"And I wonder, why, why, why, why, she ran away, and I wonder, if she would stay, my little runaway, my run, run, run, run, runaway..."  The sounds of the world bombard me with references to that cunt, Pandora's box, which I seek with the madness of a romantic young Werther.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

I needed to pore over the information I had gathered to discern a pattern that would enable me to predict the cunt's next escapade and to be there waiting for it with my net spread open.  So I walked into Ray's World Famous Pizza and ordered a slice of eggplant and cheese.  My glance took in a short cook singing off-key in his native language and making a show for the pedestrians of throwing the round dough up in the air and rolling it to make the crust.  It shimmered in the light but as I am not a pizza expert, I kept my suspicions at bay.

I paid, laid my steaming paper plate on the linoleum counter and tried to concentrate.  But the silver light was too piercing by then and too familiar.  Could it be what I thought?  Could it have grown to such proportions?  For the dough twirling around in the air in front of the open window was clearly wider than the cunt Ela and I had known.  Yet its beckoning light could never be mistaken.  That bright cunt was screwing up my life again, stirring me up even at my lunch.

I wanted to shout "There is a cunt on that pizza!" but I didn't have the guts.  Only on these pages can I truthfully describe what I've seen.  Maybe sometime, I could make a true-story TV movie.

I coolly walked up t the small eager cook and began a conversation on the nature of his job, how long he'd done it, where had he learned, did he like it, it looked so difficult and yet such fun to throw the dough up in the air and catch it, like a frisbee, or juggling, I'd love to try it, could I really, give it a spin?  He was flattered, unsuspicious.  He looked around to see if more customers envied his talent now that public interest was peaking.

My hands were shaking.  I knew I had to hold on to it no matter how slippery it would be and how smooth I was, and run away at once.

But a new shock awaited me.  "This one," he said, "is ready; you ruin it; so we start a fresh one."  And without further ado he laid it on a black rusty tray and smothered it with grated mozzarella.  I shouted: "No!"  The customers froze at the roar of my voice; some pedestrians ran in.  People got up from their seats to watch and help me.

"Don't do it!" I repeated in the same shrill voice, unable to imagine how the cunt would escape being grilled and consumed for $2.99 a slice, but equally unable to explain to people mechanically performing their menial jobs that they were about to ruin the most valuable cunt in the world.  I felt a burning pain in my own groin.

If I dashed to save it, I would be arrested and locked up.  So I held myself in check and watched them complete their funereal ritual, cover it with wreaths of onions and garlands of shredded peppers, sub-merge it in thick tomato sauce and bury it with a long shovel deep into the cavernous Erebus of their ovens.  I broke into silent tears.

Later I bought the whole nice-smelling pizza and took it home.  I spent hours searching through the gooey strands for any silver slivers.  I found nothing in the least unusual in it.  I had just watched my cunt being burnt at the stake.  I expected that would happen.  I forced myself to eat the whole thing.  I spent the day feeling sick.

In the end, exhausted and hating myself, I resolved to burn my manuscript, turned on the TV, and fell asleep in the bathtub.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

A few hours later, the blaring TV awoke me to the grim reality of my indigestion caused by the fatal large pizza.  I blinked at the screen, and, yes, trite as it may sound by now, I was shocked to see: the cunt was on the talk show!

What degradation!  So it wasn't eliminated in the hellish fires of Ray's Pizza!  What a waste!  Why had I gone so crazy?  Was all this worth it?  I just lost control.  How?  My eyes glued to the screen, my hand grasping on to my remote control, I messily spewed out my overflowing nausea into the nearby toilet.

I watched it flirt with Jay Leno and spread its lips open in front of the camera as if they were legs.  My cunt was the new queen of the "in"!  That figured!  It was the keeper of the secrets of the "in."  I turned up the volume.  The image of Ela's cunt filled the monitor!  Jay held it on his desk with the discomfort he exhibits with all the monkeys and other obnoxious pets that visit his show.

