Moby Dick

Syd Weedon

There was never any question that the universe would one day make cosmic answer to Psycho Magnet’s equally cosmic resistance to getting anywhere closer than a couple of meters to anything feminine. And this doesn’t mean that Psycho Magnet didn’t like women–quite to the contrary, he liked them a lot. But he’d earned his name–he could draw out the most twisted personalities in any crowd. Captain Trash had once observed that, if you wanted to flush out every nut case in New York City, all you’d have to do would be to stand Psycho Magnet in Times Square and wait fifteen minutes. This unique, psycho-magnetic effect had the side effect of creating in Psycho Magnet’s mind the unfortunate yet understandable misapprehension that all women were crazy, since the only ones he’d ever had the chance to spend time with were. Needless to say, he lived alone and grew a lot of hair.

On the other side of space and time, ten thousand years past in Earth’s time, the existential Wholly Other had already begun to formulate its response to this ultimate challenge posed by Psycho Magnet. A raggedy-assed space freighter with "Bernie’s Sundries" painted on its side in flaking red paint drifted toward Planet X where a race of goddesses blissfully contemplated the Euclidian harmonies of the universe. In the hold of that derelict freighter was something called "Bernie’s Love Potion Number Nine." As it happens, Bernie was in arrears on his subscription to Interstellar Navigation, Inc., and was about to slam into the orbital docking station circling above Planet X, wrecking his ship, the station, and releasing a cloud of Bernie’s Love Potion Number Nine, the most potent aphrodisiac in the universe, into the atmosphere of Planet X.

See, when the goddess appears, you’ve got to deal with her. They don’t call them love goddesses for nothing. These are women possessed of cosmic power and supernatural lust, and all that animus twisted by millennia of deprivation and loneliness.

She appears and suddenly takes over your life–not like a normal woman in whom you might develop a rational interest or perhaps decide to leave alone because it didn’t quite feel "right." No, the goddess appears and everything stops or gets set aside. You might think you have everything pretty well under control, your universe ordered and tidy, but then there she is, radiant and compelling, and suddenly you’ve got the will power of a homeless puppy.

Love Jones. There’s no help when one gets on you, no help at all. Kiss your young ass goodbye ‘cause your self respect is history. Psycho Magnet is sitting at this table at Snuggle Wet, the thrasher bar on Wilbur Street, and there’s a babe sitting across from him and she is utterly spectacular: long golden hair, the perfect nose, and the rest of the package fit together as well, and she’s looking at him. She looks again and doesn’t turn her eyes away when their gazes meet. The band’s playing, "That’s right, the women are smarter, that’s right the women are smarter, smarter than the men in every way." Psycho Magnet says to himself, Well shit, it’s easy to be smart when you’re that good-looking. People will find a way to make you smart. He looks again and damned if she doesn’t look back. This woman’s too good-looking to be looking at me, he thinks again. She’s a love goddess. Psycho Magnet doesn’t know it, but she is and she’s about to ventilate his soul with a love bullet.

Goddammitt, this is just the shit I didn’t want. Some babe gives me a second glance and I’m wanting to climb her bones. This is crazy. She’s talking. Her lips are moving, sound coming out, She’s talking, idiot, start tracking, come up with something intelligent to say. She’s bitching about a guy at the next table who’s smoking a cigar. The smoke smells like underwear that needs washing. He says that. She asks him if he’s been sniffing dirty underwear. "Only when I can’t find any road kill," he says. She makes a face like she’s going to throw up, and he awards himself the "Shoot Yourself In The Foot" award for the dumbest opening line of the year. Amazingly, she’s still there talking. She hasn’t grabbed up her things and moved to a different table. She’s still talking, asshole. Pay attention.

She’s asking a question with a smile that you’d die for, "What do you do?"

Shit, she’s asking a question. This is just too intense. Oh, Lord, I’m lost–she wants to know what I do–she’s interested. "I’m president of General Motors," he says and instantly has second thoughts, Well, maybe not the most convincing lie, but she can’t check it out `til morning.

