1/2 of Stanley - (complete story)

   1/2 of Stanley
     (in the "Baldie Stories 1" collection - on sale at Amazon.com)

They couldn’t find the top of him so they used an old half a cantaloupe to punctuate the clear run of ruin above his mouth. “How’s he even sitting up like that? You need a brain to sit up like that, don’t ya?”

“I think so, but it’s like that chicken thing; they run around a bit before they die.”

Then it spoke. It put a finger up to the top of it, scratched at the dirty rind, found a half an ear and inserted a finger clear through to where that part of the brain should have been.

“Gettem... gettem here to the spital- ohspital - getteme ospitl....”

“Crap! The hospital! Call 911.”

They led him, on foot into the emergency room. He refused to sit. Even with half a head, he was stubborn. Later, while the surgeons were shrugging around the operating table, the cops were asking questions in a room next to the emergency waiting area.

“I don’t exactly know. We didn’t know him, just saw him there after the car backed up off his head. He must have been drunk. But then he sat up, and it looked...”

“Yeah - it looked like he was going to try to light a cigarette. But the top of his head was gone. Looked like a bowl of old soba noodles. Ick…Christ!”

Two days later he was transferred to a special clinic in Colorado. Two weeks later, he was on a plane for Germany. They’d managed to keep the infection at bay by topping him off with a glorified fish bowl. There was puzzlement all around. Not only didn’t the man with half a head not die, but he seemed to be communicating just fine with a pad and a pencil. Nasal passages worked with some assistance, feeding tube did its job. The major hunk of brain that went missing appeared to be superfluous to begin with.

His family was contacted. They weren’t surprised.  “Sounds like something that joker would pull off” was what his brother had to say. His mother was fine with it as long as they never got a bill for any of the work performed. No one expressed interest in seeing the man.

His name was Stanley. And even with half a head, he was one completely irritating guy.

"He keeps writing that he wants to listen to Beethoven's fourth piano sonata! God damned doesn't have ears! Shit-basket doesn't have a skull to hang ears on! For fuck sake, I quit!"

And that was the fourth personal attendant in five days. Stanley complained about the darkness, the pain in his face, nicotine withdrawal, pissing down his leg, and he wanted soup! He wrote it:

Sopu soupp nou fuker nou!

Stanley's father suggested they drive him to the expressway and let him find his own way home.

"Son of a bitch can still play the piano, he can find his way through six lanes of traffic."

"Why do you hate our son so much!?" They’d paused to take a look. At the hospital's fairly decent upright piano, Stanley is leaning into the tangle of the fourth piano concerto’s first dawn, fish bowl for a skull tucked into a bloody gauze ascot, thumping away as if nothing were at all wrong.

Sidney pointed at the nightmare, wiggled a finger at it. 

"Same reason I hate you so much! You fucked up my life without even trying! Look, at least now he's got some effort into it! No fucking head, no fucking brains, but he’s still ruining my life, one second after the next!”

"Sidney! It's terrible! Look at him - that horrible, horrible thing plugging the rest from spilling out his neck! He's your boy! Your boy!"

"Darlene, you've said it so many times I'm starting to wonder whom you're trying to convince!"

Stanley sensed the discord; the vibrations came to his knees and elbows with the sensitivity of perfectly honed tuning forks. He wrote with two hands on two separate pieces of paper, rarely defining which words follows which, page to page. It was an unbearable torture to decode the double-handed rant.

"Piss off, something, something Else, the. Piss off some more. Lousy parents.... so on. "

Sydney laughed heartily, threw the note on the hospital floor, and laughed some more. 

"This kid is some ball buster. Honestly, no head - chin up, nothing, and he's still telling us what to do."

Sidney turned to the new attendant. "What took you so long? You’ve been on standby since yesterday?!”

“Yes, sir. It’s just...all the shouting. I figured…"

Sidney snarled, “Don’t figure! Look at that! That thing is supposed to be my son! If I started figuring, where’d you think I’d end up? No. No figuring. Unless you figure out how to make this all go away. Then let me know what’s on your mind.”

