Of all the Hypothetic jargon and fantastic visionary concepts swirling around in my head, not to mention the actually disorienting experiences I’d experienced over the preceding several months, something about the comic book story Chase Bradford had created stuck in my head. It was his name for the villains in the title of his story: “Ms. Megatronica vs. the Garnookian Butt Worms of Rott.” It reminded me of something I had read somewhere, but I couldn’t exactly place it at first.
Although my own dream visions had served as a springboard for Chase, all of the interplanetary embellishments were entirely from his imagination. I had never done anything but travel a bit into the future and the past, to realities that were not substantially different from my native, contemporary one as a college students in the Midwest. This reality was weird enough, filled as it was with friends and relatives who turned out to be Megaheroes, cats that talked or just sulked around spookily, and laboratories everywhere filled with killer robots and other mad science gizmos.
Even my glimpses of prehistory accorded with science as we know it: paleontology, early earth geology and biology, and so on. The landscape of Detroit I had glimpsed through my visor one afternoon from my apartment roof, regressed to about a billion years B.C., appeared as a volcanic landscape rimmed with unbelievably profuse vegetation on the shore of a teeming inland ocean. I’m sure this had been influenced by some kid’s science book I’d seen as a child. The alternate dimensions to which I had traveled in a contemporary timeframe also pretty much conformed to the present Earth as I understood it in my native reality. And the Forbidden Future seemed only like a ruined and devasted version of modern civilization,. It was prosaic and pedestrian, in other words; maybe even more boring than my native, present reality.
Perhaps, it occurred to me, these alternate realities were the failure of my own limited, inhibited imagination.
But Chase loved drawing his Ms. Megatronica in far-off worlds, clad in a glitzy, semi-cybernetic armored suit laden with dials and gauges and air tanks and hoses leading to her glass-bubble helmet, and getting around on a space scooter when planet-side or in a faster-than-light, incredibly phallic rocket ship when travelling interstellar—instead of flying around in a leotard and a cape over a city skyline. The worlds could be arid, airless moons with starfield skies in which Ms. Megatronica—Nicky for short—battled tentacled brain creatures resembling scrotums, flying, fanged stingrays with multiple eyeballs, and scaly, fishlike scissor people paired together at the groin like Siamese twins, with lower appendages that could cut through the titanium hull of a starship. Or else they were tropical jungles in which the vegetation was alive and mobile, more like undersea creatures—Ms. Megatronica, in those cases, lost nearly all of her attire save for her helmet and oxygen tank.
Most of Chase’s creatures, which as I say were often indistinguishable from his environments, resembled human genitalia writ large—sometimes male, sometimes female, sometimes both—and the blasted craters, gnarled driftwood, and obsessively ringed planets of his backgrounds suggested a galaxy in endless copulation. Amorphous amoebas were continually growing pseudopods and sprouting erections, and rocky crags and mesas would suddenly become limp and rubbery, and anything and everything was liable to suddenly ejaculate all over the place like a Cambrian Explosion during Mardi Gras. The laser beams and death rays from ominous towers, invading starships, and Nicky’s ever-present pistol—attached obscenely by umbilical cord to the crotch of her push-button chastity belt—sought to disintegrate, sterilize, and machete their through this overly-fecund nightmare. Nicky’s adventures presented the image of profusely populated ecosystems in which all alien lifeforms were perpetually locked in a genocidal war, and trying to castrate every other species and sometimes its own.
At least Chase drew me reasonably proportioned. Earlier incarnations of the character, as I’ve noted, hewed closer to Ms. Megaton Man’s primary-colored uniform, but amplified her curves to ridiculous proportions, and even made her features more Caucasian than mine actually appear. Since the original drawings on Bristol board were black-and-white outline drawings in India ink, I had no idea what color schemes he had in mind, but some preliminary watercolor and colored pencil sketches in his sketchbook suggested the character in every shade from caramel brown to emerald green, and sometimes with scaly or fuzzy skin. Maybe she was a chameleon or a shape-shifter.
In any case, Chase didn’t bother with any narrative explanations; he just liked drawing all that jazz—moon craters and white paint-spattered star fields and ringed planets and suckers on impossible tentacles and obsessively groping air hoses and circuitry—and on and on.
