Les aventures érotiques d'janitor

It is with great sadness that I must announce that due to my unfortunate financial circumstances, resulting in owed back rent to my unsympathetic landlady (who wears a shower cap to the grocery store just to let you know where she's coming from because she's afraid head lice lurk down every aisle along with radon rays from orbiting satellites that she claims interfere with her ability to match wits with the contestants on Family Feud) and thus my impending eviction from my roomy one-room with hotplate and stacked milk crate wardrobe abode, I have been forced to put my life of the mind on temporary hold as I turn to a life of labour, if not love instead, specifically that of the janitorial arts. Yes, I, who have lectured in all the great universities and intellectual cafes of the world, from the Sorbonne (the one in Paris, Ontario and actually called the Sore Bun Cafe & Bakery and where I'm currently banned from entering due to an incident with a cinnamon bun, galoshes, a pair of barbeque tongs, a man's thong, denture cream and too much Sudafed coursing through my bloodstream but I think they'll come around soon) to Phil's Heating and Duct Cleaning College & Taxidermy Repair Service, just outside of St. Paul, Minnesota and only a bowling ball's throw away from the Mississippi (Phil trains all his heating and duct cleaning graduates by having them heave bowling balls into the river from twenty feet away to strengthen their arms and ready them for a life of furnace-room toil not to mention the precision they will require to insert glass eyes into moose heads, trophy fish and naturally posed dead amphibians wearing sombreros strumming guitars and/or smoking cigars), am now a proud janitorial custodian with not just one, but two connecting condominium complexes under my watchful eye and let me tell you, I do not approach this responsibility lightly. Equally so, I do not use the term "janitorial arts" lightly either for the nuances, intricacies and finer points of vacuuming, mopping, stainless steel polishing, Windexing, recycling and fishing the odd poisoned dead rat out of the gaps between the stairwell landings, has made me appreciate that these are not just mere cleaning tasks, but part of a larger picture of existential angst and the search for meaning in decomposing carpeting, both metaphorically and with cleaning products whose chemical compounds have been known to cause tumors in both tuna and those who work in close vicinity to lottery ticket machines, not to mention the attention to detail worthy of a Vermeer, both in composition and the beauty hidden in the routine of everyday living, lost in seemingly never-ending hallways where every door is locked to your curiosity and the only knobs that open to your grip (and key ring) belong to fire exit doors and various utility rooms behind which only more emptiness awaits (along with a couple of drains in which you like to pee). Samuel Beckett should have been so lucky (Waiting For Mr. Clean?). Or Franz Kafka for that matter considering the amount of pests I've come across fleeing for cover at the approach of my vacuum and the baseboards and nameless doors sealed up too tight for them to escape, closed to their frenzied scuttling (actually, they manage to creep under the doorjambs quite successfully if I'm not quick enough with my hose attachment so I imagine some pest control company should be notified soon), so their only recourse is to turn and beg me to spare their verminous little lives and I become both judge, janitor and executioner all at once, urged on by the bureaucratic body of the all-controlling condo Strata council who I have no problem describing as the kissing cousins of an Eastern-European dictatorship circa the 1930ish Soviet-fueled era when pesticide was food and Stalin would dress in a clown suit and make-up in his private room in the Kremlin before entertaining his troops like Bob Hope, but a Bob Hope that hates golf but likes murdering hundreds of thousands of people. Of course golfers have been known to murder people too, but not quite as many and usually they just hit the person with a nine-iron a couple of times, run them over with their golf cart and then dump them in the water hazard where hoepfully the snapping turtles will make short work of their meaty bodies.

This is the fate that awaits Kafka's cockroach alter-ego, where not only are you subjected to waking up in an insect body, but are then captured and transported from your European homeland to America's shores where you are then forced to engage in cockroach races for the fun and fancy of saucy American dames who derive some form of twisted erotic pleasure from seeing vermin scuttle to the finish line, very much like their ever-absent husbands as they attempt to amass great fortunes on Wall St. whilst crushing the carapaces of their competitors and enjoying Waldorf Salads on the forty-second floor of a skyscraper named after their grandfather unless that grandfather is named Yitzi Schlomberger, in which case your office is probably on a fourth-floor walk-up over an egg roll factory.

Many of those dispossessed cockroaches weren't so lucky to be racing in the Kentucky Derby of the vermin world and were instead sold into slavery and forced to smuggle cigarettes for convicts from cell to cell. One such cockroach, a Stanislav Versht, told his story to a New York Times columnist who turned it into a 1930's bestseller, The Cigarette-Smuggling Cockroach of Cell Block 6.

Now, did I say a life of labour and not of love? Well, love's labour is not lost after all for here begins the erotic adventures of a janitor (or Les aventures érotiques d'janitor, because everything sounds better in French except for the word 'fenetre,' which sounds more like some kind of toenail fungus or a Tupperware container full of some unidentifiable hair adhered to a small mesa of rotting glutinous matter that once masqueraded as food instead of a window that you might actually like to gaze through, say at a marauding woodchuck chewing its way through an old pair of pantyhose it has found and dragged from a garbage bin behind the Ahoy Matey senior citizen's home along with some discarded meds it had previously eaten causing the poor creature to puff up like a ptomaine-tainted can of beans), a journey I had no idea I was about to embark upon when I took the job. My boss said nary a word about what erotically charged exploits awaited me as the only janitor in what I was soon to find was a love-starved condominium complex. Passion lingered around ever corner, in every stairwell and sometimes even down in the underground garage and recycling and garbage room, where many tenants were sloppy with their personal refuse and thus their secret urges and desires stood out like a severed sore thumb or a discarded valentine's card balanced atop a cardboard bucket filled with mildly-aged breaded and partially bitten chicken livers. It was a tell-tale heart down in that garbage room and the tale it told beat and throbbed with desire (and partially-eaten breaded chicken livers) and little did I realize that as a cleaning custodian, Cupid's lusty arrows would soon be directed at me (not even a Kevlar vest can withstand that force or trajectory), even at my weakest moments like say, Windexing the windows in the lobby foyer, my concentration so extreme I was unaware of my paunch jutting from my t-shirt alluringly, much like the breathtaking breach of a beluga in a rundown marine park just before the morning feeding when a certain dawning sense of mundanity and hopelessness overtakes even the most docile and incarcerated of beings, causing them to flex their atrophied muscles in a final show of useless and yet symbolic freedom, sometimes inadvertently, which only heightens the erotic nature of their imprisoned bodies as they are caught unawares by nubile admirers (although sometimes that nubility is hard to discern beneath the heavily-quilted bathrobes, support-hose, dust-bunny covered slippers, hairnets and the quixotic cigarette-smoke squint that animates the right side of a face in such a provocative way that illustrates both beauty and age in one windswept facial landscape like the craggy cliff face where the puffins roost and mate when the November winds blow hard against the rocky Newfoundland coast). Well, that's me in a nutshell, so to speak.

The creation of the janitor's paunch using the JP-XL-3 or "paunch pumper" as it's so affectionately called within the business. Not everyone can afford one so many janitors rely on the old standby of beer, sausage, dead raccoon meat and uncooked macaroni.

My first day on the job and the air was alive with erotic possibilities, from the twittering of birds calling to their mates to the sound of my neighbour, Litvack, declaring he had found a cure for erectile dysfunction using cucumber seeds. I heard him mate not once, but twice, with his inflatable wife, such was the successful outcome of his home-remedy and his lusty grunts echoed down the alleyway, followed by the commending shouts of fellow rooming-house dwellers yelling, "Jesus, Litvack, shut the fuck up or shut your window for fuck's sake. We can hear you squeaking on top of that rubber thing all the way down the block. It sounds like you're fucking a rubber dinghy." When you wake to that it certainly puts the day into a priapic, not to mention romantic perspective and it was heigh ho, off to work I go for me, a little bent over from a sense of wonder not to mention the erection in my sweat pants. Could a love such as Litvack had found also be waiting for me?

The above images are inserted here in order to illustrate where I differ from other janitorial custodians on the technique of mop wringing. I stand second to no man nor woman when it comes to squeezing out a mop head and where others are satisfied to merely wring twice, giving a single clockwise twist for the second squeeze (as show above), I use a clockwise and then counter-clockwise twist, thus adding a third wring, reducing the amount of excess water while not sacrificing the mop's cleaning power and efficiency (after all, we have only one planet and it's our responsibility to save as much water as possible for future generations to mop with).

I filled my mop bucket and ascended to the lobby foyer, making a perfunctory check of the tastefully inset chrome lobby waste bin where someone had seen fit to dump some untouched pork dumplings. Should I eat them, I wondered? After all, on my salary I needed to get my sustenance where ever I could find it at the cheapest price possible. Still, how would it appear if I, the trusted building janitor, were to be seen eating pork dumplings out of the garbage bin. However, considering the erotic adventures I was soon to find flung in my well-mopped path, I needed food energy to maintain my janitorial virility. In the end I compromised and surreptitiously tucked the uneaten pork pot stickers into my pockets saving them for later when I could ravenously consume them in the safety and security of the boiler room. Thankfully, no one saw me cramming pork dumplings into my pant's pockets.
It was not long after this that I was to have my first erotic encounter in the complex. On my first day on the job no less. There I was vacuuming the fourth floor hallway carpeting, using the hand-held hose nozzle for the more difficult suction-resisting dirt and lint covered sections when I felt a tug on my vacuum cleaner cord. I turned around only to find that my cord had come to the end of its length and was pulling at the wall socket and the vacuum cleaner simultaneously. It was a good twenty feet back for me to walk back to unplug the cord when from around the corner of the L-shaped hallway a woman and a small child appeared. The woman was elderly I believe (I couldn't be completely certain due to a series of flickering lights in the hallway I had been instructed to change but hadn't gotten around to yet and so there was some visual trickery afoot) but she was not without her charms, her stocky figure alluringly outlined in a polyester-blend pantsuit. As I smiled at her she smiled back, her capped teeth catching the flickering light in a captivating manner and then she did an amazing thing. She bent down, unplugged the cord from the wall socket and shuffled towards me barefoot with the most darling gnarled toes that I could only imagine curling (well, they were already quite curled but I'm sure there was room for a centimeter more or two) from orgasmic pleasure. We met halfway and she held out the cord to me, the child beside her holding her hand and gazing at some snot on the finger of its free hand.
"Eh, eh, eh," she grunted at me beaming and then she spoke to me in some lilting foreign language-Eastern European, Cantonese, Finnish-I'm not sure which, so bewitched was I by her grace and sparse but well-coiffed hair. I took the plug from her and for a moment our eyes met, or I think they did for hers were clouded by cataracts (or perhaps it was just that her glasses were so heavily smudged, probably by the greasy fingerprints of the ungrateful wretch she was minding), but I knew, instantly, that if it weren't for the child in tow (her grandchild, perhaps or maybe a child she was raising for internal organ harvesting for who knows what really goes on in these condo complexes), the two of us would be doing the Last Tango In Paris by way of Burnaby, Vancouver, British Columbia on a freshly vacuumed carpet no less, our highly endurable but equally highly flammable clothing shed and strewn with abandon near the fire exit as we made the beast-with-two-backs, a goiter and a shin-splint. With a pair of oven mitts, the picture would've been complete.
She turned to leave but the child kept yelling, "Vacuum, vacuum," and she shrugged apologetically so I ran the machine a bit to appease the child and prolong the erotic encounter between myself and the woman (internal organ harvester? nanny? grandmother?).
Sometimes the most erotic moments are those of the unanswered calls of nature (I mean lovemaking of course, not bowel movements) and I knew that, even with this unrequited encounter, its memory would dance indefinitely upon the fibers of my brain like light speckling a stagnant mosquito-infested pool of water much like the one in the empty lot behind my rooming-house where starry-eyed lovers often come to meet, exchange money and copulate behind the discarded rusty washing machine. As I've said, eroticism is in the air everywhere, even with your pants down around your ankles in a junk-filled lot with mosquitoes biting your buttocks and the object of your desire checking her text messages in between your thrusts. But love conquers all, except, perhaps, if you're caught soliciting a prostitute but there is a chance you may even find love in the lock-up too.
And so begins les aventures érotiques d'janitor, my first day already a success and only the tip of love's iceberg as I was soon to discover. Further erotic adventures assailed me like dust mites from a full vacuum cleaner bag and so stay tuned for more libidinous and lascivious trysts from I, your humble narrator and condominium custodian. As for those pork dumplings, I retired to the boiler room not long after my encounter with the internal organ harvester and devoured them ravenously and may I say, each bite among the hissing of the steam pipes was like nibbling on the soft lips of a sensual lover.

