An American Satire
by
Fanny May Cartwright
Published by F.M. Cartwright
Copyright 1974 F.M. Cartwright
Smashwords Edition
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A wave of silence spread backward from the front row. Succubus II walked on-stage. Someone whistled, as a French-man might once have whistled at the blade-raising of the first guillotine. The gynecoid was a redhead, a touch with special irony to me. Succubus II assumed an anatomical stance, palms open to the audience; arms slightly apart from its sides. For a full minute, it turned slowly in the center of the stage --- a neo-Platonic ideal of woman, not envisioned in some transcendent realm, but terrifically palpable. Its enormous breasts defied flesh, did not sag, showed no stretch marks. No dimples marred the full, high buttocks. Nor did veins reticulate the air-brushed cream of the thighs. She faced the audience, eyes downcast, with an expression of demur sensuality, which she alternated artfully with sudden torrid glances of her glacier-blue eyes, tosses of her tossled tresses, and the wrinkling of her perfect nose. The illusion was complete, and it was awesome, even to me. Though she had been given other names, I had come to think of her as Victoria. She looked like a Victoria to me. Even when she lay in the on-stage bed and took up the first position, it was like seeing a goddess spread her legs. It made me think of girls' panties with circus elephants on them…
In the orchestra pit, I saw Eldon Paisano nod. The Ultra-Moog pounded out its introductory run from Bolero, and a few bars later, super-synced The Banks of the Wabash over Ravel's sublimated pumping. A gust of applause rose, peaked and leveled, and rose to a hopeful second peak. Surveying my shoes, I tapped off the seconds as the commotion decayed. Right on the eight-count renewed applause burst forth. When I looked, Virgil was on-stage removing the horned mask. It was a ritual expected of him, and a hold-over from his carnival days. He had been born large, and with the addition of two-inch heels, stood six foot six. Under the lights of Lincoln Center, he seemed in prime condition. His new-grown moustache lent a steely grimness, even to his smiles. This shoot-from-the-hip image was reinforced by black leather pants studded with silver conchos and cut out at the crotch to allow his renowned penis free play. Lazy sparks seemed to fly as the light glanced off the organ's armament of stainless steel implants.
"Old Wildroot appeared in heads-up condition…" as the commentators liked to say.
I watched the thing swing limply, hitting against Virgil's legs and rebounding like a drunk between two lamp posts. I thought of the purple stretch marks covered by liquid make-up, the prolapsed urethra, opening on the glans like the mouth of a toothless centenarian. …And the glans itself: so much rouge...
No sooner had Virgil thrust himself onto the stage than shouts of "Yerba!" began. He pretended not to notice, even while more voices took up the cry. It was a game he had learned well enough over the past three years; a kind of diddling with the audience that he prolonged for the feeling of power it gave him. In the beginning, he had found all the posturing and posing as disgusting as I. But as his manager, I had insisted. And as I had expected, he soon developed a taste, or a lack thereof, for it.
"Yerba, yerba!" The people chanted.
Virgil signaled an assistant in the wings. The cordial glass of murky, brown fluid was brought to him. He tossed it off carelessly---leaving the sediment---, and beckoned the assistant once more. The audience commenced an excited murmur when the glass was filled again, and yet again. Draining the third draught off, Virgil crushed the glass under the heel of his boot. Then turning his back to the audience, he crouched, cradling his penis against his belly with both hands. This was to keep the blood vessels open; to prevent a rupture during the sudden rush; also, to relieve as much strain on the lower trunk of the organ as possible. Fifteen seconds later, even from my box seat, I saw the rush hit. I thought Virgil was going to faint. He went down on one knee, but managed to get his head to penis level and save himself from falling. Then he stood again, slowly, and straightened up. A momentary pause and he turned, throwing his arms wide in triumph. His face was pallid, but where before had swung a bulbous roll of studded bread dough, now stood a raging, sesquipedalian caduceus. The glans seemed an inch and a half across, and livid. So tightly was the skin of the shaft stretched, that it took on the sheen of pink silk. Suddenly, before anyone could recover from this vision, Virgil touched the accessory controls of his wrist-band and the penis spat fire. Once, I'd tried to warn him off this trick, which accounted for the fissured urethral opening. The shell flew over the audience, reached the ceiling and burst, sending down a shower of twinkling, multi-colored stars. The audience O-o-o'ed and A-a-ahed! ; then suddenly, went wild. Men in tuxedoes stamped their feet and whistled. Freshly coiffured women snatched off their Ferenghee hair pieces and sailed them onto the stage.
"King Dong, King Dong, King Dong!"
