Willy Ain’t Got No Brains

Lookit that damn fool Willy standin’ there under the giant ass end of General Robert E. Lee’s monstrous horse waving the axed-off head of a rooster up in the air for all the world to see. Scaring all of Richmond, Virginia down into the James River and out to sea. Folks driving down Monument Avenue jump up outa their seats, point like little kids, and almost wreck their cars going the wrong way down North Allen. By the time they popped outa their trance they laid on the horn and shout everything but hymns. Willy didn’t care one wit. He’d already seen the beginning of civilization and the end of the world. And so he scattered droplets of blood everywhere while dancing 65-70 some feet below the end of a bronze horse.

Red against the pale granite of the monument base was a large, square cloth. It was half as big as a picnic table and more crimson than a pool of fresh slaughterhouse blood in sunlight. Rocks held down the corners and the sides, rough chunks of granite and quartz dug out of red Virginia clay. Crushed slices of silvery-glass mica and yellow fool’s gold lay scattered across the square of the cloth. In the center, bound up in orange red twine, was a headless rooster with his chest cut open. Off to the side was a fifth of whiskey. Good whiskey, too. Not great liquor, but souvenir spirits. A black and tan bottle of 1964 George Dickle Tennessee Whisky strapped with a worn leather choker. With a file-sharpened felling axe layin’ right up next to it. There was, however, not a candle in sight.

Willy hated goddamn candles. After since he caught Rufus Buffy torturing puppies with ‘em in the back of the smokehouse. Before Rufus Buffy could grunt Willy’d snatched up a broken broom handle leaning in the corner and smacked Rufus Buffy upside ‘is head. And that was that. Was gonna hang ol’ Rufus upside down, too, and smoke ‘im all the way to Mississippi. But he couldn’t do it, couldn’t let himself be as mean as Rufus was to them li’l bitty puppies. Well, they was big, ugly ass puppies, but no matter, they were defenseless li’l baby things.

Fortunately the worse was hot wax dried in puppy fur, but Rufus Buffy disappeared. Rumor has it he ran off to Alabama were he became a radical Christian Dominionist Reconstructionist, got kicked out for killing people’s kitty cats for being “prehistoric demons from Ancient Egypt.” Rufus was terrified of mummies, see. There was a reason those dead sinners were buried under mountains of rock, he would say. Damn fool then run off to Mississippi where he turned into a Hellfire Bible Preacher. Ended up in Austin, Texas, playing the banjo, though.

There Rufus Buffy landed in jail trying to murder hookers if they didn’t want him reading them highlighted passages from his Bible while pluckin’ his banjo like a chicken. What made that case even more notorious those hookers weren’t just saloon gals preening by a sad, sad antique player piano.

They were candle-lovin’, upper class, college educated Neo-Pagans who called themselves Sacred Prostitutes in the Temple of the Goddess. Aphrodite and Gaia fell in love with each other and out crawled Texas. And these candle-wavin’ Sacred Sluts with the Horns of Pan and Cernunnos were in no mood to be lectured to by an uneducated Bible humper who’d consigned them into the boiling pit of eternal hellfire and red hot pitchforks with banjo music playin’ forever…unless they repented upon thy knees directly in front of him and unclasped the big, silver crucifix buckle of his black leather belt while he plicketed a banjo high up in the air.

So no candles for Willy, not a single one, or he’ll smite you with a locust switch. Yes, locust switches, y’know, the one with the long, dark, red thorns. But he did keep a roving eye out and about in case any Sacred Sluts for the Lord and Lady showed up with a bag of candles. Just in case. Even from behind bars where he scared the hell outa whole lotta Austin, Texas folks just looking for love and connection without having to suffer through endless banjo music.

After hanging still in the sky over Richmond for what seemed most the day, the Sun dropped behind trees and rooftops like that time we boys tossed a cinderblock off the bridge into the river. The color of the evening sky went from orangey blue to blood red indigo in six minutes flat. Just like that. BOOM!

And Willy sunk his axe right into the face of a dreadlocked Rastafarian who ambled up the steps to see what the Hell was going on. Before he could even finish saying “One Love, Brotha!” he died. Jesus spurted out beneath the ass end of Robert E. Lee’s horse in a spray of blood grayed by cannabis smoke and ascended straight to heaven. The corpse of Mr. Rasta shiszshed free of the axe blade and toppled backwards into a pile of baggy ol’ clothes and limbs askimbo.

A young woman, lovely in long, flowing hippie skirts, her mass of dreads piled up high so she looked like her skull was in the grip of a giant pulsating octopus, put both hands up to her face and did what such ladies usually do in the movies, scream like flippin’ idiots…uh…excuse me, shriek like a banshee. Instead of dashing off, she got down on her knees staring up at ol’ crazy Willy with a rooster head in one hand and an axe in another. Willy reached up with the hand clutching the rooster head and switched on his headlamp.

“Get on home,” he said and barked like a dog.

“Why you be doin’ all this mess here?” she said as she looked him straight in the eye.

“God rose up as a mighty mountain casts a shadow across all the land, then broke apart in a giant earthquake where He cast down stones as big as houses upon the unbelievers. And, y’know, when I look down at you, and I’m reminded of fruit from the Garden of Eden, and how much eating rattlesnakes and frogs taste like chicken, I’m horny. Horny for you.”

