Ode to Men of Few Words
R.A. Lubowitz

Curt was born a man of few words. He came into the world with a solemn face full of idiot knowing, a mere cunt-potato, consulting with angels in the way a cancerous, twentysomething spaniel might chat with a pile of rags or an old yo-yo. Curt’s mom had an embolism which killed her but not her lactation, and Curt fed on dead milk for a spell. They pried him loose and gave him to Carl, a man who’d eat anything so long as it was pickled.

Carl sold bogus insurance out of an idyllic highway storefront near a fetish joint where the trucker-clergy contingent enjoyed having the sides of their penises hypodermically injected with ladies’ high heel shoes pre-dissolved in hydrochloric acid.

The year was 2027 but it may just as well have been 1727, and Curt’s dad Carl died of a cake overdose, which he had pledged would kill him before the syphilis. Curt was only two when he was torn from his blessed roots. And the cake wasn’t even chocolate.

Curt was raised to keep quiet by Old Cheese, one of six madams who worked the day shift near the cemetery. She was locally credited for reviving the lost art of the toothless blowjob and had made enough to buy herself eight mattresses. Curt grew up emptying heavy garbage amid foul ecstasy. By night the working girls would bare their souls, fuck him and beat him. As his muscles hardened he earned a reputation for being a good listener.

A customer called Husky Jeans Johnson drank too much and thought he’d take the boy on the road, put a copyright on the one-word-answer simulacrum routine and make a fortune. He slipped Curt a tranque but Curt saw and while pounding Husky’s head into red and gray spaghetti Curt said rather little. He had a job to do, by golly, and there wasn’t nothing needed to be said about it. Herein lies the charm of Curt, man of few words.

Curt set out on his own and worked at a general store. He lived seven more years. He ...

laughed three times ...

ate forty-two flapjacks ...

told one joke ...

made two-hundred and ninety pots of coffee ...

made four pots of decaf ...

paid income tax twice ...

strangled seventeen waitresses to death ...

named and fed two dogs ...

went through three pairs of boots ...

spoke two thousand, nine-hundred and fifty-one words — only one of which was “hiel."

One of the waitresses that escaped was Chowder Pig Sally, a relation to Old Cheese. Her being raped was no accident. She liked men of few words. Curt hadn’t said a lot but his sperm had said, “Let there be Dan and Doug,” and the message thundered through the caverns of Chowder Pig’s womb, and the week after Curt died, Curt begat Dan and Doug.

Doug was a child of the dairy slug variety who emerged from utero in a worn-out green bathrobe, insisting that it made him feel somehow “more svelte, per se.” Five years later, Chowder cured Doug’s loquacious nature with a home lobotomy kit stolen from a sleeping Jehovah’s Witness. Doug became mute and heterosexual in twelve languages. Later he shot himself in the back of the head. The bullet exited through his mouth, hitting his mom in the ear, rendering her dead, and far worse, deaf.

Dan was the quiet one by nature, and he grew up to join the trucker-clergy contingent, and he’d pay to have hookers melt down sexy shoes and inject them into the side of his penis. Not because he liked it, but because “that’s just what the trucker-clergy contingent does, by golly. Ain’t nothing more to say.”

An acid-laden liquefied shoe must have penetrated beyond the dermis and cohered to Dan’s sperm cells, because his wife gave birth to a pair of high-heeled shoes named Goat and Wolf ... names you might expect for boys, but these were girl shoes. Having boys’ names made it hard for the girls growing up. Psychologists said they probably refused to talk because of all the teasing they had to endure on account of their names. The parents tried changing the names, but the damage had been done. The shoes, lacking the requisite social skills, failed to find mates and the bloodline was silenced for good.

But the writer of this piece is not yet silenced, for the reason that he is not nor has he ever been a man of few words. People often think he has a fascinating brain. But he has a typical brain. His scrotum, however, is unusual in that it functions as a crude parachute. He has his briefs custom made, but when in Cleveland he buys them at Bob's Big Scrotum Emporium, along with furniture and sundries designed for the scrotum-enhanced community. Not a man of few words, indeed.

From a fiction standpoint, the writer acknowledges that the climax (shoes) of his little yarn is rushed. He tends to write impatiently and send the result out angrily.

He wrote another ode a while back — to the strong. Since it was pretty strong itself, he thought he might do more odes, mainly in "praise" of positive attributes that upon examination might reveal to be less purely positive then convention holds. Uncovering the complex, flawed underbelly of certain labels like "nice," "strong," "generous," or any other good word.

His ode in this case meant to vilify the cult of minimalism and artistic restraint, collapses into mere cleverness ... an exercise in creative, poetic shock humor and absurdity which is fine if it represents and elevates something of reality but probably a guilty pleasure if it gets too silly or hard to interpret.

Then we find ourselves here, voyeuristically compelled to witness the writer's self-referential vultures pluck at the rotting heap of prose.

The epitaph for this vulture feed will read: "Here lies the Ode, which was, at its best, an elixir for those stuck with negative labels; a reminder that positive labels are wishful conveniences and at worst a conspiracy against complexity."

A member of the local clergy will offer parables to the Ode's funeral attendees: "A cop who is brave in one area of life is a craven coward in another. A woman with a model's face might have an ugly soul, or even an ugly burn on her scalp covered by a wig, or yellow teeth covered in bleach. Perhaps she's addicted to laxatives. A cute, loyal puppy finds his master bleeding to death. The puppy doesn't chase down an ambulance like Benji ... instead he laps up his master's blood while wagging his tail ..."

A sob escapes from the audience, punctuating the cleric's last remark.

But close friends and confidantes of the now maggot-infested heap of opiate-worthy absurdist drivel will tell a different story: "The life of this piece was in response to a recent Cormac McCarthy book," they will confess, on behalf of the deceased. "The piece's writer was offended by how the McCarthy book paid subtle homage to the 'few words' manner of speech of cowboys and 'real men' of all eras."

The friends of the deceased will prattle on about how the writer is of a "wordy" nature and was offended (or more accurately threatened?) by the "few words" archetype and was compelled to poke fun and create a fictional underpinning to the "strong silent" cultural phenomenon. Because like anything supposedly good, strong silence can actually be very ugly, and in fact, its opposite, in disguise.

The friends of the deceased will be granted audience despite the interminable, redundant pedantry — they will wax impotent on literary matters and be indulged because they are mourning. And the reader is kind and silent.

Later, over a platter of pressed meats, the writer will concede that silence has a time and place, and it can be a sign of maturity, strength, even wisdom, as can well-chosen brevities uttered with low breath.

This moment will mark the beginning of a healing process for him. But shards of denial will linger, which is common to those who grieve.

So when he reverts to saying, "but ... in the real world strong silence IS half the time connected with abuse, ignorance, insecurity, apathy and just plain stupidity," we will all listen patiently and furrow our brows with mock concern. We will simply say, "Uh-huh," men of few words that we are.

R.A. Lubowitz is a writer and poet by trade. He is neither female nor a Bosnian-Serb. Out of respect for Jacques Derrida, he refuses to speak in terms of biography. Lubowitz's past work was featured on Pindeldyboz, Megaera, Opium, Symposia, and Poor Mojo, where a piece was nominated for StorySouth Million Writer’s consideration.