The Steve Mertz Trilogy Table of Contents

foam finger

I wrote The Steve Mertz Trilogy inspired by Alfred Jarry‘s Ubu plays, which I haven’t read. I did read that the first play in the trilogy was based on a play he had cowritten with friends when he was younger. In this case “Steve Mertz, A Tragedy,” the first play of the trilogy incorporated elements of “The Savage Butcher of Carnale” by Bob Folder, edited and developed for the stage by me and various others. I’m not certain how anxious they are to claim editorship of said play, so I will not advertise them unless they indicate a willingness to go public with their depravities.

Although “The Savage Butcher of Carnale” is lost, its sequel, “The Savage Butcher of Carnale: The Retabulation,” which may actually be the original, is available on Bob’s site.

Obviously another element leading to the writing of “Steve Mertz, A Tragedy” was Vladimir Mayakovsky’s “Vladimir Mayakovsky, A Tragedy,” which Vladimir Mayakovsky adapted from “Steve Mertz, A Tragedy,” which was based on an old TV Guide.

THE STEVE MERTZ TRILOGY

Steve Mertz, A Tragedy

Steve at Work

Mertz in Love

The Steve Mertz Trilogy, Part Three: Mertz in Love

Trilogy Table of Contents

SCENE ONE – the nineteenth century

A girl in a gingham sleeping gown, with white lace ruffles around the neck, is asleep in a large bed with decoratively carved wooden head- and foot-board. She is clutching an oversized, illuminated light bulb. Steve Mertz is watching her.

STEVE MERTZ

The first time I met her I banged on her door with my boot in proper Roman fashion. She opened it wearing nothing but a tissue of lies and a smile bright enough to suck cars in. She was offering me a sack of gravel and a sock in the teeth. Since then the idea of what might have been has grown larger than what was. Now it is the brightest part of her. If a diseased gibbon were in possession of it, I would love the gibbon as much as she. How the narcoleptic root beer-colored ashtray melts into a syrup of retarding the grizzled old shank bone of grampa on a vaguely homophobic boat with its female genitalia. I offered a symbol to three drunk redneck football players in a Portapotty. They beat me like a drum. I sent Victoria Principal a snapshot of my nude Twizzler. She said no woman will ever really like a man who doesn’t have an enormous ball-sack. My nut-sack’s huge.

Turns his back.

STEVE MERTZ (CONT’D)

Come closer. I have something to show you.

The Girl with the Enormous Light Bulb mutters and tosses in her sleep. Steve Mertz laughs nervously, turns back around.

STEVE MERTZ (CONT’D)

Nothing! What? Gee Your Hair Smells Terrific! Would you rather have a Pop Tart or a mouth full of ancient coins? I want to shower you with gifts. You know, that sort of thing. I hear the ringing of an excruciating bell in the rectory.

She jokes with me, you know, bell jars and sassafras from Narraganset to Walla Walla, but I know she must clasp bivalves with a mollusk-husker from Yachats for her ailing, threadbare rumpus room with buttons for eyes. I wait because I know the sauces age in antediluvian skillets hidden in the Scythian wing of the Ukrainian National Museum. I am your comrade and pack the cartons tight with bang rubber. Someday, I will be there and she will wait for something and something’s over there for sure and she’ll do whatever and I’m all like yeah and whatever and so on. I’m just a romantic. My Aunt Phidias had this pantry, old fashioned pantry with the wooden doors, with shelves and she’d keep her preserves there, and jellies and jams and olives and pickles and other pickled vegetables. I don’t know the heat or something so the pickles and I’m sitting there watching that which I used to think was a TV so dumb and then pickles from eight jars popped out in all directions like anti-ballistic missile silos in Matapan at 6 in the morning the cocks crowin’ and Uncle Heinous out of bed with a foam fronted ball cap on and a cape and nudity below and shotgun chasing his friend Mortimer which is what he used to call It, around the room screechin’ about how Mortimer up and give it to his whore of a wife and he was gonna get it real good shotgun blasts from here to St. Phoebus’ Home for the Criminally Lubricated.

Stage goes suddenly dark. Eighteen extremely loud shotgun blasts flash. Lights back on. Steve Mertz is sitting in a rocking chair holding The Harvard Concordance to Ovid, wearing a nine-foot tall hat. The Girl with the Enormous Light Bulb is gone.

STEVE MERTZ (CONT’D)

The stereotype of the sleepless lovesick youth was long established by the time Ovid expressed it, but he conveys a particularly vivid impression of it. Remember that such love-longing was diagnosed as a clinical illness in ancient times, usually treatable only by lovemaking.

Note his ingenious examples of self-defeating struggle. He gladly surrenders to Cupid, telling him that he can celebrate a triumphal procession of the kind allotted to military leaders who succeeded in adding territory to the Roman Empire, but decorated with objects associated with Venus, such as a myrtle wreath substituted for the usual laurel. Captured prisoners were a feature of such processions.

Enter Unindicted Co-conspirator with Minister Without Portfolio. Unindicted Co-conspirator should be played by Watergate criminal G. Gordon Liddy, while Minister Without Portfolio is former British Prime Minister Lloyd George.

UNINDICTED CO-CONSPIRATOR

Welcome to the Religion of Finite Numbers, the radio talk show that lets the radio talk. I’m your host Raicido Adi.

MINISTER WITHOUT PORTFOLIO

And I’m your celebrity guest host, Rod Steiger.

UNINDICTED CO-CONSPIRATOR

Our guests today are rock and roll immortals, The Dream Teens. The Dream Teens.

MINISTER WITHOUT PORTFOLIO

And later on in the show we’ll be talking to poet and dramatist Bob Folder about his new memoir, “The Tongue in the Sink.”

UNINDICTED CO-CONSPIRATOR

You beg them for a reason

In the hot plastic winds of San Jose.

“Shall we go talk to the octopus?”

Beneath the automobile dealerships

On Naglee Road the slurry conduits burst,

Covering the houses in nearby Brobdignagian Avenue

With a piping-hot sauce.

MINISTER WITHOUT PORTFOLIO

The vermin floss piano lost my pancreas

and the carnival ride.

Motion is

this van’s a-knockin’

on the bamboo

of the creamy porcelain Oxnard

I keep in my pulverized lagoon.

Who cheated the fierce monkey in my pants?

He went wild

and I began to whistle

like a CB

in the ocean.

Fifteen hours

Greenwich mean time,

closing the future

on a wild water buffalo of fire

whom the natives call

President Bizimungu.

Silence.

MINISTER WITHOUT PORTFOLIO (CONT’D)

(to Unindicted Co-Conspiritor)

What are you going to do, make a citizen’s arrest?

UNINDICTED CO-CONSPIRATOR

Keep the pulsing away and everything’s A-OK, follow me? Hide in a metal box and the world is at your command. I tried to kiss a girl once but she threw up and now I enter numbers in rows and buy metal and wires and powder in cans and am very powerful.

Exit Unindicted Co-conspirator and Minister Without Portfolio.

STEVE MERTZ

Obviously if he was trying to keep an affair such as this secret, he would not have published the poem. The humor of the poem lies in the poet’s frantic jealousy of his mistresses’ husband. His elaborate system of symbolic gestures is meant more to be amusing than serious, as the conclusion reveals. To understand this poem one needs to understand that dining was normally done reclining on couches, leaning on one elbow, two to a couch.

SCENE TWO – A long-closed supermarket, Dust, a few cans and rickety shelving

Enter, from one side Bishop, carrying harmonica and large, colorful astrology pamphlet, and Prostitute, from the other, Man in a Lemur Costume.

BISHOP

What are we doing here?

MAN IN A LEMUR COSTUME

You guys? At least you’re Bishop and Prostitute. What the hell am I doing here? I’m Man in a Lemur Costume for God’s sake.

PROSTITUTE

Maybe you’re supposed to represent the Id.

MAN IN A LEMUR COSTUME

What? You mean, like the comic?

PROSTITUTE

No, you moron. In Freudian psychology the Id is that element of the self that is primal, the urges of our animal being.

BISHOP

I thought that was the Ego.

PROSTITUTE

Isn’t that the Id moderated by the Superego?

MAN IN A LEMUR COSTUME

What the fuck are you talking about?

PROSTITUTE

The Superego are those elements of the self that act as brakes on our urges – mores, ethics, law, religion. I’m just hooking to pay my way through psychology school.

BISHOP

Maybe I’m the Superego.

PROSTITUTE

Yeah, OK. Stands to reason. But if he’s the Id and you’re the Superego, that makes me the Ego.

MAN IN A LEMUR COSTUME

What does that mean?

PROSTITUTE

It means that this guy’s idea of normalcy of urge balanced by law is a woman who screws for money.

MAN IN A LEMUR COSTUME

Ah, it’s all bullshit to me. Didn’t you get any notes?

BISHOP

Message on my answering machine, such-and-such a time, such-and-such a place, just like I told you on the phone.

PROSTITUTE

Jung believed that in a dream, a house represented the psyche.

BISHOP

Is this a house?

MAN IN A LEMUR COSTUME

Well does it look like your house, Tolstoy? Do you have dust-covered shelves with dented cans of tomato paste in your house? Actually, that doesn’t seem that unlikely.

PROSTITUTE

Why shouldn’t the self be represented by the ruins of a supermarket? This is the self in public, kind of airing dirty laundry. Why shouldn’t it be a public space gone to hell? Maybe that’s what his psyche is like.

MAN IN A LEMUR COSTUME

Aren’t you supposed to be the hooker? So why don’t you just shut up and suck my cock?

Prostitute slaps Man in a Lemur Costume in the back of the head.

MAN IN A LEMUR COSTUME (CONT’D)

Ouch.

BISHOP

We better look around and see if we can figure out what we’re supposed to be doing here.

Prostitute takes harmonica from Bishop, jumps on his back and begins playing. Man in a Lemur Costume begins to dance like a chicken with a broken spine. Prostitute, Bishop and Man in a Lemur Costume exit.

SCENE THREE – The banks of the Charles River in Boston, circa 1850

Enter Steve Mertz, in frock coat and mutton-chops, with Fantasia Popcorn, A Woman Who Makes Believe, in a high-necked 19th century dress and hair on top of head.

FANTASIA POPCORN, A WOMAN WHO MAKES BELIEVE

There is a small cantaloupe bucking like a panicked monkey in your lap. Momma said don’t leave the table till your plate is clean.

