From www.thewhacker.com

WHACKADOODLE #1: PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST DEVOURED

Prologue

J. Nathan Laschtog was sitting with his family for the last time. He was cradling his little girl in his lap for the last time. He was watching his eight-year-old daughter handwalk past the fridge in her undies for the last time. And for the last time, he was watching--no, he was really seeing--his wife hurry around the kitchen doing all her morning tasks at once.

She was sipping her coffee and pouring his. She was smoothing peanut butter on bread and applying lipstick. She was filling brown sacks with Ziplocked sandwiches, applesauce cups, and leftover Halloween candy. She was tying the little one's sneakers, straightening her stockings, and warning the little handwalker for absolutely the last time to put on her school clothes.

Laschtog watched his firstborn child scurry down the hall on her hands, marveling at her strength and grace, her long hair sweeping the boards. He knew the tiny one in his lap had been lisping at him for a long time, with her clammy palms pressing his cheeks. He looked down at her and smiled. He buried his face in her delicate curls and, for the last time, he breathed her.

He listened to his womenfolk. Not their words. Just their sounds. The little one lisping from his lap, the big one humming Britney Spears from her room, his wife clacking around on her heels while reciting the endless list of things he was to do that day. He liked the noise they made--his girls, his lovelies--all talking, singing, lisping at once.

His wife stood before him with her lips moving rapidly. He looked her up and down, admiring her slim figure, the care she took with her clothes. She was once a young beauty, way out of his league, and now she was such a handsome woman.

"Listen, Daddy," the little one said, "Daddy, listen."

Laschtog studied his wife's arms, which she'd crossed in annoyance. She had such a feminine way of crossing her arms. Had he ever noticed? Where cross-armed men slid their hands over and under the biceps as if to make them bulge, she held both elbows in the cups of her hands. A man would never do that. Only a woman would--a real woman.

"Daddy, daddy," the little one called out again, standing up in his lap. "Daddy," she said again as she traced one finger along the "W" of his receding hairline. He smiled at the little girl and nodded. He nodded at his pretty wife, looking her up and down.

His smile faded as he noticed an ominous stirring in his undies. Blanching at this desecration of the last good, wholesome moment of his life, he lifted the little girl and set her down on the floor. "You villain!" he hissed, glaring down at his groin. "You little asshole!"

"Hey!" his wife said, louder now, snapping her fingers in his face. "Hey!"

Laschtog looked up to see the little one standing before him in her dress and stockings, mirroring her mother. They both had their elbows cupped in their hands. They both held one hip popped in annoyance. Laschtog's smile returned.

"Daddy, I said mommy's talking, daddy."

"Uh-huh," Laschtog said, turning to face his wife.

"Did you just call her the A-word?"

He shook his head.

"What's wrong with you?"

Why not tell her? he thought, as his heart began to race. Why not press your face to her tummy and sob out every secret, awful thing? Why not let her save you?

"I didn't sleep," he said.

"Were you listening to anything I said?"

He looked at her helplessly. She poked her tongue into her cheek. She flared her nostrils. She repeated everything.

He heard something about peanut butter. He heard something about dance practice. But had he ever seen the little mole on her chin or the tiny blonde hairs curving down her throat?

The little girl brushed past his shins as she crawled under the table. He peered down and saw her patting Ol' Bob much too hard, lisping love in his ear.

"And are you ever going to clean up after Ol' Bob?" his wife said. "It's a minefield out there. The girls can't even get to the swings. If you aren't too busy with your book, please clean up the yard. I'll do everything else. Just please clean up the dog crap."

Laschtog had been smiling at his little girl, watching her clamp Ol' Bob in a headlock while cooing, "Oh my Bobby-boo, my sweet Ol' little Bobby-boo."

But when his wife mentioned his book, he looked up sharply. Had he imagined it, or had she said your book in that tone people use when making air quotes with their fingers? He searched her face for signs of mockery. He found none. She had never mocked the wicked and vainglorious dream that was his book. And she wasn't mocking it now. Pure gratitude rose from his heart and welled in his eyes.

He stood up and leaned in for a kiss. She lowered her head defensively, like a boxer who'd rather take a shot to the brow than the mouth. Laschtog pressed his kiss to her forehead as he pulled her into him. He savored her good smell, her softness for the last time. He held her tighter as she began to squirm.

"I'm sorry," he murmured in her ear. "I'll clean it all up. When you come home, the crap will be gone. There will be no more crap in your life."

He hugged and kissed his daughters goodbye. Then, just like any other day, he stood beside the dog on the side steps, waving as the old minivan rattled away. He didn't cry or even tear up. He felt good. Serene. His wife wasn't that old. She still had her looks. She might mourn him for a while. But she was a practical woman. There'd soon be a new man who'd be so different from Laschtog. He'd have character, for starters. In a few years, the girls would hardly remember his face. They'd be calling some other, better man "daddy."

Ol' Bob hobbled across the yard, bawling at a squirrel. Laschtog followed in his PJs and slippers, smiling as he chomped up Ol' Bob's leavings in the mechanical jaws of his pooper-scooper. Then, making steam shovel noises remembered from old cartoons, he deposited load after surreptitious load into the bushes that ran behind the neighbor's yard.

Laschtog was smiling as he worked, vrooming and hissing and whistling. He was still thinking about the friendly, well-paid man who'd soon be caring for his family. He could see them all laughing together in the kitchen of a much finer house. The man was that tall, assured type with gray hair at the temples. He could be nothing but the vice president of a prosperous regional bank. And he could see his wife laughing girlishly as she joined her banker in bed. And wow, did he make her hot with his MBA and his upmarket sedan and his aura of command. And oh! Oh wow! She'd never let Laschtog do that. Nor that. And the sounds pouring from her hot, swollen lips--

As Laschtog scooped the last of the poop, he caught himself. Glancing guiltily at the neighbors' houses, he adjusted himself through his pajama bottoms. You've done this," he muttered toward his groin, "you've murdered us both."

After shaving, Laschtog donned his most scholarly outfit: dark turtleneck sweater, corduroy slacks, tweed jacket, crimson beret. Then, he went down to his basement office and hurriedly tossed notebooks and armloads of papers into the big cardboard box that always stood open at the center of the room.

Laschtog knew he was a lousy writer--lazy, showy, scattered. But he was a talented and prolific note-taker. Ideas came to him easily, and he scribbled them down on whatever surface was at hand before tossing them in the box--torn envelopes, flattened hamburger boxes, donut shop napkins, or pages ripped in haste from the books of lesser thinkers.

Laschtog cleared his cluttered desktop and emptied his drawers, loading more paper into the box, which quickly heaped up and overflowed. He tried pressing the paper down with his hands, frowning. Then, hiking one leg high, he climbed into the box and stomped up and down. When one corner of the box began to tear, he heavily reinforced the seams with duct tape. Then he piled more paper and stomped it down as before.

He taped the bulging box shut and checked his watch. Was there time to jerk off? Surely most condemned men enjoyed a last wank before going to the executioner. Of course, he would have preferred to make love to his wife one last time. The previous night, he'd petted her in bed while giving her the look he reserved for the direst of sexual emergencies.

But she'd just rolled away, moaning in exhaustion. That's how it always was. It was never the right time. Never a time when she wasn't too tired and frazzled. Never a time when making a pass didn't feel selfish and predatory. Laschtog felt the old bitterness rising like acid in his throat.

He frowned at his watch. There wasn't time to jerk off. He had a sliver of hope of surviving the day. But not if he was late.

And maybe he was being too hard on himself, he mused, as he hauled the heavy box to the garage and loaded it in the trunk of his car. His dissertation might be better than he knew. His committee might even recommend it for immediate publication at a prestigious university press. Then Laschtog would be a shoo-in for a professorship and his wife would love him again and he wouldn't have to die.

He drove across the little college town, smiling faintly, imagining how his wife would react to the news--the successful defense, the book contract en route from Oxford or Princeton. He could see her tired face lighting up. He could feel the impact as she leaped up to hug him with her arms and legs, just like a girl in a movie. He could feel her fierce grip, her kisses moistening his face. "Girls! Girls!" she'd cry, letting go with her legs but not her arms. "Come hug your smart daddy! Come hug your Dr. Daddy!"

And then, after the girls fell asleep, he saw her leading him to bed with a naughty gleam in her eye--saw her do for him all she'd done for her dashing banker.