But why was "she" making a fool of herself?  Even a severed cunt can have dignity.

Jay Leno was asking her who she really was.  She leaned back away from him, smiling flattered and mysteriously, tipped her cavity open, and shook with her mute laugh.  She was not camera shy.  Jay informed his audience that she was the latest craze on the East coast, something like the cabbage-patch dolls (the insult flew b her unnoticed, for being called "doll" in the past had always brought her good fun).  No one knows what she or it is, he said, where she lives, where she has come from; we only know that she can come, he winked and the audience clapped on cue.  We don't know who owns her, who managers her, or how she made her way to the top, but here she is!  V for Vulva!  The crowd clapped again.  V!  Viva V!  Jay said that her name had been inspired by her winning streak, her power, and her suggestive shape.  So the cunt had now acquired its own name and identity!  She was an individual!

V as in Vixen, I thought, Vermin, Viper, Villain, Vomit.  Virus, Vicious, Vile Vengeance.  Vacuum, Vacuity, Vacancy, Void.  Vertex, Voracious Vampire.  Sucking her lifeblood out of countless victims, leaving behind a putrid trail of casualties; including myself.  Is she a vampire?  I wondered.  This could explain her power, her magnetism, her sexual hunger, her restlessness, her indestructibility.  Vampires had adjusted to the "sexual revolution" of our times by moving her teeth from mouth to cunt.  That's why the encunted Ela had slept in the day, sucked dry her men at night, lived among bones and smells of decay and love, felt neither hatred nor fear, only ennui, and fooled even her mirror, as she had no reflection.  Oh, my word!

I'd heard Ela publicly divulge, a la Baudelaire: "Je suis de mon coeur la vampirs."  But I of course took nothing of hers for granted, especially not her words.  I had always suspected that Ela's sexuality was a quest.  Now I could safely assume that she was searching for the lover who could kill her, whose love would enable her to die after centuries of redundant cities and crowds and long graceful throats and tired bloodstained teeth.  And I was that virginal lover.  Was that the self-realization I have existed for?  It had to be done.  Now!

"She" comes in and out of the spotlight unpredictably, Johnny told us after the commercial break; she comes and she goes.  CLAPS.  But "she" refuses to be examined by scientists whose interest has been aroused by this unrecognizable creature, and who are now speculating the existence on earth of a new, more developed species, Johnny explained.  "If you have any information on V, call the toll-free number flashing on your screens now," a commentator's voice announced.

Meanwhile, the cunt started to puff, blowing perfect rings of smoke up into the air through her hole.  At first I assumed they were the fumes she habitually produced, but the cameras soon zoomed in to the phallic Marlboro stub trapped in her lips.  She looked sensual, serene and almost civilized.  She sucked on her cig with all her abysmal might and let out the most exquisite fragile airy circles that went up one after the other in parallel layers forming an inverse pagoda like labia sculpted in clouds.  Throughout the show, she appeared fascinated by her wetted cigarettes, whose butts she bit out of shape.

That night Ela's cunt was also on David Letterman, literally.  Dave and V had a cigar-smoke-blowing-contest, which she won.  He exhaled haphazardly making nothing recognizable with his smoke, while she blew out smoke-men, smoke-women, and smoke-babies, composed of a big ring for the body, a small one for the head, oblong rings for their arms and legs, with little loose hair on the heads, with smiling mouths, and dots for eyes and shoes and umbrellas, and with blown up genitals; they hovered in the air for--David time it--9 seconds.  She was an expert.  She had a craft now, a performing gimmick!  Then she leapt on his head and sprawled on it like a luminous toupee.  The audience cheered her gall approvingly.  She dangled and sung like Tarzan from his nose.  She slipped on to his lips, preventing him from speaking, then down to this crotch.  The audience chanted: "V! V!"

