Geek Love

Thoughts

Wow. Loved every twisted word. A dark comedic fever dream about a charming family of freaks just trying to find purpose and not murder each other.

Highlights

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cosseted 🔗

• [N] cosseted (adjective): pampered; treated with excessive care or attention 🛌💖

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Miranda seems preoccupied with deformity. She has lured the fat man from the corner newsstand up to her rooms several times to model for her. There is no obvious reason for such a fascination in her own life, even if her living does depend on that tiny irregularity of hers. She is strong and straight. Her spine and legs are as long as history. It may be that the impressions of her infancy are caught somehow in the pulp of her eyes, luring her. Or there may be some hooked structure in her cells that twists her toward all that the world calls freakish. 🔗

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How proud I am, dancing in the air full of eyes rubbing at me uncovered, unable to look away because of what I am. Those poor hoptoads behind me are silent. I've conquered them. They thought to use and shame me but I win out by nature, because a true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born. 🔗

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Olympia Binewski, aka Hopalong McGurk, the Radio Story Lady, is hunched over a book in the glass-walled recording booth at Radio KBNK, Portland. The molasses voice that has earned her living for decades pours into the sponge ear of the microphone and is transformed into silent, pulsing waves that radiate over a hundred miles. She is deep in a dramatic rendition of that speculative classic “Pit Might.” 🔗

• [N] Great language

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In the story the mind-souls of three theoretical physicists find themselves reincarnated (after dying hideously during their search for Schrodinger's demon cat) in the bodies of itch mites inhabiting the pubic hair of a particularly obtuse Los Angeles policeman. 🔗

• [N] lol awesome

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Am I contaminating her? Polluting my silence? Obliterating my anonymity? Dangling the ax of my identity over her whole idea of herself? 🔗

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I sit. She draws. Wearing only my blue glasses I am not cold but my skin rises against exposure, rough as a cow's tongue. The cups steam upward into the pale air. Our island is the size of two canvas chairs and a small cluttered table. We are marooned in the breathing bareness of the room. Darkness rolls out around us, seeping into the distant softness of the grey walls. The curtains shift slowly in their own whiteness, as though the light pouring through them has a frail, moving substance. 🔗

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Watching her work is comfortable. I feel invisible again, as though she had never spoken to me beyond “Good morning.” She is not interested in my identity. She doesn't notice it. Her eyes flick impatiently at me for a fast fix -- a regenerative fusing of the image on her retina, the model she inflicts on the paper. I am merely a utensil, a temporary topic for the eternal discussion between her long eye and her deliberate hand. 🔗

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Now, twenty years later, in this huge room, with Lil downstairs watching a TV screen through a magnifying glass, her mind steeped in the amnesiac vapor of her own decay, and Arty's wonderful face gone to worms despite me, I sit here looking at the full, ripe flesh of this almost normal young female and for a single satisfying instant see her on a platter with a well-basted skin crackling to the touch. 🔗

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His body was crying but his brain wasn't. The eyes above his tears were as sharp as ever. The blood from his shoulder was sliding faster than the clear fluid from his eyes, but to me the tears were more alarming. 🔗

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Lil was intrigued, of course, but insisted on stowing her babe not behind plebeian beans but behind artichoke hearts, escargots, some comestible expensive and erudite enough to guarantee that the customer who shoved the cans aside and discovered this sweet morsel would have a certain cachet of worldliness and money. 🔗

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Clyde Beatty 🔗

• [N] Clyde Beatty (adjective): relating to a theatrical style characterized by dramatic and often wild animal performances; reminiscent of a circus atmosphere 🎪🐅

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Arty's depiction of the “institution” scared me more than death or snakes. The institution was a cross between an orphanage and a slaughterhouse. Worst of all, it was run entirely by norms. 🔗

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I was the only one who knew his dark, bitter meanness and his jagged, rippling jealousy, and his sour yearnings, and still loved him. I also knew how breakable he was. He didn't care if I knew. He didn't care if I loved him. He knew I'd serve him absolutely even if he hurt me. And I was not a rival to him. I didn't have an act of my own. I drew the crowds to him rather than to myself. 🔗

