When Malcolm “Mal” Swannson gets back from Spain his first act, upon returning to his office, is to tack up a gaudy bullfighting poster on the fake wood paneled wall above his drafting table. In torrid hues of green and ochre, the poster announces the impending clash of wills between Manuel Alvarez and a particularly large and vicious bull named El Gordo Muerte—a confrontation to be held at 3:00 PM, Saturday, in La Plaza de Toros de Las Ventas del Espíritu Santo, Madrid. Mal had attended said bullfight and walked out of there stupendously impressed. He’s now thinking he might give up the hardware business—even give up his lucrative sideline as a certified Westinghouse air conditioning sales and service representative—so he can devote himself full-time to becoming a torero.

Those bloodthirsty Spaniards have probably never seen anything like him. Mal stands 6′7″—or 5′19″, as he likes to joke—with only socks on his feet. He weighs a hefty 268 pounds. He has some kind of a weird skin disease, like psoriasis, that makes patches of his hide turn itchy and red and fall off in flakes, leaving behind white areas that make him look like he’s been haphazardly bleached. He’s practically albino in places. But what a matador he would make! Mal imagines his tall, skinny legs encased in tight, shiny toreador pants—taleguilla—the outline of his whopping manhood bulging at the crotch. Who has bigger balls: the bull or Mal Swannson? “Mal!” the audience roars in one voice, pelting him with rose petals before the contest has even begun. So what if he’s suffering from Early Male Pattern Baldness? (A combover makes it barely noticeable.) Who cares if his belly hangs way out over his belt these days? (Too much prime rib and homemade ice cream.) He’ll still be the best darn bullfighter Spain has ever seen.

But Mal worries about his glasses—thick, black-framed numbers that make him look like Clark Kent. The world gets very blurry without them. He’s near-sighted. What if the glasses happen to fall off during a tricky verónica, get crushed under the hoof of some picador’s mount? Then where will he be?

Mal contemplates getting contact lenses.

It’s excitement I’ve been missing, thinks Mal. He needs the thrill of danger; the quickening that comes with risk. Getting married to Cynthia really knocked the wind out of his sails. Right up until their honeymoon, he was A Man of Action. He tore around the countryside in a cherry red 1958 Corvette. He had a beautiful teak and mahogany eight-cylinder speedboat for towing water-skiers on the Kings River. He raced go-carts with his buddies just for kicks. A Homelite chainsaw engine on a welded steel frame could get a guy’s butt moving at more than fifty miles an hour while he sat just inches above the ground. Man, that was fun! He won First Place in the Kings County Go-Cart Derby just a few weeks before Gordon was born.

When Gordon was born—that’s when the fun really ended. Those people who swear babies are little bundles of joy? They’re deluded. Babies cry almost non-stop and crap their pants relentlessly. Where’s the fun in that? Gordon was a complete accident, the booby prize from a broken condom. Mal had never had much luck with condoms. He was just too big for them. They exploded into latex confetti during his ferocious orgasms. He even tried wearing two at a time, but Gordon somehow sneaked in there, anyway. Once that little sucker started mitosis, there was no getting away from him.

Cynthia delivered Gordon on June 1st, 1966—the same day as Marilyn Monroe’s birthday. She would have been forty. Marilyn Monroe and her near-mystical breasts, gone forever. The thought still makes Mal sad. How many times has he jerked off to her image? A hundred times? Maybe more….

Mal has quite the porno collection, in which Marilyn features prominently. A whole cabinet inside his clothes closet is stacked with Playboys and Penthouses. He also has a hidden cache of more explicit fare, with titles like Teen Slut Dairies and The Well-Hung Intruder. Cynthia doesn’t like it, but she isn’t up for sex much these days, and a man has to have an outlet. She punishes him by buying designer stuff at the mall. Every Diane Von Furstenberg wrap dress or Yves St. Laurent pantsuit is a big “Fuck You!” to Mal Swannson.

It’s an old story. He’s not the first guy to have a wife who takes out her aggression on him with a charge card. And it’s not that big a deal, anyway…. He can afford it. His dad, Milt, passed away from cancer about two years ago, leaving the business to him and his brother, Gerald—along with three-quarters of a million for each of them in stocks and bonds. Now all Mal has to do is look after his mother, and when she goes, man, he’ll be set. The old broad has an estate worth another cool million, at least.

He decides to check in with his mother on his way home from work. She lives only four doors down, in a ranch home that Mal designed and sub-contracted, just like his own place. She’s still mad at him for making her sell the house he grew up in: a rambling, three-story Arts and Crafts mansion under ninety-year-old maples on the prettiest street in town. But she’s getting old—she had Mal in her late-thirties—and the place was too much for her to keep up once Dad was gone. Besides, living there would have made her dwell on the past. Now she has all the modern conveniences and it’s easy for Mal to keep tabs on her.

He lets himself in through the back door with his own set of keys. Mal likes to sneak up on his mom and find out what she’s doing when she thinks she’s alone. Today he hears the wheeze and rhythmic gurgle of the old asthma machine she keeps in the pantry room. She must be having one of her spells. The asthma machine is an outdated piece of hospital equipment that Dad bought for her on the cheap. It’s used for vaporizing asthma medicine, so patients can inhale it into their clogged-up lungs, where they need it most. The whole thing consists of a long plastic tube, a little condenser unit, and a big green tank of pure oxygen. Mal worries that one of these days his mother will blow herself up. Especially ever since she decided that none of the asthma medications work, and took to pouring straight shots of Smirnoff’s vodka into the conveniently jigger-sized vaporizing cylinder.

“Ma? You home?” Mal shouts, just so he doesn’t scare her into a heart attack by walking in on her. Although come to think of it….

“In here!” Helen calls from the pantry, flamboyantly out of breath.
Mal finds his bony old mother hunched over the asthma machine, wearing a dark brown turtleneck and tan polyester slacks—her usual get-up. Her hair is dyed jet black, just like it was in her illustration on the Sunny Maid Raisin boxes for all those years.

There’s a funny story about the hair dye: One day his mother called him up in a tizzy, saying she’d had an accident and he’d better come over quick. When Mal got there, he found she’d knocked over the bottle of hair dye she’d been pouring over her head once a month in the kitchen sink for the last eight or nine years. It was some old brand they don’t even make anymore—probably banned by the FDA. It turned out the stuff was so incredibly toxic that when it spilled it dissolved all the stain off the kitchen cabinet and ate a hole straight down through the linoleum floor. She ended up having the whole kitchen redone. Chalk it up to the price of vanity.

Mal can see the bumps of his mother’s rib cage straining through the wool of her thin sweater. “You having trouble again?” he asks her. She turns to him, sucking on the asthma machine’s clear plastic tube like Groucho on his last cigar.