David explained that part of her contract for coming on the show was that no one would touch her of their own will.  So as she refused to leave the set, there was nothing to do but let her spend the hour all over David who, being a good sport, revealed a boy's discomfort to get laughs, frolicked with it, made funny wrinkled faces and mispronounced her name and allowed her to steal the show from his other guests, for the audience did not want to listen to their stories and jokes, busy watching the little clown annoy and arouse the host.  Who knows what happened after the lights went off and the cameras stopped rolling.  Perhaps he had a taste of its foremost talent first hand.  Knowing Elas's cunt, I was sure it got what it wanted.

I flicked through the channels and all I saw were ad snippets announcing V's special appearances on America's Most Wanted, the resurrected The Love Boat, Oprah and Jerry Springer:  V for Vulgar.  Kitty Kelley was writing a V hack-biography for a reported $9 million advance.

On my TV, my only link to the real world these days, I watch an MTV game show giving out V prizes, but I can't keep up with the hurried voice-over: "V3-D Arts hologram watches, V earrings and pendants, V scarabs, V candleholders, V skillfully laid in leather or silver...etc." going by at 9 frames per second...too fast for me...Click!

I switch channels: the President addresses the nation.  he says:  "All over America, Operation V is under way and it's a winner!"...Click!  Fuck this remote control.  Read my lips: No more cunt!

I have a laughing fit, for I can just picture Ela when she first sees her cunt's image on an US made product: let's say she drops into that store she likes, Manic Panic, and recognizes her cunt smirking on a watch.  She goes mad:  Where is her goddamn cunt?  What has it done to itself?  Who has this much access to it?  This is a deeper wound.  And she still doesn't even remotely realize the dimensions of the international consumption of her cunt.  She thinks her cunt has been used, or abused, by artists whose work is exploited by a manufacturer; like a painting of Karole Armitage by D. Salle going mass-market.  For Ela has cut herself off from America; she is living in her own world.  And her mirror keeps quiet, hesitating to open her eyes and kill her.

  Once, a lone blind snail slowly crawled out of V on screen, on a children's show.  It turned its nervous antennae this way and that, carrying its heavy spherical home on its back, and looked intent on going God knew where.  It was unaware that it had just crossed out of the circle of the world's most wanted cunt, it had efficiently and moistly penetrated the world's tightest and first emancipated cunt.  It showed no pleasure.  I realized then, to my mirth, that the record was broken, that her power was waning, for this was the first living being to go into Ela's cunt and come out unharmed and unaffected.  And in the solitude of my bathtub, I cheered the little champion.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

  Old retired couples in trailer parks all over the country, black adolescent mothers rapping with headphones on their ears, ex-marines and ex-athletes traveling by train and bus across the States back and forth, upper-middle-class businessmen playing putt-putt golf on the weekends in the suburbs, nurses, neo-nazis, nerds, neurologists, nereids, the needy, all wear atrocious V-shirts with V's silver wet likeness exposed proudly and mindlessly on their chests. 

            No, they do not see it for what it is.  They don't revel in the nastiness, they see it like a trendy new Wheel of Fortune. 

            I wonder: Would they like their own genitals advertised on every paper, on sale in every supermarket, stuck into the mouth of every toddler as a teething aid, thrown to any house pet as a sucking rubber toy, worn by every Joe on the street, massively reproduced, sold below cost in big closeouts where the crowds run to buy three for one? 

            It's not another hot commodity, damn it, it's Ela's and my cunt! 

            Famous designer B. Blass is buying copyrights to the V mould to manufacture V-Blass paperweights.  Chef Fontainebleu at L'Odeon is bargaining for the exclusive right to feature his new nouvelle cuisine delicacy: V with escargot.  The Japanese are training their chefs to remove the poison safely and prepare V sushi instead of toro; TV hosts are already making jokes about the US President throwing up on V.

 P. Picasso is bidding for rights to use V's shape foe her new handbag collection.  S. Spielberg is looking for a script about extraterrestrial Procreation, a sci-fi porno, starring V.

