THE BLOATED TICK

KEVIN P. KEATING

Every morning for the past five months the Gonk arrived early at the service garage where he stood behind an orange tarp and cut elaborate butterflies out of scrap metal with a welding torch. This drove us to distraction because we had no idea why anyone would want to come in early for any reason let alone to make butterflies. The Gonk smoked cigarettes under his welding hood. He scratched his balls with a chipping hammer. He mumbled things under his breath. He worked as though in a trance.

The Gonk. How he acquired such a nickname no one knew though we each had our own theories and eagerly shared them with one another. “Got that name when he was born,” Hambone declared, his mouth crammed full of tobacco. “The doctor took one look at that face and called him the Gonk.” Others, like No Neck and Monkey, argued that the name had its roots in sound, in music, in an accidental drumbeat, a stick clattering against an empty trashcan, and admittedly there was something musical albeit dissonant about the name; it reminded the men of the oddball stuff I played on the radio, Bartok, Berg, Schönberg, composers finding their way through new sonic landscapes. Melee-mouth and Fruitcake believed the name had its roots in action; to them it was not a name at all but a verb that could be used in a sentence. For instance: many of the men who worked at the service garage wished to gonk their neighbors’ wives, and indeed many of the men had gonked their neighbors’ wives, sometimes repeatedly. The word could also be used in a less scandalous way. For instance: the men often gonked cigarettes from me throughout the day, which I found quite irritating since the price of cigarettes kept going up. The Gonk—a name, a sound, a word that meant many things to many men over the course of years, even over the course of hours, minutes, seconds. Spending day after day driving through the quiet suburban streets looking for (or pretending to look for) something useful to do forced us to seek entertainment in games of etymology. In the end none of our theories satisfactorily explained the its meaning or origin and so we, the otherwise listless men of the Bloated Tick, felt obliged to keep inventing new ones.

The Bloated Tick, our nickname for the city service garage, was an organism that sucked the lifeblood out of its humble employees, maybe because we were given those menial but necessary tasks that fall upon all service garage employees in every municipality across America. We plowed and salted the streets in the winter and cleaned and prepped the pool before the summer. We collected leaves in the fall and examined sewers for possible blockages in the spring. We cut the grass in the park, combed the sand on the small strand of beach, and once a year we painted the gazebo in the town square although these days it wasn’t so much a town square as it was a nondescript postage stamp of public land situated at a busy intersection where minivans whizzed by on their way to sprawling shopping plazas.

Despite our diligence and attention to detail, the taxpayers continually leveled accusations at us. That’s how they described themselves in their angry letters to the mayor. “I am a hardworking and overburdened taxpayer.” Never did they refer to themselves by last name for fear that we might seek revenge in a way only city employees can. The mayor, to his credit, always rushed to our defense, responding to these anonymous complaints with long letters written in the labyrinthine style of a consummate politician. Even though most of my colleagues were incapable of deciphering the dense tangle of bureaucratic prose I nevertheless pinned a photocopy of one such letter to the lunchroom wall.

Good sir or madam (whichever it my be):

Once again you have written to grumble about our fine service workers who, you say, are supposedly drunk while on the job and who seem to find some kind of perverse amusement in scattering refuse over tree lawns and tossing empty garbage cans into the middle of busy streets where motorists are forced to swerve, resulting in a number of accidents and injuries. One such accident was, as you put it, “quite cataclysmic.” Yes, I recall the event quite clearly, but my memory of the accident differs from yours. True, a tractor-trailer carrying several tons of birdseed swerved to avoid a garbage can and collided with the statue of our city’s founder; however, sir or madam (and I certainly hope you can appreciate the absurdity of your description) the “resulting mayhem” did not in any way “resemble something out of an Alfred Hitchcock film with flocks of ravenous crows descending from the treetops.” Although it is certainly true that the intersection remained impassible for several hours after the accident and caused delays for many motorists, rest assured that this was not due to any negligence on the part of our service employees who, you hastily and recklessly assert, “were too busy whistling at teenage girls roller blading in the park to clear the streets of debris.”