Why he entitled Nicky’s first adventure the way he did was unclear. I couldn’t even tell you which horny biomechanical creatures the Garnookian Butt Worms of Rott referred to. But I knew the phrase rang a bell. Where had I come across it in my reading?
***
On my shelf of used, trashy paperbacks, I reached for Jock London: His Revelatory Adventures by Juan Philippí Herder. Herder, as I’ve explained, was a warped science fiction author who’d been writing for anthology magazines since the fifties and had only belated hit it big in the seventies, mostly for fusing explicit eroticism with primitive, hitherto repressed adventure genres. But this particular book was different: Jock, an old pulp adventure character from the 1930s and 40s, had starred in a series of magazine novellas, a radio show, and a short-lived movie serial. A brash world explorer and Great White Hunter, Jock had traveled the world with six other associates, all experts in some science or technology or other, and saved civilization countless times—always from crazed megalomaniacs with totalitarian ambitions but simplistic, naïve, and tragically flawed plans. I tried reading a few of the paperback reprints of the originals by Sylvester Stuyvesant and found them pretty dull despite their turgid prose and breakneck action. In my estimation, Jock was a big, repressed, closet homo, and even Herder concluded “big, bronze Jock” was secretly getting it on with his similarly suntanned cousin, Trish London.
Nonetheless, Herder wrote his book as if ol’ Jock had been an actual person, a real adventurer who’d actually survived all those sensational exploits, but for whatever reason had managed to keep them out of the papers. More astonishingly, Jock supposedly sold the rights to his adventures to a pulp magazine outfit that changed his real name and obscured some of the details about his life, I guess so Civilians in trouble wouldn’t inundate him with requests to solve their problems for them. Every month, and occasionally twice a month, Jock or his six associates would pass along notes concerning their latest exploit to ol’ Sylvester, who would sit down at his two or three typewriters and churn out reams of purple prose on demand.
Herder, in grandiloquent fashion, likened Stuyvesant’s accounts of London’s superhuman adventures “esoteri-sagas,” as quasi-religious “advents” or visionary literature. The ones I read I thought were fairly formulaic gadget stories for boys. But Herder elegiacally compared Stuyvesant’s visions to the work of four other famous authors: Buck Chauncey, Philip “Prof” Loeb, and Ryerson S. (Silbert) Lee—not to be confused with another Ryerson, namely Emil Reardon Ryerson, who practically invented the planetary romance and jungle man pulp genres. Chauncey didn’t write science fiction or fantasy but rather a brew of confessional, semi-autobiographical urban porn with literary pretensions; as far as I was concerned, he was doing little more than ripping off the raw eroticism of some of the Harlem Renaissance writers, just like white swing musicians had ripped off earlier earthier, syncopated ragtime, jazz, and blues music. Loeb wrote ecstatic, hyperventilating hardware-intensive space operas. And Lee was a scribe affiliated with Beat movement, most famous for The Carnal Brunch, a classic of heroin-addicted, compulsively same-sex, Sodomite lust.
But Herder preferred Lee’s more pulp-derived, less acclaimed Nadir Trilogy: The Vulva Gear, The Laundry Stub That Imploded, and Nadir Non-Stop. The latter Herder rattled off some of Lee’s most potent phrases in His Revelatory Adventures thusly:
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> Between-Your-Toes Fungal Spores from Neptune … Radioactive Carnage … Diseased Electromagnetic Brainwaves … Freeze-Dried Toxic Sewage-Sludge, Cellophane-Wrapped … “Buried Alive in Suffocating Sarcophagus with the Immortality Antidote!” … “The thing in my pants has escaped and has a mind of its own.” … Drug Bust Crossing the Subliminal Border with Underaged Homicide … Shiv Between the Ribs with Nuclear Icicles … Gothic Hookworms Up My One-Dimensional Butthole …
I stopped when I read that last bit. “The Garnookian Butt-Worms of Rott!” I exclaimed. “My cartoonist ex-boyfriend has plagiarized the imagery of a strung-out Beat poet!”
