I, Globerapist

Prolog

I met a borracho in a bar and we fell into a deep discussion of cosmic matters. He claimed to have exhausted his funds on a one-way bus ticket into town. For many years, he’d been promising himself a trip to our little city, apparently. Why anyone would want to come here-anyone not an engineer or bureaucrat affiliated with the aerospace contractors that make their home in the industrial parks in the suburbs-is beyond me. We don’t even get many tourists out at the Astronautical Training Center run by the government. This burg is just too small and out of the way. It’s quiet and nothing happens and that’s exactly how we like it.

I’d been starved for intelligent conversation. You know I’ve always been a reader and even a thinker, and you know what it’s like to work with salesmen and account managers all day. Sometimes I think I’ll “go postal”, as they say, if I hear one more basketball game recounted in full detail. I kept buying this fellow drinks just to hear him talk. He was fascinating to me: widely read and cosmopolitan in his opinions; strangely so for someone who looked like an unwashed drifter. Few are the subjects we failed to touch on that evening. He was thirsty, too-kept putting them down about as fast as the barkeep could pour, but I didn’t mind footing the bill. Yes, we talked about everything under the sun, and I admit that I had a grand old time.

Finally, as the barmaid was wiping the empty tables and the parking lot was emptying out, he started to mutter under his breath, something about “seeking employ as a spaceman, in order to inseminate new worlds”. Anyway, I had no idea what he was talking about, and as it was getting to be pretty late and I was afraid the wife was worrying, I told him that I had to go, but I’d be happy to give him a lift to wherever it was staying. Turns out he had a room in one of the drifter hotels out by the switchyard. I pulled up in front and said goodbye and good luck and thanks for all the good yarns. I was waiting for him to get out, but he was fumbling around in his satchel for something. Finally he produced an oilcloth packet of dirty papers-it was this manuscript, which I’m sending you, Wilson, because I know how fascinated you are by any thing of this type. Told me he was going away for a long time, maybe forever, and he was real thankful for my hospitality and wanted me to have something. Then he got out of the car and disappeared into that old bum hotel and I never saw him again. Frankly, I just don’t want the damned thing lying around the house, but for some reason I was afraid to burn it. Anyway, have a look at it and tell me what you think……….

Youthful dreams

As long as I can remember, I have dreamt of fucking the world, or worlds like it. Orbs, worlds, planets, spheres, globes, balls…. these have always hypnotized my sexual eye. When I first read that scene in Robert A. Wilson’s “Illuminatus” books where the initiate inseminates a giant golden apple, I felt a powerful deja-vu. There ought to be some way to put my finger on the root of all this. I know that as a youth I was obsessed with cosmology, astronomy, celestial mechanics and whatnot. I often lay awake at night, masturbating at my leisure beneath the constellations of glowing star-stickers on my ceiling and feeling myself afloat within the bigness of the void. Like many people, I had a ritual I needed to perform in order to fall asleep. Quietly, quietly tugging my ten-year-old pod in a soothing rhythm, I would visualize those astronomical comparisons designed to give a sense of the size of outer space

…. the Earth is a grain of sand at the second base of a ballfield in Brooklyn….the Sun is a grapefruit at home plate…the nearest star is another grapefruit in Green Bay….and the next nearest a Ping Pong ball in Peking…..

and a rushing, vertiginous, almost nauseating ecstasy would shoot through my stomach. To be a dot was pure joy. To be relieved of the responsibilities of size. After all, what harm could a dot do? What black act a speck perform? At large amongst the insensate, crushing grandeur of those impossibly vast balls as they rolled along their tracks, I knew the freedom of tinyness and insignificance. Others have reported the same feeling at that age, but always described as terrifying and bewildering. The sensation, however, was the same-suddenly conscious of the Earth’s rotation; one is flung off into emptiness; where one disappears.

So it would appear that my obsession with the celestial spheres is grounded in ecstatic feelings of tinyness, perhaps learned in the womb, where, after all, we float. I’m sure that psychological science, aided by myth, would have the World represent Mother, that big blue ball which birthed us and nursed us and whom we can never outgrow. Tied always to the apron strings…at first we love her and her largeness comforts us, but at puberty something happens, we rebel. It was around then, at age 13 or so, that my innocent desire for the cosmos, which was, I’m sure, in its way sexual in an infantile, all-consuming fashion, changed and became lust. In the difficult teenage and early adult years to come, lust would curdle in frustration and become venom and my weightless visions of the void were replaced with black daydreams of cosmic rape. I’m well aware that I’m skipping over some important history here, but suffice it to say that those were dark and pimply years and they made me a venomous and unpleasant man.

