Actually it probably hurt them. Not many red-blooded Americans have even heard of Molière, but he sounded French, which was a big negative.
The curtain rose on a giant swimming pool taking up more than half the stage. It was surrounded by a sandy beach with a dozen bathers.
Suddenly Molière comes shooting up out of the water, does a triple somersault and ends with a swan dive back into the pool. He does two or three more tricks like this and the beach-goers laugh and applaud. Then this beautiful young woman in a bikini so small that if it shrunk even a tiny bit it would disappear from the universe, walks up to the side of the pool and dives in. For a few seconds nothing happens. Then Karen shoots ten feet into the air, does her own somersault and swan dive and plops back into the water. Then she again shoots ten feet up this time followed by Molière; they do simultaneous somersaults and coordinated swan dives. More applause.
Well, no sense in my trying to describe all the tricks they did—you’ve probably seen them on YouTube. Fact is, they were pretty amazing. I laughed and applauded along with everyone else.
Then the lights went out, we heard a grinding noise that went on and on, and then when the lights came back up the scene was a big living room with four or five humans and two FFs, both in their usual hairy beach ball shapes. They were partying. The scene had a lot of clever dialogue that indicated that Molière was attracted to the Karen gal, but the other FF, who was supposedly Molière’s dad, was pretty down on Molière having anything to do with a human being: humans being low-life. According to the dad, Molière’s thinking her special was like Einstein being attracted to a raccoon. And a big, good-looking human being was telling Karen she was a fool to be attracted to Molière, who was ugly, shapeless, and an intellectual snob. There were confrontations, slamming doors, and longing looks from Karen toward a hairy beach ball. Molière didn’t produce any longing looks, in fact he didn’t produce any looks at all, but he did say a few nice things to her.
In the third scene Karen and Molière in his usual beach ball shape enter a hotel room. Karen sits in a big easy chair and they talk awhile, showing that they like each other. Then Molière rolls a bit and hops up into her lap. She puts her arms around him. Molière then sprouts a head and two arms and some lips. He hugs her and they kiss. After a long kiss—the audience throwing in a few gasps and a few giggles—Molière sprouts two thick legs, hops to the floor, and, in a wobbly fashion, picks up Karen and staggers with her over to the bed where, with a mighty effort, he throws her up onto it. Then hops up beside her.
And sprouts a pecker. A good stiff one.
The audience gasps and giggles, many of the gals gasping, and the few kids in the audience, including Jimmy and Lucas, giggling.
Then Molière kneels down on the bed beside her and sprouts two more arms and begins ripping off all of Karen’s clothing. Well, having once or twice tried undressing a woman, I can tell you that having four arms instead of only two is a big advantage. Like a windmill at full throttle Molière whisks away all of Karen’s clothing before you could say “What the fuck?!”
Then he lies down on top of her and goes to work, clearly engaging in an act that once a century is called “fornication.” When he first starts humping her the audience is strangely quiet. I’m not sure whether most were fascinated or shocked or straining to get a better look. I myself was just grinning.
Then the audience did a strange thing: a few people began to boo, but were almost immediately overwhelmed by others applauding, then more and more, and some started cheering.
The curtain fell. And the applause died down and there was laughter and chatting. And some wise guy shouts: “Encore!”
The next scene was of Karen lying in a hospital bed in a white hospital gown and giving birth. Molière was propped up as a beach ball on a bedside table looking worried. Actually of course he wasn’t looking anything at all, his acting talent being somewhat limited by his not having a face or eyes. In fact, now that I come to think of it, Molière’s acting ability was limited to his changing shapes. And his talking.
Karen finally gave birth.
To a hairy baby softball played by Louie-Twoie, who had compressed his normal size for the role. He popped out from between Karen’s legs and bounced around the room a bit and then went to his mom and snaked his way under her gown to bury himself on her chest, probably to get a milk delivery. More gasps, giggles, and applause.
