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Show Anting Alone Page 170 "C'mon Axhole," Sam would feel his mouth say, independent of his will, as he stared at the green snakes that were only halfheartedly forming around the necks of everybody in the room. "You're not gonna have a chromosome left in your whole body. So you might's well enjoy it. Tell yourself that you're seeing God or giant hotdogs with legs or something." And, of course, Sam found no distance doing any of these things in either of these places, no distance from Kansas or himself. Wise men, Emerson and Modigliani, tell us that travel is a "fool's paradise," and a "mere substitute for work." Sam was finding this to be true. These trips to Chicago and Houston left Sam with nothing but the conviction that he must soon go home and start swimming laps daily at Kansas State's multi-zillion- dollar athletic complex (KSU couldn't afford to re-bind the Chaucer concordance in the library); also, he must start sedulously asking normal women his own age out on dates, too. Pull himself together, act normal for once. Because, after all, a strict regimen of carousing with just other boys in big cities, broken up only intermittently by brief sexless sojourns of comp teaching in Kansas, can lead to emotional regression and, yes, homosexuality. And there's nothing more ridiculous-looking than a seven-foot cock-queen, pudgy to boot. Sam feared nothing more than the irreversible process of emotional regression. He could still remember the chills that shot through his skull when he saw that publicity shot of John Lennon, eyes closed, his body curled barenaked like a foetus around Ono, who was fully clothed, her eyes open, staring directly at the camera in hideous cannibal triumph. Total regression. |