A ball rolled across the floor like a baseball rolling across a diamond. The whole thing was pregnant with meaning. The curvilinear path decanted volumes about the Zimbickis’ Swiffer habits, the damned degradation in rubber quality since that South American brouhaha and, most of all, gravity. In this droll commonplace, you were supposed to infer that, even at a young age, the two Zimbicki boys were the center of the universe.
At least they were referred to as “the boys.” Carmello and Treadlow were, in fact, sexless. This was a big giveaway that they were twin God figures. Their parents repeatedly told the boys about their symbolic divinity. As emeritus professors of humanities they had every right to indulge in this ridiculous analysis. Dads who were high-school sixth men got to be hoops coaches. Moms who had one or two one-or-two-night-stands in college got to buy their little girls apple-bottom jeans. It was only fair that the Zimbickis apotheosized their sexless tikes.
The Zimbickis would spirit the duo away to less-than-magical conferences. Abandoning Carmello and Treadlow on some coffee-stained patch of carpet that, ipso facto, was near the refreshment table, the parents fiercely cast aspersions on Deans, TAs, non-professional authors, and wayward audience members. “Orientalist prick”, “naive Platonist”, “cynical anti-realist.” The Zimbickis had been theatre professors — though most of their less meager wages came from writing professional dramatis personae for the in-vogue playwrights of the day — and they believed that qualified them to lecture on everything. “Art imitates life,” Mrs. Zimbicki would drawl — accenting her speech for no reason at all — “an’ thus” — really going full-belle with her pro-NUN-ciahtion — “gives the devotee of art special license to speak on life.”
During these extended conflicts, better parents would have given their god-children games to play or books to read. The Zimbickis felt that toys were beneath their children and they could never agree on whether their children were more Brecht or Artaud. By default, then, Carmello and Treadlow were given The Sports Almanac to peruse. They grew up with a keen appreciation for the earned-run average and an ever keener distaste for academics. Of course, the Zimbickis never enrolled their children in elementary school — “it’s elementary, my dear” — and instead went full-speed on their own curriculum.
Quite predictably, little Treadlow and Carmello matured into spermarchy with an entirely novel conception of simple arithmetic and English. “That’s very colonial of you,” Carmello would quip as Treadlow would drone on about his preference for 1’s over 0’s.
“There’s something of a beautiful unity to the 1, wouln’tyasay?”
“Oh bothertsktsk, whereas single-ness is parasitical on being, the 0 underwrites ooven the emptiest of presentations. Plesk?”
“Fornightetnly, you is wrong-o. Gilbert Arenas famously deduced the very frailty of the null ordinal.”
And so they would prattle. It was unclear if their parents had died yet. “With meatloaf this bad, I’d lean toward killing the cook,” Mr. Zimbicki used to write to his friends as a laugh track boomed. Such letters led most of the community to believe one parent had probably off-ed the other and then off-ed him or herself leaving the world the saddest kind of orphan, a sexless orphan besotted with the guilt and product of a thousand and one nights of nocturnal emissions. They weren’t boys but, for literary purposes, they maintained erections and, for shock-value, they harbored stores of semen. And so it goes with supporting characters.
In year thirteen of our lords, they popped their first wood. Now, keep in mind, they had no sex organs. To be precise, nothing happened — or, perhaps, nothing happened (six of one, two dozen of the other). Either way, it was a deeply foundational experience. The event struck in the middle of Eastern American geography. Carmello and Treadlow were halfway through naming the barrier islands of North Carolina. One Hatteras away from Ocracoke, the seminal event tore through the pickup-sticks-and-siding modular classroom.
No one really knows what happened next. Some say it was nothing like the accounts. Some say it was like all of the accounts. A small — yet noted for purposes of philological rigor — contingent argue that the event was the various accounts, an ideal expressed at the intersection and union of the various authors’ letters and journals. We don’t know what they are talking about.
“Chrissie’s note,” one of the few non-apocryphal texts to have been written by a witness, adumbrates the erection duet.
Hey girl,
today at lunch i was all wtf, yo? Haha. You know … slut? there wass (sic) like no way i was going to give branson a raspberry brumfest in front of ms. magdeline. I mean im not a hoe. ha. well i mean, i am a ho but not a hoe. haha. like the garden tool. home depot what what. hahahahaha. remember that time that we all dressed up like slutty bucket mascot homer and pretended to make out with dat phat effijee(sic) of gangis can (sic). Home Despot woot woot. more like ho depot! Ha. Jeez, murta, maybe i should go into comedy like that sandra bernhard slut. king of comedy chugga chugga. then i could let horatio smash my nose and noone (sic) would notice. rofl.