            V is the biggest trend ever: the Western world is bombarded by V posters, V coffee mugs, V notepads and pens, V hats, V ties, V sheets and towels, V cigarettes and cigars, V perfume, V lollipops, V Oreos, V gum, V chips, V lunchboxes, V make-up, V cameras, V calendars, V blenders, V grinders, V choppers, V rockets, V ovens, V juicers, V kites, V condoms, V furniture, V cars, V planes, V hot-air balloons, V cartoons, V storybooks with titles like V takes the Kremlin, and of course loads of V underwear.  Even Pynchon's book, although unrelated, tops the bestseller lists.  And V is given honorary Ph.Ds every week.

            In the dunes, the heart of the land, V is the most familiar image since Jackie O became a widow.  A super-speed roller coaster is being built in Disneyworld inspired by V's famous "curvacious triangle," painted pink and named V's Ride of Terror.  A new skyscraper is being erected in Paris and designed by I.M. Pei as his interpretation of V, called V la France.  The competition is cutthroat.

            Countless industrious Americans are capitalizing on Ela's cunt and rolling in big dough.  Any smalltime local merchant or hard-thinking tycoon can safely invest in V these days.  Except for me.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Today SWIFTY and a CEO lecturing on Vâs market value:

            "A creature beyond the average man's comprehension. V has a flair for publicity and audiences.  It arouses her to be seen.  But that is also her greatest defense: when aroused, she secretes some kind of silver liquid that wraps her like a cocoon and makes her slippery, impossible to grasp and difficult to see.  She also emits a temporary fog on occasion that also obstructs her from the viewer's study." 

            "V exhibits some sort of memory and critical faculty: she care-fully avoids those who seem eager to imprison her and does not go near anything resembling a machine or a scientific instrument, which could scan her; with the exception of cameras.  She is too intelligent to be a form of proto-life.  She belongs to an evolved type of meta-life.  No other creatures from her planet have yet appeared, with concrete proof, on our world.  This makes her hard to study for we don't see her interact with her own kind.  So far, her only instincts are for exposure, performance, and freedom.  She does not sleep, rest or hibernate.  No one knows yet what she subsists on."

 I watched the two experts on the news discuss the V-personality.  I learned nothing new about the cunt, but admired how far human imagination could reach; a confirmation that, even under such dire circumstances, deeply soothed me. Those inventions of the mind were the only benign effects of the V epidemic.  I enjoyed the merciless battles conducted nationwide among headstrong scientists over the true nature of my cunt, the theories sprouting up like poisonous mushrooms out of the brains of closeted monomaniacs hungry for recognition. 
------------------------------------------------------------------------

THAT DEAR ELUSIVE ALIEN: BEAUTY OR BEAST?

             Based on the assumption that we know only one third of the underwater life in the Amazon River, naturalists led by Egbert fon Fuck, are convinced that this wonderfully wet creature we now call V, is in fact the legendary elhinidia amazonon, the pink-spotted silver riverbed slug known in antiquity from the works of Hesiod.

  Wendell Carp, a subway conductor and bimonthly angler, disagrees.  He identifies it beyond doubt as a Mississippi River leech that has caused death to hundreds of his fishing colleagues over the years, a species he has found on occasion in his blackrubber gumboots.

            Dr (Miss) Phing Pon Tse, a part-time filmmaker and full-time exploress, claims to have photographic evidence of this breed of the Venus flytrap from her extensive research in the Indonesian jungles.

            Dr Ramanugan Bhopla ascertains that it is the evolutionary form of carrion turtles--trionyc gangeticus and lissemys punctata granosa--that were introduced into the holy Ganges at Benares to feed on the countless corpses deposited in the polluted river every day, and clean away the continuous procession of rotting flesh floating downstream.

Pearl-oozing sweet-tasting squid--kalamari--of the kind appearing live these days on US TV, has been studied in length at the Papadopoulos marine lab in Piraeus, whose researchers claim that the V species was stolen from their live specimen lab by Arab terrorists.

