there…and in this case what’s there is a thirty-foot phallus in the middle of Fieldtown (which nobody can deny…)…and the Gleasons are merely the first…

Now Bones can count on one finger the number of times he’s interacted with the Gleasons – he’s lived there for a year and has run into the Gleasons exactly one time, last fall about six or seven months ago, when they stood in the same line at one of the elegant coffeeshops Fieldtown has to offer…it was at the Ugly Mug on Wilson Avenue where he was trying to get them to hang up some of his paintings or something, and they stood in line together, the Gleasons behind and Mr. Bones Frantic ahead, and the Gleasons said hey don’t you live across the street from us? to which Mr. Frantic said oh yes, I believe I do, and the Gleasons said so you’re renting the place from the Cumfords, and Mr. Bones Frantic said yes yes the Cumfords, that’s right and Tommy said and what do you do? And Bones said in a great booming voice:

“I’m an artist.”

…and then it was his turn to order and other than a hasty nice to meet you upon leaving there was no more than this to the Gleason-Frantic dialogues…and from this brief exchange Bones concluded his neighbors were rather mainstream and square indeed and thought no more of it until late in the winter when he hatched the Scheme…and the Gleasons thought nothing specific about their young neighbor other than the nebulous uneasiness homeowners typically experience when it comes to renters, who tend to let their lawns run wild and their shrubbery unkempt…and part of the joke of the Lingam, of course, is that the Cumfords live some 2500 miles away in beautiful Fairview, Georgia, and have no more inkling about what goes on at their real estate investment of 848 Rosecrans Avenue than they do about drug trafficking on the Amu Darya…which is what makes the Scheme so insidious, the fact that the landlords, the powers that be, are, geographically speaking, in no position to exercise their authority concerning the presence or absence of phallic monoliths on their property…unwittingly dedicating their capital…their property…to the successful execution of the Scheme…

Now at about noon, minutes before the Lingam is due to once again bestow its concupiscent blessings upon the environs, Marnie Gleason gets a phone call on the land line…which means it’s not one of the kids or another family member and ergo not an emergency…the caller ID says FOXWORTH, eight letters that, when combined so, tend to induce in The Gleasons a sense of tepid fatigue…but Marnie overcomes her resistance and answers it anyway. “Hello, Rachel,” she says without waiting for Rachel to say hello. Why give her any more opportunity to speak than necessary?

“Marnie.” Maw-ny. Born and bred in Babylon, New York…you can take the JAP off the island but you can’t take the…and Marnie Gleason feels ashamed of herself for even allowing the thought to enter into her mind…how did it get there? And the word JAP begins to metastasize in the presence of her shame – it’s getting bigger! “Marnie, have you SEEN it?” asks Rachel.

New Jap City! “Seen it?” It takes a moment for it to register…the Thing! “Oh, you mean the –” She breaks off, realizing she has no word in her vocabulary suitable for use when addressing her neighbors about this part of the male anatomy, real, monolithic, or otherwise. Spouses are one thing, but…

“Who’s that?” asks Tommy, coming into the kitchen behind her. She points to the caller ID. F-O-X-W-O-R-T-H = Oh Lord, no. He shrinks away from the phone like it’s an enormous carnivorous bird. The Foxworths...what do they want? Well, what they want is…commitment! They want us! To join! The (cringe) Rose City Lawn Bowlers! Graacccckkk!

…The Lawn Bowlers…the first time Marnie saw them she thought they were beekeepers or microbiologists…staggering around in the park near the tennis courts…Marnie was out for a run and crossed over the Woolworth pedestrian bridge where you can see downtown gathered together in the rills and hillocks of the West Side – it always looked so…so vulnerable in that expanse of sky and greenery, like it could be squashed at any moment by an enormous vengeful thumb…but that day the Lawn Bowlers were out…the Lawn Bowlers wear white pants and white suits and white shoes and socks and white caps and white rain parkas that flutter about their shoulders like gauze…and white sunglasses…doing incomprehensible things with balls and sticks…wha’? And a few months later the Foxworths moved in next door and brought with them, in addition to their collection of California plants which promptly expired, their lawn bowling balls (“jacks” or “kitties” to the cognoscenti) and their white suits and various unspeakable sticks…which caused Tommy (o foolish knave!) to ask in a neighborly way, “Whazzat?” as they stood there in their new neighbor’s driveway and moving men (and they were real men, these, with bulging biceps and thick necks like Easter hams) lugged and tugged boxes and pieces of furniture hither and thither…

“Oh, they’re for lawn bowling,” Carson Foxworth had answered. The whole conversation was forever etched into Marnie’s mind like a satanic catechism.

