Fragment On Stubbs McMassey

The way I see it, ain't nothing to do in this here wilderness but kill people, make sweet love to their corpses, and then use 'em for kindling on the cold pestilent? pestering nights when you know somehow in your heart of hearts that your existence just ain't quite right. Stubbs McMassey, my companion, agrees right heartily with me. He's got himself a 12-gauge shotgun with unlimited ammo. The weapon rivals his wang.

We've been out here in this ingratitudinal climate for years now, have seen a buncha dirty dementia that'd make most dogs sick, and most hospital invalids well. Yesterday Stubbs tread up on a Taiwanese refugee who was ravenously eating on a bag of potato chips. Bugger's hands were bleeding, he was naked, and insects were scurrying through what little pubic hair he had. Stubbs decided to hold off on the killing and loving and burning for a bit, on account it'd been a while since he'd conversed with anyone besides me and hisself.

"What up, friend?" Stubbs McMassey said. "Mind if I share some of yer chips?"

"Yes I do mind," the Taiwanese refugee replied, "for these, I mean this, um, this is the only provisions I have."

"You lying?"

"No sir, I am not."

"Well," Stubbs huffed, "seems right shameful if'n you ask me."

The Taiwanese refugee must have felt as if the exchange had not been satisfactory to his newly-acquired "friend", for, as he continued to put the potato chips into his mouth via his bloody hands, he told Stubbs McMassey all about his origins: from his mother's infidelity with the babysitter while he was lying in his crib crying himself stupid, to his marriage to his high-school sweetheart which ended in something so infinitesimally trivial as a female circumcision, and on up to his stint as a columnist/ reviewer for Spin magazine, and then about the decade he spent as a field worker for UNICEF, and then . . . eventually . . . he finally got to talking about his sad state of affairs now, but ---

"Listen, friend: don't you realize that I don't care? It's a post-modernist world, big poop. You have lost my attention span; or perhaps you never grasped it in the first place. It is probably true that this is indeed the 'Infomercial Age', but you have solicited, harrangued, told me too awfully much."

At these words the Taiwanese refugee was indignant. Apoplectic. Flat-out flabbergasted.

"But, --- but sir, I do believe that it was you who first tried to talk to me."

"Right you is, friend, and that's the way it should be. So you just go on eating your chips and dip and listen to what I intend to spiel and don't go spouting off until I allow you to do so!" Stubbs said, and he set himself down (for mankind is indeed a material object of mere inanimate contemplation that is harshly maneuvered by Fate alone) in a shady area (for the light seens to give man's kind cancer).

Dip? the Taiwanese refugee questioned his conciousness. Oh! he means my blood! My dear, I am still quite porous, weak, leaking.

"Now, friend," said Stubbs McMassey, lit up a cigarette, continued, "If'n I spent any iota whatsoever attending to your autobiography of tripe, and if'n I ain't losing neither my sanity nor my recollected mind, why I do declaratively believe that you mentioned you used to, uh, rote, some subjective doggerel for some musical rag, the likes of which specific name you didn't betrothe me to be privy to. Now, if'n any of which I've, um, sa-eed just now makes any lick of sense to the likes of yours, I should appreciate if we could have an intellectual discussion upon the life-and-death topic of music. Respond."

"Sir, I would be happy to discuss with you whatever particulars you wish in accordance to the topic you have so eloquently selected."

"Okay: Elvis. That's it. When it comes to music there ain't nothing else. Even the gods know that Elvis is the most-exemplary hunk of man-meat there has ever been. No one shall ever be greater than him. With each new record he releases, Elvis only reaffirms his genius. He's rocked a rich man's world in a way that no black man ever could. He's rolled away the stone, risen to high angelic notes that rhythm and blues away all jazz-men'd-perfumed fornication. Elvis Presley makes Eminem look like a Jew. That latest release by Elvis, the one that came out last spring where he collaborated with Nickleback and Mudvayne and Crossfade and Ani DeFranco? --- heck, a pure masterpiece it is; whizzes in Mozart's ash-urn and makes The Beatles feel small, as if'n their testicles are retreatin', hiding in their anus and denying their prostate from being pleasured. Honky-Tonk Messiah, that's Elvis. I'm sure glad that Garth Brooks switched places with him at the crossroads and then took his place dying on the toilet, Coltrane and Max Headroom were there to witness the deal, make it official. And I ain't no flowery Judas or nothing. Not a Gnostic, not an Islamatist. Ain't no Catholicker or a Protestable. I just know what I know, and I know that Elvis is the man! And I suppose that's why I hate this doggone wilderness here where all we seem to do is egalitarianize everything until we get stressed-out angry; and then we go and interact and fight and love and spite and in the end it's just Darwin, survival of the fittest, and that soulless animal's been dead for more years than Methuselah can remember! I don't know. Nothing. But I hate this place. And I love Elvis. And I hate the fact that I'm stuck out here; that I can't hang outside Graceland's gates with my St. Peter in hand crying 'Oh man! Oh man!' like good old Onan."