Reviews of Books I've Never Read

Jokes And Their Relation To The Unconscious by Sigmund Freud

A young Sigmund Freud inspecting a joke-manufacturing machine, Vienna, 1876.

The great Soupy Sales once said, "I don't tell jokes...the jokes tell me." What did he mean by this enigmatic but telling remark? For that I had to turn to the good doctor himself, Sigmund Freud and his fascinating book, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious. I have to confess, when I first saw it on the bargain shelf at the local library for fifty cents I actually thought it was a book about bad jokes that go on so long you fall into unconsciousness listening to them, waiting for the story that never ends and the punchline that never arrives and then you have to be prodded with a pole, violin bow, cane, lit cigar, bread stick or the taxidermy penis of a bull elephant to elicit a response or incite a chuckle, a snort or even cause a trickle of drool to descend from your chin to your shirt.
Lo and behold, this book was the exact opposite, being an examination of the psychology behind jokes using some rollicking good examples like:

Customer: How much is that herring over there (pointing to a herring over there)?
Shopkeeper: That's no herring. That's my wife.
Customer: Oh, in that case, how much to have her pickled and brined?

It was that joke alone that put Vienna on the map back in 1809 and soon people from all over Europe were making the journey to the strudel and herring besotted capital of Austria to visit the location where this joke was first uttered just outside of Herr Herman's Herring Emporium. The emporium itself soon became the focus of yearly pilgrimages of hairy and smelly Europeans in heavy overcoats who loved a good joke and a good plate of herring to go with it. Sometimes they stored extra herring in their coats, which is probably what made them so smelly in the first place, especially if you're taking the slow train from Belgrade to Irkutsk in an overheated coach car.   

Some happy customers outside of Herr Herman's Herring Emporium, circa 1900. The lineups became so long in and outside of the shop, sometimes running around the block, that Herr Herman added an outdoor herring cart to deal with the overflow.

Now some of the some of the jokes represented in this book are in the original German so I had to translate them myself. Unfortunately my German is as rusty as a World War I bayonet or actually, I have to admit I don't even speak German. Nevertheless I didn't let that stop me from sounding out the words and trying to ascertain their meaning. I spoke the words through a toilet paper tube in the hopes that the slight echo effect would aid in the deciphering of this ancient and highly expressive language that often involves the spraying of saliva during some of the more hard syllabic  pronunciations. Perhaps this is why so many people in the Germanic-speaking countries always appear to be sweating profusely. It's either the saliva spray causing this faux-sweat effect that beads their hammy faces or else the steady diet of beer, pig's feet and blood sausage creating an actual physical catalyst to cause this unusual phenomenon. Freud once said about the Viennese, "their faces drip like melting pastry, even when they're happy." In fact it was this curious trait that was the cornerstone of Freud's "salivating pastry theory" in which he describes that after urine and feces the greatest gift a child can give its parents is its own saliva and how, over the years, that compulsion remains steadfast into old age where, as old people drool, especially over a nice tray of pastries served up in the senior's home just before Wheel of Fortune comes on the TV, that drooling is actually an expression of trying to recapture those moments of innocent youth where one is still looking for acceptance and to please the parental units with one's babbling and bodily functions. Looking for love in effect. In fact many seniors wrap it all into one weltschmerz of a package, drooling and filling their adult diapers simultaneously in a kind of ode to time past and the overwhelming sadness that comes from life's regrets like letting your wife go out alone in the rowboat to bring in the crab traps only to have the boat capsize and her drown, putting off that trip to Kapuskasing to visit the oven mitt factory or not taking that opportunity to appear on Wheel of Fortune and missing out on the chance to win tons of cash and maybe copping a feel of Vanna White's ass between vowel turning. Essentially we start life on shaky feet and leave it the same way, the only difference being our diaper size changes. Anyway, I'm straying from my review or as Freud would say, "schmitzen dof flugen mit Krakow baden licht und blautzen kop," roughly translated as "if I didn't know you were hit in the head with a horseshoe as a child I'd swear you were the horse's ass of Krakow."And you thought Freud had no sense of humour.

It's a known fact that Freud based many of his jokes and sayings on actual historical figures and events and so he didn't merely toss the "horse's ass of Krakow" off the top of his head or pull it out of his ass nor was the horseshoe in the noggin some strange feat of imagination. The truth is "the horse's ass of Krakow" was an actual person, one Dimitri Kobolasitzsky, pictured above, greatly feared during the early 1900's on the streets of Krakow where, with his incredible horseshoe tossing skills he cracked the skulls of many an innocent passerby, the impetus behind this all stemming from some unresolved anger issues from his childhood when his father forced him to rub goat dung on his grandmother's feet as a home-remedy for plantar warts.That and the fact that he lived in a yurt up until he was sixteen and was often taunted by neighbourhood children who called him Goat Dung Dimitri and Dirty Yurty.

So, back to jokes and their relation to that part of the mind that, given legs, would dance the Watusi in its underpants in a gymnasium full of high school basketball fans and by that I mean the unconscious and not the super-ego that usually tends to hog the spotlight, especially where the Watusi, underwear and a captive audience is involved. To sum it up in a nutshell, the good nut doctor, Sigmund Freud, theorized that all jokes and forms of humour are born out of deeper and darker motivations, a veritable bubbling bouillabaisse of neurosis, psychosis and even halitosis (few people realize the effects of bad breath on the human mind), and behind the joviality and jocularity there lies deep-seated fears and anxieties that can ruin many a punchline, wedding speech or late night sales pitches for food chopping devices or hair replacement systems. To illustrate this point I again turn to the great Soupy Sales (Freud could have had a field day with Soupy if they had lived at the same time but alas, never would the two great minds meet and share some zippy bon mots, boners and engage in good-natured buffoonery), primarily in one of his greatest routines beloved my millions and simply called "The Bear Mauled My Wife and Children."   

Soupy taking a break during the TV filming of his famous and hilarious "The bear mauled my wife and kids" routine. The bear's name was Wilfred and he and Soupy were inseparable, traveling together to engagements from Las Vegas to the Antarctic. In his declining years Wilfred was unable to perform the famous routine due to loss of teeth, which made the mauling more like a gumming instead. When old age eventually took Wilfred's life Soupy was inconsolable for weeks and instead of finding a new bear Soupy simply retired the act.

In this skit Soupy and his family are camping and while Soupy is attempting to put up a tent his wife and two kids are exploring the campsite. That's when a bear emerges from the woods and as Soupy is hilariously getting entangled in the tent and poles and rope, the bear attacks his family, killing them easily and then mauling them, removing limbs and heads with great pulls of its teeth and chewing on entrails with great relish. As this is happening Soupy is now fully covered by the tent, thrashing around and yelling, "Hey honey, a little help here, please. Hey, kids, where are you guys? Can't you give me a hand?" That's when the bear deposits a severed hand into Soupy's hand that's jutting out from under the tent and if the audience isn't already laughing at these amusing antics this sends them into hysterics. The side-splitting skit continues with Soupy eventually freeing himself from the tent and then being chased by the bear around the stage, all the while having to dodge the mauled, dismembered and bloodied bodies of his wife and children while he waves the severed hand around manically. What does this tell us? Yes, Soupy Sales trying to outrun a bear that has killed and partially eaten his wife and children is funny, especially in the hands of a comedic master like Soupy himself, but also that humour comes from very dark places, just like Sigmund Freud had earlier interpreted when Soupy was just a wee obnoxious thing named Milton and being spanked by his mother for peeing on the Yahrzeit candles.

Which leads us further into Freud's text and the idea that jokes, by nature are a judgmental impulse rooted in the unconscious where dissimilar thoughts find humorous purchase when combined absurdly and then spoken by a person with a mouth full of herring. Or a ventriloquist's dummy with an Oedipus Complex. Or an enormous man whose jowls resemble the mudflaps on a semi-trailer. As Freud himself so aptly put it in his book, "sich etwas zuruckgelegt mitzhoofen Schenectady einschlafreig tuchas schaden schmutz koffen mit ordentlich vasht kuglefloffen," that translated reads "though you dreamed that you once owned a dry-cleaning business in Schnectady, the only pants you're fit to press are those on the hind quarters of an incontinent walrus whose rear end can barely fit into those slacks in the first place and so eventually you're forced to take a job in a denture cream factory working the viscosity machine and secretly rubbing your man-nipples against the molar adhesion metal testing plates." What does Freud mean by this? Simply, the vehicle for obtaining and discharging pleasure and laughter in the first place is created from an intimate connection to a disturbed psychological condition manifesting itself first in the joke and then in the elicited response, a distribution of energy that in a sense is a reaction to repression, both sexually, culturally and in some instances agriculturally like when a farmer wants to grow, say wheat but his banker says, "There's no money in that, grow soybean and if you don't I'll repossess your farm and by the way, I had sex with your daughter and also your ox and I'm still not sure which was better."         