Laschtog blinked hard, dispelling the dream. Adjusting himself through his pants, he saw that he was already walking down the echoing corridors of the English department. He could see the door of the conference room ahead. He planned his entrance. The smile. The outstretched hand. The frank eye contact. Confidence, he told himself, project confidence! But, stepping through the door, he didn't see the three women who comprised his dissertation committee. He only saw one woman, his principal advisor, barricaded behind an oval table.

Laschtog faltered at the threshold. He didn't smile or offer his hand.

"Take a seat, Mr. Laschtog," she said, folding her hands over the thin sheath of papers that was his dissertation.

"Hello Professor…"

Laschtog trailed off. He had a habit of referring to attractive women, in his mind, according to their most suitable porn categories. So he thought of the young-looking department secretary as Barely Legal. His physician was Big Beautiful Woman. And his wife's friend, the one with the black husband, was, interchangeably, Snow Bunny or Black Cock Whore. His neighbor with the new baby was Luscious Lactating Latina. He'd been thinking of his advisor as Big Naturals for so long that he couldn't recall her real name.

"Sit down, please, Mr. Laschtog," Big Naturals said, nodding at the chair. She was a departmental bigshot who'd pioneered a revolutionary hermeneutics of pudendal imagery in Melville's minor poetry. "My colleagues Drs. Jenkins and Wilson won't be joining us today. They've asked me to represent them."

Laschtog sat down.

"I don't know where to start," she said, making a sudden, flustered movement with both hands. "Your proposal promised to extend my findings in a dissertation titled Toward a Radical Hermeneutics of Pudendal Imagery in Moby-Dick. Instead, you've submitted this…this pornography that barely touches Melville, and neglects my work entirely."

She picked up his manuscript as though it were slimy, using the tips of her thumb and forefinger. Laschtog stared at the papers. It wasn't a real dissertation, he knew. Just a thin collage of research notes and autobiographical asides and semi-plagiarisms about pornography, which he'd glued together at the last minute with thick smears of postmodern gobbledygook.

"What were you thinking?" asked Big Naturals. She set the manuscript down and wiped her fingers across the table as if to clean them. "What happened?"

"It's a draft," he said quietly. "I told you I need more time."

"You made Dr. Jenkins furious. Dr. Wilson won't get out of bed."

"I started with Melville, but I guess it got away from me a little."

"A little! The moment you submitted this," she said, wrinkling her nose and pushing the dissertation away with the butt of her pen, "you committed a flagrant act of sexual harassment if not psycho-sexual assault--"

"But I--"

"You simply can't begin a dissertation by jamming a huge albino penis in the reader's face and then following up with a twenty-page meditation on self-fellatio--"

"It's not twenty pages," Laschtog said, burying his flushed cheeks in his hands.

"Plus, this is probably the most misogynistic crap I've ever read."

"No," he said, in a voice like a whisper, "it's against that."

"Say again? I didn't hear you."

But Laschtog couldn't say again, not with his trembling lips. He looked down and shook his head.

"Pudendal imagery? No! This book is obsessed, obsessed, with men and their penises! What about women and our vaginas?"

"I--"

"And then there's your so-called ‘sources' in the porn world. I mean, Max Koch? Really? Dick Hardman? Did you even go to Los Angeles? Did you do any research?"

"Of course I did."

"Well, we googled the heck out of this thing, and we think it's all made up--your research, your interviews."

Laschtog met the challenge of her gaze. "It's one hundred percent honest and true."

"It's not," she said, staring back.

"Well," Laschtog said, dropping his eyes in his lap, "it is in the ways that count."

"Okay," she said, pinning his dissertation down with her pen and sliding it around in circles, "you were supposed to be writing a dissertation on Moby-Dick, is this not so?"

"Yes."

"For fulfillment of your PhD in English literature, correct?"

"Yes. And I still can if you'll give me--"

"More time? You've had so many chances, so many extensions. Do you know you're the longest-tenured PhD candidate in university history? I looked it up."

Laschtog looked at her helplessly. Big Naturals took off her glasses and stared at the ceiling for a while, then rested her elbows on the table and gave him a sad smile. She looked at Laschtog with her big, soft, tired eyes and spoke in gentler tones. Laschtog pretended to listen, nodding his head submissively. But he was secretly mulling a new research question: Was there a reliable correlation between big breasts and a gentle, nurturing disposition? Or was Big Naturals an outlier?

Finding out would be a simple two-step procedure. First, he'd have to give personality tests to a big sample of ladies to locate them on a continuum between nice and mean. Second, he'd need to carefully--oh, so carefully--measure those same ladies using pre-sized cups that he'd press one after the next to their warm, springy orbs. Then he--

"Up here, Mr. Laschtog! I'm up here!" Big Naturals was snapping her fingers with one hand while buttoning her blouse tight to her throat with the other.

Laschtog looked up at her, red-faced. "I wasn't," he said, covertly adjusting himself through his pants. "I mean...What?"

"Listen to me," she said with a sigh. "I said this is a dissertation defense. So defend yourself. As simply as you can, tell me what you think you've written?"

Laschtog's heart began to pound. He saw she didn't want to destroy him. She was a big-hearted, big-breasted woman who wanted a reason to show him mercy. Laschtog's pulse raced harder. This was the climax of his life. His last hope of getting home to his family.

​"Well," he said, taking off his beret and clearing his throat, "I guess I'd say that my dissertation is just one man's ejaculation of sexual confusion and pain. But it's also a meditation on the tyranny of biology and suchlike. And masturbation. And women. And a survey of the forty-thousand-year history of pornography. And, of course, Herman Melville's whole pornographic gestalt as conveyed through previously undiscovered subtexts of Moby-Dick, as well as works of indisputable smut like Typee and Pierre. But then there's the kung fu. And the hero worship. Maybe I'd say mine is a book about kung fu and hero worship. But really, everything's crammed into it. Friendship, for example. And true love. But keep in mind that my work is incredibly puritanical too. Most readers will miss that. It's a viciously puritanical screed. Have you ever read Cotton Mather or something like that? Above all, I'd compare it to something like that."

Laschtog had been staring down as he spoke, balling and unbaling the red beret. But now, he glanced up to see how he was doing. He hoped Big Naturals would be as impressed by his eloquence as his ambition. He hoped her cheeks would be flushing, her bosom heaving. After all, nothing made your average bluestocking hotter than an intellectual alpha male.

But Big Naturals' cheeks looked paler than usual, and her bosom lay dead still, like she'd stopped breathing altogether. She was blinking at him rapidly with her mouth held open. She leaned across the table to pass over his official letter of dismissal for reasons of sexual misconduct, academic fraud, and gross scholarly incompetence.

He scanned the letter, nodding while she spoke. "This is mercy," she said in a soothing, motherly tone. "All the years of work have gotten you nowhere. You were serving a life sentence. I'm commuting it. Run out of here laughing. Pick up a pizza for your kids on the way home. Drink champagne with your wife. Everything is possible now that you're free."

He held the letter and stared at it, shaking his head softly. It was a death sentence, not a commutation. Pushing forty, Laschtog had been in school since he was five. He was hopelessly institutionalized. He'd never survive the real world.

She walked around the table and gave his shoulder a consoling pat. Laschtog turned and saw Big Naturals' big naturals were in his face. They smelled of baby powder, and he felt an irresistible need to bury his face in her cleavage and sob out his pain.

He closed his eyes and leaned in. But Big Naturals was already backing away, wiping the hand that had touched him on the hip of her skirt.

"Of course, I do get it, Mr. Laschtog," she said, pausing in the open doorway. "I know what you were going for. But the days of white male writers swaggering around bow-legged, shaking their dicks at the world--you know, your Mailers and your Bukowskis and your Roths--that's over. You're too late, Laschtog. Way too late."

He drove to the hardware store in a daze and purchased two bottles of Drano. Then he headed out toward the state park, toward the trees and the cliffs. Along the way, he pulled up behind the local Waffle House, where--straining and wheezing and cursing--he yanked his box out of the trunk and heaved it into the dumpster. Then, he rested his chin on the slimy metal rim and stared down at his precious box amid eggshells, toast triangles, and soiled newspapers. He tilted his head forward and shook it softly until the beret fell. He reached for a newspaper and spread it over his beret and box like a shroud.

