Les aventures érotiques d'janitor-Reviews of Romance Books I've Never Read Installment

In an earlier installment of my erotic adventures as a janitor, readers might remember that I was reprimanded by my supervisor due to some comments I made to a tenant about lust-crazed beekeepers, fuzzy slippers, toupee-wearing miscreants and regurgitating ventriloquists but as you also know, I had only the young woman's best interests at heart. Her safety was in question, from where or from whom I'm not sure for she shut the door in my face before she could finish her sentence. Obviously, her distress was so great she could not even wait for any of my self-defense advice and fearing the worst, I have been patrolling the hallways ever since, making sure to slip a handwritten note under her door to let her know I was on the job 24-7, minus the trips to the doughnut shop, bathroom breaks in the drain of the furnace room and the odd nap behind the recycling bins in the garbage disposal area. Rust never sleeps, nor does recycling but humans do need to catch a few winks for after all we're not made of paper, plastic or aluminum, except for my roofer friend, Ed Smeeley Jr. (author of the soon-to-be-published-once-he-gets-the-money-for-Xeroxing self-help and inspirational book, Shingles of Wisdoms), who has an aluminum hip joint replacement, which he claims squeaks only when he's climbing ladders, stepping on mice (inadvertently or with great determination), searching eBay for collector commemorative Pope plates or masturbating into eavestroughing.
In fact, as luck would have it, it was while I was catching a few Z's behind the row of recycling bins that an erotic windfall would fall my way. Just as I thought my erotic adventures had tapered off to barely a trickle, much like an elderly fellow with prostate trouble trying to urinate in a public bathroom, a loud bang, like someone dropping something very heavy (a toaster oven? a body? a pair of roller skates? a fetal pig? a partial set of Encyclopedia Britannica bought on impulse from a deal offered at the supermarket), awoke me from my slumber. I waited for the fading footsteps before I crept from my sleepy hideaway and checked the recycling bin where the noise had come from. Well, the gods of eroticism had decided to shine down on me that day for lo and behold, there in the bin was a bagful of Harlequin Romance novels, a few racy covers facing up at me in all their lurid glory. Obviously, if my erotic encounters had to be curtailed, at least until my boss forgot my previous and, may I say completely misunderstood indiscretions with the more-than-willing love-starved tenants, I could feed my sensual appetite with these novels until I was back in business again. So without further ado, I commence with my first book review for these erotic journals, as I cast my critical and randy eye upon this book that I've never read.

The Dimitrakos Proposition  

First off, I'm a sucker for a foreign name. Stick that name in the title of a novel and you've got a captive reader, even if I do fall asleep halfway through the first page. Nevertheless, the title of this book insinuates intrigue, exotic locales and yes, propositions, although what kind of propositions remain a mystery, even after I didn't finish this book and in fact, dropped it in the bathtub a couple of times. Nevertheless, there are plenty of nefarious and erotic plot lines to sink your dentures into and it all begins with the rich international industrialist, Fred Dimitrakos. Born of a wealthy Greek family who, thanks to his great-grandfather, Norbert Dimitrakos, cornered the market in the frozen spanakopita business and nuclear missile guidance systems, Fred has everything a man could want, but does he, really? For Fred Dimitrakos is a deeply unhappy man. Hunkered down in his family compound on the island of Kitiakos, once the mustache-growing capital of the Mediterranean, Fred oversees the family business but his constant traveling has alienated his once-ravishing but now mole-covered wife, although she hides it well under her many layers of black cloaks, dresses, thick beard and kerchiefs. And when I'm talking moles I don't mean those pesky ones that dig up your lawn and turn your annual backyard barbeque into one never-ending series of lawsuits over broken ankles and bratwurst grease burns (even though the martinis and not the moles were probably more to blame), but those hideous brown and occasionally hair-sprouting spots that live only on unattended human skin. Add to the equation a hermaphrodite daughter and an ungrateful son whose only ambition is to be a dry cleaner/parrot breeder and who has a nasty habit of sniffing used vacuum cleaner bags while playing with his testicles and you can understand how Fred Dimitrakos is hungry for a new kind of love.
It is on one of his business trips to Paris that he meets the enigmatic and tempestuous Giselle, a raven-haired beauty with alluring crows-feet that bespeak both experience, wisdom, sensuality and too long between Botox treatments. They parry back and forth at a nuclear warhead and spinach pie business meeting (she is the heir to a nuclear warhead family fortune), and it's not long before the two of them are engaging in their own Last Tango in Paris but without the butter and the oinking. Instead it's goat bleating and feta cheese. And instead of a tango it's really more of a Watusi.
The author is quite adept in describing both the tumultuous feelings of the characters caught in their various conflicts and their subsequent fornicating although her prose leads one to believe they're making love rather than rutting like a couple of goats in deep mud watched by a group of men whose trousers haven't been washed since the Turks invented the ottoman. Take this passage for example:

"Oh," she said, in breathless surprise as he used his walking stick to trace the outer-edges of her black lace panties.
"Glyka mou," he commanded as the fires of hell burned through his loins. Her brazen dark golden eyes gazed up at him in anticipation as the liquid heat pooling between her thighs promised a soon unstoppable tide.
"I can't believe you want me again already," she murmured, the heat of her pelvis causing her to move on instinct alone. She felt no support for her buckling knees as her body hummed with an awareness that she found both disconcerting and exciting, like a hunter stalking a wary doe. But was she the hunter or was she the doe? More likely the doe since she had a better sense of smell but only time would tell.
"Yineka mou!" he barked. "Hot, hot, hot," he rasped, his long thick erection like a lance swaying slightly at the first sign of the gathering storm and then he fell upon her with scant ceremony and the voracious hiss of all-male satisfaction. Her glistening pink femininity lay fully exposed and she felt her nipples tightening much like the laces on a pair of shoes as you mount a long steep flight of stairs.
"Koukla hara mou!" he grunted, his hard-packed urgency pushing and stretching her inner sheath and she could feel him stiff and pulsing like an alien invasion in her pelvis region. She bit down on her knickers to stifle her screams and he loomed over her, his boxers stretched tightly over his manly face and jawline. They were both now flushed with the hunger of their flesh as she gripped and scratched the bronze satin of his broad back and he lifted his athletic hips to surge deeper into her depths until there was only fizzing fireworks of passion and then the shuddering groan of completion followed by a few spasmodic jerks, their eardrums thumping like an angry concierge who has just discovered that someone has peed in the bidet of a Tuscan villa while she was on duty.

Whew! You've got to hand it to author Lynne Graham for such spicy prose. It's enough to give you acid reflux and an orgasm simultaneously. I remember my last orgasm as if it were yesterday, instead of some twenty odd years ago with a darling girl named Mitzi, a bottle of Crème de menthe and a misplaced artificial leg behind an animal shelter where the throes of our passion were fortunately drowned out by the barking and mewling of despondent and unadoptable beasts. After we had found our "completion", albeit still fully clothed and me, inexplicably, with an empty and greasy KFC Family Meal bucket lodged on my head (such are the curious ways of love), we lay together gasping for air like two trout on a riverbank, freshly caught and slowly suffocating in the sunshine, gills pulsing with pleasure and pain, our heads resting on the polymer leg and I brought up a little in my mouth from acid reflux but it was a good bring up rich with nutrients and the scent of our lovemaking and not the kind that floods your mouth with unwanted and unforeseen stomach contents and minute particles of undigested food that lodge in your teeth. Still, I have few bones to pick with the author about some choices of words, uses of metaphors and similes and the unclear motivations behind some of the characters' actions.

Number one, I don't like the idea of the male organ described as a lance. Especially one that is swaying. In the old days of damsels and knights when lances were all the rage and you could catch a good jousting match on ESPN pretty much 24-7 (much like curling today), a knight who let his lance sway was in effect saying, go ahead, stick a pole in my guts and watch me twitch and bleed to death in the horse-dung peppered dust while the victor makes out with Lady Guinevere over my unspooled intestines. Well, that's not for me and I tend to think of my "lance" or "sword" (enough with this penis=weaponry imagery), as more of a wind sock, sensitive and attuned to whichever the way the wind blows, and thus picking up on erotic vibes, not to mention helping planes to land and take-off in busy airports around the world. It flaps, it flops, it stiffens, it sags, it's unpredictable, much like the weather and the act of love itself. If you don't have a wind sock for a penis then I feel sorry for you but will feel no sympathy when you're lying dead in the street, your "lance" now broken and your body being devoured by raccoons and/or hobos. 