If you think a ventriloquist's dummy with an Oedipus Complex is a strange thing look no further than this image as an example of the love that dare not speak its name, even if the speaker is someone throwing their voice using the dummy as a delivery system for their most primal and taboo desires. Or not, as in this case where the dummy truly did want to sleep with his mother and conspired with her to murder the father and then move away together to the banks of the Mississippi and run an owl sanctuary. Amen indeed and if the dummy and his mother hadn't later produced this album as a testament to their love they may never have been caught. Fortunately an off-duty policeman at a church rummage sale came across this album and once he heard the first song, "Is That An Oedipus Complex In Your Pocket Or Are You Just Happy To See Me," he realized he had an important clue to the death of Morton Pizzle, an out-of-work ventriloquist whose dead body had been found in his trailer home, stabbed repeatedly with a taxidermy swordfish. His wife and dummy had vanished and couldn't be found for questioning.

In yet another humorous anecdote, Freud relates this joke of a rabbi introducing the village butcher to his daughter in the hopes a marriage might be made.
"She's a real looker," the rabbi says to him.
"Especially if you have cataracts," the butcher replies as he sees the daughter for the first time.
"What, you don't like her hump?" the rabbi inquires.
"It's not the hump," the butcher responds. "A little hump is nice. It shows hard work, diligence, a sense that with a hump you have nothing to hide or inclination to do so in the first place. My first wife had a hump and I was very fond of it, stroking it at night and talking tenderly to its cartilage."
"That's very touching and very wise," the rabbi replied.
"Yes, but what is not so wise," the butcher continued, whispering now not to be overheard by the daughter, "is that your daughter is old, she squints, she has bad teeth and her mustache is but barely a wisp on her wrinkled face."
"You need not lower your voice," the rabbi said, "since she's also deaf."
Part of the joke here plays on the conceptual framework of the closeness in sound of two words with different meanings, thus in German, "dist fluchbranggen schvitz halfinbrot kunst mit gimmelflaushcen," works on the premise that the words "dist fluchbranggen" or "little hump" is similar to "dost fluchblangitten" that means "mouse diarrhea" and so the double meaning adds a second layer of humour whose psychology is at once both playful and equally traumatic as mouse diarrhea is not a thing to be taken lightly, especially if you step in it in the middle of the night on your way to the bathroom but when you yell, "Yeech, I just stepped in mouse diarrhea," that will naturally elicit guffaws and knee-slaps. Secondly, schvitz, or sweat is close to Schmitz, a famous janitor in Germany known for being the guy responsible for cleaning Hitler and Eva Braun's bunker and on the day they committed suicide Hitler turned to Schmitz and said "Please do a good cleanup, Herr Schmitz because Eva and I are going to commit suicide and there's no telling how the cyanide will effect us but I'm guessing we are going to shit our pants profusely and we don't want to be found like that. We've eaten a lot of bratwurst, sauerkraut, sauerbraten, spatzel and strudel the past few days and it's not going to be a pretty sight. I'm pretty sure our deathbed will be a stench-filled swamp from the great gushes of diarrhea our Nazi bodies will eject." This revelation caused Schmitz to sweat uncontrollably, giving rise to the phrase "you're schvitzing like a Schmitz who has stepped in the fuhrer's feces," and it's at this precise point where Freud's theory of the "two-headed meerschaum pipe dilemma" finds fruition based on the layering of meanings and innuendo and the double-edged interpretations of common phrases that lead a listener into the fulcrum of the joke, the resting spot from which all of the machinations begin turning in the search for laughter or its most treasured result, the spit-take.  

A group of Freudian scholars including the renowned Herr Guttenschmutz (far right) and his French counterpart, Monsieur Le Fenetre (holding the pipe) examining the actual over-sized meerschaum pipe that inspired Freud to come up with his "two-headed meerschaum pipe dilemma" in which he put forth his theory that the meerschaum pipe is really a physical manifestation of castration anxiety in that the carved head at the end of the meerschaum pipe is well aware of the fact that the smoker is placing in his mouth the pipe's stem or, subliminally, the head of the penis belonging to the meerschaum pipe's body, clenching the mouthpiece at times as if threatening to bite off the meerschaum's symbolic phallus thus supporting the completely unsubstantiated and yet convincing theory that the combination of castration anxiety, emasculation and penis envy between the genders, when they meet say at a cocktail party or shuffleboard tournament, creates an almost anti-matter energy, much like a black hole in space, and in this vortex of negative matter there is a kind of synergy that encompasses both birth and destruction and a good reason why meerschaum pipe smoking has taken such a downward turn, replaced by such substitutes as cigarettes, cigars, hookahs and water bongs. It also prompted Freud to coin his famous phrase, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar unless it's an unlit penis in your mouth." Or, might I add, a meerschaum pipe for that matter. The old adage "two heads are better than one" comes to mind but as Freud was sure to remind us, when one of them is the head of your penis then can it really be trusted to make split-second and sometimes life-saving decisions or even rationally buy a bus ticket to the Hvalfjorour fjord in Iceland wen you don't even understand the currency in the first place.

As we can see poo-poo and pee-pee play a large role in Freud's psychoanalytic joke theories and I identify these two functions by those babyish words on purpose in order to underscore Freud's belief that all our motivations are born from our suckling years and as we progress from the oral to the anal to the vaginal and finally the anginal, whereupon we have a stroke and would be lucky if we could even pronounce the  words poo-poo and pee-pee ever again, our impulses in humour are never far from our childhood yearnings and thus jokes have a way of both infantalizing and tantalizing us with their crude forms and double entendres along with some of their higher cultural commentaries exemplified by puns, word play, ventriloquism and dirty limericks sung by bearded midgets in dresses.

The famed Reginald Doothings, dirty limerick reciter extraordinaire and popular guest in all the great royal houses of Europe where his filthy little poems were so well received. Technically he wasn't quite a midget as he measured just over an inch too tall on the Hapsburg Midget-ometer, the standard midget measurement of the time but his well-groomed beard, fetching dresses and lewd limericks won over even the prudest of minds. Freud treated Doothings for a short time when Doothings had a mental block while reciting "There once was a young man from Horsham," for the queen of Norway, was unable to finish and fled to his tiny estate in the foothills of Estonia where he sunk into a deep depression and his only comfort was in being licked by his three-legged Alsatians. Freud was able to work through Doothings' problems, astutely realizing that the dirty limerick blockage stemmed from previously repressed and unaddressed childhood experiences where Doothings, an early bloomer in the facial hair department, was ridiculed by his father for his bushy beard when in effect it was jealousy that drove his father to take mental jabs at his son and also tell him he would never look good in crinoline, no matter how many weasels he hid under the bustle caging.

The great Mama Kublich, star of the vaudeville stage once asked Freud after he attended one of her performances for joke research, "Siggy, my little pisher, what did you think of my salmon mayonnaise routine tonight?" Freud replied, "I thought the mayonnaise was a little off and the salmon being stuffed in your brassiere, well, that was a little cynical perhaps considering it was a trout in the first place." Mama Kublich countered, "Siggy my little kugel-schtupper, you miss the point. The joke is not in the displacement of the fish but in the verbal misdirection independent of the psychical emphasis on its subsidiary meaning. Thus, the mayonnaise may be off but the trout leaps from the stage with the force of a derailed train on the outskirts of Antwerp, not far from the Museum of Modern Turnip Art. The real question here, Siggy, is whether indirect illusion-much like the ostrich that hides its head in the sand but then is mounted from behind by a chicken-fat covered sociopath with a fetish for long legs, necks and feathered bodies-is really just a carefully constructed allusion whose intellectual content is not much better than, say, Baroness Kunstschmeyer flicking the ears of two of her more tenacious suitors in the drawing room where the Baron himself, recently deceased, once invented the ottoman, which in turn would spawn an empire of furniture accessories as well as Turkish despots looking for a place to rest their feet. You see where I'm going with this my little matzah-ball head?" As Freud testifies in the book, Mama Kublich with great mental dexterity, had just handed him his testicles in a teacup and would cause him to revisit his theory of cathectic energy released through inhibition at the auditory perception of a punchline, especially if the punchline involved a drunken mule talking to a bartender, a rabbi wearing a parachute at a circumcision or an alien from outer space having sex with a lawn mower. In the end it's all based on discharge, whether physical or mental, though mental is better because there's less clean-up involved but the two-fold failure of the joke's dream-work foundation sets up the subjective determinants that fulfill the small ambitions of a continent chock full of a neurotic population who still insist on wearing jodhpurs to cockfights and cheese-rolling contests. On this basis Freud invented his punchline prod to measure the effects of a joke on sedentary patients but it also led him towards a further set of theories about the joke-tellers themselves.

Freud's assistant, Leopold Flugenbrau, measuring the effects of a joke via a cerebral cortex punchline prod on a difficult patient who had laughed only once in his life and that in reaction to the image of a man polishing a staircase banister without any pants on, an image that was far from funny by any stretch of the imagination as this practice was well-known to be used by wealthy European families to humiliate the household staff and keep them from asking for raises. Once you've polished a banister in your underpants, you're just happy to have a job in the first place, even if you're paid in toenail clippings, goose droppings or the colourful scabs siphoned out of loofah sponges. 

"The comic," Freud writes, "is looking to stick his tongue out as a means of personifying the animalistic, the infantile and the excretory, bundling it as such into one innervatory expenditure as to appear both mentally deficient and highly astute simultaneously. That these are also the necessary ingredients for constructing the paradigms of psychical automatism puts both the comic and the listener in a state of mind that in German is known as the einschlafrig gut machen sturbebett metzger socken fleisht und haven, or translated, the 'borrowing of the beige socks from beneath the butcher's death-bed,' the butcher being a popular comic trope as evidenced earlier in a joke and which supplies a transient sense of pleasure weighed against all that befalls one upon the Day of Judgement, even with a salami in your pocket for bribery purposes at the gates of heaven or hell if you want to bump yourself up from shoveler of feces to the wart and boil aisle and thus the preconscious cathexis of attention forces a laugh which unmasks the participants and releases their repression allowing them a type of superfluous conformity leading to the picking of lentils from yesterdays soup out of each others' beards with a spontanaiety, sense of comfort, ease and economy of movement that one usually reserves for bathing and/or the self-pleasuring of oneself onto the backs of decoy ducks in the basement of a library." Of course Freud based this entire premise on the old Bavarian parable of a dying butcher and his ne'er-do-well brother-in-law who coveted the butcher's socks and upon the butcher's passing attempted to pilfer the butcher's sock supply that was hidden beneath the death-bed that the butcher lay upon for family viewing, swapping them with his own socks but soon the smell of bratwurst grease emanating from the brother-in-law's feet gave him away and the family banished him to the Black Forest where he lived out his days as a sex slave to the dwarfs that called the forest their home and where they smoked hams in the burning stumps of once-stately elm trees, feeding the fires with cut-rate fairy dust bought off some shifty Russian importer and that turned out to be the dandruff of bridge trolls, hence the cheap price. So there you have it, summed up as neatly as a schizophrenic in a straitjacket and honestly, never have I gleaned so much information from a book I didn't read and found so much insight in the meanderings and occasional voices in my own mind (voices I might add that sound very much like Peter Lorre with a chicken on his head).  It's a veritable cornucopia of comic relief and obsessive desire, a psychoanalytic smorgasbord where the pickled herring is not what it seems. Is it a dream? Is it reality? Did someone just relate a joke or are you laughing because you just awoke on public transit wearing swim fins, a thong and brandishing a garlic press. Just remember, the next time a traveling salesman knocks at your door and you're not the farmer and you have no daughter, he's undoubtedly looking to have sex with your vacuum cleaner, not because he's attracted to it but because it will make a great story to tell his other salesmen cronies at the bar while they have a laugh at your expense. If I were you I'd have a good talk with your penis first before reading this book because if you and it are not on the same page comedy will soon turn to tragedy and that tragedy will make an Oedipus Complex look like a platypus conference compared to what will be happening in your underpants. If you don't have a penis or just misplaced it temporarily then please disregard this warning and go ahead and enjoy Mr. Freud's psychological probing of jokes because the next time someone says "Take my wife, please," it will help to know whether they're talking about their actual wife, their mother or that half pound of raw ground beef they made love to when they were thirteen.