Janitor in a gentleman’s club

Let’s skip forward now. The story of how I, a boy with such promise, grew to be a scrawny and unshaven man, living in furnished rooms, eating soup unheated directly from the can and reading the Russians while making marginal notes in red ink such as “That’s me!” and (triple underline) “I’ve SEEN this bastard around here somewhere” will be told elsewhere; or maybe it will never see the light of day. In order to learn how I found my calling and my obsession, we need know no more than this: I was a young underground man, nursing frustrations in my funk-hole, frequently masturbating, furtively coveting the round buttocks of girls. I smelt, was usually intoxicated, and was quite unemployable. Thus, the downward slide in prestige of employment: from cake-decorator in a lesbian-owned-and-operated bakery to surly used -bookstore clerk to the final rung, where I made a stand and clung.

Thinking to turn my chief pastime to gold, as it were, I sought and gained employment as a janitor in one of the many gentlemen’s clubs in our metropolis. A peep-show palace where men came to masturbate at the spectacle of Live Nude Girls There, finally, was a dark place where I could skulk and sulk, unwatched, unwashed, with holes and rends in my garments, minimum wage almost too good for me. I had only to endure the brusque and dismissive managerial style of the Iranian family that ran the place. I did a good job, too. My duty was to remain in constant movement between the various floors of that place, pushing a mop-wringer brimming with piney suds. Dark halls lined with narrow doors. A green light would go on above the door, indicating the “all clear”, a spent client would emerge, fiddling with his zipper, avoiding eye contact, and hurry to the stairs, and I would slosh my mop and shuffle into the spermiferous and reeking compartment to swab the decks. Indeed, the nautical metaphor comes easily to mind, because in those long, closeted and red-lit halls I often imagined myself a third-class steward or messmate on some infernal tramp freighter, all holds loaded to the hatches with a full cargo of spunk, all hatches battened down for a one-way cruise to the slimiest depths of the underworld.

Geometrical obsessions

In those days, I had a curious tic of constantly drawing, on any available surface, small doodles of three-dimensional shapes, be they cubes, pyramids, or more complicated forms. You may be familiar with this sort of thing; in the language of draftsmanship and mechanical drawing it’s called “isometric representation”. The form is shown from an above and side angle of 45 degrees each. All hidden lines are dotted. One day, killing time, I discovered how to represent a sphere: first a circle is drawn. A small ellipse near the top of the circle represents the visible Polar Regions, a dotted ellipse of the same size near the bottom; the invisible antipodes. The lines of latitude and longitude are then filled in, in the same fashion

. I was entranced by this new method of depicting spheres and one day, after mopping a unicellular blot left high on a cubicle wall by a client of above-average ejaculatory force, I took out my Magic Marker and limned an inconspicuous yet pleasingly orbicular globe in an out-of-the-way corner of the booth. Not long after, I had cause to revisit the same booth, this time to mop up a widely scattered pattern of small droplets that, to the trained and professional eye of a cumhouse mopboy, bespoke a particularly frenzied and vigorous style. I couldn’t resist leaving another sphere next to the first, and that’s when my secret mark was born. Like a fighter plane crew chief painting dead Zeros on the fuselage of an ace, I left my sphere in the corner of every come- compartment in that place, one per ejaculation mopped.

That camaraderie which supposedly exists between the downtrodden

I should say something here about that camaraderie which supposedly exists between the downtrodden. Although I had something in common with the girls who worked in that joint, viz., that our paychecks all depended upon the ejaculatory urge, they, burdened with the insufferably humiliating nature of their job, needed someone to look down upon with scorn. Unfortunately, something in my physiognomy, spirit, or job description nominated me for that unpleasant role, and so, instead of the foxhole solidarity one might expect to find amongst the footsoldiers of the ejaculatory trade, it was strictly a case of me against them. In a word: they hated me, and for them I reserved an especial spite, which they returned, with interest. How could they not hate me? And yet, mopping the dark halls, confronted at every turn with fat bare bottoms and breasts, masturbation my only friend, how could I not look upon them with lust and lust’s black brother, spite? They obviously knew, with the sharp sensitivity to insult or scorn of the lowly, that I saw myself as better than they, and I imagine that I became something of a stand-in for, and reminder of, the clientele- a regular face to put upon the faceless masses of furtive patrons. I was, in my lust and spite and skulking nature, Everyman who had sneered at them as he gaped, called them foul names as he spilled his seed, and slunk away, head down, ashamed of his lust, leaving a paltry tip and a few blots of sperm on the glass.

