This City Has a Disease (Full Text) (Patreon)

This city has a disease.

I gaze down to the city streets from my posh office on the 114th floor of the Oliver North Tower in downtown Terre Haute. As I observe the blue-gray skyscrapers descend into the brown muck of the city, I realize one thing. This city has a disease.

The city spends all day raging against itself. All night seeking any and all sins to suckle upon. The city is like a small dog looking in the mirror, unsure of what is happening and operating at a high stress level. This city disgusts me. It disgusts me because it has a disease.

I take a nip of my fancy brown drink to calm my nerves. It’s the kind of drink that you drink in smaller cups because of how expensive it is. Not as small as a shot glass, but not as big as a cup. It’s good stuff. It’s the brownest of the brown and that’s what we like to drink up here. Down in the city, they’ll drink anything. Because this city has a disease.

I pour another drink. I stare at my hands. Powerful, clean and stately. I think of my ancestors. Peon people. They were farmers. Simply. They liked to dig around in the soil with their hands, getting it into their fingernails, relishing in it, becoming one with the land and as such sinking into the very land itself. They chose to denigrate themselves to be mere commodities. A life chosen of dry elbows and spiceless meals. I sneer as I imagine it. I have every pleasure available at my disposal. My ancestors must have lived in a city that has a disease. This city, coincidentally, also has a disease.

This city has a disease. I was hoping to address this city and the disease that it has with my colleague, a Mr. James Vanderbilt Kennedy. We had recently met at a country club upstate, I think in Ithica or something. You can always tell it’s a college town when the local prostitutes have armpit hair. We were sitting alone in the exact type of room that powerful men tend to sit in, which is a humidor filled exclusively with brown, leather furniture, brown drinks, and the brownest cigars you have ever seen in your life. Brown is the new color of royalty. Brown is the new color of luxury, unless you’re talking about types of guys. Because when it comes to powerful men, white guys are still the talk of the town. We own all the biggest sailboats and all of the most Swedish au pairs. In fact, my colleague Mr. James Vanderbilt Kennedy owns a ranch out Uppsala where they raise blonde women to raise other people’s children.

Regardless, what Mr. James Vanderbilt Kennedy and I were discussing inside of the humidor were my unique and dangerous ideas. I said that all unique ideas are dangerous. He said that one of my ideas is just the plot of the videogame Deus Ex. He also accurately pointed out that my app idea was just a program that faked woman’s signatures and put them on NDAs. I said that we can agree to disagree, and he said that he didn’t want to do that.

Mr. James Vanderbilt Kennedy was the only man I counted as a friend and the only man I let disagree with me. He was purebred all the way through. His father was a secret Kennedy with a club foot who had been tagged as ‘non-media friendly’ by the family and had been kept in a luxurious jail for all of his adult life. Technically, he was the first John F. Kennedy Jr. His mother was a Vanderbilt woman who had been sent to boarding school where they teach wealthy girls to get ready for life as a trophy wife by giving them tons of pills and bedrest.

By the time James Vanderbilt Kennedy turned 18, his mutant father died of old age at 38, and he inherited everything that his father had built by that time. Three companies, a real estate empire, and at least 4 smaller sex cults operating in tourist locations up and down the eastern Seaboard. Through his genius alone, James turned this humble list of assets into something of substance. He had the fastest growing cult in the pacific northwest and had bought out Overstock.com and turned it into a place where you could order a kid online. He had done quite well for himself.

Me? I wasn’t half bad either. I didn’t have quite the start. My father was a simple humble mayor from a small town in Missouri, St. Louis. He wanted me to learn the family trade, be mayor, shake hands with babies, orchestrate and participate in the Veiled Prophets ball, help to pick the girl with the most malleable personality. I thought I might, for a bit. But for me, the truth came early like it was a guy who had never had that problem before, honestly. I did a little digging around, and the Veiled Prophets ball was only a subsdiary cult owned by the Branch Davidians, which it turns out were just a sub-cult to Heaven’s Gate, which apparently, by the way, is still out and doing great and outgrowing a lot of their previous bad press. I saw how deep the rabbit hole went. I sniffed the sour underwear of power and it got my little prick hard.

Yeah, it’s little, so what? I got a weird, little dick but I have tons of fucking money. I wear cool clothes. I sit in the brown rooms of power. I can pay a guy with a big swinger to do whatever clit damage I want him to, if need be. The cool thing about having a small penis is that I am a selfish lover and it feels just as good when it is small as it does when it is big, probably. A small dick probably feels better because there are more nerve endings closer together in a small one. Yeah, I’ve decided that that is true. I’m going to pay some dick scientists a million dollars to confirm it in a study, too.

