The Overwhelming Urge Read online

  The Overwhelming Urge

  Andersen Prunty

  The Overwhelming Urge

  Copyright © 2009 by Andersen Prunty

  Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1933929651

  www.andersenprunty.com

  First published by Eraserhead Press

  205 NE Bryant

  Portland, Oregon 97211

  www.bizarrocentral.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  Contents

  The Chancellor

  The Wise Man

  The Plath Maneuver

  The Murderer

  The Animal Trainer

  The Bright Side

  Gravedigger

  The Call

  The Johnsons

  Prince

  Trash Face

  Bully

  Void

  Pimp

  Drugs

  How the Man Waits for Death

  Philosophy

  Drive

  A Self-Contained Walk

  Cowboy

  Slab

  Fad

  Marcello

  All About Bucky

  Roses

  Pointing at the Sun

  New Pants

  Now I’m Found

  Crabs

  My Dumb Hair

  The Hole

  Vagina

  Laser

  Angst

  Black Leather Jacket

  Delayed Reaction

  A Sandwich in the Park

  Ted the Salesman

  2/3 Soul

  The Joke

  Shoes

  Anthropology

  CTN

  Vampire

  The Inconsequential Man

  Genitalia

  The Death of Eric

  Frogs

  A Fresh Head

  The Man Whose Insides Were Broken

  Buddy

  Breakfast

  Lawn Work

  Blood

  Obsolescence

  The Lift

  Discovering the Shape of My Skull

  The Fancy Hairs

  Mister God

  Handsome

  The Joys and Hardships of Having a Famous Mother

  The Thinker and The Fleabumps

  Tight

  Mobile Desk

  The Author

  Legless

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  The Chancellor

  I look up and the Chancellor is standing in my doorway once again. Filling the doorway. This is the fifth night he has put in an appearance and I already know how the evening is going to turn out. He trundles into my room, modeling a pair of skin tight black leather pants, cellulite jiggling wildly as he turns in robust circles of pride. The twin loaves of fat-filled flesh above the waistband bob rhythmically. Aw hell, I wish he’d leave me the fuck alone. Of course he’s going to ask me how he looks, modestly referring to himself as a fat cow, trying to evoke pity, conjure up a compliment. Then he’s going to drag me away from my writing to go watch the hangings at the Dangle Bar, laughing as the accused ejaculate all over the stage the moment the rope snaps their necks, taking enormous gulps of his Bavarian ale and hollering for them to bring out the next one, his gaseous breath blowing off the clinging flecks of foam from his mustache. He’ll turn to me and tell me how some of the hanged are fags, he just knows it. Or he’ll shout, “Don’t he look like somebody who masturbates?!” Yes, of course, whatever, Chancellor, can’t you just leave me alone? I have some writing to do. Feeling a little tipsy, think I’ll just—No, no, you sit right down here. Free drinks! No free thinks! Then we stagger out of the bar and I’m too drunk to even get it up but he insists on buying us whores. The only good thing is that he usually gives me the more attractive one because he likes to watch us while he fucks his. Even though I don’t want to let him watch, don’t even want to be anywhere near him, his power is such that I have to acquiesce. He is the Chancellor. Then we’ll go back to the hotel and he’ll make me read him stories until he falls asleep, which sometimes takes hours. He prefers Bible stories and any children’s books that in some way or the other involve the mother as an integral part of the plot. He’s developed an extensive guideline for this. Then he’ll sleep, occasionally crying out for me to come ‘rub salve on his feet.’ But tonight, to my dismay, he collapses in mid-pirouette. I roll him out of the room and continue writing.

  The Wise Man

  The wisest man in the world comes to my door. He has a very long white beard and wears a series of richly textured and flowing robes. He, more or less, lets himself in. I know he’s the wisest man in the world and I plan on having him answer some questions.

  He strolls to the middle of the living room and reaches down, trying to push my heavy wooden coffee table up against the couch. He labors for nearly a minute.

  He looks at me. “Some help?” he asks.

  “Oh, of course,” I say and help struggle with the coffee table.

  By the time we finish, both of us have worked up a pretty good sweat.

  The wisest man in the world stands in the middle of my luxurious white carpet. He looks at me and raises a finger of proclamation.

  “These are the days,” he says, “when everything has value.”

  Then he squats down a little, grunts, and defecates on my carpet.

  “Ah,” he says, “that’s done with.”

  Instead of staying in the room to ask him my series of important questions, I quickly go to the hallway closet and retrieve an abundance of cleaning supplies.

  I return to the living room. The wise man is gone. He has accidentally stepped into his mess and tracked it all the way to the door.

  The Plath Maneuver

  Stanley was a poet but his greatest art was his wild enthusiasm for suicide. He tried all different ways and had all kinds of reasons. The vertical slashes on his wrists told me he was serious about it and just happened to always be in the wrong place at the wrong time, which would be the right place at the right time for most people.