She rose up in a cloud of color highlighted by headlamp and streetlight, shook her tangle of dreadlocks, and stared Willy straight into his eyes. Her left eye bored into his as tears welled up and fell from both eyes. Willy stood there, breathing, bathed in destruction, and pointed west with one finger.

“Run,” he said.

And she did. She turned and dashed between swerving cars into the shadows. And was gone. Old brick buildings squatted against darkening skies. Shadows splattered in all directions. Sirens wailed amid bright blue and red disco lights as police cars and ambulances raced in from three directions.

Willy, he ain’t got no brains. Which means he’s smartern Hell. He can outfox Mr. Fox and Lucifer, too. Brains, see, just get in our way. Always filterin’ the news, interpreting things this way and that way. Our brains make stuff up. All lies. All made up tales. Stories we tell. Why, ain’t the definition of telling a story same’s telling a lie? Telling a story is what professors call “fiction.” It’s what we tell the public about ourselves as we make up a big, pretty lie of omission.

Brains are the riverbanks to our river of Spirit. They are the boulders holding our Soul down in the mud of flesh. Some folks swear we got four brains. Yes, four damn brains. Aliens living inside our bodies, hijacking our Souls, demonic aliens descended from some far away extraterrestrial place in outer space, rooting their tendrils deep into our nervous system as parasites passed on in the womb like certain tapeworms and nematodes can tunnel into the fetus. Hell, you eat pork ya gonna get hog tapeworms inside yo brain. That’s what medical folks say.

Got snakes inside our skulls curling up into coils of brain and snaking down through our spines all kundalinified. The reptile brain. R-Complex brain. Then that limbic or paleomammalian complex, the ape brain, yep, that damn ape brain. Wrapping around that is neomammalian brain, our cerebral neocortex, our human brain. Then there is the heart brain, which puts out more energy than all three brains up in our heads. The heart brain is wired up to the three up top.

Now, other scientists think this model is inaccurate and outdated, though in a general, popular sense people seem to grasp it. Other scientists claim there are really three different brains in our bodies and they are all wired together; one in the head, one in our guts, and one in our hearts. Yet others claim our brains must be holographic. Our minds are for certain. And some folks think men got most of their brains down in their peckers, which ain’t as big as their Big Head up top, and that’s why the world is full of troubles.

Embryologists claims that as human embryos develop the skin forms as the outermost layer of the initial brain. As the tiny bundle of cells grow into a recognizable body, instead of the nervous system growing from the brains outwards toward the skin, the nervous system actually grows inward toward our brains. Psycho-neuro-immunologist Candace Pert once remarked it’s difficult to determine where our brains end and the rest of the body begins.

Ethnobotanist Terrence McKenna attributed the rapid mushrooming of human brains to the widespread ingestion of psilocybin and other hallucinogenic mushrooms in Africa and elsewhere in Asia and Europe. So we don’t really know for sure how many brains we have. But Willy, he don’t care. He’d just as soon scramble brains of all kinds together with eggs and cheese with a big slop of hot salsa. Then he’ll crack some nasty ass joke about his “real brains” being down there somewhere in his cock.

Together folks gathered in droves behind rows of police cars banked around the curves of General Robert E. Lee’s statue. Cops in armor twirled amid the scream of red and blue lights flashing bright. All they knew was the truth as that crazy, drugged-out messiah declared it to be, that, hey, “Willy ain’t got no brains, and neither did they.”

“Willy, Willy, Willy

A Hey, Hey, Hey

Good Lord Almighty

Knows what Jesus knows

And that’s the truth that

Willy ain’t got no brains

Yeah, Willy ain’t got no brains

Willy ain’t got no brains

Yeah, Willy ain’t got no brains

Can you feel his pain, pain, pain?

Can you, Can you, Can you,

Can you feel his pain?

Cuz it’s the same as yours,

It’s the same as mine,

His pain is our pain is my pain

So, yeah, Good Lord Almighty,

Thank God for Willy,

For Willy, Willy, Willy

A Hey, Hey, Hey…”

Willy saw the mob as snarling zombies possessed by the Old Slithering Blob Gods from The End of The World. Standing in the searchlight beams illuminating the gory shadows of General Robert E. Lee, he watched the crazed crowd overrun the rows of police from behind. Everyone around became deranged in the midst of piercing sharp sounds and screaming lights. The media crews chose to highlight a fusillade of bullets, however, and Willy disintegrated into a cloud of wet, rubbery shards.

His Holy Essence cleaved in two amid the decimation of possessed flesh. Unseen by the audio-video crews of the worldwide news, Willy’s Soul burrowed deep down into the Earth’s crust through layers of mud, stones, blood, tears, worms, moles, and roots to ooze deeper down within the tomb of the planet. His Spirit broke from Soul and ascended high and lonesome toward the light into divine incineration deep inside the Sun.

Long blocks away patrons in a bar stared glassy-eyed with jolly cheer as they toasted each other with beer as their favorite team scored high above up on the TV. Nearby behind thick, crimson curtains laced with gold and purple a man and a woman make passionate love doggy-style, grunting and moaning and then giggling as they scooted around in the tangle of bedsheets and blankets and knocking pillows off onto the floor. For no matter how terrible Death may be Life goes on for the Living in the prayer that more and more people take a stand against the Disease of Violence.

 

William Dudley Bass
Friday 21 December 2012
Shoreline/Seattle, Washington

 

Copyright © 2012, 2016 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship of and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.

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