            Unidentified sources claim that the Dalai Lama has recognized V as the original incarnation of the Buddha's third eye.  "If you touch it, does it not weep?" the Dalai has reportedly said; "it weeps over the misery of human existence in the First Path of the Kaliyuga era."
------------------------------------------------------------------------

THE AGE OF WOMANIPULATION

             Experts are warning the public now against the subliminal messages hidden deep inside V's form.  Their message is: Don't look!

Professor Olegario Casagemas has written 5 books titled, The Age of Manipulation, Part I, II, III, IV, and now V.  He accuses the American ad industry of camouflaging sexual images in hundreds of commercials and TV programs.  He claims that V is nothing but a ploy to boost sales of various products.  He alleges that it is a creation--not unlike Frankenstein's--that comes out of an amoral consortium of big company labs keen to destroy their competitors; the corporate villains include Estee Lauder, Du Pont, Pfizer, and even N.A.S.A.

            By "embedding" pictures of erections in the model's face in an ad for Malboro cigarettes, for instance, Casagemas claims manufacturers and advertisers trigger a Pavlovian connection between their product and sex.  Casagemas, an ex-marketing man, distinguishes an upright penis hidden in a bottle of Tanqueray gin, and labia woven into the frosting of a Betty Crocker cake mix ad.  "This," he says, "promises to moisten the housewife's vagina.  It's all in my latest book."

The American Advertising Association has taken to attacking Casagemas with a series of ads ridiculing his alarms.  One of these shows a Scotch on the rocks with the copy line, "People Have Been Trying To Find Breasts In These Ice Cubes Since 1957."  The latest A.A.A. ads show V on satin sheets like those used in the memorable Marilyn Monroe calendar photos, with the copy line: "Some People Claim To See Female Genitals On These Sheets Even Now."

            But experts are agitated.  "I'd feel uneasy about this sort of ad," says British psychologist Jock Burnham, who uses subliminal "flash frames" in personality tests he carries out for recruitment companies.  "Repetitive flashes have been shown to influence mood.  A single flash affects a susceptible person.  Millions of children could be affected.  This barrage of V imagery is a global security risk."

Yet as news of the brainwashing reach the public, they serve to popularize V further.  In the home of the hard sell, people clamor to watch V on TV and theatre screens in order to try and depict the sex.

            "TV networks have strict rules about using subliminal frames in adverts or regular programming," a network spokesman said.  V 's shows have been run in slow motion but no hidden frames have been found."

V presents a new case altogether, experts complain.  It is her very shape that passes the sexual messages, and there are no rules so far against this.  They demand that the Federal Communications Commission passes new regulations on the physical appearance of celebrities.  This could include in the future the shape of an actor's lips etc.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

SFX: A.P. EMERGENCY BROADCAST: "From the head office in Intercourse. Penn.  At this very moment, V freaks are working the phones, organizing surging new waves of V Awareness, letting the country know about today's guest appearance of V whose coming out tell-all autobiography marks her as America's new pop erotic sage." 
------------------------------------------------------------------------

  After the Late Night with Letterman show, which became a classic, the latest craze-cum-sport in the hip-yup circles is smoke-ring blowing.  People practice for hours, scratch their throats and burn their lungs trying to create the simplest designs, a smoke fish or a smoke baby, but most are still puffing up tiny balloons at weekly smokeathons. Contests are held on every other campus and nightclub, but no one can recreate V's artistry or break V's World Guiness record.

            Now V has her own TV show: Puff That Pussy (sic).  Every week she can be seen blowing smoke valleys with smoke trees and smoke sunsets and smoke picket fence houses.  V is the champion, the idol, the star.  

            Her fans are organizing clubs, and collecting any merchandize with her image on it.  V fans get together on weekends to blow smoke and exchange memorabilia, stories and addresses of people who have se-en V in person.  PTA groups vote her their honorary president and fly her to remote areas of the country to give a live demonstration of her talents.  She goes, blows, but lets no one touch her.  Dark rumors of sexual perversions suddenly gone rampant, break out when she leaves town.

