Whistle & Fish Werewolf Tales

…poor athletes from places like Hyena Anus, Africa, if not corporately sponsored, can’t compete against those from industrialized nations who are branded with Nike swoops or Speedo wedges (or who, in the case of Chinese athletes are underwritten by The People’s money). They can’t afford the diet of their peers, nor their trainers, nor their technologically advanced suits, nor their lifestyles. The Hyena Anus athletes train by walking to the Olympic Games, where they dine on gruel and rat parts and sleep on grass mats under the fleet of vehicles that transport America’s Team to and from the games. That they are even seeded in the finals should draw the attention of reporters, and if they win a medal the story should be splashed on the front pages of newspapers, magazines and televisions around the world, because this, this is what the Olympic games are really about. Today the New York Times carries a piece by John Tierney entitled “Let the Games Be Doped”, suggesting Olympians should not be restricted from enhancing their abilities with a little genetic mutation or pharmaceutical stimulation. I’m of the mind that Mr. Tierney should be taken out back of the Times building by several doped-up weight lifters who kick the crap out of him for putting such a thing in the minds of pharmaceutical corporation executives. I recoil at the idea of genetically altered humongoid mutants pumped on the latest designer amphetamine branded by Pfizer, Merck or Bristol Myers Squibb going through the motions of competition. “Visit your physician and ask how new and improved Mercurine can enable you to win the Boston Marathon.” I’m already tired of all this nationalistic display of excess, because it no longer represents the height to which human athletes can aspire, but has become a jingoistic argument over swimsuits, doping, age, or judge’s bias. And when I think the next big news story will be a bunch of narcissistic politicians waving flags and insisting they are better qualified to run the nation further into the ground, I want to journey back eons through time and find the first monkey who looked up at the stars and willed himself to shed his tail and walk upright, and I want to crush the wretched little beggar under my heel. Maybe the next sentient race will be smart enough to learn from our mistakes, though my guess is, if they’re carbon life forms, they will not. If I could only convince myself this is just another bad acid flashback, I could probably calm down a bit and not have little green images popping in front of my eyes as my elevated blood pressure bursts tiny capillaries in my brain.

I need to get laid (or get religion). Badly.

A reminder to myself: you can pass this by.

On October 13, 1982 the Clash opened a show for the Who on the Shea Stadium stop of their farewell tour. They were a band at the peak of their game. They had released five astonishing albums in a row, including two that are widely featured in critics’ picks of punk’s best (the eponymous debut and London Calling, considered the best rock ‘n’ roll album of all time by some); they had finally broken into the top of the charts with “Rock the Casbah”; and though they were on the verge of imploding as a group, the tension crackled in their live shows. They were the new rock heroes opening for retiring rock heroes. Heirs apparent. Within months they’d be history.

The Shea Stadium show is part of a wealth of live Clash material being released in October of this year. Anyone who knows me more than a day understands I still believe they’re the only band (with the possible exception of the Beatles) that ever really mattered. So this news makes me ecstatic. It even makes up for the torturous experience of sitting through “Prozac Nation” last night.

Besides, by then American political grandstanding and mudslinging will be at an all-time high. The Clash live at Shea Stadium will be a nice distraction. God knows, I’ll probably need it.

*

An aside: Robert Christgau on the Clash.

Give ‘Em Enough Rope: “…these familiar contradictions follow upon the invigorating gutter truths of the first album for a reason — they’re truths as well, truths that couldn’t be stated more forcefully with any other music.”

The Clash: “Cut for cut, this may be the greatest rock and roll album (plus limited-edition bonus single) ever manufactured in the U.S.”

London Calling: “Warm, angry, and thoughtful, confident, melodic, and hard-rocking, this is the best double-LP since Exile on Main Street.”