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Funny how target potential became a status symbol among us. 🔗

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That winter was a slow time for the show. Business was steady but we all had time to think and doze around. Giving Papa time to think, as Arty put it, was like pumping random rounds into a fireworks factory. The odds favored dramatic results. 🔗

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“If Papa had discovered fire,” Arty sighed to the beat of his lifts, “he'd think it was for sticking in your mouth to amaze a crowd ... If Papa had invented the wheel ... he'd have laid it flat ... put a merry-go-round on it ... and figured that was as far as it went ... If he'd discovered America ... he would have gone home and forgot about it ... because it didn't have any hot-dog stands.” 🔗

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"The twins don't care if I draw a bigger crowd than they do. They don't have to play or dance or sing. They could sit on a bench and wave and they'd still get crowds. They can afford to be easygoing. Nobody's going to upstage them. And Chick! Of course he's amazing. That's my curse. I'm a freak but not much of a freak. I'm like you, fucked up without being special. There's nothing unique about me except my brains and the crowd can't see that. 🔗

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I cut Arty's meat slowly while my chest fills with a yearning that would like to spill out through my eyes and nose. It is, I suppose, the common grief of children at having to protect their parents from reality. It is bitter for the young to see what awful innocence adults grow into, that terrible vulnerability that must be sheltered from the rodent mire of childhood.
Can we blame the child for resenting the fantasy of largeness? Big, soft arms and deep voices in the dark saying, “Tell Papa, tell Mama, and we'll make it right.” The child, screaming for refuge, senses how feeble a shelter the twig hut of grown-up awareness is. They claim strength, these parents, and complete sanctuary. The weeping earth itself knows how desperate is the child's need for exactly that sanctuary. How deep and sticky is the darkness of childhood, how rigid the blades of infant evil, which is unadulterated, unrestrained by the convenient cushions of age and its civilizing anesthesia. 🔗

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We need that warm adult stupidity. Even knowing the illusion, we cry and hide in their laps, speaking only of defiled lollipops or lost bears, and getting a lollipop or a toy bear's worth of comfort. We make do with it rather than face alone the cavernous reaches of our skulls for which there is no remedy, no safety, no comfort at all. We survive until, by sheer stamina, we escape into the dim innocence of our own adulthood and its forgetfulness. 🔗

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What Arty wanted the crowds to hear was that they were all hormone-driven insects and probably deserved to be miserable but that he, the Aqua Boy, could really feel for them because he was in much better shape. That's what it sounded like to me, but the customers must have been hearing something different because they gobbled it up and seemed to enjoy feeling sorry for themselves. 🔗

• [N] Ok Andrew Tate

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“I think I'm getting a notion of how to do this. O.K., a carnival works because people pay to feel amazed and scared. They can nibble around a midway getting amazed here and scared there, or both. And do you know what else? Hope. Hope they'll win a prize, break the jackpot, meet a girl, hit a bull's-eye in front of their buddies. In a carnival you call it luck or chance, but it's the same as hope. Now hope is a good feeling that needs risk to work. How good it is depends on how big the risk is if what you hope doesn't happen. You hope your old auntie croaks and leaves you a carload of shekels, but she might leave them to her cat. You might not hit the target or win the stuffed dog, you might lose your money and look like a fool. You don't get the surge without the risk. Well. Religion works the same way. The only difference is that it's more amazing than even Chick or the twins. And it's a whole lot scarier than the Roll-a-plane or the Screamer, or any simp twister. This scare stuff laps over into the hope department too. The hope you get from religion is a three-ring, all-star hope because the risk is outrageous. Bad! Well, I'm working on it. I've got the amazing part down. And the scary bits are a snap. But I've got to come up with a hope.” 🔗

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“The one buck they've got, I'll get,” said Arty. But it wasn't the money that excited him. It was that those who never would have come to the carnival came just for him. 🔗

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There were oil wells everywhere. The soil had been abandoned to dust and lizards, and the backyard of every wind-blistered bungalow in town had thrown over ideas of shade or geraniums in favor of the whiskey promise in the mutter of those green grasshopper pumps. 🔗

