Ozone Alley # SS, page 1
Originally Published in Heavy Metal, May 1978
“The cheese stands alone,
The cheese stands alone,
Hi-ho the derry-o,
The cheese stands alone.”
(Old song)
The Cheese stood alone, leaning against the thin air that brushed through the palms that Halloween night, stood alone by choice, by design, on purpose; for the Cheese had a great mission, a message to carry to Harry Kipper, the shaved-head persona of evil incarnate. The Punk, a pin through his nose, kept his distance from the Cheese but held his ground. The Punk knew punks didn’t care, but full of nervous pique poked holes in the sidewalk, waiting for the Cheese to move. Anything was better than this waiting, this braking of the strength the Punk felt surging through his acid-tipped muscles.
The Cheese turned and sniffed the air. He wished he were back in Montreux, beside the lake, watching the fat swans cuddle up to the bread-infested children. The California coast gave him the creeps: he wished he had a Saltine to munch but knew this was a job that had to be done on an empty stomach, with a clear mind and a boundless awareness of all the infinitesimal pitfalls. He glanced down his nose at the drug-crazed punk across the alley, watched him picking his acne with bitten fingers. He cursed himself for the karmic connection they had made though he sensed it was not his fault, it would soon be over, that night would see the last of this strange bedfellow, that much he promised himself, that much he truly knew. He felt the low scuffling clouds bead his brow with an ocean-grown dew as a skinny hippie searched the trash at the far end of the alley, moaning the literature of the night-trade, calling his bankbook, keeping score in a cracked voice, banishing the demon-black dog that nipped at his heels: a childhood full of built-ins and bungalow-sized hope.
He stood alone, at the end of Ozone Avenue, ruminating on the course the bald-headed Kipper Kid would take on the way to see his mother. The Cheese knew it like the back of his hand, knew Harry would head down Main Street with his dumpy walk wearing those dumb silver shoes, carrying with him the awful he had collected last night at the party, smelling of smegma and wilted tuna fish patties, wiping his white, splotched hands, the hands that oozed grease from the day he was hatched, wiping them on the gays and tourists as he passed the Blue Fin, past the glass shop with the blue-flashed mirrors: the Cheese knew Harry stopped there to stare at his ugly pudding puss in the cold blue neon glass. He could see the turkey now, he must be shaking his whiz-bang at all the lovely ladies, scraping and bowing, smelling of tuna fish and lonely women, holding the odorific future like a dim light in front of him, to guide, cheer, and guile him home to his hairy mother.
The Cheese crossed the alley, picked up the Punk, who had fallen on his flatulent face, and straightened the nose-ring while brushing the soot from a thousand heels that stuck to the Punk’s pitted cheeks. Gotta rocket, gotta rocket, the Punk repeated ad nauseum. The Cheese kicked the cat licking his mouse-stained boots and watched it sail through the air in a wry arch. He crossed the alley back of Ozone and walked down Dudley where it met Paloma. He looked left and right. No sign of Mr. Kipper yet. He flagged a passing auto and punched out the passenger window for practice, had to keep fit, to be sharp. He melted back into the night, his square, bilious-colored form blending with the Casa Grande, a golden triplex on the corner. His pasteurized sinews twitched in anticipation: that oily fish Harry would be cut bait before daybreak. Gray dawn would find itself breaking over the grisly bend form of that scaly snake, lying boned and bare in the alleycat’s path.
Harry would be moving his fat-and-drippings ass slowly through the vacant lot, shuffling through the prickly weed, his leather skin impervious to pain or heat or cold. They used to call his mother Old Elephant Hide, and Harry had inherited the mutation — it was the boneyard for His Fatness, Mr. Harry Kipper, hisself, oy-oy. The Cheese felt for the grater in his pocket, tingled at the touch of its thousand razored edges, stood alone in the alley back of Ozopne Avenue; he felt the damp wind ripple through the holes in his fedora, pasting back his silky black hair beneath the rhinestoned brim.