so wut are u doing this weekend. im going to portia’s party. i heard the tinsley boys were cumming and were looking for some fine trim ’n’ that’s me, bitch. ha don’t know how trim my trim is but, shit, its like that rihanna jam “at least its not crown moulding” haha. yeah i went there, dick bucket. lol. god i have to finish this paper on lady gaga and badgers or someshit. i mean my mom keeps badgering me to finish that paper on the gag law, what a lady. anyway. so bored ahh. i could tear my eyes out. teach keeps blabbing about james fennimore cooper and all i wanna do is hash some bluntz. haha. no i don’t smoke but you know that, scrote-boat.
holy shit, are the zimbicki boys hard? hard of hearing perhaps? they can’t hear a thing. helloooo. dicks. haha just like me always saying hi to dicks. what can i say, i know a lot of richards. uh duh, my family is teutonic, whore. wuld (sic) you bang Treadlow. he’s cute. james franco-james say they dont have peeners. james franco-james says that he saw dem showering once in the group gym showers – no homo – and it was like haha nothing there haha or everything. shit. that’s deep. haah you’re deep slut. dickstick! haha check your oil with a dickstick. meineke boyzzzzz (sic).
The value of this tract, though admittedly vague, is inexpressible. Neglected until recently by Zimbicki scholars, “Chrissie’s Note” is rich with contextual language and the sexual angst that dominates Carmello and Treadlow’s life story. Located centrally in a constellation of slutty tweens, pop-culture detritus and creative abbreviation, the Zimbicki boys were — as their mom and pops liked to say — “just a hastily composed dialectic away from Becumming.” Poor kids.
Though the tone of “Chrissie’s Note” is light, it falls darkly under the penumbra of a competing text. Composed simultaneously, “What the teacher saw” is a heartbreaking indictment of the Zimbicki’s virility.
Just give up, Doctor Faustus. Ha! Little use that fancy degree from THE State U of College — you know, like those arthritic Left Guards and Cornerbacks say when they are introducing themselves on the TV — little use it is now. I’m stuck teaching middle-school pricks that Africa is still not a country. You know, when I was their age, I won the Scripps-Howard Spelling Bee. Right on ESPN-3. There were a shitload of crying Indians there. Sanjays and Priyas just leaking tears. L-A-C-H-R-Y-M-A-L . You still got it, you old fox.
Don’t like ads? Become a supporter and enjoy The Good Men Project ad freeI pulled down ten grand for that little dance. It takes me what, 3 months to make that now? At least that pipe-smoking dean — ceci n’est pas un professeur — was impressed. A full ride to Princeton or, you know, that one with Matt Damon. MIT, maybe? How do you like them apples. Went to Cornell instead. Da bears? Da big red! The mascot should really be a Elliott Smith type rolling down a gorge. “Presenting, THE Cornell Ragdolls.” The crowd alights, chubby bodies heave and crack the paint stretched over their twelve or fifteen semesters of five-dollar pizza pies and pony-kegs of Keystone Light. “You just gotta love the way those cheerleaders feign their deaths. Now that’s what I call spirit.”
Marched right out of graduation. Didn’t even tape a dirty word to my mortar board. The classics department white-outed Greek panegyrics to something or another on their hats. They’re all unemployed for sure. They must cruise my Facefriendshare and say, “Ol’ Faustus rightly knew.” They’d marvel at the Scrooge McDuck-like riches of the bros who had the good sense to go into actuarial sports. Hell, Fats “Pantshead” McAnderson got a job doing moneyball for the Pittsburgh Pirates. Got ‘em to hire the dead body of Lou Gehrig. Traded him to Merck for pharmaceutical research, shorted the Bucco’s stock and WHAM, Fats is set up in a Murray Hill suite. His friends can’t believe his luck, “How does he keep winning open bar night?” A regular miracle.
Well, at least I have my dignity. And this god-almighty red pen. Jesus, the fear this red stroke inspires. Mainly in the asian kids. Tiger moms and stuff — “whatnot” I should say. I have been sitting with my head down scribbling in this Moleskine that makes me think I’m an expat of somewhere else and let’s see what I’ve missed. Oh, wonderful. Two of my students, twins in fact, seem to have “popped wood,” as everyone is saying nowadays. I don’t even know what that means. I got a “special services needed” slip at the beginning of the year because these pricks didn’t have the equipment to pee in the boys’ room and now this … shocking turn of events. Hold the presses. Every day, I wish they had a midget brother so I could pull them aside and say, “Cards on the table boys, the joke’s up. The people want Two-and-a-Half Men, not two-and-a-half sexless freaks.” Oh, that would kill at the comedy club. Jon Crier would pop-up, “I haven’t stopped weeping since I had to pay a script doctor to give me a handy after my wife left me for a piece of gravel and then Ashton Kutcher banged my wife, the aforementioned pebble, Charlie Sheen, and a Victoria’s Secret Angel. He made me watch and afterwards my son hanged himself. Of course he was too fat and he broke a structural beam. The house collapsed and BOINK I had a huuuuuuuge bump on my head.” Comedy, nowadays.
Whereof we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence.
