BIKERS AND BITCHESFearful Protestant, Friendly Pediatrician
The cover drawing of Bikers and Bitches in Lester Krup’s grey arboretum of porn showed a handsome young man having his neck broken with a fist-thick chain wielded by a thug in biker armor.
Not the volume Jimmy would have chosen of his own free will, but he had given himself to random selection as his guide-in-exile.
Bikers and Bitches opened with promise, an orgy on acid at Playland-at-the-Beach, Hells Angels dangling their women off the rollercoaster, fucking them upside down. Then Meathook’s old lady knocks his Harley off the wall, scratching the handpainted gas tank, so Meathook and his men fistfuck her till she bleeds to death and hang her body in the House of Mirrors for the early morning crowd.
The Bitches of the title turns out to be a leather bar in Sausalito. In Chapter Two, the bikers attack Bruce and Mike, Bitches patrons, who are holding hands in the parking lot across the street. They kill Bruce by swinging him by the feet and dashing his skull against a parking meter. They stab Mike, but the cops arrive before they can fillet him alive. Mike swears revenge. In Chapter Three, Mike and his friends string piano wire across a dirt road on Mt. Tamalpais where the Bikers are having another orgy. When the Bikers roar out after being baited as “faggots” over Mike’s bullhorn, the lead Biker (not Meathook, who murdered Bruce) and his old lady are beheaded by the piano wire. In Chapter Four, the Bikers launch a wholesale attack on The Bitches, the police arrive, shoot one homosexual and one Biker; Bikers and Bitches are killed, maimed, and injured in equal proportions, their bones shattered, heads smashed like gourds, livers pureed, hearts blown out, eyes pulped, and a nose severed.
Jimmy set the book aside on the couch in the alcove, wiped a veil of sweat from his eyes, wished for an earthquake, sirens, pounding on the door, any action cruel and real to interrupt this action cruel and fictional. He had braved De Sade, who wrote 120 Days of Sodom in the Bastille to overcome feelings of boredom and anger, feelings now shared by Jimmy and Jimmy.
Jimmy, a philosopher who believed nothing should compromise the austere independence of the will, lived in one of those new-fangled dimensions rolled into infinitesimal strings. Other than that, he was Jimmy.
— Why not? asked Jimmy. Pleasure is intrinsically good.
— Why not what?
— You know.
— Why not keep on reading, you mean, said Jimmy, but pleasure is not intrinsically good.
— It’s intrinsically bad? said Jimmy.
— Depends.
— On what?
— There are evil pleasures: Meathook beating his old lady to death for fun.
— He beat her out of rage.
— The author means it for fun or no one would read it.
— Reading a book and killing your girlfriend are not the same, said Jimmy. Did you get pleasure?
— No.
— Not even a liddlewiddle, Jimmy?
— No.
— But a reader could.
— A sadist.
— No one suffers from his reading.
— Me. I suffer.
— Later for you. This sadist who’s reading the book you’re reading. He gets pleasure?
— Stipulated.
— And no one suffers.
— From the act of a sadist reading a book?
— Yes.
— No.
— Nor, said Jimmy, do the sadist’s wife, children, family, and friends suffer.
— Unless the book stimulates him to torture them.
— Not while he’s reading.
— Just during the act of reading? Isolated from what it may cause him to do?
— Only pleasure derives.
— An evil pleasure.
— Oh, that is so Webster Groves, Missouri, said Jimmy. What is an evil pleasure?
— Pleasure gained by doing harm to others.
— Such as breaking an Oakland policeman’s arm.
— I was saving The Girl, said Jimmy.
— You took pleasure in your act?
— Yes.
— Hitting the cop.
— Saving the girl.
— Hitting the cop.
— Ok, I got pleasure.
— That would be one of those evil pleasures.
— A righteous pleasure.
— From the suffering of another.
— From stopping him from causing her to suffer.
— Which was giving him pleasure.
— My hitting the cop caused him to suffer, which gave me pleasure, which put a stop to his cruelty and her suffering. Therefore: one pleasure (mine) plus one pain (his) minus one evil pleasure (his) minus one pain (hers) plus one pleasure (hers, at being released). That’s umm, big P pleasure, small p pain, which makes P+p-P-p+P = P. Result: pleasure.