He looked up to where the Punk had been rocking unsteadily a moment ago. Nothing, not there; he crossed the alley and picked up the nose pin with some difficulty, his large rectangular body ripe with the decay of a million dead dreams, wrapped in the secondhand saran of smutty promises broken or unkept. Tomato-shaped women rolled before his burnished eyes; they called to him in unkempt voices, grieving, their lists of woes long and padded. He gazed at the silver-pointed ring for a long time, trying to remember who it had belonged to; he searched his memory banks, walked stiffly down the humidified corridors. He emptied the drawers in his mind but only came up with a sheet of gold, prepasted stars and a thousand embossed cards that read “Punks Don’t Care”; this ring had been the Punk’s then. He tossed them in to a bag full of moldy open cat food cans.
Where was that pudding-fish Mr. Kipper, him with the sack full of awful and the yawns of a hundred smoky, bored, lonely women. A last fling? Perhaps Harry had halted along the way for a drink at the Circle Bar and was now holding out his Captain Billie whiz-bang to all comers. A bloody good time was had by all, the Cheese remembered reading after the Kipper Kids had staged their last gala. The press went ga-ga over so much gore. Women swooned, Men fought tooth and nail while waiting in line for their turn at the Big Man. Charlton Heston was heard walking about in his autographed sneakers. Action. Hot and heavy. The Cheese had laughed but now he bit his lip for Harry and maybe Larry and who knows — even Mrs. Kipper had stolen Suzy Tacky and soiled her scrambled-egg brain. They had reached right into her pan with their greasy fish stick fingers and kneaded her cerebellum into mush, and had her, and had her, and had her, right where they wanted her, right where they needed her, and for Mr. Cheese, standing alone in the alley, that was enough — for Suzy Tacky had once been his, fur and all, frivolous and bare. So it was there he stood, shuddering in the dank October night, having planned the ultimate panacea, with pain, for smarmy Harry.
The Cheese remembered Suzy Tacky as she once was: his, his alone, to have and to hold. He remembered when her brain had been synchronized, before Harry and Larry Kipper had cut the connecting tissue, in one of their obscene operations, using a rusty hacksaw on poor Suzy’s mind, sawing at it as if it were a window bar in a jail cell, thinking to gain their freedom and then their fame, while casting him as some lowlife guard, a flatfooted oaf with a stick and no feelings. They painted that picture on the poor girl’s brain screen; they followed the fat kid, the Holiness Gi from India, who was presently wrestling with his mother and cousins over the family fortunes. They did it, they did it, Harry mostly, he did most — the dirty work, the cutting, the sawing, the ragged job of sewing and patching after he had botched the job, quite a performance really, trying to implant a cunt with brains for a more intelligent afternoon’s noodling. They wrote it in the Enquirer and the hungry public, avid for drippings, puked; the Cheese remembered her as she was, the long words she made in their Scrabble games, her refined sentiments, her devotion, compassion, her homogenized sense of good humor, her demure legs, hard belly, flaky wit, flashing blue eyes — they were saucers, as large as saucers, they grew wide in fear when he found her huddled on the boardwalk, clutching the remnants of herself, shaking, her head shaved and a jagged scar from her head to her once-furry piece of fluff — it had been early in the morning and the Cheese remembered he was on his way for bagels at the deli — a considerable crowd had gathered by then: the ragmen and trashers had already been through her bag, the chickenhawks, the early morning joggers, bicycle enthusiasts, roller skaters, wharf rats, panhandlers, beach bums, backpackers, minstrels, ministers, and two men in mufti, all of them staring at once-long-ago Suzy Tacky. She had been his, he had possessed her, locked in love; they had stocked their sexual pantry with a barrelful of monkeys and had preceded from there, point A, to demolish the boundaries built; together they destroyed, purified, and resurrected. Perhaps he had been too possessive, too positive in his approach; he had papered over a lot of her mistakes; she stood awkwardly, she burned the toast (she didn’t do it the way he liked), she couldn’t whistle or hum; perhaps he had put her on a pedestal, too high; he had overreached himself in placing her there, she was only a tall blond, a mere tomato (had been, that was over now). It all ended that morning when he found her in the midst of her first madness, a crowd of the curious gathered around her former self. He had always been too possessive, the Cheese admitted to himself. He had been brought up on the farm, lonely, cold; he clung to warm patches, he loved good wine and fine conversation, a fire, the feline shadow of a woman across his bed; he loved the glow of candles and the scent of the night-blooming jasmine, the little horns of light the fog made ’neath the lamps on the boardwalk in summer.
