The Return of Nasdaqq

I, Nasdaqq, have been gone a long time. I, Nasdaqq, never went away. Maybe I haven't been gone a long time? Maybe I've been here all the while? You said I "impersonated" (your word!) an impoverished, indigent Venezuelan coffee laborer in my spiritual autobiography I Am the Bastard Daughter of Juan Valdez, which was a best-seller, and which won all kinds of awards before I was "found out," but you hypocrites, you blood-drinkers, every word was true; deep in the bowels of my American heart, I, Nasdaqq, truly am Juanita Valdez, but you can never realize this, you citadel of publishing, you wolves craving pages dripping with my guts, you take me in and pay me your thirty pieces of silver on a platter then cast me out from your prize-lined offices again onto the dark, glittery streets of your magic island, coursing with the vital fluids of all the corpses of the true souls whose spiritual essences you've sucked dry and vomited out again, and I, Nasdaqq, righteous American, champion of the indigenous, gypsy shaman of the forsaken, I see the words you've stolen from me rising up like skyscrapers of hypocrisy! I am alone, I am the alien, cast out, I never really went away! You say I live in East Hapsburg, West Virginia. You say I am a grade-school math teacher named Bob Shlep. You say that I used to write recently "discovered" lesbian erotica from the Roaring Twenties under the "pseudonym" (your word, always your words!) G. Spot Fuzzmerkin. And you claim (you label, you libel!) that once I, Bob Shlep, was found out and exposed as Fuzzmerkin, that then I started writing "fake" autobiographical novels of the high-flying world of the New Delhi stock market with the nom de plume Nasdaqq, and that when I was found out and exposed yet again, I had to retreat back to East Hapsburg, ridiculed by all you fancy New York publishing snobs, but you've played into my hands all along, don't you see? Maybe I wanted you to find me out! And who says Bob Shlep is not really, truly Nasdaqq on the inside? Is it you, you thieves, you original pornographers, you exploiters? I just want to be left alone here, teaching third graders in East Hapsburg! You think I didn't want you to know that Bob Shlep was G. Spot Fuzzmerkin, was Nasdaqq, was Juanita Valdez all along? I wear many masks, I encapsulate multitudes, I tell the truth with the lies you guzzle like wine, I am not what's killing publishing, I am publishing's bitch, I am your willing servant! Get off my lawn! I'm calling the district attorney! Publish me! Stop ignoring me! Send me money via PayPal! You call all my charities "fake," but who are you to say that I am not a home for lactose-intolerant orphans? Who died and left you the one to judge me, to say that I am not a safe house for exiled Bangladeshi Buddhist nuns? I spout multitudinous voices of greatness! I am a secret symphony, strumming orchestras of marginalized voices in the wilderness of a suburban West Virginia public school! Who knows what other ways I've tricked you that you do not know? What books of mine have you published that you do not realize sprang from my greatness? What would you say if I told you that for a quick buck I secretly ghostwrote that Lovely Bones piece of pop trash in my off hours? That I've pulled off any number of magnificently undiscovered international literary hoaxes that may or may not rhyme with "Smadie Zith" and "Lhumpa Jahiri" and "Sonathan Fafran Joer"? That I went on book tour pretending to be a twenty-five-year-old girl and you bought it, shall we say, hook, Marisha, and Pessl? (My wig wasn't even very good, but you wanted me, you needed me, you couldn't get enough of me!) I am voluminous, I am holy scripture, I am Abstract Expressionism, I am marginalia, I am anathema, I am a gay Portuguese filmmaker, I am a blind Turkish watchmaker, I am the great ignored American genius of our time, I am grading a pop quiz on long division at my kitchen table! Can you stomach me, you so-called literati, you printing-press slavemongers, you elitist ivory-tower climbers, you brilliance-ignorers? Give me money, take your television camera crews away, come and get me! Do you want Juanita again? You liked the follow up, My Bones Are Made of Dog Hair and Coffee Grounds, didn't you? You liked how well it sold, you literary bitch whore, right? Do you want G. Spot? Oh, you wanted G. Spot, you adored The Wet Gatsby, and you loved Tender Is the Crotch just as much, oh yes, you hob-nobbers, you bottom-line bastards? You've had your fill of Nasdaqq? Weren't you pleased with the ecstatic reviews for The Ganges Runs Through the Trading Floor of My Dreams? Didn't Bright Lights, Bodhisattva sell well enough for you? You "reject" me now, don't you, don't you know I cannot be rejected, I get up again as soon as I get knocked down? Do you want me to be taller? Shorter? More transgender? More ethnic? More abused? What is it this season? Who do you want me to be who I am not already? I knock on your door, I scratch your windows, I haunt your inbox, I lurk in your mailroom, I infect your slush pile, I sleep in your bindery, I am a leech in the martini at your midtown university club, I am the fly buzzing in your ear at your posh cocktail party in the Hamptons, I lounge in your doorway, I sleep in your car, I want you, go away! I am Bob, Nasdaqq, Juanita, G. Spot, and so many more, and you "caught" me, you think you caught me, you think I didn't want to be caught, don't you want to catch me again? I am Nasdaqq (you love me!) and I always have been (you despise me!) and I am an Amazon of the bile and bowels of the desperate and I am the green-hued chest and feathery soul of a fluttering unborn nationality, I am a legitimate charitable institution, and West Virginia doesn't pay its math teachers very well, I am old as the hills, I have just been born, I am being born all the time; don't you want me? Get away from my double wide! I hate you! I need you! Publish me! Publish me more! Harder! Faster! I am Nasdaqq! Won't you let me be?

The First Lady

I admit for the record – though I’m not sure that there is such a thing or that this note would constitute an entry in it if one were to exist – that the other night, the night of the President’s long-delayed announcement of his “new strategy for success in Iraq” I dreamt of having a sexual relationship with his wife, the first lady. It was an innocent sort of affair, if affairs can be called innocent: we were in a log cabin, under the covers, while her aid waited on the other side of the door. For a woman old enough to be my mother, the first lady was remarkably child-like. Her innocence allowed her to do what would make less innocent people cringe. I don’t mean that we didn’t anything especially awful; there wasn’t any sex, in the strict Clintonian sense of the word; we were only cuddling under the sheets, but this was extramarital cuddling, with someone who did not vote for her husband and did not respect him, and it was not conduct that would be considered fitting for a woman of her stature. For me, it was embarrassing, even at the time. Yet I’m not sure if this qualifies as an erotic dream. It was more of a sleepover party. At one point when we were cuddling, I remember, she said, “I think I need to masturbate now,” a sentence which one rarely hears these days, even in the most intimate situations, and it embarrassed me, as it would naturally, and I didn’t know what to do. I think I encouraged her to express herself, I don’t know, I know I didn’t stop her. I also know that she wasn’t naked, she may have been in her underwear, she may just have taken off her pants and shoes to cuddle more comfortably, I don’t remember, but I remember thinking that she was going at it, so to speak, an act I have no visual memory for, as if this were the first time, like the song “she’s a maniac, maniac, on the dance floor, and she’s dancing like she’s never danced before” that always stuck in my head when I was younger because it suggested two opposite interpretations. That was the last thing I remember clearly from the dream. I think we came out of the bedroom in the foyer where her aid, a young girl with brown wavy hair and an air of Washington professionalism, was waiting with a clipboard. I greeted her with an embarrassed grin, as if only she and I understood what her boss had just done, and, for that reason, neither of us could actually acknowledge it. The first lady, still oblivious, gave me a quick, girlish hug, saying something about how she hoped we would “play together” again soon, and they drove off in a black SUV with tinted windows. I must have been left in the log cabin alone then, though I have no memory of this.

Howling

A Japanese television crew travelled to Utah in search of a lone wolf. They carried with them a special device called a Bowlingual which was designed to translate the sounds of barking dogs into recognizable words. When the television crew finally found the lone wolf and recorded its cry, the translation the Bowlingual offered was surprising: the Wolf was not howling to mark its territory or to call down the moon, it was asking, "What should I do now?" I have been asking myself that question for the past month. Like the wolf, I am getting used to the world's silent response.

The Perfumed Garden

A library, no matter how apparently sterile or stolidly institutional, is a dangerous place to go to escape distraction. Consider The Perfumed Garden of Cheikh Nefzaoui found on the shelf in a university library, a text originally translated into French in 1850 by a French soldier based in Algeria, and then translated into English by Sir Richard Francis Burton. Plucked off a shelf of Hindu philosophy, The Perfumed Garden warns its unsuspecting readers that "the coitus of old women is a venomous meal." Anyone looking for light reading will find no shortage of a metaphor ingenuity. Especially in Chapter XIII:

Know, O Vizir (to whom God be good!) that man’s member has different names, such as:

El dekeur, the virile member;

El kamera, the penis;

El air, the member for generation;

El hamama, the pigeon;

El teunnana, the tinkler;

El heurmak, the indomitable;

El ahlil, the liberator;

El zeub, the verge;

El hammache, the exciter;

El zodamme, the crowbar;

El khiade, the tailor;

Mochefi el relil, the extinguisher of passion;

El khorrate, the turnabout;

El denkhak, the striker;

El aouame, the swimmer;

El dekhal, the housebreaker;

El aour, the one-eyed;

El fortass, the bald;

Abou aine, the one with an eye;

El atsor, the pusher;

El dommor, the strong-headed;

Abou rokba, the one with a neck;

Abou quetaia, the hairy one;

El besiss, the impudent one;

El mostahi, the shame-faced one;

El bekkai, the weeping one;

El hezzaz, the rummager;

El lezzaz, the unionist;

Abou laaba, the expectorant;

El tattache, the searcher;

El hakkak, the rubber;

El mourekhi, the flabby one;

El mokcheuf, the discoverer.