David Wallace - Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

E—:‘In other words, they’re not responsible for not being responsible, K—’s saying.’

K—:‘I’m saying it’s tricky and difficult but that if you use your head it’s not impossible.’

E—:‘Because think about it: if it was really impossible where would the whole species be?’

K—:‘Life always finds a way.’

The fuzzy Hensonian epiclete Ovid the Obtuse, syndicated chronicler of trans-human entertainment exchange in low-cost organs across the land, mythologizes the origins of the ghostly double that always shadows human figures on UHF broadcast bands thus:

There moved & shook, Before Cable, a wise & clever programming executive named Agon M. Nar. This Agon M. Nar was revered throughout medieval California’s fluorescent basin for the clever wisdom & cojones with which he presided over Recombinant Programming for the Telephemus Studios division of Tri-Stan Entertainment Unltd. Agon M. Nar’s programming archē was the metastasis of originality. He could shuffle & recombine proven entertainment formulae that allowed the muse of Familiarity to appear cross-dressed as Innovation. Agon M. Nar was also a devoted family man. & so it came to pass that, as his Brady Bunch & All in the Family flourished & begat Family Ties & Diff’rent Strokes & Gimme a Break & Who’s the Boss? from whose brows, hydra-like, sprang Webster & Mr. Belvedere & Growing Pains & Married…With Children & Life Goes On & the mythic Cosby , all with ads infinitum, Agon M. Nar in private family life did beget three semi-independent vehicles, daughters, maidens, Leigh & Coleptic & Sissee, who did then grow & thrive like kudzu among the fluorescent basin’s palms & malls & beaches & temples.

So favored was Agon M. Nar, industry legend had it, by company CEOs Stanley, Stanley & Stanley, as well as by Stasis, God of Passive Reception himself, & too so blest with savvy, that by the time his three lovely maidens — whom he now saw & adored every third weekend — had undergone their first Surgical Enhancements, Agon M. Nar had actually vanquished the esurient, heavy-hitting & high-profile Reggie Ecko of Venice as Recombinant Head of all Tri-Stan, R. Ecko of V. falling then gently back to the basin’s pastel earth, deposed & just royally pissed, under a parachute’s aegis of golden silk.

& Agon M. Nar administered Tri-Stan Entertainment’s affairs wisely & cleverly indeed; &, as is recorded, recombinations of derivations of ripoffs of spin-offs of pale imitations came to dominate & soothe the formerly chaotic MHz, Before Cable.

& while recombination as ēthos metastasized, soothed, & remunerated across the pink-orange landscape of medieval CA, Agon M. Nar’s unattested daughters blossomed into nymphetitude. Ever farsighted, Agon M. Nar wisely provided for monthly tribute to the fluorescent basin’s God of Surgical Enhancement, the spherically crispate & sartorially retrograde but plasticly facile Herm (‘Afro’) Deight MD, he of the plaid bellbottoms & lavender smock; & H.(‘A.’)D.MD, G. of S.E., well pleased at such tribute, fashioned Agon M. Nar’s daughters into nymphets far, far lovelier than the stony vicissitudes of Nature would have provided solo. Nature was a bit honked off over this, but she had more than enough on her plate in medieval CA already. Anyway, Leigh & Coleptic Nar eventually blossomed into USC cheerleaders, post-vestal attendants at the Saturday temple of the padded gods Ra & Sisboomba; on their subsequent careers Ovid the Obtuse is mute.

But it was Agon M. Nar’s youngest daughter, his Baby, his Love-Dumpling, his Little Princess — viz. Sissee, the Nar family’s lone aspiring thespian, haunter of casting calls for commercials & daytime serials — who did become Herm (‘Afro’) Deight the Enhancement technēc ian’s favorite & Personal Project; & after much non-HMO tribute, plus rituals & procedures so grisly as to compel lyric restraint, the eventually nearly 100 %-Enhanced Sissee Nar so like totally surpassed her acrobatic sisters & all the fluorescent basin’s other maidens that she seemed, according to Varietae, ‘…a very goddess consorting with mortals.’

