CHARACTERS
THE GIRL WITH THE ENORMOUS LIGHT BULB
STEVE MERTZ
FANTASIA POPCORN, A WOMAN WHO MAKES BELIEVE
UNINDICTED CO-CONSPIRATOR
MINISTER WITHOUT PORTFOLIO
BISHOP
PROSTITUTE
MAN IN A LEMUR COSTUME
SCENE
ONE: (The look of this whole play should be mid-nineteenth
century.) A girl in a gingham sleeping gown, with white lace ruffles
around the neck, is asleep in a large bed with decoratively carved
wooden head- and foot-board. She is clutching an oversized, illuminated
light bulb. Steve Mertz is watching her.
STEVE
MERTZ
The first time I met her I banged on her door with my boot in proper
Roman fashion. She opened it wearing nothing but a tissue of lies
and a smile bright enough to suck cars in. She was offering me a
sack of gravel and a sock in the teeth. Since then the idea of what
might have been has grown larger than what was. Now it is the brightest
part of her. If a diseased gibbon were in possession of it, I would
love the gibbon as much as she.
How
the narcoleptic root beer-colored ashtray melts into a syrup of
retarding the grizzled old shank bone of grampa on a vaguely homophobic
boat with its female genitalia. I offered a symbol to three drunk
redneck football players in a Portapotty. They beat me like a drum.
I sent Victoria Principal a snapshot of my nude Twizzler. She said
no woman will ever really like a man who doesn't have an enormous
ball-sack. My nut-sack's huge.
Turns
his back.
Come
closer. I have something to show you.
GIRL
WITH THE ENORMOUS LIGHT BULB mutters and tosses in her sleep. STEVE
MERTZ laughs nervously, turns back around.
Nothing!
What? Gee Your Hair Smells Terrific! Would you rather have a Pop
Tart or a mouth full of ancient coins? I want to shower you with
gifts. You know, that sort of thing. I hear the ringing of an excruciating
bell in the rectory.
She
jokes with me, you know, bell jars and sassafras from Narraganset
to Walla Walla, but I know she must clasp bivalves with a mollusk-husker
from Yachats for her ailing, threadbare rumpus room with buttons
for eyes. I wait because I know the sauces age in antediluvian skillets
hidden in the Scythian wing of the Ukrainian National Museum. I
am your comrade and pack the cartons tight with bang rubber. Someday,
I will be there and she will wait for something and something's
over there for sure and she'll do whatever and I'm all like yeah
and whatever and so on. I'm just a romantic.
My
Aunt Phidias had this pantry, old fashioned pantry with the wooden
doors, with shelves and she'd keep her preserves there, and jellies
and jams and olives and pickles and other pickled vegetables. I
don't know the heat or something so the pickles and I'm sitting
there watching that which I used to think was a TV so dumb and then
pickles from eight jars popped out in all directions like anti-ballistic
missile silos in Mattapan at 6 in the morning the cocks crowin'
and Uncle Heinous out of bed with a foam fronted ball cap on and
a cape and nudity below and shotgun chasing his friend Mortimer
which is what he used to call It, around the room screechin' about
how Mortimer up and give it to his whore of a wife and he was gonna
get it real good shotgun blasts from here to St. Phoebus' Home for
the Criminally Lubricated.
Stage
goes suddenly dark. Eighteen extremely loud shotgun blasts flash.
Lights back on. STEVE MERTZ is sitting in a rocking chair holding
The Harvard Concordance to Ovid, wearing a nine-foot tall hat. GIRL
WITH A LIGHTBULB is gone.
The
stereotype of the sleepless lovesick youth was long established
by the time Ovid expressed it, but he conveys a particularly vivid
impression of it. Remember that such love-longing was diagnosed
as a clinical illness in ancient times, usually treatable only by
lovemaking.
Note
his ingenious examples of self-defeating struggle. He gladly surrenders
to Cupid, telling him that he can celebrate a triumphal procession
of the kind allotted to military leaders who succeeded in adding
territory to the Roman Empire, but decorated with objects associated
with Venus, such as a myrtle wreath substituted for the usual laurel.
Captured prisoners were a feature of such processions.
Enter
UNINDICTED CO-CONSPIRATOR with MINISTER WITHOUT PORTFOLIO. UNINDICTED
CO-CONSPIRATOR should be played by Watergate criminal G. Gordon
Liddy, while MINISTER WITHOUT PORTFOLIO is former British Prime
Minister Lloyd George. UNINDICTED CO-CONSPIRATOR
Welcome
to the Religion of Finite Numbers, the radio talk show that lets
the radio talk. I'm your host Raicido Adi.
