The Gorgonzola School of Metaphysical Physics — a name which, notwithstanding appearances, was not intended as a joke — prided itself on its exclusivity and obscurity. The School admitted very few students, and even those admitted often failed to enroll, sometimes because they were overawed by the School’s esoteric curriculum, but more frequently because they simply couldn’t find it. The School was, you see, very well hidden. For reasons having to do with the School’s highly irregular and possibly illegal nature, its main campus was concealed behind a row of mostly non-functioning vending machines in the cafeteria of an obscure government agency, the Bureau of Apples, Cheeses, and Nondairy Creamers (BACNC or “Backnick.”) This Bureau was itself difficult to find, but even if a prospective student made it there, he or she had to know that, to gain entrance to the School itself, one had to press the button for the Jumbo Chili and Mayonnaise Cheese Puffs in order to open its door. Since this fact was not widely advertised, and the item in question was singularly unpalatable, few prospective students actually did so.
In practice, though, this obscurity and exclusivity was not a hindrance. The School had only two professors, neither of whom was actually qualified to teach the subjects to which they were assigned. As a result, it was really just fine that the School had so few students. Classes mostly consisted of the professors attempting to perform various metaphysical feats, such as teleportation or the transformation of one object into another, and failing miserably, sometimes with embarrassing consequences. Once, one of the professors attempted to transform a chicken into a Hershey’s chocolate bar, but instead turned it into what at first glance appeared to be a 50 megaton nuclear bomb. The entire School had to be evacuated, causing a panicked stampede through Backnick’s cafeteria that interrupted the important work of that agency for several hours. Fortunately, and much to everyone’s relief, the scare turned out to be unfounded. On closer inspection by the School’s janitor, he discovered that the device was not a nuclear bomb at all but only a giant, rather disgusting, mass of melted chocolate and roasted chicken. “Its safe,” he declared, “but don’t eat it.”
The principal and current owner of the School, John Jacob Gorgonzola, known not very affectionately as Mr. G (or sometimes, Mr. G-string), ran the place with what he imagined was military precision. He had visions of turning out scores of metaphysicians who would use their new-found powers for the greater good, transforming life on Earth as we know it. He imagined his students reigning over a peaceful and prosperous world like philosopher kings — eating grapes, wearing togas, debating philosophy, transforming matter at will, and occasionally slaughtering a few infidels. In practice, however, this vision was not even remotely realized. Instead of philosopher kings, what the School actually produced was a steady stream of very confused and poorly educated young men and women, most of whom were not very surprised to discover that the metaphysical skills they had supposedly learned at the School were not even good for impressing potential dates, much less transforming the world. Some of these “granulates,” as Mr. G liked, weirdly, to call them, did in fact have metaphysical powers, but they tended to use them more for the purpose of manufacturing newer and more potent recreational drugs than anything else.
Mr. G, a fat, florid man of moderate height, was notable chiefly for the fact that he had no neck whatsoever. His multiple chins blended seamlessly into his capacious chest and his rounded shoulders rose all the way up to his ears. This made it difficult for him to turn his head, as a result of which he moved about in a peculiarly robotic fashion, his broad, puffy torso rotating in different directions as he walked and his short, stubby arms swinging back and forth like paddles. At such times, he resembled a sort of ambulatory submarine, his bulbous head and chest standing in for the conning tower and his protruding stomach below representing the bulk of the craft. His legs, surprisingly, were short and rather spindly, hardly seeming adequate to support the huge structure looming over them. Many of the staff and students who saw him on a regular basis were amazed that he hadn’t as yet broken one of his legs. It was in fact a game played by some of the more rebellious and enterprising students to lay obstacles in his path in the hope of precipitating just such a calamity. Unfortunately for them, Mr. G, like many big, seemingly ungainly men, was actually quite nimble and light on his feet. He skipped, leaped, and danced around and over the obstacles in his path with alacrity, although there was one memorable occasion when he tripped over a rake and fell forward down some steps. The students, watching from behind a bush, held their breath, but amazingly Mr. G, without missing a beat, simply slid down the steps on his stomach like a penguin, righted himself at the bottom, and continued on his way as if nothing had happened.