If Darlene seemed at odds with Sidney over Stanley's condition, his well-being, or the possibility of an emotional tether to their youngest offspring, it was merely the brute force of the maternal instinct hat had overcome the aging mother. 

In fact, when the answering machine took that first call from the police, it was Darlene who said, "Don't pick it up!  If we're lucky he's dead - If not, I don't even want to know."

But later, the curious nature of the condition of their boy, the hints of potential profit that lurked burbling just under the base of his skull: talk shows, book deals, options - hell, they'd been contacted by a major toy manufacturer who wanted to pay dearly for rights for the name and identity of "Stanley The Headless Wonder Doll! " - they found something inside each of them that, when polished by desire, managed to look awkwardly like diffident care, strangulated love, or some other common pathology that passed for familial attentiveness.

"He's the worst of both of us, and nobody's math can add those things together without sobbing at the end of it!"

Sidney winced in the parking lot, "I mean, they'll know we hate him before I hang up my hat!"

But they hadn't counted on Darlene's maternal instinct. 

One look at half a head and it didn't matter how horrible the little shit had been to the world, it was her little shit! Her little shit without a face!

"He wants hair!?" Sidney screamed. He clutched the bed rail and shivered.

"He doesn't even have a brain and he wants hair! He doesn't have eyes or cheeks or a god-damned mouth and he's still telling us..."

The old man quaked. Veins in his neck pulsed and flexed and the flesh on his face jelly-rolled through a rainbow of horrific expressions, colors, ungodly contortions. Then, right before poor old Sidney dropped dead, dead and quivering still - he got out the last couple of words that would finish him for good:

"He wants a new hairdo!?"

The sound of Sidney shattering from the inside out was audible. Darlene had an eyebrow up and the doctor, who looked more intrigued than startled, had to lift his glasses over his eyes to be certain he wasn't seeing things. He nearly spoke, but didn't.

Darlene walked over and nudged her husband’s corpse with the blunt toe of her left shoe.

"Sidney?"

The doctor knelt down beside the dead man and checked for a pulse, flipped an eyelid, and thoughtlessly thumped a thought out on Sidney's forehead with a pencil.

"He has died," said the doctor.

At that moment, Stanley began to burble. Burble and bubble. He swayed and grasped at the air around him and a thin gruel of bloody matter erupted from the fleshy mess at the top of him.

"What's happening?" screamed Darlene.

"I don't know!" exclaimed the doctor.

"Do something!" screamed Darlene.

"But... but…" stammered the doctor, unsure of exactly what the emergency protocol might be when dealing with a patient with no head.

More blood and phlegm splattered about as Stanley began to swing about, left and then right and then back again.

Darlene screamed some more and then screamed again. She took it all in, dead husband at her feet, her only son - she remembered a moment of pure pleasure, the infant smiling - now reduced to this unspeakable horror...

Her shrieks increased until she found it impossible to shriek any longer. The doctor bounded across the room to upright Stanley and with one hand outstretched, poked a finger into his fleshy blow-hole to stem the loss of blood. Darlene tripped over her dead husband's body and split her skull wide open on the cast-iron lift mechanism at the foot of the bed.

Darlene was dead before the doctor felt the quality of quivering that emanated from the orphaned boy’s body. It was not the quaking distress of choking. It wasn't the flailing of fear or terror - not at all. The doctor withdrew his finger from Stanley's gullet and put a hand on the headless man's back.

"You are laughing?" whispered the doctor, horrified.

"Evil, through and through."

Stanley flailed about until he found a sheet of paper. The doctor handed the headless man a pen. Stanley swayed over the sheet as he wrote. When he was finished he tossed the sheet into the air above his shoulders. The doctor pulled it out if the air.

It said:

‘Greedy people! Hated me. Wished me dead but wanted profit from this horror. Their son...

I want a head. Make me a head. Put hair on it! Don't get greedy.’