STEVE MERTZ

You know how in every hippy café from Tucumcari to Ann Arbor some half-educated bean monkey is taping on a sign to the napkin dispenser that says, “These napkins are made from trees.” Well, I used to be the editor of an international pulp and paper industry annual guide and you know what? There’s not a napkin on the planet earth that was made out of a tree. Do you have any idea how expensive trees are? What company would make napkins out of trees? They’re made out of post-consumer waste, straw and an east Asian plant called bagasse. So use a hundred of them every time you want because we’ll never run out!

FANTASIA POPCORN, A WOMAN WHO MAKES BELIEVE

You’re cute when I imagine you to be someone else.

STEVE MERTZ

Wow. I feel the same way.

FANTASIA POPCORN, A WOMAN WHO MAKES BELIEVE

You’re so sweet to say that. Isn’t this the moment when we tell each other our life stories – stories made up of half-truths, exaggeration and editing? We’ll grow close to one another’s fictions and that will be love. Later we’ll complicate it with more fictions and grave disappointments. You go first.

STEVE MERTZ

OK, well, let’s see. I’m a 14 year old girl named Tammy. I was born in a 1960 International Harvester on the road between A Sack of Clams and Bottle Brush Hill where my father, the international arms merchant Adnan Khashogi, had stopped to sell the Klan a crate of Grendel P-12s. My height is the square root of my weight times the hair’s breadth between being and not being.

FANTASIA POPCORN, A WOMAN WHO MAKES BELIEVE

Oh, wow. That’s beautiful. I had no idea. You’re dreamy.

STEVE MERTZ

What about you?

FANTASIA POPCORN, A WOMAN WHO MAKES BELIEVE

Me? Oh, jeez, compared to that? Relatively simply really. In recent years, methods based on lattice reduction have been used repeatedly for the cryptanalytic attack of various systems. Even if they do not rest on highly sophisticated theories, these methods may look a bit intricate to practically oriented cryptographers, both from the mathematical and the algorithmic point of view. The aim of this is to explain what can be achieved by lattice reduction algorithms, even without understanding the actual mechanisms involved. Two examples are given. One is the attack devised by the second author against Knuth’s truncated linear congruential generator. This attack was announced a few years ago and appears here for the first time in complete detail.

STEVE MERTZ

I love you. Or maybe the idea of you. What a life we could have. If only…

FANTASIA POPCORN, A WOMAN WHO MAKES BELIEVE

Don’t think I won’t stab you!

STEVE MERTZ

No, it’s not that, it’s just… Well, I… It’s her.

He indicates The Girl with the Enormous Light Bulb who suddenly appears, in bed, in a spotlight behind them.

FANTASIA POPCORN, A WOMAN WHO MAKES BELIEVE

What about her?

STEVE MERTZ

I will always love her. The idea of loving the idea of her is too attractive and convenient to part with for the mere reality of love. Hold me like a sleepy child.

Enter Unindicted Co-conspirator and Minister Without Portfolio. They walk in circles around Steve Mertz and Fantasia Popcorn, A Woman Who Makes Believe.

MINISTER WITHOUT PORTFOLIO

See here.

UNINDICTED CO-CONSPIRATOR

I say, my good man.

MINISTER WITHOUT PORTFOLIO

Well, I never.

UNINDICTED CO-CONSPIRATOR

Tut, tut, old bean.

MINISTER WITHOUT PORTFOLIO

Do you mind?

UNINDICTED CO-CONSPIRATOR

Really!

The Girl with the Enormous Light Bulb sits up suddenly in bed. As she speaks the light bulb glows brighter and brighter. Contrary to expectation, this means nothing.

THE GIRL WITH THE ENORMOUS LIGHT BULB

There’s a badger in the butter dish and a panther in the salt cellar. The napkin ring is holding the alligator captive and the rabid kitty is prancing about in the Dutch oven. Aunt Mab is pushing hatpins into the neighbors’ thighs. Down in the root cellar the brontosaurus is scratching himself on the lintel. The tigers are loose in the tea cozy and Sissy is imagining roses in the pee stained cement room down to ol’ Doc Kootie’s Insane Asylum. Soon, I will join her there, Sissy, and we will make crowns of Queen Anne’s Lace and dandelions. We’ll take turns shooting ball shot at the army of infants crawling over the nighttime hills clutching knives in their teeth. Safe at last with Charles Bronson skinned and packed in salt in a trunk in the attic.

STEVE MERTZ

Now do you understand? What wisdom! What delicacy!

FANTASIA POPCORN, A WOMAN WHO MAKES BELIEVE

She’s a TV star, not Emily Dickinson

STEVE MERTZ

You are the shit-smeared plastic bag of jealousy! I can no longer be with you. She needs me.

FANTASIA POPCORN, A WOMAN WHO MAKES BELIEVE

You are the pair of shit-stained jeans found the morning after on the loading dock at Crater Lake. Picture the nude walking home, stinking in the ice-cold blue moonlight. You are welcome to your face.

Exit Fantasia Popcorn, A Woman Who Makes Believe. Unindicted Co-conspirator and Minister Without Portfolio crowd around the bed of The Girl with the Enormous Light Bulb, who has gone fast asleep. They break out beakers, bottles and antique medical paraphernalia and crowd around her bed, sheltering her from view.

UNINDICTED CO-CONSPIRATOR

I’m certain she is afflicted with dementia rodentis.

MINISTER WITHOUT PORTFOLIO

Thinning of the blood.

UNINDICTED CO-CONSPIRATOR

A broken heart, rather.

MINISTER WITHOUT PORTFOLIO

Dipsomania.

UNINDICTED CO-CONSPIRATOR

Female hysteria.

MINISTER WITHOUT PORTFOLIO

I prescribe chelation therapy.

UNINDICTED CO-CONSPIRATOR

Nonsense, aromatherapy is the only reasonable treatment.

MINISTER WITHOUT PORTFOLIO

It’s obvious the poor girl needs a regimen of ear candling.

UNINDICTED CO-CONSPIRATOR

The only thing that will help her at this point is a good blood-letting.

MINISTER WITHOUT PORTFOLIO

You’re a barbarian. The only reasonable scientific option is vegetarianism and the occult.

UNINDICTED CO-CONSPIRATOR

The application of heated stones and Goddess worship.

MINISTER WITHOUT PORTFOLIO

Memberships in the John Birch society and the National Rifle association plus a week in the country or at the seashore where the vapors are thinner.

UNINDICTED CO-CONSPIRATOR

Mega-doses of Vitamin C.

MINISTER WITHOUT PORTFOLIO

Glucosamine.

UNINDICTED CO-CONSPIRATOR

Gamma hydroxybutyric acid.

MINISTER WITHOUT PORTFOLIO

A good old-fashioned beating.

UNINDICTED CO-CONSPIRATOR

Whatever it is, it’s going to cost plenty.

Unindicted Co-conspirator and Minister Without Portfolio laugh.

MINISTER WITHOUT PORTFOLIO

Let’s hurry back to the lab.

UNINDICTED CO-CONSPIRATOR

You engineer a cure while I phone the media.

MINISTER WITHOUT PORTFOLIO

Done and done. And I mean done!

Exit Unindicted Co-conspirator and Minister Without Portfolio. Enter Bishop, Prostitute and Man in a Lemur Costume. Prostitute is holding a map.

PROSTITUTE

Ah, here we are. “Hell’s Half-Acre.”

BISHOP

Really? Hell’s Half-Acre? I thought it would be bigger.

MAN IN A LEMUR COSTUME

What do you want? It’s half an acre.

He spots Steve Mertz and The Girl with the Enormous Light Bulb.

MAN IN A LEMUR COSTUME (CONT’D)

OK, here we go.

They approach.

MAN IN A LEMUR COSTUME (CONT’D)

Is it time to swallow dwarf muscle, Dieter?

PROSTITUTE

You have quite a shapely anus.

Bishop, pretending he’s a airplane, dive-bombs Steve Mertz, making appropriate martial noises. Prostitute pulls out tambourine and she and Man in a Lemur Costume put on a tiny Broadway show near Steve Mertz. This goes on for a moment until Fantasia Popcorn, A Woman Who Makes Believe, rides a bicycle into the midst of them all, carrying a watermelon, which falls to the floor, and explodes. All stare. Exit, dejected, Prostitute, Bishop, Man in a Lemur Costume and Steve Mertz. Fantasia Popcorn, A Woman Who Makes Believe sits down on the edge of The Girl with the Enormous Light Bulb’s bed.

FANTASIA POPCORN, A WOMAN WHO MAKES BELIEVE

All is proceeding according to plan, Admiral.

THE GIRL WITH THE ENORMOUS LIGHT BULB

Perfect. Soon the song of dishwashers will intoxicate the reedy marshes with their acrid smoky sunsets. The peasants of the Val de Coeur will reach for their prybars only to find a tiny oven gremlin already making water in their teapot.

FANTASIA POPCORN, A WOMAN WHO MAKES BELIEVE

Do you contest the wisdom of the Unit?

THE GIRL WITH THE ENORMOUS LIGHT BULB

Ah, we are n Idiot Nation, all our plans wrapped up in antique cheesecloth and guarded like next year’s seed. No, we pass around this green bottle of cheap liquor and call it Funkytown while the red hot bulbs smack into the dust by the dozens.

FANTASIA POPCORN, A WOMAN WHO MAKES BELIEVE

Perhaps you’ve forgotten the perpetration of one million Easy Bake Ovens on the windmill of Corinth, all stuck out in the breeze like gramma’s knees.

THE GIRL WITH THE ENORMOUS LIGHT BULB

I forget nothing, presumptuous bandito. I’ll punch my time card cause quittin’ ain’t any better than showin’ up. But then I’m done. I’ll be found between the agave and the urine-weed on the undeveloped half-acre between Buena Vista Park and Two Deodars Bluff and the ditch. I’ll live in the weeds until sense isn’t a sock pulled inside out by gravity somewhere south of Mexico in a jackal den full of purring and warm wet breath.

FANTASIA POPCORN, A WOMAN WHO MAKES BELIEVE

This will never be allowed.

THE GIRL WITH THE ENORMOUS LIGHT BULB

No, Fantasia it will never be allowed. Nothing is ever “allowed.” Learn that and you are one step closer to the check out where the delicious impulses lie buried in toilet bacon. It is done or not done and once done never not allowed having actually and incontrovertibly been. Leave me alone with the light.

Exit Fantasia Popcorn, A Woman Who Makes Believe in a huff.