“I’m always having trouble,” she says. “I had you, didn’t I?”

“I thought I was supposed to be the light of your life!” Mal pouts and puffs out his cheeks.

“You are, honey…. Now come here and sit down.” His mother pats the top of a cardboard box full of Del Monte canned peaches just across from her.

Mal sits. “Have you been to see Gordon?” she asks him.

Uh-oh. Now he’s in for it. “No,” Mal admits, staring at his size nineteen white leather oxfords. He’s been looking for white wingtips, but so far no luck, outside of golf shoes.

“He’s getting out tomorrow, you know….” His mother takes another huff off the tube, then asks, exhaling, “Have you seen him even once, in the whole two months he’s been in there?”

“Oh, Ma… you know I don’t like hospitals!”

“That’s no excuse. He’s your son. He needs you. When was the last time you gave him a hug?”

Mal hunches his broad shoulders.

“You don’t know? Shame on you! I thought I raised you better.”

“Christmas,” Mal says, for lack of any concrete memory. “I think I hugged him at Christmas.”

“Are you sure? Remember, I was there at Christmas. The only thing I saw you hugging was the toilet after you drank all that eggnog and helped yourself to three bowls of my green tapioca pudding.”

He isn’t usually a big drinker, but Mal always seems to go a little haywire around the holidays. Touché, Mom, Mal thinks. He turns petulant.

“Y’know, sometimes I wonder if he’s even mine. I mean, he’s so skinny and weak. And look at me!” Mal points to his own barrel-sized chest. “How does a guy like me end up with a wheezy little runt like Gordon?”

Helen merely stares up at him from the depths of some private Samadhi, toking on the asthma machine’s tube like a Hindu at her hookah.

“Okay, so I guess, maybe, it’s hereditary…” Mal says. “Sheesh, Ma, aren’t you about done with that thing yet?” In irritation, Mal switches off the asthma machine’s compressor. His mother suddenly sits up straight, as if awakened from a trance.

“That did it! Oh boy, I feel better now!” She breathes out a little singsong sigh of relief, then slaps Mal on the knee. “How ’bout some banana bread?”

“No thanks…. I just thought I’d pop in to see how you’re doing. But I should be getting home. Cynthia’s probably already got dinner made.” Mal knows Cynthia has done no such thing. He does most of the cooking. If he didn’t, they would have starved or succumbed to food poisoning years ago.

“Oh well then…. Toodle-loo!” Helen waves him goodbye without standing up.

Mal notices his mom is doing the happy sigh thing again. The old biddy must be looped. He probably would be, too, if he’d just inhaled half a pint of 98-proof liquor. Mal kisses her goodbye and heads for the door.
When Mal gets home, he finds the house empty. Cynthia is probably over at the hospital with Gordon. Either that or she’s running around town with her friend, Janice. Now there’s someone he wouldn’t mind seeing naked. Janice Marrsden is stacked like no woman he’s ever laid eyes on, outside of magazines. He’s been thinking about putting a pool in the backyard, just so he can get a chance to see her in a bikini.

The truth is, Mal’s getting a little bored with Cynthia. Her body has never been the same since she had Gordon. She used to be such a hot little number, but now her boobs are sagging, even though she agreed not to breastfeed (Mal read an article in Penthouse—or was it Juggs?—that said not nursing was the way to keep them perky and permanently one to two cup-sizes bigger). She also has some post-pregnancy flab around her middle. She goes around looking like she’s five months pregnant. It’s embarrassing! Even worse, her belly button turned really big and ugly. Every time she takes off her Playtex Control-Top Panties now, it’s like an old man’s nose poking out at him. Mal swears that Cynthia let herself go on purpose, so he wouldn’t pester her for sex. If that was the plan, then it’s working. Damn her eyes! If she going to act like that, what’s the point of being married?

Mal inwardly laments the perfidy of women. Oh, what a heartless world he’s been born into! Betrayed by his wife, by his weakling son, by his family in general. Cast adrift in a godless universe without a meaningful connection to anyone. He feels overwhelmed with sadness and an inescapable sense of doom. He’s failing at everything, he thinks, and no matter how long he stays married, no matter how many children he ends up having, in the end, no one will truly understand him. Condemned to solitary confinement within his own sorry skin, he’ll die alone.

There’s nothing he can come up with to ease the numb horror of that final thought. Feeling a sudden queasiness, Mal staggers to the bathroom and locks himself in. Nursing his sense of cosmic alienation there among the cool blue tiles, Mal tells himself, Get a grip! You can still enjoy life’s simple pleasures. And then he does what he knew he was going to do all along: He sits down on the john with the May 1972 issue of Playboy and beats off to the Barbi Benton spread.

He thought he might get off guilt-free this time, but it only makes him feel worse.

• • • • • • • • •

A few weeks after Gordon’s return home from the hospital, Mal rolls out of bed on a sunny Sunday morning and heads straight for the bathroom to read the letters section in the latest issue of Penthouse. The minutes fly by in a haze of “I’m-a-sophomore-at-a-small-Midwestern-college… I-swear-nothing-like-this-has-ever-happened-to-me-before you-wouldn’t-believe-it I-met-this-gorgeous-girl-with-long-blonde-hair-perfect-breasts we-went-on-a-picnic I-guess-she-got-a-little-drunk her-nipples-showed-through-her-thin-cotton panties-came-off-as-she-unzipped my-eight-inch-dingus-throbbing between-her-wet-lips I-was-in-heaven then-she-said-she-had-a-friend I-looked-in-the-rearview-mirror-and-saw-Spiro-Agnew blowing-another-steamy-load-into-my-madly-undulating-wife oh-god-I-moaned seeing-her-creamy-tits-stuffed-pussy oh-my-frickin’-god I’m-coming! Ohgodohgodohgod-I-can’t-wait-for-it-to-happen-again.” Mal is appalled by his own lack of self-control when he realizes he’s whacking off at a time when most normal people would be getting ready for church. To make amends to whatever god or deceased relatives he might have offended, Mal decides to tackle the dismal, thankless chore of getting to know his only son again.

He finds Gordon sitting at the kitchen table wearing Jockey shorts and a dingy white T-shirt, contentedly munching away at the heroin of children’s breakfast cereals, Kellogg’s Super Sugar Smacks (“Dig ‘em!” says the beatnik bear wearing a turtleneck on the front of the package). As usual, Gordon is so engrossed in a book that he’s seemingly unaware of the spoon’s repetitive journey from the cereal bowl to his mouth. Tiny puddles of milk are everywhere.

“Hey there, Gordy… what’s that you’re reading?” says Mal, playing the happy paterfamilias.