Secondly, what is this strange language that Dimitrakos is speaking? I know from my extensive language studies at the local doughnut shop that it certainly isn't Greek that he's grunting out in the heat of the moment. Is the author laying subtle clues for us about his real origins? The alien invasion that Giselle is feeling in her pelvis--could that signify an actual alien being mating with her and planting its alien seed in her womb in order to breed a new species and create a race of half human/half alien creatures that will be used for an intergalactic sex slave market? Is this why Dimitrakos is wearing his boxer shorts over his strong, handsome face--a camouflaging of his actual bulbous, pulsating and heavily-veined head? And if that's the case, I would've thrown in a few tentacles and barbed reproductive organs for a more realistic approach. All I can say is Lynne Graham, you better step up to the plate because leaving these questions unanswered will only turn your eager big league erotic reader into a meager neurotic minor leaguer with a dry mouth and flayed strips of hot dog skin glued to his pallid and concave chest in frustration. On this topic, if we're talking some kind of interplanetary sexcapades, then goddamnit, be a man (even if you are a woman romance writer) and just come out and bloody well say what the hell is going on. It would certainly spice up the novel a bit more instead of having the reader try to decipher these little innuendos that do nothing for the plot nor the erotic juices that should be free-flowing from the page to the eye and then from the eye to the groin. There's a chain of command here, Lynne Graham. Use it!

Finally, and I have to thank my friend, Ed Smeeley Jr., roofer, loving divorcee and life coach, for this insight and I quote, "What kind'a woman would want to get involved with a married guy who has a hermaphrodite daughter and a vacuum cleaner bag sniffing son. I mean those things aren't just everyday anomalies, they're in the family DNA.  If the lovely lady in question has any hopes of a future with this Dimikakas fellow and might want a kid or two of her own to raise and help her to shave and sort buttons and boil chicken feet in her old age, she's gonna haft'a think twice before reproducing with this fool. Good chance their children will turn out to look like dust bunnies with multiple male and female sex parts not to mention hairy and/or lint-covered breasts that, I have to admit, wouldn't look too bad on a centaur, but that's not the point. I mean she'd want a kid you wouldn't be embarrassed about taking to school and, well, you show up with a dust bunny with horse's hooves and hairy tits and sporting a penis and a vagina, maybe even two or three, and some of them maybe even stuck to its hairball of a forehead and well, odds are there go your chances of being invited to the PTA casino night fundraiser in the gymnasium or the bridge tournament at the Sunshine Travel Lodge & Motel convention room where the first two drinks are free and if you're lucky, you might meet yourself a desirable little filly and spend the night 'cause there's ten percent off the $39.95 room for bridge tournament attendees." Ed Smeeley Jr., you are a genius is all I can say because where I was willing to give the author the benefit of the doubt to this already far-fetched plot line, good old Ed cleared up a few points with his astute comments and really called into question the whole frozen spanakopita, nuclear warhead, international industrialist and alien sex slave themes that the author bounces off one another as if they and the characters were on trampolines. If only Ms Graham had injected a little nude trampolining, well then, maybe we wouldn't be having this discussion.

I could go on and on about the further intrigues (and indignities) that this book spits out with all the finesse of a watermelon seed from a post three-hour root canal patient's mouth, but that would ruin it for you. Here are a few teasers though, sure to fuel the fire in the loins of your mind (mind loins, I call them), and guaranteed to tantalize your erotic yearnings, a kind of amuse-bouche for the taste buds of the groin. I don't want to give away the entire thing but Fred Dimitrakos, after considerable mating episodes with his mistress, finds that they are selling missile guidance systems and nuclear warheads to opposing countries. And one of those countries, to add insult to injury, also happens to despise spanakopita. Now there are two things you should never bring up during a dinner party or while fornicating and one of those is politics. The other is how a festive jello mold should be introduced to a less-than-formal table setting but I don't want to open that can of worms right now. So, Fred and Giselle call it quits and Fred goes back to Greece to his mole-covered wife and freakish but loving kids, but not before he learns that Giselle is pregnant with his child. Dimitrakos refuses to have anything to do with the son born of this dalliance and instead, back on the island of Kitiakos, begins an affair with the daughter of the quality-control foreman at the frozen spanakopita factory, but she, in turn, begins a romance with Fred's hermaphrodite daughter after having discovered she likes her bread buttered on both sides, so to speak, and then things really get complicated.