• [N] Beauty

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After the morning shift at KBNK I hole up in an empty office at the station and spend the afternoon on the phone. I enjoy it. I can never be inconspicuous in person. A hunchback is not agile enough for efficient skulking. But my voice can take me anywhere. I can be a manicured silk receptionist, a bureaucrat of impenetrable authority, or an old college chum named Beth. I can be a pollster doing a survey of management techniques or a reporter for the daily paper doing a feature on how employees view their bosses. Anonymous, of course -- no real names used and all businesses disguised. 🔗

• [N] I like this, she enjoys making anonymous phone calls, pet ding to be someone else

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She talks. People talk easily to me. They think a bald albino hunchback dwarf can't hide anything. My worst is all out in the open. It makes it necessary for people to tell you about themselves. They begin out of simple courtesy. Just being visible is my biggest confession, so they try to set me at ease by revealing our equality, by dragging out their own less-apparent deformities. That's how it starts. But I am like a stranger on the bus and they get hooked on having a listener. They go too far because I am one listener who is in no position to judge or find fault. They stretch out their dampest secrets because a creature like me has no virtues or morals. If I am “good” (and they assume that I am), it's obviously for lack of opportunity to be otherwise. And I listen. I listen eagerly, warmly, because I care. They tell me everything eventually. 🔗

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unduly 🔗

• [N] unduly (adverb): excessively; overly so 😮📺

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Sometimes when we've been drinking I can't help smiling at Miss Lick while I picture myself drilling her through the eye with her pop's target pistol. The irony of my killing her righteously for doing what she considers righteous -- and she, remember, never killed anyone -- is hilarious to me. I must watch my drinking. I like it too much. 🔗

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Wanting to do it didn't make him evil. Getting away with it is what turned him into a monster. 🔗

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"So, let's get the truth here! You don't want to stop eating! You love to eat! You don't want to be thin! You don't want to be beautiful! You don't want people to love you! All you really want is to know that you're all right! That's what can give you peace! 🔗

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she'd dropped a few chins along with her limbs. 🔗

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“Arturism was founded,” wrote Sanderson, “on the greed and spite of a transcendental maggot named Arturo Binewski, who used his own genetic defects and the weakness of the unemployed and illiterate to create an insanely self-destructive following that fed his maniacal ego ... ” 🔗

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lacunae 🔗

• [N] lacunae (noun): gaps or missing parts; deficiencies 📚❓

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He seems to have no sympathy for anyone, but total empathy. 🔗

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“We all have to start somewhere,” Arty grinned, as I slipped a forkful of ham between his lips. Sanderson leaned on the stove drinking coffee and regaled us with an urbane description of his search for a surgeon willing to perform the task. “I ended up with an eighty-year-old veterinarian who was Grand Wheezar of his local KKK congregation. I told him that my mother had just confessed, on her deathbed, that she had gone down with a pecan picker and I was actually sired by an octoroon Catholic communist. The old gentleman agreed to do the job immediately. He pats me on the shoulder and says, 'Yer right, son, you'd fry in the eternal oil for passing that much taint on to another generation.'” 🔗

• [N] Lmao, Sanderson claims, falsely, that he cut his balls off.

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Then he dreamed that he was in the open door of a plane several thousand feet above the earth and he had to jump holding a baby in his arms. It was his baby. He jumped, pulled the rip cord on the parachute, and it didn't open. The emergency release didn't work. He was falling fast. The wind tore at him fiercely. He was gripping the baby as tightly as he could but the wind pried under his arms, strained at his muscles, and suddenly the baby was loose, falling beside him, just out of reach. He flailed and groped in the air, trying to reach it. The baby was falling just a little bit faster than he was. It was below him, falling away from him as he fell after it. The earth screamed up at him. He knew that the baby was going to hit first and he would see it, would know it for a whole fraction of a second before he was smashed into a pulp himself. The terrible millisecond of that grief burst in him and he woke shrieking. He couldn't get the dream out of his head. He prayed that he would have the dream again but that this time he would fall faster and be allowed to die first. The dream was not to be monkeyed with. It did not come again and it would not go away. 🔗

