Digressive Notes On Mexican Gangbangs

I don't need a hug. I've got hugs overflowing out of buckets up here. What I don't have is an extra several hundred dollars to pay for the Mexican gang bang I'm about to receive from the telecommunication banditos . . .

-Walter Kovacks
in a personal communication to the author

There are all sorts of gangbangs in Tijuana. One I saw in the street this morning five feet in front of my hotel entrance was conducted with almost no one paying it any mind. I couldn't believe the obscene viciousness of it all, a melee of bestial acts ignored by everyone except an itinerant used pots-and-pans salesman, who banged a few of his wares to frighten the participants off the sidewalk and into the gutter where they belonged....

Three street dogs, a panting, beleaguered, rust-colored, grimy cocker spaniel bitch, and two soiled German Shepherds were engaged in acts of repulsive licentiousness that instantly reminded me of Thomas Hobbes(1588-1679). "Nasty, Brutish and Short" was his dictum about the life of humans in a "State of Nature"( I've modified that remark to cover the lot of impecunious writers: "Nasty, Bookish and Short"). It must have been from watching filthy, diseased and unloved curs going at it, taking notes on gangs of wild street dogs mating and fighting over dross from garbage pails, that the old tennis pro/philosopher probably hatched his entire statist philosophy.... maybe...

The older, big German Shepard dog, whom a week previously I had named "Lysander" in tribute to his vulpine fairy-face, and Lysander's scrappy, bedraggled, puppy-dog side-kick-apprentice of the same breed, had most likely cornered the bitch in a garbage heap and had their way. Or rather, Lysander had had his way — the young doggy delinquent, no doubt excited by watching mange-mongrel Lysander at it, got his signals mixed up and mounted the cocker spaniel from the front and began rapidly, grotesquely, pummel-fucking its face. The shocking, nihilistic and absurd part was that Lysander's genitals were still locked to the spaniel, but now his body was resting sideways off the dog, as the threesome caromed against parked cars, over-spilling garbage cans, unwary children and two and a half foot curbs (a hazard in Tijuana), and was now totally uninterested by all the commotion he was a distinct biological part of, some supra-organism like an ant hill.

The movement was supplied totally by the young shepherd, pushing all three of them around to an uncertain end. The snarling and heaving tableau moved somehow to the doorstep of the hotel, and when I walked out and saw them, it appeared that the filth-smeared cocker spaniel, panting wildly from spending all morning fending off the sexual assault of two horny mongrels was now fending off the sexual assault of this crazed and filthy young shepherd, while Lysander looked on uninterestedly from her posterior...

When I arrived Lysander had already long since finished his chore and was silently licking his muzzle, (savoring the lay he just had, like a Federale, picking his teeth and bowleggedly walking back to his squad car from the Zona Norte), while remaining locked in the genital embrace of the cocker spaniel. But though he was still locked to the spaniel, he had climbed off from the mating posture and was now perpendicular to the dog, Lysander's left hind leg still resting on the spaniel's lower back, while the rambunctious juvenile performed his inverted and hideous Satanic rites... blaspheming normal congress with this mockery of Nature's intentions...

Lysander was actually staring around, completely uninterested in this cavorting threesome. Like if you were in a tag-team wrestling match and only cared about your manicure while getting thrown repeatedly to the mat. It was Lysander's boredom with the whole situation that intrigued me, calling to mind some demented verse from Edward Leer...The spaniel seemed completely exhausted as any animal in God's wolfish kingdom would be, fending off sexual assault from the front and the rear — be it from stray dogs or Rumsfeld's soldiers.

I found out a few years ago that dogs do actually "lock" and cannot extricate themselves from each other until well after coitus. I remember as a child seeing this lock and being profoundly horrified that they could not separate, that the dogs were never again to lead normal lives. It was the image of that slimy canine genitalia, united against the will of the owners that for years hounded me as figment of a bad dream, or something I perhaps saw on a Wild Kingdom episode while wearing one of those asbestos-lined, fire retardant pajamas that encapsulate the feet; some type of surrealist manifestation of suburban angst, the very image of The Fiend...

Just a few years ago, in a slum in Bangkok just off Kao San Road, I saw the exact behavior I had previously thought was a hellish fantasy, imagery quietly filed away in my psyche and attributed to Hollywood-induced phantasmagoria! Like all the flashbacks I constantly have to early '80s television sitcoms like The Love Boat ("Vickie come back!") and Three's Company ("I can explain Mr. Roper!"). Only now as an adult I could examine my nightmare in depth and in real time! It was better than an Easlen encounter group! The dogs' genitals were in fact locked, seemingly against the owners foreknowledge and consent. Both dogs were awkward in their deportment, like kids at a gunny sack race, but showed no signs of serious unease, except extreme perplexity at the party prank Nature had played on them. It was revelatory! There they were, two despised and diseased street dogs, with locked and externalized bloody genitalia (alas, a frequent concomitant to doggy homelessness), and me, on that septic Bangkok street curing myself of all hang-ups with regard to dog sex and, by extrapolation, mule impregnation (a popular bestiality pastime in medieval brothels and continuing well into the twentieth century)... and it was mule impregnation that led me, somehow inexorably, to Ira Levin's satanic schlock masterpiece, Rosemary's Baby.... But I'm getting ahead of myself, here.

Perhaps the reader has surmised from reading the above that the writer has a lot of time on his hands, or is lacking valuable funds to get real stories (contenting himself with whatever comes to hand), to lodge himself suitably, is at the end of his tether, broke, trapped in a slum in Tijuana and turning to street dogs for company and solace. Possibly even talking to the street dogs for oddly long periods of time, naming the dogs, asking them over to fictitious tea parties and get-togethers to be held in a stately house (purchased from royalties accrued to him from tripzine.com) situated in a leafy and respectable suburb. The reader may conjecture (falsely) about the real reason the writer moved to Tijuana in the first place, i.e. to be close to cheap, generic Xanax prescriptions, the kind he hasn't been able to kick for several years, like Noelle Bush, but all those surmises would be wrong — at least wrong in part; or correct in some of the financial particulars, but not at all in the pharmacological or behavioral ones.

But I digress, I was talking about Satanism and Rosemary's Baby. Subjects with real meat...

It was in an excellent interview with Robert Anton Wilson in his book, The Illuminati Papers that I first became acquainted with name of novelist Ira Levin. He was mentioned because he had written a chemical sci-fi dystopia a la Huxely called, This Perfect Day which, according to one reviewer, "Outshines Orwell!" (It didn't). (Novels and stories about chemical dystopias will always play a necessary and trenchant role in contemporary fiction because they show an expanded landscape of real or future society: In fifteen years, Time and Newsweek will be writing articles about the "stolen minds" of the "Ritalin Generation" and how members of that numerous and numb chemical clique show an inordinate fondness for whisky, drag racing, game shows and handguns) I was further interested in Levin's work because I later discovered he authored the seminal The Stepford Wives a book I had been wanting to read for years, ( I have it with me in my polyvinyl backpack right now!), since it entered the national lexicon as a descriptive phrase of the tragically wide-spread phenomena of robotoid suburban housewives.

During the fiasco of my stay in Los Angeles three years ago, a friend drove me out to UCLA for a look-see and we walked among the scads and gaggles of cookie-cutter, assembly-line students. He froze up and rasped, "Egad! Stepford Students!" It hit home. I had observed the phenomena in Berkeley previously, but lacked that apposite phrase (close to the student union in Berkeley, where mini sandwich boards announced various student groups, one wag had cleverly inserted on one:

BOURGEOIS MATERIALIST STUDENTS MEET EVERYDAY

One day shortly after my first grievous visit to the UCLA campus, I went back and walked into a reading room at the main library and was instantly hit with a visceral revulsion to see droves of well-scrubbed, Pollyanna Stepford Students flopped on couches and supine on desks. It was the exact image I had seen five years previous in my cold water flat in the Arab quarter of Montpellier, when I picked up and examined my overcrowded roach motel. (A large portion of the Anglo-world call roaches "blatts" — go figure). The feelers of the roaches were tentative and relaxed, the roaches themselves seemed little bothered by their incipient doom, just like these young punctilious scholars, whose heads drowsed in overpriced textbooks and whose fingers pecked confidently on sine and cosine keys of scientific calculators. Kids driven, like the roaches whom they branched off from 1.8 billion years ago,(which, curiously enough is almost the exact number of McDonald's burgers sold on this planet) in the same manner as our coleopteran cousins, to respond to chemical signals like pheromones, chic aftershaves, colognes, perfumes, Hootie and the Blowfish CDs, Bruins pep rallies and rotting meat, to congregate in droves and spawn and hatch and spawn and hatch spawn and hatch and spawn and hatch and spawn and hatch... Enough!

I remember exiting that reading room in all haste, reeling from the experience... but what was the experience? It wasn't your run of the mill Enochlophobia (fear of crowds) it was... A VISION OF THE FUTURE... but even creepier, A VISION OF THE NOW! It was culture shock of our INSECTOID SOCIETY the blank brummagem culture of today's higher learning... and the foul lie of the Western Cannon, the masquerade of the dignity of the individual... You get the picture.

Rushing through throngs of students on the outside walkway, and going to sit on the steps of the student union to collect myself, rubbing my temples, processing the data of that invidious spectacle... and seated on the steps also, not too far away, was a scruffy, long-haired guy, unshaved, wearing a t-shirt memed with some anti-social punk rock band, and he was shell-shocked like me! Him blithering, "What . . .What the fuck man? What the fuck is all this?" I counseled him to remain calm, maybe read some modern ethnology texts and/or some of those sociobiological diatribes Tim Leary wrote (Infopsychology, Intelligence Agents), and blast some old Circle Jerks tunes — particularly, their incomparable classic Beverly Hills (a place not too far away from where we were). With singer Keith Morris belting out:

Beverly Hills
Century City
Everything's so nice and pretty
But all the people, they look the same,
Don't they know they're so damn lame?

So, this novel is more a thriller than a horror story or possibly a hybrid, because there's all sorts of double-crosses and redouble-crosses as Rosemary slowly pieces it all together: she's carrying Pan. But generally speaking a pretty good book for people at a seventh grade reading level. And while this genre is not my favorite, Levin gets good marks for knowing how to get the reader's blood racing (mine was!) at different points, which is kind of fun like a roller coaster ride or a trip through a spook house after two bowls of Cap'n Crunch cereal and two bags of (individually wrapped) Sweet Tarts.

But wait a minute, what led me to Rosemary's Baby in the first place?? Get to the point guy, tie this fucker off. OK: I found an omnibus copy of Levin's work, containing three novels Rosmary's Baby, The Stepford Wives, and This Perfect Day, the latter to my knowledge never being made into a movie like the others. And I remembered that So-Cal hipster Anton Levey was in the movie. And since all these titles have some marginal interest for me in terms of American entertainment trends of the '70s (remember those pajamas with the encapsulated feet?), I went in for the long haul and read them all. Which proved disappointing aesthetically but taught me a lot about the book publishing world... From reading Levin's prize works, I surmised there is a huge class of writers who view characters, plot and dialogue as the necessary drudgery to be performed in order to show off some really cool and ingenious ideas. Levin's formula, and I've seen this in other schlock maestros like V.C. (feces) Andrews, seems to be, "What if the stories from the hygienically-challenged schizos who splutter at me from bus stops were really true?" Not necessarily a bad idea, but to pull it off... well you'd need some depth, and depth is not this guy's strong suit. Exhibit B: The Stepford Wives was so hackneyed, the dialogue like sludge, like drinking a whole bottle of castor oil ( or Robitussen?). I couldn't finish it. I flipped through to the end of the book where the protagonist finds out all the housewives are robots or were drugged by a secret gender-specific chemical that rendered them like Annette Funicello on phenobarbital. No, not a good read by a long shot. Look, I don't have an answer as to why people buy this shit. They want it like neo-liberal economists Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand acolyte and wrinkly Fed Chairman, Alan Greenspan, keep telling us. They want it...

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