Gordon holds up the book so his father can read the cover. It’s Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf. Not a book Mal happens to have read—or even heard of.

“Steppenwolf, huh? What’s that about? A wolf?”

Gordon, still reading, says, “It’s about a guy named Harry Haller, who wants to commit suicide with an overdose of opium. But then he gets invited to this weird club—for Madmen Only—instead.”

“Really?” says Mal. Heck, it actually sounds kind of interesting. He wonders if any naked women show up at the club later. “How do you like it so far?” he asks.

Gordon puts down the book and contemplates just how much he should reveal. For perhaps the first time in his life, his father actually seems interested in what he’s going to say next. Gordon decides to confide in him: “Sometimes, I feel an awful lot like Harry.”

“Don’t do drugs, son. They’re bad news,” says Mal, missing the point entirely.

“I won’t. But if I get invited to a club for Madmen Only, I’m going. Okay?”
Mal brightens. “Well, that’d probably be the Hoo-Hoo Club,” he says, making a reference to a secret fraternity of lumber merchants that he’s scheduled to be initiated into later that week, “but you can’t go there until you’re older. In the meantime, how about you and I go do some flying?”

Gordon jumps up from the table. “That’d be great! Cool! I’ll go get dressed!”

Mal owns a red and white Cessna 172, the last significant toy leftover from his freewheeling days as a bachelor. He keeps it in a hanger at the Selma Airport. It’s a cruddy little airport, bordered by a weedy, lily-pad-choked lake, but the rent is cheap and it’s only eight miles away. Cynthia hates the airplane and wants Mal to get rid of it even more than she wanted him to get rid of the speedboat, the go-carts, and the Corvette—but Mal is sticking to his guns on this one. Taking away his ability to fly would be like taking away his freedom.

He and Gordon drive out to the airport in Mal’s Ford Pinto, the “Lean, Green Machine” Cynthia made him buy after he sold the Corvette. Her justification was that it would be great on gas mileage. She also just loved the little hatchback—an automotive innovation that, in her opinion, was “too cute for words.” Mal hates the rattletrap piece of crap. It has a four-speed transmission (every speed too slow) and the driver’s seat is stuck at the back of its tracks and tilted at a crazy 45-degree angle, broken, because the car is just too damned small for him. To show his contempt, Mal keeps the backseat full of greasy tools, torn blueprints, and old milkshake cups from the Selma Dairy Queen. He also lets bird shit build up on the paint. The Pinto is only a few years old, but it already looks ready for the junk heap. Even Gordon is embarrassed to be seen in it.

There’s no talk between father and son until they turn onto the dusty tar road that runs alongside the lake to the airport. Up ahead, a padlocked chain is strung between two red-painted concrete posts at the airport’s gate. Gordon asks in advance if he can unlock it. Mal hands him the key. Knock yourself out, kiddo, Mal thinks to himself. When they pull up to the posts, Gordon scrambles out of the Pinto and drags the chain to the side of the road as quickly as possible, as if he’s performing some manly, heroic task. Mal drives the Pinto into the airport proper and Gordon returns the chain to its original position with a fancy, one-handed click of the padlock, then jumps back in his seat. If Mal is supposed to be impressed, he doesn’t show it. He merely holds out his hand, palm up, for the return of the key, as if even a word of praise or thanks might cheapen this little ritual of theirs, which has been playing out on summer weekends for almost as long as Gordon has been wearing pants.

They park alongside Mal’s hanger—Number 5 in a row of eight—and get out to slide open the corrugated sheetmetal doors. They each take one. Again, Gordon strains at the task in a show-offy way, using only one hand. His door moves a few feet, then stalls. The steel track it rides on is corroded with rust. He tries using both hands, really leans into it, but the big door won’t budge. Save it, son, Mal thinks. You’ll never be a he-man. Mal goes over and pushes the door the rest of the way, trying to make it look easy, as if he wasn’t really using the leverage from all of his 268 pounds.

Inside the hanger’s grease-smelling shade, the Cessna stands on its three wheels like a proud, sharp-beaked bird. Mal kicks aside the tire blocks, opens the pilot’s door, and pushes the airplane out into the sunlight. Man, it’s a thing of beauty…. The gleaming red nose cone looks dangerous, the silver prop lethal. The blank, Cyclopean eye of the windshield somehow speaks to him of soulless malice.

Mal loves everything about the plane: the macho complexity of its instrument panel, the new plastic smell of its ox-blood vinyl seats, the muted slosh of aviation fuel in its wing tanks. He runs through a quick pre-flight check before starting her up. The part Gordon likes best is when Mal opens a tiny spigot under the motor cowling and squirts a pinkish-hued stream of high-test fuel onto the tarmac. It looks like a dog pissing. Gordon used to ask why the plane did that and Mal jokingly told him that even planes have to take a leak every now and then—but now Gordon knows better. It’s to make sure there’s no water in the fuel line. Everything checks out okay. Mal spits into the little puddle of gasoline he’s created and the saliva skids along the surface like a bubble.

They both hop into the plane. Gordon sits in the co-pilot’s seat, pretending he’s steering. Mal starts the engine and they taxi toward the runway, waiting for clearance from the control tower. That’s another thing Mal loves about flying: the private language everyone speaks over the radio, a language that makes no sense whatsoever if you’re not a pilot. It’s like belonging to a secret club.

The control tower tells him Runway Two is clear. Mal positions the plane and gets ready for take-off. He stands on the brakes and revs up the engine, checks the flaps, looks over his gauges. The noise inside the cabin is almost deafening. Then with a giddy rush of adrenaline, he lets the brakes go. He can feel the gravel skittering under the Cessna’s tires as it picks up speed, the whole fuselage shaking with the sudden velocity. Mal concentrates on keeping them on a straight path between the landing lights, steering with the pedals at his feet. The prop bites into the air, chews up the sky, gnashes at gravity. They’re hurtling toward the end of the runway like an ape with its ass on fire. Then there’s a brief sensation of floating, a sudden lessening of tension as the engine’s roar smoothes into a drone and the wheels sail clear of the ground. That first moment in the air is as good as it gets for Mal. All of his petty concerns leave him. His mind is clear. It’s just him and the plane for that one split-second—

—then he looks over and sees Gordon smearing the Plexiglas co-pilot’s window with the greasy tip of his nose.

“Hey, Gordon, cut that out!” yells Mal, but Gordon doesn’t hear him. He’s so wrapped up in watching the ground fall away—farmers’ fields dwindling to patchwork quilts, the other airplanes on the tarmac turning into tiny toys—that he’s oblivious to all sounds, even his father’s shouting.