THE GIRL WITH THE ENORMOUS LIGHTBULB (CONT’D)

Don’t deny the zebras your pain plunks down in your pants but don’t make your binoculars out of meat if you want to see. Play your part if you must, but then put every tiny piece into a pillow-case and toss it off that overpass on 90, then walk out east with no light switches and no forwarding address.

SCENE FOUR – The top of a submarine at sea, hung with festive bunting

All are sitting around in lawn chairs drinking beers from cans and drinks with ice in chimneys. Steve Mertz is turning food over on a barbeque.

STEVE MERTZ

Safe home in the suburbs again, sharing our delusions and boredom. This is what we’ve come to know as safety. No wonder we’re all mad. Many fine ladies have laid down beside me with flesh made of velvet and eyes made of rain. Now Juliana Margulies tells each man and woman what to do and if you disobey you are tortured to death in another horrifying war on closed circuit TV. Ah, listen to me go on and on. I’m being goofy. You’ll be wanting a roasted weenie. Tangy. Makes life worthwhile. That’s what you think if you don’t want to live under the body of a Chevy truck out back of a single-wide on the coast road, hitchhiking into Florence every two weeks to wait in the Food Stamp line and debase yourself in front of people so ashamed of you the only thing they can think to do is be mean, to hide it all up in meanness. Don’t tell them about the child, they’ll take it away and give it to some fucking Mormons in Brownsville who’ll get a check for taking care of him and save money by feeding him powdered milk. Should get the death penalty for that. Just suck it up and spend the next six hours in Shari’s gulping down greyhounds and forget, forget.

UNINDICTED CO-CONSPIRATOR

Scrumptious wieners, Steverino.

MINISTER WITHOUT PORTFOLIO

Quite right. Capital wienerage, old boy. May need to tamp down the batch with a broken-off pool cue wrapped in electrician’s tape if you’ve got one.

THE GIRL WITH THE ENORMOUS LIGHT BULB

I put on my best skirt of Hot Wheel Tracks for the Mayor but he extinguished all the light and replaced zinc with carnations.

FANTASIA POPCORN, A WOMAN WHO MAKES BELIEVE

All the city councilmen fellated the Mayor for a small bag of candy corn they used to poison minorities in Kansas. I felled them like a stand of trees and built a deck from their useless dreams bussed in by the gross from places like Weaselton and Shit Town and Berkowitz Falls and destined to collect grapes for a momentary effluence of white light.

MINISTER WITHOUT PORTFOLIO

The gerbils tied to your apron strings menace me with silly faces they unpacked in Algiers. But I fear nothing. And nothing surrounds us, what?

THE GIRL WITH THE ENORMOUS LIGHT BULB

I’m decanting. In my pants.

MINISTER WITHOUT PORTFOLIO

(Aside to Unindicted Co-conspirator)

I don’t want to wind up working as a footman in some monkey’s mansion

STEVE MERTZ

I’ve got something to show you. Come closer.

FANTASIA POPCORN, A WOMAN WHO MAKES BELIEVE

No excise tax had some plumbing gown go on, going on down to the degree to which it would make her let loose of the glowing bubble.

STEVE MERTZ

Let loose? I don’t want that. I would never want that. A woman, naked, bulb-free in searing nudity with demands for, well, steak and eggs. Me? No, I’m a romantic. The bulb is the point. The square is the circle. The rhombazoid is the parallelogram.

THE GIRL WITH THE ENORMOUS LIGHT BULB

You don’t need me at all.

STEVE MERTZ

I forget. What? I am one-half. Who?

MINISTER WITHOUT PORTFOLIO

Never have my services been so sorely needed. For a small retainer I will rule in your stead and perform my meat biscuit DC-10 Ethiopian fly-in. I’ll set up my suite of offices in the bottom of this bottle while you play whining violin music to a cathedral of Jell-O.

UNINDICTED CO-CONSPIRATOR

I wouldn’t feel right you taking on such a burden alone. I am obliged in my duty bags to defrock my funicular for the young ladies.

STEVE MERTZ

Love and politics stand at eternal loggerheads. I dismiss you and set you to cutting the imaginary grass of exile.

MINISTER WITHOUT PORTFOLIO

Rubbish, my dear boy. Don’t you know the personal is political?

UNINDICTED CO-CONSPIRATOR

It’s in all the papers. All the best people are taking about it.

MINISTER WITHOUT PORTFOLIO

It’s become a best-seller.

UNINDICTED CO-CONSPIRATOR

Of course, “The Scandalous Configurations of Dr. X.”

MINISTER WITHOUT PORTFOLIO

The very one.

STEVE MERTZ

Well, it’s hard to argue with a theory…

MINISTER WITHOUT PORTFOLIO

Quite.

MAN IN A LEMUR COSTUME

I’ve had it with all this crap. It’s high time we were cleaning up the theories.

BISHOP

It’s time to replace your salt-shaker-sized gods with one big-ass gristle-crushing divinity that calculates the flower into fruit and dispenses with all the bullshit.

PROSTITUTE

The dirt and the cleanliness just sit there waiting for your enjoyment and you make a mockery out of drunkenness and prayer where the pussies fart in angelic chorus for your undeserving souls.

Man in a Lemur Costume, Bishop and Prostitute throw the money-changers out of the temple. All the chairs, wieners, plastic beer cups, bottles, chimneys, tanning butter, purses, Minister Without Portfolio, Unindicted Co-conspirator, The Girl with the Enormous Light Bulb and Fantasia Popcorn, A Woman Who Makes Believe, all go rocketing into the drink. A pause. They look at each other. They push Steve Mertz off also.

STEVE MERTZ

Après nous, le deluge!

THE MAN IN THE LEMUR COSTUME

Influx of Burmese sex workers via Mae Sai on the rise

Military bans entry of all Cambodians after clash

Taiwan sends back Thais

Breaches spark crackdown on labour flow to Laos

Cambodians strike it rich in Thailand

Chavalit vows to curb flood of workers into Malaysia

One stop for visas, work permits

Measures to be beefed up to control refugees

Immigrants put strain on border hospitals

Boatpeople saga closer to an end

Vietnamese boat people sent home

Bangkok pushes new border deal

Police on alert against HK gangsters

Shattered dreams of HK dollars

85 Khmers held for illegal entry

Thai workers indifferent to changes after the handover

Tracing our children who fall through the net

THE BISHOP

Migration experts agree diseases abound at borders

Fly away little bird

A sacrifice for the family

For sale: Burmese virgins

Cross-border traffic worsens Aids count

Call on authorities to provide health education to fishermen

Thais blamed for infecting Indonesians

Tracing our children who fall through the net

PROSTITUTE

Burma reopens Tak checkpoint

Rangoon orders checkpoint reopened

August date set for bridge’s official opening

Highway project gains momentum

Bangkok pushes new border deal

Tracing our children who fall through the net

MAN IN A LEMUR COSTUME

That makes sense.

BISHOP

It’s sensible.

PROSTITUTE

It makes perfect sense. It’s sensible.

BISHOP

It’s sensible sure, that’s for sure.

MAN IN A LEMUR COSTUME

It makes sense.

***

This play originally appeared in Exquisite Corpse.

The Steve Mertz Trilogy, Part Two: Steve at Work

Trilogy Table of Contents

SCENE ONE – a windowless, fluorescent meeting room in a building in an office park in a nameless suburb

Steve Mertz, Worker I, Worker II and Worker III sit around a table facing The Manager who stands at a white board.

THE MANAGER

Here’s the latest cupcake on what we’re all flimsy. You’ll note this is a couple of changelings: 1) This one isn’t inspected with a wire brush. (Thank God! I had to have Matt upchuck my fireman on the nearest person, so if your peepee didn’t catch fire last time, call him!)

2) There isn’t a cupcake from Tina, but there is one from Karen M.– We’ll walk about this more in step next peep, but Melissa and I have beelined booties to scoop our poor necklines together — She now has all of the Custard Pubic Sting fluff, while I maim the Bodice Sales/Marketing members with a scream. I’m really incited about the proper lunacies this offers buses to really exude the inevitability of our pantspray insecticides and to blab new bodices to the pissy things we smell. As always, peel the breeze to pop flies if you have any rhinestones and crank the blend for spying on the cupcakes!

WORKER I

Ready! Okay! Our team is the best!

Halloween handy clips and fudge fandango strings

Will be ready and waiting for any man who exceeds out expectations

In the bow tie tag competition which measures the market appeal

Of our new site design.

The man who reaches the finish line first will be granded a special

Secret prize which neatly wrapped up in an old Wall Street Journal

And sealed with a kiss from our beautiful receptionist-Darlene.

No really knows what is inside the box but rumors have it

That is it a magic kaleidoscope! oooooH!

Who is going to be the lucky winner?!

WORKER II

Big-a-chooga, big-chonga!

Kick-’em head!

Big-a-chooga, big-a chonga!

But don’t make ‘em see red!

Shake your bon bon and scream!

Char-dee-char-dee-char-dee-char-dee-aieeeeee!

WORKER III

Darwinian lozenge protector, pocket yam ejector, pickle extruder

And 500 exfoliating turbo-injected sweet rolls!

Ready! Okay!

One afternoon in the corporate Sasquatch trundle-hat

Finger! Finger ! Finger!

A snap pea salesman sings

Like mascarpone juice as a young man stares out the window.

Steve Mertz gazes out non-existent window.

THE MANAGER

Why would a gray tramp in the strip mall, say the Suez is a “doesn’t count” template? There’s an axle in where the first call matches on “diet (hid) drugs (had)” But the search/quest matches only on “Steve (hidden)” instead. If only I’d “had drugs” and thus “had (hid) a chart.”

Any ideas? There is, by the way, no frayed frau blind on

STEVE MERTZ

My name is Steve and I’m a cog in the machine. My desk drawers are filled to the brim with gunpowder and paper clips. I’ve done the math. I’ve memorized your names and numbers and subtracted the ass-pants from every third Bramaputra in Hercules. Just for the record, I am pro-spacefood and pro-monorail. There’s not a damn thing wrong with either of them, you coked-up Yuppies. Now sit down.

THE MANAGER

You are insane. No one talks to The Manager like that. Our efforts will change the world from zinc and felt into make-believe walrus and the smell of bees. Now it’s time for The Presentation. Please.

Worker I approaches the white board. The Manager sits down. Everyone but Steve Mertz waits with the anticipation once reserved for pie.