“You mean, like, croquet?” Marnie had asked in polite a fashion as possible, in response to which the Foxworths had guffawed merrily (and for a moment too long to be polite, in Marnie’s opinion)…and then the campaign had begun (that day!) in earnest. No, it’s not croquet and you really ought to join there are rinks just down the street from you it’s so much fun you meet the most wonderful people and you can’t imagine how much fun it is being out there in the sun dressed cap a pie in dazzling white it’s not expensive we have enough equipment so you can share although I’m sure you’ll want to get your own eventually ha ha ha and it’s not hard to learn but it takes a lifetime to master and lots of younger people are starting to get into it now too…OH GOD!

So in truth it is a relief to talk to Rachel about something besides Lawn Bowling and have to muster up another militia of excuses and explanations to deflect the relentless drive for conscription the Foxworths perpetually administer like militant desert zealots…

“What on Earth would cause someone to make something like that?” Rachel Foxworth sounds less outraged than she does indignantly chatty. Maybe she’s also delighted that they have something else to talk about besides the Lawn Bowling (you mean, like, croquet? Har har har har…)…

“It’s – it’s art, I guess,” says Marnie. And then – she feels something stir within her and she feels compelled to…to defend the artist Bones Whazziname’s right to self-expression against her (lawn bowling!) neighbor’s barbaric queries -“we met the artist before -a very nice young man …a very interesting fellow – we ran into him once at the Ugly Mug…” What the hell was his last name again? Frenetic? Frantic?

“An artist?” Rachel hoots into the phone. “Honey, you ought to come back to New York” – Yawk! – “sometime if you want to see art.”

The thought of traveling anywhere with her neighbor fills Marnie with a sense of colossal dread and she digs in her heels. “Well – there’s something to be said for his sense of scale,” she says lamely. “I mean, he’s obviously very talented.”

“Talented!” Rachel isn’t buying it. “Honey, it doesn’t take that much talent to carve a big cock” – cawk ! – “and stick it on your lawn. Talent! Oh, talent has nothing to do with it!”

Now the last thing Marnie wants to do is to get into any kind of extended dialogue with Rachel the Jewess (o shameful thoughts!) or anyone else about modern aesthetics but this line of thinking is cut short by Rachel gasping into the phone. Without even turning to look out the window Marnie knows what’s happening (and right on time – hell, it’s twelve o’ clock! Every hour en punto!) because it’s already happened three times that morning.

“It’s – it’s coming all over the place,” Rachel shrieks. “It’s ejaculatin’!” And in her mind’s eye, Marnie can still see the delicate trajectory of that thin white rope against the morning light…

“It does that,” Marnie says, by way of explanation…you owe me one, Bones whateveryournameis, she thinks to herself…me, your defender…

At that very moment, for the fourth time that day, Bones Frantic is nearly rolling around on the floor with delight…

Now the Lingam, the Phallus, the – the Thing is gathering its shadow into itself as the sun rises to its pitch like a golden falcon…every hour on the hour, en punto…and yet – the Thing is not what it seems to be…like an atom it is mostly empty space…thirty feet of mostly empty space, a skein of thin plaster covering a dermis of newspapers, in turn stretched over a wire endoskeleton – the wires create a hidden network of diamond shapes as they cross over each other again and again…and at its core, the vas deferens: a hose running up the vertical axis of the Thing...and the two enormous testicles are an equally vacuous pair of spheres of plaster and newspapers and wire…and every hour, on the hour, en punto… but the master stroke is the battery-powered pump in the left testicle - there, in the dark globe of wire, every hour, on the hour, the snout of the excellent pump sucks hosefuls of viscous faux seminal fluids made of rug cleaner and flour and baking soda from a plastic bucket…four hosefuls in a row, and launches each bolus, each creamy missile, in a virile arc over the lawn in mortar-like bursts.

Now Bones Frantic has a roommate named Expo…Expo is a year younger than Bones but a whole head taller. He’s a gangly motherfucker that looks like an emaciated vulture, hunched over and vigilant – his nose is a gnarled beak flashing below a pair of sunken white orbs…Poor Expo, Bones thinks to himself about ten times a day. Poor bastard. Now Expo has about as much use for Bones’ sentimental pity masquerading as compassion as he does for the monstrosity currently lurking in the front yard…and he hasn’t met the neighbors, either – not at the Ugly Mug or anywhere else. So it’s a bit of a shock when he’s accosted by one Mrs. Rachel Foxworth – here’s what happens.

