Not Andersen Prunty

Bucky had amazing flatulence. He would stroll into a room full of people, get ripped on beer, and let them fly. His friends would make circles around him, slapping their thighs and laughing until tears streamed down their cheeks.

Bucky disappeared one day and it was rumored he’d got someone’s girl pregnant and the said someone decided to plug up Bucky’s asshole.

I was never Bucky’s friend but I go to a lot of the same gatherings and watch the people whenever someone else gets ripped on beer and starts letting them fly. They still form the circle but the laughter is frantic and near hysterical. Terrifying. And their eyes bulge and their faces turn red but no tears ever come out.

It is a grainy black and white day.

Mr. Gravel’s small house sits back a long driveway. They call it a lane in the country. He steps out of his house and looks at the low hill horizon. He walks down the steps of his front porch. There is a man with sunglasses on doing pushups in the front lawn. Mr. Gravel pays no attention to this as he heads for the lane. He has to get the mail. The box is way down off the road.

To entertain himself for this long walk, he raises his arms above his head, fingers extended, and begins hooting. He hoots with each step he takes. “Hoo, hoo, hoo.” The gravel crunches beneath his feet.

About halfway down the lane, he gets excited because he can see a large package bulging from the mailbox. He has always been afraid someone will steal his mail. He hopes this is the package he has been expecting.

He breaks into a light jog, his arms still extended toward the sky. Within no time at all, he is at the mailbox, his hands on the thick brown package, greedily pulling it out. Too excited to carry the package all the way back to his house, he rips it open.

He pulls the gun out, letting the bubble-lined paper fall around his feet. He tosses the pistol from hand to hand, feeling its heft. Mr. Gravel smiles knowingly. He is pleased. Placing the cold barrel of the gun against his forehead, he pulls the trigger, thinking that it’s so cold because it’s been outside all day.

His head erupts.

A dying spray of red against the black and white day.

Mr. Gravel’s body staggers before falling to the pavement of the road. The neighbor’s dog, always loose, wanders over and begins licking at the wound.

Every day, Eric strolls proudly out of his house with a cadre of invisible but beautiful women. Every now and then he sneaks them into a public bathroom stall and makes glorious love to one or more of them while the others watch. He performs all voices with near channel-like perfection, often alarming men in the other stalls. Some of them find themselves enlightened by Eric’s new height of masturbatory zeal.

He takes the women to jewelry stores and asks them what they want, forcing the commission-hungry workers to address their particular coordinates in the air.

When Eric finally dies of a heart attack (he weighed over 400 pounds and everyone saw it coming) no one attends his funeral. The priest blesses him, completely unaware of all the beautiful women standing around him, aroused by his stoic celibacy, each of them looking for something to fill the void.

One morning my mother had Wilford Brimley come over and make some Quaker Oats for my breakfast. I walked downstairs and she told me she was going back to bed. Something about her jaw being sore. Mr. Brimley moved deftly around the kitchen as I lit up a Lucky and downed a quick shot of whiskey.

“That stuff’ll kill ya,” Mr. Brimley said, sliding the bowl in the microwave.

“What the hell, you’re only thirteen once,” I said.

He chuckled. “Well, I guess yer right about that.” In a couple of minutes he sat the bowl down on the table in front of me. I took a bite and choked it down.

“How is it?” he asked.

“Tastes like shit, Brimley,” I answered.

“You rude little cocksucker! I oughta bust that bowl over yer fuckin’ punkass head!”

I stood up and threw the bowl at his glowering red face.

“Well then, you shuldn’ta fuckin’ asked me!”

I went upstairs to my room where Julie was showered and waiting for me. I rolled over after we finished and handed her a washcloth to wipe the come from her chin. Reaching into my nightstand, I pulled out a joint, lit it, and inhaled. After passing her the joint and exhaling, I told her, “That fucking Brimley’s a real jerk.”

“I’m sorry he ruined your breakfast, baby.”

“Where did Mom find you, doll?”

She smiled and blew smoke against my face, suckling my earlobe.

Seth is my cousin who came to stay with my parents and never left. He lives in a room in the basement. Occasionally, I go downstairs to bum cigarettes from him. He appears at the door, Metallica blasting in the background, sweaty from intense masturbation. “Pounding off,” he calls it.

Today, I go down to Seth’s room to get some cigarettes but there is no metal and he never comes to the door. I stand there for a few minutes before opening it. When I look inside I see Seth hanging from the ceiling by a belt. The word “Satan” is written on the wall behind him in what can only be sheep’s blood.

Buddy called this morning, very excited about what he called his “new figure.” I was excited for Buddy. He had been maybe twenty or thirty pounds overweight and, as no one had seen him for a few months, I assumed he had lost some of this excess weight.

I decided to throw a party in honor of his new figure.

“I’m real glad to hear about this,” I told him. “I think everyone should see you.”

A hundred guests must have shown up between eight and nine o’clock, all eager to see what had become referred to as the “new Buddy.”

Buddy got there around 10:30. It looked like he had put on 200 pounds. Everyone burst out laughing. They couldn’t control themselves. I laughed too, the gin and tonic I was enjoying shooting through my nose and making my eyes tear up. Festive music came through the house speakers.

Buddy seemed totally undaunted. “No, wait, you haven’t seen anything yet!” he announced with the same enthusiasm I’d heard in his voice that morning.