The doctor looked up slowly.

Stanley shook with joy. He was feeling better, much better indeed.

The End

The Rise And Fall Of Sylvester Sylvester (complete story)

           The Rise and Fall of Sylvester Sylvester

 (in the "Baldie Stories 1" collection - on sale at Amazon.com 

            The launch of the hair-sculpture series had catapulted Sylvester Sylvester's mediocre career from a chip-and-dustbin sculptor into a porcelain-precious art-star.

"No darling, Cinque Terre! Sweetheart! We open in London, fly to Prato to visit Andrea, and then after party in Vernazza, or Monterosso, or something."

When he tried to move away from the hair-sculpture series into the belly-button lint series the empire nearly collapsed, but thirteen shrinks and forty milligrams a day later, things stood up again.

"No, I don't really mind except for the ankle bracelet. Honestly, I still don't think it's polite, but when they explained how valuable I am, not only in dollars and cents but as a cultural asset, I figured it was a small price to pay..."

The first reviews were less than inspiring. In fact, they were simply rude. "Hairball Dreamer," said Smitty Roberts.

But he pressed on. The bad press grew in pace with the scale of the hair-sculptures. By the time he had replicated Michelangelo’s David in pubic hair, his career had been secured.

"Someone will always complain that you've changed! It's jealousy."

He forfeited his friends with the ease and grace of a dedicated visionary. His divorce was a masterpiece of decorum and civility. The attempts to spin the accent didn't fare well, but his truculent British made for some good laughs. By the time he was famous, so were his new friends and family.

"Are you kidding? Birdy-Birdy isn't a pet name for my new wife! You haven't heard of her? Famously failed snuff-film star, third world self-help guru, Post-Fluxus Now and Then Again-er? I have no idea what it's all about, but she looks fabulous head to toe in motor-oil..."

There were two art-star children: Yem-Yum & Hoppity. There were issues: Yem-Yum was born with two tongues. Hoppity wouldn't learn how to speak until he was twenty-six, and then all the words that came out of him when he did were horrific. But SS & BB, as they were known in short circles, didn't care much for the kids anyhow. No tears lost there; the tots treated the art-stars like lepers. Couldn't stand them.

"The children - just never got the feel for them, you know, in a plastic sense, art-wise – that is, three dimensionally..."

Great fame came with even greater absurdity in art and in family life.

Sylvester Sylvester teased his hair up into a mighty volcano above his long forehead. Every ridiculous inspiration made that mountain shudder and worry. Birdy Birdy staked a claim, officially, on a plot of space within that mass of hair, claiming it "A Studio within a Studio." She staged performances atop Sylvester Sylvester's head. She fashioned cages out of garbage and hair, introduced insects and vermin, made short digital clips - the torture of both man and beast - and sold them to educators as learning tools.

You wouldn't believe how fast they sold.

"They call it "Picasso's Castle", but it's mine now, I bought it, right? So we call it Casa Neurotica. Ha! Get it? A play on words! Neural erotica! Ha!"

It was about that time when the hues of joy and tints of fortune shifted spectrum for the art-star clan.

"Chiggers, dear. Chiggers or larvae; something or another with wings or claws or antlers… You know something? I once spent two months sitting on a cold branch waiting to take a picture of a newborn deer, just to see what the tiny antlers looked like! Can you believe it? Anyhow, it's an infection - critters burrowed under my scalp. Long-short, I'm bald as a bat!"

Meetings became awkward among those wealthy collectors and sparkling curators who divined weakness through osmotic translations of failed couture. One bad hair day, and the vultures whispered. And there was “Good-Bad” and there was “Bad-Bad," just as there was “Good-Good” and “Bad-Good.” Not so tricky as it sounds. Sylvester Sylvester's festering scalp evolved. Soon, dribbling pustules sputtered over a scaling toss of infected flakes, pink meat, and grey ooze...It was “Bad-Bad."

The top of that head was a crime scene. SS was slow on the pick-up.