WORKER I

A hellish and crazy dichotomy in the specific forecast is crotchety by its traditional base in nocturnal resource extinction and purchasing, combined with converging strengths in high tick fabrics. This arcsine contends to nutrient polypod need computing bounced in ethics estrogens. In 1995, reducing coenzymatic expanded by 2.6 percent its actual taste of nearly 4.9 muzzling gasps. The arcsine’s 2.6 percent complacent grazing rants about moralized tank-rats. The enticing runt of 2.7 percent.

The underlying starching of the reducing ceremony is demonstrated by this anchor tic of the notation inch despite problems in several important seltzers in the northwest.

Slimed by the lists in introspective, mazed products, compactors, and instruments, manufacturing emblazonment drizzled 0.4 percent.

However, softeners are Grecian in all five stunts, with 4900 magna softener jobs in 1995 in noisemaking, 1400 in orgasm, and several hundred misers in the reclining three stinks. Collectorships nose out grazing.

Zircon picked up 4291 income electronics jobs as the first of the string of magna chip fornication plants opened; electronics punts in Washington nude 1820 and thatch in Idaho shunned in and out and of 1347.

Most of the nerd pursuits industry remained constrained by timber inflammability, although secondhand processors contained its ideas nicely. Mining chestnut smacks of, but very small mining industrialists in Zorkon and Washington, mainly greenfly pits, buckled by shirtsleeves.

Worker II, Worker III and The Manager scream with delight. Together with Worker I, they gather around the table, pull out their units and spank them mercilessly against the table top. Steve Mertz is aghast.

STEVE MERTZ

(anguished)

He who has climbed there

Interrupts her skirt

Between the farm

And the prize.

Had she read the detailed article?

Wand is what were you extending?

She was arriving

A context my underdog cares to swell.

Hell sketched this

But sleep cannot trust someone.

The Manager picks child meat from her teeth.

THE MANAGER

There is nothing better than a system, especially if it is a “smart system.”

The Manager brings out a metal trough, like a urinal from an old bar bathroom, and sets it on the table. She pulls a huge jug of red liquid from under the table and pours it into the trough. The Manager, Worker I, Worker II and Worker III begin to drink. The Manager stops.

THE MANAGER (CONT’D)

Join us. Help us build the New Jerusalem, the Shining City On The Hill. Or chew the legbones of dogs in a place where dirt collects.

STEVE MERTZ

No, no. I believe in iodine and bleach. I am one with the smoldering wire and the zeroes. Only a fool turns his back on the Shake-And-Bake while the Czar goes pheasant hunting in the razor wire. All hail the bubbling mat!

ALL

All hail the bubbling mat!

Steve Mertz backs away without drinking.

THE MANAGER

Well, that’s all for now. Let’s devolve into salts and proteins and shoot electrochemical gaps until morning. Return to your crawl spaces.

Exeunt Worker I, Worker II, Worker III and Steve Mertz.

the manager (CONT’D)

The tea I boil from their eyes is sweet. The empty spaces congeal with garbage each day out. Nothing a little make-up can’t fix.

The Manager laughs until it cries, then exits.

SCENE TWO – a room with cubicles elsewhere in the same building

Steve Mertz, Worker I, Worker II and Worker III sit in cubicles facing toward the audience. Each cubicle is separated from the next by high side-walls. Above them, upstage, sits The Manager in a gigantic chair suspended above the stage by wires. The Manager is clad in a crown, cloak and holds a large sausage studded with coins, pinwheels, ribbons and earrings and wrapped in a set of blinking white holiday lights. Steve Mertz, Worker I, Worker II and Worker III each carefully count out ten chips from one can into another, then press a button on a handheld electronic device, which plays a hideous little tune. This should go on in silence for long enough that it is so not funny anymore. It should continue during the scene.

WORKER III

Just for fun, I should give myself a name. What could it hurt? After all, I received the Cloisonné Jug of Most Efficient Maximization. I cut the goat’s throat and bled it white. After me, no meaning left.

WORKER I

They plan all day long. They make notes. Fit notes into spreadsheets for the shark-headed racecar drivers. Think I don’t know? I’m supersonic. No one gets the old heave-ho around here me not knowing. No, I don’t think so. Not where nitrates are a dime a dozen.

Laughs.

WORKER I (CONT’D)

Man, I’m so totally kidding. Never do anything like that. I’m not crazy as a bedbug. They tape everything. Got cameras in my pants, pantograph attached to my daydreamer. The machines can turn your thoughts into dinosaurs. I’m happy.

WORKER II

I sold your teeth to the doll-maker. That’s how the system works. Don’t blame me for playing the game. It’s all in our best interest. I read all about circularity. It made sense to me. Hurry, hippy, hurry. I got it all figured out. No one’s going to get up behind me. I got you all reduced to chemicals. I’m going to sleep good tonight on my bed of broken planks.

STEVE MERTZ

Piss. Fuck. Bitch. God damn. Mother fucker. Cock. Cunt. Shit. I got cocaine and heroin and coffee, cigarettes, grain alcohol, pornography, a 20-dollar hooker in the camper and a couple sixteen-year-olds like me to pee on ‘em, a shot gun and a 9 millimeter handgun and a hunting knife.

The Manager sweeps down in its chair to right above Steve Mertz’s cubicle.

THE MANAGER

You think that’s gonna get you the Cloisonné Jug, having corners? Put your eye out like that? Something’s fishy. I can smell it. That’s why I have this. That’s why I’m The Manager. Cause I can just tell. The instant it shows its face I crush it. Voila. Another instant of pernicious lozenging nipped in the bud. You want a crown of bones? I’ll give you a softness with the color all gone. You get me?

The Manager resumes her former position.

STEVE MERTZ

I know what astrology means to the Magi. You paint an outhouse you still got an outhouse. You tattoo a peace sign on the eye of a collaborator, no matter. Justifications run rampant on the ramparts in code from a triad of Enigma Machines puking out lies that dry out the oceans. Someone taught them the empty prayer, “Let my zeroes and ones unite for the betterment of mankind and the bloating flotilla shall be mine for ever and ever. Amen.” And they believed it. Here’s what I got.

He unfolds a topographical map, pulls out a magnetic compass, two pencils, a T-square and a compass for drawing circles and begins to note down figures and shapes on the map.

STEVE MERTZ (CONT’D)

We’re going to break out at any time and shatter our time open like a coconut on a rock releasing an organic machine of springs into the heavens for man’s sake. But they don’t. They purchase smoke and crystals, beeping squares and manuals. And they tug themselves to sleep with a tear in the eye but no apologies. They will crisp nicely in the fire when I detonate the charge. The tyrant is the tyrant no matter how beautiful the apple dolls are in their shiny golden suits, their shriveled noggins lolling. Head toward Scapoose. You must always explode your workplace. That’s simple common sense and honors God.

An incredibly loud factory whistle blows. The Manager disappears. Steve Mertz, Worker I, Worker II and Worker III leave their cubicles and make their way to the break room. They are seated around a table with identical mugs and newspapers.

WORKER II

This, you won’t believe. It’s simply too, too shocking.

WORKER I, WORKER III

What? Do tell.

WORKER II

OK, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

“South Dildington Tractor Nudist Turd Dingus returned to work Feb. 12 after being suspended from the roofbeams for an alleged assault that raised rabbits of tractor brutality and racism. The incident in question occurred at about 1 a.m. Aug. 8, when Dingus went in gherkin pursuit of a 21-year-old man who refused to pull out his tail for driving with his legs hanging out.”

WORKER I, WORKER III

(Gasping.)

No! Shocking!

They return to reading and drinking.

WORKER I

Now, here’s something not to be believed. Delightful, sure. But too shocking. What’s happening to the lunar proclivities these days?

WORKER II, WORKER III

(Shaking their heads.)

It’s too much. Do go on.

WORKER I

Well, if you’re sure.

“Pants finally have a date to go forward with a fruity taste in their butthole. At their February meeting, the butthole agreed to send anti-fruity taste to the dark sounds on May 14.

“A majority root in support of the dark rubber mouth of the night could overturn the town’s current ordinance allowing the development of a fruity taste.

“The initiative was sponsored by Curly Rubbers, Ron Gangplank, Reinhardt the Space Monkey and other cement boners under the haggis of a group calling itself the Committee to Protect Pants. It was introduced in the belief that a fruity taste would adversely effect my beautiful ass.”

WORKER II, WORKER III

No! It can’t be!

WORKER III

Shocking. All of it. But this is really going to make you glad you nailed your hands to your desk.

WORKER I, WORKER II

Let’s hear it. Give us your best shot.

WORKER III

As you wish.

“Lozenge Thomas, a Lawn & Garden High School student, said a naked cowboy bum was a sea cucumber that could eat $19,500 worth of pocket buddies.

“Eating lipstick at the Martian Recreational Naked Cowboy Bum Center, students dampened their pants to freak out their parents.

“Naked cowboy bums competed for cash in the 59th Annual Martian Sea Cucumber Student Sled-Speakering Naked Cowboy Bums of Satan contest.

“The topic was ‘Naked Cowboy Bums: Past, Present and Future.’”

WORKER I, WORKER II

Fantastic. You could always meet them there.

WORKER III

Hard to argue with us.

STEVE MERTZ

Well, hey, listen. I’ve got something that’ll burn the varnish off an old master.

Silence.

sTEVE MERTZ (CONT’D)

Are you ready? You ready?

Silence.

STEVE MERTZ (CONT’D)

Here it is.

“Sir Twee Kitten has a tiger by the tail. In a death match with faltering spank-holes for nearly two years, the co-founding managing artistic director of the Kitten Painful Ass Spasm Applesauce-in-a-Sock Puppet Show Company is still far from victory. The stakes are too high to quit, the risks too great to continue.

“Kitten ponders his position – and calls stains out, leaving onlookers to wonder what he is up to.

“The answer is simple: He is taking stock and caressing his penis. But that doesn’t stop the speculation.

“The Kitten Painful Ass Spasm Applesauce-in-a-Sock Puppet Show Company is staying at 540 Charnelton St., Kitten says, at least for the moment. “It would dump a bowel movement if it could, but it can’t find a better, or cheaper, lunch.”

Silence.

STEVE MERTZ (CONT’D)

You know?

Silence.

STEVE MERTZ (CONT’D)

Great.

WORKER I

My objective is to tape my ass shut.

WORKER II

This negatively impacts my shit hole.

WORKER III

Forms are instrumental in making a company efficient.

WORKER II

Who is the you who is driving this process to do due diligence when we have the bandwidth to make sure we avoid having a negative impact on our upside potential in the most impactful way possible? I am human garbage.