The cast-off son, Melvin Botchner (he changed his last name from Le Peigne de Queue to avoid any anti-French feelings once he began his own frozen food dynasty), is soon out-selling his father in not only the spanakopita department, but branching out into calamari and something of his own invention that he calls "cock's comb wieners." In as much time as it takes to produce a urine sample behind a flimsy curtain in a busy hospital, Melvin has driven his neglectful father's business into the ground. The two finally meet in a showdown, Giselle looking on in a pair of stunning anaconda skin boots and after a lot of poignant and telling emotional stuff is said between father and son along the lines of "I should've made your mother abort you the minute I heard she was pregnant," and "You're just a fading old spanakopita fart-bag with sagging testicles and nasal hair so thick it's a wonder you get any oxygen up there," there is a fight to the death between the two at the Acropolis in Athens (the one in Greece, not the Acropolis Greek Restaurant in Athens, New York, which I think would've made a far better setting as the other is much too obvious and you can pretty much see it coming the second the author starts describing Fred Dimitrakos's erection as a Doric column three chapters back). Who wins this battle of the frozen food father and son titans? What happens to the sensual Giselle and will she ever parade around proud and nude again in her anaconda skin boots, stopping traffic wherever she goes, whether it's in Paris or a Des Moines Costco parking lot? I leave these questions for you, dear reader, to discover for yourself as you plunge into the torrid romance and eroticism of The Dimitrakos Proposition. For me the jury is still out on this one. I felt aroused but as if I were pulling my own erotic plow through fields of turgid prose and although I don't mind doing a bit of work myself, sometimes a man wants to put down his plow, wipe his brow, drop his trousers and let the propositions come to him for a change.