The last scene of the play was a little uneven, boring at first, better at the end. It took place in a nice middle-class living room with all the traditional bourgeois stuff. Sitting in an easy chair, Molière was shaped like a small human being wearing jeans and a T-shirt and reading The New York Times. Karen and her two children—a soccer-ball-sized LT and a four-year-old human kid—were watching television. It was a thriller program about Muslim high school kids using the chemistry lab to make a poison gas to wipe out people on a subway train. Of course the stars of the show were the cool federal agents who were going to catch them before they could earn an “A” in chemistry and wipe out dozens of American commuters.
Karen and the boys and Molière exchanged about a dozen bits of dialogue showing that they had become solid, stolid, upstanding, normal middle-class American citizens. The scene was so boring and banal that I personally began to hope the high school kids would release the poison gas in the damn living room and put us all out of our misery.
Just when the audience was getting ready to throw rotten tomatoes at the actors, Louie-Twoie begins bouncing around the room like a berserk soccer ball.
“Leb’s eff shom fun!”
And the little four-year-old human suddenly leaps off the couch and does two cartwheels and a somersault, and Molière surges up out of his easy chair as a beach ball and begins bouncing around the room, Karen leaps up and throws off her long skirt and sweatshirt and, dressed in bra and panties, begins choreographing her gymnastics with Molière’s and LT’s.
As they cavorted around the room, Louie shattered the TV set, the boy smashed several lamps, Karen wrecked the rocking chair and Louie-Twoie smashed the glass in a nice china closet. Smashed a bit of the china too. They were trashing the bourgeois life that I’d thought they’d sunk into.
Then all four of them left the stage and began dancing or bouncing or doing cartwheels in the aisles among the audience. Some members of the audience joined them and soon a conga line of twenty or thirty people led by Louie-Twoie was snaking up onto the stage and then back down off it.
A good time was had by all.
Molière, Karen, LT, and the boy led the audience out of the theater into the Village where they sucked up a few more conga dancers and disappeared into the night.
* * *
The reviews of the play the next day were mixed. “Lowbrow porn,” said the New York Post. “A provocative look at inter-universe relations,” said The Times. “What the fuck was that?” wondered the Village Voice. “I’m speechless,” said The New Yorker, as part of a two-thousand-word review.
The next night’s performance was even more sensational. And shorter. In scene three, the moment Molière sprouted his pecker and rolled on top of Karen on the bed, a dozen policemen appeared and half of them went on stage and threw a blanket over the obscene couple. For a moment some of the audience thought that this was part of the play, but most realized that the cops were real and began to boo and hiss.
In any case, the play came to an end. Karen and Molière were arrested, and LT and the boy actor taken off to social services to see how traumatized they’d been by being forced to act in an obscene play.
Naturally, Carlita was called in to defend them and managed to get them out on reasonable bail. In a brief press conference afterwards, she pointed out there was nothing obscene about Molière’s having two limbs, or three limbs or four limbs, and where his limbs sprouted from was irrelevant. FFs did not have peckers, she argued (I think she used a different word), and therefore couldn’t act obscenely if they tried.
As for Kar
en, at no time was any of her pubic area (Lita’s phrase, not mine) visible to the audience. Moreover, her bare breasts were visible for only a short time, and bare breasts had been a staple on stage and screen for centuries. Carlita announced that she was confident she would win the case.
But the play was closed by court order, and none of us good guys had any desire to spend time trying to get it open again right away. We suspected that the play had been closed not for being obscene but because it showed humans and FFs loving each other. The Powers that Be didn’t like that.
Molière’s team had made videos of both the opening night performance and the police-raid performance and began posting parts of them on YouTube. College and community theaters all over the world began clamoring for Molière and his team to stage their play in their theaters.
