When Harley Marndog and Calliope Kolankiewicz were married, Harley’s grandfather, J. Milford Marndog, gave them the deed to a modest hog farming operation on twenty acres of redwood-forested land outside of Pine Bluff—an old mining town turned tourist trap on the high cliffs of the California coastline just south of Big Sur. Calliope, a vegetarian at the time, insisted the hogs be set free before she moved in with Harley.

Upon their return from a honeymoon in Jamaica, Harley sent his grandfather a comically rueful note complaining about Calliope’s wanton disregard for the value of good pork. Included with the note was a conciliatory cigar, which J. Milford promptly smoked. He was a senile old capitalist with a strong yen for bacon, and his daughter-in-law’s swine-liberation struck him as wasteful and impertinent. He felt a hot fury boiling off his mottled pink ear tips. Soon, however, he noticed the skunky perfume from Harley’s cigar seemed to be putting him in a much better mood. He suddenly didn’t care so much about feral pigs and corporate profits. In fact, he decided he would never again be a slave to material desires. As his first act of independence, he flushed his gold Rolex watch down the toilet.

Years later, in his final postcard to Harley and Calliope, J. Milford told them he was herding sheep in Jamaica. He had liquidated his vast industrial empire and traveled there to search for more of Harley’s special cigars. He claimed to be the father of seven Jamaican babies—each with surly green eyes, beautiful ebony skin… and a million-dollar trust fund.
“Grandpa Milford’s always been a hopeless horndog,” said Harley with a grin.

“You’d think at his age he’d know a little something about contraception,” said Calliope. “Frankly, I’m surprised he can still get it up.”

“He does a whole lot more than just get it up. I’ve got seven rich Rastafarian baby uncles!”

Harley felt like celebrating. He grabbed Calliope and danced the mambo, right there in his electric blue boxer shorts.

• • • • • • • • •

Nine months later, Harley and Calliope were graced with a baby of their own. Philo entered the world to find his parents raising zebras on their land—a decidedly unprofitable venture. Harley had become a tree surgeon to pay the family’s bills.

Philo had splendid but unreliable memories of his early childhood. As a baby, he had absolutely no fear of falling. He was quite sure of that. He seemed to recall being packed in a knapsack and carried on his father’s back as Harley went about his business. The money saved in babysitter’s fees must have been substantial.

On weekends—or so Philo imagined—his mother tied him to the tail of a kite and let the breeze carry him up to the tops of tall redwoods, where his father worked. But Philo longed to go still higher, to commune with the clouds. His mother didn’t think it was safe to let out that much string.

Inspired by dirigibles, Philo began retaining gas. He gorged himself on beans, zucchini, and jalapeños—and refused to burp or fart. He also inhaled the helium from numerous birthday party balloons.

Philo grew immense and airy. His thoughts turned grandiose. He would avenge the Hindenburg—make the airspace safe for bloated babies!

He started wearing mooring cables on his wrists and ankles. His parents thought it was just a child’s harmless affectation until Philo won a trophy in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

After that, the cables came off and he was confined to his room until he deflated.

• • • • • • • • •

Harley’s memories of his own childhood were nowhere near so agreeable. Harley’s mother, Charlene, was a big Norwegian woman with a wild temper who had habitually flown into psychotic rages over spilled milk and muddy floors. Harley had spent most of his childhood hiding from her in closets and up in the limbs of tall trees. He had vowed to be a much more mellow parent around Philo.

Charlene, of course, didn’t approve of the manner in which Philo was being raised. She saw a lack of discipline turning the boy into “a snot-nosed young hellion.” She also felt Philo’s moral integrity was being compromised by “the wicked lasciviousness of that Hippie Harlot.”
By that latter turn of phrase, she meant Calliope.

Harley had once tried explaining to Charlene that Philo’s moral integrity, or lack thereof, was something Philo would have to work out on his own. And just because Calliope had a frank, sensual manner and a voluptuous body that she tended to clothe in peasant skirts and lacy satin bodices, that didn’t mean she was a slut.

To which Charlene had responded: “How would you know, Girly Boy?”

Charlene thought Harley’s long blonde ponytail somehow compromised his masculinity. She didn’t care that Harley climbed trees all day with chainsaws dangling from his hips, that he was highly skilled in a variety of the martial arts, or that his reflexes were so quick that he could punch a flying quail with his fists.

Charlene was, in Harley’s long-considered opinion, “A shark-faced bitch with no real life of her own.”

• • • • • • • • •

Dealing with his tree surgeon business and his hateful shrew of a mother took a lot out of Harley, but he always managed to rejuvenate himself by taking time out to indulge his favorite hobby. To that end, he’d built a laboratory in one of his grandfather’s old sheds.