— What a calculating moralist you are.
— There can be a moral purpose in using pain to stop pain. Punishment, self-defense.
— Never did I think I would hear Jimmy O’Shea, radical leftist, argue the calling of the prison warden, said Jimmy.
Jimmy slipped a grocery receipt between the pages of Bikers and Bitches, went to the fridge for a Coke.
— You got me wrong, he said. At this moment, Martin Luther King is causing someone pain. Somewhere racists are in anguish, the joy of lynching denied them, their manly pride trampled. And Martin’s glad. I’m glad. You’re glad.
— So is Meathook. Glad the bitch is dead.
— Pain and punishment are not the same.
— I believe, said Jimmy, it’s pleasure and punishment that are not the same.
— The pleasure I got from hitting the cop wasn’t from the pain I gave him, but from the punishment I administered.
Jimmy, who had no choice but go to the refrigerator and share the Coke, delivered the following parable:
— A pediatrician, a gentle, softspoken man has practiced for many years in a small town, say in Missouri. He is the best of doctors, his treatment the finest, his advice clear and capable, his knowledge of childhood diseases encyclopaedic. The parents in his town, we’ll call it Webster Groves, clamor for his attention, spend years on his waiting list, consider themselves lucky to gain his treatment for their children. They do not know that when he gives the little ones their shots, their regimen of inoculations, their boosters, as the needle penetrates the pink flesh (and no doctor can administer a shot without some fear and pain), this pediatrician almost comes. His cock swells at their terror, his heart races, the taste on his tongue is of pure sex, the more intensely erotic the more the toddlers cry and beg, the more they blubber with tears, wince, tremble. He never deliberately increases their suffering, in fact, children so lucky as to receive his services recall that the other doctors in town caused them far more pain and felt terrible about it. The hurt this doctor causes is the minimum possible, half (since according to you we can add and subtract pains) what they suffered under their former pediatricians. At night, alone in his parlor, he jerks off to the memory, reenacts in his mind their screams, the wide eyes, the quiver of skin as the needle first indents, then breaks, then penetrates their innocence. His pleasures are greater than anyone in town. He is Webster Groves’ best doctor. He may have been yours. Mine.
— You’re sick, said Jimmy.
— I’m a philosopher. Would the world be a better place if he was callous, or worse yet, like the other doctors, miserable at the pain he is forced to inflict on the children in his care? Doesn’t his pleasure lessen the sum total of pain in the world?
— There is no sum total of pain in the world.
— You were doing the sums.
— This is perverse.
— Isn’t it? Causes are not effects, James. Pain is pain, however it may come to be, pleasure is pleasure, however it is got.
Jimmy and Jimmy looked over at the book on the sofa armrest.
— Well? said Jimmy.
The book lay on red fabric, nylon and naugahyde.
— Well what?
Now the book throbbed in Jimmy’s lap.
— You want to know how bad it gets.
— I do.
— Suppose it turns you on?
— Risk I have to take.
— Are you afraid?
— Deeply.
— It’s only a book.
Jimmy turned the page.
— Come in, Jimmy. Come in, you fearful protestant, said the book.
......
Moral : there is no practical problem a philosopher can solve.
Babyass and Meathook
Jimmy cheated, skipped to the final chapter, which concluded on a note of personal redemption. Mike and his pals Percy and Adam go camping in the woods near Stinson Beach and are engaged in vigorous greased and naked activities before the campfire when who should roar up on their Harleys but Meathook and BabyAss, who murdered Bruce in Chapter One, and their sidekick Cuntwipe, a new member of the gang.
Percy made a break for the woods but Cuntwipe was on him, whirling the 10 gauge chain which snapped like a whip around Percy’s neck, yanking his head to the left, cracking the third cervical vertebra. The nude man went down on his back, arms feebly warding off Cuntwipe’s steeltoed boots as he snapped the ribs on Percy’s right side.
