Readings...

Unbroken

Laura Hillenbrand

   The day passed. Three times, a single wad of rice, a little bigger than

a golf ball, sailed through the door window and broke against the floor.

Once or twice, a swallow of tea in a cup was left on the sill, and Louie

sucked it down. Night came.

   Another day came and went, then another. The heat was smother-

ing. Lice hopped over the captives' skin. Mosquitoes preyed on them in 

swarms so thick that when Louie snapped his fingers into a fist, then

opened his hand, his entire palm was crimson. His diarrhea worsened,

becoming bloody. Each day, Louie cried out for a doctor. One day,a 

doctor came. He leaned into the cell, looked at Louie, chuckled, and 

walked away.

   Curled up on the gravelly floor, both men felt as if their bones were

wearing through their skin. Louie begged for a blanket to sit on, but 

was ignored. He passed the time trying to strengthen his legs, pulling

himself upright and standing for a minute or two while holding the 

wall, then sinking down. He missed the raft.

Readings...

From the novel Choke by Chuck Palahniuk

   "Look at us, dude," I say.  I find the last bottle of beer and it's warm.  I say, "All women have to do is get naked, and we give them all our money.  I mean, why are we such slaves?"
   Denny flips over the page on his pad and starts something new.
   I move his rock to the floor and sit down.
   I'm just tired, I tell him.  It seems women are always bossing me around.  First my mom, and now Dr. Marshall.  In between there's Nico and Leeza and Tanya to keep happy.  Gwen, who wouldn't even let me raper her.  They're all just in it for themselves.  They all think men are obsolete.  Useless.  As if we're just some sexual appendix.
   Just the life support system for an erection.  Or a wallet.
   From now on, I say, I'm not giving any more ground.
   I'm going on strike.
   From now on, women can open their own doors.
   They can pick up the check for their own dinners.
   I'm not moving anybody's big heavy sofas, not anymore.
   No more opening stuck jar lids, either.
   And never again am I going to put down another toilet seat.
   Hell, from now on I'm peeing on every seat.
   With two fingers, I give the waitress the international sign language for two.  Two more beers, please.
   I say, "Let's just see women try and get along without me.
Let's just watch their little female world grind to a halt."
   The warm beer tastes from Denny's mouth, his teeth and Chapstick, that's how bad I need to drink right now.
   "And for real," I say, "if I'm on a sinking ship, I'm getting in the lifeboat first."
   We don't need women.  There are plenty of other things in the world to have sex with, just go to a sexaholics meeting and take notes.  There's microwaved watermelons.  There's the vibrating handles of lawn mowers right at crotch level.  There's vacuum cleaners and beanbag chairs.  Internet sites.  All those old chat rooms sex hounds pretending to be sixteen-year-old girls.  For serious, old FBI guys make the sexiest cyberbabes.
   Please, just show me one thing in this world that is what you'd think.
   To Denny I say, this is me talking, I say, "Women don't want equal rights.  They have more power being oppressed.  They need men to be the vast enemy conspiracy.  Their whole identity is based on it."
   And Denny turns just his head, owl-style, to look at me, his eyes bunched under his eyebrows, and says, "Dude, you are spiraling out of control."
   "No, I mean it," I say.
   I say I could just kill the guy who invented the dildo.  I really could.
   The music changes to an air raid siren.  Then a new dancer struts out, glowing pink inside some sheer baby doll lingerie, her bush and breasts so almost there.
   She drops on strap off her shoulder.  She sucks on her index finger.  Her other shoulder strap drops, and it's only her breasts that keep her lingerie from falling to her feet.
   Denny and me both watching her, her lingerie drops.

Readings...

Water for Elephants

by Sara Gruen

Prologue

   Only three people were left under the red and white awning of the grease joint: Grady, me, and the fry cook.  Grady and I sat at a battered wooden table, each facing a burger on a dented tin plate.  The cook was behind the counter, scraping his griddle with the edge of a spatula.  He had turned off the fryer some time ago, but the odor of grease lingered. 