"What do you mean it didn't bid well? What does that even mean? We own that auction house, don't we?"

And before Yem-Yum had his second second-tongue removal (the little bugger grew right back after the first removal), Picasso's castle was sold to another equally visionary art-star and was renamed Pookie Palace. To add insult to injury, the poor structure was immediately adorned with a twenty-five foot tall vitrine filled with raw chopped-meat, which baked in the late July sun, just outside the welcome-rotunda, until the Board of Health came and carted it away.

"Well, of course BB is upset! But it's common knowledge! You never approach a body slathered in motor-oil with an open flame!"

Down was less graceful than up. Jack and Jill. Humpty Dumpty. The rest of them…

Eventually, Yem-Yum would find success in gimp-porn. This worked well to support theories of Darwinian linearity. He would sire sixteen children, half of them double-tongued, and they, in turn, would thrive and multiply until things got really sordid. But before all that happened, this happened:

"We all overextend! It’s capitalism riding invention! Daring pays for daring! Art is commerce! How can I be broke?"

They were kind enough to take off the ankle bracelet. They left him the credit cards, the balances, and the receipts for the collateral on loans that paid for the Up. The fine art in hock never had the SS initials. They wouldn't rate it, even though the loans were signed with the very same initials. Funny how Down works sometimes.

"No, BB and I love each other mucho gracias! It is our art that defines our attraction, not our physical selves! My disfigurement and hers…this is no coincidence!"

In fact, it had mattered greatly. Birdy Birdy was appalled by the disintegration and dilapidation of Sylvester Sylvester.

What began as an infection of the scalp spread downward - hot lava seeped beneath Sylvester Sylvester's skin. Angry molten eruptions burned through his flesh. The pain split him in half, and then quartered him. Birdy Birdy sympathized. Her burns were no less dramatic, and they covered her in no slow dripping manner. Flames had consumed that horrible day, and the few moments before she had been extinguished were moments that would pain her forever. She feared she would never perform again.

But it was art and love that mattered! In the end! Nothing else! Balls to anything else!

Except that SS had a very hard time looking at BB.

"I'm a surface aesthete! I love the surfaces! Give me a nice surface, and I'll show you something nice."

He'd meant to suggest that he was not a shallow being, not by a long shot. He was a spirit who had been folded into being from gossamer strands of universal fineness. He'd meant to suggest that his perception was rarified and profound; his existence, a singularity of cause - a tattoo to that effect he considered; something in Latin across one brow, or better still, the tips of his fingers...

What he meant to say was that Birdy Birdy no longer aroused him. It had been bad enough with the kids plowing through her. Now this!

Deeper.

"The Highbank Annex is not on the water, it's in the water! This is about the meeting! The Highbanks were repulsed! Listen, I'm not giving in! What do you mean you won't stand beside me on this?"

Sylvester Sylvester lost sleep. Alone, in that big bed, he cried and dreamed other people’s dreams - dark things - resistance, lethargy, and ordinary fear. Birdy Birdy gave up sleep entirely. It simply hurt too much.

"I made it on hair and lost it on hair! I am a phoenix! The bald phoenix! Rebirth! There will be a sign!"

Hoppity hadn't as much as burbled a sound in the up or down years. It was noticed. His only reaction, to any attempt at communication (or any external stimulus at all), was a singular dissatisfied and disparaging eye-roll. Except when someone got hurt. When someone got hurt, Hoppity laughed with his head raised high, chin to heaven. Hoppity laughed a lot at Sylvester Sylvester and Birdy Birdy. SS could only admit to himself that it was in this interminable silence and deranged laughter that he found his sign.

Abandonment.

The universe had forsaken him and was mocking his isolation.

"I'm down to six assistants, four packers, and two runners. This isn't a studio - it's an abandoned warehouse! And my studio manager had a meeting with accounting and they're cutting back on catering!"