Although Mr. G was for the most part satisfied with the conduct of his staff, he did have one particular sore spot — and that was with respect to the aforementioned janitor, Mr. Albert Seed. Mr. G, as it happened, was paranoid of infection. He also hated disorder. He was known, for example, to fly into a rage if a student so much as sneezed in his direction. He was further known to surreptitiously rearrange items on a student’s desk, if he thought the desk was “messy.” As a result, he had high — one might say unrealistic — expectations of his janitor. He expected the School to be spotless at all times. However, given its unusual curriculum and the many often disastrous experiments that were conducted there on a daily basis, achieving this goal was virtually impossible. Mr. G, frustrated by what he saw as inexcusable malfeasance on the part of Mr. Seed, frequently harangued him on this subject. He would plant himself in the doorway of the cubbyhole that Mr. Seed used as an office, and deliver the most vitriolic stream of insults and abuse imaginable. At such times, it was not unusual for his face to turn beet red and his lips to turn white with froth, such that he resembled a rabid, overfed, mechanical toy whose spring had malfunctioned.
“God-damn it, Seed,” he would shout, his fat arms flailing, “what the hell is wrong with you? Why can’t you get anything done? What am I paying you for? Why hasn’t this hallway been cleaned? Why are there mashed potatoes in the sink? What are those stains on the wall? Is that mayonnaise? And what in god’s name is a zebra carcass doing in the teleportation lab? I thought I told you to keep this place sanitary! We can’t have dead herbivores lying around, attracting all sorts of vermin — rats, flies, roaches, and who knows what sorts of disgusting underworld ghouls! My skin is crawling already, Seed! Explain yourself, man, or I’m going to separate your atoms one by one and send them to so many different corners of the universe they couldn’t put you back together in a billion years!”
Seed, a mild mannered man with a walrus mustache and an insouciant manner, took these harangues in stride. He would lean back in his chair, hands behind his head, a faint smile on his face, no more troubled than if he and Mr. G had been discussing the latest golf tournament. He did, however, take care to position himself well beyond spitting range. He also seldom responded to any of Mr. G’s outrageous charges, choosing instead to nod sagely, his head bobbing like a cork floating in a pond. Sometimes, he would goad Mr. G to further heights of rhetorical excess by posing an innocent, but carefully crafted question, such as, “Didn’t you say the other day, Mr. G, that jerky made from zebra meat was surprisingly tasty?”
Mr. Seed’s sangfroid on these occasions was due in part to the fact that he knew Mr. G’s threats were idle — Mr. G could hardly even separate the fingers of his own hands, much less anybody else’s atoms. More fundamentally, however, Mr. Seed rested easy because he had a secret. This secret was that he, and he alone, of all the staff of the School, including its two professors and Mr. G himself, was the only one who could actually perform feats of metaphysical physics. He alone knew the proper incantations, the proper formulas, the proper positioning of the hands and feet, and, most importantly, the proper sneer with which it was necessary to address otherwise recalcitrant matter. During Mr. Seed’s long tenure at the School, he had made it his habit, after hours, to peruse the textbooks, class notes, experiments, outlines, and other paraphernalia of the School’s professors, to the point where he became an expert in virtually all of the subjects — not only teleportation, shape-shifting, and demon haunting, but also hallucinations, possessions, soul grafting, mind bending and, most fearsomely complex of all, tax preparation.
When his evening’s work was done — the floors swept, the carpets vacuumed, and the bathroom toilets plunged — he would ring out his mop, hang up his broom, and seat himself comfortably at one or another of the professor’s desks. There, he would study, combing his mustache thoughtfully and occasionally flexing his fingers — thereby causing little sparks of metaphysical energy to fly about the room like fireworks. Whereas the professors, being underpaid, intellectually incompetent, and usually undernourished due to their over reliance on the unhealthy fare in the Backnick vending machines, never really mastered their subjects, and could hardly even recite a basic incantation, Mr. Seed had the leisure, the quiet, and the healthy food (which he mostly stole from Mr. G’s extremely well stocked refrigerator), whereby he was able to not only understand and apply the principles of metaphysical physics, but to actually develop new ones himself. These new principles he proudly, but secretly, referred to as “The Seed Catalogue of Metaphysical Mechanics,” a work that eventually grew to some 38 volumes — all stored metaphysically in various liminal cubbyholes that Mr. Seed created throughout the School’s campus. Over time, so many of these cubbyholes came to exist — in lockers, flower pots, desk drawers, tree branches, the HVAC system, and even the urinals in the men’s bathroom — that, if the campus were ever visited by someone with metaphysical sight, it likely would have resembled a giant piece of Swiss cheese.