Expo is hooping in front of the house at around three that afternoon – the Thing just did its en punto trick again but Expo doesn’t notice – he’s too engrossed in the hula hoop whirling around his hips to pay attention to the Lingam giving it up for the nth time…he’s got his eyes closed like he’s intently listening to some piece of sexy music being played on a tiny transistor radio nearly buried in the sweet white noise of the breeze when he hears a woman’s voice – its timbre reminds him of a lapdog yipping and yapping but it’s a woman’s voice nonetheless…and he opens his eyes and the nearly invisible music fades away and instead there is a squat toadlike woman looking at him in the most…accusatory way…and she’s saying:

“Young man!”

…but what’s most disturbing are all the white clothes she’s wearing, like she just got back from some…Aryan golfing tournament in heaven – she’s wearing a pearly white biker’s cap beneath which perch white sunglasses overlooking a white blouse tucked into white pants which trail down to immaculately maintained white shoes…but the parka is what makes the whole ensemble truly ethereal, the translucent white parka that floats about her shoulders like a gossamer cape worn by some superheroine, rippling silently in the wind like a silk flag. And she’s – barking at Expo (the poor bastard!), barking “Young man!” at him, and he freezes and the hoop tumbles from around his hips to the sidewalk with a hollow clatter.

“Y-yyess?” he says hesitantly. He doesn’t know about lawn bowling and can only assume the worst of this porcine wraith…

“Young man, what is your name?” She peers into his face intensely like she’s divining something.

“Ex-po,” says Expo.

Her eyebrows flow together in excessive contempt and she shakes her brow at him. “Expo? What’s your real name?”

“Expo,” says Expo, trying to be as unvulturelike as possible.

“Okay, Expo,” she says. “Do you care to tell me about the…this Thing in your yard?”

Wha’? For a second Expo thinks she means the hoop and then he remembers and turns to gaze upon the Lingam as though seeing it for the first time. “Oh – that?” he says. “That’s nothing.” He shrugs.

“Are you the artist?” she asks. The awtist? She has a New York accent.

Wait a minute…”Who are you, lady?” Expo says. “I told you my name.”

She looks him up and down and says, “Mrs. Foxworth.”

Expo shrugs again. He’s suddenly feeling – well, cocky, and careless, is how he’s feeling. “I thought we were on a first name basis,” he says. “Mrs. What Foxsworth?”

“Rachel,” she says. “Rachel Foxworth.”

“Okay,” Expo says. He steps out of the hula hoop and bends over and picks it up.

“Are you the artist?” she asks him again. Single-minded, this bitch is.

“Maybe,” Expo says.

“Well,” says Rachel Foxsworth. She looks perplexed. “Are you or aren’t you?”

“So what if I am? What’s up with the white clothes?” Expo asks. He leans in a little closer, balancing on the hoop, like he’s trying to inspect her raiment for
any blemishes.

“Young man,” Rachel Foxsworth says, “I am your neighbor – I live there-” – and here she points dramatically across the street at a nearly identical ranch house on the lot next to the one directly across from them…Expo notices that the shrubbery has been ripped out and instead there are just pale brown patches marching around the perimeter of the property…”-with my husband…and we – well, we are not very happy.”

Expo snorts. “Maybe you should see a counselor, a marriage counselor,” he says. “My mother-“

She cuts him off. “My husband and I are very happy with one another,” she says. “What we’re not happy with is this…this Thing you have in your yard…these – emissions…" She trails off. She obviously can’t bring herself to say the right word.

Expo stands up straight and twirls the hoop around his wrist. Her clothes are so dazzlingly white he can barely concentrate on what she’s saying. “It’s an art project,” he says. “Like I said, it’s nothing.”

“Oh, it’s nothing, all right,” she says. “Nothing good!” She steps back as though she expects him to slap her for this critical assessment but he just looks at her. Is this bitch for real?

“Do you have other white outfits like that?” Expo asks. He imagines a closet full of identical white outfits hung on white wire hangers, one for each day of the week. The concept is not unattractive…he pictures a pristine white house with white leather couches and great white frames of blank white canvas hanging on white walls.

