Ode To Men Of Few Words
Curt was born a man of few words. He came into the world with a solemn face full of idiot knowing, a mere cunt potato, consulting with angels in the way a cancerous, 20-something spaniel might chat with a pile of rags or an old yoyo. Curt’s mom had an embolism which killed her but not her lactation, and Curt fed on dead milk for a spell. They pried him loose and gave him to Carl, a man who’ll eat anything so long as it’s pickled.
Carl sold bogus insurance out of an idyllic highway storefront near a fetish joint where the trucker-clergy contingent enjoyed having the sides of their penises hypodermically injected with ladies’ high heel shoes pre-dissolved in hydrochloric acid.
The year was 2027 but it may just as well have been 1727, and Curt’s dad Carl died of a cake overdose, which he had pledged would kill him before the syphilis. Curt was only two when he was torn from his blessed roots. And the cake wasn’t even chocolate.
Curt was raised to keep quiet by Old Cheese, one of six madams who worked the day shift near the cemetery. She was locally credited for reviving the lost art of the toothless blowjob and had made enough to buy herself eight mattresses. Curt grew up emptying heavy garbage amid foul ecstasy, and by night the working girls would bare their souls, fuck him and beat him, and as his muscles hardened he earned a reputation for being a good listener.
A customer called Husky Jeans Johnson drank too much and thought he’d take the boy on the road, put a copyright on the one-word-answer simulacrum routine and make a fortune. He slipped Curt a tranque but Curt saw and while pounding Husky’s head into red and gray spaghetti Curt said rather little. He had a job to do, by golly, and there wasn’t nothing needed to be said about it. Herein lies the charm of Curt, man of few words.
Curt set out on his own and worked at a general store, and lived seven more years. He…
• laughed three times
• ate nine-hundred and forty-two flapjacks
• told one joke
• made two-hundred and ninety pots of coffee
• made four pots of decaf
• paid income tax twice
• strangled seventeen waitresses to death
• named and fed two dogs
• went through three pairs of boots
• spoke two thousand, nine-hundred and fifty-one words – only one of which was “hiel.â€
One of the waitresses that escaped was Chowder Pig Sally…a relation to Old Cheese, and her being raped was no accident. She liked men of few words. Curt hadn’t said a lot but his sperm had said “let there be Dan and Doug,†and the message thundered through the caverns of Chowder Pig’s womb and the week after Curt died, Curt begat Dan and Doug.
Doug was a child of the dairy slug variety who emerged from utero in a worn-out green bathrobe, insisting that it made him feel somehow “more svelt, per se.†Five years later, Chowder cured Doug’s loquacious nature with a home lobotomy kit stolen from a sleeping Jehova’s Witness, and Doug became mute and heterosexual in twelve languages. Later he shot himself in the back of the head and the bullet exited through his mouth, hitting his mom in the ear, rendering her dead instantly, and far worse, deaf.
Dan was the quiet one by nature, and he grew up to join the trucker-clergy contingent, and he’d pay to have hookers melt down sexy shoes and inject them into the side of his penis. Not because he liked it, but because “that’s just what the trucker-clergy contingent does, by golly. Ain’t nothing more to say.â€
An acid-laden liquified shoe must have penetrated beyond the dermis and cohered to Dan’s sperm cells, because his wife gave birth to a pair of high-heeled shoes named Goat and Wolf…names you might expect for boys, but these were girl shoes. Having boys’ names made it hard for the girls growing up, and psychologists said they probably refused to talk at all because of all the teasing they had to endure on account of their names. The parents tried changing the names, but the damage had been done. The shoes, lacking the requisite social skills, failed to find mates and the bloodline was silenced for good.
