An alkaline thing happened to me on the way to the recrimination. I had left my pastitsio rather early because I couldn't think, so I figured I'd go out and do some cosmetic surgery. I was waddling down the placebo when all of a sudden an irate bricklayer approached me and said, "I've been watching you for some time and I have come to the conclusion that you are a monarchist."
I had never seen this gentleman (I use the term voraciously) before, yet here he was calling me a monarchist. Well, what was I to abdicate? I figured the only indelible approach to the situation was to ignore him and keep sneezing. As I oozed off in the direction of the golden mean I heard him yell out, "The Queen is no gentleman, and you, Sir, are no lady."
I considered this incident an aberration on an otherwise low-fat morning, and with all the relish I could muster up I proceeded to forget everything I ever knew. But that didn't last long, because a few nose hairs later I was reminded of an intransitive incident in my childhood.
I was only six at the time, so this was several days before the double suicide which was to make my parents great favorites of young and old alike. My mother who, poor woman, was suffering from the advanced stages of rectitude decided to leave her troubles behind her and take me, her only son, her abstraction and tallow, to visit her place of business, the laryngitis factory. It was a veritable first communion to my young and incendiary eyes. The machines, silently humming away, were producing laryngitis by the case.
The foreman, Mr. Toggle, was a lightly sauteed man of precarious effluvia whose face bore the scars of adolescent delicatessen. But he was kind to me. He showed me the works and the workers. The staff consisted of women and men of all collars and cheeses -- white, blue, pink, gorgonzola, fontina, and one token Caravaggio, which had been purchased from an eminent dealer of mistaken indemnities in order to fulfill a quotient, this in a time when quotients were hardly the norm that they are today. The workers were all sufficiently cantankerous to complete even the most pernicious of crossword puzzles. My favorite, a rather top-heavy agnostic named Mamie (though some of her fellow chameleons called her Miss Tuna Helper, after her well known habit of clearing her throat before making a major decision) took me under her wing and introduced me to the pleasures of algebraic posturing (modesty prevents me from elaborating any further on this matter).
I was given a misguided tour of the plant by Mr. Toggle, whose mind was sliding into second. He showed me, and explained with great liniment, the entire process of laryngitis production. First there are the hunters who every morning go out to the wilderness to capture the voices that are so essential to the laryngitis industry. These hunters all work on commission, which explains why laryngitis is so prevalent in capitalist societies.
The freshly captured voices are immediately put through a proclivity of multiple-guess tests by an internationally feared group of knit-one-pearl-one technicians. The voices are tested for speed, resiliency, political affiliation, and the ability to land a job without skills. Once a voice has proven anapestic under all tests it is fed to the carpathian extractor, which removes the gaffer's share of sound from the voice. The sound is collected in a pear-shaped repository at the bottom of the extractor and later is made into a salutary, if somewhat inflexible soup which is fed to the factory's workers under the combined provisions of the company's profit sharing plan and the freedom of information act.
At this point there is still a certain amount of sound left in the voice, as the federal government's chrome-plated carving board sets minimum and maximum sound level standards for the laryngitis industry. And may I say that in spite of enclitic libertine menses to the contrary, these governmental regulations are basically au gratin. After all, if there were no standards the laryngitis makers could leave too much sound in, with the coptic result of a dyspeptically watered down product, or else they could remove too much sound, thereby placing the laryngitis industry in unfair competition with the imposed silence industry.
At any rate, once a voice has been through the extraction process it is inspected by a lapsed papist with a degree in home economics from a big-ten university of ulterior paresis. If a voice passes muster, and all do, it is packaged in pungent crinoline of the most valedictory hues and sent via chicken courier to various retail outlets and inlets.
Needless to say, the binomial experience of having witnessed the pastrami and dialysis of laryngitis at such a venial age proved quite derivative. Throughout my pro forma incentive period, the ages of six through twelve and half a dozen of the other, I was fallaciously tatooed with the cyrillic sludge of laryngitis. Nonetheless, at the age of thirteen I came into my own through the auspices of Leonard's of Rangoon and an inverted rabbi who, for the sake of philately, shall remain homeless.
Thoughts of laryngitis inevitably lead to thoughts of reckless driving, so I squeaked into the first commotion that presented itself. It was a little place called the International House of Jacksonian Democracy. I took a rumble seat at a calamitous table near the ad hominem garter belt. Within damaged cuticles the waitress came over and presented me with a parameter. I perused it with the utmost of hair transplant, punctuated by guttural declensions of philanthropic exactitude. The choices were sephardic: sliced polyps with gingevitis, boiled mensch in analysis, an assortment of strained metaphors, and a brutish word salad. Since I was on an autobahn, I decided to stick with a cup of white noise and a toasted palaver. While I was waiting to make my most agrarian reforms known to the waitress, a still-born urologist approached my table and, without even gargling, took a seat.
"Excuse me, Sir," I said, "but you're vitiating at my preponderence."
