The Burden of Dreams

There are two types of men in the world: those who merely dream, and those who will stop at nothing to capture their dream. Some say there's a third type of man-the kind who gets really loud and vocal at a little league baseball game when he thinks the umpire messed up a call against his son's team and won't shut the hell up about how "the fix is in". My father was a chaser of dreams, carved from the same cloth as Charles Lindbergh, Sir Earnest Shackleton, and Paul Reiser. From the time he was twenty-one, when he journeyed on foot across Michigan for six months in an attempt to buy a package of Chuckles from every Walgreen's in the state, to his shocking retirement from the world of high finance at age fifty-eight, he crossed uncrossable borders and broke down unbreakdownable walls to get what he yearned for. So when my father called me into his palatial office at TriBiOmniCom on a drizzly March afternoon and told me that what he now wanted in life more than anything was to achieve coitus with an Amish midget, I did not hesitate for a moment to assist his quest.

"Son," he said to me, staring out the wide window which looked down on midtown Lutzburg, "your mother has been gone for eight years now, and certain....appetites are beginning to haunt me." (My mother vanished mysteriously in 1994, swallowed by a rare internet black hole while surfing the web for the best price on a George Foreman Grill.)

"Every man needs to satisfy his appetites," he went on, his piercing grey eyes gazing at the Calvin Klein billboard across the street, which showed two eight year olds snorting heroin off the back of a large walrus. "The time has come for me to pursue one impossible dream-to achieve coitus with an Amish midget."

"Yes, Papa," I said, beginning to take copious notes. He already had a plan.

My father was a wealthy man, having patented a computer software program which could scan a photograph of any human being and tell him or her within seconds which member of Supertramp they most resembled. All his vast resources were mobilized within minutes. Helicopters were dispatched to Pennsylvania Dutch Country, and by six o'clock that evening, two possible candidates for my father's scheme had been identified. Helen Ippleflap, a cobbler's wife, was four feet two inches tall, and when she was informed of the offer of one million dollars in exchange for fifteen minutes of sexual intercourse, she expressed polite interest. "Mayhap I consult my husband," she told the suited, bespectacled agents of TriBiOmniCom in her humble kitchen, from which wafted the smell of fresh raisin bread. "I bed with none other than he, but goddamn, a million beans!" Unfortunately, my father would not commit to gadoogling Ms. Ippleflap, as he was unimpressed by her photograph. "She is short, yes, delightfully so," he told me, "but she looks like a cross between Leonard Nimoy and whatever Leonard Nimoy ate for lunch today. I will only spill my seed into an Amish midget who instills in my noble wicket a happy smile!"

Fortunately, we got much luckier with Miss Prudence Cartgoody, a nineteen year old blonde lass who barely broke 3'6" and practically beamed at the suggestion that she nail a complete stranger for cash. "I have heard of this 'gadoogling' in the fair streets of Lancaster," she said, "from tourists who speak of the Pamela Anderson and the Hugh Grant. Am I then to expose my tendermuffin to a man-sir?"

"That would be part of the contract, yes, miss," she was told emotionlessly.

"It has the sound of pleasing work," Prudence said, nodding and untying her bonnet. "Can I shine anyone's rooster while they're here?" She was flown in to Lutzburg the next morning. By the time I ushered her off the chopper, my previous illusions of the Amish had been subtly altered. I really had no idea they were such money-hungry sluts. Maybe Witness actually got it right.

We took Prudence to my father's office. He looked her up and down, then bent over at the waist and shook her delicate hand.

"Good lady," he said in his most cultured voice, "I welcome you to the United States of America, and thank you from the bottom of my heart for helping me achieve my dream."

We had instructed Prudence not to say a word, figuring that what my father truly wanted was the traditionally perfect image of a silent, servile Amish midget from such books as Mill on the Floss and The Hunt for Red October. She remained quiet and smiled. Later I would learn that she had made the mistake of shaving her choodle and writing the words DO ME on her stomach in creamed corn, but apparently neither one of these transgressions was enough to distract my father.

"Let us retire to the antechamber," he said airily, and with that, they left myself and three TriBiOmniCom lawyers behind to somehow occupy ourselves for a while.