All of this is merely to say that our employees do not consume alcoholic beverages while on duty and that they make every effort to be efficient, conscientious, and dependable. If an overturned garbage can is spotted in the middle of a busy intersection please be forewarned that this is the deliberate act of unruly teenagers. The best way to solve this crisis is to call the brave men and women of our fine law enforcement agency who will quickly apprehend these miscreants and bring them to justice. We are all very proud of our new multi-million dollar juvenile detention center, and we intend to put the facility to good use and make our community safe for law-abiding citizens. Last month alone we apprehended, prosecuted, and incarcerated over one hundred teens I have spoken to the governor personally and he has promised to allocate more funds for an additional wing to the detention center. We certainly look forward to working with our usual building contractors. Newspaper reports of projected cost overruns have been distorted for cynical political purposes.

As for the statue of our founder, which was damaged in the accident, the city has already commissioned a celebrated international sculptor to replace it. I hope this letter has sufficiently addressed your concerns.

Most Sincerely,

Honorable Oliver Tann

One morning, as we straggled into the lunchroom to get our coffee, we noticed that the letter was gone. Suspicion immediately fell upon the Gonk. He alone had an opportunity to take the letter, crumple it up, burn it, shred it, whatever, because he arrived at the garage hours before anyone else. “He destroyed that letter,” I said, “because the mayor is a Democrat and he can’t admit that a Democrat would come to the aid of the working man.” Although the Gonk had an aversion to politics, local or otherwise, he was known to be a staunch Republican and a man committed to small acts of religious devotion although I for one believed that his religion consisted of a patchwork of inconsistent beliefs, an incoherent Babel of Christian doctrines—Baptist, Pentecostal, Branch Davidian—combined with a healthy dose of commercial entertainment. I envisioned him late at night in his trailer (“It’s a double wide,” he often corrected me), sitting in a foldout chair, eating onions and tomatoes fresh from his little garden, listening to the hypnotic cadences of the televangelists who preached sermons about the abominations of homosexuality, feminism, liberal elitism. He sensed the legitimacy of these messages, and in a flash of divine revelation and patriotic consumerism he dialed the number on the screen and purchased a dozen Jesus fishes. He welded them to the back bumper of his pickup truck, a whole school of them swimming across open highways and lonely gravel roads, and despite never having read a single verse in the Bible, the Gonk defied me to question the sanctity of these icons and the inevitability of the Rapture.

Many of the men at the service garage held similar religious convictions (or “afflictions” as I thought of them); they prescribed to the belief that kneeling in a vestibule and murmuring hosannas constituted a life of piety. Their true religion, like the Gonk’s, was consumerism and they showed their devotion through the purchase of crosses, books, pamphlets, videos, statues of Mary carefully placed in front yards like lawn jockeys. My skepticism annoyed them. “Ain’t you afraid of burnin’ in hell, Perfessor?” Jack-o-lantern asked me one day as we dragged a dead deer off the road and hoisted it into the bed of a service truck. “You spend yer time tryin’ figure out reasons why God don’t exist. Maybe you oughtta figure out reasons why He does exist? What if you’re wrong, huh? At least if you believe in God you won’t burn forever.” I smiled and said, “Ah, yes, Pascal’s wager.” Jack-o-lantern, who didn’t seem to appreciate the fact that he’d independently stumbled upon an argument of sheer genius, scratched his head. I repeated myself, “Pascal’s wager, Pascal’s wager!” but each time I shouted these words Jack-o-lantern picked at his teeth—a dozen rotten stumps in an otherwise gaping maw filled with pestilential fumes—and said, “Huh? Huh?” We went back and forth like this until Birdbrain wandered to the back of the truck and interrupted us. “Hey, Perfessor, can I gonk a cigarette from you?”

My own nickname was no secret. I once taught at a small Jesuit college in Cleveland but was forced to resign after engaging in an “inappropriate relationship” with a female student. No matter how often my co-workers at the garage pestered me, I refused to bore them with the mundane details of the affair, the sordid meetings at her sorority house, my positive obsession with her flat belly, the incriminating and embarrassingly mushy e-mails, the lurid photographs. These things were commonplace, variations on a theme, an older man seduced by the wiles of a nubile and reckless strumpet. Although the newspapers made me out to be a villain, I didn’t particularly feel like one. After all, the girl was of age and more than willing. These were the facts and they were a matter of public record. For a time I actually enjoyed the notoriety, the hysterical pitch of the hate mail and the libidinous propositions I received over the phone from time to time, but notoriety is tiresome, a young man’s game—it’s difficult to dine at a fine restaurant without eliciting stares and whispers—and so I made the decision to blend into the quiet and anonymous milieu of working class life in the faraway foothills of Northern Kentucky. I didn’t mind working at the service garage. The pay was adequate and I enjoyed being outdoors.