I never even tried to be friendly with any of the strippers save one. From the beginning I despised them for their idleness, their vanity, their petty jealousies and rivalries. As far as I could tell, their conversation consisted of nothing but complaints about their cretinous paramours and fights over small personal items such as lipsticks and hairbrushes. Every once in a while, for variety’s sake, they would engage in a spirited debate over which neighborhood thug drove the most expensive automobile. Their leader was a half-breed Latina named, incongruously, “Jenny”, and her, I wanted, with all the venom at my disposal.

Jenny

Jenny was a very pretty girl with a spoiled and petulant face, the thick body of a peasant, and wavy black hair, pulled tightly back from her low forehead into a cascading topknot. Her lips were outlined in black pencil, her ears adorned with giant gypsy-hoops of gold. Her outstanding feature was her ass, which was very large and round, and which drove me to redouble my masturbatory efforts. Scarcely a day passed that didn’t find me in the stinking employee toilet, bent over an erection like Portnoy, imagining squeezing a ribbon of seed like toothpaste into the crevice between her hemispherical assets.

I was so starved for attention that I ran countless errands for Jenny just to talk to her. Pregnancy testers, red Twizzler sticks, Benson and Hedges cigarettes (which she thought were classier than the Newports everyone else smoked), buckets of chicken from Popeye’s, tubs of diet sodas, dime bags of alternative tobacco. I was willing to be her factotum, her man on the street; whatever she wanted me to be, though it availed me not. Standing in the doorway of one of the little cubicles, which smelled like nail-polish remover, cum, and cigarette smoke, I was always awkward and horny. I would try to lock eyeballs with her tits (which were quite small and out of proportion with her heavy-duty chassis) as she bent over in her terrycloth dressing gown, which she wore when she wasn’t working the floor in a white bikini looking for customers, but she was unavailable to the male janitorial gaze. Her lip would twist and she’d hiss“The fuck is you looking at, flaco? Get your skinny pendejo ass out of here before I smack the shit out of you!” (The “oo” sound in “looking” pronounced to rhyme with the “u” in “ukulele”.)

There was no way for me to stand my ground in the face of that kind of blunt scorn. I’d tear my eyes away from her large bottom and focus on my pool of piney suds. Her G-strings were unbearably stimulating. She had a different one for each day of the month, sometimes two a day. There was a strange difference in texture between the skin of her rear and that of her face. On her ass, the skin was rather coarse and large-pored, with a greyish tinge; overall reminiscent of new-plucked chicken flesh, while her face was smooth, youthful and pretty. This discrepancy seemed to point at something larger- metaphysical even.

After a while, I started to get a bit obsessed with Jenny’s ass. If one needed me to perform an errand, I could reliably be found shuffling around the neighborhood of her cube with a hangdog expression, trying to catch a glimpse of it. I wanted to fuck it, although Lord knows I hadn’t the solidity or the force to deal her the pounding I dreamt of: my little noodle would have been completely lost between those twin medicine balls and she’d have shaken me off as a baboon shakes off a beetle. All in all, I felt an aggrieved sense of being dispossessed of something that was rightfully mine. As a private dancer, she was, in fantasy anyway, the property of anyone, and my constant exposure to her milieu served only to erode in my mind the barrier between the fantasy and the reality; where I should have grown cynical I grew soft. No doubt she WAS a whore, to the last bone in her body; all women are, but since I had nothing she wanted she was as off-limits to me as the moon and the stars. Watching her perform day after day for any hunchback in possession of a picture of President Jackson aggravated my sense that I’d somehow been ousted from my rightful position as regards ownership of her, and that only spite prevented her from reinstating me. Perhaps it was ammonia fumes that were responsible, or that hyperactive salsa music that used to blare from the speakers at all hours; or maybe excessive masturbation had perturbed my equilibrium. Looking back on the events that set me upon my path, I discover upon introspection that practically any stimulus would have served. If I seem to be regarding Jenny as a bit of an object, it’s for this reason, although admittedly, a person as self-centered as I needs little excuse to view his fellow man as cutouts moving stiffly in his own private puppet show.