Les aventures érotiques d'janitor-Chapter 2

I was sitting with my neighbour Litvack the other evening, enjoying some of his homemade wine from a time-tested recipe he picked up in the penitentiary and resting my tired dogs up on the rust-pitted engine block of a 1972 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. Some kind of spiders had set up webs inside the cylinders and intake manifold and over my big toe I could see the odd bug wrapped inside a spider cocoon, either already having its lifeblood sucked from its body or being prepared for dinner. We were enjoying the fetid summer breeze channeling down the back lane, carrying with it the alluring smells from the poultry factory and tossing the remains of our hair and scattering our dandruff to the wind like the ashes of a cremated family member, as we sat on the dangerously slanted back porch of his rooming house, the moon a toenail sliver in the sky above us.
"What'sa matter, hard day at the office?" Litvack asked, taking a swig from the 40-ounce plastic Pepsi bottle that he ages his wine in.
"Well, the life of a janitor is not easy, that much I'll say, but what is even more tiring are all the erotic adventures that befall me."
"What, you jerking off in the furnace room again?" Litvack laughed and then gobbed up some phlegm, which he deposited in a half-eaten Pizza Pop that his inflatable sex-doll wife had laid out for us along with some Cheez-Whiz slathered in the stringy troughs of some sad looking celery sticks.
"Well, now that you mention it, I've found my erotic encounters have fallen off a bit lately. You might say I'm in a bit of an erotic slump."
"Erotic slump! Jesus, you've only been on the job a week and the only pussy you've got is when some flea-ridden cat rubbed up against your leg."
"That's not true. How about that internal organ harvester who unplugged the vacuum cleaner for me?"
"You call that erotic. She was ninety years old and last time I checked, unless Depends have become Victoria's Secret lingerie I'd say you're batting 0-for-three and the pinch runner is masturbating on third base because he knows he'll never come home this season."
"Oh yeah! That from a guy whose wife could double as a life raft."
"Hey, watch what you say about the little lady," and with those words Litvack cast an uneasy glance at the rubber sex doll that was propped up against some piled milk crates a few feet away, her mouth open in surprise, either from the last remarks or just because she was born that way. It's hard to tell with these mail-order brides. It's a language barrier thing.
"No offense," I said, suddenly feeling bad. "And these appetizers she's prepared are delicious."
"You hear that, honey," Litvack called to her. "Try some more of those Cheez-Whiz and celery things. Those celery sticks came from the dumpster out back of a TGIF. You know, those people order those goddamn Bloody Caesars and then they don't eat the celery sticks. I grabbed whack loads of them from the trash. Okay, maybe they suck on them a little or something but saliva can actually help keep a vegetable fresh and hell, they're still plenty good as long as there's no chew marks on'em. That's free celery for the taking. One man's trash is another man's canape is what I say."
"I couldn't agree with you more. Just yesterday I enjoyed an entire plate of pork dumplings out of a lobby trash bin and they were soft as a lover's lips and as teasing as a pig in a wedding dress."
"Now you're talking. So, tell me your troubles, lover man. I can cure whatever ails you or that weasel you keep in your pants that's gnawing, gnawing, gnawing to get free. A guy with my experience makes Casanova look like a clown."
"Rodeo or circus?"
"What?"
"Rodeo or circus clown? Which one do you make Casanova look like?"
"Damn, I never thought about that. I'm guessing circus clown. After all, those rodeo clowns always getting gored by bulls and kicked by broncos and stuff, I'm figuring they're not in too good of shape. Hard to maintain a hard-on once you've been gored a couple'a times and have hoof prints indenting your forehead. Even with Viagra. You tend to spook easily and get a little skittish at the first signs of trouble or nude activity. But those circus clowns well, they're always getting a bit of that back tent action and with those big shoes the ladies always think, well, if the shoes are so big the penis must be the same."
