Defenestration

The Day of the Revolution

By Michael Jarrette-Kenny

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The revolution will not be satirized. All those who would attempt such an act will be considered reactionary and will be satirized themselves. Those who satirize satirists who have satirized reactionary satirists will themselves be judged reactionary and satirized appropriately.

In retrospect, it had been a particularly difficult day. Arriving at work that humid July morning I discovered a smoking crater where my desk would have normally been. “If Rube Goldberg had designed sex toys,” a female intoned in the backdrop of the security tape as Abdul Mohammed Liechtenstein, the building janitor stumbled randomly into my cubicle at 8:35, two minutes prior to my arrival, on the day of the revolution. Earlier that morning in a fit of self-disgust over the failure of recent peace talks in the Middle East, The former orthodox Jew turned Islamic Fundamentalist had declared jihad against himself. Remarkably the localized detonation was unobserved by any of the other employees who assumed that I had been keeping some sort of incendiary device in
my desk, in preparation for an upcoming “postal” session.

My co-workers tip toed around its circumference avoiding my gaze as soon afterward, the sprinklers began dispensing a frothing mass of what appeared to be non dairy creamer along the halls and stairwells. My supervisor arrived seconds later at the head of a phalanx of armed security guards who escorted me from the building, using my head as a battering ram with which to open the metal doors.

I returned home discouraged and confused, circling my block several times in an effort to find my house without success, only to find that in the intervening hour my white colonial had been painted lime green and a new house number affixed to the door. I attempted to insert my key into the lock as a set of conjoined twins dressed in Cotton Mather era apparel appeared in the doorway and began cursing my ancestors in a haughty dialect of Mandarin Chinese. Later I was to discover that the pair had recently left their small Amish community in Pennsylvania to begin their Rumspring, proceeding quickly through the bacchanalian underworld of the Amish rave scene, manufacturing methamphetamine on the side. After a raid on their lab in the motel 6 across the street, they had surveyed the landscape and settled on my house as the most suitable distribution point for their latest batch. They had been taking an online immersion course in Chinese in order to better converse with their pair of mail order brides and had apparently forgotten how to speak English in the interim.

My wife, a soon to be Nobel Prize winning physicist and amateur circus freak was nowhere to be found.

Returning to the office, I ritualistically disemboweled three security guards with a fountain pen given to me for my five year anniversary at the company, holding my office mates captive with a Black swing line stapler as I began composing my revolutionary manifesto, dictating to my hostages as they inscribed my words along the walls with type writer correction fluid. As they began to reflect on the profundity escaping my lips though the intercom speakers, they too turned upon their former masters on the upper floors, stripping to their underwear, rending the flesh of their ex-overseers with abandon,
copulating wildly behind the partitions of their cubicles. As the entire office is now enshrined at the Metropolitan Museum I often return in the early morning hours to gaze longingly at those hieroglyphs, the first manifestations of the revolutionary zeitgeist, inscribed along the morose corporate gray wall paper, designed by the C.I.A to diffuse any stirrings of unrest among the worker drones of America.

Out in the parking lot, crowds were already gathering in record-breaking numbers. By 2:00 in the afternoon, news helicopters began describing the assembled masses in adjectives usually reserved for the Nuremberg rallies and Britney Spears concerts. Midgets dressed in World War 2 era sailors suits were selling tee shirts with my likeness photo shopped onto a dollar bill in place of George Washington’s head, the proceeds of which were allegedly donated to charity, funding a maverick ex-McDonald’s execs fledgling franchise of assisted suicide discotheques in Oregon and the Netherlands. Some garrulous employee had prematurely disseminated my secret 5-point plan for the proletariat revolution to the assembled press corp. and was promptly assassinated by one of my more fervent followers.

Heading a motorcade of 30 other cars (driven by pierced hermaphrodites, Babies with beards etc.) My wife Kathleen appeared in the middle distance, clad in black leather widow’s regalia, straddling the front seat of a replica of the Lincoln town car made famous by Lee Harvey Oswald. As usual the anatomically functional vagina that stood in place of her left ear was moistening beneath her polyester head thong from the erotic charge she was getting out of denouncing me in public.