’Course it wasn’t all wine and roses. There was a lot of toilet water and poison ivy too. Some Christian churchmen, Jewish rabbis, Muslim imams, and Southern atheists were unenthusiastic about the mixing of the races, and saw intercourse between a human woman and a member of an unknown and hostile terrorist species as even worse than if she’d given herself to an ape or an ostrich. Some of us thought the idea of an ostrich was a good one and Molière ought to incorporate it into his rewrite of the play.
People were split down the middle about Love Has No Boundaries. Those who sort of liked FFs thought the play (or rather the YouTube videos) fun, while those who hated or feared the FFs thought it was simply a further horrible attack on our human way of life. Many of the naysayers were more upset about Karen giving birth to an alien softball than they were the simulated sex.
“The idea that our species may become contaminated by a race of hairy balls is too frightening to contemplate,” said the Reverend Peter O. Platt, and then spent an hour and a half contemplating it. He concluded he was against it.
The New York Times was more reserved: “There is no evidence that penetration by any part of the body of a Protean into a human female can result in conception.”
In response, Gibberish wrote a letter to The Times’ editor which included the following provocative sentences: “You’d be surprised what miracles we FFs can perform. Watch your wives, my friends, watch your wives.”
The letter didn’t improve the FFs’ PR very much. In fact it was soon the main quotation used to attack them for threatening to take over the world.
Still, some people stayed sane. The Presbyterian Science Monitor wrote: “Since only the least intelligent and most promiscuous women would ever be tempted to give themselves to an alien, we can be confident that any offspring of the coupling will be of a distinctly inferior quality.”
Right. If you mate a creature with an IQ of two million with another creature with an IQ of seventy, you’ll get on average an inferior creature with an IQ of only one million.
Oh, what a falling off there would be.
THIRTY-TWO
(From LUKE’S TRUE UNBELIEVABLE REPORT OF THE INVASION OF THE FFS, pp. 150–154)
The gigantic explosion rocked the North Shore west of Mattituck Inlet not quite enough to wake the dead, but enough to disturb the sleep of many of the living. It got hundreds of citizens out of their beds, wondering if finally we’d stumbled into a nuclear war.
There were actually four witnesses to the explosion, two having a late-night drink on their patio overlooking the sound and two others lying on the beach and making love. They all reported an explosion. It was loud.
There was no boat on fire as an aftermath. The boat had disappeared. There was a small burning of gas or oil on the surface of the water but it quickly died out. A few minutes after the explosion there was only darkness and silence.
Several people called 911 to report the explosion. Both county and state police rushed to the scene. So did Sheriff Coombs. So did five fire engines.
The Coast Guard sent two boats to investigate. Sheriff Coombs, when he saw that in the darkness there was nothing to see from the shore, drove to a Mattituck Marina, commandeered a high-powered cruiser from a friend, and zoomed out of Mattituck Inlet to see what he could see on the water itself.
The Coast Guard and Sheriff Coombs discovered very little. There was some floating wooden debris, an oil and gas slick, but no sign of any bodies—in fact nothing of any significant size remained. The Sheriff had seen the results of two or three boats destroyed by gasoline explosions, and there had been a lot more debris. This explosion must have been beyond anything he’d ever seen or read about.
By dawn, several witnesses had reported that they had seen a thirty-six-foot fishing boat motoring west from Plum Gut that evening, and one witness said that the fishing boat anchored about where the explosion occurred. In another half hour Sheriff Coombs had learned enough to be pretty sure that the boat was Billy Morton’s. With two phone calls he verified that Billy’s boat was not at its Greenport pier, that at least one person had seen Billy and his family motoring out of the marina late that afternoon, and that there was no one at home at the Mortons’ North Road home. Neither their boat nor they were anywhere to be seen.
The question was whether Billy and his family were all on the boat when it blew up. And why—or who—blew it up.
Sheriff Coombs had no answers. But he made up for it by having plenty of questions.
* * *
The NSA knew immediately that the Mortons had been on board when the explosion occurred, and that they had all been killed. The NSA had planted a bug on the boat, a very sophisticated one that they were able to monitor from one of their satellites. Nothing is ever too expensive for a government bureaucracy, especially if it’s to save the nation from its many enemies. Like the Mortons.