   The rest of the midway - so recently writhing with people -  was empty but for a handful of employees and a small group of men waiting to be led to the cooch tent.  They glanced nervously from side to side, with hats pulled low and hands thrust deep in their pockets.  They wouldn't be disappointed: somewhere in the back Barbara and her ample charms awaited.

   The other townfolk - rubes, as Uncle Al called them - had already made their way through the menagerie tent and into the big top, which pulsed with frenetic music.  The band was whipping through its repertoire at the usual earsplitting volume.  I knew the routine by heart - at this very moment, the tail end of the Grand Spectacle was exiting and Lottie, the aerialist, was ascending her rigging in the center ring.

   I stared at Grady, trying to process what he was saying.  He glanced around and leaned in closer.

   "Besides," he said, locking eyes with me, "it seems to me you've go a lot to lose right now."  He raised his eyebrows for emphasis.  My heart skipped a beat.

   Thunderous applause exploded from the big top, and the band slid seamlessly into the Gounod waltz.  I turned instinctively toward the menagerie because this was the cue for the elephant act.  Marlena was either preparing to mount or was already sitting on Rosie's head.

   "I've got to go," I said.

   "Sit," said Grady.  "Eat.  If you're thinking of clearing out, it may be a while before you see food again."

   That moment, the music screeched to a halt.  There was an ungodly collision of brass, reed, and percussion - trombones and piccolos skidded into cacophony, a tuba farted, and the hallow clang of a cymbal wavered out of the big top, over our heads and into oblivion.

   Grady froze, crouched over his burger with his pinkies extended and lips spread wide.

   I looked from side to side.  No one moved a muscle - all eyes were directed at the big top.  A few wisps of hay swirled lazily across the hard dirt.

   "What is it? What's going on?" I said.

   "Shh," Grady hissed.

   The band started up again, playing "Stars and Stripes Forever."

   "Oh Christ. Oh shit!"  Grady tossed his food ionto the table and leapt up, knocking over the bench.

   "What? Whats is is?" I yelled, because he was already running away from me.

   "The Disaster March!" he screamed over his sholder.

   I jerked around to the fry cook, who was ripping off his apron.  "What the hell's he talking about?"

   "The Disaster March," he said, wrestling the apron over his head.  "Means something's gone bad - real bad."

   "Like what?"

   "Could be anything - fire in the big top, stampede, whatever.  Aw sweet Jesus.  The poor rubes probably don't even know it yet."   He ducked under the hinged door and took off.

   Chaos - candy butchers vaulting over counters, workmen staggering out from under tent flaps, roustabouts racing headlong across the lot.  Anyone and everyone associated with the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth barreled toward the big top.

   Diamond Joe passed me at the human equivalent of a full gallop.

   "Jacob - it's the menagerie," he screamed.  "The animals are loose. Go, go, go!"

   He didn't need to tell me twice.  Marlena as in that tent.

   A rumble coursed through me as I approached, and it scared the hell out of me because it was on a register lower than noise.  The ground was vibrating.

   I staggered inside and met a wall of yak - a great expanse of curly-haired chest and churning hooves, of flared red nostrils and spinning eyes.  It galloped past so close I leapt backward on tiptoe, flush with the canvas to avoid being impaled on one of its crooked horns.  A terrified hyena clung to its shoulders.

   The concessions stand in the center of the tent had been flattened, and in its place was a roilling mass of spots and stripes - of haunches, heels, tails, and claws, all of it roaring, screeching, bellowing, or whinnying.  A polar bear towered above it all, slashing blindly with skillet-sized paws.  It made contact with a llama and knocked it flat - BOOM.  The llama hit the ground, its neck and legs splayed like a five points of a star.  Chimps screamed and chattered, swinging on ropes to stay above the cats.  A wild-eyed zebra zigzagged too close to a crouching lion, who swiped, missed, and darted away, his belly close to the ground.

   My eyes swept the tent, desperate to find Marlena.  Instead I saw a cat slide through the connection leading to the big top - it was a panther, and as its lithe black body disappeared into the canvas tunnel I braced myself.  If the rubes didn't know, they were about to find out.  It took several seconds to come, but come it did - one prolonged shriek followed by another, and then another, and then the whole place exploded with the thundersous sound of bodies trying to shove past other bodies and off the stands.  The band screeched to a halt for a second time, and this time stayed silent.  I shut my eyes: Please God let them leave by the back end. Please God don't let them try to come through here.