But no matter — none of the professors nor Mr. G were able to invoke metaphysical sight. Neither, with a few rare exceptions, were any of the students. In the present term, only one student, Ms. Rolanda Arquebus — a rather near-sighted and chubby young girl with a fondness for Nacho Cheese M&Ms — could see Mr. Seed’s cubbyholes. She discovered them by accident one day when she and another student were conducting an experiment in ectoplasmic reactions, and they inadvertently added too many dried newts to the flask. This in itself would not have caused the subsequent reaction, but when the mixture turned bright blue, Ms. Arquebus leaned over the flask to look into it and a few stray Nacho Cheese M&Ms she had in her shirt pocket dropped directly into it. The result was that the mixture boiled up in a huge cloud of foul-smelling metaphysical smoke which, although harmless, coated her horn rimmed spectacles with an ectoplasmic goo that enabled her to see the cubbyholes quite clearly. She was astonished to find, after the smoke cleared and she was able to see again, that there were a large number of very thick books stashed throughout the classroom, including one perched right on top of the professor’s head. Unbeknownst to her, the professor — Mr. Orton Skank — wore a toupee. Seed, in a gesture intended as an ironic joke, had created a cubbyhole there by altering the metaphysical structure of the toupee to accommodate one of his volumes. Thus the professor’s lack of knowledge was, as it were, corrected, at least as far as Mr. Seed was concerned.
Ms. Arquebus, not knowing any of this, raised her hand and when called upon, asked Mr. Skank why he had a book perched on his head. Mr. Skank, who was already out of sorts that day due to the inexplicable absence from the Backnick vending machines of the Condensed Mushroom and Mayonnaise Soup that he habitually ate in the morning, could neither feel nor see anything on his head. He therefore assumed the students were playing some sort of trick on him. This assumption, combined with the hollow feeling in his stomach occasioned by his lack of any breakfast, together with the fact that virtually all of the morning’s experiments had gone awry, and the fact that his classroom was now filled with remnant tendrils of foul smelling ectoplasmic smoke, caused Mr. Skank to lose his temper.
“Blast it, Ms. Succubus,” he shouted, his toupee falling forward slightly and half covering his eyes, “or whatever your name is — what the hell are you talking about? Books? What books? We don’t have any books in this class. This is metaphysical physics, for god’s sakes, not English literature. We learn here from the gut! By instinct. By the careful application of ridiculous, illogical rules — with help, of course, from the energy produced by the consumption of very large doses of salty, unhealthy, foods. Which, by the way, I didn’t even get this morning. Oh, dammit all to hell. What do you know? What do any of you know? I should have listened to my mother and become a beet farmer! Or at least sent in that flyer she gave me for that free correspondence course. Whatever you’re talking about, whatever you see on top of my head, I’ve got nothing to do with it! Maybe its a pizza, or an apple, or a halo, or a little old lady from Pasadena. Who knows! Who cares! God — can’t I get any peace around here?”
So saying, Mr. Skank stormed out of the classroom, his arms waving, and disappeared for the rest of the afternoon, likely to the nearby Wagonwheel Bar, which he was known to frequent rather more often that was strictly healthy. In the meantime, Mr. Seed, who happened to be sweeping the hallway outside the classroom at the time, took note of the fact that Ms. Arquebus was apparently among the few students blessed with metaphysical sight. He took note of such students because he occasionally needed them in order to perform the most difficult, and by far the most important, of his janitorial tasks. This was the subjugation of invading demons, ghouls, vampires, zombies, internet trolls, and other undesirables from the netherworld. The School, while almost completely unsuccessful in teaching metaphysical physics, had over the years conducted so many experiments, tried so many incantations, and broken so many of the normal rules of physics, that it had inadvertently eroded the boundary between our world and the netherworld such that the highly unpleasant denizens of that world could occasionally slip through. Typically, this happened at night, although once, a fiend in the shape of Jimmy Carter appeared in the middle of the day, throwing peanuts around and ordering everyone to “put on a sweater, dammit.” Naturally, it was ignored and eventually it disappeared of its own accord.