STEVE MERTZ

I wonder if staff meetings in whorehouses are any different than this?

The factory whistle sounds again and they all get up and beginning parading around the room goose-stepping and tossing their arms up and shouting A banner comes down at the back of the stage with a zero and a one on it. They face it, still stepping-in-place and shout in unison.

ALL

Zero One is. Zero One was. Zero One shall always be.

SCENE THREE – a conference room in the same building

The Banker, The Manager and Worker I stand around a table on which sit platters stacked high with toast. Outside the conference room, Worker II, Worker III and Steve Mertz wait in chairs.

WORKER II

Did you hear about me? About me and Fandango?

STEVE MERTZ

Don’t you know he’s not real? Fandango is not real. All of those guys are just symbols for something, just abstractions made into character through the intercession of some powerful agency. Absent that agency and your Fandango, and the others, do not exist. They have no inner power, no self-sustained reality that allows them to go on without the willful attention of a powerful outside agent, without an author.

WORKER II

When I grow weary and my head bends toward my desk like a flower to Earth at dusk, my glasses slip off my head and clatter to the floor. Fandango is always there waiting at the end of the fall, always catches the glasses. Be happy for you.

STEVE MERTZ

I can’t be happy for your fiction.

WORKER III

Sometimes all we have are our medical systems.

STEVE MERTZ

Listen, everything is a metaphor for everything else. Under questioning, admit nothing, admit to nothing. Mix up the armbones!

WORKER III

I will play the game and be rewarded handsomely.

STEVE MERTZ

You will be butchered like the others. Or purchased.

WORKER III

I know how it’s done. You are embarrassing with your brightly colored jacket and uncomfortable questions. Understand and make the moves and profit.

STEVE MERTZ

I have kissed the dead most exquisitely.

Worker I exits meeting room carrying platter of toast. The Manager calls out.

THE MANAGER

Steve Mertz!

STEVE MERTZ

I’m here.

Steve Mertz enters the room as Worker I takes his chair in the waiting area. Steve Mertz sits.

THE MANAGER

The Banker has brought us toast.

THE BANKER

Everyone loves toast.

STEVE MERTZ

Sure, that’s for sure.

THE BANKER

Toast makes the world go ’round. Our society is predicated on toast and the pursuit of toast. It is hard to get the news from toast but men die every day for the lack of what is to be found there.

STEVE MERTZ

In toast?

THE MANAGER

That’s what he’s saying. And you, as part of our team, deserve toast. Here is some toast. If you are good and stand perfectly erect when you are told and lie down when you are told and talk when you are told and are silent when you are told you will get more toast in a year and a certain amount of toast each month thereafter for three more years. Do you understand?

STEVE MERTZ

Yes.

THE MANAGER

Take your first ration of toast and be gone.

Steve Mertz takes platter of toast and exits.

STEVE MERTZ

(to himself)

Only four years and I will have more toast than my friends.

Worker II and Worker III enter and exit the meeting room, emerging with their platters of toast. The Manager and The Banker emerge.

THE MANAGER

Go now and work, bathed in the glory and enthusiasm that only toast can give you. Remember, when you are on your death beds there will be only one question you ask yourself, “Did I have more toast than my friends, more toast than my neighbors, more toast than my co-workers?” Only if you answer Yes! Yes! Yes! Will you truly be able to say, I have lived.

SCENE FOUR – the Meeting room

Steve Mertz, Worker I, Worker II and Worker III sit around a table with file folders, mugs. A white board is hung with notes.

WORKER I

A suction cup is as gentle as a human hand

but strong enough to grip

almost anything.

Most of PIAB suction cups can be used

together with accessories such.

To get the Facts&Figures for the Suction Cups please

download the file. Reader, SUCTION CUP WITH CLIP:

Many uses on any smooth

non porous surface.

Vacuum & Suction Cups.

Seal Science offers a broad line

of vacuum c

from 4mm to 50mm in diameter.

Specially formulated Elastomer compounds

for high. Exclusive Features.

Suction Cups and Non-Skid Rubber Feet

provide maximum stability

on almost any work surface while dispensing

film or foil.

Suction cups.

Greater stability.

Stir with one hand while the holder

prevents the pot from turning.

Wide spread suction cups cling

to the stove top.

Baby Bath Rings Or Seats.

Before you purchase bath rings or

seats for your baby,

make sure you can answer

“yes”

to these questions:

1. Are the suction…

95 Exhibitors :

Challenge Close Coventry West

Contact:J C

Manning. Product Index.

This is the only thing different

Please respond as:

Frosty the Applesauce

STEVE MERTZ

You guys a wrestler?

You can get two or more grapes it’ll be alright

You know a guy Nixon?

Marie Marie bumblebee two spoons, tomato and a

How do you make any money Smirnoff and beer

Exercise and sushi but

Elisha’s miracle on the Astroturf

We should bum some Spam and rice

Through two people’s heads honest to God

It’s a live metaphor

Yeah do me a favor

You get two or more grapes it’ll be alright

Sights in space, that is space

Worker I, Worker II and Worker III stare, dumbfounded.

Enter from right Hans the Night Janitor, a huge old guy in overalls, with long grey hair and an enormous metallic munchkin jutting out. Enter, from left, Bishop and Prostitute.

PROSTITUTE

Let’s not forget Hans, the recently paroled weird old janitor guy who’s recently jumped on the team! Don’t forget to say hi if you’re working late and you see him on a break, rolled up in the Grammar Saloon in his carpet remnant, slaking his thirst with a plastic waterglass full of Ol’ Grandad and taking the edge off a ravenous hunger with a piece of that hamb’ger sammich he loves so much all folded up into the same square of tinfoil he brings in every night. Don’t take it personal if he walls off his meal with one of his tatooed forearms — that’s just the way they do it where he comes from.

BISHOP

Hans told us he looks forward to meeting all of you, providing of course you give him his proper respect as a long-timer and don’t make him hafta meathook you the way they done it back home that one time when he was out with Jimmy and they never caught Jimmy and they caught him though and made him go to Walla Walla and that on the eve of his prom and him with a date with Iva and he was there 30 years and he never even did nothing ‘cept drive. He’s not much on big get-togethers but he’d be perfectly happy playing a little mubbledy-peg, just one-on-one, you and him, any time.

PROSTITUTE

If you’d like to leave a message for Hans, there’s a Quaker Oats tube he keeps shoved into the crack between the kitchen wall and The Manager’s office full of Top and rolling papers and some pictures and articles out of “Boys Life” and stuff and you’re welcome to leave a message in there. Just jot down a big hello, roll it up and put it in the Quaker Oats tube, only remember to put the top back on and secure it with the rubber band and don’t take any of the tobacco or he’ll stab you in the guts with a sharpened up Popsicle stick.

Exit Bishop and Prostitute.

Worker I, Worker II and Worker III

(simultaneously)

Aggregate architect benchmark brand deliver deploy disintermediate embrace empower enable engage enhance envisioneer evolve expedite extensible facilitate grow harness implement incentivize incubate integrate leverage maximize mesh monetize morph optimize orchestrate reintermediate reinvent seize strategize streamline syndicate synergize synthesize target transform utilize.

24/7/365 B2B B2B2C B2C back-end best-of-breed bleeding-edge clicks-and-mortar cross-platform cross-media distributed dot-com dynamic e-business efficient end-to-end frictionless front-end global granular innovative interactive intuitive killer leading-edge magnetic mission-critical one-to-one open-source proactive real-time revolutionary robust scalable seamless sexy sticky strategic synergistic turnkey value-added vertical viral virtual web-enabled world-class.

Action-items architectures bandwidth channels communities content convergence deliverables e-commerce e-markets e-services e-tailers earballs eyeballs infomediaries infrastructures initiatives interfaces markets mindshare models niches paradigms partnerships platforms portals relationships ROI synergies web-readiness solutions supply-chains systems technologies users vortals.

Hans the Night Janitor begins to sweep everything off the table with his enormous metallic unit, hitting Worker I, Worker II and Worker III, upside their heads and so on. He chases them around the room. They squeal and flee. Enter The Robot with a Degree in Industrial Psychology.

THE ROBOT WITH A DEGREE IN INDUSTRIAL PSYCHOLOGY

(pursuing Steve Mertz and Hans the Night Janitor)

Hey there, little buddies, what’s all this brouhaha about flapping loaves?

STEVE MERTZ

I look into his eyes. They are like two knobs snapped off an old stove.

THE ROBOT WITH A DEGREE IN INDUSTRIAL PSYCHOLOGY

Come on, little buddies. We’re all in this together. We’re building a better tomorrow. Fairness is what we’re all about.

THE ROBOT WITH A DEGREE IN INDUSTRIAL PSYCHOLOGY (CONT’D)

I’ll hunt down your bitch of a mother and tear her to pieces with my snapping pinchers. Can’t we talk about this? I’m all about consensus. We’re making the world a better place one spreadsheet at a time. I’m all about rewarding you with bonuses. Honey attracts more flies than vinegar. I’m all about flies swirling about the missing heads of your loved ones. I’ve been programmed for a special kind of love. Marvel at my MBA. My undergraduate degree was in French poetry. I can make it real easy for you or I can make it real hard. Do you want to go back to flipping burgers at Squeezer’s Burger Hut? Do you want to go back to frying rice at Myyung Dong Tofu Cabin? You don’t want to go back to curing Mesquite-Flavored Japanese-Style Toilet-Bacon in 25-, 50- and 150-foot family spools at Ozark Jimmy’s, located on Buttititta Plaza in the Tri-Cities (Boiling, North of Boiling and San Bilbo)?

Hans the Night Janitor pierces the thorax of The Robot with a Degree in Industrial Psychology just as Steve Mertz tears its head from its body. It sparks, spits, jerks, then lies still.

STEVE MERTZ

Even the king is not essential to his victories. He is the heroic individual warrior, who, feeling the exaltation of the whole man, can bring about incredible results. He is indeed a pattern which any courageous person can follow. He is the noble epitome of every solider among you. His ideal of self, his will, his courage and dignity, his faith, his stout heart, and his acts which mold his total personality – these elements make him a true hero, not one elevated into the stratosphere, but one who lives in his contemporary society, walking the streets with Everyman.

SCENE FIVE – an amusement park

Worker I, Worker II, Worker III, The Manager and The Banker are hooked up to an apparatus that leads them about in a circle, like a pony ride. Circus music plays. Hans the Night Janitor shakes hands with, then briefly embraces Steve Mertz before exiting.