Once they’ve reached cruising altitude, Mal reaches over and taps Gordon on the knee, yelling right into his face: “Let’s go buzz Kingsburg! Want to?” Gordon nods his head in the affirmative, bouncing up and down in his seat.

From 1300-feet in the air, they follow the same country roads they drove in on, occasionally hitting thermal pockets that cause them to fall off invisible ledges, dropping two or three stories with a sudden smack and shudder. For Mal, piloting a single-engine plane is like driving a go-cart across the sky. It’s a thrill, zooming along at about 120 miles an hour, not all that high above the treetops and telephone poles. It’s nothing like flying in a jet, where there’s a safe cushion of twenty thousand feet between you and the ground.

“Look for Ze Svedish Teapot!” Mal shouts like a Scandinavian madman.

The Swedish Teapot is the crowning achievement in a long history of civic mania designed to make Kingsburg famous as The Swedish Village. At some point during the Great Depression, desperate for tourism, the city council passed a resolution suggesting that all downtown buildings should have “a Swedish look” to celebrate the fact that 94% of the town’s population had once consisted of Swedish immigrants. But no one could agree on what “a Swedish look” really meant until Mal’s dad, a crafty Norwegian, sold City Hall a big load of discounted lumber. He told them to use it to tart up the storefronts with fake half-timbering and a bunch of brightly-painted business signs in Old English script. Svenske Gifte Shoppe. Andersen’s Autoe Service. Leif’s Olde Tyme Pizza Shacke. Etcetera. Later, another resolution passed, and the town started hosting an annual Swedish Festival. Big-titted high school cheerleaders in skimpy Swedish costumes danced around a Maypole. A Swedish Parade followed immediately thereafter. It featured the standard fez-wearing Shriners on go-carts, but there was also more idiosyncratic fare—like drunken, moose-antler-wearing Rotarians posing as Vikings, hurling candy at cowering children from the deck of a cardboard Norse ship. Word got around, and the tourists started showing up in droves. Soon orange, yellow, and blue plywood Dala horses were bolted to all the lampposts. Swedish polka music played from loudspeakers on every street corner along Draper Street—Kingsburg’s main drag—from noon until dusk. Then, in a final masterstroke, the city council conceived of a glorious symbol to stand in perpetual recognition of the town’s unique heritage. A crew was hired to scale the 300-foot-tall water tower in Olafson Park and transform it into a gigantic Swedish-style coffeepot, complete with spout and handle.

“It holds 1,500,000 cups of coffee!” literature from the Kingsburg Chamber of Commerce proclaims. That same literature doesn’t mention that everyone in town thinks it’s really a teapot. Nor does it mention that The Swedish Teapot holds nothing but well water with potentially chromosome-damaging levels of pesticides and fertilizers from the enormous amount of agricultural work that goes on in the area. Kingsburg’s second claim to fame, after all, is that it’s The Raisin Capital of the World, the proud home of Sunny Maid Raisins. For a town to grow as many raisins as Kingsburg grows… well, it just doesn’t come naturally.
“There it is! I see it!” Gordon shouts, pointing at the horizon, as the teapot tower and all the rest of Kingsburg springs into view.

It’s illegal as hell, but Mal points the Cessna’s nose down and swoops right along Draper Street at about 500 feet. The plane’s noise is so loud that it drowns out the polka music. People come out of their stores to see what’s going on. Mal catches a glimpse of roly-poly Mrs. Lundquist, opening the door to her Swedish Sweets Shoppe with the sign in the window that says: Lutefisk Taffy Half-Price. And there’s that grouchy, bald-headed old fart, Henry Jacobsen, lurching out from under the awning of Jacobsen’s Pharmacie wearing a starched white pharmacist’s jacket and shaking his El Cheapo aluminum cane.

More people, too many to name, head out onto the sidewalks with their faces tilted upward and their mouths agape. Gordon imagines them all shouting, “Look! Up in the sky! There goes Mal Swannson and his boy, Gordon!” There’s something incredibly satisfying about that kind of attention, and he’s a little disappointed when Mal points them back up toward the clouds and says goodbye to Draper Street with a saucy wag of the Cessna’s wings.

From a safer, FAA-sanctioned altitude, Mal tilts the plane in a slow, lazy circle so they can look down at the rooftops of their own neighborhood from the outskirts of town. “Do you see our house?” Mal asks. Gordon soon picks it out, and Jimmy’s house, too, across an intersection and three rooftops up. He even thinks he can make out Jimmy in the middle of the street, riding his bicycle, although from that height it could be anyone. Gordon waves hello, but the little figure on the bike doesn’t wave back.

The wind picks up on their way back to the airport. Just as Mal is making his final approach—flaps at 20-degrees, the air speed indicator bawling a warning like a mechanical baby—a strong crosswind gusts in and tosses the Cessna sideways off the airstrip. They slam down in the dirt between the landing lights at ninety miles an hour and bounce toward the lake. For one terrible moment it looks like they’re heading straight into the drink. But Mal gooses the prop and gets them airborne again, right out over the lily pads. A maneuver like that is called a “Touch-And-Go”—and it was a bad one. Mal hopes the guys up in the control tower didn’t see it, but they probably did. He flies around the airport again, feeling a little shaky, and lines up for another approach. He takes the crosswind into consideration this time and touches down with hardly a bump. He taxies back to the hanger, puts the plane away as fast as he can, and gets the hell out of there. Driving the Pinto has never felt better.

Although Mal doesn’t notice, Gordon tries to suppress the knowledge that they both almost met a watery death in the same algae-green lake where he used to chase frogs and capture tadpoles in Folgers’s coffee cans. In fact, Gordon doesn’t betray even so much as a glimmer of anxiety until they get home, when he scampers into the bathroom just off the garage and barfs up a bellyful of partially-digested Super Sugar Smacks. Before he can finish, his mother click-clacks over on her high heels to stand above him, asking, “What’s the matter? Did your father feed you too much candy?”

“Motion sickness,” Mal explains—and leaves it at that.

• • • • • • • • •

The day Mal is initiated into the Hoo-Hoo Club starts out like any other. At 7:30 in the morning, he unlocks the hardware store’s front doors and turns off the alarm. As President and CEO of Swannson Lumber, Inc., Mal could assign that task to someone else and sleep in, but he likes doing it. Unlocking the doors always makes him feel like the king of his domain. He’s greeted by the familiar smells of sawdust, greasy bolts, jute twine (macramé is getting to be a big fad), oily dust in the racks of galvanized plumbing supplies, the stench of new plastic steaming off green vinyl garden hoses, the baked electronics of unpacked Black-and-Decker power drills. Virile smells. Masculine smells. If someone could put those smells in a bottle of aftershave, Mal thinks, they’d have a big winner.

