Christopher WunderLee - The Loony - a novella of epic proportions

Albert grew up fatherless, congested, and persistently sick in a world of movie theatre Sundays (the church of the personality) and tongue bathing dogs with floppy soft ears and comic books where asymmetrical evil-doers were bested by triangularly endowed, tight-wearing, primary colored, dimpled chinned champions of the ideals of the empire, and lollypops from the bank teller windows, and ice cream trucks with gristled tunes ta-tunking out of loudspeakers, and summers under the hose and sea shore vacations where he built sand castles out of the fragments of heaven. They moved into the Levittown sanctuary of Regina’s parents (who were aficionados of the wily ruminations of the one and only Doctor Benjamin Spock, grandma having read Baby & Child Care some eleven times) while she went to beauty school at nights and worked as a roller rink waitress during the day for bratty heirs of the fortunes of business journal listings and society page write-ups. Albert attended public school throughout his elementary education (his only true memories were of duck and cover armageddon exercises, although how his little freckled arms would protect him from an Atomic blast confused even young Albert), but was awarded, much to the pleased and pampered ego of his mother, a scholarship to a Jesuit secondary school when he turned ten. There, at St. Christopher of the Fat Child of Jesus School for Beloved Angels of our Lord, Albert was ensconced in the mythology of Catholic dogma, he listened wide-eyed and repentant to the tall tales of carpenters and fishermen and lion feed, took Latin and Greek, studied history and books, politics and science, and considered quite seriously joining the ranks of the “soldiers of Hey Zeus.” But once he was old enough, he heatedly flogged his mushrooming “worm” (as his mother used to call it) in fitful, delirious carnivals of incensed yearning, and he realized, whilst apologizing for the damn thing, that he could never go without such a blessed, contorted, convulsing ecstasy, and he, who saw the pearls of budding breasts and the sheen of nude skin, could not, despite what god promised, go without at least touching one of them just a single time.

He attended a primary school in Hartford a few thousand miles from his home, where the boys wore blue uniforms and played the god forsaken games of rugby and cricket with synthetic new England accents (they were all of them, from out West somewhere) and the instructors all feigned orthobiosis and talked with guttural nasal voices about Milton and that jolly fellow Joyce, “a little preposterous, don’t you think, but jolly good prose,” and Donne and that coy Marvel. Albert received excellent marks on his tests, but received a bit of a nasty reputation as mildly pantophobic, and oddly strange. He was less than popular, couldn’t sqweeg, or muster, or tally hoe to save his life, failed miserably at the juvenile game of defamation, and spent his four years haunting the halls of education, watching his fellow classmates go on like pleased rogues about to bed a damsel in distress. About the only sexual expergefaction he experienced throughout his teens (during those wholesome golden days of Eisenhower patriarchy) was the soterial discovery of Justine .

Justine was, like the solemn, haughty tone of her name, an exoptable maid who’d been plucked from adolescence and placed rather squarely into the capable hands of a nunnery to be deflowered in the most imaginative ways. It was described so indelicately, Albert foamed and spat and breathed, just listening. She was defeated and branded and lesbianized by her own caregiver, and she had no qualms with any of it, not the sodomy or the crucifixes up her cunny or the sacred oil lubed lavishly onto her pubertal stiff nips, or the eucharist wine poured down the prepubescent arroyo between her legs and offered ceremoniously to several starving nuns in the cloister of their rancorous lust. He stayed with her as long as he could, tenderly caressing her as she spoke of the rose thorns whipped against her flexed buttocks, as she detailed yet another eunuch orgy in the tomb of a high priest, amongst the skeletons of saints, as some sausage drove in and out of her now swollen womb. Albert clutched desperately to the words, comforted her in the darkness of his own assumptions, surrounded her with his seldom expressed assurances, and begged her not to finish. Instantly, like a disease finally manifesting itself, they were in desperate, absurd, maladroit, shameful adoration with each other, hopelessly Albert possessed her, he worshiped her, and dreamed in sickly fear of her leaving him. They spoke, misunderstood, miscommunicated, he died as her words left her lips, he was resurrected by her confidences, he followed her, she played with him, he desperately needed her to profess everything and she did, and he confessed to her, and she forgave him and he tried to forget about her experiences and they absorbed each other and promised never to stop speaking. But she did, she finally, one gloomy night of tree branches regaling the window, his drip drop semen ponding in his pjs, said her last few words and ended it with him. He wept bitterly that night and never forgave her for her trespasses.

