To the Artist's Page                   To our home page

To Phil Rockstroh's previous piece     To Phil Rockstroh's next piece

The Old Gods Visit Brooklyn

How did it come to this? Daily, a hundred times-- perhaps more-- the ancient fear intrudes. The old gods of panic and dread disrupt my nebbish deity's waking dream of safety and permanence. My god has multiple arms like those from the east, but, in his pale hands, he clutches sanitizers, cleansers, pesticides, duct tape, retirement portfolios, guns, security systems of all descriptions, schematics for missile defense shields.... His skin is covered with a protective layer of plastic lamination. His accessories include necklaces made of razor wire.

The old gods smell something awful. They seem hairy-assed, shit-hurling monkeys. They track their spoor across the scoured and waxed floors of my flawless dream-house. They clog my drain with mattes of simian fur. Their heavy breathing brings humidity to a room, curling and frizzing my immaculately blow-dried hair. Good lord, in the wrong lighting, I might be mistaken for ethnic and approached as such! Their calls, chitterings, and howls disrupt the soft-rock classic soundtrack of my home-entertainment unit mind. I close my eyes and see James Taylor butt-raped by an Episcopalian priest wearing a gorilla mask.

I hear the scratchy scuttling of mice between the cranial walls of my skull. Grisly bears prowl the subdivisions of my denial. Coyotes have made a meal of my yapping chihuahua wishes. I opened my mouth to utter an anguished protest and out flew a winged jack-ass who kicked me until I lost consciousness.

I came to as squirrel-monkey valets were strapping me to a saddle upon the jack-ass' back and we flew through interdimensional portals arriving at a world illuminated by a lava-light sun where cockroaches clad in lime-green leisure suits lounged near pools of toilet water and lady-slugs, squeezed into tube-tops, swiveled their stalk-held eyes away from me in repulsion. I looked heavenward, crying out to the oily, multi-colored sky, "What is all this about?" A floating, six-foot long, dog penis descended toward me and doused me in spray to claim me as territory.

I was in a realm where farts had given names: Larry, son of broccoli, Ed, born of bean dip, Bertha, bastard child of home brewed beer. Flying fetuses perched, like city pigeons, upon monuments carved from petrified woolly mammoth dung. Fetus-droppings rained upon me-- while clouds of airborne sperm swarmed around my face, thick as gnats in high summer.

The colors of the sky were abloom in the bright shades of a baboon's buttocks, then a voice spoke to me, issuing down from the Divine Rectal Spincter of the Omniscient Monkey God's brilliant baboon asshole and it said: "How would you like to lick every inch of the streets, back alleys, and public toilets of the city Calcutta with your squeamish, little tongue?"

"Not my idea of a promising evening," I replied.

"Then how would you like to be submerged in a sea of boundless smegma culled from the reeking foreskins of a million, decrepit, syphilic sailors?"

"I was thinking more along the line of a scalding shower and a massive infusion of intravenous anti-biotics."

"You've managed to annoy the hell of me, you pathetic, little piker-- I'm meting-out to you the ultimate in vile punishments: a daily commute on the New York Subway system."

And that's how it came to this. Here I stand, queasy, mortified, clutching the antigen-seething metal handrail, swaying in this lurching F-train, being jolted and jostled against all form and manner of my fellow land-mammals and wondering whether I should have gone with the first choice of punishment that the Monkey God's Vengeful Asshole offered to me—and given the entirety of the city of Calcutta a tongue bath and been done with it.

To the top of this page