Recently, Mr. Seed had been battling a particularly malevolent demon which, while hideously ugly and basically as dumb as a brick, nevertheless had excellent taste in Scotch whiskey. Soon after it appeared, it discovered that Mr. G kept a supply of very rare,18 year old Throat Phog (much sought after by connoisseurs) in a locked drawer in his office. It immediately consumed the entire bottle, slurping it down in the most disgusting fashion. This precipitated a raging tirade from Mr. G, who naturally blamed Seed. He was so enraged, his words hardly even made sense:
“Damn you Seed!,” he screamed, spit flying a near record distance from his mouth. “You worthless son of a whore’s ingrate! I’ll burn your undershorts! l’ll drown your puppies! I’ll smear you with ectoplasm and feed you to a drooling, saber toothed koala! I’ll plant you upside down in the dirt and cut off your fingernails! You’ve crossed me —and not just me, the entire Scottish nation — for the last time! Don’t think you can get way with this, Seed, you foul, perverse, blasphemous warthog! Heads will roll! Tusks will roll! The torments of a lifetime supply of Exlax are too good for you . . . .”
On and on he went, not even noticing that Seed actually left his office after the first couple of sentences, leaving behind a mere simulacrum of himself that he conjured for the occasion. This simulacrum, possessing as it did all the same characteristics as Mr. Seed himself, shrewdly asked, when Mr. G paused at one point for breath, “whether the koala he mentioned was the one just now running down the hallway behind him . . . “ Which, as the simulacrum intended, caused Mr. G to lose the thread of his harangue and spin around to look. Naturally, there was nothing there, but the delay allowed the simulacrum to dissipate unobserved, so that when Mr. G turned back again, it appeared as though Seed had simply vanished. Mr. G, momentarily baffled, opened his mouth to continue his tirade, but seeing Seed’s empty chair, closed it instead with a slight snap of his teeth. Then, feeling a bit dejected and abused, he stomped off down the hall, being careful to check in both directions first to make sure that there was no unusual Australian fauna skulking about.
Mr. Seed, meanwhile, had made his way to Mr. G’s office, where he surveyed the damage caused by the Scotch guzzling demon. Other than the empty bottle of Throat Phog, the only other thing missing, as far as Seed could tell, was a certificate Mr. G had won in a hot dog eating contest some years before which had been mounted on his wall. If Seed remembered correctly, the certificate said that Mr. G had eaten some 56 hot dogs in ten minutes, coming in second place in the “without mustard” division. Seed wondered at first why the demon would take such a thing, but then he realized the demon probably confused the certificate with the actual hot dogs themselves and took the certificate thinking to gorge itself on the kind of heavily processed food that demons, for some reason, preferred. It presumably bit down on the certificate expecting to experience a gush of nitrate laden meat and instead found itself chewing on a cheap piece of laminated paper. “It must have been a tad disappointed,” Seed thought to himself, trying to imagine what sort of foul grimace a hideous demon in such a situation might make. “And it’s probably very angry.” Seed decided then and there that he needed a plan — some way of barring the demon from reentering the normal world, or at least the School, because who knew what the weird creature might consume next?
