“Shitfire,” Tommy shouts over teacup gears and you feel like your eyes are being yanked out of their sockets as the cup sinks low then swoops up fast. “My old man was an Alka-Seltzer junkie. Didn’t even plop the bastards in water. Just crunched ‘em between his teeth, let ‘em slow fizz up inside his mouth. Sometimes, when he was smashed drunk, he’d work up a good mouth-foam and wake us kids, frothin’ like a rabid bloodhound all over our hair and pillow.” While he was talking Mommy winked at you. Men! “Old bastard couldn’t digest custard if it came out of a baby’s ass.” Mommies and little girls. Is there anything in the world more beautiful?

Then the whoosh stopped. You open your eyes again, back from the whirling teacups, and the professor has stopped spinning. Now he’s in full Scratch’n’Chat mode. So here’s my thesis, here’s my thesis. The whole setup, at Dr. Max’s. It’s, like, all No Exit-y. Sartre had the idea. But not the execution. But Maya Deren—do you know Maya Deren? Oh you have to check her out, you have to check her out. Why?? Because! Maya Deren was Max’s only avant garde patient. She made beautifully unwatchable movies with Marcel Duchamp. But she out-No Exited little wall-eyed Jean Paul. Did you know Simone de Beauvoir wrote an entire novel on Sartre’s B.O.? Kind of like Huysmans’s symphony of scents, except with Sartre, there was no perfume. It was all stink. When he sped he didn’t clean himself. Cliché Frenchman. But worse. He was unclean—down there. His ass. In three chapters, she talks about how he left brown streaks on the sheets. But Sartre didn’t care. He had that great speed megalomania. The shit of Sartre is worth more than the gold of kings. Sartre the lady-killer with a penis the size of a baby sardine. That’s what Camus called him. La Sardine Bebe. But in those days, everybody knew. Duchamp was the man with the monster. The Algerian Camel Leg, Camus called him. And you know what Duchamp said? This is priceless, this is priceless. Duchamp said “I am Marcel Duchamp? Why shouldn’t my penis be surreal?” Duchamp’s cock—that was the original Rrose Selavy. Man Ray even photographed it—before he shot the other Rrose Selavy. The famous one. The Rrose they knew they could be in the papers. Have you ever seen his Readymade, Why Not Sneeze, Rrose Selavy? Sugar cubes and a thermometer and a fishbone in a birdcage. And—oh this is great, this is fantastic. The Professor picks his arms when he gets enthused, his pale flesh erupts in blood-flecks, like someone has written the bible in red braille from sallow shoulder to the tips of his burned-dead fingers. Maria Martins, Duchamp’s mistress, said “Before Duchamp and I made love, he would say, ‘Well darling, do you want your liver tickled?’” The professor erupts. His laughter is high and deranged, like a rabid bat being tickled. “And you want to tell me the French aren’t romantics? Of course, art historians were too genteel to say who, I mean what, I mean where—ha-ha—the real Rrose was. How could they? Duchamp was never crude. This is the man who made the urinal elegant. High Art. On speed, Duchamp liked to say that he could play chess with himself across a table. This much the journalist printed. The part about how he moved the pieces with avec son grand cigare he did not. Now, of course, he would be a star… But Maya Deren. She gave human form to The Fear. Existential dread. A woman with a mirror instead of a face, so when you look at her you see yourself staring back. Hell is other people who are you. Do you grok this? She made the world monstrous because she made it a reflection of us. Or am I being pretentious? Oh God, Oh God...what’s happening to me?” The professor clutched his neck for a second, appeared to fight for breath, then recovered. “Listen, when you talk about Dr. Max, you’re talking about the secret history of the American Elite.”