Black Market Clash: “First side combines B’s and a U.K.-only album cut from ’77-’78, when everything they did was touched with the desperate euphoria of revolutionary holdouts, with two garageland covers, the Toots appropriate and the Booker T. a stroke. Second is spacy Clash dub plus hooks, with the yearning ‘Bankrobber’ more lyrical than anything else they’ve committed to plastic. Yet.”

Sandinista!: “…if this is their worst — which it is, I think — they must be, er, the world’s greatest rock and roll band.”

Combat Rock: “…the babble surrounding Robert De Niro on ‘Red Angel Dragnet,’ for instance, may well be the first evidence ever that Taxi Driver has something real to say about urban oppression.”

At the core, I am a Luddite. I dislike change and resist progress. Although I have been an early adopter of all things pertaining to the Web and on my computer, outside that framework I loathe gadgets. The clothes washer in my home has a dial with three settings: regular, delicate, and permanent press. I dial in the size of the load and the temperature settings, pull a knob, and I’m off. The clothes dryer is equally basic: turn a dial, push a knob, and the clothes spin until dry. The refrigerator has no automatic ice maker, no fancy stuff on the door, nothing more complicated than a light that comes on when I open it. Some days, when examining the anarchic state of its contents, I wish the light didn’t work. None of my appliances contain television screens, fancy led buttons or are hooked remotely into computers. None of them talk to me in cheery synthesized voices explaining how they are to be maintenanced or serviced. I like it that way. I don’t want to establish personal relationships with inanimate objects. It’s bad enough that I have begun speaking fondly of my iMac, or that I sometimes wake with a start in a nightmarish fever, worried that she might allow another’s data to occupy her hard drive. It’s unnatural. One should not be on such intimate terms with a machine.

It’s at least part of the reason I’ve resisted owning a cell phone. They’re a little too ubiquitous for comfort. People become far too attached to them and to the notion of being available always and everywhere. (Nothing disturbs me more than seeing humans in public places with Borg-inspired Bluetooth devices protruding like futuristic fashion accessories from the sides of their heads. Who on earth is so necessary that they have to be perpetually connected to a communications device? Look at it this way: No one needs to be more accessible than the President of the United States. The day he shows up at a press conference sporting a hot pink Bluetooth headset is the day I’ll start reconsidering their usefulness.)

Cell phones have created a whole new definition for the word “rude”. Gone are the days when people politely excused themselves before answering the corded telephones in their homes. The cell phone reigns supreme. Nothing galls me more than engaging in conversation with someone who suddenly holds up the index finger signaling I should hold my thought so he or she can take a call. Some don’t even give me the finger. They simply exit conversation and answer the phone. It’s a cell call: I’m supposed to understand. (The Borg-wired don’t even exit the conversation; they just start speaking into the air and leave me wondering whether I’ve lost my mind when the topic of discussion shifts from non-Neutonian physics to the disposition of a pet Guinea pig that is locked away in a kennel for the weekend.)

Cell phones, I have concluded, are the spawn of the devil. Except for simple buy-as-you go plans that I purchased so friends and family might be easily connected when I was away from home, I have resisted owning one.

Until now.

I have suddenly come into the possession of a second- or maybe third-generation Nokia that has me more convinced than ever cell phones are demonic (or at the very least part of a Japanese plot to roll back the effects of World War II and dominate the world).

It does everything: makes calls, rings one way for one set of callers (the ones I’ll ignore), another way for another set (these I might consider taking), still other ways for individuals who always warrant attention, checks email, keeps track of time (clock, timer, and stopwatch), makes wonderfully grainy photographs and video clips, sends and receives text messages, plays games (thumb-bowling rocks!), holds notes, surfs the Web, minds dates, and keeps track of the weather. If there are things it doesn’t do, there are probably applications available that do them.

Needless to say, I am obsessed with the device. Since I’ve had it, I’ve sent and received text messages, checked email from restaurants, talked to friends from remote locations and Googled something to prove to a friend I knew what I was talking about. The Google thing put the bridle on me. At that moment I was obsessed.