“You are rather impertinent,” she says. “Do you know the word impertinent?”

Expo looks around with mock paranoia. “Impotent? Even if I wasn’t – I mean, Christ, lady, I mean, Rachel – you’re married.” He says this last word with a singsong lilt that makes it sound like something puerile.

Rachel Foxsworth glares at him, turns on her very white heels, and flounces away, and as far as Expo is concerned, that is the end of that. Except that…

Knock knock knock knock on the Gleason’s front door and when Marnie looks out the peephole it’s Rachel! In her white lawn bowling gear! The peephole has some kind of fisheye lens and Rachel looks especially ominous amidst so much refraction…and she looks at her a moment too long…and damn it! Surely she had seen that little pupil of daylight in the peephole’s iris go blink! as she eclipsed it from the inside…and now Rachel knows there’s someone there! So with in an inward sigh she opens the door –

“Marnie!” says Rachel. Maw-ny. “Do you know who I just talked to?” She is very agitated.

For the second time that day Marnie feels that sense of thank Christ this isn’t about lawn bowling and she says, “No, who?” She opens the door wider and Rachel barges past her into the foyer. She’s clasping and unclasping her hands like she’s trying to wash anthrax spores off her hands. At the edge of her vision Marnie sees Tommy leap up from the Lay-Z-Boy, presumably in horror, and run toward the back stairs. She’s on her own.

“Marnie, do you know this boy – Expo?” Her eyes are fluttering with anger. “The pervert who built that – that cock in the yard?” Cawk.

It occurs to Marnie she doesn’t know for sure that Bones Frantic is behind this after all…but he had said, “I’m an artist,” hadn’t he? Was his roommate an artist too? “I don’t know anyone named Expo,” she says. “I thought someone named Bones Frenetic lived there.”

“This boy, Expo-” Marnie says. “Do you know what he said to me?”

“No,” says Marnie.

“He insulted me and my husband. He insulted our marriage. He insinuated I wanted to- to bed him –”

…and here Marnie suppressed a smile…

“-and he said we needed to go to counseling! To counseling!” And she bursts into tears and becomes a bulbous blubbery mess, standing there in the Gleason’s foyer, with her white parka hanging about her shoulders like a ghost.

Marnie suddenly feels horrible for ever thinking the word JAP…awkwardly she puts her arm around Rachel and tugs her close, so that Rachel’s shoulder is under her armpit, and Rachel suddenly mashes her head against Rachel’s proximal breast. She starts making strangled gurgling sounds in her throat and Marnie feels warm tears soaking through her blouse and her bra…did old Expo hit some marital raw nerve?

“There, there,” she says, stupidly.

Expo’s inside now, watching court TV. Bones Frenetic is sitting on a stool in the kitchen, watching Expo…finally he can’t stand it anymore – he gets up and goes into the living room and stands in front of the TV.

“Heeeeyyyy…,” says Expo. “Do you mind?”

“Who were you talking to in front of the house just now?” Bones asks him.
Expo cranes his neck, trying to see around Bones’ hips, and then sighs and sinks into the couch. “That woman in white?” he says. “That’s Rachel Foxsworth.” Bones is still peering at him expectantly so he says, “She’s married.”


“To who?” asks Bones.
This causes Expo to giggle – Too-hoo! – and then he says, “To Mr. Foxworth.”

“Mmmmm,” says Bones.

“She lives across the street,” Expo says. “In the house with the lawn where they – where they took the shrubbery out.”

“The shrubbery?” says Bones. “You mean the bushes?”

“Yes,” says Expo. “I don’t think she liked your sculpture very much.”

Bones likes the sound of this immensely. “How do you know?”

“She kept asking about it,” Expo says. “She said she and her husband were not very happy about the thing in the yard.”

This is too much, too much! “‘Not happy,’” says Bones. “That’s great.”

“Why is it great?” asks Expo.

Bones gazes with compassion upon Expo – poor bastard! - and wonders if there’s any point in telling him about the scheme…finally he just says, “Well, Expo, you know, if an artist can, well, ummm….shock people, then, well, you know, if he does that first, then he can do anything he wants – you know, like Madonna.”

“Mmm-hmmm,” Expo says. He looks like he couldn’t care less, which he couldn’t.

“Then you’ll have their attention, see?” says Bones. “Did she say anything else?”