P.S. Darker tabloid rumors are daily killing V off: V is dying of AIDS in a provincial hospital, they assure.  Once a week a doctor appears on prime-time news to reassure V maniacs and V watchdogs that she is in perfect health.  The next day the gory stories resurface. 

                        P.P.S. I worry that one of these days they may be true; and then a clever mechanical rubber facsimile of Ela's cunt will appear puffing away on the monitor, while Ela's special cunt will be rotting away in quarantine.  The big companies won't let such a moneymaking trend go.

            For V is omnipresent.  She performs televised live shows in Vegas, smoking in the open-mouthed pose that is the V logo shot; lasers zoom as V goes up the clouds (painted stairs) in a laser tunnel, creating her own fog-machine, glowing artificially like a seasoned star.  See V in a red-white-and-blue bolero.  V in a rhinestone-encrusted Elvisoid suit.  V advertising Coors Light, Orion, Amex, Pepsi, Nike, The Heart Association, The Olympic Games, Wrigleys' Circus.  V is the message of the day.  V is the media queen.  V is the other half of TV. 

Even TV Guide is publishing a special section called: V Guide.  V is on the cover of every self-respecting magazine.  The reason:

            V is the new reincarnation of the American identity.  V has found her own voice and broken away from the bondage of an abused childhood.  V rose out of the claustrophobic hereditary prison that was her selfish single parent: the human body.  Now that V is free, every American wishes they had as much guts as V.  V is the star-spangled emblem of the American ideal of individuation: any American can make pots of money.  Me.  Myself.  I.  V is living proof.  V is the new role model.     As such, V casts her spell over fashion and society, making and breaking lives and fortunes.  V is the biggest seller and star in a star struck world.  V is the ultimate crossover artist, the ruling force of the age of synergy.  And only V has broken Cleopatra's age-old record of fucking 15,000 Roman soldiers in a single night.

            Meanwhile, I'm calling the booking agents of every show V is on, and no one knows V's manager or address.  Every V deal is finalized anonymously via a home computer modem.  I ought to know who is behind this. I've heard that the warden of the women's prison is buying up major stock on Wall street and is undergoing two liposuctions.  Why go on? I wonder.  V is the poised and polished end of history and nature as far as I can see.  Every day I, in my old role of the Viewer, watch as V toasts the shambles of my life with calligraphy of smoke reflected on the lid of my coffin.  
------------------------------------------------------------------------

(SFX: Passing car stereo BLARING:) "You're cruel device, your blood like ice, one look could kill, my pain your thrill.. I want to love you but I better not touch, I want to hold you but my senses tell me to stop, I want to kiss you but I want it too much.. I want to hold you with needles and pins, I want to hurt you just to hear you screaming my name, I want to touch you but you're under my skin.. I want to kiss you but your lips are bitter like poison, you're poison, running through my veins, I don't want to break these chains..."

            For those of us in the know, all words refer directly and firstly to Ela'scunt.  It makes for a nightmarish existence.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

"This one goes out to the one I love, this one goes out to the one I left behind, a senseless prop to occupy my time, fire!"

            Now I know what took me ages to admit: language has been invented solely to sustain and expand the myth of love, which keeps us well-behaved and blind.  I have tried to behave like a wild animal or like a superior ultra-refined creature, but for one who has been taught to understand words, there is no escape from the trappings of love.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

"The soldier came knocking upon the queen's door, said I am not fighting for you any more I've watched your palace up here on the hill and I wondered who's the woman for whom I kill.. How hungry are you, how weak you must feel as you live here alone and you are never revealed, I see you now and you are so very young but I've seen more battles lost than I have battles won and I've got this intuition that it's all for your fun, now will you tell me why? ..She said I've swallowed a secret burning thread, it cuts me inside and often I've bled.. and she shut herself up like a fan..."

  There can be no words that don't refer to Ela's cunt.  This cunt is all-inclusive.