On about the seventh virtual dimension, the Mother Goddesses from Planet X are starting to materialize using the waves of anxiety churned up by Psycho Magnet’s distress. They’re about to rescue him. They’re launching the "Anything this much fun must be dirty" weapon. It’s large, pink, and trailing a cloud of cheap mascara, but it is formless, at least in the real dimensions. It will have to take a form in the real third and fourth. It will beam itself in and take a shape which is compelling yet repugnant. At the level of gauge-field mechanics, a deep freeze is forming from the quantum fabric.

The Missing Dream–the girl who was never really there, the girl he had made up in his mind when he was sixteen and a snug pair of blue jeans would give him a hard-on. Some days she was blonde, some days a red head. At times she would be tall and athletic, but then the weather would change and she’d be petite and cuddly, a sultry, brown-eyed kitten with a shape like a girl from a Marvel Comic book. The only thing she was consistently was missing. She was never really there. She preferred to simply haunt, and in that way she was a demon lover, a tormenting phantom standing in the way of every other woman who might come close. In that way she was like the medieval knight’s angel, appearing just in the nick of time to preserve his chastity when temptation was near. The Missing Dream.

The Mother Goddesses of Planet X knew all about The Missing Dream, of course, because they created her. When all the crap is stripped away, the most beautiful and perfect woman in the world is a five-year-old’s mom when he’s got a scraped knee. This is a curse placed on everything male, however inadvertently, by the Mother Goddesses.

In geostationary orbit with their cloaking device on, the love goddesses are aiming the Testosterone Exciter Ray Canon toward a grungy bar thirty thousand miles below them on the planet’s surface. In a mansion at the end of Bleaker Street, Madam Zelda looks into her crystal ball and sees a huge breast which seems to fill the entire sky. In the dim and smoky recesses of Snuggle Wet, Psycho Magnet sits at a table surrounded by three blonde love goddesses–Ingre the Valkyrie Maiden, Love Puppy, and Sr. Mona of the Church of Elvis. Psycho Magnet’s got a hard-on like he hasn’t had since he was seventeen. In the ninth, and perhaps last real dimension, Mildred, the supreme grandmother mother goddess, decides to tidy up a bit.

The sweeping broom of the supreme grandmother mother goddess is like no ordinary broom. Such a broom, wielded by such hands in the ninth dimension can make the planets swerve in their orbits, and thankfully for the citizens of Earth, Mildred isn’t really warmed up and the lightly swishing broom is only enough to move the tectonic plate upon which rests North America by approximately seven and a half inches. Unfortunately for the patrons of Snuggle Wet, this shift of the tectonic plate occurs at precisely the instant that the love goddesses fire the Testosterone Exciter Ray at Psycho Magnet. Its aim now thrown off by approximately seven and one half inches, the ray falls on Dudley Limprick, a second year business student who is out on the town trying to accomplish all those things his mother told him not to do when he got to college–such is the vengeance of the mother goddesses. The full force of the Exciter Beam illuminates Dudley like a Christmas tree for a nanosecond, exciting every atom in his body to an erect and totally Neanderthal posture. He is Chuck Norris...no, Rambo...no, Captain Blood...no, they’re all wimps next to him. The waves of supercharged testosterone dissolve the rational thought centers in his brain, and he hurls a full beer mug at Psycho Magnet and the table of the love goddesses.

Psycho Magnet, of course, is not the kind to take this kind of shit lying down, and besides that, sitting as he has for two hours at a table full of love goddesses, he’s suffering from some pretty serious hormonal toxicity himself. Doing his best Conan the Barbarian, Psycho Magnet dives across the crashing tables and grabs Dudley, wrapping his wiry arms around the sophomoric berzerker. This noble act results in a sort of Nantucket Sleigh Ride around the crowded bar. In a fleeting moment of clarity, Psycho Magnet asks himself, OK, genius, now you got him–whatcha gonna do with him? Dudly, doing his best Moby Dick, makes a frantic lunge into the bar attempting to dislodge the alien life form which has attached itself to his back. The bar catches Psycho Magnet in the medulla. As he sinks into the blackness of unconsciousness, Psycho Magnet dreams of Marilyn Monroe commanding a Abrams main battle tank and chasing him through the desert with heat-seeking missiles. Love Puppy is so entranced with Dudley’s sudden virility that she spirits him away to Jellico, Tennessee where they’re married at three in the morning and conceive triplets before dawn.