"Well, that's not me, I mean being gored and having hoof prints in my head and being uncomfortable with nudity, except at the Dairy-Freeze, but I'm beginning to think that with all the eroticism wafting through the condo hallways like an unrefrigerated head cheese, the tenants might be getting too much of a good thing. Here I am, Mr. Janitor Man with my ring of keys and mop-handle calloused hands and the scent of industrial cleaner emanating from my sweaty body along with a little Fantastik that I like to spritz on my face and I think, can there possibly be an end to these good, erotic times and will I just become as everyday and mundane as a shoe tree? Or sock drawer? Or broken salad spinner left on top of the microwave? I feel like I need a little something more, a little something to keep my erotic personality at its peak and keep the tenants guessing and wondering, 'how does he do it?' and 'what's he going to do next?' and 'how can a man with such voluminous folds and flaps of flesh possibly be so adept at love making?' I just want to make sure they don't take my eroticism for granted and likewise I want to keep them turned on and tuned in to the art of janitorial love."
"I know what you're saying," Litvack said as he took a bite from the same Pizza Pop he had only moments before hawked phlegm into. "And I've got one word for you. Tattoos."
"Tattoos?"
"Tattoos," Litvack said after a few enthusiastic chews. "Here, let me show you," and with that, Livack rolled up his sleeve to show me a blue, blotchy image on his bicep of a man's head where none of the features were discernible and where ever an eye or ear could be made out, it was all misshapen from where the ink had run. "Did this one myself while I was in the joint."
"Who is it?"
"You don't know? Jesus, it's Leo Gerstenzang for fuck's sake."
"I don't...I don't know who that is," I said, the reluctance of my admission wavering in my voice.
"Oh, Jesus, Haltiwanger, I thought you were an educated guy. Leo Gerstenzang, the goddamn inventor of Q-Tips. Everybody knows that."
"Why do you have a tattoo of the inventor of Q-Tips on your arm?"
"'Cause he changed the way the whole goddamn world thinks about ears and ear cleaning, that's why. And when you change the way people think about those things you kind'a change the entire course of modern history, don't'cha think? I mean, you got waxy buildup in the ear canals, before you know it no one can hear properly, diplomatic relations go down the drain, bingo, World War III. Fuck, Haltiwanger, do I have to explain everything to you? What university did you say you went to? The university of shit-for-brains?" Litvack cracked open a third 40-ounce Pepsi-bottle of homemade wine and took a good, long pull, one bleary eye open and staring upwards as if it were trying to incinerate the moon with its reddish and hard gaze. "Listen, give me a ball-point pen, a safety-pin and fifteen minutes and I'll have you fixed up in no time."
"I don't like tattoos. Or at least I don't relish the idea of getting one. I hear that it hurts."
"Ah, it's nothing. Like getting pecked by a hundred or so hungry chickens after a hard morning of laying eggs. A child could do it."
"That might be so but I'm neither a chicken nor a child. There must be another way."
"Well, you could go the fake tattoo route. You know, those kind you apply with warm water."
"Yes, that's it," I replied. "That's exactly what I'll do," and I got up, staggered a few steps, fell off the back porch and whacked my head against a stack of hubcaps. I remember as I hit my head upon them thinking, that's a nice uniformly stacked pile of hubcaps, it's so unlike Litvack to be so neat and organized, and then it was lights out for me for a few seconds or so. Litvack produces a complex but highly potent vino. Rumour has it he learned to make it in a prison toilet bowl.
"You okay?" he asked me. I stood up, a little unsteady and waved him off. Litvack's wife looked on at me with her usual surprise and even from where I stood I could hear her body hissing.
"Your wife's losing air, I think."
"I know. She's got a goddamn leak. Every time we do the dirty deed she's flat as a pancake afterwards. You don't have a bicycle pump and a patch kit I could borrow maybe?"
"No, sorry." And with those words I weaved my way home, stopping to retch here and there in some mangled-looking shrubbery. I'm not sure if it was the wine or the recycled celery.