The bug made the Mortons’ last hours very vivid. After the family had eaten dinner and the sun had set, Mr. and Mrs. Morton began drinking and chatting in the cockpit, and the two boys began playing a noisy game of speed chess down below. This lasted until ten twenty-seven P.M. Then the family prepared for bed. There was much idle talk and the sounds of drawers being opened and closed. After some rustling of people shifting in their beds, there was fifteen minutes of silence, only broken by a cough from one of the boys. Then there was the sound of someone stirring in a bunk, the sound of something striking something, and then a long burst of “foul language” from Billy Morton, mostly attacking his berth’s low ceiling but also complaining about God. Mrs. Morton was heard to say, “Shut up, you old fool, you’ll wake the boys.”
After the swearing bit there was silence for exactly three minutes, then a loud bang immediately cut off by total silence. The tape ended at the exact moment of the reported time of the explosion. The NSA’s expensive bug was no more. So too, concluded all those who heard the recording, were the Mortons.
ITEM IN THE NEWS
NEW GIRLS’ SPORTS CHEER GOES VIRAL
Troy, NY. Nov. 20th
A cheer created for the College of Saint Rose’s Girls’ Basketball and Field Hockey Teams has gone viral, being tweeted over five hundred thousand times and posted on Facebook almost the same. The cheer was apparently created by a Protean alien whom the girls call “Boo-Boo.” It had been playing with both teams for more than a week during practice sessions.
God is good, God is great,
Who do we appreciate?
God, God, God.
THIRTY-THREE
(From Billy Morton’s MY FRIEND LOUIE, pp. 240–246)
Our survival wasn’t exactly a miracle. What happened was that me, Carlita, and the boys packed up a big picnic lunch and a lot of other stuff, and went down to Vagabond. I motored us out of the harbor and east out to Plum Gut and into the Long Island Sound. Louie had wanted to blow us up in Coecles Harbor, but I said I didn’t want to pollute that small body of water with the debris of my boat and the diesel fuel. I thought that was pretty thoughtful, and even Lita gave me a peck on the cheek. Louie relented. We decided to blow up off a lonely stretch of beach east of Mattituck Inlet. The Long Island Sound had been absorbing tons of junk for four hund
red years.
However, before we blew up the boat, Louie suggested that we first all get off it. I approved this idea. So after the sun had set, we all began putting on a performance for the bug that Louie said was aboard. We started by having a couple of hefty belts in the cockpit, the boys noisily arguing down below. But while we were doing this we were all getting into the scuba gear Louie had provided us with. When we were geared up and ready to abandon ship, I turned on the tape we’d prepared earlier of the family talking to each other as we supposedly undressed and got into our berths. And then trying to go to sleep, and my banging my head on the ceiling and loudly indicating my displeasure. It was a great tape. It was my first official acting role, and if you ever get to hear the NSA recording you’ll be impressed by how convincingly I swear. Had a lot of practice.
After my swearing spree, there was another few minutes of silence and then a gigantic BOOM! The boat blew up.
We, of course, were gone. A half hour earlier we’d slipped into the sound and swum underwater the hundred yards to shore. When we got there in the pitch darkness, we took off our scuba gear and then climbed some steps to the land above, and to a car that conveniently drove up and offered us a lift.
If I’d been directing the film we would have stayed to watch the big explosion, but Louie said we should be well away before people began to rush to the shore to see what had happened and noticed us in the car. I tried to convince him that he didn’t have to worry about being realistic in a thriller, but he pretended he didn’t know what I was talking about. So then, car lights off, we left.
If you’ve never seen an FF drive a car you don’t know what you’re missing. Turned our thriller into a farce in less time than it takes to burp. Louie drove in the shape of a one-legged sphere with no head. After two minutes of watching this headless apparition apparently steering the car with his belly button, I insisted Carlita take over.