   I opened my eyes again and scanned the menagerie, frantic to find her.  How hard can it be to find a girl and an elephant, for Christ's sake?

   When I caught sight of her pink sequins, I nearly cried out in relief - maybe I did.  I don't remember.

   She was on the opposite side, standing against the sidewall, calm as a summer day.  Her sequins flashed like liquid diamonds, a shimmering beacon between the multicolored hides.  She saw me, too, and held my gase for what seemed like forever.  She was cool, languid.  Smiling even.  I started pushing my way toward her, but something about her expression stopped me cold.

   That son of a bitch was standing with his back to her, rad-faced and bellowing, flapping his arms and swinging his silver-tipped cane.  His high-topped silk hat lay in the straw beside him.

   She reached for something.  A giraffe passed between us - its long neck bobbing gracefully even in panic - and when it was gone I saw that she'd picked up and iron stake.  She held it loosely, resting its end on the hard dirt.  She looked at me again, bemused.  The her gaze shifted to the back of his bare head.

   "Oh Jesus," I said, suddenly understanding.  I stumbled foward, screaming enen though there was no hope of my voice reaching her.  "Don't do it! Don't do it!"

   She lifted the stake high in the air and brought it down, splitting his head like a watermelon.  His pate opened, his eyes grew wide, and his mouth froze into an O.  He fell to his knees and then toppled forward into the straw.

   I was too stunned to move, even as a young orangutan flung its elastic arms around my legs.

   So long ago.  So long.  But still it haunts me.

   I DON'T TALK MUCH about those days.  Never did.  I don't know why - I worked on circuses for nearly seven years, and if that isn't fodder for conversation, I don't know what is.

   Actually I don know why: I never trusted myself.  I was afraid I'd let it slip.  I knew how important it was to keep her secret, and keep it I did - for the rest of her life, and the beyond.

   In seventy years, I've never told a blessed soul.

Readings

An excerpt from

Rant

An Oral Biography of Buster Casey

by Chuck Palahniuk

The green color of the hillbilly's eyes, the shit on his boots, salesmen call those "mental pegs." Questions that have one answer, those are "closed questions." Questions to get a customer talking, those are "open questions."

For example: "How much did your plane ticket set you back?" That's a closed question.

And, sipping from his own cup of whiskey, the man swallows. Staring straight ahead, he says, "Fifty dollars."

A good example of an open question would be: "How do you live with those scary chewed-up hands?"

I ask him: For one way?

"Round-trip," he says, and his pitted and puckered hand tips whiskey into his face. "Called a 'bereavement fare,"" the hillbilly says.

Me looking at him, me half twisted in my seat to face him, my breathing slowed to match the rise and fall of his cowboy shirt, the technique's called: Active Listening. The stranger clears his throat, and I wait a little and clear my throat, copying him; that's what a good salesman means by "pacing" a customer.

My feet, crossed at the ankle, right foot over the left, same as his, I say: Impossible. Not even standby tickets go that cheap. I ask: How'd he get such a deal?

Drinking his whiskey, neat, he says, "First, what you have to do is escape from inside a locked insane asylum." Then, he says, you have to hitchhike cross-country, wearing nothing buy plastic booties and a paper getup that won't stay shut in back. You need to arrive about a heartbeat too late to keep a repeat child-molester from raping your wife. And your mother.

Spawned out of that rape, you have to raise up a son who collects a wagonful of folks' old, thrown-out teeth. After high school, your wacko kid got's to run off. Join some cult that lives only by night. Wreck his car, a half a hundred times, and hook up with some kind-of, sort-of, not-really prostitute.

Along the way, your kid got's to spark a plague that'll kill thousands of people, enough folks so that it leads to martial law and threatens to topple world leaders. And, lastly, your boy got's to die in a big, flaming, fiery inferno, watched by everybody in the world with a television set.

He says, "Simple as that."

The man says, "Then, when you go to collect his body for his funeral," and tips whiskey into his mouth, "the airline gives you a special bargain price on your ticket."

