OCR Text |
Show Acting Alone Page 433 first four-fifths of what was to be this psychosex bio's most commonly used word: peckersnot. He deeply loved it, as much for its sheer nauseatingness as for its amazing folk-metaphorical imagination and energy. The truck drivers and ditch diggers of this country are expected to keep themselves inarticulate in a masculinely Hemingwayesque way, aren't allowed to express their emotions except in degradingly sentimental country music, nor their considerable linguistic energy except in scatological words. This, of course, keeps them politically fragmented and easy to suppress on a cultural level - which was fine with Sam, for he felt nothing but contempt for the gritty-necked swines' value systems. But he loved their obscenities. He considered the working class's _sick words to be the richest part of this poor old depleted language which he was about to sell out for a cool million or so. He was intending to put peckersnot independently into the mouths of several disparate characters, to make the term seem, at least in the context of the book, a major part of the common contemporary American idiom, an everyday cussword like fuck shit piss. In a bestseller this prophecy of the coming of peckersnot would self-fulfill and peckersnot would be smeared on paper, both slick and newsprint, and on celluloid and on the lips of every youngster all across this great country of ours. The humorous youngster in E.T. who, in the presence of the darling Barrymore child, calls his brother a penis-breath, much to the delight of his delightfully loose mom, put penis-breath in every American child's mouth. And Sam wanted to do no less with his own peckersnot. Granted, this was all perhaps a mere symptom of an encroaching methedrine psychosis, but it seemed the only important function that this book could fulfill. Sam's |