MINISTER
WITHOUT PORTFOLIO
And I'm your celebrity guest host, Rod Steiger.
UNINDICTED
CO-CONSPIRATOR
Our guests today are rock and roll immortals, The Dream Teens. The
Dream Teens.
MINISTER
WITHOUT PORTFOLIO
And later on in the show we'll be talking to poet and dramatist
Bob Folder about his new memoir, "The Tongue in the Sink."
UNINDICTED
CO-CONSPIRATOR
You beg them for a reason
In the hot plastic winds of San Jose.
"Shall we go talk to the octopus?"
Beneath the automobile dealerships
On Naglee Road the slurry conduits burst,
Covering the houses in nearby Brobdignagian Avenue
With a piping-hot sauce.
MINISTER
WITHOUT PORTFOLIO
I was driving my outer space rocket ship into the Magoo Cluster
when I sighted a band of scintillating green floating in space.
I pulled up alongside and slowed down to sub-atomic transport-drive
rate. I looked out the passenger window and it was then I saw them.
Leprechauns.
They
wore belts on their hats and they wore belts on their shoes. Belts
were everywhere. It was horrible. Just horrible. The felt-green
of their tall hats, the bright green sateen of their vests, the
grass-green of their wooly coats and they had shiny green pants
on. It made a cloud of lambent green against the matte black and
sparkling white stars of space. I can see them still, their little
leprechaun faces frozen in bewilderment, the occasional clump of
reddish bristles on the chin, one with a burnished copper frying
pan, another with a penny-whistle, still another, holding a lollipop,
all of them turning in a grisly underwater ballet, all floating
slowly away from where the hatch must have blown on their little
leprechaun space rocket.
They
will float away on exactly the same trajectory as they had begun
on, drifting farther from one another. Some would be claimed by
the gravity of planets, would burn up on reentry, perhaps a small
carbonized piece of skull all that remained to strike the planet's
surface. Others would perhaps fall into the fiery well of a star,
vaporized, dissembled by the ferocious chemistry of the stellar
engine. But most, most will float forever, slowly turning, off into
the fathomless eternity of space, further and further into the unending
icy darkness, further and further from their fellows. Solitary dead
leprechaun spacemen drifting eternally out into the horrible vacancy
of the intergalactic night.
UNINDICTED
CO-CONSPIRATOR
The vermin floss piano lost my pancreas
and the carnival ride.
Motion is
this van's a-knockin'
on the bamboo
of the creamy porcelain Oxnard
I keep in my pulverized lagoon.
Who cheated the fierce monkey in my pants?
He went wild
and I began to whistle
like a CB
in the ocean.
Fifteen hours
Greenwich mean time,
closing the future
on a wild water buffalo of fire
whom the natives call
President Bizimungu.
MINISTER
WITHOUT PORTFOLIO
Shih-huang Ti was traveling in the wilderness. After one week of
travel he spotted a monastery on a cliff. He rode his horse up to
the monastery and dismounted. Entering the Great Hall he was met
by a monk holding a bowl of rice.
Shih-huang
Ti said, "I have traveled very far. I must relieve myself.
Please show me your toilet."
The monk did not speak but thrust out the bowl of rice.
Shih-huang Ti said again, "Please show me your toilet."
Again, the monk thrust out the bowl.
Shih-huang Ti shouted angrily, "Monk! Is this how you treat
your guests? I have told you twice already, show me your toilet!"
The monk replied compassionately, "The toilet is here."
Shih-huang Ti took down his riding breeches and loosened his bowels
into the bowl.
UNINDICTED
CO-CONSPIRATOR
What are you going to do, make a citizen's arrest?
MINSTER
WITHOUT PORTFOLIO
Keep the pulsing away and everything's A-OK, follow me? Hide in
a metal box and the world is at your command. I tried to kiss a
girl once but she threw up and now I enter numbers in rows and buy
metal and wires and powder in cans and am very powerful.
Exit
UNINDICTED CO-CONSPIRATOR and MINISTER WITHOUT PORTFOLIO. STEVE
MERTZ.