He turns on the coffeepot and dumps two cups of Folgers into the filter. The lumberyard crew will be in soon, and they’ll want to stand around drinking coffee and telling jokes for a good twenty minutes before they start their day. The yard crew consists of three minimum-wage Mexicans—Paco, Leo, and Ruben—and their foreman, Johnny Hoss, the self-proclaimed “World’s Strongest Okie.” Even though Mal stands almost a full head taller, there’s something about Johnny Hoss that intimidates him. There are stories floating around about Johnny. How he lied about his age to get into boot camp, shipping out of Oklahoma to Vietnam just before his sixteenth birthday. How he specialized in night operations behind enemy lines once he got there, trained to decapitate his foes with a length of piano wire. How he killed a hundred men that way, maybe more. Mal once saw Johnny demonstrate his piano wire technique on a four-by-four post, snapping it neatly in two. He also saw Johnny fill the back of a pickup truck with 94-pound sacks of concrete mix, tossing them from a platform a good twelve feet away as if they weighed no more than goosedown pillows. The man could pick up an armload of 20-foot Douglas fir beams and walk them across the yard without even breaking a sweat. His perpetually sunburned neck was bigger than his square, crewcut head. His belly looked like he spent every afternoon drinking gallons of beer, but it was all pure muscle. The only things even slightly soft about Johnny Hoss were his eyes, which were large and brown, with extravagant lashes. They were movie star eyes, really. They made him just too damn good-looking.

“Hey, Boss. Today’s the big day, huh?”

It’s Mike Shriver, Mal’s Number One air conditioning man, sneaking up on him, snapping him out of his thoughts about Johnny.
“Yep, tonight’s the night,” says Mal. “Today we’re men, but tomorrow we’re Hoo-Hoos.”

Mal has invited Mike—and Johnny Hoss—to be initiated into the Hoo-Hoo Club with him. He didn’t want to do it alone. Besides, the club’s numbers have been dwindling in recent years and it will make Mal look good, bringing in some fresh blood.

He and Mike head back to Mal’s office to look over their schedule. Mike perches himself on Mal’s drafting stool, looking like a big, friendly vulture in an oversized navy blue mechanic’s jumpsuit with his name stitched in red over the left breast pocket. He has a narrow, pockmarked jaw and a snaggle-toothed overbite that causes his lips to stick out beyond the tip of his nose. His close-set, watery yellow eyes usually convey one of two expressions—bewilderment or suspicion—from under the grease-stained brim of the Benjamin Moore Paint cap he always has on. Not even his mother would ever make the mistake of calling him handsome, but he’s one hell of a Westinghouse Certified Air Conditioning Technician. Mike brings in more money for Mal than any other single employee. In a way, Mal loves him like a son. Better than a son, actually, compared to his feelings about Gordon.

Mike says, “I stayed late last night and finished hooking up ol’ Mrs. Emmersen’s unit. Man, oh man, when I turned that baby on, I thought snow was gonna come out of the vents.”

“Yeah, we sold her way too many BTUs,” Mal admits. “But she’s rich now that Bob cashed it in. She can afford it.”

“I just hope she doesn’t leave it on all day and then come home to find her cats frozen stiff.” Mike lets out a self-congratulatory chuckle at the end of that little joke.

Mal just looks at him and says, “She has too many dang cats, anyway.”

Gerald, Mal’s younger brother, stoops and pokes his head in through the doorway to say good morning to them on his way to the back office. Gerald is Vice-President of the company and handles all the books. He’s even taller than Mal—at 6’ 9”—but he has a sissy’s way about him. He majored in accounting at Reedley Community College. He spends his days reading obituaries and bankruptcy notices and trying to collect accounts receivable. Mal gets all the glamour jobs: drawing up architectural projects, formulating plans of attack with Mike and the rest of the A.C. boys, telling the lumberyard crew what to do. But without Gerald, he knows he’d be in trouble.

That doesn’t stop Mal from hating him. In fact, he despises him so much that he didn’t invite Gerald to tag along with them to become a Hoo-Hoo. But it’s not like Gerald would ever do such a thing in the first place.

Ignoring Gerald’s greeting, Mal says to Mike, “The coffee should be ready now. Wanna go get a cup?”

“Cuppa Joe? Yeah, sure. I could use an eye-opener…” says Mike, who usually shies away from caffeine. “Mrs. Emmersen made me stay late and eat cookies with her. Fresh baked chocolate chips. But jeez, the old broad just about talked my ear off. She was going on and on about pillbugs crawling out of her bathtub and doorknobs falling off and the barking noises her refrigerator kept making. I think she wanted me to fix everything. I tried pretending I was interested, but really, I just couldn’t give two shits. She made me feel so tired I could barely walk out of there. Finally, I had to tell her I don’t know jack about pillbugs or barking refrigerators. I told her she should call a dang plumber.”

Mike keeps talking—past the key cutter with its revolving rack of shiny key blanks, past the white pegboard walls hung with shovels, rakes, push brooms, and handsaws—until they reach the coffee counter, where Paco, Leo, Ruben, and Johnny Hoss have already gathered. Johnny is explaining to his amused audience how he obtained his college degree:

“Y’all may think I’m just a dumb Okie—and it’s true, I dropped outta school in the third grade—but I bet y’all didn’t know I got me a college diploma. Not many third grade dropouts that can say that, huh? Paco, you got a diploma? Ruben?” Johnny Hoss bats his movie star eyes at them in mock concern.

“They don’t give out no diplomas in juvie, man…” says Ruben.
“Well, they don’t give out no diplomas in the Marines, neither, no matter how many gooks ya kill. But once I got out, I figured it was time I got me some education. They have this thing where the government pays you to go back to school. So I ended up takin’ me a six-week course in animal husbandry. By the time I was done I got me a diploma, which says, basically, that I’m qualified to jack-off roosters.”

Paco, Leo, and Ruben burst out laughing. Johnny Hoss laughs right along with them, but he’s not finished: “That diploma got me a job at the Albion Poultry factory. A good job, too. Paid nineteen dollars an hour. Full benefits. And all I had to do was jack-off these roosters. Lemme tell ya, they was horny little suckers. They was just beggin’ for it. I’d grab ‘em by the ankles and turn ‘em upside down, then I’d get my thumb way down in there and start rubbin’ it around, just like they showed us in class. Them roosters would start gettin’ into it. They’d ruffle up their damn feathers. They’d start cluckin’ and flappin’ and carryin’ on—wigglin’ their little asses like all get out. Then Bingo!—tsst, tsst, tsst!—they’d shoot their wads halfway across the room if you didn’t catch it in a cup the way you was supposed to. You wouldn’t believe all the jizz them roosters had in ‘em. And they’d do it five, maybe six times a day. It was just my first job outta college, but it was a good ‘un. I kept it for more’n a year.”