With this thought in mind, Seed spent the next couple of nights retrieving various volumes of his Catalogue from their liminal hiding places and considering possible countermeasures. Eventually, he realized that the best way to bar the demon from ever returning to the School was to perform a complex metaphysical procedure described in Volume 26 of the Catalogue as a “double percussion belly twist.” Unfortunately, this procedure involved some intricate gymnastic maneuvers that Mr. Seed, being of a rather stiff-necked physique, and none too young either, decided he probably could not manage himself without an undue risk of injury. He therefore approached Ms. Arquebus for assistance. At first, she was skeptical, saying in a flat, nasally voice:
“I don’t know, Mr. Seed, my daddy is very strict — I don’t think he would like it if I were consorting with demons after hours. He made me promise when I came here never to talk to any communists, radicals or liberals, never to spit in the palm of my hand, and never, under any circumstances, to do any work for the government. He also made me promise to get the phone number of that older girl whose name I think is Scarlett — you know, the one who wears those fancy leotards all the time? — but I haven’t had time to do that yet.” Here she paused while she fortified herself with a handful of Nacho Cheese M&Ms. “I mean,” she continued, talking while chewing, “I don’t even know Scarlett. I don’t know this demon you’re talking about either. Maybe he’s a communist. Or a liberal. My daddy can’t stand liberals, you know, or really anyone with a beard. One time, we were at the zoo, and there was this man there with a clipboard . . . .”
Seed at this point interrupted, and by promising her that neither he nor the demon in question were communists or liberals, that the work would only take a few minutes (likely not true, but Seed was impatient), and that he would amply compensate her with as many M&Ms as she could carry once they were finished, he managed to persuade her to help, albeit reluctantly. So it was that, a few nights later, they were stationed in Mr. G’s empty office, Seed having procured another bottle of Throat Phog with which he hoped to entice the demon to appear — and which, naturally, he occasionally sipped from himself, much to the fascination of Ms. Arquebus. She, pursuant to Mr. Seed’s instructions, was standing on Mr. G’s desk armed with a pair of erasers heavily loaded with chalk. To perform the “double percussion belly twist,” she had to smack the erasers together to generate a large cloud of dust while simultaneously dancing an Irish jig and singing “Danny Boy.” Then, while the demon was confused, covered the chalk dust, and possibly vomiting, Seed had to administer the coup de grace by smacking it over the head with a copy of Homer’s Iliad — preferably one in the original Greek. Why this bizarre procedure was called a “belly twist” was a mystery, even to Mr. Seed, who, though he had coined the phrase himself many years earlier, had forgotten why he did so. “I probably was drunk,” he thought, ”or maybe just horny.”
Fortunately for the pair of them, they did not have long to wait. Drawn by the pungent smell emanating from the open bottle of Throat Phog, the demon materialized in less than an hour. Its huge mouth gaped wide, showing rows of nasty-looking teeth, and its green, warty skin glistened, but its fearsome appearance was undermined by the fact that, oddly, it was wearing a bib with the words “Eat at Stinker’s” crudely lettered on it. Ms. Arquebus, startled by the monster’s ghastly appearance, and perhaps wondering who Stinker was, froze in terror, nearly letting the erasers fall from her hands. Seed, seeing this, shouted “Go, dammit!” at her and kicked the desk, nearly knocking her over. He also took a swing at the demon with the Scotch bottle, hoping to distract it, but this did not turn out quite as he planned. The demon simply caught the bottle with one of its six prehensile claws, extracted it from Seed’s hand, and proceeded to down its contents in one long gulp. Ms. Arquebus, meanwhile, did start to move, but instead of dancing a jig and singing, she merely shuffled her feet and emitted a terrified whining sound. Half-heartedly, she clapped the erasers together a few times, but all she managed to do was cover herself with the dust, while the demon remained largely untouched.
Seed, seeing her lackluster performance, felt a cold chill come over him as he realized they were likely at the mercy of the demon. The Throat Phog, however, saved the day. The heavy peat content of the drink caused the demon to become seriously addled, to the point where it could hardly walk or even stand. Rather than attacking the two of them, it slumped over the desk and began stuffing Mr. G’s desk calendar in its mouth. This enabled Ms. Arquebus to recover her wits — she shook herself briefly, then launched into a vigorous jig and a highly credible rendition of “Danny Boy,” which she knew quite well because her father often sang it himself after a night of heavy drinking. She smacked the erasers vigorously, producing an enormous cloud of dust that momentarily obscured both her and Seed’s vision. Seed, however, seized the moment and cracked the demon with over the head with Mr. G’s heirloom copy of the Iliad —or at least what he thought was an heirloom copy of the Iliad.