* * *

And so it was, for the future doctor recovered from his melancholic desperation that last ecstatic summer before college, before the dorm rooms, and the exams, before the unfortunate meeting, and the inclusive acceptance of the lie, by purchasing his very own vermilion Valiant and flaneuring American-style like a doomsday piece of celestial litter across the country, to see the great Pacific and leap its shores like a mad expatriate on the parabolic chariot of Helios.

He mounted his metallic stead the day after graduation, after he’d received the card from his grandparents with a one hundred dollar bill, crisp and clean, as if it wasn’t the bloody tampon of Liberty’s purity, and whistled (out of character). Albert had managed to dragon chest away a good twenty-three quid, but knew he’d be short, and chug, chug, chug to a stop outside of some lazy middle-earth town of Stetsons and dairy manure, but with his grandparents’ contribution to the rocket fund, he’d be soaring over Big Sur and its fabled conifer skyscrapers with money to spare.

He took the highway southwest, screaming like a warring foreign spirit, honking like a beat trumpet player at the down’s syndrome cars clumsily cruising at the sickly pace of the legal limit, and tore up the pavement with bellowing tar, acrobatically weaving, swerving, his engine rhonchisonant, speaking in automotive tongues to the lord’s of velocity, the wind howling in defeat, the particle/wave duality of light, using its bipolar personalities alternately, trying desperately to keep up with g-forced Albert, riding on his father’s lightning bolt. A few cruisers around Cincinnati saw the diamond shard of speed plummet through their jurisdiction and pulled out in hot pursuit, sirens wailing, lights flashing in patriotic hypnosis, balls of their feet aching as they pummeled the accelerator, and steering wheels shaking in excessive harmony, so that soon Lochner had a convoy of falling stars tumbling through the highway night of the earth. He paid them little mind, as he skirted the big rigs and muscled the dawdling commuters, until the image appeared on the side of the divine road, a receding figure of animate arches, feminine and holy, a vision, mother Mary of god, thumbing it in Ohio, her dziggetai broken down, her Joseph long since discarded out of boredom (she’d received the ophelimitic deblateration of god for jesus’ sakes alive), a lygophilic picaroon just ready for the picking… And the meteorite stumbled over god’s dooryard.

There was Albert giving Aristotle the big finger as the whitewalls of his terra cruiser retraced the passage of inertia through history, his swerving, gravel spitting, screeching tires resisting… a quick nod to Galileo, before passing quite gracelessly to the pages of the infamous Principia via the brake pad just in time to smile crookedly at the vision, who reeled back on high boot heels and almost, in a clumsy frolic of back-stepping away from the shoulder, fell over her pastel floral luggage collection sitting stacked in an almost Stonehenge-like ring. However, before he was able to lean across the great velour expanse and open the passenger door for his roaming jezebel to leap in, if she so chose, a gaggle of pistol wielding pursuers were on him like ants on a lonely, lost, newly unwrapped sandwich at a Sunday picnic in the park… Poor Albert was dragged quite indelicately out of the cabin, embarrassingly sprawled out on the pavement before his on-looking Aphrodite, frisked like a fondled female secretary in a crowded elevator, and seated roughly in the back of a tired, whining cruiser whilst the boys in blue confiscated his birthright. He spent six hung-over nights in a local jail with a jocuserious russet giant named Jeremiah spouting neo-scholastic theology.