Reviews of Books I've Never Read

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

Just another day at the sacrificial virgin and iron ore smelting factory.

First off, let me say I saw the movie and it's nothing like the book I've never read. Secondly, I rarely read authors whose names I can't pronounce (e.g. Chuck Palahniuk, Michel Houellebecq, J.M. Coetzee, Maurice Chevalier, Dean Koontz, Boris Flinkbrot), but I am willing to make the exception and I heard this Eugenides fellow really puts out a tense page-turner, like John Grisham but not as sexy with the characters unless you like them malnourished and with the pallor of Cornish game hens before cooking. Well, I wasn't to be disappointed because as it turned out, this guy had me up to the wee hours of the morning, although my weak bladder and paranoid delusions also helped. The fact that he was able to blend mystery with literary leanings was kind of like using the meat of an extinct species for a fondue pot bubbling with Velveeta cheese. When I say extinct species, I'm not kidding. For this book is really about virgin sacrifice, not suicide as the title would suggest (you can't judge a book by its title or its remainder sticker price) and these days, that concept has about as much foothold in contemporary society as a rock climbing dodo or Mahatma Gandhi at an NRA rally.

The book opens in a seemingly terrific suburban enclave in Michigan, or maybe Wisconsin, I'm not sure which because the descriptions of lawns and mowing machinery would seem to suggest Grosse Pointe but then sometimes a buffalo or bison comes walking across the grass, so your guess is as good as mine. Although the leaf blower portrayals lean heavily towards the eastern side of Lake Michigan, down Bloomfield Hills way, almost spitting distance from downtown Detroit unless you're spitting hot lead from a Glock 26, in which case it's a little closer.

Mr. Eugenides relaxing on his ranch in downtown Detroit where he raises buffalo for Buffalo chicken wings and plays high stakes Parcheesi with other glittering literati. Here he's pictured with his favourite buffalo, Melba, who he has claimed was a major inspiration, along with his beloved lawn mower for this book. What a buffalo and a lawnmower have to do with five suburban virgins destined for sacrifice is a mystery and when asked in an interview Mr. Eugenides replied, "Hey, don't knock it till you've tried it," which only deepens the mystery. The ranch is open to the public every second Wednesday of the month and buffalo birthing gloves are supplied to all the kiddies.

I have to say that for a thin book and first novel to boot, Mr. Eugenides (pronounced "Eugene, at

ease," but if you bark it like a marine drill sergeant with a dolmades stuck between his teeth you'll come very close to how it should sound in the original Greek), has created not only a novel that has an inherent creepiness in its themes and situations, but is equally adept at crushing creeping silverfish that would dare feed upon its very pages while you sleep. Let me just say that a lot of silverfish died virgins beneath the impact of this book, impressive for something that weighs in at barely half a pound. A lightweight in the world of heavyweight tomes but a K.O. artist when it comes to going the distance on the ropes.

Now let's get to the nitty-gritty of this suburban noir literary mystery and to do that we must start with the virgins. And I'm not talking just one or two but five, count'em, five virgin sisters romping through the pages of Mr. Eugene-At-Ease's pastoral and yet psychologically bleak landscape. Honestly, you need a bunch of virgins to keep people reading this morose thing. Of course the author is pretty smart sticking virgins right up there in the title because, let's face it, virgins sell like balloon animals at a swinger's party. As P.T. Barnum once said, there's a virgin born every minute and pair them with the suckers also being born every minute and you've got a marketing marriage made in heaven. Think of all the stuff with virgins. A virgin Caesar, virgin Shirley Temple, Like a Virgin, the Virgin Mary, the Virgin Islands, a virgin bride, Virgin Airlines, really you can't swing a dead cat without hitting some virgin thingamajig but Mr. Eugene-At-Ease uses his virgins for a higher calling. Namely as sacrificial victims to the god, Balalabub, a great and evil forgotten Aztec deity reborn as Hymie Kugelman who lives a few doors down from the virgin sisters and whose thirst for fresh virgin blood can never be sated except on Sundays when he's happy to just take his Cadillac out for a spin and maybe later watch a movie and have a nice grilled cheese sandwich and some sweet bread and butter pickles on the side, maybe some potato chips too although this sometimes gives him indigestion.

The great Balalabub (a.k.a. Hymie Kugelman) in all his radiant glory. Even cacti cower at his feet and virgins faint dead away as he takes them back to his suburban hideaway where he drains them of their blood and sometimes fits them for brassieres, not necessarily in that order.

Okay, here's how the plot pans out. The five virgin sisters, Rickie, Nickie, Mickie, Vickie and Rhonda (nicknamed Hickie because she lets all the boys suck on her neck), are the daughters of Renaldo and Pinky Lingmire. Renaldo is a sewer systems engineer and Punky teaches kazoo to neighbourhood children out of their home to bring in some extra cash. It's an affluent neighbourhood and close-knit community where everybody knows everybody except for some of the people they don't know and then some of those people don't know some of the other people so does anyone really know anyone or what they're doing in their rec-rooms, especially in underwear and easy access to a bubble machine? That's where this novel takes off like a jet plane in a whiny folk song and introduces the major themes of alienation, the pressures of social uniformity, the dark secrets of seemingly functional families that turn out more dysfunctional than that guy down the street who practices home taxidermy on neighbourhood cats, how the demands of a ten-pin bowling league and obsessive Hummel figurine collecting has affected that family psychology and the heartlessness of youth, especially regarding etiquette on escalators at the mall and the ridiculing of people's badly hemmed pants. Throw a washed-up Aztec god into the mix and you've got a recipe for meatballs in mole sauce along with a pretty good novel to boot.

Introduce a bubble machine into a rec-room setting and the sky's the limit. Unfortunately you can't always predict the outcome and, as in the case of Flip Minchford of Balousie, Mississippi pictured above, he was transformed into a gorilla suit-wearing deviant with a makeshift space helmet that helped him to recycle his own revolting fumes that he breathed constantly in his rec-room cave, inciting him into fits of rage and the urge to lick the bunions of elderly nuns. I mention this  to illustrate that just when you think you know your neighbours they go ahead and do something crazy like fornicating with bread pudding or selling top secret government information to Romanian gypsies. Just a word of warning next time your neighbours invite you over for some hors d'oeuvres and a game of Twister.

It's a intriguing narrative in that the story is told by a chorus of rutting teenage boys so it's not first, second or third person point-of-view but something I call twenty-second person perspective, give or take a couple of kids who disappear to summer camp or to the cottage for the holidays or come down with a bad case of food poisoning and aren't able to narrate the story because they're too busy vomiting into wastepaper buckets. Are any of these narrators reliable? Well, sure, though not around liquor cabinets or automobiles. Or virgin daughters for that matter. But their narrative descriptions are both sincere and somewhat innocent, tinged only here and there with depravity and singed with the spit of backyard BBQ hot dog grease. But what each of these narrators have in common is a fascination with the Lingmire sisters. If their understanding of the sisters is lacking, dictated by a skewed and hormone-swollen subjectivity where beauty is in the eye of the beholder except in the case of Chip Sundstrom, who has a glass eye and so, with the light reflecting off it he couldn't tell beauty if it hit him in the head with a two-by-four, at least they are still able to speak freely, lending an urgency to the characters' thoughts and desires, but as teenagers we are led to understand that they're still too stupid to comprehend the urges of the great Balalabub and his insatiable need for fresh virgin blood not to mention that it's an unemployed Aztec deity that is the driving force behind their community. New baseball diamond for the Little League team? Yep, that was Balalabub's doing. Bake sale to raise money to send odor-eating shoe inserts to poor children overseas? Balalabub again. In fact, there's no charitable organization or cause Balalabub didn't have a hand in or oversee. Though the community only knew him as just dopey old Hymie Kugelman with the bad toupee, always knocking on people's doors and asking for money, the smell of mothballs wafting off him stinging their nostrils as he stammered under their porch lights. Little did they know that the blood of virgins stained his shag carpeting.  

So many suburban backyard BBQ accidents involving grease-spitting hot dogs could've been avoided with the simple addition of a wiener rotisserie like the one pictured above. Why fill the emergency wards with teenagers spattered with wiener grease burns when with this simple and cost-effective appliance a community can be safe and happy again.

Who are these sisters, really and why do they keep disappearing one by one, their blood-drained bodies turning up behind Fortunato's Yogurt Silo with torn school yearbook pages stuffed in their panties? Is it a symbol of rampant consumerism, prevalent in the suburban landscape, that blood can be gulped up like so much fruit-flavoured yogurt with even a little left over to feed your overweight dachshund? And do the yearbook pages implicate the sisters' many teenage admirers as the perpetrators of these horrendous sacrifices, as Detective Horst Vactate believes over the course of his feeble investigations? But as every investigator knows, the focus should begin at home yet somehow Detective Vactate overlooks the obvious because he's a complicated man, twice divorced and taken to holding lederhosen parties that no one attends except for his idiot cousin, Gruenschveltz who thinks he's a Luftwaffe captain and regularly stuffs bratwursts up his anal cavity and dances polkas with an inflatable sex doll he calls Marie.