A romantic head cheese scenario complete with vino, tomatoes and lusciously-sliced pig's head in aspic, its unrefrigerated aroma known to cause people to swoon in its presence. But left too long in the open air, this head cheese can soon turn to dead cheese in a matter of minutes so beware the ignored and overheated head cheese. It is the smell of evil itself, its erotic elements quickly lost and replaced by a decomposing puddle of brain and eyeball matter, not unlike something Satan likes to drink before bedtime or bathe in to help his psoriasis.

The next day I awoke with an erotic bounce in my step and a new sense of promise imbued in my janitorial duties. For with the idea of tattoos planted firmly in my head, and by firmly I mean like a great oak in a park under which children play, dogs pee and the odd wino goes to sleep and never wakes up (when an acorn falls from thirty feet, hits you in the skull and you don't even blink chances are you're probably dead), I saw only hope and determination in what the erotic future might bring. So I guess you could say it was pure fate, or maybe destiny, I don't know which and I always confuse the two, much like I confuse the numbers nine and six, especially when I'm playing bingo and craning my neck this way and that and lose out on winning a free tie caddy and limitless French fries at the snack concession, for on that day as I was in the garbage room heaving the contents of overloaded recycling bins into the dumpster, I came across two packs of unused My Little Pony and Barbie tattoos, pink, iridescent, sparkly and eye-catching. Though they were made for children (more specifically, little girls), I had no doubt of their attractive powers once they were adorning the arms, calves and yes, even the neck of my manly janitorial body. I wasted no time in retiring to the furnace room where the water supply was plentiful (albeit at 140 degrees centigrade so a tattoo application could soon turn to a third degree burn making the process, ironically, more painful than actually getting a tattoo in the first place) and when I re-emerged twenty minutes later I was sporting not one, not two, but twelve tattoos, strategically placed to highlight my deeply buried muscle structure and camouflage my various skin rashes. Confidence flowed through me like a snake in the tall grass where some picnickers have decided to play Frisbee. Or a heavy-set man on a mall scooter driving through a yard of preschoolers at full speed.
Fortunately I was wearing a sleeveless t-shirt that day as I was vacuuming the third floor hallway of the east building so all my tattoos came into play, catching the halogen spotlighting over each condo doorway, the various Barbies and array of pink, white and purple ponies seeming to dance with each flex, twitch and flabby fluctuation of my body. If these tattoos didn't do the trick then obviously the tenants of this building must be brain dead, I thought. They and I would be put to the test much sooner than I expected.
For as I was almost finished sucking up the dirt, dog hair and inexplicably, corn niblets on the third floor carpeting, a door opened and a beautiful young Japanese woman stood there in her bathrobe and fuzzy slippers (I mean the good fuzzy, not the trashy googly-eyed, bunny-eared and pink-tongued variety like my meth-head sister-in-law wears in the trailer park whether she's smoking some rock or berating her garden gnomes for peeing on the astro-turf) and asked me if I could help her. Actually, I couldn't hear what she said originally over the sound of the vacuum cleaner so I shut the machine off and cocked an appraising and sympathetic, if slightly ringing ear.
"Do you know who I should contact about the apartment?" she asked "I'm staying here while my friend is away and I'm just, just wondering who I can talk to about some problems in the condo."
I struck a bit of a pose I'm not too ashamed to admit, leaning in such a way on the vacuum cleaner handle to both show-off my multitude of tattoos and create a body posture sure to ripple my atrophied muscles. I could tell she was not immune to my charms as she pulled her bathrobe closer together at the neck, a body language move I knew to be both inviting and inquisitive while simultaneously feigning disinterest and confusion. The tattoos were working I thought. The art of seduction was in my favour.
"Well...well...well," I stammered and then continued, "I guess you could always try the strata council or speak to my boss, if you want. What's this about? Maybe I can help." I could only hope she could see the pair of pliers in my back pocket and know that when it came to maintenance, cleaning and problem solving I meant business. If a pair of pliers don't inspire confidence I'll be a monkey's uncle or an uncle's monkey, I'm never sure which. Either way, if a monkey and I were to go head-to-head in a pliers usage contest, I'm sure I'd win easily, even with the monkey throwing its feces at me.
"It's a problem with the stove and also some questions about security," she said and I almost didn't hear her, so mesmerized was I, my eyes buried deep in the soft surface of her fuzzy slippers. It was like my eyes were at play in the field of the Lord's lint trap but I quickly snapped out of my reverie. Now the mention of stove troubles piqued my curiosity and though I don't have a lot of experience with this appliance I do know my way around Sterno cans and a hotplate but when she mentioned security issues I was all ears and at that moment I finally understood what Litvack had meant and silently thanked the inventor of Q-Tips myself since it was only that morning that I had de-waxed the old canals for a moment such as this. Now readers of this blog may know that I am a master of self-defense as evidenced in my previous two-part series dealing with every conceivable debauched and depraved assault from crazed beekeepers to those driven to crime by excessive library fines not to mention liquored-up juvenile delinquents, beady-eyed hobos with painted clown faces, people who claim to speak Assyrian while reaching for your wallet and animal husbandry scientists whose semen-stained smock coats from artificial insemination experiments gone awry are only an indicator of their deep and twisted diabolical natures, so I felt in this one area I could help the poor young lady in her predicament.
"Listen," I said, sounding both confidential and erotic at the same time, not an easy task when you're wearing filth-stained janitor's pants. "The stove is not really up my alley but security is my middle name. Actually Orville is my middle name but I don't want to get into that. I once killed a man for making fun of it, well, I didn't actually kill him as much as just admonish him and then he hit me in the face and I spent a little time crying in the bathroom of a Dunkin' Donuts, but what I want to say is if you're having any security problems, any threats on your life or anyone having designs on your fuzzy slippers or claiming they're a hairdresser and want to comb your hair but they're wearing nothing but flip-flops and a dollar-store bandanna around their toupee, I can help."
"Oh, no, it's...it's nothing like that," she said, backing up into the apartment, almost as if inviting me inside although her perplexed face said otherwise. Perhaps I had unleashed too much eroticism in one big wave and I could see her eyes darting from one Barbie and My Little Pony tattoo to the next. The one on my forehead (a blue pony with a rainbow mane and tail) might have been overkill but I'm never a man not to take risks or have any regrets.

