Chap One "Well, now," said Mrs. Jethroe, the mother of this extraordinary late adolescent on the fast receding previous page, the one who calls himself D.J. (if you recalled) "well, now," said she, "what am I going to do with Ranald? He''s as obscene as a barmaid and just as barmy. The boy needs to be spanked. I would just as soon spank a puma. He''s evil," said Mrs. Jethroe to her psychiatrist, who is a Jewish fellow, nothing other, working his ass off in Dallas, which means so to speak that he must spend eight to ten clammy periods of fifty minutes each listening to Dallas matrons complain about the sexual habits of their husbands, all ex hot rodders, hunters, cattlemen, oil riggers, corporation gears and insurance finks, zap! Well, like every one of these bastards (as Mrs.
Jeth--call her Death-row Jethroe--might say when her breath is big! like the bottom of a burnt-out bourbon barrel) well, every one of these bastards has the sexual peculiarities of red-blooded men, which is to say that one of them can''t come unless he''s squinting down a gunsight, and the other won''t produce unless his wife sticks a pistol up his ass--that man is of course a cop. If the psychiatrist wasn''t such a fink and such a nice Jewish fellow type as to be working for the general good and wheel of society, and if he wasn''t afraid of drilling a little career-and-cancer piss right into the heart of Texas, he would write this book about the ejaculatory jump habits of cops, big ass Southern redneck cops all bullwhipped and bullshitted up into putteez, son, they come more ways--I froth at the mouth, said the killer, but don''t think it''s spit. Well, what''s to say, D.J.''s mother, Death-row Jethroe, is the prettiest little blonde you ever saw (looks like a draw between young Katherine Anne Porter and young Clare Boothe Luce, whew) all perfume snatchy poo, appears thirty-five, is forty-five, airs, humors, curl to her mouth, half Texas ass accent, half London wickedness, trill and thrill, she''s been traveling around the world, Heartache House in Bombay and Freedom House in Bringthatpore, shit, she''s been getting cunt-tickled and fucked by all the Class I Dongs in Paris and London, not to mention the upper dedicated pricks of Rome and Italy while her hus, big daddy Rusty Jethroe, is keeping up the corporation end all over the world including Dallas, Big D, Tex. That''s some end, son, Big N we call it. Mum''s first name is Alice. They found her vagina in North Carolina and part of her gashole in hometown Big D.
Why? Why was her parts metaphorically blasted? Because, man, she used a dynamite stick for a phallus. You try that sometime for lots of hymen. D.J.''s father, Big Daddy, old Rusty, has got the dynamite. He don''t come, he explodes, he''s a geyser of love, hot piss, shit, corporation pus, hate, and heart, baby, he blasts, he''s Texas willpower, hey yay! Does this idyll of family life whet your curiosity, flame your balls, or sour your spit? Don''t argue, Alice Hallie Lee Jethroe is speaking to her Doc, Clam Fink, the Texas Jew, actually his name is Leonard Levin Fichte Rothenberg, pronounced by all big mind Texans as Linnit Live''n Fixit Rottenbug. "Well, now Lionhard," says Hallelujah Death-row, D.J.
''s sweet blond mother to Dr. Fixit, that little ole rottenbug, "will you jes take a fix on what dear Ranald has to say about everything? It''s enough to make a mother wipe up Aunt Jemima''s puke. For I love him like a jewel even if he is a thief. But he''s out of his mind. Poor sad little fellow. He''s so delicate and beautiful even if he is barmy as a barmaid." "Hallie, let''s adjust our sense of the real," says Dr. Hebrew Hairy.
"Ranald''s delicacy and beauty are memory engravings, perhaps are chromosomal etchings, RNA, DNA, RNA, DNA, one for the left eye, one for the right." "RNA, DNA, RNA, DNA," says Hallelujah. "The facts," says Fichte, "are these: Your son, Ranald, is six feet one at the age of eighteen, and is considered highly attractive by his social compeers, as well as mean and vicious." "He read the Marquis de Sade at the age of fifteen." "And the drug addict William Burroughs, whom personally I can''t see as a talent, I mean give me a hot pastrami sandwich, is now his hero." "Do you mean the Hot Pastrami, Live''n Fixit?" asks Hallelujah. "No, sir, I mean William Burroughs. Adjust your sense of the real, Alice Hallie Lee Jethroe, the time has come to program out your attitudes.