This is neither here nor there. I do not wish to distract too much from the narrative, but I am very proud of my small penis speech and I like to give it whenever I have a chance. Be that as it may, I need to tell you about an important moment I had with Mr. James Vanderbilt Kennedy. We were sitting there in silence, thinking about tricks we could pull on the world for money, when all of a sudden I said something that sparked an interest.

“One day,” I said, “there will be a real rain. One that will wash all the filth away.”

James Vanderbilt Kennedy immediately straightened his posture and looked at me. He made eye contact as he drank something brown out of a small glass.

“Interesting thought,” he said, “Care to elaborate?”

“This isn’t really the area for it,” I stated.

“What do you mean?”

“We’re in a humidor in the basement. This is more of an, arms clasped behind the back, looking outward over a cityscape type of thought,” I said.

“Oh, do you mean kind of like it just fits better if you are looking out over people and they look so small that they are like ants and you can’t see their faces or whatever so it is easier to dehumanize them when you aren’t confronted with their humanity,” he said.

“Yes, yes, exactly! Like, I am wearing this super expensive suit and I drive this cool car that talks to me and all that so I look like a King or a God or something to these people. And I need that, let’s be honest. But I tell myself that I deserve that, too. And then I pour a drink and I’m like, whoa, I really am the guy who has it all. So when I think that, I see the average person, you know? Have you ever met an average person?” I said.

“No, absolutely not. What? Why?” He said.

“Average people are insane. They watch TV shows like Burn Notice. They put trampolines in their front yards. They say things like ‘wrestling is just soap operas for men’.”

“Oh man, I mean, it is upsetting to hear that. That makes me dislike average people. But how does this play into the real rain that one day will come?”

“I’m glad you asked. First of all, it is admittedly a bit of wishful thinking. I can’t predict that there will be some act that can be perceived metaphorically as a real rain that washed away all the filth. And in that case, to me, the filth would be average people. People who quote Cartman. By saying that there WILL be a rain someday, you know, I am manifesting it out there that there deserves to be a rain that will get rid of poor to average people. That’s what I’m saying.” I said.

“I get it, I get it. I understand what you mean very clearly. I also understand how this is more of a conversation that should take place at the top of a tall building. Because this is one of your unique and dangerous ideas.”

“I actually have an office at the top of a building. It overlooks everything so I feel insanely powerful when I’m sitting in it. Maybe we should have the conversation there,” I said to my friend, Mr. James Vanderbilt Kennedy.

“So what you are suggesting is that we halt this conversation in the most abrupt way possible, so that we can have this conversation in a more appropriate and dramatic setting. Why, this conversation must be really important to you,” he said.

“It is. It is about an idea that is very central to my being,” I stated, simply.

“Well, if I am to wait for this conversation for a more appropriate time, could you at least tell me what the conversation is going to be about?” He asked.

“Yes,” I said, “This city has a disease.”

With those words, Mr. James Vanderbilt Kennedy stood up, shook my head, and left the room whitefaced and silent, gulping as he swallowed his own spit. I exhaled thick plumes of luxurious smoke as the mahogany double doors leading outside slammed shut. In the wake of his absence, I took a mournful sip.

It would be many weeks before Mr. James Vanderbilt Kennedy and I were able to have our discussion. The constant demands of the lesser towards that of the greater means that the great men of our society have little time to foster more greatness together. This city has a disease.

It was a crisp and calm autumn day when Mr. James Vanderbilt Kennedy made the trip to my office on the 114th floor of the Oliver North building in downtown Terre Haute. At the time, I was looking out of my window and thinking about the city and the disease that it has.

My nameless secretary (it’s in her contract so I can claim that I don’t know her when the Federal Government makes non-disclosure agreements retroactively illegal after they discover what is going on at the straight part of Fire Island) somberly opens the door for Mr. James Vanderbilt Kennedy. He is wearing a beautiful brown suit with every single suit accessary you might imagine. Cufflinks, a vest, pocket watch and a regular watch, all beautifully, boldly brown. I motion for him to have a seat in front of me at my desk instead of saying hello. It’s kind of a tradition amongst businessmen.