Fifty bucks, round-trip. He looks at my scotch sitting on the tray table in front of me. Warm. Any ice, gone. And he says, "You going to drink that?"

I tell him: Go ahead.

This is how fast your life can turn around.

How the future you have tomorrow won't be the same future you had yesterday.

My dilemma is: Do I ask for his autograph? Slowing my breath, pacing my chest to his, I ask: Is he related to that guy... Rant Casey? "Werewolf Casey" - the worst Patient Zero in the history of disease? The "superspreader" who's infected half the country? America's "Kissing Killer"? Rant "Mad Dog" Casey?

"Buster," the man says, his monster hand reaching to take my scotch. He says, "My boy's given name was Buster Landru Casey. Not Rant. Not Buddy. Buster."

Already, my eyes are soaking up every puckered scar on his fingers. Every wrinkle and gray hair. My nose, recording his smell of whiskey and cow shit. My elbow, recording the rub of his flannel shirtsleeve. Already, I'll be bragging about this moment of him, squirreling away his every word and gesture, I say: You're...

"Chester," he says. "Name's Chester Casey."

Sitting right next to me. Chester Casey, the father of Rant Casey: America's walking, talking Biological Weapon of Mass Destruction.

Andy Warhol was wrong. In the future, people won't be famous for fifteen minutes. No, in the future, everyone will sit next to someone famous for at least fifteen minutes.

Typhoid Mary or Ted Bundy or Sharon Tate. History is nothing except monsters or victims. Or witnesses.

So what do I say? I say: I'm sorry. I say, "Tough break about your kid dying."

Out of sympathy, I shake my head...

And a few inhales later, Chet Casey shakes his head, and in that gesture I'm not sure who's really pacing who. Which of use sat which way first. If maybe this shitkicker is studying me. Copying me. Finding my hot buttons and building rapport. Maybe selling me something, this living legend Chet Casey, he winks. Never breathing more that fifteen inhales any minute. He tosses back the scotch.

"Any way you look at it," he says, and elbows me in the ribs, "it's still a damn sweet deal on an airplane ticket."

Readings... The Illuminatus! Trilogy

There is no god but man.

Man has the right to live by his own law--to
live in the way that he wills to do: to work as
he will: to play as he will: to rest as he will:
to die when and how he will.

Man has the right to eat what he will: to drink
what he will: to dwell where he will: to move as
he will on the face of the earth.

Man has the right to think what he will: to speak
what he will: to write what he will: to draw, paint,
carve, etch, mold, build as he will: to dress as
he will.

Man has the right to love as he will.

Man has the right to kill those who thwart
these rights.

-The Equinox: A Journal of Scientific Illuminism, 1922 (edited
by Aleister Crowley)

*Taken from The Illuminatus! Trilogy
Introduction to Part II: The Golden Apple
by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson

Readings...

"Growing up is a trap, snapped Dr. Robbins. When they tell you to shut up, they mean stop talking. When they tell you to grow up, they mean stop growing. Reach a nice level plateau and settle there, predictable and unchanging, no longer a threat. If Sissy is immature, it means she's still growing; if she's still growing, it means she's still alive. Alive is a dying culture."
-Even Cowgirls get the Blues by Tom Robbins

Readings....

Montag looked at the river.
We'll go on the river.
He looked at the old railroad tracks. Or we'll go that way.
Or we'll walk on the highways now, and we'll have time to put things into ourselves.
And someday, after it sets in us a long time, it'll come out our hands and our mouths.
And a lot of it will be wrong, but just enough of it will be right.
We'll just start walking today and see the world and the way the world walks around and talks, the way it really looks.
I want to see everything now.
And while none of it will be me when it goes in, after a while it'll all gather together inside and it'll be me. Look at the world out there, my God, my God, look at it out there, outside me, out there beyond my face and the only way to really touch it is to put it where it's finally me, where it's in the blood, where it pumps around a thousand times ten thousand a day.
I get hold of it so it'll never run off.
I'll hold onto the world tight someday.
I've got one finger on it now; that's a beginning.

-excerpt from Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury