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enjoy this writing from CEE in the free 2013 PDF file chapbook: the Thing in the Lounge at WagonWheel (I Come in Avarice) (click on the front cover image or the title text to download the free PDF file)				You can also order this as a 2013 6" x 9" perfect-bound paperback ISBN# book! Click on the cover spread for the book the Thing in the Lounge at WagonWheel (I Come in Avarice)

PONG

CEE

    It’s a real cacophony, out there. Out your window. Of voices. Hatefilled. It’s a din. Shrieking at the Before picture, not the After. As if that were the problem, as though it were true, and granting that, as if it solves anything. “’Everybody gotta have their ‘peen-yun!”, spits a friend. Such hatred, at all the Beauty I knew. Such bile and screaming vitriol. You want some advice, nonfriend, instead of sitting there on Friday nights, cringing with every bite of the healthy snack you say you “love”, cheering like a Packer fan watching the Bears get biker-stomped as you help Bill Maher redefine redefinitions, try the bathroom mirror, some time. For your own issues. Are you happy? Are you realized? Beatific? Or, just insane?
    Someone in town called me “a hipster”. Ah, how little you know me. I’m the Dennis the Menace Beta, nonfriend. Richie from Happy Days and post-Dealey Plaza, in a supercollider. I was progeny of Benny Goodman, borne of Andrews Sisters. Conceived in Allen’s Alley, birthed in a Lustron hospital, into land of milk and Studebaker. Crew of cut, and happy about it. Peoria Valley Sunday. I was, as I grew, the living embodiment of the 1964 New York World’s Fair: an old kid in a new time. And, I awakened to this grim knowledge, only in stages. One of these was in Rockton, IL, at what for me and mine amounted to a resort hotel: The Wagon Wheel. It was 1973.
    Yuck it up, all you like. Those who get me don’t agree with me and those who agree with me, don’t get me. Faux Western is all I need. Oversized items for family photos. Candy in the gift shop that looked like plastic. Hotel disinfectant, that smelled of angel’s wings. No supervision—if a kid got hurt, he was punished. Dad wanted me to learn to swim. The pool was a terrifying place. I had my own priorities. I was in the game room, as much as possible. Two plays for a quarter; One play, for a dime. You couldn’t have found one thing digital, to save your jaded soul. Everything was pinball. Pinball and shuffleboard bowling and electro-mechanical baseball. Shooting games, with mounted wooden gunstocks. Spinning tin Martians whooping their cries, blasted by a pastel howitzer. And everywhere, the silver ball. Pinging and clanging, off rubber Baby Boomer buggy bumpers. Hoping the Church of Your Choice Lady, would put on the red light. “Special”. Mecca for American boys, when “Mecca” could mean only “Rome”.
    My friend, whom I’ll call Scott—as ‘twas his name—was with me, that Watergate weekend. We had exhausted in nothing flat, our initial allotment of change, and from there of course, timing became everything. We repaired to where our moms had lighted, in the Wagon Wheel’s open lounge. We approached the den of Bloody Marys, with practiced cool. Brokering for anything extra was quite naturally, a perfect art. We sauntered in, looked, stopped. Stared.
    The thing was ugly. Wooden home stereo cabinet, around dull baby crap console. It looked boring. And a TV screen, black and white, no less, which to me said “down market”, even then. Mocked, poorly, to seem Space Age, but the name-font was already cliché by 1973—too “Tang”, too “the Eagle has landed”. The name, spoke of a crap sport of the Orient, the kind of thing Wide World of Sports shoved under your nose on some week Ali wasn’t fighting. The sounds it made were, sorry, retarded. It was a dumb brute concept with nothing to recommend it.
    Scott and I had walked perhaps 200 steps, yet from malt shop to Jupiter 2. We stared, at our alien future. The kitsch, ‘60’s font, spelled out, “PONG”.
CEE, front row of The Mothers of Invention concert,
Montreux, Switzerland, December 4^th, 1971

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