The Book of Counted Sorrows

In 1936, at the age of 21, Heff married a female wrestler named Bea Scuttles, whom he had met in a conga line at a funeral for his friend, Toynbee Doob, whose business card had read “Toynbee Doob, Songwriter (Doomed).” The doomed tend to find one another in this cold lonely world, and to take a warm fuzzy solace in their shared burden of utter hopelessness. By the age of 22, Toynbee had written six smash hit songs, whereupon he had been pecked to death by a flock of rabid young actresses who had come to Hollywood seeking fame, with stars in their eyes, with hope in their hearts, but without all the necessary vaccinations.

Bea Scuttles, by all reports, did not consider herself to be doomed, but she was drawn to Heff anyway. Together they produced a child named Hisser, of indeterminate sex, whom they tried so very desperately to love, but who was, in fact, a hideous mutant with six legs, four arms, sucker pads on its hands and feet, a mouth half as big as its misshapen head, blazing red eyes, and an adorable mass of springy blond curls that once made Shirley Temple weep bitterly with envy. Hisser spent most of the day hiding from the sun, most of the night crawling across ceilings, and would eat little more than raw carrots and live cats. Hisser would drink anything, but only through a straw, and it had the annoying habit of loudly blowing bubbles in whatever beverage it was consuming.

Eventually the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals became suspicious after Heff and Bea adopted 3,624 cats from various animal shelters in the greater Los Angeles area. When the ASPCA representative paid a surprise visit and interrupted Hisser at dinner – a live-cat sandwich and a side of carrot slaw – the jig was up. By order of the court, the child was made a ward of the state and was conveyed to the compassionate but high-security facility known as the Malibu Home for Monstrous and Dangerous Mutant Children.

To us, in this more enlightened age, it seems all but impossible to believe that mutant children, regardless of how monstrous or how dangerous, would ever forcibly be separated from their parents and kept in a locked facility. We now understand that the right thing to do is embrace even the most monstrous and dangerous mutants – nay, not merely embrace them but celebrate them – in recognition of our awareness that there is a little of the mutant in every one of us, even if we don’t eat live cats, the brains of unwary schoolteachers, or masses of steaming cow guts. In that intolerant and ignorant era, however, all dangerous mutant children were sequestered, men were expected to be courteous to women, women were expected not to discuss gynecological problems over dinner in a fine restaurant, and all non-mutant children uniformly respected their elders and never used the word ass in any context whatsoever. We have come a long way, and we have every reason to be proud.

The court-ordered seizure of Hisser was the blow that destroyed the Heffalope marriage. After the divorce, Bea at first resumed her career as a female wrestler, but soon she disappeared from human ken. Heff struggled to earn a few dollars here and there, writing doggerel for tawdry magazines about naked female scientists and for other tawdry magazines about busty blonde philosophers. (Pornography was illegal in those days, very much underground, and salacious material had to be disguised as publications with redeeming social purpose. Fortunately for pornographers, most of the upstanding citizens were so innocent and naive that the thinnest tissue of serious intention could convince them that a collection of photos of bare-naked women fondling themselves was entirely pure if a microscope or Bunsen burner, or volume of Plato’s writings, were included in each shot.)

Sickened by the venereal verse that he composed for these sleazy rags, and inspired by something that he had read in The Book of Counted Sorrows (which was at that time in his possession), Heff fled to a shabby room in a shabby seaside motel in a shabby beach town on the magnificent Pacific coast and in one week wrote Ode to My Mutant Child in 754 rhyming quatrains. The film rights sold immediately to Orson Welles for $612,004, a colossal fortune in those days, and not exactly chump change in our own time.

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