"White Trash Lab Rat Transplant"

c. 2005 by Chris McBeth

The Raging Queer was screaming, swearing, throwing furniture, foaming at the mouth and generally acting out as his Mother lay dying on the operating table.

He was angry from not being able to be with her-the indifferent Security Blackbots had escorted him from the operating room. And he was angry because he knew that even when she was conscious she talked in riddles. Honesty was not her way. From a broken home background rife with alcoholism, abuse and incest-emotionally she herself was more of a stunted child than a woman.

He raged because there was no name for the twisted jumble of emotions he felt for her; and no way for him to express them other than through violence. If he had been a healthy GAY man (how he loathed that term--as if there was anything GAY about being queer) he would be able to turn off his emotions, detach, objectify, (as it was so easy to objectify, turn off and detach from men-AFTER you came with one of them that is) maybe call his shrink or his sponsor; calmly ask for reassurance of some kind from his lover (another absurd word) if he had one.

These healthy supportive actions however weren't part of the equation in his life. He couldn't afford a shrink at this point-he'd had so many bad ones in the past he distrusted them all instinctively. He fallen off the wagon so many times in his anti-sex 12 step program, it hardly seemed "Program" was still a part of his life. Besides his sponsor was probably dead of AIDS by now. As far as a lover, he had none. The longest relationship he'd had was Elizabeth with her honey-colored hair. Back in the day she had been a teen-aged prostitute replete with black pimp turning tricks in the best hotels in New York. A few months after their relationship began, Elizabeth had thrown him out, as she didn't approve of his bisexual lifestyle. "Get rid of the men or get out" was her ultimatum. He'd gotten out. No man had ever replaced her as his lover. Fuck her, he thought, she'd been a whore and SHE was telling ME to lay off the men-HA!

No, all he had was his Mother. She was the only balm in his life--besides cumming with men. But cumming with men had little heart, so emotionally he kept looping back to her, seeking some kind of warmth from her. And after staring at her like a deer frozen in the headlights on a cold snowy Wisconsin highway, the headlights of her eyes never said that "Yes" to him. He always ended up skidding on the cold icy patch that covered her heart.

He rested from his violence for a moment; the Blackbots were nowhere to be seen. He approached the porthole window to the operating room and peeped in. The lovely old woman lay covered with a sheet up to her neck. The cold steel table was illuminated by bright white surgical lights like a fabulous Hollywood opening night or a star-studded charity event at the Met. And there she lay there, motionless, like a grand beautiful old Queen. Some of her wounds screamed out from just under the edge of the sheet, gaping crimson holes sparkling like wet rubies.

Finally the Blackbots appeared and motioned him into the Animal Transplant room, which adjoined the Operating Room. He entered and walked along row after row of cages of large white lab rats. Some sleeping, some copulating, some feeding, a few fighting. One was chasing itself and then catching and chewing on its own tale, mad from the confinement. The room smelled of cedar chips and rat shit. Closest to the Operating Room door was a single large cage in which in the bodies of two rats lay, unmoving and bandaged, breathing through tubes with miniature rat IV's connected to them.

He understood then that they had transplanted pieces of these rats into his Mother. Miniature rat lungs or tiny rat livers. Since the early part of the century, the poor, the uninsured and immigrants were given organ donations from animals. Only the rich could afford the luxury of human transplants. Drugs had made the animals transplants function almost as well as the human ones.

The Blackbots gently motioned for him to enter the adjoining door to the Operating Room where his Mother lay, conscious but groggy. Instead of her usual soft golden brown ash blond-tipped coif, her hair was stiff like wire and straw-like, almost bleach-burned white, like the kind of cheap wiry wig they placed on naked mannequins in the window of small-town run-down department stores on Main Street in Anytown, U.S.A. And at the very top of her head was a shaved and bandaged bald spot that looked like a yarmulke skull cap. “Oh Jesus” he thought “they COULDN’T—“ but the thought was too ghastly to finish.

