HEAD

I want you to take my head. Would you carry it like a baby? Talk and coo to it, beat it or tell it to shut up? Careful now, it's moving around like it's about to grow flippers or elongate like a shrimp covered with soft armor. Put me on ice and take me to the ballgame. All I want to do is stare up at the sky from a bed made of cold beercans.

As a person, I am a bit of a failure. But as a detached head, I am free. No one expects that much from a singular head, I make a living telling fortunes. Free from my body, my mind roams far and wide, bringing back wisdom and strange tales from dark regions of the soul.

"You will go on a fantastic journey." My face lights up like a jackolantern, but maybe it's the box you've made for me. It's like a gypsy's wagon. A family stands in front, the same look of expectation and horror on their faces. You step up to warn the children not to touch or poke me.

I often fall asleep in mid-sentence leaving the the desperate soul hanging on my last word. Because I am only a head, people fear me like they never did in my walking life. "Shh, don't wake him," you say, closing the box, "he really needs his sleep. It's that hot little brain working like crazy." Thanks. I really appreciate this. I mean, you get the cash, but I get to just be and that's important to me.

And now, I'm on tv. I get to say anything I want and people love it. They're hanging on my every word. You see, I'm telling them shit that never got said. They nod their heads and look at each other, "He's got it. I never thought of that, but it's true." You people with bodies, you forget your heads, you forget your bodies. You never knew what you had.

David Letterman loves me. Laughing, flashing his famous teeth, he tells me he wants me back on the show. He says I could be the next Chris Elliot. "You can sit right here on my desk, and just say whatever is on your mind." He rubs his hands together. "It'll be better than having Harvey Pekar on."

I sign the contract with pen and mouth, and don't really get a chance to check it out because of the angle. Instead he keeps me in a room back stage and consults me as an oracle every show. "Come on and give up the zany stuff, or I'll squeeze you like an edible gourd." The man is really crazy, as in bad, evil crazy. After 20 years of this he'll do anything to keep his ball rolling and I am the boulder he rolls in Hell to the top of the latenight rankings.

I will crush him as I roll down. I threaten Dave that if he doesn't give me equal billing. I'll bring this show down. I'll ruin NBC. In one skit, Dave has me done up as the Wizard of Oz, replete with flames shooting up all around me. I insult the president, Dave's suit and the New York Yankees. Dave thinks I'm going too far.

I stop hoping you will come and rescue me. You're pissed about those tickets I promised. Full of my own hubris, I neglect our relationship until we cease to talk to one another.

The last straw in my television career is when I insult the network's parent corporation. Dave tells the coffee delivery guy to set me out on the sidewalk. "I'll haunt you in your dreams, Letterman!" I scream as I'm roughly escourted out of the Ed Sullivan Theater.

Some teenagers from Brooklyn find me and take me home. They teach me to rap. I am a novelty at parties and they laugh at me. I am not an incredible rapper, but the word is getting around, so these guys are starting to charge at the door and the party never stops. The kid who lives here has his mom totally cowed, she just sits in the corner staring at me, making mean faces. Sometimes she yells through the noise at me, "You're the cause of all this trouble, Humpty Dumpty." I'm nervous about my fate.

After several days of relentless music and drinking, the party dies down and all the kids fall asleep. Wandering her house, looking at the destruction, she spies me resting on a pile of fast food wrappers. She grabs me by the hair. "This party is over and you are getting the Hell out!" "Please! Hold on a second, let me call my friend." She won't listen to me. She just takes me a couple of blocks and puts me in an abandoned shopping cart full of random junk. She is kind enough to put me under some dirty old clothes so I don't freeze to death.

There is darnkess. Then there is movement. Someone pushes the cart off the street to a squat in an abandoned subway tunnel somewhere in Manhattan. I had read about this one time.

"I thought they moved all you people out," I say. "We just got bored and moved back." I am surprised to find that they treat me with some respect, but all I can think about is salad bars. Around a fire made from pallets, I dream of lying among the kale, just ogling the colors and smelling all the scents. It is like a symphony of odors, each item is a theme, with the pasta nearby dominating the composition. It occurs to me here that I haven't had sex for a long time.

I think I could be truly happy if some young woman carried me around in her purse. She could take me out and touch my cheek with her soft hands. We would spend long hours staring at each other, trying to read the other's thoughts. I am the only one who understands her. If she would leave her asshole boyfriend who falls asleep after sex, we could go away somewhere, anywhere. We'd make up new stories for everyone we meet. "He's an independent film director," she tells the waitress. I can barely hold my laughter. When the waitress fills our coffee and leaves, we crack up. "I've never had this much fun in my life," she admits, not

even in college when she did a lot of drugs and had unprotected sex with all her friends.

I am so happy, and I tell her so in words that cause everyone in the Midwestern diner to join hands and start ascending to heaven like an apotheosis. The fat trucker sprouts wings and shoots me in the ear with his heart-tipped arrow. Nodding her head, mistyeyed, not looking at me, she tells me, "Unfortunately, I have to get back to work on Monday."