The author's fictional use of a yogurt silo works as both an excellent metaphorical device for intimating the fine line between abundance and gluttony along with adding some veracity to his story since yogurt silos such as the one pictured above have been popping up in strip malls all across the United States and are popular with both young and old alike. In this picture, Titus Blanchard, originator of the Yogurt Silo franchise, stands at the site of his first Yogurt Silo in Des Moines, Iowa. Behind the silos are the feeding tubes where for $1.89 a customer gets ten minutes unlimited feeding time. As Titus likes to say, "You can't get more natural than this. It's like sucking the yogurt straight from the cow's teat, without the fruit flavouring of course."

It is precisely Detective Vactate's shortcomings that lead him on a wild goose chase (literally, because for a while he believes that a crazed wild goose with a sharpened beak has been attacking and draining the blood of the virgins) when really, the answer is lying right under his nose but because of allergies and bad sinus congestion, we are led to believe that Vactate wouldn't know a rotting sardine from an apple blossom no matter how far you shoved them up his nostrils. For in the end, and this is the shocking truth, it's actually the father, Renaldo Lingmire, who offered up his own daughters to Hymie Kugelman (a.k.a. Balalabub) for sacrifice. How could a father do such a thing to his own children? Again Mr. Eugenides insinuates the moral complexities of the seemingly ideal suburban lifestyle and upbringing and the scenes involving Renaldo and his leaf blower that he uses to drown out his own miserable thoughts and motivations are especially poignant. In fact, it is Mr. Eugenides' economy of language and his attention to the mundane that makes this book so riveting. Take this passage for example:

"The day almost amplified the idea of mid-western life in its fetid breeze and pale sunlight that dappled the foliage where a raccoon had recently died after eating poisoned cheese. But this was of no concern to Renaldo as he strapped the leaf blower to his shoulder. Raccoons were one thing but sacrificial virgin daughters were a whole new ball game. The 30cc engine had the weight but the shoulder pad bore it well as it vibrated through Renaldo's body in the waning summer heat. The machine had a 485 CFM air volume and an air speed of 180 mph. Add to that a variable-speed trigger throttle and you weren't just blowing leaves, you were executing them. Much the way the Great Balalabub sacrificed virgins behind the naugahyde bar in his rec-room. If Renaldo listened closely, just beneath the thrumming of the leaf blowing machine, he could almost hear the voices of his lost daughters and likewise all the daughters in the community, offered up to Hymie Kugelman who oddly used denture cream to keep his toupee in place, a fact that he had hid from all three of his wives, even after they had divorced him because he felt a man who has lost both his hair and his teeth was really broadcasting his lack of virility, especially when some good-looking broads were on the menu that evening. But if guilt were a three-piece suit worn by a moribund salesman peddling flange gaskets for a phosphate mining factory, then you could easily put Renaldo on that sales team and book him into a motel on the outskirts of Kapuskasing where a hooker is still the same price as a dozen doughnuts from Tim Hortons and a man's word is as good as the blood that floods his mukluks after a snowmobile has crushed his feet. Still, in Wisconsin, the buffalo continue to roam, their snorts and mucous drips and the mighty swings of their scrotal sacs holding sway over the warp and weave of the prairie grass and the inhabitants feel the weight of the land and sky pressing to their temples like an ice cream headache. Renaldo blew the leaves to hell and back somehow wishing that it was himself that he was blowing to the underworld instead, so great was his remorse and his soul felt under the waning Detroit sun, misted with the vaporous debris from the automotive factories, as stained as Satan's underpants after a Szechuan buffet."

Whew! I don't know about you but when I read that passage the blood drains from me like a chicken under the knife of a kosher butcher in Poland, circa 1883. By 1884 the chickens weren't as tasty and by 1885 you couldn't find a decent chicken in Poland if your life depended on it. It wasn't until 1939 before any good chickens returned to the country but then the Nazis arrived so that's the end of that story. Anyway, the interplay of soul-stirring prose and semiotic coldness is as much a structure for the author to hang his carefully chosen words on as it is a warm, cozy bathrobe that Renaldo Lingmire likes to wear when he's down in the sewers drawing up new blueprints for his engineering firm. What everyone doesn't know, except for Renaldo of course, is that he owes his job to the Great Balalabub who got him an interview at Corky's Sewage Engineering and Pipe-Fitting, thus facilitating his happy upper-middle class existence and all the trappings that a bubble machine and a fancy cheese tray can bring (besides supplying Balalabub with sacrificial virgins, Renaldo also poisons all the neighbourhood raccoons as the above passage describes, using a lovely combination of Roquefort, Wisconsin cheddar and a Trappist monk hard cheese that he orders directly from the Our Lady of the Bleeding Gums Abbey in Berryville, U.S.A. and for this he has no regrets as his mother was killed by a family of raccoons when they tipped a load of bricks on her head as she was spying on one the workmen doing renovations to the family mansion in Montauk where she suspected him of lolling around naked, smoking cigars, eating corn dogs and drinking whiskey when he was supposed to be building a wall, and so she had slid beneath some scaffolding, which required that she too had to remove her clothing so as not to snag any fabric on a stray nail and there they were both found, naked as jaybirds and the family of raccoons chittering merrily over their crushed skulls). So Renaldo has made a pact with the devil, or balding and toothless Aztec deity in this case and when Balalabub begins demanding fresh virgin blood, Renaldo offers up his own daughters for sacrifice. Then, once they're gone, Renaldo must continue to procure more virgins using his Margaritaville Minivan Tour as enticement and sometimes when he can't find any girls he lures some teenage boys and dresses them up in wigs and yoga pants after he knocks them out with a large, frozen salami he keeps under the front seat of the minivan next to the Margarita mix and Balalabub, who really likes his peppermint schnapps, doesn't seem to notice after six or seven shots. And Detective Vactate continues to believe each one of these cases is a suicide instead of a sacrifice plus, to complicate matters, he's also fallen in love with Pinky Lingmire, which just goes to show you love is blind, especially when that love is unrequited and the object of your affection throws hot pork dumplings at your eyes. It's not completely Vactate's fault though working the suicide angle because Renaldo, once Balalabub is through with the bodies, poses the corpses over various sewer gratings in such a way and with certain objects that makes suicide look like the only deductive option. And even when Pinky Lingmire discovers her husband's indiscretions and murderous abetting ways, she so much loves the leather seats of her Lexus that if she were still of child-bearing age, would definitely continue to procreate to provide more virgin daughters for the great Balalabub and thus maybe trade up her Lexus for a Maserati not to mention upgrading their home entertainment system and kitchen appliances.

An Aztec Vienna Sausage Harvest Season hat as worn by the high priests during the gathering rites. The ceremony originated when the first wave of Viennese sausage-making refugees washed up on a raft in the Gulf of Mexico, escaping a plague of psychiatrists that had descended upon the Austrian capital, accusing the cocktail wiener makers of acute penis envy coupled with an Oedipus Complex that would make any mother blush. The image is courtesy of Al's Aztec Party Hats and Ritual Sacrificial Supplies, Fort Wayne Indiana.

As for Renaldo, his semen is still seaworthy when it comes to navigating the uterine lining and so Balalabub urges him to carry on various illicit affairs with married neighbourhood women in order to keep up a steady supply of virgins for future sacrifice, no mean feat when those women know you make your living crawling through sewer systems in a bathrobe that's covered in rat feces. Fortunately Balalabub bestows upon Renaldo his ancient purple sparkle hat, once worn by Aztec high priests during Vienna Sausage harvest season and no woman can resist its shimmering charms and hypnotic effect. Thematically, the novel follows some very well-trod post-modern tropes, trod in hiking boots I might add and so there is a heavy-handed or more precisely, heavy-footed plotting afoot along with some theoretical shenanigans that insinuate themselves into the narrative like an unwanted house guest who shaves over the kitchen sink, the paradigms shining like kidney stones passing and plunking into a well-lit toilet bowl, but Mr. Eugenides makes these muddied trails his own through his own particular brand of dark humour and some imaginative uses for barbeque tongs. Really, this novel would just be another Stephen King door-stopper but in the adept hands of Mr. Eugenides it becomes an in-depth examination of the American Dream gone sour like a block of Wisconsin cheese left too long in a barn on a back road long forgotten by farmers and poets, politicians and torque-wrench salesmen and all sense of control by a nation gone awry has been left in the palsied hands of aging and decrepit deities who nevertheless impress us with their dusty and denuded plumage like peacocks parading through a delicatessen, their now paltry feathers reeking of corned beef and pastrami while somewhere a group of virgins lick Total-Care toothpaste off the eyelids of perfectly posed dead Civil War re-enactors. That's the kind of dream Mr. Eugenides is talking about and if this puts you ill-at-ease then perhaps you should crawl back to your Socrates (pronounced Sock'R'Tease) because obviously Mr. Eugene-At-Ease is not the kind of author you're looking for. 

The author taking a break from a hard day of writing, spending a little quality time with his beloved buffalo and his partner, Mitzi, wearing her famed buffalo horn cocktail hour headdress.

The Haltiwanger Method of Self-Defense: Part 2

As proof of how invaluable the Haltiwanger Method of Self-Defense is, since Part 1 of this post I have had the unfortunate occasion to have to use my defense system twice. It just goes to show you the amount of evil that awaits you on a daily basis whether it be liquored up punks, crazed beekeepers or depraved marionette makers with unaddressed Geppetto complexes and an obsession with lie-detecting elongating wooden noses that make castration anxiety seem like the innocent daydream of your local butcher and penis envy just another night on the town for your community centre Zumba instructor. Granted, the first time was defending myself against my neighbour, Litvack's crazed guinea pig, which has grown so big and fat and, I suspect, has developed a taste for human flesh, that I feared for my life as the beast went for my neck. Litvack claims that that's impossible as Mr. Carruthers, as Litvack calls him, is so obese he can barely walk from his food bowl to his bed of wood chips (which is only inches away as Litvack also likes to remind me since the incident), but I saw the psychotic look in Mr. Carruthers' eyes and took the necessary steps to defend myself and deter what would no doubt have been a very bloody event. The fact is, with its long hair and corpulent body, Mr. Carruthers very much resembles Alfred Hitchcock in drag and with his psychopathic eyes, one is very much put in mind of that great director's most frightening movie, Psycho. In the world of guinea pigs, Mr. Carruthers could very well be a middle-aged Norman Bates and with his two, long front teeth, not unlike a couple of fillet knives, he would have made mincemeat out of my jugular in no time. Litvack was not happy that I karate chopped his guinea pig but because of my Haltiwanger self defense training I was able to temper the blow using the Haltiwanger half-chop to merely stun the rodent when I could have just as easily crushed him like an overripe mango. That Litvack then took back the hot plate he loaned me for cooking up some of my gourmet feasts (be aware that some of the finest gourmet foods can be found in the fifty cent unlabeled dented can bin at your local grocery store and that it's creativity that makes the dish, not the price of the ingredients or their discoloration, smell or alarmingly soft texture due to the past due expiry date), is inconsequential to me and honestly, Litvack is the loser here since he was the recipient of so many of my culinary conquests. And if Mr. Carruthers bears me any ill will after I karate chopped him, so be it. That guinea pig would no doubt eat an innocent baby in its crib if given half the chance. Test his droppings and I'm sure you'll find human DNA.