• [N] Vern, the guy that shot at the Binewskis in the beginning, has a nightmare

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maudlin 🔗

• [N] maudlin (adjective): excessively sentimental or emotional; tearfully self-pitying 😢💔

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“The truth is always an insult or a joke. Lies are generally tastier. We love them. The nature of lies is to please. Truth has no concern for anyone's comfort.”
-- Arturo Binewski to N.S. 🔗

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“I get glimpses of the horror of normalcy. Each of these innocents on the street is engulfed by a terror of their own ordinariness. They would do anything to be unique.”
-- Arturo Binewski to N.S. 🔗

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We create a leader by locating one in the crowd who is standing up. This may well be because there are no chairs or because his knees are fused by arthritis. It doesn't matter. We designate this victim as a 'stand-up guy' by the simple expedient of sitting down around him.” 🔗

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“The more people we exclude, the more people will want to join. That's what exclusive means.”
-- Arturo to N.S. 🔗

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"As it is, I don't need all that crap. For what I've got to say, the more exposure the folks have to the outside world, the better. Feed 'em newspapers, TV, world reports. Tell 'em about terrorist attacks, mass murders, disease, divorce, crooked politicians, pollution, war and rumors of war! Then go ahead and tell 'em that only fools and half-wits join my outfit. The first half of the news cancels out that particular message. Let the relatives and lovers loose on 'em. All they can stand. Because it's the world that drives them to me. You news guys are my allies. Those soggy wives and cheating husbands and nagging, nutso parents are my best friends. 🔗

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a pair of ancient Harley-Davidson motorcycles with sidecars. One of the sidecars was shaped like a wooden shoe and the other like a submarine. They belonged to a pair of hard-nosed old thugs, who slept in their sidecars and insisted on having the tattooed skin peeled off their arms and legs as they were removed. They tanned the tattoos and kept them in scrapbooks in their saddlebags. 🔗

• [N] nice

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duenna 🔗

• [N] duenna (noun): a woman who acts as a governess or chaperone, often for young women; caretaker 🧕👗

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But that week I had become a full-fledged bleeder and was still absorbed by this first change in myself that I had ever noticed. The click and buzz of my synapses kept making the same connection. If you can change, you can also end. Death had always been a theory to me. Now I knew. The terror hurt good and I nursed it and played it like a loose tooth. 🔗

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From what I have come to understand of life, this show skill, this talk-'em, sock-'em, knock-'em-flat information, is as close as we got to that ultimate mystery. I throw death aside. Death is not mysterious. We all understand death far too well and spend chunks of life resisting, ignoring, or explaining away that knowledge. 🔗

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I suspect that, even if I had begun as a norm, the saw-toothed yearning that whirls in me would bend me and spin me colorless, shrink me, scorch every hair from my body, and all invisibly so only my red eyes would blink out glimpses of the furnace thing inside. In fact, I smell the stench of longing so clearly in the streets that I'm surprised there are not hundreds exactly like me on every corner. 🔗

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“She's not asleep,” I muttered at Arty's ear.
“She chose not to. He can stop the pain without putting them to sleep. He says most of them like to sleep because knowing and seeing are painful.” Arty stuck his lower lip out and slid it along the railing. “It kind of goes along with what I'm always spouting, doesn't it?” 🔗

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She was mainly preoccupied with, lunch and the way the meal symbolized the breakdown of the family. 🔗

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“Mama, Elly isn't there anymore. Iphy's changed. Everything's changed. This whole berry business, cooking big meals that nobody comes for, birthday cakes for Arty. It's dumb, Mama. Stop pretending. There isn't any family anymore, Mama.”
Then she cracked me with the big spoon. It smacked wet and hard across my ear, and the purple-black juice sprayed across the table. She stared at me, terrified, her mouth and eyes gaping with fear. I stared gaping at her. I broke and ran.
I went to the generator truck and climbed up to sit by Grandpa. That's the only time Mama ever hit me and I knew I deserved it. I also knew that Mama was too far gone to understand why I deserved it. She'd swung that spoon in a tigerish reflex at blasphemy. But I believed that Arty had turned his back on us, that the twins were broken, that the Chick was lost, that Papa was weak and scared, that Mama was spinning fog, and that I was an adolescent crone sitting in the ruins, watching the beams crumble, and warming myself in the smoke from the funeral pyre. That was how I felt, and I wanted company. I hated Mama for refusing to see enough to be miserable with me. Maybe, too, enough of my child heart was still with me to think that if she would only open her eyes she could fix it all back up like a busted toy. 🔗