The diner collapses around us. The trucker falls on a chair, breaking it. "I really can't take you home because my roommates will get suspicious and my landlord won't allow another person in the apartment. They get mad if Rod stays over too much." I summon up some strength to express myself through my collapsing reality, "Forget all that. Forget Rod. It's just us and the road." She won't hear it. She's stopped

listening to me and all her words run together as she is paying the bill, leaving a 12 percent tip that really embarrasses me, fixing her eyeliner and walking out of my life.

The waitress figures that I am the rest of her tip. She won't even treat me like a human being. She keeps looking for the batteries, turning me around in her hands. "I've heard of stuff like this. You're like the Singing Bass." My humiliation is complete when she raffles me off to pay for the cost of repairing the diner. I go home with a Mennonite family and we spend long hours in quiet contemplation. When they read to me from the Bible, I reveal my heretical ideas on religion. They decide they can't have me living in the house. "Put the demon head in the barn, son."

The quiet children take me out to the barn where they bust out the biggest stash of killer bud I have ever seen. "Pops thinks this hemp is for rope, but we got some seeds from a friend who went to Amsterdam. This seed here is from Bali. "The kids all ask about the big city. All they can think about is growing up and leaving. In my stoned reverie, I tell them that they really have heaven right there, that everybody in the city is just yearning to leave and go to the country and live the simple life. They call me a liar and show me that they are all sadistic monsters, these quiet, well-behaved children. They practice throwing their knives at the barn floor around me. One throw severs my left earlobe and I begin the bleed. This stops the game and they need to go in to dinner anyways. I am left out in the cold, drafty barn.

At this point, I am at danger of being eaten alive by rats and if it wasn't for the barnyard cat saving me, I would have suffered my greatest fear. Besides being alone, that is. The cat is very playful and takes a liking to me, but I yell at it when it gets rough and scratches up my nose. Luckily, it didn't go away and I spend the cold night with the cat wrapped around my face. The fur is in my nose and mouth and I'm having a little difficulty with it because I am slightly allergic to the dander,

but all in all, I am very grateful to this animal.

That night, I have a vision of my future. I am comforted by the thought that I do finally get to save the planet, as it is my life-long ambition. I start a religion and multi-level marketing scheme based on solar energy and worship of the sun. With the failing environment and lack of comfort from the great world religion, this very simple, materialist perspective gives comfort to the torn spirits of humans everywhere. Backed by some silicon valley millionaires, we start the organization which catches on with our core which is basically surfers and nudists from Mendocino County, but from California it quickly spreads. Some of the New Age message is lost on people, so I quickly arrange for splinter groups to acquire the teachings of other world religions to make flavors that are compatible with just about any tradition. The christians really dig the homonym Son and Sun, so our

closest star is identified with Jesus. You get the idea. In some areas, my image appears iconic, my features on the solar disk. Some wear a medallion with my face on it surrounded by rays. They will kiss it before they sunbathe or put up solar panels that they get with huge discounts from the church along with incredible government tax subsidies.

This rosy future is blemished and my organization threatens to collapse as cases of skin cancer skyrocket. I am denounced publicly and hounded by the other world religions. The Time Magazine cover story is "The Setting of the Sun-King?" In our darkest hour, a bio-tech company and one of my many financial acquisitions synthesizes an anaerobic microorganism that produces ozone and can do so in the upper atmosphere. NASA, which I picked up for a song during some recent privatization madness, dramatically sends an aging, barely functional Space Shuttle to distribute pods of the bacteria across the ozonosphere. The plan is a success and the ozone layer is exponentially increasing.

It works a little too well and people who are not nudist sun worshippers suffer from a vitamin D deficiency from the paucity of ultraviolet rays coming through to the skin which, as we all know is how the body produces the nutrient. Fortunately, the same bio-tech company creates a gene that enables to humans to produce the vitamin from the rest of the light spectrum. The gene, modified from corn, also causes people to start photosynthesizing. Freed from having to eat, the digestive system atrophies giving people a very slender socially appealing look, so the therapy becomes very fashionable. The church offers members the therapy as a sort of baptism for free. The only drawback is the green complexion.

With all the green people, it occurs to many that we look like aliens, or what the popular idea of aliens was in the 50s. A popular philosopher muses that we become what we mythologize. She notices many circumstances where technology has enabled us to do what gods and monsters can do, and to literally become them. Her grand opus "Myths of the Future" posits that time and myth have an inverse relationship. The book starts fads of reconstructive surgery where people modify themselves to become their heroes, icons and historical figures. At our marriage ceremony, she puts me on her shoulder so that we look like a two-headed beast.

For awhile, we complete each other, but our relationship deteriorates as we become addicted to psychoactive nectars that the biotech company derives from the union of several powerful shamanistic vegetables. Drug-addled and increasingly confused by the strange world we helped create, our minds warp into shapes that could barely be called self-conscious. Kept alive by a nutrient bath that my biotech caretakers created, I spend my days suspended between thoughts, my features gradually distorting. It takes years to remember the time you took me to the park and set me down on the bench beside you, where we would just watch people.