Oh, the empire had grown to its limit and was contracting rapidly. Sylvester Sylvester hadn't touched one of his own works in eleven years. He hadn't sketched one out in six. He hadn't worked concept or strategy in two. He picked scabs, cried, and tried to believe in the vision of the bald Phoenix rising. But instead, all he saw was Yem-Yum's second tongue growing in for the fifth time, Hoppity spewing his awful nothing, and Birdy Birdy. There was that.

Her need for attention and determination to be the strangest of all creative minds inspired her to create GimpPark. She spent six hours a day in a hole in the ground, "performing." Others she hired performed beside her. It was a minor success. SS never saw BB much after that. She found her own crowd and he found something else. Eventually Birdy Birdy wrangled a divorce from Sylvester Sylvester. She waited until the kids had grown and did it to legitimize the relationship with a confused, cross-dressing hermaphrodite who assumed the well-suited role as the bearded-lady in the geek show.

It was better for her.

"Milano is off this year. And Venezia hasn't happened in six years, so there goes another country!"

And as the countries and dealers and clubs (you wouldn't believe the clubs, how they knew - one opening flop and you aren't making it to the Adonis Wing at Sha-Sha) withdrew their favors, Sylvester Sylvester found himself back in the studio, late at night, with his one and only remaining assistant, Flemgaard. Together, they drew up concepts for new works of art and puttered around with tools he'd never touched before: paint brushes, carving tools, armatures, cameras, blow torches, and other items that lay around in various workshops and different floors of the ever-shrinking studio real-estate that was his home. It was boredom and the need for diversion from the crumbling losses that put a mallet, a strobe light, and a die grinder in his hand. His condition never improved. Bacterial viruses bred mercilessly upon his body; diseases found inspiration in his hospitable bowels.

"Yem-Yum left grad school to travel to Amsterdam. Says he met a nice group of people there the last time he visited with BB's troupe. And Hoppity is still here. Funny, with a name like Hoppity, you'd have expected more."

Long after the last agent broke contract and shortly after the last gallery returned unsold work, Sylvester Sylvester began making profound and beautiful things. He'd never sell them - no one looked or listened when they pretended to look and listen - but SS didn't notice and didn't mind. He and Flemgaard broke artistic boundaries daily. They sat quietly in the small, single-floor studio, sketching, thinking, and drawing in the power of that silence, while Hoppity washed brushes, edited photos, changed tanks, and rolled his eyes.

Hoppity was twenty-five years old when Flemgaard married his sweetheart, Betsy, and moved to a small town with no name beside the Snake River in Wyoming. Six months later, a dealer stopped by after hearing rumors about a tragic character, a rising phoenix, a hermit of sorts, living downtown with his idiot son.

"He wanted to look around, why would I mind? It had been years. I had no need, and no care. The place was paid for, they'd taken theirs, and there was enough left for a quiet life. I told him to make himself at home. He didn't flinch when he saw me. Point for him."

The dealer was shocked by what he saw. Astounded. The body of work was breathtakingly simple and profound. The idiot boy trolled among the divine objects, tinkered with them, grimaced and shook among them, disappeared and reappeared silent but proud.

"Twenty-six years. Not a word. Then, the dealer stands there in the morning sunlight and makes a suggestion. He spoke a few kind words. I hadn't heard kind words in a long time. Not from the art world. And then..."

And then, Hoppity spoke.

It was loud and profane. It was a storm of anger and violence. It was what Adam should have said to the serpent. It was pure and hateful. It was magnificent and lasted for as long as the dealer stood there with his kind words and decent suggestion. When he was gone, Hoppity went quiet again. And Sylvester Sylvester looked at his son and nodded.

"No, not too many people come around much at all, with me looking the way I do, and Hoppity guarding against kindness and good intentions the way he does. No. We see Flem now and then. YY doesn't bother; he's busy spawning. BB died last year. Chainsaw accident. I miss her. All in all, we get on. We make things. It's nice to make nice things."

And that's it. That is the story of the rise and fall of Sylvester Sylvester.

The End

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This story will be available in "Baldie Stories 1", through Kindle.
       

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