Obviously
if he was trying to keep an affair such as this secret, he would
not have published the poem. The humor of the poem lies in the poet's
frantic jealousy of his mistresses' husband. His elaborate system
of symbolic gestures is meant more to be amusing than serious, as
the conclusion reveals. To understand this poem one needs to understand
that dining was normally done reclining on couches, leaning on one
elbow, two to a couch.
SCENE
TWO: A long-closed supermarket. Dust, a few cans and rickety
shelving. Enter, from one side BISHOP, carrying harmonica and large,
colorful astrology pamphlet, and PROSTITUTE, from the other, MAN
IN A LEMUR COSTUME.
BISHOP
What are we doing here?
MAN
IN A LEMUR COSTUME
You guys? At least you're BISHOP and PROSTITUTE. What the hell am
I doing here? I'm MAN IN A LEMUR COSTUME for God's sake.
PROSTITUTE
Maybe you're supposed to represent the Id.
MAN
IN A LEMUR COSTUME
What? You mean, like the comic?
PROSTITUTE
No, you moron. In Freudian psychology the Id is that element of
the self that is primal, the urges of our animal being.
BISHOP
I thought that was the Ego.
PROSTITUTE
No, that's the Id moderated by the Superego.
MAN
IN A LEMUR COSTUME
What the fuck are you talking about?
PROSTITUTE
The Superego are those elements of the self that act as brakes on
our urges - mores, ethics, law, religion.
BISHOP
Maybe I'm the Superego.
PROSTITUTE
Yeah, OK. Stands to reason. But if he's the Id and you're the Superego,
that makes me the Ego.
MAN
IN A LEMUR COSTUME
What does that mean?
PROSTITUTE
It means that this guy's idea of normalcy of urge balanced by law
is a woman who screws for money.
MAN
IN A LEMUR COSTUME
Ah, it's all bullshit to me. Didn't you get any notes?
BISHOP
Message on my answering machine, such-and-such a time, such-and-such
a place, just like I told you on the phone.
PROSTITUTE
Jung believed that in a dream, a house represented the psyche.
BISHOP
Is this a house?
MAN
IN A LEMUR COSTUME
Well does it look like your house, Tolstoy? Do you have dust-covered
shelves with dented cans of tomato paste in your house? Actually,
that doesn't seem that unlikely.
PROSTITUTE
Why shouldn't the self be represented by the ruins of a supermarket?
This is the self in public, kind of airing dirty laundry. Why shouldn't
it be a public space gone to hell? Maybe that's what his psyche
is like.
MAN
IN A LEMUR COSTUME
Aren't you supposed to be the hooker? So why don't you just shut
up and suck my cock?
PROSTITUTE
slaps MAN IN A LEMUR COSTUME in the back of the head.
Ouch.
BISHOP
We better look around and see if we can figure out what we're supposed
to be doing here.
PROSTITUTE
takes harmonica from BISHOP, jumps on his back and begins playing.
MAN IN A LEMUR COSTUME begins to dance like a chicken with a broken
spine. PROSTITUTE, BISHOP and MAN IN A LEMUR COSTUME exit.
SCENE
THREE: The banks of the Charles River in Boston, circa
1850. Enter STEVE MERTZ, in frock coat and mutton-chops, with FANTASIA
POPCORN, A WOMAN WHO MAKES BELIEVE, in a high-necked 19th-century
dress and hair on top of head.
FANTASIA
POPCORN, A WOMAN WHO MAKES BELIEVE
There is a small cantaloupe bucking like a panicked monkey in your
lap. Momma said don't leave the table till your plate is clean.
STEVE
MERTZ
You know how in every hippy café from Tucumcari to Ann Arbor
some half-educated bean monkey is taping on a sign to the napkin
dispenser that says, "These napkins are made from trees."
Well, I used to be the editor of an international pulp and paper
industry annual guide and you know what? There's not a napkin on
the planet earth that was made out of a tree. Do you have any idea
how expensive trees are? What company would make napkins out of
trees? They're made out of post-consumer waste, straw and an east
Asian plant called bagasse. So use a hundred of them every time
you want because we'll never run out!
FANTASIA
POPCORN, A WOMAN WHO MAKES BELIEVE
You're cute when I imagine you to be someone else.
STEVE
MERTZ
Wow. I feel the same way.
FANTASIA
POPCORN, A WOMAN WHO MAKES BELIEVE
You're so sweet to say that. Isn't this the moment when we tell
each other our life stories - stories made up of half-truths, exaggeration
and editing? We'll grow close to one another's fictions and that
will be love. Later we'll complicate it with more fictions and grave
disappointments. You go first.