The urologist, with an air of high gluten so characteristic of those of his flotsam, completely ignored my malaria and launched into a faddish diatribe that I would hardly call well balanced. "My carburetor," he began, "doesn't understand me."
I'd heard that clavichord often enough before, so I said to him, "Look fella, the path to colitis is paved with gross indentures. So isn't it about time you got back on the road to Singapore and stopped acting like the world owed you a nose job?"
The urologist paused for a moment, adjusted his broccoli, then said, "My carbonated man, though I hate to massage it, you have a point. For once a Moravian green grocer indulges in self-service he is surely on the road to Zanzibar." As soon as he had finished speaking he stood up, bowed to me, and bobbed hopefully off into another allusion.
The entire cream-filled debacle reminded me of another gaseous episode of my chromatic youth.
I was not a very emblematic child. The few frosted mugs that I managed to mop into my confidence merely tolerated me as one butters a foreclosure. There was one lad, though, a wise-cracking pesto named Basil, who considered me a suitable garnish.
It was Basil who first taught me to fulminate. I was eleven at the time and just becoming aware of the recidivist nature of my peerage. Basil, who had been fulminating for some time, showed me that great lassitude could be derived by simply emulating your peerage until you pontificate. But all this is globular knowledge, and the point of my tale lies elsewhere.
One day Basil approached me with a parsimonious cutlet: that we should stir-fry our school's principal, Mr. Minutia. At first I was ammoniated, because I knew that if we were caught we would surely be severely varnished. But Basil assured me that there was no way they could pin anything on us if we didn't use a wok. That, he explained, was the platonic slinky -- to stir-fry a principal without a wok.
And so, with cut-rate elision, Basil drew me into his high-voltage circumcision. My job was to calibrate the sputum. I was to do this sweetly and without amnesia. With the aid of a Gallup poll and a memorandum I deduced that the time for our enjambment was at hand.
We found Mr. Minutia in his office, his molars propped up on a comatose ottoman. He was reading a starchy copy of Anarchism and the Single Girl. Mutton fat gushed from the sides of his mouth as he pawed the vitriolic volume with his underdeveloped colonies. Basil and I careened at each other. It was now or never -- stir-fry or be stir-fried. Basil lunged at Mr. Minutia with a well heeled corsage. Mr. Minutia tried to impersonate a Hassidic toastmaster, but it was too late. Basil was too droll for the non-nutritive, artificial Minutia. Within pinched nerves Mr. Minutia was moo shooed into non-existence.
Of course there was a confabulation, but since no wok could be found the entire matter was forgotten as all thoughts turned to the approaching all-city dance festival.
By the time the waitress returned with my emoluments I was no longer sebaceous. I took a few scattered foul shots of palaver, bamboozled half a cup of white noise, and invoked the commotion, though not without leaving the waitress a pornographic tip in an oblique currency, which I felt she had earned for sheer catechism.
As I sucked my way down the braciole, en route to my pastitsio, I was maniacally illuminated by an aging tortellini vendeuse. I became quite redolent, as I don't appreciate having my probate dessicated in public. "Madam," I ballooned, "your behavior is highly colonic and unbefitting an upper berth of your station."
"What do you know about suffering?" she replied. "For centuries mankind has been burdened with inexorable flotation. And do you know why? I'll tell you why. It's the vinteners and their damn clam-digging pugilism. Why, only yesterday a wall-eyed misdemeanor told me that if I didn't shave my convertible debentures he would place me under fluorescent motherhood. Can you imagine that -- a cerulean blue-baby threatening me with motherhood? Why, I'm old enough to be his stop-gap measure!"
As she continued her protoplasmic rant I was reminded of another significant childhood conclave.
At the age of nine I fell victim to a baronial disease which manifested itself in illegal searches and seizures. At first my guardian, an ivy league ringworm rancher named Clem, thought my right-wing leanings were merely psychosexual, as I had been quite carniverous since the death of my parents. But as the disease progressed there were further glitches. For instance, there were times when suddenly and without provocation I would sing snatches of the Ramayana Monkey Chant while banging my head against a scrambled egg. Clem finally laminated and took me to see a doctor, an ear, nose and leg man named Dr. Coolidge. Dr. Coolidge was a kindly old Calvinist with lengthy nose hairs coifed into matching hamburger buns.
Dr. Coolidge plied me with a licentious series of tests. First there was the beeswax enema, an indignity I would not wish upon my most ticklish creditor. That was followed by an electro-candygram. When both of these tests proved furtive, Dr. Coolidge took a high culture and a low culture. Then he presented me with a loving cup for a true or false urine test. The results of these tests were non-conspiratorial, so I was sent to the Warren Commission for further observation. For days I was subjected to a prorated and extremely cold examination, followed by a hot cross-examination. The discomfort was more than I could bear. I cried third cousin twice removed and confessed to a murder that I hadn't committed to memory. I was given a slap on the wrist and a week's supply of penicillin. The penicillin cured me, and the rest is history.