Need he whip himself into a frenzy of guilt and deprecation? Was he really the villain of this too-true scenario? He caught himself, held himself steady, went to the center of his being with an ancient technique he had learned from a master’s messenger. He knew what he had to do — it was the right action, spontaneous. Poor Suzy Tacky. He wondered where her pitiful shell was hanging out these days. The Punk had seen her in the parking lot of the Liquor Locker two days ago. She had been bumming spare change from the tourists in between bashing herself against the fire hydrant in a series of bizarre sexual advances. The Punk, not easily displeased, had turned head over heels in his rabbit-like haste to rid himself of the scene — having once been Suzy’s fellow student at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, he had nurtured
The Cheese stood alone in the alley behind Ozone Avenue, hoping Harry Kipper would not be late, that he would keep his unknown date with the grater, that the Kipper Kid’s fate would be signed and sealed in stainless steel. The damp ocean breeze flagged the jasmine, gathering the skirts of its night scent about the Cheese’s knees; down the alley a dog strayed from can to can, splaying the contents across the dirty concrete; from the boardwalk came the low tones of a conga lament — the drums talked of lost love, demons, and a night full of long knives. The Cheese whistled a soft, fearful reply, hoping the sweat he felt blush through his hands meant that Harry was nearby. He tested the salt air for the smell of ripe tuna and mouse pee. Nothing. Yet he fancied he was not wrong in feeling the first fitful ripple of tightness in his gut be longed to a minute intuition that Harry was close now. He moved his soft, square body up against the shadow of the garage door and stood still as a cat, coiled and cool, thanking of the ragged scar along the length of Suzy’s once bountiful body.
Harry studied the blackheads among the stubble that covered his fat face like crabgrass covers a swamp. He burped and farted and wiggled his false teeth loose; they were stale-smelling and green with the week’s work. He had to go home to mother and his terrible twin Larry. He hated his brother naturally, from birth, hated the stumblebum’s rush Larry made of every operation, hated the scar on his forehead where they had been joined, hated the headaches he got from hating so hard, hated his mother for holding up to him the mirror that had belonged to the surgeon-madman, his father, Karl Kipper, hung by his neck until dead, the murderer, the make-believe doctor; he hated the thick plates they used at dinner and the gritty soups and gruel his decrepit, cruel mother made him slurp. Harry felt for his whiz-bang in his pocket — he was sure it was getting shorter; he had taken to hanging a weight around the end of it, a fishing type of lead weight that he had bought at the tackle shop at the end of the pier one day when he was searching for bait to cut; he was not sure the weight was working — the constant jerking of it as he walked was a painful reminder of his diminishing manhood. He held it softly for a moment and prayed, then flushed the john and joined the revelers and merrymakers at the bar. The couples were busy pecking and cooing at one another; the loners gazed off into space in front of them filled with smoke and beer ads. Harry settled his fat behind onto a stool and drank down his draft, tipped his hat to the barkeep, and kept a steady pace till he got to the door where he paused, wondering which way to go; lately he had been taking the walk along the ocean on his way home, avoiding with a coward’s eye Suzy’s old address and the alley that the Cheese had been seen haunting lately. Not that he was afraid of the Cheese, with that ridiculous yellow ochre suit that he wore with those cardboard-soled shoes; he wasn’t afraid, he knew he was alone, he knew the Cheese was a loner and a loser, outside of love and lucky, incredibly lucky to have had that luscious, now rotten tomato, and Harry wasn’t sorry either, wasn’t sorry for the operation-performance piece he had done on that lace-trimmed lady. Art, after all, was larger and more real than life, and what he had done was in the name of art — if not Art, then at least Science, but it must have been for Art’s sake because after all, Harry and Larry were artists first of all and full of the life of artists, brimming to a rolling boil with the very densest sense of