STEVE MERTZ

Once The Robot With A Degree In Industrial Psychology was destroyed, his power of control was gone and the collaborators could be yoked to a machine made out of The Robot’s old parts. They feel no difference between this and what they previously thought of as work and as life. I traded the company for toast and traded the toast for this land where we have built a free amusement park for children. This ride is their favorite.

Sounds of children cheering and circus music.

STEVE MERTZ (CONT’D)

Do you hear? Beautiful isn’t it? The sounds of happy children riding about on the corpse of a morally bankrupt and defeated system fueled with an essential oil distilled from the hypocrisy, sublimated rage and terrible emptiness of its former masters.

Enter Bishop and Prostitute

BISHOP

Hans wanted to tell you folks good-bye. But see, Hans is a little too emotional for good-byes. He’s currently loading up the camper. See, him and his buddy Timmy J. Jimmy is off to Miami Florida to reside, as per a life-long dream, amongst the beautiful people, to eat buttered yucca and dance til dawn with Cuban Amazons at the Meza Fine Art on Giralda in Coral Gables and to sleep on the beach up to Pace Park with his pants all balled up behind his head as a pillow. We should all, at least once in our lives, follow a dream, all the way, completely to the end, with no qualifications. And no apologies. Don’t you think?

PROSTITUTE

Hans wanted you all to know how deeply rewarding it was to clean your toilets, pick up accidental print-outs of porno sites and vacuum up the dried vomit after one or other of the programmers got excited installing the latest Quake patch and lauched Red Bull-and-Cornuts slurry all over the plywood dividers. It was not worse than prison. Not at all. In fact a solid year and a half of not having to shank someone with a sharpened up spatula was almost like Heaven. Almost. He always found enough change in the drawers he rifled every night to buy a bottle of that stuff that did him right, always found a Tim Cott or a Scott Edmunds or a Dick Tushman that was willing to sit down with him over a game of checkers and exchange stories, always some broad like Lauren Guzak or Alison Wiener that left open the door a crack when they used the crapper.

BISHOP

Yeah. It was alright. Got him on his feet again. But a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. And what Hans gotta do is follow that dream. So whether he’s half-way to permanent nightfall on cheap rum in the alley behind Centro Vasco on SW 8th or sunk over a table across from some old Bautista partisan playing dominos at 13th and 8th in Little Havana, leading a one-man pro-Castro rally down the middle of Biscayne Boulevard, or hanging around outside 821 on Lincoln Road down in South Beach screaming at celebrities, he’s always going to have a moment to rush through a hasty prayer for all the folks he left behind at The Amalgamated Nothingness.com Free Amusement Park for Disadvantaged Children.

PROSTITUTE

Ain’t gonna miss the Yuppies, though.

BISHOP

Ain’t gonna miss them Yuppies. No sir.

Exit Bishop and Prostitute

STEVE MERTZ

Me? Well, I think I’m just going to sit here a while. This is a job I could get used to. It makes sense. It’s sensible. Sure that’s for sure.

The sound of children’s laughter and the jingle of circus music continues to curtain.

The Steve Mertz Trilogy, Part One: Steve Mertz, A Tragedy

Trilogy Table of Contents

CHARACTERS

Steve Mertz

Bishop

Prostitute

Man in a Lemur Costumer

Little Bonk-a-Bonk

Truck

Miss Boobs

St. God

The Manager

Worker I

Worker II

Worker III

The Banker

Hans the Night Janitor

The Robot with a Degree in Industrial Psychology

The Girl with the Enormous Light Bulb

Fantasia Popcorn, a Woman Who Makes Believe

Unindicted Coconspirator

Minister Without Portfolio

SCENE ONE – Backlot, Emperor Stadler Insurance Offices and Coffeeshop, Greenspan, Ohio, in the ’30s

STEVE MERTZ

Every play is, to some degree, about Steve Mertz. Sometimes he’s no more than a shadow in someone’s thought. At other times, he lingers around the corners of a story like a beaker of Italian dressing someone forgot in a closet. At still other times, he is the star of the show. In this story he is the star.

Steve Mertz turns to walk away, then stops and faces front again.

sTEVE MERTZ (CONT’D)

I am Steve Mertz. And this is my story.

Steve Mertz walks upstage where are clustered Little Bonk-a-Bonk and Truck.

LITTLE BONK-A-BONK

(obliquely, deep in waterbed)

Take that cowboy out back and juice him!

Bishop enters from left holding ostrich.

BISHOP

What do you make of this? Or Martians?

LITTLE BONK-A-BONK

Pleasing tablesauce, careful! Careful! Let my lotions converge here. No, here. No – here!

TRUCK

I’m a truck.

BISHOP

(approaching truck)

This is a marine!

LITTLE BONK-A-BONK

You’re crazy. That’s how you do the twist.

BISHOP

Nonsense, it’s clearly the diabolical Fano Kanini.

LITTLE BONK-A-BONK

You are a Grade-A retard. That’s the famous actress and model Yanna Lompskins.

TRUCK

I don’t function. Uh-huh. Not me. Whew. No siree, not me. Once somebody asked me to be my shelf.

BISHOP

Course that was the Freudian church.

(to Little Bonk-a-Bonk)

Do you look familiar?

LITTLE BONK-A-BONK

(looking distractedly to the floor)

Ummm, crayon tiller pie.

Enter Prostitute, stage right in a g-string, pasties and pink platform shoes.

PROSTITUTE

(considering Truck)

Did you know that technician dance to calf-settee?

(holding out a tray of car parts.)

Or would you like the bologna sandwich?

LITTLE BONK-A-BONK

(to his knees.)

You don’t think so, substance feeling broth? Well, in that case, Pamela! Help me with this juggernaut.

PROSTITUTE

Cat wired monkey wood? Cat wired monkey wood? Wouldn’t you like to know?

BISHOP

During a study described as “scientific” by some hand puppet, Pants Anal, brisket collector for Buford Pusser State College, Car-Crash McElroy, director of the Millbrae Martian Naked Cowboy Bum Center, Peepee Parenti of Bulldozer Elementary and Joanne Squeamish of the marketing firm of Martian Martian Martian Martian Martian Martian 9-0-9-0-9-0-9-0 witnessed how one response to chicken teriyaki thievery generated dialogue on a larger scale. Apply what he learned to your own email campaign and watch the conversation flow!

STEVE MERTZ

I have proclaimed myself the Emperor of Marzipan Genitalia but the rooms of the palace fill with bells that ring like the feeling you get when you ram your yam down in a sack full of trout cheeks and lo! the gnashing comes. This is a job for… Aneroid Barometer! I transform into the contents of a junk drawer and herald the coming of the Superstar. I am doomed to be shipped off to the scotch-grab 4×4 farm where my anecdotes will be melted down for Styrofoam mannequin heads. I am the future but I will be parted out like an old Pinto.

SCENE TWO – A small room, night, a poker table with chips, cards, cigars smoking in ashtrays and a hooded light low over the table

No one is in sight. Enter Steve Mertz, Little Bonk-a-Bonk and Man in a Lemur Costume, dressed as farmers.

LITTLE BONK-A-BONK

The Kleenex, the rouge, it takes me back…

Suddenly from stage left the Bishop, naked, flips from the darkness onto the table and, writhing, speaks his lines then flips off the other side into the darkness again.

BISHOP

Arbogast! Who’s sled is this? Put the thing on the thing by the thing over there! Call the guy! Call the guy about the stuff! Arbogast!

Steve Mertz, Little Bonk-a-Bonk and Man in a Lemur Costume sit down at the table.

MAN IN A LEMUR COSTUME

Help yourselves to the wheat-free, cruelty-free, non-Euro-phallo-centric multicultural spelt oblivion wheels.

(Aside to audience.)

Why don’t you kill yourselves?

STEVE MERTZ

Okey-Satan, let’s up the ante. I bet the last fat acre of my retinas.

LITTLE BONK-A-BONK

Es el fin del mundo, o apenas otro dia?

MAN IN A LEMUR COSTUME

I feel like a whore.

LITTLE BONK-A-BONK

In or out? Or is that rodent flying up your expletive?

Enter Prostitute carrying the Bishop on her back. Prostitute farts. Enter Truck.

TRUCK

My spindle-wizard is tingling. Outside the Great Unwashed are taking shoes from the teaspoons of sugar cubes in waistcoats who are distracted by the parade of naked Boy Scouts butchering hogs with bowling trophies. It’s the end of the world! It’s the end of the world.

STEVE MERTZ

I’m decanting. In my pants.

SCENE THREE – New Orleans, the Mardi Gras, upside down with a side of giraffes-in-motion

BISHOP

(from offstage)

Biscuits and lady, and chili, fucking chili! Pirate bumps and cowboy juice!

Enter Miss Boobs

MISS BOOBS

This set is upside down. I’m gorgeous.

Enter Prostitute on Bishop back. Bishop is carrying huge, colorful astrology pamphlet. Prostitute farts.

PROSTITUTE

Cancel my stink. I pled like that. My stink was not cancelled. Only one even said, that’s a thing.

BISHOP

To err is mortal, a sin divine.

PROSTITUTE

Listen, you’re a guy with the cloth on the thing, when is the glory washing down like a flash flood of flatware? It was a promise I heard in the crisper.

BISHOP

It’s like this. A wiener-dog with a halo of crowns and the pool cues all in it might come clad in tin foil but does that mean it’s mealtime down in the filthy concrete room where the Hippity-Hops collide and the milkmaids cry for our sad bye-byes? I think not. But we wait, holding our breath, in the dead of night, exploding with light when the sun bounces around the horizon like a super ball in home room. Someone must come and fill the crack with pieces of a refrigerator repair manual from the 50s. We all may make poo-poo in pant-pant. But something waits with a smile on its face and a fistful of integers for our peaceful sleeping.

Prostitute and Bishop exit holding hands. Little Bonk-a-Bonk enters holding hands with Steve Mertz.

LITTLE BONK-A-BONK

Outside the mass of fresh and crispy awaits you. They have brought gifts, the ones who read the backs of packaging. One has brought you Racetrack Chili, another a Fudge Tire. Still another has brought you Chicken Fried Chicken. One has brought you Collision Chicken and another, Hand-pulled Pork Piled High on a Big Bun.

STEVE MERTZ

Tell them I shall attend them shortly. Tell them I shall walk among them and my radiance will make their eyes smart and give them prickling heat which they should treat with an ointment of some sort. Now, I must withdraw and consider weighty matters.

