Authors: Benjamin Weissman
Headless
Also by Benjamin Weissman
Dear Dead Person
(High Risk/Serpent’s Tail)
Also from Dennis Cooper’s
Little House on the Bowery
series
Victims
by Travis Jeppesen
Grab Bag
by Derek McCormack
(forthcoming, June 2004)
This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Published by Akashic Books
©2004 Benjamin Weissman
Drawings by BW
9 Honchos (detail), 1995, gouache on paper, 43” x 34”
Collection of Hirsch Perlman
eISBN: 978-1-617750-90-8
ISBN: 1-888451-49-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2003109537
Inside layout by Sohrab Habibion
All rights reserved
First printing
Printed in Canada
Some stories in Headless originally appeared in: Another City (anthology), Bomb, Documents Sur L’Art, L.A. Weekly, The Little Theatre of Tom Knechtel (exhibition catalogue), More & Less 3 (Hallucination of Theory), Parkett, Purple, Santa Monica Review, Snowflake, Unnatural Disasters (anthology), and Western Humanities Review.
Little House on the Bowery
c/o Akashic Books
PO Box 1456
New York, NY 10009
To Amy Gerstler, the exquisite,
and Murray Weissman, perfect father
In loving memory of Wendy Lewis Moore
and Gracia Weissman
A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
Humongous thanks to brilliant soulful pals Thomas Bernhard, Bernard Cooper, Dennis Cooper, Trinie Dalton, Dana Duff, Sean Dungan, Matt Greene, David Humphrey, Tom Knechtel, Bill Komoski, Rachel Kushner, Paul McCarthy, Laura Owens, Hirsch Perlman, Lari Pittman, Lane Relyea, Thaddeus Strode, Gail Swanlund, Johnny Temple, Lynne Tillman, John Wentworth, and Zach Yates.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Adolf Hitler was not known for his skiing ability. He was not comfortable on the hill. The incline frightened him. To be blunt, he was a terrible skier, a bundle of conflicting limbs and joints all colliding at the groin. The whooshing sound of speedy skiers made him jumpy. He did not take well to icicles forming on his manicured mustache. He resembled a walrus pup with narrow ice fangs, a look flattering on some gentlemen, but on his face not so at all. When asked,
if you could be any animal, what would it be?
as cold-blooded and smooth-skinned as he himself was, the walrus, or any sluggish lower mammal for that matter, was not on his list, even if he gave an amphibious impression of breathing through gills rather than nostrils and mouth. Yes, he was fond of the whiteness of the snow, just as Ahab was mesmerized by the whiteness of the whale, but he was a complainer; he whined about cold temperature, moaned about fatigued thighs, his lace-up boots pinched his flat bony feet, and to make matters worse, he had wobbly ankles. The T-bar and Poma-lift disturbed his balls. Hitler read
Moby Dick
in translation, a gift from Goebbels, in the privacy of his own prison cell, while he was writing
Mein Kampf.
The salad days. He never learned English, unlike today’s ambitious multilingual Europeans. Like so many lonely men of that period, and many still today, he masturbated to the scene in Melville’s novel where all the shipmates join hands in a bucket of whale sperm and squeeze the gooey coagulants and sing a brotherly tune of labor and soul. If only Leni Riefenstahl could’ve put such a sequence together in
Triumph of the Will.
But it probably would’ve disturbed the
mise-en-scene.
Hitler did not own his own pair of skis. In order to appear like the common man, a
volk
-skier, he rented. On a similar note, Hitler was eager to trade in his penis for something less drowsy, but organ transplants, or substitutions, in that area of the body were not foolproof, and, as history has proven, severing one’s own penis and surgically grafting on a new and better one, a bigger, more charismatic jimmy, is frowned upon and remains an unsafe practice. Hitler’s penis floated about his crotch like a hollow pinky. He wanted his cock to sway, a slab of meat that commands respect, that could be pounded against tables and the tops of people’s heads, and if it were to be weighed on a postage scale would register
at the very least
four pounds. How could a man of modest physical stature, he often fretted in the bathroom mirror, convince the population of a master race, when he himself, and his faithful but never-to-be-fully-trusted assistants (a group of unsavory men, some tubby and slow, others skinny with pockmarked faces), were, in a sense, the furthest thing from a sight for sore eyes, or for that matter, a thing of beauty? Handsome they were not. Der Fuhrer & Company were specimens of ill health, poor diet, and cryptic exercise. He dreamt that boys would drop their knickers and salute him, not with a raised arm, but with their young erections—long rows of adorable poles all at 45-degree angles. Hitler could only snowplow. He fell often. He pouted. He’d lie in the snow and curse. He’d try to stand up with his skis pointed downhill only to fall again. He couldn’t follow instruction. Then along came Miss Braun, a great skier: bumps, downhill, GS, deep powder, and aerial jumps. The fraulein was a hot dog. Yes, Eva was fearless, to a fault. It almost cost her her life. After a day of flirty skiing with Olympic champions Gunter, Heinz, and Klaus, Eva would catch up with Adolf on the bunny hill. She’d stop abruptly and spray a blast of snow all over him, and then giggle madly. Sometimes she’d