February 12, 1998
"Goons"
My first acquaintance with goons was from Popeye.
Popeye presented a boy's life picture of male/female relations, and I credited it, from what I saw around me, with being a fairly good representations of the way things were going to go in my life. Males mumbled and bulged and knocked each other about, which was basically confirmed during kickball, horses, and Little League, as well as by such as Don Harris, a retarded boy, if you asked me, who had some kind of hormonal spurt that made him a threat to any male who met him after class.
Don tried to make such encounters easier by hanging around the door of the upper hall of Gladstone Elementary after the bell rang at 3:30, which meant that, after the initial rush, laggers would either have to go by the one-man gauntlet he formed on the steps there or go around to hall C and out the back entrance. I of course did this without any pangs of conscience, knowing that there were just too many people who did not want to meet any shape or form of Don Harris to take up his taunt of chicken in the cafeteria, which would otherwise have been a morally justified affront. Being retarded, Don didn't catch onto the easy solution at first, the old randomizer strategy, but something must have jogged the grease spot he called his mind, because eventually he started sharing himself between the two exits.
Such, then, was the male world. From my eyrie above it, seeing the friends Dad sometimes invited home from work, another hypothesis from Popeye, that there was a major difference in the behaviors of hairy and less hairy males, was also confirmed. It was rare that one of the less hairy ones - the ones that would get these spots of pinkish skin peeping through the hair on their heads and would haplessly try to glue various strands over it - didn't exude a sort of baffled virility, an aura of having lost it, especially compared to Dad, who had no problems with growing hair.
Girls squeaked, and you picked them up when you wanted them and slung them over your shoulder in Popeye. Another direct hit. Girls kicked, being hauled around like this. They kicked in vain. And this was, incidentally, the weapon of choice for girls, the kick. I didn't know why, but it was so.
The goons, however, were the most edifying characters, and even now, my Popeye-watching days long behind me, I probably owe some residue of my life philosophy to my study of goons. Incidentally, I am jotting down these notes in search of a life philosophy. According to the "Excellence For Management" book that my boss has been distributing (my boss is the definite Don Harris type), you have to have a life philosophy. So I am going to see if I am a TopGun person or a HangDog person.
The Goons were under the command of the Sea Hag. The Sea Hag was an ambiguous woman, with the slightest sprinkling of hairs on her chin, clueing in the with-it viewer that, extrapolating from the principle of hair ruling in the male world, this woman was going to be a caution. In the perpetual war between Popeye and Brutus over Olive Oil, she was Brutus' ambiguous ally. Popeye, of course, was an exception when it came to hair, but then, his strength was from an outside drug. Spinach, for him. Mine, for a long time, was cocaine, but I don't blame that on Popeye's influence, even though cocaine has had an influence, some nights, on my life much like the sudden musculature that inevitably results from pouring streams of spinach in your mouth. But getting back to the Sea Hag - this will all straighten itself out into my philosophy of life in a moment, don't worry - perhaps she really didn't want Brutus to get Olive Oil, or perhaps she wanted Olive Oil for herself, or perhaps, who knows, her siren blood went vamping out for Popeye and Wimpy and Brutus and all the sailors at sea. Perhaps there was a current of jealousy. I don't know: was she perhaps secretly Brutus' mother? She never really seemed to help Brutus, for all her sea hag powers.
The goons, though: I watched the goons with that selfless absorption kids bring to television, as though the narrative and images were some kind of divine liquid, and the point was simply to let it stream into you. So, in terms of my life philosophy, or at least in terms of predictions as to where in life I was going to go, the goons were of primary importance. I became one (ha ha!). At least, I never achieved the shore leave autonomy of Popeye. At that time, there was a small television set in my parents' room. I would come home from school and watch Popeye on that small set, sitting on my mother's and father's unmade bed, both of them being out in the afternoon - my father working at the paper, my mother doing her volunteer work for the church. I liked the smell in there, the slight odor of adult socks and stockings and the smell of deodarant and the smell of the pillows where they had slept, the smell of their hair and nightsweat. I would pull down the shades, block out the afternoon sun. A cocoon in which to grow happily sticky, caterpillar to butterfly, larval stage to the raging, mandibular adult. I fully expected mandibular, or the chordate animal equivalent - having a strong grip, using the powerful ray of my mentality to pierce through the barriers that were thrown in my way as I made it up the corporate ladder. If ladders and barriers exist on the same metaphorical wavelength, which I think not. But anyway. This, I take it, is a TopDog trait, but unfortunately, in me, it has rather atrophied. It is like an appendix in me, one of those functionless organs which the triumphant march of evolution has not succeeded in sweeping away. There it is, ready to get infected.
Now that the facts of life are clear to me, I suppose that the goons embodied the sturdy endurance of the engorged phallus, emerging in bald splendor from its hairy cousin testicles. Or so my wife would opine. She's going to graduate school, now. Forty-five, and going back to school. Taking English of all things. She throws around words like phallus, it has become a household vocabulary item. Me, meantime, I'm talking about TopDog traits and the pack instinct. We make a pair.
But to get back to my Weltanshauung - what I learned from the goons, what I got a taste of, was the dumbshow of desire and power. During, as I mentioned, my renaissance coke period, I got a real strong idea of what that was about. But it all goes back to Popeye. The main thing about goons I learned was how dumb they were, and that is what makes me think that they have to be phallic, because the body part that exemplifies dumb for me is the phallus, the penis. The cretinous but ever-willing dick. It is dumb beyond the mere negation of intelligence. It is dumb almost in mockery of intelligence, the way luck is dumb - hinting at a diabolic twin of logic, a netherworld of quite different and opposite rules to this one of ours. A dimmer world, a breathless world, shades drawn on rooms with unmade beds. I got the drift. The picture. I was young, what, I had to be about ten. I started watching, I don't know, at four? Five? TV, it has been there my whole life long. But it kicked in for me around ten. Watching the goons issue out of the sea hag's cave. I might be confusing this with the monkeys in the Wizard of Oz, but the principal was the same. Women. Goons. It doesn't take a genius. The goons do the sea hag's bidding under a sort of spell. They march forward hypnotised, conjured by the hag's estrogenic need.
So if I have a position in the dog order, this is it (and incidentally, dog order, I wonder if I have to use phrases like that). The thing about this book that is supposed to be so unique is that it views the corporation - as the author, a veterinarian, says in the preface - as a natural organization, which makes no sense to me. But to identify myself, now? A very important part of your life philosophy, as the guy points out. As a dog, I think I must be some mutt stunned by smell, just howling there, not leading the pack towards any particular destination, not being a LapDog, or a WatchDog, but being the dog equivalent of a goon, the dog with the discipline problem, the dog that you always say, that dog never learns anything. That is the dumbest dog. Or, to give up the silly dog thing altogether, I don't see any need to take the test and see what fucking dog category I fit in, or to take the big overview of my life like the author recommends you take a night off to do. I was born to hang around the sea hag's cave. To obey. To issue out. To never win. Over and over again, the death march of a futile potency.
That's me.
Copyright © Roger Gathman
All rights reserved.Roger Gathman is a freelance writer whose postgraduate work was in philosophy. He has lived in various places, Santa Fe and New Haven the last couple of years, presently Atlanta, soon New York City. He calls New Haven his "semi-permanent abode".
Goons is a spinoff from Gathman's novel-in-progress, tentatively entitled, "Early's Encyclopedia".