Mr. Carruthers in all his psychotic glory. This picture was taken before I karate chopped him and wiped the evil gleam from his eye and made him think twice about adding human flesh to his diet.
 

And this is how I'd like to see Mr. Carruthers if I had my way. Roasted with potatoes and maybe served up with a nice Riesling or Chardonnay. Looks like the only thing those two front teeth are good for now is scooping up guinea pig gravy.

My second run-in occurred when a monkey allegedly mistook my head for a coconut. Where exactly are you living, you might ask? In what North American city might such a thing happen? Well, I'm getting older and no doubt balding but never has my head been mistaken for a coconut before. A cantaloupe maybe, even a small seedless watermelon, but a coconut has never been my head's forte in the resemblance department. The monkey in question actually belongs to Litvacks's cousin, Maurice, an unemployed organ grinder and the fact that Mr. Carruthers and the monkey, Bonga, are best friends only makes me think there's a conspiracy afoot. I'm positive that Mr. Carruthers informed Bonga of the karate chop incident and as I was leaving my rooming house a few days later, Maurice and Bonga were sitting on the stoop of Litvack's rooming house next door to me. This is the conversation that ensued.

Maurice: Hey, Haltiwanger. How is youse?
Me: Hi, Maurice. Hi Bonga. Enjoying the sunshine?
Maurice: We're liking it just fine. Eh, Bonga? Too bad not everyone can be enjoying it today though. Like, for example, take Bonga's guinea pig pal, Mr. Carruthers. He don't wanna come outside on account'a his nerves are shot after some wiseguy gave him a karate chop. Now who would karate chop a cute little guinea pig, a guinea pig I might add who's getting on in years. It's like hitting a senior citizen. I ask youse, what kind'a person would hit an old fat hairy senior citizen? What kind'a louse would do that? Eh? That's what me and Bonga here are wondering. Right, Bonga?
Bonga: Eee, eeee, eeeee! Whooo, whooo, ahhh, ahhhh, ahhhh!
Me: Oh, yeah...well...well, that's really terrible there Maurice. I'm sorry to hear about Mr. Carruthers and his nerves and all. Very unfortunate. Please send him my regards and express my deepest sympathies. I really have to be going now (I must add that at this point I knew the jig was up and Bonga was looking at me with fiery vengeance in his beady little monkey eyes and his tiny, green pillbox hat was tilted at a peculiar angle that insinuated trouble but then maybe I'm just paranoid and out-of-work organ grinder monkeys make me nervous although there is no confusion about what happened next).
Maurice: Sure, sure, have a nice day. By the way, did you get a haircut. 'Cause your head looks kind'a like, well, I don't know, whadd'ya think Bonga but I think it looks a lot like a coconut. I mean I'd say a melon but there's just a bit of this thin, wispy hair sticking up, which really is coconut-like. Like if youse body was a tree and your head was on top I'd climb up that tree without a thought and pick that coconut before it drops to the ground and rots. Just a thought.
Me: Uh, well, that's very astute of you, Maurice. Very goods powers of observation you got there although I'd beg to differ about the whole coconut head resemblance thing, especially because, if you might've noticed, the back of my head is actually rather flat, which is not something you normally see on a coconut. Maybe more like a papaya that's gone kind'a soft and is resting on a counter top so one side gets a little flat due to pressure and gravity and sunlight and fibrous texture and such, so papaya yes, coconut not so much (I might further add that at this point Bonga was pretty much chomping at the bit, trying to shake off his little dress and I noticed that Maurice had subtly unhooked Bonga's chain from the tiny leash around his neck).
Maurice: Papaya, coconut, it's all the same to me. They're fruit, grow on tropical trees and they're both delicious. Am I right, Bonga? Yum, yum.

It was at this point that I turned to go and I'd taken only half a step before I felt Bonga's hairy and slightly piquant smelling body landing squarely on my shoulders as he grabbed my head with his deceptively strong little monkey-handed grip and began twisting my head this way and that, attempting to wrench my noggin from my neck. When that didn't work he began to pummel me with his tiny monkey fists and I believe he also defecated on my treasured Arrow Mach II tailored shirt (luckily the shirt's strong polyester fibers withstood the torrent of monkey fecal matter and made for an easier clean-up process in the end so hats off to all the fabric scientists and engineers at the Arrow corporation). 

All I can say is that if a monkey defecated on Bob, Paul or Steve's shirt they wouldn't bat an eyelash knowing that the scientific construction of their Arrow Mach II shirts are built to withstand any primate's fecal onslaught. Cooler heads shall always prevail as Bob, Paul and Steve easily illustrate and if the confidence in their gaze doesn't take your breath away maybe their shaped shirts, well-groomed facial hair and easygoing yet confident manliness will.

In the flurry of enraged monkey activity I think he also tried to have sex with my ear (it's a known fact organ grinder monkeys' sex drives kick into high gear when they're faced with stressful and confrontational situations which is why, particularly in the city, you can see many of them fornicating with dead pigeons, squirrels, discarded burritos, senior citizens that have fallen to the pavement as a result of over-medication and the odd raccoon that they've just killed in an argument). In fact, it's when I felt that tiny, stiff monkey member enter my ear canal that I realized now was the time to act quickly and defend myself before the monkey, in the throes of passion and at the height of arousal, achieved orgasm and flooded my ear with his beastly genetic matter. I used the Haltiwanger Monkey Evasive Maneuver #4 which entails grasping the monkey's penis between thumb and forefinger while the other hand finds the beast's tail and gives a good tug. This way the animal is being pulled in opposite directions by its two most sensitive appendages and if any monkey thinks his opposable thumbs make him cock-of-the-walk in the concrete jungle, wait until he meets the Haltiwanger Opposable Thumb Double-Tug and Peek-a-Boo Testicle Scoop'n'Squish Defense. Now that you have the beast's attention, release its tail and bring your hand up to your face, fingers splayed so that you're peeking through your digits. You can even blurt a playful "peekaboo" like you would to a baby to make it gurgle and goo. This will puzzle the monkey, causing him a moment's pause whereupon you can take advantage of his bewildered state to scoop his family jewels into your palm (as unseemly as this seems), and give a good squeeze which should result in the monkey looking for coconuts, if those coconuts grew in the dirt and could only be found by falling to one's knees and screaming like a primate that just saw its entire family turned into bush meat. That's the kind of coconuts I'm talking about. Looks like the only organ grinding this monkey is going to experience involves his own organ unfortunately. Or at least the coconuts that hang beneath his monkey tree. Now I'm not a big fan of grabbing any sort of testicles, be they on a man, monkey, iguana or Liberace wax museum figure, but when push comes to shove and your head is in danger of being torn asunder by an evil unemployed organ-grinder monkey with a chip on his shoulder, an axe to grind and an overactive libido, it's best to put your nose to the grindstone and your hand to the testes and put the primate in his place as swiftly as possible so your afternoon is free to enjoy a nice donair on a park bench or hitting the dollar store to stock up on decorative toothpicks for the next time company drops over. In fact that's where I was headed before Maurice and Bonga waylaid me and Maurice so surreptitiously hinted to Bonga that my head might resemble the hard-shelled fruit of a tree. By the time I was through with Bonga I could count organ grinder monkeys as well as guinea pigs as my mortal enemies as news travels fast in the animal kingdom, even if you've been karate chopped or had your testicles crushed and can barely squeak or grunt out the news. Now there's no doubt Maurice will lie in wait for me, looking for that perfect opportunity to seek revenge for what I did to his monkey's testes (not to mention squashing Bonga's little pillbox hat and getting schmutz on his sundress), but Maurice is truly a coward at heart and always cowers behind his monkey whenever there's trouble afoot. I expect no trouble from him or at least not the sort of trouble I can't handle with some of my Haltiwanger self-defense techniques and if all goes according to plan, the street in front of my rooming house will be strewn with primates in pain clutching their reproductive organs while a hand-cranked organ plays Lara's Theme at an abominable tempo and Omar Sharif (aka Dr. Zhivago) rolls over in his grave.  

Maurice and Bonga in better days before Bonga allegedly mistook my head for a coconut and paid the price for it. Don't let Maurice's charming facade fool you for beneath the jaunty hat, colourful bandana and ruddy Alp-climbing complexion lies the complex cogs and wheels turning in the psychological machinery of an inherently evil man. The Nazis in the Sound of Music could learn a thing or two from this organ-grinding despot. As for Bonga, one look at his feral little face says it all. If this isn't a monkey that would crack open your skull and suck out your brains like they were just so much banana puree, then you've obviously been taken in by his fetching sun dress and stylish accessories.  

Now that we've taken care of self defense tactics when dealing with insane members of various animal species (and although I've only described guinea pigs and organ grinder monkeys these defense techniques are easily applicable to all manner of creature, be they lizard, lemur, hamster, halibut, praying mantis or mangy game-park denizen looking to pad out its next measly meal with some human meat), it's time to take a look at another source of attacks from one of the least likely of places, making this type of perpetrator extremely dangerous. Serial killers, you ask yourself? Crazed, balding butchers with cleavers who can't get a date because they smell like pig's feet and refuse to take off their bloody aprons, even at the movies, perhaps? No, I'm talking about fully functional martial arts puppets controlled by withering yellow-bellied wimps who are so afraid of physical contact that they make attack puppets do their bidding. You can recognize them easily as they appear ham-fisted from a distance but as they draw nearer the illusion is revealed as martial arts puppets clutched in each sweaty palm. I have had first-hand experience with these puppet-wielding deviants, the most recent occurring as I was napping on my usual park bench surrounded by cooing pigeons, frolicsome squirrels and mentally-ill men urinating, defecating and/or masturbating in the bushes. There I was enjoying the sunshine and catching a few winks in order to re-energize my constantly put-to-the-test self-defense depleted physique when I felt a flurry of tiny hands and feet pummeling my face and neck. Groggy at first, I snapped quickly to attention once the mucous crust flaked from my eyelashes and I was able to focus, finding myself staring into the evil visages of two of the most devious martial arts puppets to ever walk this planet. Gorblon the Russian and Huch-Huch the Turk, manufactured by Flimbor Industries and discontinued after both were implicated in a rash of attacks on unsuspecting citizens who weren't expecting to have two harmlessly seeming toys rain blows upon their nostrils, earlobes, eyebrows, belly buttons, nipples, toenails, dewlaps, double chins and any part of their thoraxes exposed by revealing summer clothing.   