& she consorted a lot . For as word of her trans-human charms spread throughout the basins & ranges & interior wastes of medieval CA, bronzed men with cleft chins & rigid hair from as far away as the Land of Huge Red Pines journeyed in loud & extraordinarily phallic chariots to gaze upon Sissee Nar’s spandextral form with wonder & glandular excitement, & to consort. The tragic historian Dirk of Fresno records that so vertiginously protrusive was Sissee Nar’s bust that she needed aid to recline, so juttingly sepulchral her cheekbones that she cast predatory shadows & had to do doorways in profile, & so perfectly otherworldly her teeth & tan that the BC demiurges Carie & Erythema, mortally affronted & blasphemed, entered an appeal for aesthetic justice (specific appeal: for a nasty attack of comedones & gingivitic recession) to Stasis — i.e. yes the Stasis, Overlord of San Fernandus, Board-Chair ex off of Tri-Stan’s parent, the Sturm & Drang Family of Exceptionally Fine Companies; Stasis as in summum solo, Olympic Overseer, God of Passive Reception & all-around Big Mythopoeic Cheese. Carie & Erythema’s case never even made it onto the Olympian docket, though; for Stasis, G. of P.R., had himself personally gazed down upon & admired Ms. Sissee Nar, & from his home-entertainment module kept distant video tabs on the riveting maiden at all times via the state-of-the-art hand-held technai of his foam-winged factota, Nike & Fila (who split shifts).

It’s right around here that Ovid the O. tone-shifts to Lament. For alas, the God Stasis’s immortal S.O., the basin’s Queen Goddess, Codependae, was seriously ill pleased that Stasis spent more quality time admiring Sissee Nar’s camcorded image from the vantage of his module’s exercycle than he spent even bothering to deny his infatuation with the much-Enhanced maiden to Codep. over the Olympian couple’s oat-intensive breakfast. Stasis’s denial was Codependae’s ambrosia, & she found its absence inappropriate & irksome in the extremus. & plus then when she came out of the sauna & found the Reception-God on his cellular pricing swan-costume rentals — well, this was understandably impossible to detach from; & Codependae vowed retaliation against this mortal & undulant strumpet before her entire Support Group. The horn-mad Queen began teleconferencing with the affronted demiurges Carie & Erythema, plus had her administrative assistant contact Nature’s administrative assistant & set up a brunch meeting; & Codep. basically got all these transmortals, their self-esteem compromised by Sissee Nar’s Enhanced & Passively Received charms, to declare a covert action against Sissee & her much-favored father, Agon M. Nar of Tri-Stan Unltd. Having three divinities plus Nature all honked off at you at once is just not good karma at all, but mortally naive Sissee & workaholic Agon M. ignored sudden sharp increases in their insurance premia & went about their business of moving & shaking & recombining & undergoing Enhancement & auditioning & consorting & avoiding anything in the way of autoreflection more or less as usual. I.e. they were blithe.

It soon came to pass that Codependae & Co., after much interface, settled on a vengeance vehicle. This was the Telephemically dethroned, parachuted, & highly vengeance-oriented Reggie Ecko of Venice, who’d suffered a massive self-esteem-displacement & had sold his house & tank of pedigreed carp & moved into a freebase fleabag in an infamous Venetian residency hotel known along the boardwalk as The Temple of Very Short Prayers, & was now spending all his time & contract settlement hitting the alkaloid pipe & drinking Crown Royal right out of the velvet bag & throwing darts at 8 × 10s of Agon M. Nar & watching incredibly massive amounts of late-night syndicated television, gnashing his increasingly discolored teeth &, like, totally embittered. A covertly active strategy went into effect. While the demiurge Erythema began to appear to Reggie Ecko in the mortal guise of Robert Vaughan hosting Hair Loss Update every night from 4 to 5 A.M. on Channel 13, & to work on him, Codependae herself began work on the heart, mind, & cojones of Agon M. Nar, insinuating herself into his 4–5 A.M. REM-stage as the Cerberian image of Tri-Stan’s three CEO Stanleys, ancient entertainment-kabalists who never left their video center & shared but a single large-screen CCTV monitor & remote between them. Under Codependae’s direction their images began to kibbitz at Nar’s psyche, & to Foretell. There are at this point long, long Ovidian lyrics about the vengeful Goddess’s CEO-mediated siren-songs to the oneirically impressionable A.M.N….so long in fact that Ovid’s copyed at a certain glossy organ ended up deleting major portions of the epiclete’s SIREN.SNG file. The thrust of what’s stetted, however, is that Cod.’s covert plan begins, alas, to unfold with all the dark logic of a genuine entertainment-market inspiration.