***
I immediately grabbed the phone and dialed. “Oh, boy, Chas better change the title of our story … I mean, Chase … I mean, his story. He could get in trouble if someone catches him ….” I waited breathlessly as I heard the ringing over the line. Then it occurred to me, “Wait! What if he thinks I want to get back together with him?”
I heard him pick up the receiver with a groggy “Hello?”
I plunked down the phone. I realized I wasn’t so much concerned about correcting Chase Bradford’s inadvertent swiping of Ryerson S. “Silbert” Lee as I was with Lee’s hallucinogenic vision. While Herder’s paraphrase of Lee had stuck in my mind, I had never actually read more than this sampling of his “Slice-and-Splice” prose myself. I needed to do my homework, at least, before confronting Chase.
I had seen copies of Nadir Non-Stop in local bookstores and had leafed through a copy at Marwil’s on the Warren Woodward campus. It’s disjointed style hadn’t appeal to me, and I was no doubt broke at the time, so I didn’t pick it up. But now, I was curious about it. Only problem was, I was broke again, and searching for a copy at a new or used bookstore would be chancy. Not only might they not have a copy in stock, but I might spend even more money that I didn’t have on different books on adjacent shelves that I wouldn’t have time to read. But I knew where I could find a copy, and not be tempted to pay for it outright.
I started at the Warren Woodward Undergraduate Library. Unfortunately, their copies were all signed out, no doubt to lit majors studying Ryerson S. “Silbert” Lee’s prose stylings and likening it to the poetry of Robert Frost. But the librarian had a suggestion. “There should be a copy over at the Inland Ocean Institute. It’s a non-circulating copy, but you could read it there. Do you know where the Institute is?”
Honey, do I know where the Inland Ocean Archeological and Anthropological Institute is? It had only served as the start- and endpoint of my most important adventure of the summer.
I hoofed it over the Wardell building. My advisor, Dr. Dolores Finch, was nowhere to be seen, and I didn’t even spot Michele, who was usually at the desk. I plunged into the stacks, which were now dustier and cobwebbier than ever, and found a man engrossed in a book in front of the Ryerson S. “Silbert” Lee shelf.
He was older than college-age but not old, medium height and slender, with a sharp, black goatee like the Ghoul, and longer—but not long—wavy hair. He wore a light-blue fabric cape, something a like magician would wear, over a vintage suit and patent leather shoes that had a certain vintage about it. At his feet was a case of some kind with a handle on it. I could also swear he was wearing powder or makeup of some kind; the effect was entirely eccentric. He was absorbed in the bound volumes of Emasculating Adventures and Feminizing Science Stories, or somesuch pulp magazine from between the wars. He looking mainly at the glossy covers, not the yellowed text pages, and chuckling to himself.
“Man, do you believe these?” he was remarking to himself as he flipped through the splashy painted covers. “Rockets exploding on launch pads … aliens with phallic weapons or appendages threatening women clad in metallic brassieres … men in hotpants restrained by even uglier alien creatures, helpless to intervene. Can you imagine a male readership to whom this kind of material would appeal?”
“You should see the covers to Amazing Heresies,” I said.
He looked up at me. “You know your pulps. My name’s Ponty,” he said, closing the volume and extending his hand. “Ponty Jacobs.”
“Are you named after the car or the city? Or the Native-American chief?”
He laughed. “Neither. And neither. Ponty’s not short for Pontiac; everybody asks me that. It’s short for Pontormo. Pontormo Polverizzo—Jacopo da Pontormo Polverizzo, to be exact. My parents were art lovers, but I didn’t care for Jake.”
“Polverizzo—is that like pulverize?”
“I guess so, although I’m not fluent in Italian,” said Ponty. “I was born right here in the U.S. of A.”
“I had you pegged for an exchange student,” I said. “Except your American accent is too good.”
“Nope. Toledo, Ohio.” He grinned. “I’m on my third post-doc.”
“That’s great,” I said. “I’m just starting out in grad school. I don’t see how I’ll ever make it through.”
“Just one step at a time,” said Ponty. “One foot in front of the other.”