He threw his car into gear and then straight back into park. Surely a condemned man deserved a last good meal, he thought.

Inside, he ordered chocolate chip waffles, two patty melts, cheesy hashbrowns, French fries, and a chocolate shake. But when the girl brought his food, he stared at it without appetite. And when she walked away, he stared at her plump bottom, also without appetite.

He would be dead soon. Imagining his family with the kindly banker didn't bother him. They'd all be better off. And it didn't bother him to imagine the Drano eating through his guts. The entire world would be better off.

What bothered him was the thought of his box o'dreams rotting away forever in some putrid landfill. Big Naturals was right. His dissertation was chaotic in its design, juvenile in its humor, grotesque in its carnality. But the ideas in the box were a different matter. The box held the raw material for a masterpiece, and no one would ever convince him otherwise.

Laschtog slumped lower and lower until his gloomy eyes were on level with his plates. Then an idea drew him up straight in his seat. He couldn't save himself, but he might yet save his box. Nodding slowly, he dunked a fry in his shake and nibbled it.

He just needed to duck into the post office before killing himself. He'd mail his box to some great sociologist at Harvard or a sexologist at Yale. Surely there was a precedent for this, he thought, as he stirred a fistful of fries in his shake and folded them into his mouth. There must have been a scientist who died after conducting a grand experiment. And then a different scientist chanced across his data and whipped it into publishable form.

Laschtog devoured his meal in a greedy rush, then hurried out to his car. He sat in the driver's seat with a pen in his fist and a napkin on his knee. Tonguing syrup from the corner of his mouth, he began writing, leaving the salutation temporarily blank.

Dear Professor _______,

After I send you this box, I'm going to the woods. I'm going to lean out over a cliff's edge while simultaneously a) chugging Drano and b) busting myself in the head with a big, sharp rock.

This box holds the life's work of the late J. Nathan Laschtog, ABD. No one has yet written THE GREAT BOOK ON PORN--its Principia, its Decline and Fall, its Moby-Dick. But I've spent my career taking notes and gathering reflections for a definitive multi-volume dissertation on porn's historical, artistic, scientific, and ethical dimensions.

You are authorized to organize these papers and claim editorial credit for publications that ensue.

Please direct all posthumous awards and royalty checks to my widow, Wendy Laschtog.

Sincerely,

Joe Nathan Laschtog, ABD

Laschtog glanced over the note, smiling. He was imagining the article that would appear in the New York Times a few years hence:

TRAGIC YOUNG GENIUS EFFECTIVELY ASSASSINATED BY NARROW-MINDED DISSERTATION COMMITTEE

He smiled softly as he imagined Big Naturals reading the article with one hand clapped to her horrified mouth. He could see his wife struggling to read the article through a blur of tears, could see her dreamboat banker looking up from the sports page to ask, "What's wrong, hon?"

Laschtog's smile collapsed, and tears flowed down his cheeks. He knew no one would ever dig through his box, much less some renowned scholar. The box didn't belong at Harvard or Yale. The box was already where it belonged: in the dumpster with the filth.

Shaking his head softly, Laschtog crumpled the tear-stained note he'd written into a damp little ball. He tossed it through his open window as he exited the Waffle House parking lot. "Swish," he predicted as the wadded napkin left his hand. But Laschtog had never made a swish in his life. As the car accelerated away, the napkin hit the lip of the dumpster and fell to the pavement.

When he reached the state park, he pulled off on a deserted road and walked toward the woods with the Drano bottles in one hand. As he neared the tree line, he crouched down and scooped up the first rock he saw. It was perfect. One side of the rock fit snugly in his palm. The other side was edged like a tomahawk. He disappeared into the forest and headed for the cliffs.

Back at the Waffle House, Laschtog's wadded note was wandering around the dumpster, pushed here and there by gentle gusts. Alongside the napkin, a receipt for a bottle of Jergens and some Kleenex hovered and swirled in the wind. Long ago, Laschtog had sat in his car outside a local drugstore, scribbling lines about the origins of pornography on the back of the receipt. By chance or fate, the receipt worked free of Laschtog's box, fluttered to the pavement, and eventually made its way--along with the entire contents of his box---onto an obscene website called thewhacker.com.