• [N] :(

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Like colors or a spring tree against that kind of blue sky that pulls your heart out through your eyes. Pretty things will swarm you like that, like your heart was a hive of electric bees. He was like that, the geek boy. He made normal seem beautiful to me. 🔗

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“That's how I learned. It's O.K. for me to love a norm like that. But if he comes to loving me it's because I've twisted him and changed him. If he loves me he's corrupted. I can't love him anymore. I won't pretend it didn't hurt.” 🔗

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(Arty -- conversation with N.S.)
"There are those whose own vulgar normality is so apparent and stultifying that they strive to escape it. They affect flamboyant behavior and claim originality according to the fashionable eccentricities of their time. They claim brains or talent or indifference to mores in desperate attempts to deny their own mediocrity. These are frequently artists and performers, adventurers and wide-life devotees.
“Then there are those who feel their own strangeness and are terrified by it. They struggle toward normalcy. They suffer to exactly that degree that they are unable to appear normal to others, or to convince themselves that their aberration does not exist. These are true freaks, who appear, almost always, conventional and dull.” 🔗

• [N] On norms and freaks

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(Arturo in response to critics)
“It's interesting that when these individuals choose -- and it is their choice always -- to endure voluntary amputations for their own personal benefit, society professes itself shocked and disapproving. Yet this same society respects the concept that any individual should risk total annihilation in war, subject to the judgment of any superior officer at all and for purposes ranging from a promotion for the lieutenant to higher profits for the bullet company. Hell, they don't just respect that idea, they flat expect it. And they'll shoot your ass if you don't go along with it.” 🔗

• [N] Hmm, Arty is cooking here

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That's when it clicked that the mechanics of my life were not going to run on the physics that ruled the twins or Mama in her day. If I bled it didn't mean what Iphy's blood meant. If I loved it wasn't the same as Iphy's love or the love of bouncy girls in the midway.
Arty had done his best to teach me this all along but I had seen him as a special case, not governed by the prosy gravity that held the rest of us. Vinnie, the Pin Kid, tried to keep me from knowing that he'd never thought of me the way I had thought of him. His kindness scalded me awake. 🔗

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Life for me was not like the songs the redheads played. It wasn't the electric clutch I had seen ten million times in the midway -- the toreador girls pumping flags until those bulging-crotched tractor drivers were strung as tight as banjo wire, glinting in the sun. It wasn't for me, the stammering hilarity of Papa and Lil, or even the helpless, dribbling lust of the Bag Man rocked by the sight of the twins. I have certainly mourned for myself. I have wallowed in grief for the lonesome, deliberate seep of my love into the air like the smell of uneaten popcorn greening to rubbery, staleness. In the end I would always pull up with a sense of glory, that loving is the strong side. It's feeble to be an object. What's the point of being loved in return, I'd ask myself. To warm my spine in the dark? To change the face in my mirror every morning? It was none of Arty's business that I loved him. It was my secret ace, like a bluebird tattooed under pubic hair or a ruby tucked up my ass. 🔗

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My job was to come back directly, with nothing leaking from beneath my dark glasses, to give Arty his rubdown and then paint him for the next show, nodding cheerfully all the while, never showing anything but attentive care for his muscular wonderfulness. Because he could have killed you. He could have cut off the money that schooled and fed you. He could have erased you so entirely that I never would have had those letters and report cards and photos, or your crayon pictures, or the chance to spy on you, and to love you secretly when everything else was gone. 🔗

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The sky above Molalla was aching blue but I walked from Arty's tent to our van in the same air I'd sucked all my life. It was a Binewski blend of lube grease, dust, popcorn, and hot sugar. We made that air and we carried it with us. The Fabulon's light was the same in Arkansas as in Idaho -- the patented electric dance step of the Binewskis. We made it. Like the mucoid nubbin that spins a shell called “oyster,” we Binewskis wove a midway shelter called “carnival.” 🔗