To the crowds, he was not a man, but Manhood, darling of sophisticated magazines, cultural-crack radio, and Sixty-nine Podo tweets; the genitals on a million sweat shirts. They had come to see him perform another labor; give them deeds to fantasize about in their own grinding lives; play John Henry and beat the machine lying spread-legged on the stage. It never seemed to concern them that Virgil had just administered himself three times the normal portion of Yerba Priapismo, a drug never reputably analyzed. Because I knew him, I'd had a premonition he might. That would be on his own head, not mine. Virgil guarded the drug obsessively, refusing to allow the most reputable pharmaceutical houses to analyze it. Even I, who coined the name Yerba Priapismo, had held the dried root in my hand only twice…
Four years earlier, I was teaching Economics Theory as an exchange lecturer in the national university of a particular South American country. Because a group of native students got themselves shot over a certain theory I facetiously proposed, I was forced to resign my post one midnight and return to the United States, sans all but the clothes I'd borrowed from a friend's closet; without so much as a scribbled note for a professional proficiency evaluation---my cup of hemlock.
I ran into Virgil on the last leg of my journey to the states. Twenty minutes out of the Caracas airport, the seat-belt signs switched off and I was going forward to get a magazine. A few places in front of my own, I passed a bearded fellow who was gazing out the window and clutching a leather valise in his lap. Not until I reached the front of the plane did it occur to me that there was something familiar about him. On my return trip, he spotted me.
"Niles?" he said.
Extrapolating from a voice I hadn't heard in twelve years:
"Are you Virgil…, Winkleman?"
He grabbed my hand and shook it like he was driving nails.
"Niles, ole Niles! Hey, can I buy you a drink or something?"
Virgil had grown a beard. Aside from that, he hadn't changed much --- always a bit larger than life. At nine months, my mother was delivered of Virgil, a baby so elephantine that it was a month before I was discovered in my own amniotic sack and dislodged from my mother's left fallopian tube… But that's a digression… My mother's husband never accepted me. A farmer with technological pretentions, he kept methodical record of each date when he and my mother slept together. These occasions he lazored into a Holo-Calendar, at two rolos, to distinguish them from the servicing dates of the cows (one rolo), or the Poland-China brood sow. Simply, clicking backwards, twenty-four clicks from my untimely ripping, there were no "two-rolos" on the calendar. As for the doctor's explaination of impacted fetii, the stumpish old man found the analogy of multiple-paternity in pig litters; more commensurate with his education.
As soon as she could walk, my mother was liveried to a room Old Wink knocked up for her above the stables in the barn. So far as I could tell, Virgil never suffered any psychic damage because of his early separation from my mother. Perhaps the fact that my mother was in the Big House frequently, performing her usual domestic routine spared Virgil any feeling of abandonment. One of the earliest recollections I have is listening to Virgil and my mother cranking the ice cream freezer up on the back porch of the Big House, at dusk. Virgil was too backward to operate the settings, but each time my mother reached to help, he would fret until she let go. It was a teasing game that eventually got my mother laughing as she otherwise, rarely did. Strapped into my safety harness, and perched in the hayloft door like the cuckoo in a clock, I listened and longed for the day when I would be given my chance to work the controls of the ice cream machine… But that's a digression from the meeting in the plane.
It had been two days of stand-by flights and trying to sleep sitting up. I was rumpled and grimy, so I allowed Virgil to buy me a soft drink. I needed a shave and despite Virgil's beard, expected that he would have a razor.
Virgil wedged the valise between his leg and the bulkhead.
"Yeh, yeh," he explained, "I'm a geologist now, you know? Got my 'Bachelor's' six months ago. Now I'm on my way up in this big stateside outfit. We're big, Niles!
He had completed a geological survey near the headwaters of the Orinoco, and was on his way back to the home office in Indianapolis. The drinks arrived while he was showing me his credit cards.
"So, what brings you to South America, Niles?"
At first, he misunderstood and thought I was in the Peace Corps. It was necessary for me to explain. He'd finished his drink and was sucking on the ice.
"You got a doctorate!" An ice cube fell out of his mouth. "I didn't know you'd gone to college… you're younger!"
Later, I returned Virgil's shaving tools. The mouth of his seatback utility pocket was stuffed with plastic cocktail glasses. I tossed the kit on the empty seat next to Virgil and said I'd see him sometime.
"Okay." He went on quickly, "I kind of have something to talk about with you." He grinned sheepishly and bit at a hang-nail. "It won't take long."
I sat reluctantly. Virgil hesitated, then:
"I don't suppose you know anything about patents do you, Herr Doctor?"
I said I'd taken some business law; why?
"Okay," he says, "then this is priviledged information! There's this tribe of Indians in the jungle where I worked. They're ugly, scrawny little fuckers. From their faces you can't tell the women from the men, and they rub rancid goat puke, or something, on themselves to keep off the mosquitoes. But the elders know about this secret potion they brew from the root of a particular tree. This potion gives a man a hard-on you wouldn't believe. See, every four years the tribal elders have a big ceremony and whack off the old chief's cock with something like a big paper cutter. ---This makes him one of the elders. --- Then, these elders choose a new chief from the men of the tribe, and keep him furnished with the potion…. Listen, Niles, for the next four years, he walks around with a perpetual hard-on; lives like a king. He can screw anything, or anybody he wants and they have to let him."