Since then I’ve been eying the little phone lovingly. I flip open the screen to be sure it still works. I get nervous when the green bar in the power meter goes below a certain level. I find myself wondering why no one has messaged me in the last ten minutes. I even held up an index finger to stop a companion in mid-sentence so I could take a call.

This afternoon I found myself longing for a sleek Bluetooth headset.

Where can I find a chapter of Cell Phones Anonymous?

Some years ago — more than I care to admit — I was a freshman at the local community college, sitting in a Composition 101 class, listening to a professor tell how one should think before committing words to paper. He carefully explored the logical nature of expository writing, explaining in fine detail how a thesis statement should be constructed, how it should contain an overview of all the paragraphs to follow, and how great thesis statements did so without sounding like every other thesis statement in the universe. He then read the beginning paragraphs from a number of classic essays, and that’s when he put the hook in me.

He was tall, ruddy-complexioned, mid-thirties, neither gaunt nor fat but somewhere between; obviously once well-conditioned, he had grown a little soft in the middle. His hair was the pale color genuine blonds turn just before they gray, and his eyes were sky blue. He appeared at times painfully shy, awkward in front of people, in some ways the antithesis of a teacher; but when he read aloud enthusiasm crept into his voice, and his great love for his mother tongue leant him a note of confidence he lacked at other times. The written word was his One True Religion, the classics were his cathedral, and he was a deeply devoted evangelist of the faith. He talked about writing the way most men talk about God.

He also wrote, though I did not learn this until much later in our relationship. He wrote terse, carefully worded Southern gothic short stories; he wrote a dark, dense novella; and he wrote poetry, lots of poetry. “If the novel is the king of literature,” he once told me, “then poetry is surely its prince.” His poems were like finely crafted Swiss watches, each phrase a tiny gear in a larger clockwork, each precisely interlocking with the next, recording the passage of time, ticking down a man’s years in his love of the South, especially the Appalachian South. Many of his poems were published: some in smaller magazines, some in celebrated literary journals. They deserved publication; they deserve wider reading.

We became acquainted as more than student and teacher on a fluke. When he returned the first paper I submitted in his composition class, a fat red “F” was scrawled on top of the front page. I scoured the pages, searching for places where grammar had been corrected or errors had been ticked off; they were clean. Incensed, I waited until class ended and the room was empty before I confronted him, slamming the essay down on his desk and demanding, “What is this? I didn’t deserve an F.”

Harry Dean looked up from the book he was reading and said in his characteristically soft voice, “No, sir. The person who wrote that essay deserves a much higher grade.”

I couldn’t believe my ears: “Are you saying I plagiarized this paper?”

“I am.”

“I wrote every word.”

Harry’s steely eyes were giving nothing away. “No one,” he said, “in this school wrote that essay.”

“I did, and I’ll prove it,” I insisted. “I’ll write every word of my next assignment right here in class. Under your nose. I can write.”

So I did. Every word at a desk directly in front of his. Nothing on the desktop but a handful of notebook paper and a blue ballpoint pen. When I was done, Harry apologized. He turned the “F” paper into an “A” and gave me an “A” for the second paper as well. Years later, when Harry edited the college’s first literary anthology, my essay appeared in it.

“I couldn’t believe anyone in this town cared about writing,” he told me later. “You don’t expect an essay like that from a Comp 101 student.”

It was the beginning of a thirty-three year friendship, one that started with Harry mentoring me through an introduction to Southern literature. At his insistence I read William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy, Eudora Welty and Katherine Anne Porter. Zora Neale Hurston, Flannery O’Connor, and Carson McCullers became familiars, as did later writers, James Dickey, Reynolds Price and John Kennedy Toole. We’d meet for lunch in the canteen and wear out others at the table, talking about books. His wife invited me to dinner in their home, where I met his two sons and where Harry and I argued about Jazz Era writers and Beat Poets. At one point I extolled Charles Bukowski, and Harry slammed his fist down on the table and shouted, “He isn’t a poet! He’s a fad!” Some years later, during a telephone conversation he recanted, “He might be a poet after all.” Harry never forgot, and he never clung to a notion he couldn’t support. He was a guy you rely on to tell you the truth.