STEVE
MERTZ
OK, well, let's see. I'm a 14 year old girl named Tammy. I was born
in a 1960 International Harvester on the road between A Sack of
Clams and Bottle Brush Hill where my father, the international arms
merchant Adnan Khashogi, had stopped to sell the Klan a crate of
Grendel P-12s. My height is the square root of my weight times the
hair's breadth between being and not being.
FANTASIA
POPCORN, A WOMAN WHO MAKES BELIEVE
Oh, wow. That's beautiful. I had no idea. You're dreamy.
STEVE
MERTZ
What about you?
FANTASIA
POPCORN, A WOMAN WHO MAKES BELIEVE
Me? Oh, jeez, compared to that? Relatively simply really. In recent
years, methods based on lattice reduction have been used repeatedly
for the cryptanalytic attack of various systems. Even if they do
not rest on highly sophisticated theories, these methods may look
a bit intricate to practically oriented cryptographers, both from
the mathematical and the algorithmic point of view. The aim of this
is to explain what can be achieved by lattice reduction algorithms,
even without understanding the actual mechanisms involved. Two examples
are given. One is the attack devised by the second author against
Knuth's truncated linear congruential generator. This attack was
announced a few years ago and appears here for the first time in
complete detail.
STEVE
MERTZ
I love you. Or maybe the idea of you. What a life we could have.
If onlyÖ
FANTASIA
POPCORN, A WOMAN WHO MAKES BELIEVE
Don't think I won't stab you!
STEVE
MERTZ
No, it's not that, it's justÖ Well, IÖ It's her.
He
indicates THE GIRL WITH THE ENORMOUS LIGHT BULB who suddenly appears,
in bed, in a spotlight behind them.
FANTASIA
POPCORN, A WOMAN WHO MAKES BELIEVE
What about her?
STEVE
MERTZ
I will always love her. The idea of loving the idea of her is too
attractive and convenient to part with for the mere reality of love.
Hold me like a sleepy child.
Enter
UNINDICTED CO-CONSPIRATOR and MINISTER WITHOUT PORFOLIO. They walk
in circles around STEVE MERTZ and FANTASIA POPCORN, A WOMAN WHO
MAKES BELIEVE.
MINISTER
WITHOUT PORTFOLIO
See here
UNINDICTED
CO-CONSPIRATOR
I say, my good man.
MINISTER
WITHOUT PORTFOLIO
Well, I never.
UNINDICTED
CO-CONSPIRATOR
Tut, tut, old bean.
MINISTER
WITHOUT PORTFOLIO
Do you mind?
UNINDICTED
CO-CONSPIRATOR
Really!
THE
GIRL WITH THE ENORMOUS LIGHT BULB sits up suddenly in bed. As she
speaks the light bulb glows brighter and brighter. Contrary to expectation,
this means nothing.
THE
GIRL WITH THE ENORMOUS LIGHT BULB
There's a badger in the butter dish and a panther in the salt cellar.
The napkin ring is holding the alligator captive and the rabid kitty
is prancing about in the Dutch oven. Aunt Mab is pushing hatpins
into the neighbors' thighs. Down in the root cellar the brontosaurus
is scratching himself on the lintel. The tigers are loose in the
tea cozy and Sissy is imagining roses in the pee stained cement
room down to ol' Doc Kootie's Insane Asylum. Soon, I will join her
there, Sissy, and we will make crowns of Queen Anne's Lace and dandelions.
We'll take turns shooting ball shot at the army of infants crawling
over the nighttime hills clutching knives in their teeth. Safe at
last with Charles Bronson skinned and packed in salt in a trunk
in the attic.
STEVE
MERTZ
Now do you understand? What wisdom! What delicacy!
FANTASIA
POPCORN, A WOMAN WHO MAKES BELIEVE
She's a TV star, not Emily Dickinson
STEVE
MERTZ
You are the shit-smeared plastic bag of jealousy! I can no longer
be with you. She needs me.
FANTASIA
POPCORN, A WOMAN WHO MAKES BELIEVE
You are the pair of shit-stained found the morning after on the
loading dock at Crater Lake. Picture the nude walking home, stinking
in the ice-cold blue moonlight. You are welcome to your fate.
Exit FANTASIA POPCORN, A WOMAN WHO MAKES BELIEVE. UNIDICTED
CO-CONSPIRATOR and MINISTER WITHOUT PORTFOLIO crowd around the bed
of THE GIRL WITH THE ENORMOUS LIGHT BULB, who has gone fast asleep.