Gorblon the Russian (left) and Huch-Huch the Turk, ready for business with their special abdominal push buttons that trigger their lethal karate chops and punches. Combined with their kicks, activated by quick finger taps on their spring-loaded blue support stands, these two spell trouble even if they couldn't spell the word trouble if their lives depended on it. 

Now, the key to properly dispatching these two diabolical evil-doers and their fists and well-manicured feet of fury is to not concentrate on the puppets but rather their milquetoast puppet masters. You must strike at the source to disarm their terrible tools of pent-up rage administered by those with personality disorders and incontinence problems, the prime catalyst being inferiority complexes that, if translated into neon signage, would put any Las Vegas marquee to shame. The fear shining in the eyes of these lily-livered malefactors could easily be discerned by astronauts in space, even more so than the Great Wall of China. So, disregard the puppets and lunge straight for the controlling hands and arms of their masters. Chicken-hearted miscreants such as these are easily overpowered if you follow my three easy steps to successful self-defense. First, tear the heads off the martial arts puppets. You do this by grasping the hand of the puppet master, encircling the thin, knobby wrist with what I call the "grip of death," which is really just a regular grip but you squeeze really hard and grimace and growl and perhaps even drool for effect while you do it. You'd be surprised the results this technique gets, especially when dealing with spineless and malnourished crooks whose last meal was a half of a chewed chicken wing, three shriveled French fries and the backwash from a nearly empty plastic bottle of Pepsi fished from the garbage can of a public park. As they stare at you with a shocked face, their hand immobilized by your "death grip," you simply reach out with the other hand and grasping the albeit small but fearsomely bearded and mustachioed plastic head of Gorblon the Russian or Huch-Huch the Turk, you rip their head asunder from their neck much the same way Bonga, the organ grinder monkey wished to tear my allegedly coconut-shaped noggin from my body. Repeat again with the other hand and now the deadly martial arts puppets are just a two headless, inconsequential dolls that not even Barbie would sleep with. As for their master, I promise he will be left standing, mouth agape, spindly wrists throbbing and two headless puppets fallen at his fungus-riddled feet. Count slowly backwards from five and if he hasn't run off or at least begun to back away by this time, use the "Hammer of Thor" side hand blow, so named from olden days when Vikings used it to chop the heads of their freshly caught herring, striking at either the collarbone or the earlobes, two extremely sensitive parts of the human body (a trait also shared by wombats and anteaters). To use the "Hammer of Thor" side hand blow simply keep your hand open and stiff and chop at your attacker while yelling "Hammer of Thor" simultaneously.     

Here is Gorblon and Huch-Huch in action, demonstrating their deadly chops and kicks. But those black belts won't count for much when you pop off their heads and send their puppet masters scurrying for the shrubbery.

Here's another situation you might find yourself in, especially if you fall under the category of human shrimp. I don't mean that you're actually half-human and half-crustacean because that would really work in your favour when it comes to self-defense, especially if you had enormous pincers, but rather than you're diminutive in stature and can be tossed around like a beach ball, even in a strong wind. Here's the premise. A bully or a wise guy who is much taller than you is loaded with confidence but you're about to prove to him that most of it is false. He's living in a fool's paradise but little does he know that you're living on a luxurious cruise ship called the H.M.S. Haltiwanger with enough power to send old Neptune himself running for his mommy. He thinks that because he towers over you, he can defeat you with one big knock-out blow and then go home to watch the Late Show on television. Maybe have a bowl of crispy pork rinds, six or seven brewskies and then pass out while passing vile gas during an episode of Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea. Well just let him try it (not the gas passing and beer and pork rinds but the knock-out punch), because you're ready. The photo below says it all. As he grasps your head with his car-wrecker crane sized mitt, give him a convincing fearful human-shrimp like look that says, "please don't hurt me because I don't want to defecate in my pants or crustacean carapace." While he's looking down at you with disdain and maybe even a little disgust at the thought that you might actually soil yourself, you now have the huge ignoramus exactly where you want him. Before he can even strike, thinking he might have the whole situation wrapped up before he even throws a punch, you strike instead with the speed of a rattlesnake that's been disturbed by a lost tire salesman fanning himself with a pork pie hat and singing Ave Maria at the top of his lungs to keep himself company in the corn field he's wandered into after drinking too much schnapps. Using the "Shrimp Finger Thrust," with the hand straightened but fingers flexing like shrimp legs, grasp the goon's waist while driving your shrimp fingers into his abdomen. The bully's pride will be hurt by this point but that's not all. Follow this up with a second "shrimp finger thrust" to the testicles and the tormentor will be licking his wounds, although licking your own testicles or abdomen is no easy feat. 

It may look bad for the shrimp in the shiny underpants but when the big buffoon is laying on the ground trying to lick his own groin wounds we'll see who's doing the laughing.

Next is another shrimp vs. giant scenario except this time the shrimpy fellow isn't you but rather your sidekick. This kind of defense counts on some beforehand preparation and the sense that you're going to get into a skirmish with some giant blockhead at some point during your daily travels, even if you have to instigate it yourself to test the efficiency of this self-defense technique. So, call up the smallest, shrimp-like meekest friend you know and have them accompany you for the day. Saunter the city streets, whistling, humming songs or just spitting on things, all the while keeping an eye out for big oafs looking to beat up on a couple of pipsqueaks like yourselves. Really, this shouldn't take long, especially if you roam a bad section of town and make loud comments like "Get a load of that dumb ox over there," or "Looks like Blimpo the Blockhead escaped from the circus again."
Now here's where things get interesting. No doubt the boneheaded chump is going to take offense at these comments and and make a beeline straight for your jugular veins. One glance at the couple of squirts calling him names and he'll think he has it made in the shade when it comes to putting you and your runt friends' lights out. But this is where you'll surprise him using a trick I learned, interestingly enough, from old episodes of the Three Stooges and is a move I like to call the "Moe Howard Subterfuge." In essence, you'll be offering up your shrimp pal as a diversion so you can hit the big galoot right where it counts. The image below illustrates both the simplicity and the effectiveness of the Moe Howard defense. As the goon approaches, you throw your half-pint pal into the fray head first. The natural reaction is for the big bruiser to grasp the shrimp's hair or ear to move him out of the way, seriously compromising his concentration. Get your shrimp friend to make lots of whimpering noises too, although he might be doing that naturally as the huge buffoon tears out tufts of your friend's hair. Now is the time to act before your buddy is completely bald. Grip the clodhopper's free arm (the one that's not pulling at your sidekick's hair or ear) but entwine your arms in such a way that you're pulling back against his elbow joint. Then apply my patented shoulder pinch on the dolt's collarbone (you may need to stand on a stool to reach it so maybe carry a small stool with you on your travels-your sidekick can carry it), squeezing it like an enthusiastic accordion player. You'll hear the sweet music of "I surrender, dear," from your oafish foe in seconds and your shrimp sidekick should have lost only a slight amount of hair.

It's shrimp fest down at the docks but it looks like this brute is going to get a bruising once you snap his elbow like a dry lasagna noodle and squeeze his collarbone like you're playing Flight of the Bumblebee.

I'm now going to devote a bit of time to a new problem arising on the city streets these days. As you know everything old is new again and that especially holds true for pork pie hats and walking canes. Now the pork pie hats (and the occasional bowler hat too), pose very little threat but those walking canes are something else. Thus, chances are any villain you should happen to meet on the street is undoubtedly carrying one of these canes and though this might give him the air of a debonair gentleman out for a stroll, how many gentlemen do you know wearing sweatpants stained with whiskey, the run-off from nosebleeds and aerosol cheese? Not to mention the snake tattoos on their necks. These are the visual clues that will help you discern the true gentleman from the riffraff. Once you have ascertained that the approaching fellow with the walking cane means to bean you on the bean, followed perhaps by a few stinging strikes to the buttocks and some pokes to the solar plexus, it's time to give this cad a taste of his own medicine. Thus I recommend always carrying a walking cane on your person and if you don't have or can't afford one, a simple broomstick will suffice. Also, regarding pork pie hats, if you want to one-up your adversary I suggest a hat equipped with  armour reinforcement. Now this doesn't mean using expensive metals like Kevlar or lead when easily-found household objects will do the trick. Simply line the top of your hat with pages torn from an old Bible or use deli meat or beef jerky strips. Save up your old teabags and these also will cushion any blow. If you don't own a pork pie hat but feel the need for protective head covering, a good-sized pot lid attached to the head with elastics or string makes an excellent armoured hat. Now let's get down to the nitty-gritty. The three examples below should cover any cane attack scenario.

The pork pie hat and cane attack: Your attacker confronts you, cane at the ready. Perhaps you had a few disagreeing words with him last week. Now he's returned to exact his revenge. Assume the cane-defense position, which means simply stand with legs apart, cane raised and hiss through your teeth, "Suck broomstick you filthy hoodlum." Then lean forward and tap him on the top of his pork pie hat. This lets you know if there's any beef jerky, old tea bags or Bible page reinforcement in the lid. Regardless, the fact that you tapped him on the hat first means you've won the fight. If he persists in his attack you may defecate in your pants, which should confuse him long enough that you can then run or there's a good chance he may run first. If you decide to stand your soiled ground, it helps to remove your hat and use it to fan your stench into your adversary's face. If all else fails, feel free to throw some feces at him.With any luck you'll hit him in the eyes, blinding him temporarily whereupon you can beat him soundly with your cane.

The Mary Poppins Defense: A variation on the walking cane, using an umbrella instead, this self-defense technique asks that before leaving the house you dress like Mary Poppins first. A man, upon seeing you, goes berserk. Perhaps he saw the movie as a child and has bad memories of the experience. Perhaps he just hates Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke. Maybe his mother sang him "A Spoon Full of Sugar" as she shoved cod-liver oil down his throat. Either way he means business but luckily you have your umbrella with you and are wearing a roomy dress, making it easier to perform sweeping leg kicks. Talk to the oaf in a high voice in order to trick him into thinking you'll be a pushover. Say things like "Oh, please dear sir, do not rob or harm me. I have but a tuppence piece to buy something to feed my squealing pig that, in turn, needs to feed the forty wretched, ungrateful and ugly children in my charge that remain unimpressed by my singing or flying though they do like to look up my dress while I'm in the air and stare at my underpants and perhaps you'd like to do the same, which I will let you do if you are kind to me." His bowler hat is a dead giveaway to some form of armoured head reinforcement, be it past date due deli meats or a block of cheese so avoid a blow to the head and instead ram the tip of your umbrella under the roughneck's chin, followed by a knee to the face and then just get all Mary Poppins on his ass. You can use the curved handle of the umbrella, secured behind the fiend's neck, to drag him to the ground where you can then stomp on him with your matronly shoes. He'll be dead before you can say supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. Then squat over his face, hike up your skirt and show your underpants to his lifeless eyes. "How do you like them bananas?" you say, adjusting yourself.