We were both political lefties; we doubted the church but could not divorce ourselves completely from the notion of God; and we loved the English language. We’d sit up late into the night, discussing verbal philosophies, hacking away at deconstructionism, and marveling over semiotic constructs. He was one of a handful of people I could talk with about meaningful things without being ridiculed or humored.

He was a straight-up guy, a good father, and a deep thinker; few things in life are more important. He loved music, wrote songs, and played several musical instruments; there, too, his passions were rooted in the folk and bluegrass traditions of the Appalachian South. Even after I left school and we fell out of constant touch, I considered Harry one of my better friends. When we did talk, we simply picked up the thread of our last conversation, whether it was two days or two years ago, and we ran with it. At the center of every discussion was a single question, “Who are you reading now?”

We won’t pick up another thread. Harry died last Friday in a Chattanooga hospital. I owe him a lot. My understanding of the South would be much shallower without his influence, and my appreciation of literature would be much poorer. He was one of a kind. I’ll miss him.

Lately I am plagued by cephalopods. They frequent my dreams, appear in the literature I am reading, and pursue me on the Web. I feel myself being wrapped in their tentacles and sucked toward their beak-like mouths. But we can talk about that another time. Right now I’d like you to picture a seawall on an island in the Pacific — call the island Okinawa. It is a long gray day, and the sky, ocean and seawall are all the color of brushed aluminum.

Two boys, one 14 and one 16 years old, are perched on the wall, passing a hand-rolled cigarette of questionable origin back and forth, drawing smoke into their lungs and exhaling aluminum-colored clouds as they stare out at the ocean. The younger of the two is the taller, a thin, gangly boy with dark eyes and a mop of hair the color of wheat; the elder is lower to the ground, but sturdier, a hatchet-jawed, blue-eyed, dark-haired dynamo. His name is Dave. The younger boy idolizes him and believes he understands all the arcane secrets of the universe. If Dave says something, it must be true, because Dave, like the Pope, speaks infallibly.

The younger boy is me. Dave and I are stoned as only two boys sitting on a seawall on a lonely stretch of Okinawan beach can be. We could be poured off the wall into a cake pan and baked without ever lighting an oven.

Out of the blue (or in this case, out of the brushed aluminum), Dave says, “Girls who wear braces or have worn braces are the best kissers.”

“What?” I say, thinking I have misheard him.

“Braces,” says Dave. “Orthodontia. Girls who have it are the best kissers.”

“Are you sure?” I ask.

Dave nods emphatically: “Yes. Sure. Without a doubt. They have octopus tongues.”

I am hopelessly stoned, and the sudden image of a girl opening her mouth and spilling out a load of suckered octopus tentacles is dreadful; I am taken aback by it. The thought of putting my tongue into such a mouth is repulsive and I tell Dave so.

“No, man,” he says. “It isn’t like that. It’s more like being drawn into the heart of a mystery.”

“By tentacles.”

“Yes,” Dave says. “But tentacles you’ll crave for the rest of your life.”

“I’ll have to take your word for it,” I tell him, but I am still horrified by the notion, though I think it would make a great premise for a creep movie. Attack of the Octopus-Tongued Nymphettes! In Cinemascope! And Technicolor!

:::

Over the years I’ve kept track of the orthodontic histories of women I have kissed; and for the record, while Dave might have been mistaken about a great many other things, in my experience he was on the money concerning the wearing of braces and the quality of a kiss. Women who have worn them really are the best. Why this is true I cannot say. Maybe it has something to do with oral obsession. These days I don’t hesitate: I ask about it right away. No sense wasting time.