They break out beakers, bottles and antique medical paraphernalia
and crowd around her bed, sheltering her from view.
UNINDICTED
CO-CONSPIRATOR
I'm certain she is afflicted with dementia rodentis.
MINISTER
WITHOUT PORTFOLIO
Thinning of the blood.
UNINDICTED
CO-CONSPIRATOR
A broken heart, rather.
MINISTER
WITHOUT PORTFIO
Dipsomania.
UNINDICTED
CO-CONSPIRATOR
Female hysteria.
MINISTER
WITHOUT PORTFOLI
I prescribe chelation therapy.
UNINDICTED
CO-CONSPIRATOR
Nonsense, aromatherapy is the only reasonable treatment.
MINISTER
WITHOUT PORTFOLIO
It's obvious the poor girl needs a regimen of ear candling.
UNINDICTED
CO-CONSPIRATOR
The only thing that will help her at this point is a good blood-letting.
MINISTER
WITHOUT PORTFOLIO
You're a barbarian. The only reasonable scientific option is vegetarianism
and the occult.
UNINDICTED
CO-CONSPIRATOR
The
application of heated stones and Goddess worship.
MINISTER
WITHOUT PORTFOLIO
Memberships in the John Birch society and the National Rifle association
plus a week in the country or at the seashore where the vapors are
thinner.
UNINDICTED
CO-CONSPIRATOR
Mega-doses of Vitamin C.
MINISTER
WITHOUT PORTFOLIO
Glucosamine.
UNINDICTED
CO-CONSPIRATOR
Gamma hydroxybutyric acid.
MINISTER
WITHOUT PORTFOLIO
A good old-fashioned beating.
UNINDICTED
CO-CONSPIRATOR
Whatever it is, it's going to cost plenty.
UNINDICTED
CO-CONSPIRATOR and MINISTER WITHOUT PORTFOLIO laugh.
MINISTER
WITHOUT PORTFOLIO
Let's hurry back to the lab.
UNINDICTED
CO-CONSPIRATOR
You engineer a cure while I phone the media.
MINISTER
WITHOUT PORTFOLIO
Done and done. And I mean done!
Exit UNINDICTED CO-CONSPIRATOR and MINISTER WITHOUT PORTFOLIO. Enter
BISHOP, PROSTITUTE and MAN IN A LEMUR COSTUME. PROSTITUTE IS HOLDING
a map.
PROSTITUTE
Ah, here we are. "Hell's Half-Acre."
BISHOP
Really? Hell's Half-Acre? I thought it would be bigger.
MAN
IN A LEMUR COSTUME
What do you want? It's half an acre.
He
spots STEVE MERTZ and THE GIRL WITH THE ENORMOUS LIGHT BULB.
OK,
here we go.
They
approach.
Is it time to swallow dwarf muscle, Dieter?
PROSTITUTE
You have quite a shapely anus.
BISHOP
pretending he's a airplane dive-bombs STEVE MERTZ, making appropriate
martial noises. PROSTITUTE pulls out tamborine and she and MAN IN
A LEMUR COSTUME put on a tiny Broadway show near STEVE MERTZ. This
goes on for a moment until FANTASIA POPCORN, A WOMAN WHO MAKES BELIEVE,
rides a bicycle into the midst of them all, carrying a watermelon,
which falls to the floor, and explodes. All stare. Exit, dejected,
PROSTITUTE, BISHOP, MAN IN A LEMUR COSTUME and STEVE MERTZ. FANTASIA
POPCORN, A WOMAN WHO MAKES BELIEVE sits down on the edge of THE
GIRL WITH THE ENORMOUS LIGHT BULB's bed.
FANTASIA
POPCORN, A WOMAN WHO MAKES BELIEVE
All is proceeding according to plan, Admiral.
THE
GIRL WITH THE ENORMOUS LIGHT BULB
Perfect. Soon the song of dishwashers will intoxicate the reedy
marshes with their acrid smoky sunsets. The peasants of the Val
de Coeur will reach for their prybars only to find a tiny oven gremlin
already making water in their teapot.
FANTASIA
POPCORN, A WOMAN WHO MAKES BELIEVE
Do you contest the wisdom of the Unit?