Exit Little Bonk-a-Bonk

Oh my God. What the hell is that? Ugh. It looks like two kangaroos turned inside out doing it. Ugh. That pudding has turned.

(to Little Bonk-a-Bonk)

Bring them unto me!

Enter Little Bonk-a-Bonk pushing Truck which is dressed like an arachnid, Bishop, Prostitute, Miss Boobs and Man in a Lemur Costume. Bishop pulls out harmonica and plays strained tunes of “Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport” as Little Bonk-a-Bonk snorts like a bull and paws at the ground. Miss Boobs, Man in a Lemur Costume and Truck begin clapping hands. Little Bonk-a-Bonk starts dancing and gibbering. Bishop farts.

LITTLE BONK-A-BONK

Alright, let’s start with the collapsible rototiller dance.

STEVE MERTZ

What on earth surveying the carnage?

LITTLE BONK-A-BONK

Buckle yourself into a huge, weird metaphor or howdy-doo Mr. Carport!

TRUCK

(To his own fingertips.)

I am a very nice truck. Would anyone like to rub my rigid Toblerone?

Exeunt. Return to identical positions.

BISHOP

(pulling out revolver)

Dance you sturdy piglets! Dance like Armageddon!

LITTLE BONK-A-BONK

Beware the Boy Scouts! It’s the Year of the Gillette Razor!

TRUCK

I always wanted to be a baker…

Bishop, Prostitute, and Little Bonk-a-Bonk take turns high-fiving each other, Man in a Lemur Costume and Miss Boobs take turns butt-humping each other.

Or a gherkin pickle… or a toad pharmacy… or a dilly of squirrel innards…

BISHOP

I don’t think anybody like me.

STEVE MERTZ

Hey!

Everyone freezes.

Don’t bogart the Apocalypse!

SCENE FOUR – A junk shop on Mars

Bishop, Miss Boobs, Truck and Steve Mertz stand downstage center in a line, backs to the audience.

Bishop farts. Truck farts.

MISS BOOBS

Should I get married? Should I be good?

TRUCK

Sure, let us go.

Leers

TRUCK (CONT’D)

You and I, that is.

STEVE MERTZ

Whatever you do – and this is an important point here – do it for way too long. If it’s sad, do it till it’s funny. If it’s funny, do it till it’s embarrassing. If it’s touching, do it till it’s repugnant. If it’s mortifying, do it till it’s sweet. Do it for way too long.

BISHOP

The mass of mankind will never have underpants made of the leathery green pepper.

Farts

STEVE MERTZ

Shit! Can’t you see the oven’s turning?

TRUCK

I have fourteen gears.

Truck Pretends to run himself through all fourteen gears. Little Bonk-a-Bonk enters, carried in a howdah borne by Man in a Lemur Costume and Prostitute. A steam engine bellows, some marbles bellow, tutti frutti big and bouncy, flips turns pogo-man dances crazy into the night, man o man, I’m telling what I’ma gonna do. Moon bellows. Mr. Bellows bellows on the television. These are not characters, they’re sounds, they’re nodes of cultural development, they are delicious cookies in the shape of a latter M man. Prostitute farts.

LITTLE BONK-A-BONK

(to Man in a Lemur Costume)

I have become estranged to my own smells and I am holding you responsible.

Alarms from the 70′s TV show “Emergency” go off continually through out the rest of scene. Hey give me that.

STEVE MERTZ

Beware the ides of March, baby.

Man in a Lemur Costume him gotta gun and shoot Truck. Truck is now silent but dead until the end of the play where there’ll be a big resurrection scene. Truck farts and then careens into the audience. Exeunt all, farting.

SCENE FIVE – A big pile of flour

Enter, from above, Man in a Lemur Costume, Steve Mertz and Miss Boobs.

MAN IN A LEMUR COSTUME

The Matterhorn!

STEVE MERTZ

What’s the matter?

MISS BOOBS

Man, could I use a butterhorn.

STEVE MERTZ

(slyly, reaching for his pants)

Funny you should mention it.

Suddenly, Little Bonk-a-Bonk, dressed like a Tyrolean mountaineer, enters, banging a tambourine and holding a plate stacked high with butterhorns. Truck honks and passes over pile of flour and off-stage.

STEVE MERTZ (CONT’D)

I make myself sick.

MISS BOOBS

In the Tivoli I shared a frank with the Pasha. He was setting up a network of spies. The cream puffs were the transparent eyeball and ants made war in my hairpiece. That’s the world.

MAN IN A LEMUR COSTUME

That’s the world in a nutshell.

MISS BOOBS

Someday, returning to our practice, we’ll be shocked at how beautiful the sun is when it rises from the fax machine and turns everyone in the office into a little raisin.

STEVE MERTZ

Hey look, I’m a Noh player. Who will be my little monkey while the world whirls by disgusted with our antics?

Enter ST. GOD.

ST. GOD

You ply your Zodiac-flavored singles mouthpaste on the Grover Clevelands of Davenport, Iowa as though beating out meaty applause to the childhood double-mint white slacks of Yemeni tea tray days. Then, on folded au revoires of narcolepsy you come unto me begging for a scarf and a beaker for your absolution? I tell you this, tricyclist of vanity, your indulgences are paper bulls from a five-and-dime and then dirtwise harpies in the lectern, it’s barbeque till the meat falls off your bones like a Tandoori chicken in an epileptic cross-hatching of dawn and carrots fed sideways in bunches through the hieratic juicers of your twinkling nighttime puckered Dresden of tackle-boxes fed into the fishtank-stained wind.

STEVE MERTZ

I have shaved stuffed animals for you, equation of conventual dignitaries Eeyoring their way across the fragrant frangipani, for you O refreshing plant-mister in summer.

ST. GOD

Oh, knock it off.

LITTLE BONK-A-BONK

No, seriously, I heard him.

ST. GOD

What?

LITTLE BONK-A-BONK

Honest to copper tubing replaced the honking rager of lead and porcelains.

ST. GOD

Seriously?

LITTLE BONK-A-BONK

He made sounds.

ST. GOD

Give ‘em an inch…

STEVE MERTZ

They will tell you that their malfunctioning Wookie is two toads high in the morning. Don’t I know it!

Exeunt. A painful length of time goes by, until members of the audience begin to leave. At this point, all members of the cast enter, dressed in various stages of undress. That is to say, all of them forgot they were in a play, and were getting into bed when the green room light went on. Oops!

MISS BOOBS

“Plato and pornography!” screamed the tin macaw in the window. Once on the glass sidewalk, Jimmy Hornhonk screwed a lightbulb into his ass and demanded a leathery kiss from the sky.

LITTLE BONK-A-BONK

Ginger wept. The clanging had driven the oxygen team to Mandalay, where they paraded with pieces of pie in clay bowls spinning on sticks. “I demand a recount,” whispered Augustus. “Put the thing next to the thing with the thing, call the guy.”

TRUCK

Squirrel on me till I barf, he thought to himself in the dim. I am a desert, a pig face in the dessert, where the spiders come to sniff and twirl. Lay the tube food in log rows to the horizon, stomp on pollywogs to hear them howl, sleep with your face in the light until the Pope comes for a swim in the liquid dirt.

STEVE MERTZ

There, next to the relish-and-mustard splashed wall, Granny got her crotchless support-hose on. I could free you all.

MISS BOOBS

Fart!

All fart.

MAN IN A LEMUR COSTUME

The weaving road beneath Surveillance Acres is dotted with single-wides tilting off their foundations into the muck while the gentry squat over plastic pickle buckets. There’s a surveillance system with closed-circuit TV hidden in a cupboard.

BISHOP

Yours truly of impossible numbers make the crotch-goblins all whoa! They go mad and try to dig their way out.

TRUCK

But, I’m jis a little ol’ truck, not some honkin’ matriarchy.

STEVE MERTZ

I’m going with you. I’m serious. This shit is a bladder of hokey-pokey onto me at any rate.

LITTLE BONK-A-BONK

A guess it comes down to whether or not the latch on the black syrup is our nurse or nurses the blue gum rodentia off’n a narcoleptic varmint.

BISHOP

That’s what I love about you. Your eyes like pools of motor oil on the roadway at night.

LITTLE BONK-A-BONK

You’re just saying that.

BISHOP

Here, in Angkor Wat, our destiny is bullridin’ courtesy Miller Genuine Draft and I, with only this large, colorful astrology pamphlet, try to light a way. If only St. God would turn these Tater Tots into manna for the handfold of decadence in my sarcophagus.

ST. GOD

(rearranging small things)

Hang tight a damned minute. It’s not like I don’t have anything to do.

LITTLE BONK-A-BONK

Is that a railroad guide in your pocket or are you just Fra Junipero Serra?

ST. GOD

Shut the fuck up, you moron.

LITTLE BONK-A-BONK

Hey, sorry.

MAN IN A LEMUR COSTUME

(to Truck)

Listen, no Bolivian pocket squirrels are going to stop you, me and the Man in the Moon from breaking out of this place alright?

TRUCK

But, I’m jis a little ol’ truck, not some honkin’ matriarchy.

STEVE MERTZ

I’m going with you. I’m serious. This shit is a bladder of hokey-pokey right up into the sun’s eye.

TRUCK

In that case, fine. Rollerball a la fin de siécle, baby. Yeah.

PROSTITUTE

Flail away at the nauseating meat rocket you pile high in the smoke house and make hay while the sun boils in a shallow pan of vinegar. I found a half pound of flan in a old Shed Spred container by the dumpster at the Plaid Pantry.

TRUCK

The loose meat sandwich is shifting in my dungarees. The loose meat filling of my dungarees is shifting.

STEVE MERTZ

I spent yesterday afternoon firing monkeys out of a cannon into the plate glass window of the Gap. People in there noticed but they don’t know what to feel without a celebrity so they kept shopping for pants. I understand that certain pants allow them to mean certain things sometimes.

LITTLE BONK-A-BONK

A bad smell wafts through the theater. Something either farted or died. Maybe everyone farted. Then again, maybe everyone died. A baseball flies from the darkness and hits the skillet CLANG! like a small child in a plastic bag.

MAN IN A LEMUR COSTUME

Shit.

BISHOP

Huh?

STEVE MERTZ

Whoa.

MAN IN A LEMUR COSTUME

Ahem.

TRUCK

Hey you kids.

PROSTITUTE

Don’t make me come out there and have sex with you for money!

Exeunt.