Precipitating events

A Rum State of Affairs

After my sheepish non-courtship had been limping along for some several months, Jenny seemed, overnight, to tire of my presence. For a while she’d apparently been amused with an errand boy who read big books on break, and tolerated, or at least ignored, my feeble flirtations, but at some point she seemed to get wise to the malice and contempt underlying my fixation on her and my person abruptly became noxious. Maybe she’d caught me unawares, peeping at her with malevolent cow eyes. Whatever the explanation, she no longer summoned me to run out for her lunch and cigarettes, and when I tried to inch up to her as she leaned on her high stool between clients, she sneered at me and drove me away with personal remarks and an imperious flap of her well-manicured hand. I persisted: gazing hungrily at her buttocks had become a habit I couldn’t do without. If I couldn’t pilfer my daily eyeful while performing as her stooge, I’d just have to take it, boldly. Her loss of all tolerance for me actually put a bit of steel in my backbone and I took to parking my wringer bucket at the end of the hall and leaning on the mophandle, arms akimbo, staring at her body with a naked need. Needless to say, she didn’t put up with this for long. Before the day was out, management had informed me that I had better keep in constant janitorial motion with my gaze fixed firmly upon the floor; and if I was spotted irritating the dancers by touching their asses with my eyeballs one more time, I’d be out on the street.

I pulled myself together and managed to play the part of model mop-boy for about a week, but all the while I was seething inside. I can’t tell you how bitterly annoying it is for a man of my education to suffer insult and scorn from a near- illiterate; who probably moves her lips while reading the “TV Guide” listings, a completely materialistic sow who keeps herself in gaudy jewelry by witnessing the ejaculations of sexually frustrated strangers. Her non-tolerance of me, her open disgust for me, went straight to my gizzard and started burning me up from inside. I masturbated more, not less, but thoughts of lovemaking turned to thoughts of violent, forceful intercourse. The problem is that her ass seemed to grow in my mind, the farther I was driven from its presence in the real world; and the angrier and more lustful and resentful I became, the larger it seemed to swell in my masturbatory fantasies, to the point where it was capable of absorbing, insensate, all my malice and force. In my own fantasies, I could inflict no damage or pain upon it; I was as puny as a bug raping a beanbag. Behind my eyelids, I clambered upon it, flung myself upon it, flailed at it frenziedly, all to no avail. I tried my hand at every method of self-abuse, hoping for a different outcome. No dice.

A Fateful Day

On a fateful Monday, I spent morning sloshing about, eyes swollen from lack of sleep. My penis was so sore that I’d had to swaddle it in lotioned tissue to prevent my drawers from irritating it. The entire previous night had been spent writhing upon my cot, praying for sweet relief from the fantasies that tormented me. I’d squeeze out orgasm after weakening and belated orgasm in search of sleep, each requiring more effort than the last, until I was completely wrung out and exhausted and fell into a hellish doze populated with unbearably gigantic entities like those postulated by Mr. C.S. Lewis in his “Out of the Silent Planet”, communicating nonsense from one end of the ether to the other in a hideous booming drone. I’d have called in sick the next day and taken to my bed, but with rent overdue I needed every last kopeck, drachma and shekel. By the time my lunch break arrived, I was so cranky and sore, physically and metaphysically, that I went straight to the liquor store and spent my lunch money on a poorboy of Tokay, which I drank straight off in a phone booth. Somewhat refreshed and feeling that I was onto a temporary solution to my misery, I returned to the liquor store and spent my carfare for the rest of the week on a pint of the cheapest vodka. Which likewise I did drink down posthaste. It was a different mop-boy that staggered back to work late, under the glaring Islamic eye of the manager. I felt aloof, expansive, and indifferent to the petty scorn of the insects with whom I- temporarily of course, due to a slight detour taken on my road to better things- was forced to associate.