He was also right about the octopus tongue. But so was I. Because once you’ve romanced a woman who has one, you’ll be haunted by the ghost of her kisses for the rest of your life. Tentacles or no tentacles.

Gentlemen:

Good news! I’ve just this day received email from the Nigerian Senate informing me that I have been chosen along with six others to receive a $500,000 stipend from the Nigerian government. This mystifies me, because I never contacted the Nigerian government concerning a writer’s grant, and I am further puzzled by the Brazilian origin of the email (who knew Brazil and Nigeria were so closely affiliated?), but I am never one to look a gift horse in the mouth.

As soon as I email them my banking information, they will deposit the sum in my account. It now appears I will be able to repay you sooner than expected.

So if you could hold off a few more days before repossessing my personal items, I’d be eternally grateful and you’d get the funds you rightly deserve.

Oh happy day!

As a general rule, I dislike entries explaining how a Web site has changed, especially when there is technical information I don’t understand — which is most of the time. I even loathe it when it’s me doing it. So today I’ll pretend it’s a Marvin Gaye song and get it over within the three-minute time slot alloted AM radio pop tunes.

Since we’ve put on the new blue skin, quite a lot of the Werewolf Tales site has changed. The most dramatic for me was a content management system refit from ExpressionEngine to WordPress. This was predicated on a number of things, not the least of which was the urging of several designer friends to give it a look. I have to admit the transition was one of the least painful I’ve experienced, and I like the way the WordPress tags are based on a PHP instruction set. Nice. ExpressionEngine seems a good deal more powerful, but I’ve promised to tinker with new system for a month before reverting back. We’ll see how it goes.

This version of the Tales consolidates all entries under one design. As I progress in my understanding of WordPress, I hope to offer older skins as options for readers who prefer them. Choice is good.

This has never been a “blog”; rather, I’ve always envisioned it as my personal site, a place where those interested come to be engaged or entertained by my writing and thinking; but lately I have been picturing Whistle & Fish as a sort of public house, where people also come to engage one another. To this end, I’ve created thePub, a forum where readers can share their thoughts and opinions on a number of different subjects. For those who do not have a presence on the Web, I hope this will be an opportunity for self-expression; and for those who do, I hope they will consider thePub as an extension of their personal endeavors. Either way, feel free to speak your mind (with the usual caveats against flaming, stalking, trolling, and illegal activities).

The former “About” page is now about Harry Haller, your W&F bartender and narrator, and there is now an about thePub page that will explain a little of its lycanthropic background.

Okay. Soundtrack over.

I hope you will enjoy the new (dare I say improved?) Whistle & Fish Werewolf Tales. Thanks for visiting.

When the police arrived at Macy’s, Invisoman was sweeping up pieces of broken glass from the floor of the bridal department with a whisk broom. Stark naked and staggering, he had careened into a shelf filled with Waterford stemware and sent thousands of dollars of goblets, champagne flutes, wine glasses, water glasses and sherry glasses crashing to the linoleum, shattering them into quality crystal shards and wrecking the dreams of hundreds of hopeful brides and wealthy alcoholics. Invisoman was drunk as a bicycle. His wife of twenty years was divorcing him after long months of complaining to friends, “I can see right through him.” Invisoman thought she was speaking literally; she was speaking figuratively. She threw him out of their house on his invisible ear. After drowning his sorrows at a bar down the street, Invisoman went to Macy’s hoping he’d find a gift to assuage her and buy him some time. He believed he was invisible. The police (and gaping onlookers) assured him he was not.

Sgt. Patterson, the senior of the two arresting officers, telephoned Invisoman’s wife, who told him in terse conversation, “His name is Herb Lumpkin. We’re going through a divorce. He isn’t taking it very well.” Sgt. Patterson assumed Invisoman was a candidate for Bellevue, and he radioed his conclusion to his superiors, who enthusiastically agreed. He and the younger officer, Patrolman Patrick O’Malley, were escorting Mr. Lumpkin to their patrol car when Invisoman began vibrating.