THE
GIRL WITH THE ENORMOUS LIGHT BULB
Ah, we are a Nation of Idiots, all our plans wrapped up in antique
cheesecloth and guarded like next year's seed. No, we pass around
this green bottle of cheap liquor and call it Funkytown while the
red hot bulbs smack into the dust by the dozens.
FANTASIA
POPCORN, A WOMAN WHO MAKES BELIEVE
Perhaps you've forgotten the perpetration of one million Easy Bake
Ovens on the windmill of Corinth, all stuck out in the breeze like
gramma's knees.
THE
GIRL WITH THE ENORMOUS LIGHT BULB
I forget nothing, presumptuous bandito. I'll punch my time card
cause quittin' ain't any better than showin' up. But then I'm done.
I'll be found between the agave and the urine-weed on the undeveloped
half-acre between Buena Vista Park and Two Deodars Bluff and the
ditch. I'll live in the weeds until sense isn't a sock pulled inside
out by gravity somewhere south of Mexico in a jackal den full of
purring and warm wet breath.
FANTASIA
POPCORN, A WOMAN WHO MAKES BELIEVE
This will never be allowed.
THE
GIRL WITH THE ENORMOUS LIGHT BULB
No, Fantasia it will never be allowed. Nothing is ever "allowed."
Learn that and you are one step closer to the check out where the
delicious impulses lie buried in toilet bacon. It is done or not
done and once done never not allowed having actually and incontrovertibly
been. Leave me alone with the light.
Exit FANTASIA POPCORN, A WOMAN WHO MAKES BELIEVE in a huff.
Don't deny the zebras your pain plunks down in your pants but don't
make your binoculars out of meat if you want to see. Play your part
if you must, but then put every tiny piece into a pillow-case and
toss it off that overpass on 90, then walk out east with no light
switches and no forwarding addresses.
SCENE
FOUR: The top of a submarine at sea, hung with festive bunting.
All are sitting around in lawn chairs drinking beers from cans and
drinks with ice in chimneys. STEVE MERTZ is turning food over on
a barbeque.
STEVE
MERTZ
Safe home in the suburbs again, sharing our delusions and boredom.
This is what we've come to know as safety. No wonder we're all mad.
Many fine ladies have laid down beside me with flesh made of velvet
and eyes made of rain. Now Nicole Kidman tells each man and woman
what to do and if you disobey you are tortured to death in another
horrifying war on closed circuit TV. Ah, listen to me go on and
on. I'm being goofy. You'll be wanting a roasted weenie. Tangy.
Makes life worthwhile. That's what you think if you don't want to
live under the body of a Chevy truck out back of a single-wide on
the coast road, hitchhiking into Florence every two weeks to wait
in the Food Stamp line and debase yourself in front of people so
ashamed of you the only thing they can think to do is be mean, to
hide it all up in meanness. Don't tell them about the child, they'll
take it away and give it to some fucking Mormons in Brownsville
who'll get a check for taking care of him and save money by feeding
him powdered milk. Should get the death penalty for that. Just suck
it up and spend the next six hours in Shari's gulping down greyhounds
and forget forget.
UNINDICTED
CO-CONSPIRATOR
Scrumptious wieners, Steverino.
MINISTER
WITHOUT PORTFOLIO
Quite right. Capital wienerage, old boy. May need to tamp down the
batch with a broken-off pool cue wrapped in electrician's tape if
you've got one.
THE
GIRL WITH THE ENORMOUS LIGHT BULB
I put on my best skirt of Hot Wheel Tracks for the Mayor but he
extinguished all the light and replaced zinc with carnations.
FANTASIA
POPCORN, A WOMAN WHO MAKES BELIEVE
All the city councilmen felated the Mayor for a small bag of candy
corn they used to poison minorities in Kansas. I felled them like
a stand of trees and built a deck from their useless dreams bussed
in by the gross from places like Weaselton and Shit Town and Berkowitz
Falls and destined to collect grapes for a momentary effluence of
white light.
MINISTER
WITHOUT PORTFOLIO
The gerbils tied to your apron strings menace me with silly faces
they unpacked in Algiers. But I fear nothing. And nothing surrounds
us, what?
THE
GIRL WITH THE ENORMOUS LIGHT BULB
I'm decanting. In my pants.
MINISTER
WITHOUT PORTFOLIO (Aside to UNINDICTED CO-CONSPIRATOR)
I don't want to wind up working as a footman in some monkey's mansion
STEVE
MERTZ
I've got something to show you. Come closer.