She was beyond looking white trashy—he had never pictured her in that class anyway. But now she looked different. She was “uber” white trash, white trash nightmare; white trash Mad Lab-Rat experiment gone bad. And still, as he stared at her, he loved her more.

He felt himself growing hard. He flashed on his earliest Mother sex memories. Forbidden and repressed. The taboo veil of his body again feeling her body; the pressure of her hungry "Motherness-that-loves-too-much" squeezing his little puppy body closer and closer into her until her coarse pubic hair was biting into his stomach, hands and arms like needles and he couldn’t breathe from the pressure of her. Then that sound--that gurgling sound as she came on him, wrapped around him in a dream, holding and smothering him.

Now he wanted to lie down on top of her again. That she was groggy, still drugged from the anesthesia made him get fully erect. He fought the urge to jump on top of the cold hard steel table and mount her, penetrate her, pump and pound her with those hot hot super silver surgical lights burning over them like suns. He flashed on another memory of how she used to lie prostrate for hours under her sunlamp, loose towel covering her breasts, small damp cotton wads over her eyes. Sometimes she would do her “leg-up” exercises at the same time. Her six-pack was the most fabulous and the first he could ever recall seeing. How he longed to fondle it now, massage those gorgeous Venus stomach muscles of hers, caress and penetrate her…

He longed to feel what her cunt felt like. He wanted to enter her hole again and see what it felt like to be touching the place where he came from; that place where he’d emerged from some thirty odd years ago. To shoot his cum into her mound—to explode inside her old woman beauty was all he needed to reach supreme Tantric enlightenment!

It was mad but he saw his fucking her as being some kind of catalyst for his life energy to change. An exorcism to fling out all the demons and darkness that haunted him day-to-day. She would transform him through her excitement. There would be no screams but only half-murmured whispers of hot pleasure and little girl-nothing words cooing from her lips like small Vermont birds singing in the green lush summer. As he fucked her and fucked her, her juices would flow again inside her, her body electrified by his pounding waves; a steady and unstoppable stream of power giving them both new life.

As she began to open her eyes his fantasy ended. She tried to reach for the large bandage that covered part of her chest and trailed her fingers down toward a large exposed wound further down on her torso.

“It took two—two to fix me” she slurred softly “that’s what that doctor said.”

“Shhh Mom—quiet now—just rest. The nurse‘ll be in soon. Just rest now.”

Like changing a bike seat, or the oil in a car. I changed the direction of the story. Then I became my Mother in that hospital bed, recovering. The transplanted pieces of live rats renewing my life, my chi with their tiny energy. Then I was young again and following my emotions to their solitary stunted source of rage. I was 11 or 12, a tomboy loving to play with my model wooden airplane in the back of the house in the garden in the dirt and weeds on a street in Sterling, IL. It's the Depression. I am bruised and bleeding from “The Old Man” coming home all boozed up and throwing me down on the kitchen floor like a rag doll and fumbling with his zipper and sticking his Peter in that place between my legs…my brothers and sister screaming, screaming for him to get off me, blindly batting at him like so many flies buzzing around a buffalo. Father McBeth, big ragged whisky drunk bearing his weight down on my soft white virgin tomboy place—squeezing and squeezing the rage into me like some poisoned kind of vise squeezes the heart out of a chicken till it emerges engorged with sex up to it's neck and out through it’s beak, then you chop off the head and let it go running, running shooting the hot chicken blood into the cold white perfect Illinois snow.

This is where rage comes from I thought recalling my Mother’s stories of growing up during the Depression in the 20’s and 30’s in that small house in Sterling, Illinois with a Dad who was a boozer and six brothers and sisters and mush every day and never enough to eat and one day brother Ward was mowing the neighbor’s lawn and it rained and he got wet and caught a chill and had a nervous breakdown and died. Sad stories. Sad stories from a beautiful old Queen. Sad but so so rich the memories passed on and on for future generations to be horrified by, to be tainted by. And they in turn, needing the healing, the release from the rage. The release from living.