We sat in tense silence for an appropriate amount of time (8 seconds). Than Mr. James Vanderbilt Kennedy spoke.

“Before we begin this important conversation, a conversation that I expect to have enormous repercussions in the worlds of government, finance and culture, I wanted to share something with you. You were gracious enough to let me know the subject of this conversation. Before you begin, I would like to give you a glimpse into some of my thoughts as well.”

“Interesting,” I said.

“I hope so,” Mr. James Vanderbilt Kennedy continued, standing up out of his chair.

Mr. James Vanderbilt Kennedy reached his hand inside of his jacket’s breast pocket. He carefully withdrew and unfolded a sheet of paper.

“This poem is called ‘Vile Machinations of Bile’,” he said, and cleared his throat.

“Fleas congeal into form.
The soiled gears of a golden machine grind and wretch
to condense brown diamonds, perfect in structure
there is no autonomy in true order
no submission, just matrices of function
from gears, oil and bile litter to the landscape below
the bile and oil emulsify into that of a yeoman’s head, puking,
the puke congeals into a body, an ass sprouts from the body, shits
the shit forms into legs and the yeoman stands,
the yeoman multiplies, unbound, fucking and sucking
cumming and nutting and blowing wads while eating, eating, eating
fostering bacteria swinging from their nuts like mold as they hunger,
they are of one kind, they will not turn on each other
to rip their briny, yellow-stained flesh from one another,
the succor of one another they deny, and now,
for the first time, the worms eye the golden machines of the heavens
that they, as by-products, have no means to judge, no talent,
and they climb up and feast upon the machines of glittering gold
as they fill their bellies, they die, falling to the ground like rain
their bodies nothing more than fuel for the next fodder.”

Mr. James Vanderbilt Kennedy took a seat and looked at me intently. I took my time to answer and let the silence dominate the room. Sure, it was a power play. I wanted to see if he would sweat. Everything is a power play if you wish to remain in the brown halls of power.

I exhaled. Mr. James Vanderbilt Kennedy tightened his lips and maintained his eye contact. Well played, Mr. James Vanderbilt Kennedy.

“Would you like a drink?” I asked him. This was another power play. If you don’t know how this is a power play, you don’t belong in the business world.

“It wouldn’t be a business meeting if we both weren’t drinking,” he said. Another perfect played hand by Mr. James Vanderbilt Kennedy.

“We both understand each other,” I said, plainly.

“Do we?”

I stood up and looked out of my window. I did not answer the question. If you answer another man’s question, you are basically admitting to him that you’re a bitch. Mr. James Vanderbilt Kennedy understands that. He played the first move. He will not play another until I… reveal some of my hand.

“Your poem… disgusts me. I suppose that was your intention. However, all true things are a little bit disgusting. You can’t fake puke. You can’t fake a big dog doo on the sidewalk. You can’t fake blood and guts and you can’t fake a big zit.”

“Toe jam,” Mr. James Kennedy Vanderbilt continued, “little pieces of shit.”

“Right, those too. The point being—”

“Anal warts. Caesarian sections. Little minced pieces of ass,” he continued.

“Be that as it may-“

“Corn and peanuts in a big poop-”

“What I’m trying to say,” I interrupted, “Is that you are right. We cannot deny the… trend of things. Where outward wealth, technology and luxury have become too common. The plebians have had their taste and they want our share, not knowing that we are the very reason that that share is provided. We have been far too kind to the poor.”

Mr. James Kennedy Vanderbilt gave me a solemn nod in agreement.

“This is why I wish to have this grave discussion at this time,” he said, “we appear to be at a crucial juncture in our civilization.”

“What do you hope to gain out of this meeting?” I asked.

“I want to hear your ideas. I want you to tell me what you told me weeks ago.”

I stared out of the window for a time. Crowds moving in mass in the city streets below look more like blooms of algae than individualized people with hopes and dreams. They look like they should be treated with sprays of chlorine. My will has never been higher. I will begin.

“This city has a disease,” I began, and Mr. James Kennedy Vanderbilt scooted forward in his chair.

“What disease would that be?” He asked.

“This city has a disease. Every fettered apartment, every chintzy shopping mall, filled with frivolous desires for people whose destiny it is to eat slop, every single fugly person contributes to this city having a disease. The white ionic columns have been stained yellow-green by the malnutritional shit spewing from their collective assholes. They take their rusty pots and pans into the street and clamor, begging for more, more, more. They are wearing crusty t-shirts and jorts and they want to stick their dorito-covered fingers into our mouths to rip out our gold teeth. Yes, yes, my friend, this city has a disease. And this disease is rotten to the core.”