  One day he came over and his head was blackened. His hair was charred and stuck up in clumps amidst his raw, pink scalp. He smelled smoky.

  “What have you been up to, Stan?” I asked.

  “I can’t figure out how she did it,” he said.

  “How who did what?”

  “Sylvia Plath. How she killed herself by sticking her head in the oven.”

  “You ass,” I said. “It was a gas oven.”

  He laughed at his foolishness.

  “Of course,” he said, chuckling. “Of course.”

  The Murderer

  Heinrich had rented the place at 401 Kenwood for a year. The small house was incredibly run down. The paint was peeling. The pollution from a nearby factory had turned it a dark gray. The windows leaked. Train tracks were fewer than twenty feet behind the house and trains ran all the time. But the things that bothered him the most were the cockroaches. When he flipped on a light, he saw them covering the floor. They climbed the walls and hid under things. He could hear them in the walls whenever the house was quiet. For the past year, he had called his landlord every week, an answering machine answering each time. “Please,” Heinrich would say quietly into the receiver. “Do something about the roaches.”

  Over the weeks, his plea was eventually reduced to, “Please, roaches.”

  Eventually, he had an idea. He decided to collect the roaches. He used a large trash bag to put them in whenever he could catch them. The effect, he realized, would be best if they were alive b
ut he couldn’t figure out a way to do that. So he saved and he saved. Within three weeks, the bag was bulging. He set out for his landlord’s house, surprised the absentee maggot had actually told him where he lived. The check has to go somewhere, Heinrich thought.

  Of course, the landlord lived in a huge clean house in one of the best neighborhoods.

  Heinrich rang the doorbell.

  No answer. He waited.

  He rang the doorbell again and heard a familiar sound. Just someone approaching the door, he reassured himself.

  When the door finally opened, Heinrich felt his gorge hit the back of his throat. The landlord was an enormous cockroach. He held a martini in one of his legs and wore a gaudy Christmas sweater, obnoxious green trees knitted into a red background. Heinrich threw the bag of cockroaches into the house and ran away, back to his own house that was, by law, the landlord’s house also.

  Three days later he received an eviction notice in the mail. There wasn’t any type of explanation, just Heinrich’s full name and the address, both scrawled out in angry cockroach handwriting.

  The Animal Trainer

  He must be on some form of disability. Home all the time. He lives across the street and I see him come out of his house with a puppy behind him.

  The man walks the puppy to the bank of grass growing on the curb. His pale gut hangs out of his tight and stained t-shirt.

  “Come on, doggy,” he says. “Make poops.”

  The dog looks innocently at the man. They stand that way for a few minutes, the man as vacant as the dog.

  “Come on, make poops.”

  The dog stares.

  “Here,” the man says.

  He pulls down his gray sweatpants, turns his buttocks to the road and squats. A turd slides out, landing on the shaggy grass.

  “Do that,” he says to the dog.

  The dog sniffs at the man’s feces, hunches his back, crouches, and lays one down.

  “Good,” the man says. “Good dog. Good dog.” And he pats the dog on the head, feeding him something from his palm.

  The Bright Side

  I go downstairs to the kitchen. I have designs on finishing off all those chops. As I pass through the living room, I hear a low moaning.

  “Dad?”

  The moan again. He must be sitting in his easy chair, sunk down in the dimly lit room so I can’t see him.

  “Dad? You feeling all right?”

  “God no.”

  “Indigestion?”

  “Worse.”

  “It can’t be all that bad.”

  “You wouldn’t say that if you were an antelope.”

  I rush around to the front of the chair.

  “Come on, now. That’s ridiculous.”

  But the words are barely out of my mouth before I see my father. There he sits; a slender, beautiful antelope. He looks very sad.

  “Life is miserable.”

  He reaches his hooves over to the end table, trying to grab his beer can between the two small things. It slips away from him and foams onto the floor. He leans his head back in the chair and groans again.

  “I hope you’re not ashamed of me,” he says.

  “Of course not.”

  I pick up the beer can and pour what’s left into my palm. I proffer my hand toward my father. As though he can't control himself, he laps greedily at the beer. He politely wipes some foam from his fur with a shiny hoof.

  “Better get some sleep,” I say and playfully shake one of his antlers.

  In the kitchen, eating my chops, I hear him get out of the recliner.

  “Hey!” he calls. “This isn’t so bad!”

  I go into the living room.

  “Look at this! I can walk on my hind legs!”

  He’s drunk, I think. He obviously licked the remainder of the beer out of the carpet. I try not to think about him doing such a degrading thing. Now he’s heading for the stairs.

  “You be careful with those stairs,” I caution.

  “Oh, I think I can handle it,” he says and twitches his little tail as he shakily climbs the stairs.

  I don’t want to think about what he’ll do next.

  Gravedigger

  Gladys goes downstairs and aggressively taps on her husband’s shoulder. Her husband’s name is Hank.

  “You gotta go upstairs and talk to that boy,” she says.