Now, as even freshman physics students understand, things in the physical world are perceived by the human eye because light reflects off them, vibrating at different wavelengths, and is captured by the retina. Herbert Lumpkin, through years of meditative practice, could set the molecules of his body vibrating in such a way that light passed through the space between atoms instead of reflecting off them. Thus, he disappeared. It was simply a matter of focused concentration and heat resistance. Vibrating molecules create friction, and friction means heat. When invisible, Herbert Lumpkin’s internal body temperature sometimes soared as high as 600 degrees.

Sgt. Patterson and Patrolman O’Malley first recognized Mr. Lumpkin’s metamorphosis as a gentle vibration under his skin, much like that of a battery operated sex toy set on low. “Sarge,” said Patrolman O’Malley, “something’s wrong with this guy. We’d better get the cuffs off him.” Once the handcuffs were off, Invisoman’s internal body temperature shot up 50 degrees. Sweat poured from his body. Mr. Lumpkin shed the blanket his captors had thrown over him to hide his nakedness and then he vanished. “One moment he was there,” wrote Sgt. O’Malley in his report, “and the next he was gone.”

Seconds later Invisoman burst into flames.

Everyone thought he had learned a new trick and was aping Johnny Storm, the Human Torch. His spectacular pyrotechnic display mesmerized his audience, and several minutes passed before the more astute among them realized Invisoman was screaming. By the time Lillian Franklin arrived from the cosmetics department with a fire extinguisher, Invisoman was nothing more than a lifeless lump of charcoal smoldering on Macy’s floor.

Bacardi killed him. He had spent most of the afternoon tossing back 151 proof rum-laced shooters, and his blood alcohol level was extraordinary. Once his internal temperature exceeded 400 degrees, pouf! The alcohol ignited. And so did Invisoman.

His estranged wife sued everyone from Macy’s to the Bacardi Corporation to the City of New York, but it was no use. And since his life insurance carrier viewed Mr. Lumpkin’s death as self-inflicted, it was exempted from paying a death benefit. Macy’s took pity on the penniless Mrs. Lumpkin, and they offered her a job scrubbing floors late at night, when all the customers were gone and the ghost of Invisoman haunted the place, leaving behind the faintest odor of burning flesh after tipping over individual pieces of Waterford crystal, just to keep in practice.

A very recent change in CMS has temporarily thrown off search engine accuracy — something we believe will be remedied over time. If you arrived here expecting different content, please enter your search in the form to the right and you should find what you were seeking. We apologize for the inconvenience, and thank you for visiting Whistle & Fish Werewolf Tales.

His hand rests on her bare knee. Tires hiss on the pavement as the little car hurtles along the highway past mile after mile of greenery in the rain. In a broad pasture somewhere south of Hopland, she sees hundreds of sheep grazing in a grey-brown flock, their heads tucked down against the weather, their bodies claustrophobically close to one another. She tries to remember them as more than a blur, but the car rushes on, and the rich landscape, its greenness exaggerated by the cloud cover, fills her view.

Everything out the windshield is lonely. The wipers tick-tick hypnotically. When they pass other cars, their drivers seem dour, grimly pressing ahead to what? An evening watching television with the spouse in a bad marriage? A hotel bar for a quick drink before making a monotonous business presentation in a conference room filled with equally bored attendees? A nightclub blaring mediocre music in the ears of sweaty dancers packed like sheep on a lighted floor, each dreaming she was the star of her own life before going home to an empty tryst — or worse, to a house cat yammering for food?

She feels the weight of the man’s hand on her knee. She pushes hard into the headrest and then takes his hand in hers and moves it up along her bare thigh until she can feel his body heat radiating near her sex. She closes her eyes against the violent greenness outside.

The radio plays Miles Davis. She knows the song but cannot remember its title.

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