Seedy Porn
The vegetable world is seducing us in the usual way
The person who just came into the office is a half breed. I don’t mean a mix of racial status in a place and time, I mean bred half purposefully, and left half wild. Her yearnings toward a oneness with nature have begun to make her erotically charged by tomatoes and peppers and eggplants and squash, and whatever else grows by the rivers of Babylon.
She was a farmer in clean overalls over a pale denim shirt. She had on white running shoes trimmed in pink. There was about her a self sufficient air, which on examination was her having both a masculine and a feminine element at play together. I was hesitating to look directly into her face because she was made up as a mime.
She’d built over a foundation of pure white, the lips were puffed up by some chemistry, and were painted a deep purple. The eyes were a tangle of dark pools and flashes of light on watery surfaces, a path into a gothic cemetery. I had expected something entirely different after speaking to her on the telephone about her sexual issues with garden vegetables. “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?” I asked. “Union Square?”
Didn’t I see you trying to escape from an imaginary box?
“Oh,” she said, as if just discovering she was in mime drag. “I’m a scarecrow.”
“But, the point of a scarecrow is that you don’t have to be there, because if you’re going to be there anyway, you can scare the crows yourself. You can just wear your street clothes.”
“There,” she said, “you’ve cleared it right up. I dress as a scarecrow to sneak up on the vegetables.”
“Why would anybody want to sneak up on vegetables?””
“To get pictures,” she said.
“Garden of Hedon?”
“That’s right.”
“So, have you got any pictures?”
She was by the desk in a twinkle, pulling erotic art out of a Trader Joe’s shopping bag. “The garden is alive with erotic art,” she said. “Look at this potato. My god, to be that free.”
The vegetables had a native innocence about them which made me hesitate to get too enthusiastic about having sexual knowledge of them. She had begun to compare a tomato — now posed on my desk — to Shunga. “Let go of your preconceptions of what is and what is not erotic, Layman.” So I looked at them again, boldly, now, opening the kimono.
“I see it too!” I said.
I could see it, too. The vegetable world is communicating with us through the only way it can get our attention, genital display. Birds do it and even baboons. “Hey, you want a piece of this?” To pick up a tomato with a perfect ass is to reach a different level of communication with vegetables. These are alien beings we eat, like us, but with more fiber. It’s an evolutionary process. First primitive art expressing through vegetables, then, emotional attachment.
“You’re in love with the garden,” I said. “Don’t beat yourself up about falling in love with vegetables, in the Biblical sense, I mean. You can’t help it. You’re always on your knees, handling them, feeding them, making sure they have water. You get fixated. I heard about a duck that mated with a garbage can lid, and he loved it as his one and only. When the master had the garbage man take it away the duck was killed chasing the garbage truck down the street.”
“I feel guilty,” she said. “Am I projecting?”
“Vegetables are naifs.”
“Naive or ingenious?”
“Both, at the same time.”
“This gives me chicken skin,” she said. “Maybe I’ll make a soup.”