throw out a hip, knock him to the ground, and sing, “Dolfy on his duffer.” She was always trying to get a rise out of him, bless her naïve heart. Unfortunately his response was always, “I’ll kill you.” She’d cry. He’d kiss her on the nose, he’d say meow, and as with most couples, the little hurt would disappear from the mind. Hitler painted a watercolor of a man sawing off his own cock. The idea haunted him. Of course, he threw the picture away. If you can’t salute with it (the veiny human wurst) or eat with it (like a shovel) or fight with it (like a sword), what good is it for, huh? he wondered, wiggling lifeless all one’s life, waiting for the kindness of strangers to bring it happiness (don’t hold your breath); indeed, more often than not it was the sweaty obliging palm of one’s own. Hitler painted snow scenes. Those he kept. Some he gave away to friends. He painted a male figure licking an ice-cream cone. A ski instructor tried to teach him stem Christy but Herr Hitler would catch an edge and plant his poles like he was digging for oil. Hiding his true feelings, he insisted he loved skiing. Politics and athletics were a difficult combination but he forced the issue. Similar to the certainty and assurance of a slow-moving tank he was content with the stiff ungraceful snowplow. Why learn something new if it’s going to get you into trouble and make you look foolish? During a lunch break Hitler drew a sloppy swastika in the snow with his urine. Then he drew an upside-down heart. Then he dropped his ski pants and crossed them both out with a loose splatter of feces. The great outdoors, he thought. Traveling without the proper ointments was a serious problem. He wouldn’t permit anyone to film him skiing. The only conceivable image was of the headman standing with his skis at his side, or on his shoulder, or exiting the chalet, striding toward,
never away
, from the camera. He had a flat uninspiring butt which he would’ve also liked to have traded in for something else, something more solid and global. He scratched his anus like a monkey infested with ticks. He’d smell his fingers and fall asleep. He dreamt he was caught in an avalanche, buried under 10 feet of snow. A St. Bernard came to his rescue. Hitler was fond of dogs. He preferred dachshunds. The large hound spoke German. It said,
Wiedersehen.
And then, for no apparent reason, it defecated on his face. And yet, and this is the amazing part of the dream, the heat from the feces prevented him from getting frostbite and saved his life. Another close call. Sure, it was only a dream, but wow, what a good one, and then of course you might ask, why so much shit? Interesting question. It was three in the morning. Maybe a shit facial, he thought, with its many organic properties, would cure him and his ministers of their dire complexions. He craved chocolate. So much for heading in the right direction. He nibbled away. A fudgy night. Yes, a bar of chocolate, always by the bed. He closed his eyes and thought, I hope someone remembers me like this.
The day I am born brings injury and death to many people. My mom is a beautiful lady with a huge scar running down her back from a surgical procedure that almost killed her. A lonely flute whistles a sorrowful note. As a little boy I sleep on the floor in the kitchen with the oven on and open to keep warm while she has intimate moments with many strange men in the bedroom—at least 10 a week, sometimes 20 or 30 when she is not menstruating. Their laughter and screaming booms through the hanging bed sheet that serves as a partition so I practice punching and strangling my pillow to drown out the sounds of their sex.
Violence conquers all.
I write that in my journal.
When I turn 15, an age where I could be of some use, I am compelled to pick up a lead pipe and beat one of my mother’s suitors in the head until he is bloody and without pulse. Even though the men are bigger than me—on another night I beat a second man as well—they are easy to destroy with their heads facing down, always on top of my mother’s. Killing her customers is not something she appreciates me doing, but I do it nonetheless, spontaneously, and I clean up all the blood and brain matter with soapy water and many sponges. Three hours after midnight I roll the men into garbage bags and drag them with great effort to the town dump. Since the men never tell anyone where they are going when they visit us, we never have trouble with the police. I pull out a kitchen knife and stab my football until it is dead. One night I stab my mom. Slit her throat. She is plastered on cold sake. I’d like to say it was an accident, but that would be untrue. Everyone in our neighborhood knows my mom is a prostitute. I kill her before someone else does. It’s better that her son be the one. Along with instructions on how to gouge a person’s eyes out, the Bible recommends that we clean the feet of our loved ones with the hair on our head. I dig a three-foot hole in the ground of the public park where townies bury their pets and that is where my mom rests in peace, bless her worried gutted soul. I pack up a knapsack with a plunger, hammer, pipe, hose, razors, wooden sandals, and a pith helmet, anything hard and sharp that can be used as a weapon. In the middle of the night I walk 10 miles to a new neighborhood, sleep under a bridge in a cardboard box.