The B.O. Defense: The final example in this cane attack segment requires not bathing for a few days or weeks or even a month or two if you really want to be sure of this defense technique's effectiveness. A ruffian struts down the street, happy as can be in this dog eat dog society. He flicks his walking cane at anyone who dares get too close to him and threatens to get dust on his leotards or in his mustache. You approach in a sleeveless undershirt. He doesn't like the looks of you or the fact your mustache is bushier than his (tip: spend the time you save by not bathing to put your efforts into growing an impressive mustache). His raises his cane and makes a thrust. You lift your arms and let the full force of your formidable body odour hit him square in the face. Too bad his life insurance policy doesn't provide for death by B.O. That's okay. You go to his home, marry his wife and raise his children as your own. End of story.

Next, I'm going to quickly illustrate how an everyday routine can be utilized in your self-defense technique. Notice a similarity in the two images below. One shows a man doing that popular dance known as the Watusi. It's a dance still popular with both young and old these days and I, for one, Watusi at least once a day. Even if it's just with myself in a mirror or looking into the back of a soup spoon. The image beneath that shows one of my prized pupils, Egon Plimpset, leading a class through a series of Haltiwanger self-defense exercises. See where I'm going with this? That's right, the Watusi moves have been integrated into my self-defense system so that your opponent will just think you're dancing while you Watusi his sorry ass all the way to the emergency room. Whether wearing a suit or martial arts outfit, the key is to look convincing and it even helps to sing along with your moves like "Boom de boom de boom, yeah, bumpity boom de bump, yeah," smiling and giving thumbs-up fist pumps before going in for the kill. There's your enemy dancing along and starting to enjoy himself when suddenly you give him the 'kiss and grind' punch that's as easy as blowing a kiss and waving goodbye to a loved one departing on a train or ship. Except you're also hitting that person in the face which you certainly wouldn't do to a loved one unless it was your Aunt Phyllis and she made you massage her dewlaps. Anyway, you'll get the last laugh thinking of your foe trying to do the Watusi in a full body cast.

Just an innocent guy having a little Watusi fun? Think again when he's dancing on your coffin.

"Meow," said the innocent cat. "Wanna dance?"  Don't be fooled because seconds later he'll make you cough up your internal organs like a hairball on the gymnasium floor during the slow dance at prom night. Grrrr! This house cat suddenly became a tiger and you're about to step into his den of death.

Now I'd like to return to some tips I gave in Part I of the Haltiwanger Method of Self-Defense dealing with passing gas through plaid pants as a self-defense technique. The effectiveness of this approach cannot be underestimated, which makes me want to revisit it with a new set of circumstances. Say you're an attractive woman taking a walk through the park or a well-fenced petting zoo. Suddenly some big galoot with a nice hairline and fancy V-neck sweater decides you're going to be his gal and to drive home this point he grasps you beneath your bazooms. Fortunately, you've taken my suggestion and worn plaid pants precisely for this kind of situation.You've also kept up a good gas-inducing diet over the past few days so that when a situation such as this rears its ugly head (as it undoubtedly will, especially for an unattended woman at a petting zoo), your rear will be ready to pass muster when push comes to shove and fisticuffs turn to farting. The two examples below should prepare you for any attack by some cad in polyester/rayon blend slacks.

In this photo series, the big louse (let's call him Armando because I hate that name) grabs Miss Glinkwurst just beneath her gazongas. "How about a roll in the hay in the pygmy goat display," he slobbers in her ear. No doubt those hairy paws will be making fast work on the hooks of her brassiere under the leering eyes of the pygmy goats and, unfortunately, any children who might be petting them. But not so fast, Armando you disgusting lout because Miss Glinkwurst uses the Haltiwanger "untied shoelace" approach. "Excuse me, sir," she says, "but I believe your shoelace is untied. Let me do it up for you." Armando can't resist, especially since as she bends over to tie his shoe he'll get a riveting view of her rear end. Of course that will also be the end of him. As Miss Glinkwurst bends forward, she releases some lethal intestinal gas that she tested earlier on her pet dachshund, Mumpsy, who was overcome almost immediately (dachshunds make perfect test subjects for these kinds of emissions since their long, sausage bodies make them more immune to blasts from the bowels due to length and circumference). If you own a dachshund you can do your own testing or else visit your local park, find a dachshund and when the owner isn't looking fart in the dog's face and then monitor the results. Because Miss Glinkwurst is wearing plaid pants, the gas is able to spread all that more easily through the looser weave of the fabric and as Armando is hit in the face with the first wave of the deadly odour, Miss Glinkwurst is able to grab Armando's ankle and pull upwards throwing him off balance. A couple of more farts to the kneecap and then a quick buttock chop to the solar plexus and testicles and the only thing Armando will be good for after that is playing the lead part in Annie at an assisted living facility for the elderly where he can try his new soprano voice on for size.

In this second example, Armando is again up to his dirty tricks. This time he's using a frontal assault hoping the shimmer of his polyester/rayon blend slacks will be enough to distract the lady until he has her firmly in his clutches. Unfortunately for him she's on to his devious ways and with some fancy wrist twists to break his grip along with plaid pants, a stomach full of gas and a couple of swift kicks to the genitals and ankles, this guy is definitely off the bowling team, at least until the end of summer. The only ten-pin ball Armando will be lifting is the one in his swollen scrotum.

Moving on, I'd just like to say that in this day and age of vicious degenerates preying on the innocent we must remember that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Unless you're talking about a pound of cured deli meats like, say, pastrami, which needs no preventative and should be eaten immediately. Anyway, here's the situation and how the Haltiwanger Method of Self-Defense can keep it from escalating. You get into a verbal argument with somebody, perhaps over a parking spot or you both tried to grab the same watermelon at the supermarket or a heated debate over who has the bushiest mustache but regardless of the cause, the result is always the same. Maybe he's a poker-faced wiseguy who likes to poke you in the chest or the poker's cousin, the pusher who likes to push you about. He feels superior, confident, cocksure and as you stand there being poked or pushed, you must anticipate his next move while nonchalantly striking the Spring Attack Avec Mustache Stance. You pretend you're only holding your fingers and sniffing them a little bit but really you are poised like a tiger or the broken coil spring on an old mattress.Your opponent has already sized you up as a patsy so won't he be surprised when you suddenly leap sideways, pivot quickly on the ball of your foot or if you don't know where the ball of your foot is use your heel instead, or simply jump behind your foe and grasp him around the neck in my Haltiwanger Super Coma Mustache Hold (see image below). Note; you will need to grow a mustache to use this technique. Now you've got the blubbering punk right where you want him. Get your mouth and mustache close to his ear while maintaining the coma-inducing hold around his neck. It's best to not comb your mustache for a few days letting plenty of food particles build up in its bristles, which you can then gently blow into your assailant's ear causing him discomfort not to mention the smell of old soup and deli meat grease that he's bound to get a whiff of. If he has a mustache, insult it. Say things like "I think you have some mouse droppings under your nose," or "Hey, Ash Wednesday's over, you can wipe that schmutz off your face." This should enrage him causing him to struggle beneath the arm you've circled around his throat and then all you have to do is merely squeeze and start cutting off arteries and blood flow and whatever else goes up through the neck to the brain but suffice to say your opponent is sure to black out or at least get very sleepy looking and maybe even froth a bit at the mouth. If he does pass out you can shave off his mustache just to let him know who's boss when he wakes up and if he doesn't wake up and you've accidentally killed him, well, in the big city that's what we call results.

It's not only the choke hold that's doing the work here but also the proximity of the mustache and mouth to the adversary's ear, allowing you to both whisper insults to him as you cut off his airway while simultaneously letting flakes of old food particles from your mustache fall like a fine fetid snow into his face. My thanks to two of my former pupils, Vern Chuggers and Gorgon Haupsmeyer for re-enacting this scenario. Unfortunately both have since passed away, Gorgon from auto-erotic asphyxiation and Vern was beaten to death by a couple of drunk funeral directors at an Advancements in Embalming convention.

Finally, I'd just like to say that you shouldn't fall for all those cockamamie self-defense schemes like those Chuck Norris Action Jeans pictured below. It's not the jeans that make the fearless man, it's the technique and the ability to defecate on cue. And this you can do whether you're wearing jeans, a bathrobe, a hula skirt or an Elvis-style pantsuit complete with cape. Of course I still stand by plaid pants paired with built-up intestinal gas as a successful part of your self-defense arsenal and they will stand you in good stead better than some crappy action pants and a couple of feeble leg kicks to go with your sparse, dying grass mustache.

And for those of you who should suffer the same fate as mine with your head being mistaken for a coconut by an out-of-work and disgruntled organ-grinder monkey, take heart. Just like old Chuck Norris there, I too have developed my own special self-defense clothing line specifically for this situation. I call it the Leather Coconut Head Protector and what it does is alters the coconut-like appearance of your cranium so that the monkey is led to believe it's actually a bitter and unpleasant gourd he's seeing. If he still decides to make the leap, the thick leather covering will protect you from monkey paw scratches and any fecal or reproductive matter the primate may release in its excitement. If you think this situation is just an anomaly, I direct you to a recent copy of the Costa Rican Times where the headline read, "Monkey Mistakes Man's Head For Coconut," right on the front page. Al Lumbargo of Minnesota was quoted as saying, "I just got off the cruise ship and was looking at some nice souvenir carvings when this goddamn monkey leaped on my head and began twisting and pulling like I was an Iowa cornstalk. I ain't no ear of corn or banana for that matter but try telling that to this monkey or any of his friends that were cheering him on." Mr. Lumbargo is currently suing the Costa Rica government, the souvenir shop and the cruise line. He's also suing the monkey if it can be found. All of this could have been avoided with my Leather Coconut Head Protector.

My old friend, Captain Blimpy Mycroft modeling the prototype of my Leather Coconut Head Protector. Blimpy liked wearing it so much, to this day he refuses to take if off. That he has a face uglier than a baboon's bottom actually works out in everyone's favour. Some people have a face for radio, others a face for sitting on. I call this the Mycroft Syndrome, a treatise of which I'm still working on.

So, in summary, whether it's monkeys or malevolent human beings you're dealing with, the Haltiwanger Method of Self-Defense will supply you with all the information and technique you'll need so you can protect yourself with the speed and ease usually associated with making spaetzle mit ham hoofs or a nice apple strudel assembled by a team of displaced Romanian gypsies. You will fear no man, no matter how puny you are and if they're puny, well all the better for you. If you're both puny well, you could charge money and call it midget wrestling. Either way you can't lose and all those beady-eyed punks and mashers and juvenile delinquents and hoodlums stinking of liquor better watch out because once they tangle with you they just might find themselves six feet under washing socks for Satan's army.