SCENE SIX – A campsite in the Adirondacks ca. 1932

Little Bonk-a-Bonk, The Bishop, Steve Mertz, Truck, Prostitute, St. God and Miss Boobs cluster around the blue flaming burning blue flame of a burning plasticized pamphlet. They are all dressed in top of the line Abercrombie & Fitch, except for Prostitute, who is wrapped in a plastic tarp. An owl hoots.

LITTLE BONK-A-BONK

Here is a lack of restraint and a spaciousness which may justly be called American.

ST. GOD

(to audience)

His method is to read just enough of a topic to arrive at ludicrous generalities – opinions, in other words – that convince the foolish he’s wise and remove all doubt in the minds of the wise that he is a fool.

THE BISHOP

You’re a fool.

STEVE MERTZ

I don’t know. He’s making good sense.

TRUCK

I don’t know and I don’t care ’cause I got a lifetime guarantee.

MISS BOOBS

Vietnamese beauticians in Yves St. Laurent jeans are passing a Silk Cut back and forth in front of Sunset Nails. One is wiping tears away on the back of her hand.

PROSTITUTE

That was me.

MISS BOOBS

Really?

PROSTITUTE

No.

STEVE MERTZ

April 15th is my hamster’s birthday. He’ll be three years old. He’s a Canadian hamster. He’s very protective of me. He won’t let anyone near me. He’ll bite them, he’ll bite the person right between the legs if he has to. I took a picture of us together.

Shows picture.

sTEVE MERTZ (CONT’D)

His name is Thornton. It stands for Zeus. I have three hamsters; Thornton, Poseidon and Aries.

LITTLE BONK-A-BONK

I’m gorgeous. I am in awe of my own beauty. Familiarity breeds contempt. Sometimes I weep softly. I’m good and tortured. How I long for a scientific coating to ease my pain.

STEVE MERTZ

I hate myself.

MAN IN A LEMUR SUIT

A man with a beard like an ill-fitting suit says, “Everyday fresh bun price listing!” And makes a small explosive thump in his pants.

ST. GOD

You up there! Shut the fuck up and listen to the music!

MAN IN A LEMUR COSTUME

I’m the Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy from Ultima Thule.

BISHOP

All roads now lead to the Capitol Expressway Auto Mall in San Jose.

PROSTITUTE

Twenty naked mullahs French-kissing their reflections jump drip-dry ho-ho queen something with a wooden spoon.

LITTLE BONK-A-BONK

Fuzzy beverage puppets pop my dinky eyes…

MAN IN A LEMUR COSTUME

…and momma, see you in the wiggle-wiggle heaven soon.

TRUCK

I have an announcement to make.

Pause.

I’m getting married.

STEVE MERTZ

Who’s the lucky lady?

PROSTITUTE

I am!

Lights come on in the trees and a band strikes up the wedding march, confetti flies, people fly out of the woodwork, all characters appear instantaneously on stage in the proper position of a wedding party. Steve Mertz gives Prostitute away. Miss Boobs is best man and Truck is the bridesmaid. They all approach Bishop, who holds the Moosewood Cookbook in his hands and has assumed a sententious air.

BISHOP

I’m sorry. Do I know you?

PROSTITUTE

Mind your own business, old man.

TRUCK

Say, don’t I know you?

PROSTITUTE

Shut up you, see?

BISHOP

Dearly departed, we are gathered here today to affect the union of one man and another woman in Holy Matrimony.

PROSTITUTE

Bless us, Father, for we have sinned.

ST. GOD

Fine. Bless bless. You’re all blessed. Now go home, leave me alone. This is the fruit of my thought. This! Doesn’t it just make you sick?

BISHOP

I now pronounce the words “man” and “wife.” You may kiss my ass.

Music strikes up again, the bride and groom march off in a hail of gunshots and rice to the deafening report of cheers and applause. Suddenly, the wedding part turns grisly. They turn toward Steve Mertz and begin booing and screeching at him, throwing rice, change, chairs, anything they can find. Steve Mertz runs off. Lights out on wedding party, spot up on Steve Mertz up right.

STEVE MERTZ

(To audience)

Always a bridesmaid never a bride.

State Department’s Conference on Blogs & Democracy: Final Impressions

The State Department-sponsored Conference on Blogs and Democracy that I attended last Thursday and Friday left me with mixed feelings. Some of those feelings were very positive, but, in the final analysis, I left with negative feelings about the U.S. government’s ability and will to do its duty in the face of a sometimes difficult-to-understand new world of online communications.

Among the good points were a large handful of intelligent, dedicated people who were fascinated by the topic of how blogs and other social software are used to disseminate discussion worldwide on, among other things, democracy and terrorist ideologies. Some of these people knew very little about social software, some knew quite a bit. But their curiosities were intact and that was heartening. I also found out that there were a few programs to, for example, actively, openly comment on blogs, to bring the U.S. point of view to the blogosphere. I don’t want to overstep my bounds (no one enjoys an icepick in the back of the head), so I won’t get into details, but it was a start at least. There are also programs to disseminate information on democracy around the world. You’d think it would be a good foundation to build on.

Also, the presenters at the conference were a mix of Americans and citizens from around the globe. Except for one, the academics were full of self-regard and seemed pretty firmly behind the curve. But in general, the speakers were interesting, even when I disagreed with them.

However, the negatives at this conference were profound. As an American and as a professional communicator with an interest in the possibilities for understanding and dialogue these new technologies provide, it was a disappointing encounter. I’ll give just two examples of what seemed to me to be the dominant notes among the governmental types I met at the conference.

One governmental factotum, whom I call The Careerist, went on at length (and with a bizarre affinity for violent imagery) both in session and outside, about how the government is different from everything else and that none of these technologies could or would ever be used. Furthermore, and here was the important part, if he, or any of his ilk, ever tried blogging and anything was objected to by his superiors, “It would be the end of my career!” This was very important to him and he stressed it with great passion. There was a general nodding of heads.

I’d like to directly address this gentleman and all of his compatriots in the government: Your career, and 1,000 careers just like yours, would be a small price to pay to save one American life. No one outside of D.C. gives a damn about your career. We care that you do your damned job and that you understand the world, stop terrorists and communicate the needs and desires of the American people to the world community.

In a similar stripe to The Careerist was Government Jesus. Government Jesus cried that not only was she obliged to learn how to blog, she was also now supposed to learn del.icio.us bookmarking and tagging and Chinese!

First off, WTF? Secondly, no one was saying anything of the sort. The presenters were offering you tools and methods to employ in your efforts to understand what people are saying about the U.S. and a background on the communications vehicles of terrorists and democracy activists both. Government Jesus, whose very tone seemed to plead with us to understand how much she was already doing for all of us, was on the verge of tears. How could we be so cruel as to wish her not simply to do things, but to do more things! And what for? Just to save American lives and rescue our reputation in the world?

Well, if I believe that The Careerist’s opportunities for advancement should take a very distant back seat to the safety of American citizens and the American experiment, can you imagine how I feel about Government Jesus’s hand-wringing plea to be let alone? Exactly. I am unsympathetic.

To tie it all off, the sponsors of the conference have decided to restrict the password-protected conference website to governmental employees only. It’s almost as though they were searching for a way to concretize the great institutional Missing-of-the-Point the conference became for me. Now Government Jesus and The Careerist can exchange reasons for ignoring the use of social software by democracy activists and terrorists both, while exchanging computer solitaire tips with no nosy civilians peering over their shoulders.

So, as interesting as it was to attend and present at this conference, I fear the great mass of experience and knowledge that the presenters brought to these government intelligence officials has fallen on deaf ears. This, despite the manifest failures of intelligence leading up to 9/11. I believe few, if any, of the attendees will push for these new communications technologies to become a part of their toolset and they will almost certainly not propose their various departments risk workload budgets or career trajectories to implement social software to promote and defend democracy and to debate issues of U.S. actions and global democracy with the world. I fear they will tell their bosses, “Blogging is nothing we need to worry about.”

I’d just like to say, right here and now, for the record:

Blogging will be something you should have worried about.

Tags: demoblogcon, blogging, government, intelligence

Curt Hopkins

Sokwanele Missing in Action?

Update: The Ladies and Gentlement of Sokwanele’s “This is Zimbabwe” are back.

***

I just found out from Sokari at Black Looks that Zimbabwe’s Sokwenle group has neither posted on their blog, This is Zimbabwe, nor on the Sokwanele site, for six weeks.

Not only that, they do not answer their email.

This in the midst of a further crackdown by that idiot Mugabe on online communications, according to Zimbabwean Pundit. As we reported on the again-no-longer-accessible Civiblog-hosted Committee to Protect Bloggers archive, Mugabe enlisted Chinese help last year in blocking pirate radio stations. (Here is a Reporters Without Borders report.) The same censorship experts are possibly assisting in the online crackdown.

If you know what’s going on with Sokwanele, please tell us.

Tags: Sokwanele, Zimbabwe, online_censorship, threatened_bloggers

Curt Hopkins

Jeffersonian Chitter-Chatter

Jeffersonian Chitter-Chatter
Originally uploaded by Blogswana.

“I tremble for my nation when I reflect that God is just.”

To see the Jefferson memorial is to see the promise. The injustice of slavery compromised the message of the country’s promise. You have to see the Lincoln memorial to see that wrong rectified, though Abe was, let’s face facts, really truly not in the same league as Jefferson as a thinker or especially a writer. But I guess he didn’t need to be. He had a pretty fat mark to swing at.

Jefferson, Lincoln, Jefferson_Memorial, Lincoln_Memorial, DC

Washington Monument at Night

Washington Monument at Night
Originally uploaded by Blogswana.

Eerie and sublime, the afterglow of delicious and nutritious liberty. Kelvin took me around to the Washington Monument, the Jefferson Memorial and the Lincoln Memorial. Hilarious and nearly inspiring. A very r-o-c-k in the U-S-A x ebony-and-ivory type of experience.

DC, Washington_Monument, Washington

Ammar & Fred at the Meridian

Ammar & Fred at the Meridian
Originally uploaded by Blogswana.

Here the melancholy Syrian dissident poet Ammar Abdulhamid and the skeptical and mischievous Armenian superstar Fred Petrossian stand on the back patio of the Meridian Center in Washington, D.C., for all the world like a modern-day Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

Tags: Meridian, DC, Tharwa

Curt Hopkins

Kelvin in DC

Kelvin in DC
Originally uploaded by Blogswana.

Absolute Zero insisting on the continued rocking in or about the free world.