Six minutes later my father came out of the room, looking as triumphant as Christopher Cross when he accepted Rhythm Romp's 1977 Best Male Artist award. "You may give her the million dollars," he said, walking past us in his finest silk robe. "I have inserted my penis into her thelma from assorted angles and our contract is complete. Let the record show that Amish midget choodle is of a most delectable variety!"

Later that night, I found myself beneath a wildly bucking and newly rich Prudence as she bounced up and down on my own member in room 219 of the Lutzburg Super 8. She had decided to stay in the city, renouncing her teeny Amish ways for a life of unrestricted intercourse among the general populace. As I lifted her off me and set her down temporarily in the top drawer of the dresser to go shower and shave, I couldn't help but feel a little sad for our corruption of a once-airtight culture.

I was not afforded too much time for regret, however. My father frantically phoned the room as Pru lay there idly drawing circles of sperm on her chest.

There was something else he wanted now.

"Dirty sex on a zeppelin?" his chief legal counsel, Stanley Pickwit, asked in the cavernous expanse of Conference Room T at 1:17 a.m. "Do you realize how much that will cost, sir?!"

"I do," my father said confidently, smoking a cigar the size of the Erie Canal. He coolly surveyed his team of yes-men and then turned a kinder, more paternal eye towards me. "I will not leave this world having ever backed down from a challenge. What would my son think of me then?"

"I will always have the utmost respect and admiration for you, Papa," I said with total honesty.

"Pish posh," he muttered. "I, Hendricks Fingermelon, WANT something, and I shall have it. Thorpsalt, how much would it cost to rent a zeppelin and a lovely young lady to accompany me on it for the purposes of shnazzing her dry?"

Thorpsalt, a skinny drink of water who had made ass-kissing into a kind of performance art, actually hesitated for a moment. "Well, sir, I'm not quite sure if there are even any zeppelins in existence at the moment. Now, a blimp...."

"No blimps!" my father retorted. "I want to shnazz a woman on an authentic zeppelin in the skies of Berlin!"

Stanley Pickwit sighed. "Sir, building a zeppelin for such a purpose would cost millions of dollars."

"Don't forget the money it will take to find a comely, sexually experimentative woman who is also an experienced zeppelin pilot," my father said. "That condition is absolutely set in stone-I must yoidle the pilot. From behind at first, I should think, then possibly up against the dashboard. Zeppelins have dashboards, don't they?"

The logistical details of my father's new plan were debated for hours, but in the end, he was certainly going to get what he wanted, even if it meant dipping into TriBiOmniCom's sheltered cash reserves. I knew he would simply not be dissuaded. There was a fire in his eyes I had not seen since he hatched his 1991 plan to manufacture pocket combs that could also be ridden like mopeds. The yes-men and the butt-smoochers would have to learn that a man with a goal is a man with the ultimate weapon against hypocrisy and even mortality itself. My father would bang the daylights out of a zeppelin pilot in midair within eight weeks, and that was that.

Construction of the zeppelin began the following Wednesday in a massive Air Force hangar sixty miles south. I was to supervise the operation, from the hiring of the engineers to the contracting of the painters who would apply the vessel's name to its right side. During those eight weeks, concerned whispers about my father were heard in back rooms, limousines, and secret tool sheds. His enemies conspired in Starbucks cafes and in the changing rooms at Kmart to spread rumors that he was losing his mind and was a danger to his own company. The media gathered in the meat freezers of Taco Bells and inside rolled Persian carpets to plot a seemingly endless stream of shock headlines. HENDRICKS FINGERMELON RISKS PAST SUCCESSES FOR BOOTY. BRILLIANT C.E.O. SPENDS COMPANY ASSETS ON YUMGINA. FEARLESS ENTREPRENEUR LOST IN THE HARSH WILDERNESS OF CHOODLE. Through it all my father paid no heed, knowing, as I did, that the human soul is obligated to pursue its most powerful yearnings no matter what the cost. Whether a man is trying to climb Mount Everest, build a transcontinental railroad, bring Christian values to the Amazonian rain forest, or Vesuvius on some brunette's zoomers in the hold of a humungous airship, it was the quest that mattered, dammit, the quest.

I will never forget the way my late father's chest swelled when he puttered onto that military tarmac atop his CombScooter and first saw his custom-made zeppelin, christened The Minty Swan, being rolled out for public view on the day of its inaugural, and only, flight. I knew then that it was all worth it....and that it was not all quite over.