In a bizarre turn of events, the book Seed used turned out not to be the Iliad at all, but instead was a large print copy of Green Eggs and Ham. Mr. G, as it happened, was an intensely insecure individual who had for many years concealed his lack of classical education, or indeed much of any education, by surrounding himself with fake copies of the classics and repeatedly and boastfully lying about how many times he had read them. The library in his office, consisting of several shelves of thick volumes bound in expensive Moroccan leather, was thus seriously misleading. The volumes did not actually contain the books advertised — they consisted instead of either blank pages or some other book entirely — often one that Mr. G had saved from his remote childhood, the only period in his life when he had actually read anything. Seed, perhaps negligently, had failed to discover this discrepancy, and thus made the embarrassing mistake alluded to above.
Green Eggs and Ham, not being written in iambic pentameter or ancient Greek, did not contain anywhere near the metaphysical potency of the Iliad. As a result, the demon was not dispatched to the netherworld, as both Seed and, to a lesser extent, Ms. Arquebus expected. When Seed struck it, the demon simply rolled over, opened its mouth, and consumed the book — expensive Moroccan binding and all — in one gulp, much as it had dispatched the bottle of Throat Phog. It then emitted a grotesque burp, wiped its mouth with the bib, and said something that sounded like “up yours.” Whereupon, much to Seed’s surprise and relief, it vanished in a cloud of chalk dust and green metaphysical smoke.
Seed, realizing that their performance that night was not ideal, expected the demon to return. But, mysteriously, it never did. He waited for weeks and then months, but no trace of the creature was ever observed. Nor, somewhat disappointingly, did any other demons visit the School in future years. Mr. Seed devoted many hours of his subsequent career investigating why this was so, perusing again and again the many volumes of his Catalogue, but he never arrived at a solution. Ms. Arquebus, for her part, hardly gave the matter another thought. She devoted much of her subsequent School years to making friends with the flamboyant Scarlett, and eventually did secure her phone number, which she ill-advisedly gave to her father. In due time, she graduated from the School and became a marketing executive for the M&M’s company. In that capacity, she never used the metaphysical skills she had practiced at the School. She did, however, sometimes use them to slip various items of contraband to her father at the prison where he was incarcerated. He, although loudly proclaiming his innocence, and insisting that he had been caught in a “commie frame-up,” ended up doing two to four years for statutory rape after it was discovered that Scarlett, notwithstanding her astonishingly adult skill set, was underage.
As for the School itself, it went on as before. Mr. G continued to harangue Mr. Seed in vile terms and the students continued to try to trip him up. Over time, he gained an enormous amount of weight and finally died of a massive heart attack. His body was discovered seated in the chair in his office, his head face down in a plate of Corn Beef and Mayonnaise Hash, a copy of Hop on Pop open beside it. Apparently, the excitement of that volume, combined with the Hash, was simply too much for him.
Down in the netherworld, however, the School became a legend. Unbeknownst to anyone, the Moroccan leather binding of Mr. G’s phony copy of the Iliad contained a red dye that, combined with the heavy peat content of the Throat Phog, produced a potent metaphysical compound. That night, when the Scotch drinking demon returned to the underworld, the compound surged through its body and it found itself, within hours, transformed into an Italian barista, with an insatiable desire for coffee, opera, expensive leather shoes, and pepperoni pizza. This urge, or contagion, eventually spread to the entire underworld population and within months, nearly every demon, vampire, troll and zombie in the place was either constructing its own pizza oven, roasting its own coffee beans, tanning leather, or attempting to master Verdi’s arias. (Needless to say, the spectacle of a demon singing “La donna e mobile” must give one pause.) These efforts took so much of their time, and induced so many squabbles over methods, materials, sources, readings, and interpretations, that they simply didn’t have time to revisit the School. The School was enshrined in their memories, however, as, in their own words, “arrraguba dachnnorsh tob,” or in English, “the place of many idiots,” which was not, after all, an unfitting sobriquet.
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