This writing was accepted for publication in the 84 page perfect-bound issue... Down in the Dirt magazine (v085) (the August 2010 Issue)		Order this issue from our printer as an ISSN# paperback book: or as the ISBN# book “clearing the debris”:

Order this writing in the 2010 collection book of July-December prose from “Down in the Dirt”:		click on the book cover for an author & poem listing, order the 5.5" x 8.5" ISSN# book order the 6" x 9" ISBN# book

Gutroach and Boogerdung at the Sleep-Cheap-We-Peep Inn

Mary Campbell

    Recently I had the honor of serving on an authors’ panel at the first annual meeting of the Virtually Unpublished Writers of Tasteful Religious Books Society. Actually, I didn’t really serve on that particular panel, because I went to the wrong hotel. Which I didn’t find out until the next day. The conference was at the Cheap Bed Sheep Shed. I showed up at Sleep-Cheap-We-Peep. Anyone could have made the same mistake.
    I wondered why the concierge looked at me strangely when I asked him to direct me to the conference room. “Well, we have meetin’s in the back of the bar sometimes,” he said, pointing at a faux-hardwood door, which you could tell was flimsy and hollow by the multiple holes at about the level where a man’s fist would be if he were to drive his fist into it.
    Well, I thought, the VUWTRBS is on a pretty tight budget, although, given the fragrance (Eau de Bud Light) and the ambience (dark as a sewer tunnel and about as tidy), I made a mental note to suggest the Kmart employee break room for the second annual meeting.
    I was reassured when I saw a dais with a couple of folding chairs and an audience of more than a hundred seekers of spiritual truth. I walked onto the dais feeling confident in my navy patent-leather pumps and navy-and-white linen polka-dot sheath dress with a white Peter Pan collar. I chose one of the folding chairs — the one without an overturned beer can and glob of Cheez Whiz on the seat — sat down, demurely crossed my ankles, and waited.
    I looked at the audience. They, presumably, looked at me. It was hard to tell, because of the spotlight that made everything appear radioactive.
    After half an hour, the audience was getting restless, as evidenced by what sounded and smelled a great deal like a certain unseemly type of competition my brother and his friends had sometimes entertained themselves with after they’d had a few beers. Since there didn’t seem to be anyone in charge, I decided it was time to take the initiative.

We’re Gonna Tear This Place Apart

    I stood up and walked to the microphone, tapping it to make sure it was turned on. I adjusted it to my height, smiled a huge, welcoming, spiritual smile and said a hearty “Welcome.” My voice sounded confident, the first time I heard it, before I went temporarily deaf. I could hear just enough to discern the word “welcome” bounce off walls, floors, and ceilings, pass through a linear accelerator or two, and return sounding like Jobba the Hut with a bad case of tonsillitis.
    I turned the microphone to “off” and spoke directly to the Seekers, smiling more broadly and spiritually than before, if that were possible, though I had the feeling that my ears were actually meeting on the back of my head and thought I’d probably reached my maximum smile diameter.
    “Well,” I said perkily, “this is supposed to be the Q & A session led by Mr. Edmund Digby. Mr. Digby, you’re not out there in the audience anywhere, are you?” There was no answer, other than a signal that the competition might be starting up again, so I said, as quickly as humanly possible, “Well, let’s just start without Mr. Digby and the others. I’m sure they’ve been delayed and will be here any minute.
    “My name is Mary Campbell. You’ll see it there on your program, next to Unfamiliar Territory. I assume you’ve read it and you have some questions. Who wants to go first?”
    “I’ll go first,” said a young man in the front row — one of the few faces I could actually see. He was puffing on an odd little pipe, which he then handed to the young lady next to him, and she puffed on it too and passed it on, and I was about to say something about How Germs Are Spread when the young man said, “My name is Gutroach and my question is, where’s Puking Maggot Progeny?”
    I glanced at my list of attendees, pretty sure I would have noticed a name like that earlier, and sure enough it wasn’t there. “Mr. (or is it Ms.?) Progeny isn’t on my list,” I said. “Is he or she a late registrant, perhaps?”
    “Well, perhaps he is or perhaps he ain’t, but we paid to see Puking Maggot Progeny and by G-d, we’re gonna see Puking Maggot Progeny or we’re gonna tear this place apart.”

She Who Must Be Obeyed

    At this I became a little indignant. I had never read any of this Progeny person’s books, nor had I heard of him, but I knew that my work had merit too, and I said as much, with all the asperity I could muster. “So,” I concluded icily, “perhaps Mr. Progeny ain’t gonna be here, in which case you can listen to me and then we can go to the wine-and-cheese buffet before the banquet, or you can all go home and I’ll see that your registration fees are refunded.”
    “Wine and cheese?” said Gutroach, grinning as broadly as I had but not, I thought smugly, as spiritually. His smile was very bright, I had to admit — too bright, I quickly realized, for someone who had, as far as I could tell from my spot on the dais, only three teeth, but since these were approximately the same shade of mahogany as his gums it was hard to tell. “WINE and CHEESE? Yummy, YUMMY.”
    Then he licked his chops (whereupon I could see where the gleam came from), scratched his...lower torso, and started to get up from his seat. The odd little pipe, I noticed, had made its way back to him, and I was opening my mouth to give a brief lecture on hygiene, when he shouted to someone else in the room, or perhaps to someone on the Isle of Wight.
     “Hey, Boogerdung,” he yelled, as if Boogerdung were lying inside a sealed casket instead of sitting in the second row, “I got the munchies. You got the munchies? Let’s go grab that wine and cheese and go to the Scab Zombie.”
    I had reached my limit with Mr. Gutroach, and I had no interest in hearing whether or not Mr. Boogerdung had the munchies.
    “SIT down, Mr. Gutroach,” I said firmly, sounding, greatly to my surprise, like She Who Must Be Obeyed. “The Scab Zombie is closed. Raided. Shut down. Everyone’s in jail. I’m the only act in town tonight, and I’m ON!”

‘He loves that little girl, Man’

Mr. Gutroach actually sat down, even looked a little sheepish. The audience was quiet. I cleared my throat and began to read:

Anna Sighs
Pressing on my pearly window, Night inhales. . . .

    “Hey!” Mr. Boogerdung interrupted. “Why should we care if night is pressing on your %&^%$& pearly window?”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “Why should you care if Bing Crosby is dreaming of a White Christmas?” Silence. Faces blank as notebook paper.
    “Okay,” I said. “Let’s try that again. Why should you care if Mr. Marshall Mathers’s public persona is that he’s a pistol-packing drug addict who bags on his momma, but he wants to take time out to be perfectly honest ‘cuz there’s a lot of shit that hurts deep inside o’ his soul, and he grows colder the older he grows, and the boulder on his shoulder is like the weight of the world, his neck is breaking and he wants to give up but he doesn’t. And why doesn’t he?”
    “’Cuz he’s bringin’ in the big bucks, Baby,” said the girl next to Mr. Gutroach.
    But Mr. Gutroach paid no attention. “Man, that’s some sad shit,” he said, shaking his head, “’cuz Eminem, he loves that little girl, Man.”
    “Is that right?” I said. “Well then maybe, just as one little teeny-weeny example of questionable parenting, he shouldn’t do songs that end with him slitting that little girl’s mother’s throat and yelling, ‘Bleed, Bitch, bleed!’”
    In the ensuing silence, I read my poem:

ANNA SIGHS
Pressing on my pearly window, Night inhales and,
bloated with the noxious air, it tries to come
inside and take its pleasure there. My little lamp
is proof against the first assault, and bears the siege
with dignity, but we are only three—the lamp
and Anna here with me, but Anna sleeps while Night
retreats to breathe the venom that it needs so it
can swell again and burst the breach.

All-engorging, thick with vile effluvium, and
restive, Night still heaves against the pane and probes
the porous mortar, thus to gain a continent, and
breathe again, but holding breath within, as if
release would leave it spent of form and substance, vanished
in a photon storm.

No, to find fragility and penetrate,
just as the hungry sea assaults the levee where it
groans, and swallows up the shore—except that Night
can but devour and look for more, can ebb but not
abate, for it is powerless to moderate its
gluttony, nor would it, if it could.

Anna tosses in her sleep, and if she feels the
indolent oppression, swollen with its kill, she
feels it inwardly, and moans, the speech of wan
resistance, drained of will, a feeble protestation,
habit murmuring, “I am.” Something in her
knows the enemy and would arrest it, summoning
a name, essaying ownership. It rises out of
bounds before the net is thrown.

Bereft of thought and consciousness, it senses nonetheless
that I alone am here to watch and to resist —
to fill the lamp until the fuel is gone. One forgets
at midnight that this too will pass; not even Night
outlasts the unremitting circle. But at midnight
one unreasoning expends what has been grown and
gathered season after season, sacrifices
every treasure, throws into the flame a hundred
fragile artifacts, to gain a moment’s clarity.
At midnight, friends have settled in and locked their doors,
oblivious to ghastly appetite, now thickened
by the certainty that Anna will comply and
abdicate her shape, to be a pool, a fog, and
then evaporate.

Perhaps she dreams that Night will hide her face and nobody
will notice that the Anna space, once occupied by
negligible molecules, is vacant now. But
Night and I were taken by surprise; we had
forgotten that the planet turns. At sunrise, the
tenacious lamp still burns, and Anna sighs.

I knew I had them at ‘the vile effluvium’

    Man, you musta been WAY down when you wrote that,” Mr. Gutroach said softly. “Lookin’ at you, who’d of thought you ever felt that dark?”
    I moved my chair to the edge of the dais so I could see the audience better. About twenty-five people remained in the tawdry room, with a combined (visible) tattoo count roughly equivalent to that of the U.S. Navy’s Third Fleet.
    “You all aren’t members of the Virtually Unpublished Writers of Tasteful Religious Books Society, are you?” I asked. There were a few puzzled looks, a few guffaws, and one nonverbal comment from a Rude Bodily Noise contestant.
    “Well, you sure ain’t Puking Maggot Progeny,” said Mr. Boogerdung.
    The girl next to him whispered something in his ear. He shook his head no. She said, “Please.” I looked at them curiously.
    “She wants me to read a poem I wrote for Mama, who died.”
    “Oh, please do,” I said. “My mom died a long time ago, and I still miss her. I’d be honored if you’d read your poem.”
    Apparently Mr. Boogerdung kept it with him all the time, in his wallet. I noticed he had a library card in there too. The sheet of paper had clearly been folded and unfolded a hundred times. It was about to fall apart at the folds. He opened it carefully and held it reverently and began to read:

Mama, sometimes at night, when everything’s quiet,
I wonder if you’re near. I wonder if you hear
Me when I talk to you ‘bout bein’ sad and say I’m sorry for bein’ bad.
When you were here on earth, were you sorry you gave me birth?
Daddy always said I was jest a waste of human flesh.
But you always made me feel better inside, like if I tried
I could be great and do you proud. Is that still true now?
Mama, I know you’re in Heaven. I hope the angels up there are givin’
You clouds and harps and such, ‘cause down here you never got much.
But sometimes I watched you prayin’ to God, and you were sayin’
Watch out for my boy when I’m gone, and if his daddy carries on
’Bout him not bein’ worth a lick, you give that mean old fart a kick.
(Beg pardon, Ma’am, but that’s what Mama said.)
But after you weren’t there to yell at, Daddy didn’t seem to care
’Bout nothin’ else and died hisself. I love you, Ma. Am I too bad for God to help?

    You could have heard a pin drop. I was so moved by his sentiments and so impressed with his natural, untutored style that I didn’t know what to do except hug him. He hugged me back, probably thinking of his mother.
    “What was her name?” I asked. “Your mother’s, I mean.”
    “Well,” he said, “her given name was Charlotte Rae but everybody called her Sugar.”
    “Your mother’s name was Sugar Boogerdung?”
    Mr. Boogerdung and Mr. Gutroach laughed so hard that Mr. Gutroach belched enormously mid-laugh and almost choked to death.
    “Them ain’t our real names, Ma’am,” Mr. Boogerdung said after picking himself up off the floor. He leaned toward me and said in a low voice, “I was christened Jody Leonard Bodie. You can call me Len if you want.”
     “What about you, Mr. Gutroach?”
    “Arthur Billy Clovis Dewitt at your service, Ma’am,” he said obligingly but almost in a whisper and more to his shoes than to me. “My folks thought it’d be cute for my initials to be ABCD. But if you don’t mind, please call me Gutroach or Billy, or Buttface, I don’t care, as long as it ain’t Arthur or Artie or Clovis.”
    “Great to meet you gentlemen,” I said, taking Len’s left arm and Billy’s right arm and leading them toward where the wine-and-cheese buffet ought to have been if I hadn’t been at the wrong motel.
    “I haven’t introduced myself properly either,” I confessed. “’Mary Campbell’ is my nom de plume . At home I’m known as Festering Pustule, but you guys can call me Pus.”

Copyright of written pieces remain with the author, who has allowed it to be shown through Scars Publications and Design.Web site © Scars Publications and Design. All rights reserved. No material may be reprinted without express permission from the author.

Problems with this page? Then deal with it...