He stripped off his shirt and glided out into the middle of the floor. As everyone’s laughter died down a bit, the music seemed to get louder and Buddy started dancing, flinging his filled skin in all different directions. He made a series of raunchy faces. Buddy’s new figure made him look too middle-aged and weird to really be Buddy, but he continued dancing, rolling that gut in people’s faces while contorting his own.

It was simultaneous, I think, the feeling that we had all quickly come to hate the new Buddy.

The smell of breakfast fills my bedroom.

I go to the kitchen, my head aching from a three-day bender.

Mother is hunched over the stove, working diligently to prepare the meal. My father, a foolhardy schizophrenic, has assumed the role of mad bomber. He is bent over his empty plate, anxiously twisting his crazy handlebar mustache. Quickly, he backs away from the table, crosses the kitchen and goes to the phone.

He has to call in a threat. His voice is vaguely Eastern European.

Mother serves breakfast. The toast is burnt beyond all recognition and the eggs are hopelessly runny.

Agitated, I shove my plate off the table and say, quite loudly, “What is this shit?!”

My father runs back to the front door, reaches into his rucksack and pulls out a black and shiny ball-shaped bomb. He lights the fuse after flicking a match on his teeth and tosses the bomb at me, flashing a dastardly smile all the while. It explodes on the table and knocks me out of my seat. My face is blackened. My hair stands straight up in the air. Smoke rises off my clothes. Mother leans against the sink and cries. Breakfast has been ruined.

Carl was middle-aged. He was free. He had new hair.

His circle of friends waited for him in the parking lot.

He approached them. They clapped him on his flannel-clad back. Carl kept his hands in the pockets of his new pants, the deepest shade of blue and skintight.

“That’s some crazy ass hair, Carl.” Steve was the first to notice.

“Crazy as shit,” Bob said.

“Fancy,” said Frank.

Carl had had his hair professionally permed that morning and was beginning to feel slightly embarrassed about picking such an ostentatious hairstyle. He nervously shifted from foot to foot and ran a hand over his fancy hair.

The next week they all stood in the same parking lot and they all had perms. They smoked their unfiltered cigarettes and whistled at the young girls as they got out of their cars.

I’m going to the supermarket downtown to buy some coffee and eggs when I see Sammy the Legless outside. This isn’t at all abnormal. He has been sitting outside the supermarket three out of four times I’ve been.

“Hey, Sammy!” I call.

He nods and smiles beneath his baseball hat. Smiles a little larger than usual, I think. What could make him smile so large?

While picking out my purchases I overhear the squat cashier talking to a regular customer. Some piece of bar trash I’ve noticed wandering around the town.

“You fucked Sammy?” the customer asks.

“Well, kinda. He’s got some nerve damage down there so he has some trouble getting it up most of the time. But I got him out of that chair and all laid back in the bed. Well, at this point, I was kinda wonderin’ what to do. But I had that horrible fuck ache, ya know? You ever go a whole day and just know yer gonna get it at the end of the day?”

“Oh yeah, sister.”

“Yeah, well, so I has him back on the bed and I’m lickin’ that thing and I know it’s gonna be huge if he gets it up but there ain’t nothing happenin’. And I says to him, ‘Feel good, baby?’ ’N he just looks at me from unnerneath that stupid hat ’n says, ‘I can’t feel a thing.’ So at this point I’m thinkin’, Well one of us is gonna be getting’ off one way or the other so I take off my panties and climb onto his face.”

“Oh yeah? How was that?”

“That little fucker’s got a tongue that’ll go all the way up to yer stomach, let me tell you. God, I couldn’t stop comin’. When we got finished I felt sorta bad for him so I asks, ‘Ain’t there nothin’ I can do, baby?’ ’N he tells me about the dildo in his closet.”

“He wanted to watch you use the dildo?”

“No! He wanted me to shove it up his ass!”

“Really?”

“Yeah, turns out he can’t feel hardly nothin’ in his dick but he’s got a highly sensitive asshole. The second I slid it in he started spurtin’ all over the place.”

I creep by the customer and put my purchases on the counter.

“That all, sir?” the cashier asks.

“That’s it,” I say.

On a whim, I become an anthropologist. First thing, I go to a primitive tropical island. I get to know the locals, using my newly invented universal dialogue. They seem to be a sublime lot, blissed out by what they call the “Orchestra of the Gods.” This orchestra, the island folk explain, plays weekly in a sort of parade.

The rest of the week, I sleep fitfully and fear that I am coming down with the plague. Finally, the day of the parade arrives. The islanders line the island’s one dirt road and I plow my way to the front, my heart thumping with anticipation. An electric murmur runs through the crowd and I know the orchestra must be coming. Upon seeing them, I am automatically disappointed and enraged. They are a stick orchestra, making no noise whatsoever other than the clicking and clacking of the goddamn sticks. But they act as though they are playing real instruments—blowing into the sticks, strumming the sticks, beating the sticks against the air.

The crowd oohs and aahs.

I want to tell everyone there that this is a farce. But I can’t. I’m an anthropologist. An objective observer. A cultural chameleon. In an attempt to fit in, I unthinkingly hold up a lighter. It is the islanders’ assumption that their pathetic orchestra brought this canister of fire to them. After that, I become a god.