He went on for some time about this paper he was planning about how pulp magazine illustrations described a secular “Fall of the Watcher Angels,” apart from the text stories. “You notice how all these robots and aliens are always shown going after the earth women, while the boy-toys are standing by helpless, crying into their sword-and-sandal tunics? They’re the Watcher Angels from the Book of Enoch, who taught all the women about makeup and fashion and metallurgy and contraception. Only its nuclear power and faster-than-light propulsion and cloning. They mated with the human females, and produced monsters and giants and heroes.”
“I read something about that,” I said. “You sound like Michele; she calls fantastic fiction a kind of secular Bible.”
“You mean the girl who works here with the Ancient Egyptian mascara?” said Ponty. “No, I’ve never talked to her. But I’m not surprised she’s made that observation. Working around this stuff, anyone’s bound to notice the pseudo-Biblical overtones. I just hope no one scoops me before I finish my grant application.”
I realized I hadn’t introduced myself. “My name’s Clarissa,” I said. “Clarissa James.”
“Wait, are you Avril’s sister?” said Ponty.
“Avie? Sure,” I said. “Do you know her?”
“Of course I know Avie, from auditions,” he said. “In fact, we were in some one-acts last semester.” Suddenly, the cape-and-powder getup made sense. “In that case, Clarissa, I’m just plain Bryan Williams to you, from Hamtramck—Ponty’s just my stage name. I created a whole elaborate persona for this bit part I’m playing at the moment; It’s just a brief walk-on. I’m heading down to the Beth-El Theater down on Woodward right now for rehearsals.” He pointed to the battered case at his feet, which I recognized now as a clarinet case, although smaller and older than mine. “I play a street musician in Why Did I Ever Leave Toledo?, a student production now in rehearsals. My part has no speaking lines, but I still wanted to flesh out my character, give him some believable background, you know? So, I created Ponty. Sorry to practice him on you.”
“You sure had me going,” I said. “I was all ready to compare notes with you about our respective departments in grad school.”
Ponty, now Bryan, chuckled as he put the bound volume back on the shelf. “I like to dress the part before I leave the house because the dressing rooms down there are pretty ratty—I mean literally rat-infested,” he said. This didn’t surprise me; the Beth El Theater used to an architecturally significant synagogue that had seen better days. Avie had told me about how rundown it had become as an auxiliary undergraduate theater space. “I just stopped in here on the way down Woodward Avenue for some inspiration. I’m not the academic type at all, I’m afraid. My day job is candlemaker at a gift shop down in Trapper’s Alley. I was just on my way to rehearsal.” He looked at his watch. “Say, I better get a move on. But you oughta come over to the house for dinner sometime, Clarissa.”
“Oh, thanks,” I said. “But I’m seeing someone.”
“No, I meant you and Avie. My wife Rosemary would love to meet you.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “We should do that.”
We said our goodbyes and Ponty, or Bryan, grabbed his case and ran off, light-blue cape fluttering behind him.
***
I located the Institute’s copy of Nadir-Needle Non-Stop Pin-Prick. The girl at the desk, who wasn’t Michele, said, “It’s reference only. You have to read it here.”
I explained that I knew Michele, and not only her but also my grad advisor, Dr. Dolores Finch, interim director of the Institute, and Doctor Messiah before that. “I usually just fill out a slip of paper—I’m allowed to take anything out. I always bring it back.”
“Sorry, reference only. You’ll have to read it here.”
Hmph. I ended up going to Marwil’s instead.
> Note: Wold-Newtonites will immediately recognize in this chapter the thinly-veiled roman-à-clef reference to Philip José Farmer’s Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life (New York: Doubleday, 1973; Bantam Books, 1975), particularly his first chapter, “The Fourfold Vision,” and writers Lester Dent, Henry Miller, E.E. “Doc” Smith, and William S. Burroughs (not to mention Edgar Rice Burroughs). Clarissa’s observation that Miller “was doing little more than ripping off the raw eroticism of some of the Harlem Renaissance writers, just like white swing musicians had ripped off earlier, earthier, syncopated ragtime, jazz, and the blues,” is an original observation. Everyone’s a literary critic—even Ms. Megaton Man!— The author.