“Get to the car,” Mike yelled, “Get to the car!” But Adam had been knocked to his knees. Mike grabbed a branch from the fire, jabbed it desperately at the two men kicking Adam, by sheer luck stabbing BabyAss in the right eye. The biker roared. Blood flamed from his eye socket where the shaft of burning wood had stuck.
“What the fuck’s wrong with you?” Meathook yelled.
“The faggot took my eye out,” screamed BabyAss.
There was a terrible silence, except for the crunching to Mike’s left, where Percy lay naked, his beautiful chest crushed by Cuntwipe’s savage kicks. Mike heard teeth smash, knew it was over for his friend.
“Kill the motherfucker,” bellowed Meathook, pulling the implement for which he was named from his studded leather belt.
But they had overlooked Adam, who seized Meathook’s boot as the biker leaped over him, clung to him, brought him down into the campfire flames. BabyAss, half blind, staggered toward Mike, but the naked man was too fast, yanked open the door of the Volvo, slid across the seats, and came up with the .357 Magnum.
Meathook, howling with pain, dragged Adam with him through the fire, stood up as Mike came out with the gun in both hands and brought him down with a single shot, the bullet entering Meathook’s left cheek, driving upward into the skull, smashing through the rear of the left orbital cavity. The slug penetrated the front of Meathook’s brain close to the midline, spewing tissue from the orbital frontal region out the top of his head in a flume of red and grey.
A perfect frontal lobotomy.
At the sound of the shot, Cuntwipe and BabyAss froze. Mike leveled the Magnum on them while he helped Adam, seared but alive, to his feet and into the back seat of the Volvo. BabyAss started to cry.
“Take off your clothes,” Mike ordered.
“Come on, man, be a pal,” said Cuntwipe, “We were just having fun, shit.”
Mike had intended to kill them, but he couldn’t. It was over. All that remained was a higher vengeance.
“Lie down on your back, or I’ll blow your dick off.”
“Sure, man,” said Cuntwipe. He laid his hairy ass on the leaves. “I don’t have nothin personal against faggots, you understand.”
“I understand,” said Mike. “Now you,” to BabyAss, “lie on top of him.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Die then.”
“Ok, ok.”
“Not that way,” said Mike, “Sixty-nine.”
“Oh shit no.”
The two bikers lay naked, quivering, their faces in each other’s crotches. Mike tied them, arms to legs, legs to arms, with the chains and jumper cables from his car.
“Now, suck!” he ordered.
“I can’t, I can’t,” cried Cuntwipe. At the first touch of Cuntwipe’s cock to his lips, BabyAss threw up. Mike pushed the gun against his cheek. They sucked.
Mike backed toward the car where Adam moaned in pain. By the light of Meathook’s burning corpse Mike saw the two bikers bobbing awkwardly, stiff cocks pumping at each others’ puffed and bloody lips. They were into it; they couldn’t stop.
He slid behind the wheel of the Volvo.
“It’s ok, Adam,” he said, “It’s ok, now.”
— Hey, philosopher, said Jimmy. Hey, Beyond Good and Evil, what was that about, why did I read it, what did that prove? Brutal, stupid deaths. Bill Montenegro.
— Ah, said Jimmy.
— A trick of the light. It never happened. He can't be dead.
— Something happened.
— But not that.
He saw he’d cracked the spine of the book. Now Krup’ll know I read it. He nudged it back in place with the toe of his boot, wiped his palms on his chinos.
An hour later, Cathy arrived to report that Beverly Absalom had brokered a deal with the Oakland DA for Jimmy’s voluntary surrender, arrest, and immediate bail, a press conference was scheduled on the steps of the Alameda County Court House, bail had been raised, and all was well.
She rang the doorbell to Lester Krup’s apartment four times: one long, two short, one long, their prearranged signal. Placed one above another, the rings produced the trigram Li from the I CHING:
the symbol for Fire, an auspicious omen, though the commentary does state It is best to kill the leaders and take captive the followers. No blame. And line 4 says, Your darkest fears will have to be faced.
“You look pale,” said Cathy. He was hugging her too hard, hurt her.
They spent the rest of the afternoon at home in bed dissolving, shred by shard by flake .