Harley fancied himself an amateur psychopharmacologist. As a small boy, he used to tell his mother that he wanted to grow up to be a drugstore pharmacist in a quaint New England town where the sidewalks were swept clean every morning. He and his mother would live there at peace amid orange maple trees and tidy sparrows. Harley’s days would be spent dispensing Valium to a cadre of little old ladies in blue smocks he employed at his drugstore, who would in turn give the Valium to the town’s fine and noble citizens, so they might continue to lead their fine and noble lives relatively free from anxiety. But this was really his mother’s dream, and when Harley repeated it, he was usually just trying to get himself out of trouble. The only brain chemistry Harley was truly interested in altering was his own.

When Philo was six years old, Harley discovered the chemical compound for Blissful Living Love-Radiance of Infinite Divine Being. Deep in his lair of moldy test tubes, bongs, stale beer, psychedelic fungi, ageless Twinkees, and stainless steel gynecology instruments, Harley could be found every Tuesday heating the new compound with the blue flame of a blowtorch under a customized fishbowl designed to catch the fumes.

On one such Tuesday, Calliope interrupted Harley’s labors with a shout to him from outside the shed:

“Harley? Can you go into town and get us some Ajax?”

Harley reached for the stereo and turned down the volume on Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland album. “What’d you say?” he shouted back.

“Ajax! I need you to go into town and get some Ajax!”

“Yeah, okay… just a minute.”

Harley took off his tie-dyed lab smock and his orange-tinted swimming goggles. Science would have to wait. Just before he left the lab, he stooped and stuck his head up into the fume-befogged fishbowl, inhaling deeply.

Calliope and Philo were standing outside at the fence feeding green weeds to the zebras when they heard a loud and particularly joyous cock-a-doodle-doo! erupt from Harley inside the shed.

“Oh crap…” Calliope said.

An unfortunate side effect of Blissful Living Love-Radiance of Infinite Divine Being was that it often turned people into roosters.

Calliope squatted next to Philo and gave him a hug. Looking grim, she said, “Daddy’s turned himself into a rooster again. We have to go into town with him so he doesn’t hurt himself.”

“Can’t I stay here with the zebras?” Philo didn’t like going into town. The people there pinched his cheeks and tousled his blonde hair and told him how cute he was and what a big boy he was becoming. They were patronizing him, and he knew it.

Harley appeared in the doorway of the shed and said, “I’m ‘cluck’ fine.”

Calliope went over to him and grabbed Harley’s cheeks. “Look at me,” she said, searching his eyes—not angry, just concerned.

“I’m fine,” he repeated. “Fine, ‘cluck’….”

Calliope stepped back a few paces and looked him over. Harley seemed on the verge of a massive rooster attack. His elbows were quivering. The saggy flesh of his neck was twitching.

“I don’t like this,” Calliope said. “I didn’t get married just so you could be a barnyard animal full-time.”

“Peace, baby.” Harley made a peace sign and strutted across the yard, thrusting his head to and fro and flapping his cocked elbows like Mick Jagger on a bad night.

Making a valiant effort to restrain his ‘clucks,’ Harley climbed into the old school bus that he and Calliope used as their primary mode of transportation. The school bus was painted in Day-Glo colors. Its back end had a mural painted on it depicting six Picasso-like sea monsters staring at a naked French woman’s bulbous behind. People could tell the woman was French because she wore pearls and smoked a Gauloise from a long black cigarette holder.

The school bus’s engine fired right up. Harley waved goodbye to his little family as the bus headed off down the driveway.

“Bye, Daddy!” Philo shouted after him. “Bring us home some Milk Duds for the zebras!”

“Damnit, Harley,” Calliope shouted with more of an edge, “you be careful!”

Harley drove along the dirt road leading away from his happy hippie homestead with a walloping dose of Blissful Living Love-Radiance of Infinite Divine Being leaping in his arteries. The world seemed young, vibrant, and alive with sexy goodness. The creek running through his property was giving him a hard-on! He felt like making love to a tree! He wanted to find a mossy knothole in the trunk of some slender maple and just ram it in there—be at one with the sap rising to the leaves.

God! he was in love with everybody! And Holy Fuck! he wanted to get it on with everything!

Calliope and Philo watched as the school bus swerved wildly and Harley, stripped to the waist, managed to hang half of his long body out the driver’s side window.

“COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO!” he crowed. He bobbed once, twice, then three times, like a spastic rooster.

It occurred to Calliope that Harley was probably unfit to drive.

Then the school bus ran off the road and went down an embankment to the right. The bus tilted, went up on two wheels, and crashed on its side. The noise it made was horrible, like a thousand tombstones smashing through a thousand stained glass windows.

Philo and Calliope went running.

Harley, unharmed, crawled out of the wreckage through the school bus’s broken windshield. He scalded his left elbow in the steam hissing from the demolished radiator, but that was of little concern. He had more important, more roostery things in mind.

When his distraught family reached him, they found Harley bent over at the waist with his nose deep in the loamy soil, pecking for worms.