The pilot of the zeppelin was an unpleasant and just borderline-attractive lesbian named Winnifred Milwaukee. She was absolutely the only zeppelin pilot we had been able to find after an exhaustive search that spanned the continents. She had never had intercourse with a man before, and would accept no less than one million eight hundred thousand dollars for the grand event. "And if that bastard soups inside me," she warned us, "I'm gonna make him suck it out with a straw."

Twenty-one TriBiOmniCom representatives and assorted members of the press waved at the zeppelin as it rose into the air for its six day journey towards Germany, where, fourteen hundred feet above Terlippitzplatz, my father quickly dropped his pants and hoisted sail into Winnifred Milwaukee's reluctant snuzzer, referring to her as "the coldest dyke I've ever encountered". Ms. Milwaukee actually attempted to chloroform my father three days into the return trip when he suggested that she might have a happier life if she learned how to slurp wangie. "I got plenty even, though," she later told reporters. "I told the old prune I'd ram the blimp into the side of the Matterhorn if he didn't eat me out for three hours."

My father's face was still ashen from that particular experience when The Minty Swan (or the Lez Zeppelin, as some wits called it) touched down once again. But he managed to put on a wide smile and uncork a bottle of champagne for the photographers whose flashbulbs popped picture after picture of one of America's boldest patriots. TriBiOmniCom lost approximately eleven million dollars on the entire deal and its stock plummeted seventy-nine points, but as my father would tell his biographer just days before he died, "you cannot put a price on the sight of your funfoam hitting a woman in the ear at two thousand feet."

Two weeks after Winnifred Milwaukee cashed her oversized novelty check for a cool $1.8 million, my father's doctor informed him he had only seven more weeks to live, having contracted a rare disease called Coital Altitude Syndrome, which struck the central nervous systems of men in their fifties who engaged in sexual intercourse at heights too far above sea level. The business world bowed its head in regreftul silence upon hearing this news, while at the same time it breathed a hidden, hypocritical sigh of relief. TriBiOmniCom had been headed into the toilet since my father had turned his attentions away from the business world to focus on his ambitious penis-related challenges. He was expected to step down as CEO as early as the following weekend. A secret meeting of his closest advisors was called for Conference Room W at 10 a.m. on Saturday.

It was there that he revealed to us his desires to be provided with oral gratification by a Chinese teacher of motorcycle safety in center field during the ninth inning of the All-Star game.

Every great man has at some point approached a line past which those around him have the responsibility to urge him to stop, to go no further with his mad journey toward potential disaster. My father crossed that line at 10:02 that morning, and for two hours Stanley Pickwit, Fielding Thorpsalt, and even Hendricks Fingermelon's dutiful son labored to steer him away from this final stunt. This one would surely land him in jail, we insisted, and would destroy not only his own image but that of TriBiOmniCom itself, which had already suffered a harsh blow in the wake of the Senate's hearings into the company's refusal to hire anyone who had enjoyed The English Patient. We tried to explain to him that nailing an Amish midget in his office and banging a slutty lesbian in a gas-propelled balloon had rightfully made him a hero to dreamers everywhere, but being dragged out of Yankee Stadium half-naked would not go over too well in historical perspective. It was simply an impossibility.

My father lost his temper then and ordered us all out of the room. Who were we to doubt him? he shouted. Who were they to question a man who'd now had his penis in places they had only read about?

His burst of rage was even more dramatic than I thought. The next day, my father fired all eight hundred and twenty employees of TriBiOmniCom and sold the company to an overseas concern called The Norwegian Doughnut Collective. He pocketed the millions they paid him and announced in a press conference that he no longer wanted to be known as one of the greatest venture capitalists in American history. Instead he wished for "the prayers of all horny men everywhere as I attempt to attain coitus on the grandest stage of them all". He stopped there to tantalize the nation with suspense. I watched his announcement on the flat-screen Hitachi mounted on the wall of my favorite Kutzburg whorehouse, where I had retreated to mourn my loss of faith in my beloved father and to see if Paulette was available to give me one of her infamous Tongue Wheelies, a sexual maneuver so intensefully blissful that it is believed to have been what killed Bruce Lee and Grover Cleveland.