FANTASIA
POPCORN, A WOMAN WHO MAKES BELIEVE
No excise tax had some plumbing gown go on, going on down to the
degree to which it would make her let loose of the glowing bubble.
STEVE
MERTZ
Let loose? I don't want that. I would never want that. A woman,
naked, bulb-free in searing nudity with demands for, well, steak
and eggs. Me? No, I'm a romantic. The bulb is the point. The square
is the circle. The rhombazoid is the parallelogram.
THE
GIRL WITH THE ENORMOUS LIGHT BULB
You don't need me at all.
STEVE
MERTZ
I forget. What? I am one-half. Who?
MINISTER
WITHOUT PORTFOLIO
Never have my services been so sorely needed. For a small retainer
I will rule in your stead and perform my meat biscuit DC-10 Ethiopian
fly-in. I'll set up my suite of offices in the bottom of this bottle
while you play whining violin music to a cathedral of Jell-O.
UNINDICTED
CO-CONSPIRATOR
I wouldn't feel right you taking on such a burden alone. I am obliged
in my duty bags to defrock my funicular for the young ladies.
STEVE
MERTZ
Love and politics stand at eternal loggerheads. I dismiss you and
set you to cutting the imaginary grass of exile.
MINISTER
WITHOUT PORTFOLIO
Rubbish, my dear boy. Don't you know the personal is political?
UNINDICTED
CO-CONSPIRATOR
It's in all the papers. All the best people are taking about it.
MINISTER
WITHOUT PORTFOLIO
It's become a best-seller.
UNINDICTED
CO-CONSPIRATOR
Of course, "The Scandalous Configurations of Dr. X."
MINISTER
WITHOUT PORTFOLIO
The very one.
STEVE
MERTZ
Well, it's hard to argue with a theoryÖ
MINISTER
WITHOUT PORTFOLIO
Quite.
MAN
IN A LEMUR COSTUME
I've
had it with all this crap. It's high time we cleaned up these theories.
BISHOP
It's time to replace your salt-shaker-sized gods with one big-ass
gristle-crushing divinity that calculates the flower into fruit
and dispenses with all the bullshit.
PROSTITUTE
The
dirt and the cleanliness just sit there waiting for your enjoyment
and you make a mockery out of drunkenness and prayer where the pussies
fart in angelic chorus for your undeserving souls.
MAN
IN A LEMUR COSTUME, BISHOP and PROSTITUTE throw the money-changers
out of the temple. All the chairs, wieners, plastic beer cups, bottles,
chimneys, tanning butter, purses, MINISTER WITHOUT PORTFOLIO, UNINDICTED
CO-CONSPIRATOR, THE GIRL WITH THE ENORMOUS LIGHT BULB and FANTASIA
POPCORN, A WOMAN WHO MAKES BELIEVE all go rocketing into the drink.
A pause. They look at each other. They push STEVE MERTZ off also.
STEVE
MERTZ
Après nous, le deluge!
THE
MAN IN THE LEMUR COSTUME
Influx of Burmese sex workers via Mae Sai on the rise
Military bans entry of all Cambodians after clash
Taiwan sends back Thais
Breaches spark crackdown on labour flow to Laos
Cambodians strike it rich in Thailand
Chavalit vows to curb flood of workers into Malaysia
One stop for visas, work permits
Measures to be beefed up to control refugees
Immigrants put strain on border hospitals
Boatpeople saga closer to an end
Vietnamese boat people sent home
Bangkok pushes new border deal
Police on alert against HK gangsters
Shattered dreams of HK dollars
85 Khmers held for illegal entry
Thai workers indifferent to changes after the handover
Tracing our children who fall through the net.
THE
BISHOP
Migration experts agree diseases abound at borders
Fly away little bird
A sacrifice for the family
For sale: Burmese virgins
Cross-border traffic worsens Aids count
Call on authorities to provide health education to fishermen
Thais blamed for infecting Indonesians
Tracing our children who fall through the net.
PROSTITUTE
Burma reopens Tak checkpoint
Rangoon orders checkpoint reopened
August date set for bridge's official opening
Highway project gains momentum
Bangkok pushes new border deal
Tracing our children who fall through the net .
MAN
IN A LEMUR COSTUME
That makes sense.
BISHOP
It's sensible.
PROSTITUTE
It makes perfect sense. It's sensible.
BISHOP
It's sensible sure, that's for sure.
MAN
IN A LEMUR COSTUME
It makes sense.
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