what it all meant, cocksure, naked before breakfast and in front of large number of enjoyably shocked affluent upper-middle-class arty-farty types. They loved the operations the Kipper Kids performed, they gasped to see small breasts made large and generous hearts turned to dry prunes before their very bugged eyes; it was better than “Baretta,” that much they knew (you needn’t have told them), and they loved what Harry had done to Suzy, went positively ga-ga over the announcement: The Kipper Kids Will Implant the First Cunt with Half a Brain. And they did, only they didn’t get the laughs they expected and accepted, the laughs they needed, fed on, vultures, milktoast, vampires; no one laughed when they dragged Suzy off to the boardwalk or even smiled to think of her lapping the concrete, her tongue raw with the salt-caked footprints of a myriad of mothers pushing strollers; no one smiled at the bloody hands of Harry, famous Karl Kipper’s son, the Siamese brother of Larry, who Harry hated naturally, from birth, like his own self, little knowing that hate bound the subject to the object and little caring, because it was all Art or Science to Harry, and Harry wasn’t afraid of the Cheese, who stood alone, neither Art nor Science by his side, in the shadows of the Casa Grande apartments, whistling softly to himself, waiting for his chance, his passion, like St. Joan’s, burning slowly at the stake inside him.
Fat Harry turned down Main and continued to Palace where he turned toward Pacific Coast Highway Road; he trundled along the glass-strewn sidewalk, scratching his stubble, clawing at the rubble in his mind for a solution to a problem he didn’t know existed, careful to avoid the dogshit, keeping one eye out in the alleyways, fearing the sinewy arms of the shadows, cajoling one foot in front of the other. He should have gone by the ocean, he thought to himself, shifting his bag of awful from one hand to the other; not that he was afraid — fear was not in Harry’s vocabulary, nor were the words guilt or love, freshman, penguin, sanguine, hockey, beriberi, relationship, personal, and a host of others starting mostly with t or g — it was just that as he walked down Pacific that night in late October, he had a sudden realization that he felt something last Saturday when he attempted to sew Suzy Tacky back together; it was a funny feeling, something like… what was that word, he wondered? Something like remorse, the word named after the man who invented the code, he had seen the word once, on a wall in a barroom john — no, no, that was another word! What was the word he was trying to think of? Sexy? Had he felt sexy toward that poor botched girl? It started with an s: senile, no, that meant stupid old. Sensitive — that was the word he was looking for to describe his feeling. It was as if he wanted to kiss her, in front of all those critics; they would have booed, he would have kissed her then and there but they would have panned the show, they would have torn him apart on paper, saying he pandered to the lighter side of life, that he didn’t take his art seriously, that he was turning to comedy for relief. God, he was tired of being a gladiator. He felt suddenly misunderstood — why couldn’t he be sensitive, too, like the other stars of the art world, making little impressions of hearts and flowers on the foreheads of the hoi polloi, or singing duets with electric canaries in large groves of pseudo-mimosa trees? He was tired of hacking and stabbing his way to fame, his tool and trademark the dripping fat of a fire-scorched pig’s head, tired of the blood and guts and his brother and mother egging him on, holding him up, keeping him level, drugged; he was fed up with the business of impersonating his famous father’s operating procedure — he wasn’t a doctor, he was a do-gooder. Why didn’t anyone understand him, Harry Kipper, the kid with the calf’s-glove touch.
The Cheese was now certain he smelled that rat Harry Kipper, the ripper of his once-beautiful Suzy’s brain from its pan. The night breeze was full of a rancid buzzing; the smell of tuna fish and smegma fouled the jasmine that had been tickling the Cheese’s fancy a previous few moments ago; his gut tensed, his soft mold-encrusted arms turned to iron; feeling for the steel grater in his pocket full of holes, he jolted himself to a ramrod-stiff position and waited while the stench grew stronger, whistling a sensitive tune full of crisp recrimination silently to his lost love.