Mr. James Kennedy Vanderbilt observed me eagerly with a quizzical look that seemed to encourage me to continue. I did.

“Oh yes, this city has a disease. In our schools, children chomp and bite cigars and e-cigars and inhale the putrid smoke, exhaling the dark rank smoke into the good linens and drapes, forcing the most sublime of us to bask in their destitution. Oh yes, this is the type of city so sick that only a real rain could wash it all away.”

“Tell me more about this rain,” said Mr. James Kennedy Vanderbilt.

“Oh, this city. This city and its fucking disease. It makes me sick to the pits of my stomach. The sewers fill with the ichor and bile of the uneducated, stroking and poking their pricks. Their nasty genitalia spray urine and pheromones all over the bus stops. They climb and climb the scaffolding of progress and they wipe their big blue monkey asses all over the greatest architecture the world has ever seen. The politicians do nothing, as they shake in carnal fear of the dirty fingernailed masses marching up and deposing them, they’ll cut our throats to keep their power, not realizing that they were merely temporary placeholders…”

“Temporary? To be replaced by what?” he asked.

“The messed up thing about this city is that it has a disease. And these fucking chattering vagrants, mewling middle managers, people who have never even fucking set foot at Martha’s Vineyard, these fucking people that eat shit like Ruffles, fucking subhuman filth all coalescing into a large, fugly blob of the commons, embracing the shit that they are and trying to stain us, the rulers of the world, those who crawled out of the shit three thousand years ago, these people expect us to smile when we are grabbed by the ankles by these simians, they want our throats to fill with mud and shit as they remake us in their image, shaking their big blue monkey asses.”

“You already mentioned the big blue monkey asses.”

“Oh, how mine city does have a disease! And as the masses seethe and froth with animosity on all that has been accomplished, they sneer and tweet from the technology that we have provided to them as they sit on their big blue monkey asses. This city has become a labyrinth of dark alleys and brothels where you can fuck all the big blue monkey asses that you want. Alleys so dark that even the light of the moon is to disgusted to illuminate it, letting the ooze and blood lay dormant and fecund for some new generation of antagonistic bacteria to froth and boil it forth. Every single crevice in this city, which has a disease by the way, is a new breeding ground for the creatures of anti-progress. We don’t live in hell. We live just upstairs. And every day new demons gestate in our midst.”

“Enough waxing poetic! What do we do?”

“What do you do when your city is overrun by the most familiar of evils? There is no dominion of the lesser. They are always bound to their scraps, their futile struggles, their corn-based sodas. They bloat like ticks off of the noble blood of venerated capital. Every bank is consecrated ground that his been invaded by simpletons who couldn’t even fit a square peg into a square hole. The blue-assed fools who can’t sit down in a simple office chair without landing on their nuts. Pigs shaped like men who gnaw on their on toenails during church. Raging, without God, without meaning, pursuing every possible desire. To give these people luxury would be akin to flushing caviar down the toilet. I don’t know if I’ve said this before, but this fucking city has a fucking disease and I’m sick of it.”

“I’m sick of it too,” Mr. James Vanderbilt said, “So what are we going to do about it?”

“Another thing about this city and the disease that it has is that they troglodytes arm themselves with daggers and pistols, highwaymen and thieves that you are forbidden from garroting in a public forum. Stick up men, bank robbers, drug dealers, garden variety sluts, this city tells them they are special, that they are valid, when the only thing they should feel kinship with is an untimely death. They have removed the cold boot of discipline from the leg of the law, and now all the swine is getting fat while the butcher is away. Oh, fuck, for fucks sake, this city has a disease! Am I crazy? Am I crazy here? Does anyone else think this city has a disease? I mean, c’mon!”

“I think that the city has a disease,” said Mr. James Kennedy Vanderbilt as he made a very inbred facial expression.

“Yes, you might be right. This city has a disease. Our hospitals fill with bloated corpses of the deranged as drug dealers turn on each other like rats spotting cheese. Their wet mouths demand justice as they slurp down chocolate milkshakes and twerk on each other. Oh, my, this city has a disease. It’s pretty obvious to me at this point. It’s nuts. And all the while, an army of blue-assed dunces haphazardly gelatinize together to try to take us down. It makes me fucking sick. It makes me want to puke. But you know what, Mr. James Kennedy Vanderbilt? If I ever puked a single time it would make me no better than them.”