“If it was such a great job, then why’d you quit, pendejo?” Paco asks.

“My thumbs was gettin’ sore.”

Johnny holds out a well-callused thumb and uses it to do something vaguely obscene to the sparse black mustache under Paco’s affronted nostrils. “¡Cabrón!” Paco complains, lurching to get away. Then Johnny eyes Mal—while Leo and Ruben laugh—and says, “C’mon, guys, let’s get to work.” As they all head outside, Johnny turns and yells, “See ya, Gordon!”

“Bye!” says Gordon appearing from behind the coffee counter, which is taller than he is. He’s carrying a small wastepaper basket loaded with crumpled Styrofoam cups and coffee grounds.

“Gordon! What are you doing back there?” asks Mal.

“It’s Saturday,” says Gordon. “I’m supposed to be here. It’s my job, remember?”

“I thought your mom wasn’t bringing you in until later.”

“I always get here this early.”

“Were you back there this whole time?”

“I’m supposed to empty the trash first thing,” Gordon says. He doesn’t want to mention the fact that every Saturday Johnny Hoss sneaks him his own special cup of coffee—with lots of non-dairy creamer and sugar. “It’ll stunt your growth,” Johnny says, “but with your daddy as tall as he is, you’d be better off a little stunted.” As a diversionary tactic, Gordon asks his father to explain to him what jizz means.

“Oh, crap,” says Mal. “It’s, um, the stuff roosters shoot out of their wieners so they can have babies.”

“Roosters can have babies?”

Gordon pretends to be so staggered by this information that the wastepaper basket tilts in his hands, dumping a few coffee grounds onto the laces of his blue suede Puma tennis shoes.

“No, but hens lay eggs, and… damnit, Gordon, go empty that trash before you spill it all over the carpet.”

Gordon takes off, leaving Mike and Mal alone. Somewhere behind them, a sales clerk rings one of the registers, making the day’s first sale (a pair of butter yellow work gloves and a Hula Hoe). “You believe any of that rooster business?” Mike asks.

“Who knows what to believe,” Mal says darkly, “when it comes to Johnny Hoss.”

The rest of the morning goes by in a blur—as they all do—with Mal answering phone calls, reading the mail, talking to customers, shuffling papers, dispensing advice, and lending a hand wherever a hand seems to be needed. Around noon, he mans the cash register while the clerks head out to lunch. A sunburnt old contractor, Hank Rasmussen, swaggers in demanding to buy 100 two-by-four studs, but he wants to go out back and personally handpick them. “Sure… go ahead. The customer is always king around here,” says Mal, as he charges Hank for Select grade lumber—instead of the stud price—without telling him. A little while later, two bandanna-wearing Mexican delinquents hit the counter—known paint-huffers. They start babbling at him in Spanish. Mal takes them around to the Paint Supplies section and opens the theft-proof Plexiglas case he recently installed to protect the spray cans of Rustoleum. He hands the boys two cans each of Metallic Copper, even though they’re pointing and waving their hands at everything, like a drunken, four-armed octopus. Mal knows what’s best for them. If they’re paying just to inhale the stuff from inside a gym sock, they might as well be discreet about it. Copper is the closest match to their skin color. Besides, metallic paint gets you higher—everybody knows that.

Mal spends the rest of the afternoon cooped-up in his office, drawing plans for a swimming pool in his backyard. He and Gerald inherited a cabin in Morro Bay from their father, which they’re thinking about selling. If it happens, Mal will use his share of the proceeds to put in the pool (kidney-shaped, with a Jacuzzi, is what he’s thinking—while visions of Janice Marrsden in a bikini keep crowding his thoughts, making him half-delirious). Gordon and Cynthia won’t think it’s a fair trade—they both love the cabin—but they’ll just have to put up with it. Gerald says they can make a pile of money on the deal, and business is business.

The next thing Mal knows, it’s time to drive to Fresno for the Hoo-Hoo Club meeting. He and Mike and Johnny make the thirty-minute trip in Cynthia’s avocado green Cadillac Eldorado. Mal left Cynthia with the Pinto. He wants to show his guys a good time, and the Caddy has air-conditioning and a Quadraphonic sound system. He plays them his tape of Roger Whittaker, Mal singing along to the lyrics of “I Don’t Believe in ‘If’ Anymore” in his froggy baritone—which no one seems to appreciate. Johnny asks him if he has any Lynyrd Skynyrd and Mike wants to hear Deep Purple, but neither request can be granted. The only other tape in the car is The Herb Alpert and The Tijuana Brass Christmas Album. Rather than torture themselves with that, they switch to an AM station and listen to Bill Cullen interviewing Joe Garagiola for NBC Radio.

The Hoo-Hoo Club has rented out the Copacabana Room in the Ramada Inn just off Blackstone Avenue for the big shindig. Mal can tell Mike and Johnny are impressed. As he leads them through the palm tree flanked double doors, someone tries to hand Mal a brochure. He doesn’t even bother to look at it. He already knows the literature. Founded in 1892, the Concatenated Order of Hoo-Hoo claims to be the oldest industrial fraternal organization in America. Their mystic symbol—to be found on the sides of lumberyards and timber companies everywhere—is an arched black cat against an orange background with its tail curled into the number 9. The club’s membership is strictly limited to lumber merchants and their employees, but as Mal surveys the red-carpeted room he sees nothing to distinguish the people there from any other cheap-suited mob of businessmen—except, perhaps, for a preponderance of gold-rimmed aviator-style bifocals and some extravagant Martin Van Buren-style muttonchops. But even those seemingly flagrant fashion choices can’t define them as a group. The same look can be found these days on regional bank managers, State Farm insurance agents, Methodist Sunday school teachers, “Broadway Joe” Namath, and John Lennon. It’s 1973, after all….

A stacked waitress with a ponytail and pimply skin shows them to a table near the center of the room. Mike and Johnny take seats, looking a little lost among all the lumber bigwigs. Mal sees Arnie Andersen standing nearby and invites him over. Arnie owns Citizen’s Lumber, up in Modesto. He’s a ruthless son-of-a-gun who once sued Georgia-Pacific when they were late with a big plywood shipment. Or maybe he just sued the truck driver—Mal doesn’t really remember. All he knows for sure is that Arnie Andersen is always suing the pants off someone.

“Arnie! How’s business?”

“Business stinks, Mal!” Arnie says with a jovial shrug. “I just bankrupted some bearded jackass who thought he could build himself a hippie-dippy VW repair shop without paying me for my lumber first. Now I own the damn place, but what the hell am I supposed to do with it? You got any Volkswagens that need fixin’?”