Naturally, word got out quickly about my father's exact plans, and security for major league baseball's All-Star game was beefed up to Code Red levels. There was little to worry about, I felt. Two weeks was not nearly enough time for my father to have made the necessary arrangements for his final epic sexual statement to mankind, although his total disappearance after the press conference made me a little concerned that he might be spending twenty-hour hours a day working on those damnable plans. I feared for his declining health.

When Mariano Rivera struck out Barry Bonds to bring the American League to within one out of victory on that hot July night, I finally relaxed. Even the announcers in the broadcast booth suggested that the only shnazzing the sellout crowd of fifty-eight thousand would get tonight was on the price of a souvenir program.

The security force on the ground seemed quite tense, however, and the television showed sixty-odd policemen standing catlike in foul territory, their eyes peeled for any sign of some wealthy nut dashing onto the field for sexual purposes. (Interesting trivia tidbit: Just such a thing had happened during Game One of the 1983 World Series, when the female owner of a well-known shoe company ran out onto the mound in a crucial two-out situation and actually conceived a child with Phillies pitching great Steve Carlton.)

Not even the most seasoned counter-terrorism expert, however, could have foreseen or guarded against what happened next.

Montreal Expos star Vladimir Guerrero was in the batter's box, waiting for a 1-1 pitch, when he dropped his bat and pointed skyward. A parachute had appeared in the sky above Yankee Stadium. My dying father, the famed industrialist and proudly demented pervert, was descending toward center field.

The policemen all began to rush toward the outfield to arrest him the moment he touched the grass. How could he have been so short-sighted as not to see that he would be nabbed so quickly, I remember thinking. It would have taken at least thirty seconds for his envisioned Chinese teacher of motorcycle safety to slurp him off, even if she had been able to materialize from nowhere. The cops were bound to snap cuffs on him long before anything could occur.

This time, it was not only me and a bunch of high-priced suits that had underestimated my father. The entire country was guilty this time. More than fifty million people watched on TV as he fell gently to earth wearing a parachute fortified to hold the weight of not one, but two, people. The second, 34-year-old Mai Linh, a resident of Dpho Fwap, Manchuria, noshed frantically on my father's wicket as he held stoutly onto her legs. Her upside-down slurpwork was cheered on by everyone in the stadium.

They hit the ground eight feet away from a stunned Bernie Williams, the noted Yankee outfielder who possessed three World Series rings and who now finally had one good baseball story to tell his grandchildren. Bare seconds before my father was surrounded by half the NYPD, Ms. Linh's cheeks were seen to bulge somewhat as a fountain of zither mix leaked out of the corners of her mouth, the result of an orgasm timed with dramatic perfection. Hendricks Fingermelon's eyes glazed over in silken pleasure as the crowd in the stands spilled out onto the field in wild celebration. The game was never completed, and in fact the sport of baseball was thereby banned forever from the globe. Just as Nostradamus had once predicted, a terrific amateur fellatrix had doomed the national pastime forever.

It was official then in the hearts and minds of Americans everywhere: My father was a visionary to be celebrated. He was greeted back in Lutzburg with a tickertape parade. He was pre-emptively voted Time Magazine's Man of the Year, and the Intercourse Hall of Fame in Reno, Nevada awarded him with a wax replica, placed in the main lobby of that historic building between Madonna and Monique LaCreme, the brave Frenchwoman, sometimes referred to as the Rosa Parks of masturbation, who in 1899 pioneered the fight for a woman's right to get off with a cucumber.

My father wrote me a note of forgiveness upon his return, telling me he wished to see me one last time before he died. I rushed to his estate, where he greeted me warmly on the south lawn.

"Son," he said, "I know it was too much to ask for anyone to believe in my All-Star Game Fellatio Adventure. Don't feel as if I turned my back on you. You will always be my pride and joy."

"Thank you, Papa," I said, tears streaming down my face. "I was never prouder to be your son than when you souped in that Chinese woman's mouth."

"Shortly I will die," he said, his voice cracking with emotion. "But I do not intend to go out like a lamb. Won't you assist me, boy, in devising a final sexual feat to test the limits of the human imagination?"

"But father," I said, "don't you want to spend your last days on earth resting and recounting your triumphs to your biographer?"

He put a gentle hand on my shoulder. "I shall rest in the bosom of heaven," he told me. "As long as I have one final dream to achieve, there is work to be done. So I ask you now, Pinky......will you help me?"