I saw Ranald at your request, he was recalcitrant, charming, gracious, anti-Semitic, morally anesthetized, and smoldering with presumptive violence, a host of incense, I mean incest fixes, murder configurations, suicide sets, disembowelment diagrams and diabolism designs, mandalas! Face into the eye of the real, Hallelujah, he''s a humdinger of a latent homosexual highly over-heterosexual with onanistic narcissistic and sodomistic overtones, a choir task force of libidinal cross-hybrided vectors." "He has high-breed vectors all rights," says Hallelujah, "he''s got the cunningest ancestry, in fact, cause we''re on my mother''s side from the Norloins." "New Orleans?" "Yis, from Norlins, the Norlins Frenchy Montesquious and the Bat Fartsmotherers." But seeing that Levin Fichte is living on her word, she just knocks over a bottle of one of his urine specimens, adieu albumen! and says, "Mon Doo Ginsberg, you''re sure full of shit for a doctor, don''t y''know there are no fine Southern families called Fartsmotherer? Lord knows we ain''t that fucking stupid, why even British county stock wouldn''t be called Fartsmotherer, maybe Assknocking, but not the other, you can''t analyze me Living Fichte if you don''t know things like that, oh poo I wish you was an Italianate Jew, all earthy and Levantine and suave and had a cunt-tickler of a mustache, instead of your clammy cold Lithuanian brow, what are you, a Talmud hokum? speak up, ass, I just wish you was good enough to kiss my sweet perfumed powdered old pooty-toot, hey Linnit? am I getting out my egressions now?" "I would not call them aggressions so much as identity crises," said Linnit. "Oh, poo, let me tell you about the Montesquious. Half-Portuguese, half-French, all that hot crazy blood packed one-quarter into me, for the other half of mah mother was just straight Arkansas mule, the Mulies, why they the richest family in Arkansas then, hot out of Peezer, Arkansas, and they used rat paper for tar paper on the Chic Sale, that''s how benighted was their latrine, army folk of course, the MacArthurs used to kiss their ass. And my daddy, well he was just a lover of a husband to my ma, and he must have had a dick on him like a derrick, do I shock you, Dr. Jew?" "To my cornplasters.
" "Oh, Linnit, you''ll be the death of me yet. Listen to this old hen cackle. Well, Daddy was Indian for sure, and he had a personal odor like hot rocks in the sun which is in me all mixed with the fine sauces of Franco-Portuguese Montesquiou rut--I mean you should smell my armpits, noxious to some, a knockout to others, I keep them perfumed of course, we want no barmaid''s fatal scent on Hallie Jethroe, so I wash, Dr. Rothenberg, three times a day, I don''t want nothing but a soupçon of my good sweet crazy full-blooded woman''s scent on the breeze off my knees, just enough for to keep the breed alive, talk of high-breed vectors, well, my own sweet husband, Big Daddy, David Rutherford Jethroe Jellicoe Jethroe, Rusty, is just as high breed as you want, I can''t even follow Rusty''s family, they''re all marshals, and bastards and cowboys, and one desperado, and one railroad tycoon, and one professor at Harvard, first Texas professor they ever had in Upper Clam City, near Clamsville, which is what I call Harvard, now Linnit, you''re a Harvard man, tell me straight and clear what I am going to do with Ranald, he''s insane, that boy, and he looks just like George Hamilton the actor, who I think is Instant Heaven, he''s so brood-looking, yes, there''s something Hebrew about Ranald, he''s so big and dark and mysterious for eighteen, and he goes all the way back to Egypt you just know unlike you, dear Jew, you Talmud hokum, you clammy Have-it grit, I suppose I now have to pony up my fifty dollars for the hour." "Madame, you owe me eleven hundred and fifty." "You''ll have to bust a nut to get it, Rottenbug." "I''ll torture you, I love torturing gentile females. All that white buttermilk flesh.
Yum, yum. Yum, yum, yum." Hey, hey, they really talk that way? That little blond lady, Hallie-perfume and powder on the poo--she talk that way? And Rottenbug going yum yum yum--is he out of his fucking skull? Wait and see. Nobody''s got any OK patience any more, just cannibals asking for chocolate on their stick--how the hell do you know what Hallie''s saying to Linnit and Fixit saying back? Wait and see? You know what they''re doing. They''re talking about Tex, Tex Hyde, Gottfried "Texas" Hyde Junior, that''s D.J.''s best friend, and know what, get that drop of cream off your jeans before you grow hair in your hand, this is the pitch, Tex is half-German and half-Indian on his father''s side, Redskin and Nazi all in one paternal blood, and his mother, well, bless his mother, Tex Hyde''s mother is jes old rawhide Texas ass family running back thru fifty-two shacks where in each shack the beans in the pot have been stuck on blacky inside side of the pot for six weeks--those beans look like gravel, Marshal Bean--yeah, Tex''s mother runs fifty-two shacks right back to the Alamo where all old saddlesore real Texas ass families run back to, why lick the scab on LBJ''s knee if one-tenth of all the Dallas ass families that go back to the Ala.