“My Caddy could use a lube job.”

“Hell’s bells. I don’t know diddly about cars—especially Kraut ones. You’d think I might’ve learned something about ‘em while I was shuffling Nazis around in the CIC, but no. And the longhaired crumb bums who drive those things nowadays don’t have any money, anyway…. How’s business up in your neck of the woods?” They start walking away from the table.

“Could be better. We’ll see how the raisin crop does this year.”
A waitress comes by and hands them drinks. Big drinks the color of Ty-D-Bol liquid toilet bowl cleanser, with little green mermaid swizzle sticks. Not something Mal was expecting.

“Cheers!” says Arnie.

They clink their glasses together and take big gulps. Mal tastes molasses-flavored gasoline. “What the heck is this stuff?” he asks with a horrified pucker.

“It’s an old Hoo-Hoo tradition,” says Arnie. “Secret recipe. Hope you like it, ‘cause you’ll be drinking a lot of this stuff tonight. It’s part of the ritual.”

Mike and Johnny are also in possession of the weird blue cocktails. They raise their glasses to Mal in a toast and shout out something obscene, which doesn’t quite carry across the noisy, crowded room. “What did they say?” Mal asks Arnie.

“‘To the Imperious Blue Thunderfuck.’ It’s the name of the drink.”

“Huh…” says Mal. He takes another huge gulp. He figures he might as well choke the stuff down. It’s bound to make the evening more interesting.

About twenty minutes later, Wayne Covington—President of Covington Lumber and Hardware in Visalia—gets up on a little stage behind a podium and asks everyone to sit down. He says they’re all in for a huge treat tonight because the Chief Executive Officer of Hoo-Hoo International—the Snark of the Universe—has flown in all the way from Alabama just to be with them.

“What the heck’s a Snark of the Universe?” asks Johnny Hoss.

Good question, thinks Mal. It takes a minute for his brain to engage (that drink is getting right on top of him, whatever it is…) but then Mal is able to explain that the Hoo-Hoo Club’s officers are named after creatures in a poem by Lewis Carroll—the guy who wrote Alice in Wonderland.

“‘Jabberwocky,’” Arnie adds helpfully.

“Whassat—some kinda secret code?” Johnny sounds belligerent.

“It’s the name of the poem,” says Mal. “It’s a weird poem, really. It doesn’t make a whole heck of a lot of sense. There’s stuff in there about talking oysters and other things with crazy names like… well, I don’t remember the names right now. Arnie? How ‘bout you?”

“Bojums. I remember it has Bojums in it. I think those are the things you find in the bottom of your red flannel pajamas after a really bad nightmare.”

“No, those would be dingleberries,” Mike Shriver pronounces.

At that point, Wayne Covington helps them out with some of the terms by inviting The Supreme Nine to join him up at the podium, calling each of the Hoo-Hoo Club officers by their name and title: “Steve Emerson, Arcanoper; Jeff Bankston, Bojum; Lee Hendricksen, Gurdon; Fred Erickson, Scrivenoter….”
“Damn! I feel like doin’ the hula!” Johnny Hoss says, apropos of nothing.

“What’s in these drinks?”

“I can’t believe it!” Mike chimes in. “It’s only my second one and I’m already bombed out of my skull.”

Mal himself is feeling no pain. “Pussies,” he says, trying to keep a straight face.

They all watch as the Snark of the Universe hobbles up to the podium—a white-haired old gentleman decked out in orange suspenders and a string tie under a wrinkled cream-colored suit. He looks like a Kentucky horse breeder gone to seed, or maybe Father Time on a bender. Wayne proposes a toast, all gobbledygook and smarmy good feelings. Down the hatch, thinks Mal. A waitress is there with another Imperious Blue Thunderfuck for him before he sets down the empty glass. I’d like to Imperiously Thunderfuck her, Mal thinks, even though she’s not all that good-looking—blubbery arms, greasy brown perm, a voice like a pelican. Doesn’t matter. Alcohol-fueled perversity is coursing through his veins. He has a partial boner going, “Hubba hubba….”

“Greetings, fellow Hoo-Hoos,” says the Snark of the Universe in a high-pitched, quavering voice. “Can you all hear me out there? Great. Let me start off by telling y’all that I come tonight bearing prophecies from the Seer of the House of Ancients….”

This guy sounds like somebody’s grandma riding a dildo, thinks Mal, somewhat uncharitably; and the Seer of the House of Ancients is probably some senile old fart who runs a True Value store down in Mississippi.

“The Seer tells me grand things are in store for the Concatenated Order of Hoo-Hoo in the coming year. Yes, very grand things. So be on your toes!”

This exhortation rouses the room to drunken cheers. Apparently those Imperious Blue Thunderfucks are having an effect beyond Mal’s immediate vicinity. “Show us your tits!” someone shouts. It’s unclear whether this request is directed at one of the waitresses or the Snark of the Universe. The latter nervously fingers a button on his shirt.

“Tonight, as you know,” the Snark bravely continues, “we’re initiating nine new members into the Fresno County Sub-Order of Hoo-Hoos. This is a very fine thing you young men are doing. You’ll be on the receiving-end of venerable mystic secrets that must never leave these premises. In fact, y’all must swear to never speak of anything that transpires between these four walls of the Ramada Inn’s very elegant Copacabana Room. Swear it upon the Slithy Tove, who will come to your house in the dead of night and stick its hollow, anteater-like tongue down your throat and suck out all your vital organs if you should so much as breathe of these forthcoming events. Swear it now, gentlemen.”

Mal swears to whatever-it-is, along with the rest of them.

“Excellent. I can tell you really mean it. The Slithy Tove is well-satisfied. We may now distribute the Sacred Jabberwocks. Assume your positions, men.”

The older members of the Hoo-Hoo Club form two straight lines of twenty-seven men each down the center aisle of the room. The waitresses enter from the sides with drink trays piled high with rubber crocodiles—or something like that. Vulcanized iguanas might also be a safe bet. Each man in line takes one of the spiky, flexible creatures from a tray and grasps it by the tail. Some of them experimentally swish the things through the air, like batters during a warm-up pitch.

“I don’t like the looks of this…” says Johnny Hoss.

“Oh crap,” says Mike.

“Initiates,” says the Snark of the Universe with enough sibilance to create a burst of feedback from his microphone, “it’s time to strip down to your undershorts.”

So they strip, knowing what’s in store for them. Mike is the first to run the gauntlet. The sound of all those rubber lizards hitting him is really something, almost deafening. Mike takes it like a gangly toddler—crying and drooling by the end of it, his Hanes athletic briefs bunched up in the crack of his red-smacked ass like a loose diaper. The other initiates follow him.