Many of the men resented the fact that I had made love, repeatedly, to an eighteen-year old girl with fragrant hair and unblemished skin. “The Gonk ain’t been with a woman in three years, least that’s what I heard,” said Motherload. “Ever since he started makin’ them butterflies, he hasn’t so much as looked at a woman.” Stories of the Gonk’s sex life (or lack thereof) didn’t interest me much, but the careful analysis and deconstruction of stories used to be my forte and so this gave me something to ponder while scraping paint from the gazebo. Of his three failed marriages, we heard only about the deranged third wife who chased him from their bed in the dead of night with one of his own shotguns because, so the rumor went, he’d been gonking one of the women in the trailer park. The Gonk collected firearms and even mounted them on his wall—a .38-caliber pistol, a Glock, a high-powered assault rifle. He had guns for hunting deer and rabbits, guns for shooting empty beer cans in his overgrown yard, guns for firing into the night sky at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve, guns for a hundred secret purposes. He had night vision goggles and exploding bullets and glimmering bayonets. The Gonk was a veritable one-man arsenal prepared for “the revolution.” He harbored deep suspicions about the government, even about the innocuous suburban government that gainfully employed him, and one day he told the service director, “Don’t ever call me at home. Ever. For any reason. I don’t want to come in for overtime—no evenings, no weekends, no holidays.” But late one night when an unexpected snowstorm descended on the hills, the service director, desperate to find men to plow the streets, dared to call the Gonk who in turn dialed the phone company, told them to cancel his service, and then ripped the cord out of the wall. Despite this act of insubordination, the Gonk was singled out as the hardest working and most efficient man on the payroll. He always showed up early. Very early. To make butterflies.

I, conversely, was a “minute man,” always the last to arrive at the garage, coming in one or two minutes before I was supposed to punch in at 7:30 AM. I am not a morning person, never have been, and tend to stay up late at night writing and smoking one aromatic stick of mary jane after another. My thoughts always seemed more lucid, the ideas more vivid and original, after my brain had been doused in THC. Sometimes I wondered if this habit was a weakness on my part, a kind of moral failing, but I told myself that it was better than spending my evenings at the Turkey Gizzard Tavern with the other men who, over time, had developed humps from leaning over the bar and drinking shots of whiskey. As a result of their “self medication” their noses were red and pitted. The alternative, they said, was to go home to their nagging spouses.

“Monogamy is a foolhardy proposition,” I said one day as we marched up and down the little strand of beach along the river, cleaning up bottles and cans and cigarette butts. Cueball held a tampon applicator between forefinger and thumb and grimaced. “What the hell!” he cried. “I don’t understand it. Do women change their tampons while sitting on their beach towels? Damn if I didn’t find a dozen of these things last week.” Everyone shrugged. No one could fathom the impenetrable abyss that was a woman’s psyche. Still, many of the men believed matrimony to be a rite sanctified by god. “Men and women were never meant to be together,” I argued. “They were meant to satisfy their primal urges and then move on.” Cueball rubbed his head and said, “Society would collapse without marriage, without two parents raising a child. You can’t have civilization without men and women getting hitched.” I raked the sand and found a fashion magazine, a tennis shoe, a bottle opener. “Civilization,” I continued, “is an aberration, an evolutionary byproduct. It was never meant to be. In any event, the divorce rate is so high that civilization may indeed collapse one day. Personal relationships inherently lack stability. Just ask the Gonk.” But the Gonk never took the bait, never filled the air and drowned out the squawking gulls with a quasi-mystical tirade, never even raised his eyes from the sand, and as we continued to march along the beach and watch the river lap gently against the rocks we waited for him to say the only words he ever said: “The revolution is coming.” Yes, the revolution, his steadfast mantra, though I doubted that he saw in his dismal record of marriage and divorce the catalyst for this imaginary revolution of his.

I had an appreciation for someone like the Gonk, a man of few words, so I was mortified when Pigeon tapped me on the shoulder one day and said, “You talk too much, Perfessor.” We were having lunch back at the service garage and I had just finished explaining why I prefer to eat pita bread and taboule rather than bologna sandwiches. All around the table I could smell cheddar cheese, salami, Hostess Ding Dongs, day old meatloaf. “You think yer better than the rest of us, don’t you?” Pigeon said. I crossed my arms and smiled. “Do I give you that impression, Pigeon, that I’m better than you?” Pigeon belched before answering. “No, I know you ain’t better than me. I said that you think that you’re better than us. You think a lot of things. That’s your problem. You think too much. You don’t stop thinking. But it’s all in your mind. None of it’s real. Get me?” I nodded. “What you’re saying, Pigeon, is that I’m neurotic, is that it?” Pigeon grimaced. “If that’s what neurotic means, then yeah, you’re neurotic as they come. Your mind spins round and round like a hamster running on one of them wheels. Hamster thinks he’s pretty clever, too, going absolutely nowhere.” Everyone snickered, their eyes twinkled. “Goodness gracious, Pigeon. I never thought you’d be so upset over something as simple as my lunch. Which reminds me. Did you happen to bring any of that delicious possum stew today?” The men roared laughter. Pigeon slammed a hand down on the lunch table, his face burning with rage. “I don’t eat goddamn possum stew!” I stood up and said, “What was it then? Oh, yes, crawfish. Plucked from the creek in your own back yard. Mmmmm.” I tipped my hat and left the lunchroom to spend the rest of the hour in solitude. Pigeon, unable to disguise his indignation, bobbed his head and shouted, “You think we’re all cartoon characters, Perfessor, we’re all rednecks. But we ain’t! We ain’t what you think we are.”

The Gonk never joined us for lunch. I found him, as usual, in the back of the garage, toiling away at his butterflies. Having just cut three or four of them from a large sheet of scrap metal, he now clamped them to the vices mounted on his little workstation where he polished them with a grinder. There were dozens, maybe even hundreds, of butterflies hanging from the ceiling by fishing wire, each one meticulously painted with swirls of simple primary colors, red and yellow and white, others designed with psychedelic splashes of purple and pink. There were small and startlingly realistic ones, large and curiously stylized ones, some done in pastels, others in glaring neon. A gentle breeze came through the windows and the service garage was momentarily transformed into a riveting kaleidoscope, a ballet of pivoting and pirouetting butterflies. I said to him, “You do fine work, Gonk. Astonishing detail.” He whirled around and nearly tore into my flesh with the whirring grinder. “Don’t fuckin’ creep up on me that way!” He scowled. “Can’t swing a dead cat in this place without hitting an asshole.” He turned the grinder off and I held a cigarette out to him, which he accepted without nodding his head in thanks. “I’m terribly sorry, Gonk. Are you making these butterflies for any particular reason?” He shook his head, leaned over to scrutinize the edges of two delicate wings. “The reason I ask is because I know a man who runs an art gallery. I should say that I used to know a man. That’s all part of my past life. But I’m certain he’d be interested in your work.” The Gonk brushed away some metal shavings from the butterflies with the tips of his fingers. “Not interested,” he muttered. I smiled. “Of course not. Of course not. It’s just that you have a real talent, a skill. You’re a craftsman. What passes for art these days is so much trash. But this…this is truly exceptional work. Besides, you can make a bit of money.” With the cigarette bobbing between his clenched teeth he repeated, “Not interested” and then went back to polishing his butterflies.

I envied his devotion to his art. Recognition did not interest him, and this in my opinion made him a true artist. I, too, had an artistic impulse but secretly I craved the respect and admiration of my old colleagues who would be forced to admit, grudgingly of course, that mine was a talent divinely inspired by the muses. Stacked high on the rickety card table in my studio apartment were random piles of paper, notebooks, binders, napkins with notes jotted on them, gibberish, a thousand indecipherable ideas, all fragments of an unfinished book, a novel never really started. The piles of loose-leaf paper grew into a wobbling pillar that came dangerously close to toppling over the edge. There was no cohesion to this disorder, no way for me to synthesize the wildly disparate ideas. Each sheet was an autobiographical sketch, an essay, a diatribe against the injustices of life. No butterflies to be found anywhere. In truth I didn’t really care much about this unruly work-in-progress. What really concerned me were the glowing reviews it was sure to receive, the startled reactions of my enemies back at the Jesuit college who would recognize within the relentless chapters of my epic tome their own blatant hypocrisies. For hours I sat at the table, a dedicated scribbler indeed, and watched the blank pages swell with words until the shrill tone of this interior monologue nauseated me. My writing sessions always ended in the same way—I would throw the pencil against the wall and storm out of my odious little apartment in a rage.

Sometimes I drove across the river into the city and headed toward the red light district. I am a man of many weaknesses, I admit this, but unlike my colleagues, both at the university and at the service garage, I saw no shame in quenching these natural desires. What’s the point in repressing them? My routine was to stop at one of the dozen or so video shops along the strip to purchase some “special cinema.” Naturally I gravitated toward those films claiming to feature unfettered, uninhibited, unrealistically voracious college girls. The fact that these movies actually starred 30-year old sluts never bothered me. Only the fantasy mattered, helped to remind me of the good old days. I was a middle-aged man now with thinning hair and a protruding gut, as desirable to young women as a beached whale, and my one release from the intolerable ache of celibacy was “special cinema.”

As I drove along the busy street, thinking of the cornucopia of copulation I would discover on the shelves, I spotted a rusty pickup truck in the parking lot of a gentlemen’s club. Curious, I yanked the wheel hard to the right and pulled up behind it. A dozen Jesus fishes were plastered to the back bumper. I rolled my eyes and thought, Is there no end to the hypocrisy in this world?

I went inside where a burly man in a maroon sport coat greeted me at the door. “Howya doin’ tonight?” he said as he reshaped the greasy strands of his comb over. “There’s a five dollar cover charge. Unless you have a gonk card.” My eyes bulged. “Excuse me, a what?” He pointed to a sign on the wall. “G.O.N.K.” it read in big bold letters and beneath this in smaller print “Gentleman of Northern Kentucky. You too can enjoy all the privileges as a preferred member. Only $50. Ask for details at the door.” The man must have thought me crazy because I kept murmuring “Gonk, Gonk, Gonk.” as though it were an incantation. “Yeah, pal,” he said, becoming a bit irritated with me. “For fifty bucks you get into the club without paying the cover. It’s good for a full year.” When I didn’t respond he said, “Hey, buddy, you gotta card or not?” I shook my head. “No, I’m afraid I haven’t.” He held out his hand. “Then it’s five bucks.” I gave him the money then hurried over to the bar where I sat on a stool and ordered a martini.

I scanned the room. The eyes of a dozen lonely and aging G.O.N.K.s glimmered in the darkness, their dilated pupils riveted to the undulating thighs of a young woman as though to a hypnotist’s pendulum, and each time she circled the stage the G.O.N.K.s stuffed crisp dollar bills in her swelling garter belt. Wearing nothing but a black thong and high heels she emerged from and then disappeared back into the swirling gray mist of cigarette smoke. Finally she clung to the pole at center stage, wrapped her legs around it, floated through the air, defied the laws of gravity. Tattooed to her arms and legs, her wrists and ankles, even along her tiny waist were dozens of butterflies, intricate little creatures, their colors resplendent and dream-like, and they seemed to flutter right through her flesh as though she were an apparition, a beam of light. Maybe she wasn’t a dancer, I thought, but some kind of erotic magician, and I prayed she wouldn’t call on me—“I need a member from the audience to assist me with this next trick”—because no magician in the world could make my growing erection vanish into thin air. I enjoyed the rest of the show, mesmerized like the rest of the men, and I no longer searched in vain for the Gonk. Instead I debated an important matter in my mind. Was it worth fifty bucks for a membership card? Surely this was a small price to pay, considering I’d be part of an exclusive club, and although it may have been just another illusion conjured up by the mysterious woman and her enchanting butterflies, in some sense I felt like I’d been a member of the club all along.