“Of course, I have spoken to representatives from the Nobel committee and my ex- husbands actions will not effect the outcome of their deliberations.”

Later at the custody trial for the unified field theory, which she had birthed with my assistance, she continued to minimize my mammoth contribution to our joint brainchild. It was during a late night aural sex session that ended up lost in a post coital collage of lengthy equations uniting Clerk Maxwell’s electromagneticism, Schrodinger’s wave equation’s, and Einstein’s general relativity (She had actually converted the head board of our bed into a chalkboard). She would claim that my contribution to her cogitation was a mere 2 inches, a lie easily disproved before the gathered onlookers who afterwards had to be revived with smelling salts after glimpsing my rippling appendage.

Needless to say, I have been awarded ample recompense for my contributions to Humanity. The custody agreement has allotted me 30 hours a week in which I may stand outside Kathy’s house chanting “na na nana na” through a bullhorn, half the income generated from any commercial enterprise involving “My Unified Field Theory” (patent pending) and a bronze statue of my likeness roughly equal in proportion to the empire state building to be erected on the former white house lawn.

The revolution will be available on DVD, VHS, Laser Disc, CD-Rom, Betamax, Hardcover, Paperback, Polaroid, Daguerreotype, Oil painting, Cuneiform Tablet
and as a limited edition Neanderthal Cave drawing.

I am watching a movie of a review of a book inspired by the book I am currently writing. The main characters are being played by the British royal family. They are dressed up as letters of the alphabet. The remaining letters are being played by 70’s porno stars. The movie consists of close-ups of the actor’s crotches. The movie has been shot one letter at a time so it is very very long, longer then the holocaust documentary Shoah, longer then a Michael Caine film festival. Because the screen consists of nothing but black space, it
takes me awhile to realize that I am not actually watching the movie. I am in fact, watching the back of the head of the person who is watching the movie. I become angry at this deception and storm out of the theater. The letters follow me off the screen into the street causing a 24-car pile up. Ron Jeremy’s engorged organ is stuck into a pedestrian’s eye socket. Prince Charles has been impaled on a fire hydrant and water is shooting out of his ears and mouth causing and an army of overheated street kids to gather around him, bathing their overheated bodies in the royal effluence. Seka lays spread eagled over the traffic light, her long legs extended out into the bottom half of the letter A. The random piles of bodies have through some statistical aberration formed into advertisements for Preparation H suppositories. Rather then take the victims to the hospital, the arriving rescue crews drink apple martinis and play scrabble with the corpses.

I am oblivious to the carnage my exit has caused. Because of my misanthropic tendencies, I have been barred from participating in the Miss America pageant. I am no longer interested in being the fearless revolutionary leader. My followers lie out before me like a lumpy carpet, hoping to receive the imperial footprint on their faces, a mark that will entitle them to a lifetime of free white castle cheeseburgers. This makes travel on foot difficult to say the least. As a result I have had Arnold Schwarzneggar’s headless body made into my personal off road vehicle. A joystick similar to that of the Atari 2600 has been attached to the brainstem allowing superior handling at a price well within the reach of most totalitarian dictators.

I go to the port authority bus terminal to consult the oracle: a transsexual Jane Mansfield impersonator with a bad case of colitis whom has taken up residence in a stall in the 2nd floor restroom. I pound on the door of the stall and she yells at me to come back later. I adjourn to the bowling alley next door and play 3 games, conquering a visiting champion from the Czech republic on a 7 10 split by cracking my bowling ball in half with a shuriken throwing star. I return to the bathroom and take a seat in the stall next door.

“Forgive me fearless leader,” she says in an incongruous accent reminiscent of Marlene Dietrich. “I was delayed by the stirrings of my odoriferous taskmaster.”

A protracted siege by a busload of food poisoned Bolivians, apparently protesting her commandeering of the commode has left her exhausted and irritably bowelled. In revenge she was preparing a sphincterian soliloquy of epic proportions. It began with a brief apologia.