  “What’s the little jackass done now?” Hank asks.

  “Why, I left him alone for two minutes and he done cut off his balls and glued them to his forehead.”

  “For Christ’s sake,” Hanks says. “Let me get my pants on.”

  He puts his pants on and heads for the stairs. Gladys calls out from behind him. “And remember to call him Snake or he won’t answer ya!”

  Hank gets upstairs and opens the door to the boy’s room. The boy, “Snake,” lies on the bed, wistfully staring out the window, his balls glistening on his forehead. Hank snaps. He rushes over to the bed and begins shaking the boy.

  “You listen here,” he says. “If you think you can get away with murder just ‘cause you got them damn leg braces, then you got another thing comin. Get them balls off your head.”

  “I can’t,” Snake says.

  “Well you better find a way.”

  “You try it. They’re glued.”

  Hank angrily reaches out and clutches one of the testicles in his fingers. The thing won’t come loose. It just squishes there between his fingers.

  “That does it,” Hank says.

  He yanks Snake off the bed and throws him to the floor, the boy’s leg braces clattering.

  “Get your pants down. I’m givin you the spankin you deserve.”

  The boy moans pathetically and frantically tries to crawl to his bathroom.

  Gladys comes into the room before Hank has a chance to spank Snake.

  “Hank! You cut that out!” she yells.

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” he says. He kneels by the bed and begins to pray.

  Snake makes it into the bathroom. He finds a razor and slashes at his wrists. The blood courses out and Snake discovers that he can now walk without the aid of the braces. With blood-covered hands, he removes the braces and tosses them into the bathtub. He throws open the door to his bedroom and charges across the room, launching himself through the glass in his window. He plummets to the ground outside. His parents call the ambulance but a hearse shows up instead. Which is appropriate because Snake is dead. He lies in a crumpled heap on the front lawn. A huge man gets out of the hearse.

  The man is a gravedigger.

  He takes an enormous shovel from the back of the hearse and proceeds to dig a hole in the front yard. Once the hole is deep enough, he nudges Snake into it with his foot.

  Snake’s parents stand on the front lawn, crying as the gravedigger finishes filling in the grave. After tamping down the dirt, the gravedigger tips his hat to Snake’s parents and gets back into his car.

  Hank and Gladys go back inside the house to begin anew.

  The Call

  I’m in a room full of people, all of us wearing wigs. I have the nagging suspicion that mine is on crooked and try to adjust it while studying my reflection in the wineglass in front of me.

  A man with a crazy mustache has just made an ass of himself by trying out a new style of dancing.

  The phone rings from the kitchen and we all drunkenly scramble to reach it, trying to squeeze through the door at once. An older man with a worn-out thin white wig and strange buttocks is the first to answer it.

  “Hullo,” he says. “Mm-hm. I see... No... Yes, of course... I understand.”

  The man gently places the phone back in the cradle, takes off his scraggly white wig and tosses it on the stove. Dejectedly, he slumps his shoulders and slinks past all the staring eyes. He reaches the door and looks back. On the verge of tears, he raises his hand in a half-hearted wave and leaves the room. We all adjust our wigs and take a deep, collective breath, knowing we’ll never see him again.

&nbs
p; The Johnsons

  In my search for spiritual enlightenment, I travel to the desert to study a group of people called the Johnsons. Living in total isolation, their village has the look of a suburban street. There are only about sixty of them and none of them have a first name and, since all of their last names are Johnson, the only way to address them is by their street number. I visit 468 Johnson Lane and speak with the man and woman there. All of the men have very thick hair, which they keep heavily gelled and parted to the side. I ask them why there are no children around and Mrs. 468 says, “Oh, they’re really worth too much money to keep.”

  “You mean they cost too much?”

  “Oh, good heavens, no. We get paid so much for them. The men with the mustaches give us so much money... Well, it’s impossible to resist—look at all the nice things it has bought us.”

  The house is nice. It has all the modern amenities. The electricity, Mrs. 468 tells me, is supplied by sorcery. I stay overnight at their house, sleeping in a luxurious bed, and get up the next morning to follow Mr. 468 to work. He dresses as though going to an office—a clean white shirt and navy blue tie, khaki trousers, his hair all thick and gelled. I follow him out into the desert, across a low dune where he is, in due time, joined by the other Johnson men.

  They do not speak. They merely shuffle around in the sand, as though the others don’t exist. This continues for a few hours until they decide it’s lunchtime. They pull sandwiches and bottles of water from their baggy khaki trousers. After they finish eating they all begin ridiculing one man. They tell him that his wife doesn’t love him and they all slept with her last night. They tell him that his house looks like a garbage sack. They accuse him of being impotent, flatulent and disease-ridden. They tell him that the only person uglier than him is his wife. Then they pull out barber’s clippers and shear clumps of hair from his lustrous head. They all laugh at this new haircut and circle up around him, chanting, “Flumpy hair! Flumpy hair!”