“She seemed to think that I’d built the stupid thing. Plus she said I was impotent,” says Expo. “I’m pretty sure she called me impotent. I tried to play it off as a joke, but she didn’t think it was very funny.” Now Expo knows damn well what she said…he’s just playing along with his own joke. But like, dude, get out of the way of the boob tube, yo! Behind Bones’ thick waist the white defendant onscreen is making a lengthy protestation in Ebonics.

That was odd….there was a ghastly little coincidence here…how could she know…did he know? “Impotent?” Bones asks.

“That’s what she said,” says Expo with the barest trace of a queer smile. He knows! Does he know? Why did she – say that? “Can I please watch my freaking court TV now?”

“Yes, yes,” says Bones distractedly.

Expo clears his throat. “Well – could you move your fat ass, then?” He jerks a thumb toward the door to the kitchen to indicate the direction he’d like Bones to move his fat ass…

…and Bones wanders off to the kitchen…is it that obvious? The neighbor – Foxworth? – she successfully inferred this? Was building a Lingam on the lawn tantamount to putting up a billboard proclaiming: I Have Erectile Dysfunction? Crap! It was so obvious now! Of course! If Rachel Foxsworth could infer the truth – what about critics and curators? Would they all glance at a photo of the Lingam and say to themselves:

“He’s so very talented but…well…he’s got E.D….”

Bones had a sudden urge to run outside and tear the Lingam apart, rip the plaster and newspaper off the wires crisscrossing in diamond shapes, reduce it to a pile of rubbish right there on the front lawn…Impotent?

Bones Frantic: Notorious Impotent Artist…

She thought Expo was me – and she thought Expo was impotent…because only an impotent male artist would…erect…a 30-foot phallus in the yard – one that – ejaculated! Arrrrckkk! It was all so Freudian and subliminal, is what it was…but so obvious now!

He imagined hordes of female gawkers parading about on the lawn and in the driveway, laughing – laughing and laughing while Expo hooped from the sidewalk and egged them on. What a morbid nightmare…he bet the woman from Pingo’s would be there too, be there in one of her tight T-shirts with the little five-pointed stars marching across her tender numbers, pointing at him, laughing…laughing…

Across the street, a short while later Marnie Gleason and Rachel Foxsworth are standing on the stoop saying their goodbyes when they see it – Bones Frantic is – attacking the sculpture (The Lingam! The Thing! The Cawk!) on the lawn with a shovel, whacking at the base of it this way and that and sending chunks of plaster and dried newspaper flying…one of the testicles caves in as the shovel comes around and strikes it in the tropic of Capricorn…the wire endoskeleton buckles and curves to the right and the vas deferens comes loose and dangles out the side of the phallus, almost sixty feet in the air, like the head of a worm looking out from a long thin apple. Whack whack whack and daylight shines though the wire diamonds at the base of the Lingam…exposed! The whole structure shudders and bends precipitously lower as the blows fall one after another…the wires are twinkling in the sun and Bones Frantic takes a break, panting…

…..he can get it hard…he knows he can this time…he feels it… the shovel feels magnificent in his hands, like a sword…

“Who’s that?” Rachel says with wonder. “What is he doing?”

“That’s Bones Frenetic,” Marnie says. “He’s the artist I was telling you about…”

Rachel looks confused for a second but then shrugs and stares…whatever.

…as the hose goes ffffhhhhhhhttttt! as the clock strikes one as the vas deferens ejaculates its creamy white faux seminal fluids upon Bones’ tender fat skull, en punto, one, two, times, and he gasps and drops the shovel and leaps out of the way as the toxic foamy cream runs in rivulets down his cheeks…rug cleaner…and more bursts ffffhhhhtttt! fffhhhhhhttttt! Grrarrrggghhhh! His eyes are burning burning burning in their orbits from the rug cleaner run run running into them and he drops to his knees and howls…

And Expo, who has been watching this whole display from the house, perched on the sofa in the living room like…well, like a vulture...suddenly goes pop! and bursts into phlegmy guffaws, and thinks: Bones – you poor fat jowly bastard...have you gone crazy? Even better than court TV!

And Rachel looks on with concern, freshly fortified by neighborly companionship, and says, “That poor boy. Do you think he’s okay?”

And Marnie, who barely notices her New York accent at all, says, “I think it’s all part of the same thing – I guess it’s a performance piece.” Maybe I should try lawn bowling just once, she thinks. It would be a nice gesture…

And the blinded, impotent Bones Frantic screams and screams as spring goes pop! in every direction. With a vengeance.


April 2009