Some joker starts playing Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of A Thin Man” over the P.A. system. When Dylan sneers out the famous chorus line—“…something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mister Jones?”—Mal, standing there in his Fruit-of-the-Looms, realizes with a shudder that in this case he’s Mister Jones. Maybe he’s always been Mister Jones. He hears something about having contacts among the lumberjacks to get the facts when someone attacks your imagination. He wonders: Is that doped-up folksinger reading my frickin’ mind?

With a head full of Imperious Blue Thunderfucks, Mal finds himself suddenly open to the occult vitality of Bob Dylan’s lyrics. He wonders if there’s any way to shed his Mister Jonesness. He wants to get with it. Become a hep-cat. He wants to—how do they say it?—“Turn on, tune in, and drop out.” Mal imagines himself smoking a fat cigar of marijuana in Haight-Ashbury, then balling some dirty little hippie chick on a beanbag chair in her patchouli-smelling Victorian attic. After his orgasm, she puts on a tie-dyed negligée and plays the harpsichord for him. Then he goes downstairs and finds the Black Panthers sitting around the kitchen table, making a bomb to blow up a bank or the home improvement section at Sears. He gives them some skin. They give him the high-five. And Mal says, “Who’s the man?” And the Black Panthers say, “You da man, Mal. You, babes. You is one funky-ass muthafucka….”

This tender reverie comes to an abrupt and intimidating end when someone gives Mal a shove. He staggers into the gauntlet and suffers a hail of blows from fifty-four flailing mini-dragons. He finds it oddly comforting, although he knows he’ll be showing some welts later. At least it sobers him up some—maybe too much. He suddenly feels like barfing. It’s the smell of all that rubber. It’s expanding up his nostrils, assaulting his sinuses with the too-powerful stench of bicycle tires and new shower curtains. Eyes watering, saliva glands working overtime, Mal grabs Arnie Andersen by the lapels and croaks like a sea lion right into his face.

Oh, it’s only the dry heaves, thinks Mal. Nothing’s coming up. The other guys stop whacking him, anyway. No one wants to risk getting puked on.

“You okay, Mal?” Arnie asks him. Just friendly concern—one guy to another.

“Sure, yep,” Mal says through a belch.

Then with a backwoods holler, Johnny Hoss leaps naked—except for one gray sock and Confederate flag emblazoned boxer shorts—onto a group of Mal’s iguana-wielding tormentors. He sends them scattering like bowling pins. It looks like the start of a free-for-all, some wild-assed melee, but then Johnny hops back up on his feet and just stands there grinning, pleased with himself in the same way that a big dog seems pleased when roughhousing with a bunch of pups.

“Gentlemen, gentlemen…” the tremulous voice of the Snark of the Universe admonishes them from the podium. “Let’s all restrain ourselves for a moment. It’s time for the second phase of our hallowed initiation rite. Blindfolds, please!”

Mal, Mike, and Johnny all submit to being blindfolded, along with the other six initiates. Deprived of his sight, Mal feels dizzy—on the verge of passing out. He’s led into a small, warm room where he smells candles burning and hears voices echoing off the walls. He’s told to kneel. Some kind of chanting is taking place. To Mal’s ears, it sounds like a Catholic mass, but instead of Latin, the words all seem to be made-up by Lewis Carroll. Then the Snark of the Universe’s amplified voice rings out, reciting some mystical nonsense, a singsong incantation. Someone forces Mal to drink more of the Imperious Blue Thunderfuck—spiced this time with nutmeg and cinnamon. Then he’s told to stick out his tongue. Cold fingers pinch it and a slimy, hairy thing about the size of a slug is put into Mal’s mouth. He’s forced to swallow. Nearly gags. One last singsong magic spell follows, along with another jolt of Old Thunderfuck to wash the slimy thing down. Mal hears someone retching. He gets a whiff of the tomatoey tang of fresh vomit. Things are definitely getting weird.

The chanting stops. Mal hears people leaving the room. He wonders if he can take his blindfold off now. As if in answer, the Snark of the Universe says, “Our initiation ceremony is almost complete. Just ten more minutes and you’ll all be welcomed into the Vasty Eternal Brotherhood of Hoo-Hoos. But for these next ten minutes, you must leave your blindfolds on at all times, no matter what.”

It’s then that Mal gets hit with the first headbutt.

Somebody in there is acting like a bull gone mad, making grunting noises and running around the room with his head down, ramming into people. That first blow to his solar plexus knocks the wind out of Mal and he falls on his side with a thud. He hears the man-beast tackle someone else. There’s a yelp of pain and the dull collapse of yet another man hitting the floor. Mal thinks the unseen marauder must be Johnny Hoss, drunk out of his mind, making quarterback sacks in pure darkness, just for the hell of it. As Mal gets his lungs back he tries to concentrate. He climbs to his feet with his back against a wall, sending out feelers so he’ll be able to sense where Johnny strikes next.

“What the hell’s going on here?” someone demands to know.

“Holy jeez! I’m ripped to the tits!” Mike Shriver shouts.

A few more bodies go down with various yips and grunts. Then Mal is hit again. This time he takes a headbutt to the stones, but by anticipating it, he’s able to partially deflect the blow. He’s also drunk enough that the sensation is dulled, so he doesn’t fold. Now’s the time to take action, he thinks. What would Joe Garagiola do? No… wait! In a flash of inspiration, Mal recalls the words of the great Juan Belmonte: “In order to fight, one must forget the body.” Belmonte learned to bullfight nude, under the moonlight. Mal suddenly knows what must be done. He steps out of his enormous white underpants and dangles them at his side like a matador’s cape.

“Toro! Toro!” he shouts at his invisible assailant. C’mon, Johnny, Mal thinks. Come to Daddy.

A black force ripples the air in front of Mal like a malevolent wind. Now is the time to become the torero, to calmly meet the Minotaur on its own turf. “Toro!” Mal taunts again, dancing, feinting, a maestro in death’s arena. Who has bigger balls: the bull or Mal Swannson? “Mal!” the audience roars as one.

Then he’s sideswiped. Hamstrung. Mal can’t believe his bad luck. He crumples as frantic, sweaty arms grapple with his midsection. He strikes out blindly and listens for a voice, some identifying syllable, but all he hears is heavy breathing. Then there’s a moment of true horror as Mal realizes it’s no longer just fun and games. A howl of pain escapes him, and he urinates like a toad, as his inner thigh feels the pressure of someone’s savage, clamping teeth.

At least he missed my ‘nads, Mal thinks as the lights switch on and he hears men shouting. He passes out as soon as it seems safe.