This is the pretty much the tattoo I wore on my forehead minus the background rainbow and cloud cover. I have since learned this pony's name is Rainbow Dash and she is responsible for weather so I can only imagine she is failing at her job given the amount of clouds gathering over Pony Town. Apparently she has a pet tortoise named Tank so he must be ex-military and I hope I can find a tattoo of him too because placed together, perhaps on my chest or lower back, the combination would undoubtedly knock eroticism right out of the ballpark. I'm not sure if those are wings or blue sausages attached to her back but either way there is a phallic implication that'll make you forget all about the storm clouds brewing on the horizon.

"Don't be afraid," I said. "Just tell me, was it an insane beekeeper, a regurgitating ventriloquist, a former Tiddly Winks champion fallen from glory with too-tight elasticized socks and a chip on his shoulder, a ne'er-do-well who fell down a well as a child and no one came to look for him and eventually he scaled the walls only to be raped by squirrels in his weakened state and is thus taking out his vengeance on anyone who resembles his mother or a plaid-pant wearing galoot whose only interest is in your bazoombas. Or gazongas as they say in your culture."
"Uh, that's okay, I'll just...just..."
I didn't hear the end of her sentence, not because of ear wax buildup (I'd already attended to that problem earlier as I've explained), but because she shut the door in my face. Obviously I'd misjudged the potency of my erotic tsunami and vowed in the future to tone it down a couple of notches, both in the tattoo and self-defense departments. There's a fine line between tooting your own horn and blowing taps for your penis as the sun sets on the battlefield of love and I realized I'd have to learn to strike that uneasy balance and temper my erotic powers. Still, I chalked this one up as an encounter that, with a few less My Little Pony and Barbie tattoos, would no doubt result in a future tryst between this charming girl and myself and we would make mad, passionate love and then try out some self-defense moves naked and when the stove caught fire while cooking our frozen jalapeno and cheese poppers, we would laugh and beat out the flames with her fuzzy slippers. I took heart that eroticism was still alive and well in this condo complex and could hardly wait until our paths would once again cross, although I was sure by that time I'd have two or three more erotic adventures tucked under the belt of my vacuum cleaner attachment fanny pack that I adapted for the purpose myself to hold the various specialty nozzles that mark my work as that of a professional.
Later that day as I made my way home, I walked by a construction site where a worker yelled at me, "Hey, nice tats you faggot." I barely gave him the time of day (since I wasn't wearing a watch nor am I one of those people who can tell time by the position of the sun). Still, I thought, if he only knew all the women these tattoos had attracted maybe he'd saved his derisive comments for himself, especially when he got home from a hard day of pouring concrete and was masturbating frenetically and despairingly into a bowl of Cap'n Crunch while listening to phone messages from collection agencies. I don't know why I think he pleasures himself into a bowl of Cap'n Crunch except he just strikes me as that type of person. As for why I specifically chose that cereal, I was always fond of it in my youth and I'm just figuring this as a little product placement to generate some extra cash. So, to the people who make Cap'n Crunch, if you're reading this consider this one a freebie. After this though it will cost you.
Later that evening my landlady called me to the rooming-house phone and I bounded down the staircase expecting it to be some condo tenant wanting to arrange a little erotic rendezvous in the janitor's room. Imagine my surprise when I discovered it was my boss on the line and although I imagine you could call him an erotic guy, despite the excessive ear and nasal hair, he wasn't really what I had in mind when I had applied the tattoos earlier that afternoon. I had been thinking more about the fairer sex at the time, even if they too had an excess of hair sprouting from their head orifices for that could be a very tactile erotic experience and I was working it out how I could let him down gently when again, I was surprised.
"Listen, Haltiwanger, I've had some complaints at the building," he said. I was flabbergasted. Who would possibly complain about, number one, my fine janitorial work and number two, the deep levels of eroticism I brought to the condo complex?
"I don't understand," was all I could stammer.
"Okay, I'm not going to fire you, yet, but you've gotta stop talking to the tenants. One lady in the east building said you were babbling something about bees and ventriloquists and being raped by squirrels and combing her hair while you're naked with a banana on your head..."
"Bandana. I said bandana and not on my head but on the head of some toupee-wearing miscreant who wanted to steal her fuzzy slippers."
"Okay, we're not even going to talk about it. I don't want to know what goes on in that twisted brain of yours but if you don't stop talking to the tenants I'm going to have to get rid of you. The head of the strata council had a few calls and I've calmed him down so just don't open your fucking mouth when there's people around. Nobody around, in the stairwells or furnace room, fine, go ahead, talk to yourself as much as you want, although try to keep it to a whisper. Screw me up again and you're out the door. And somebody said you have some kind of kid's sticker on your forehead so get rid of that too before you show up for work tomorrow."
"The head of the strata council!" I said. "That wouldn't be that guy up on the fourth floor of the west building...what's his name...Eugene?"
"Never the fuck you mind who he is, just do what I said and everything'll be alright."
"Will do, boss," I replied but inside my mind I was already putting together the pieces of the puzzle and this Eugene guy was at the centre of it all. I knew he was jealous of me and had been plotting my demise for a while, taking care to strew all manner of debris on the carpeting outside his door to see if I picked it all up with the vacuum cleaner and generally laying traps for me to trip me up and make me look bad to the tenants and strata council. I would have to deal with him later, when my erotic adventures were not so pressing but in the meantime I would have to walk softly and carry a big mop (and maybe a spray bottle of Windex in my back pocket). I felt this would in no way put a damper on my erotic adventures but I would definitely have to be more discreet about my little tête à têtes. Ah well, it's all part and parcel of being the virile and tattooed guy that I am but still I must say uneasy lies the head that wears the erotic crown in the kingdom of the janitors.

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.