To the coprophagous critics
Who crowd like hungry flies
around the words of others
With envy in their eyes

Pincers poised they rend and tear
Imagining a feast
And bathe their prey in acid
When they find no shit to eat

Scrape and scour for sustenance
Among another’s dreams
When time would be much better spent
In search of a latrine

I’ll paraphrase Catullus
And not urge you to desist
Keep smiling through your poison pen
Teeth cleaned by poet’s piss

Before continuing in this excretory indulgence, she felt it is was her duty to detail for the edification of the uninitiated her ascent (or rather descent) into this peculiar, pyloric Parnassus (Okay enough alliteration for one goddamn paragraph already).

“You know,” she says, “I was not always where I am today (that is alone, in the dark, with my panties around my ankles). Try to imagine yourself perched on the porcelain altar, struggling and straining after one too many visits to the local taco bell, when something strange happens. The lights dim and the walls of your stall tremble. Slowly the soft stertorous moan, the flatulent stutter of peristalsis is by degrees transformed into a lush sonorous baritone, a voice that can only be described as biblical. The note sounds, generating overtones, forming into phonemes and then, miraculously words. Like Siegfried bathed in the dragon’s blood, the unintelligible squeaks and snorts of your anus have been converted into garrulous music. Quatrains, prophecies, opera arias begin to emanate from your hindquarters. Imagine your shock and disgust. You pull up your pants and rush out of the office without explanation. When you arrive back at your apartment you take all of your remaining Prozac and wash it down with a bottle of Jim Beam. You slump down on your couch and listen to its plaintive wail, the whispered threats smothered in the seat cushions. People have accused me (unjustly) of having an adolescent preoccupation with bodily functions (I prefer to think of it as Rabelaisian), but have they every tried to sleep while their asshole whistled the Battle Hymn of the Republic, the Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde and Free Bird all in one simultaneous cacophonous, counterpoint? I think not.

“How does one cope with such trauma? Life as you can imagine goes on as before except for one small thing: the slightest bout of flatulence can have deadly consequences. Walking down the street can be impossible when your asshole is shouting obscenities at passerby. It insults your boss’ hair plugs. It tells ethnic jokes on crowded subway platforms. You wear three pairs of underwear, you try butt plugs, pacifiers, gas free diets. You spend years in therapy, attempting to work through that difficult toilet training when suddenly the voice changes. Suddenly everything makes sense. A content begins to emerge. Days and nights are spent feverishly transcribing these anal utterances until your
bathroom walls are covered in minute maniacal scrawl. The voice emits cryptic farts like Zen koans. Rolls and rolls of toilet paper are filled with your exegesis of elimination. A voluminous philosophy of the universe takes shape as you struggle through your third helping of fiber rich oat bran. But alas, you are stranded in your stenography, how does one notify the public at large to the wisdom contained with your obviously highly developed digestive tract?

“Needless to say the Port Authority Police were not thrilled at my demands for cable modem access, to say nothing about the velvet lined toilet seat cover. It took an hour trapped in an elevator for my asshole to convince them with its superior rhetorical skill. Unfortunately this necessitated a few concessions on my end (no pun intended), one of which being the role of myself and my partner in this little enterprise. How does one pay these exorbitant New York City rental fees? Among the suggestions are a weekly advice column (Dear Duodenum?) a detective show (Tales from the stall?). Or perhaps a game show (You bet your ass?) As both my asshole and myself view entertainment as merely a day job we will leave it to your holiness to decide an appropriate rate of compensation.”

“Never mind that.” I say. “What the hell do I do now? I’m tired of the fearless leader thing.”

There was nothing but a solitary eructation, reverberating solemnly between the tiled surfaces.

Finally she said.

”There is always pizza delivery.”

Violence is not the answer. Violently answering is not the answer. Violently not answering is not the answer. Answering violently that you will not answer is not the answer. Not answering violently that you will not answer is not an answer and therefore will not receive an answer.

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Michael Jarrette-Kenny has had fiction appear in Burning Leaf, Duct Tape Press, Aphelion, and others. Sometimes, when people aren’t looking, he turns himself inside out and lets dogs chase his entrails.