“Wait, what? You’ve never puked before?”

“Oh yes, this city has a disease, and it is just now wriggling in the cold light of day. Exposed, but shameless. Unrepentant evil unaware of even the concept of morality, slopping Pepsi after Pepsi into their weird, shapeless mouths. Every day, they undulate themselves into larger and larger slabs of meat, begging for more. This is no way to live. They want to eat a bunch of chicken wings and touch the Mona Lisa. They want to commit crimes as a profession and get thanked for it. They are machinations of want, emulating us, unaware of what we do. Of how hard we work to keep society afloat. Oh, this city has a disease all right.”

“Listen, all right, I’ll be very clear. I am enjoying you waxing poetically greatly, but I would like to get to brass tacks here. We both hate the poor. Like, we hate them. We are sitting around in a luxurious, brown office, talking about how much we hate poor people. We’re the good guys, I get it. But what are we gonna do, man? What are we going to do?” said Mr. James Kennedy Vanderbilt.

“This city was once a shining beacon of hope. It’s golden outline inspired other cities from a respectful distance. Men in suits shook hands with other men in suits. They ate at restaurants with a pristine white tablecloths. Now? Well, I hate to tell you buddy, but this fucking city? It’s got a fucking disease. Is the disease terminal? Don’t ask me. Ask the orphan on the street corner eating a human foot for lunch because that’s all he has. Ask the homeless veteran how he enjoys eating human feet for lunch. And the schoolteachers? Don’t get started. They eat human feet for lunch too. If that isn’t a sign that this city has a disease, I don’t know what is. Also, the police can’t be trusted either. Because they also eat human feet for lunch.”

“Nobody is eating human feet for lunch,” said Mr. James Kennedy Vanderbilt.

“Human foot after human foot is eaten for lunch and what does this city do? Nothing. That’s a surefire sign, at least to me, personally, that, yeah. This city miiight just have a disease or something. Listen, I don’t wanna be the bad guy here, I don’t wanna be the source of bad news, but, between you and me? This city has a disease. I want you to do something for me. I want you imagine a city. Now imagine that that city has a disease. That is where we are at, currently.”

“Right,” Mr. James Kennedy Vanderbilt said, “you’re right, I get it. What I’m saying is what are we going to do about it?”

“Every fucking blue-assed ingrate with a stomach full of human foot meat will gather into an unholy storm of want, coming down to my skyscraper, demanding some of my foot meat. And they expect me to buckle, to cower to their collective might, and I will say no. That foot meat is mine.”

“Wait, do you have foot meat? Actual foot meat?”

“The finest cuts of meat from the most elegant feet in the world, taken from Ballerinas that retire, would be too rich for these blue-assed Neanderthals. I’d like to see all of them put into a big pot and cooked up, I really would. I really would love to see that. I’d like to take a big hammer and bop them all on the head. The only way these people could ever contribute meaningfully to society would be if they were all ground up into fertilizer and used to fertilize the grapes in my vineyard. But even then, those grapes wouldn’t make a good wine because they are all so stupid that it would make the wine taste stupid. But, it would still be a positive contribution because we could feed that wine to dogs instead. They could become dog wine.”

“I’m sorry, is this still metaphorical? Do you eat human foot meat? Do you give your dog wine? Is your plan to save the city from the disease that it has into fertilizer for grapes that you intend to turn into wine that only dogs can have?”

“This city… has a disease.”

“Let’s do it.”

“Do what?”

“Your plan. All of it,” said Mr. James Kennedy Vanderbilt.

“Repeat it to me so that I know you understand it,” I said.

“Well, we are going to take the people with the blue-asses who eat the lesser foot meat and we are going to figure out a way to grind them up into fertilizer. Then, we are going to take that fertilizer and use it on the grapes in your vineyard. However, the fertilizer, since it is made out of dumb poor people, will make the wine taste dumb, meaning that we won’t want to drink any. So we are going to have the wine made from these stupid grapes into wine that is meant for dogs and dogs only to consume. I don’t know if that will cure the city’s disease or what, but, whatever, I’m on board. Is that right?”

I was quiet for a long time. Brooding. I began to feel myself filling with rage. Even amongst my compatriots… I am misunderstood.

“No. Let me start over. And actually listen this time. This city has a disease. This city has a disease. This city has a disease.”