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This mystery appeared when I first stood in a rooted house. I hadn't understood before that anything about me needed explaining. It's all very well to read about houses, and see houses from the road, and to tell yourself, That's where folks live. But it's another thing entirely to walk inside and stand there. 🔗

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Al always laughed at the stuck houses. He hauled out his only bit of scripture to deal with houses. “The birds of the air have their nests,” he would announce as though it were a nursery rhyme, “the foxes of the ground have their holes.” And he would raise one finger and jut his eyebrows forward in his teaching way, “But the son of man hath nowhere to rest his head.” 🔗

• [N] 💪

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No, she claims she's not crying, though her sinuses are trying to squeeze out through her eyeballs. She is, however, feeling sorry for herself because this is “her” window and the big dusty room on the other side is “her” room and Oly misses it and would like to crawl in and shut the window and never leave it again, but she cannot because instead of a brain she has been blessed with a flame-purple hemorrhoid and she is in miserable, though voluntary, exile until her little project is finished. 🔗

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Here the telephone is white and has its own table. Where I live the phone is an ancient black-and-chrome wall box with coin slots and numbers scratched into its paint. It rings often but few people ever use it to call out. It is too exposed there in the grease-brown entryway. Whenever it rings, Lily answers, though it is never for her. 🔗

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Miss Lick watches me surface and blow. She grins as I scrabble for the guttered side of the pool. “It's amazing that you and I are so much alike, isn't it?” I kick off on my back, paddling away from her, grinning.
She's right. We each appear totally alone in our lives. I'm the shy, isolated dwarf creeping in and out of my shabby room, living only through my throat and my inherited work. She is the muscular monolith, cut off by brass, stalking around in her old man's ambition, too imposing in finance and physique for the regular commerce of talk and touch. We choose to seem barren, loveless orphans. We each have a secret family. Miss Lick has her darlings and I have mine. All we've really lacked is someone to tell. Now she tells me, and I tell all to these bland, indifferent sheets of paper. The only point where our narrow tracks converge is her bid to turn my darling into one of hers. 🔗

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Time is a rap on the ear with a brass knuckle. I've been letting it ride. 🔗

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“Mary!” I yell, yanking on the heavy arm. “I didn't mean it like this.” Miss Lick's eyes pop open, staring upside-down and furious. Her wrist flicks loose from my hands, swatting me, groping for me as I fall clattering against the forgotten gun on the floor. Her hand snaps onto my throat, hot and hard. A white light comes on behind my eyes as she lifts me above her with my right hand fluttering at her fingers on my throat and my left hand heavy with the gun. I am rising, until my ears explode and I begin a long, slow fall at the end of her arm, toward the tile floor, watching the sudden black hole where her right eye was, her big legs flopping in the footbath and the sputtering roll at the crotch of her tank suit as a dark liquid runs onto the tile. Her hand is still huge on my throat, but she's gone. I'm alone. 🔗

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After twenty careful years of not revealing myself to you, I find it hard to reverse the process. For all you lacked in a parent, I hope you can eventually forgive me. I can't be sure what the trunk will mean to you, or the news that you aren't alone, that you are one of us. Yet I hope that someday you'll come to collect us all from the shelves of the vault. Take down Arty and Chick and Papa and the twins, and all that's left of the Jar Kin, and, by then, Lily and me. Open our metal jars and pour all the Binewski dust together into that big battered loving cup that first held only Grandpa B. Bolt us to the hood of your traveling machine and take us on the road again. 🔗

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My son is 19 now, and in college. I just turned 44 with a howl of triumph. I never expected to survive this long. But my family tends to view mortality as a mere statistical probability, not a sure thing. That inherited optimism is insidious. It undermines the sternest logic. So, though I'm a slow learner, maybe I'll have life enough yet to write something that will punch out through time, and sit dustifying on some shelf waiting to talk to far-off generations. At least I'll have a hell of a good time trying. 🔗