The Putti

Author(s): Shelley Jackson

Source: Conjunctions, No. 26, Sticks & Stones (1996), pp. 212-218
Published by: Conjunctions
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 The Putti
Shelley ]ackson

I am here to sketch the contours of the double danger that con

cerns us: the putti as parasite, the putti as drug. I am here with
bias, performers and visuals.
We will start by considering the putti as drug, known as auntie,
little sister, pigeon (after the look-alike that dupes hasty buyers),
slug, devil, root, red doll. I am a user. No doubt I will speak strange
ly at times. It is my conviction that if I do so, it will not hobble
my presentation, but add to it that stink of the real which makes
of fact, understanding.
Please follow me as we leave the committee room to observe the
sale of putti firsthand. If you are wearing the wrong shoes, elegant
slip-on medium-heel galoshes are available for a small rental fee
from the kiosk outside, so move right along toward this authentic
street scene, please do not step over the ropes to examine the illu
sion more carefully as you will damage the exhibit, you will all
be thoroughly searched as we leave. Observe a street polka-dotted
with chewing-gum rounds. Here putti may be tracked down quick
ly enough by anyone with a wad to wave around, and I have been
amply supplied thanks to the Commission's caboodle, the finan
cial acumen of this commission makes me stiff in my physical
pants. But even with bags of the wallet-weed you can't pick up
prime stuff on the street.
Street putti's not the scab red of the best strain, but a waxy
cardinal red, and not much bigger than a grasshopper. Show your
money and watch the plastic-baggied root unroll from squares of
flannel drawn from the pockets of our well treated stand-ins whose
chapped ankles stretch bare out of secondhand dress shoes, boys
with long hairlessthighs and slender cocks and brown-mauve
heads shiny like oiled hardwood furniture. They have the sex ap
peal of a small mallet rapapped on the table by a presiding officer
in calling for attention or silence.
A word of advice: examine the goods before you buy. You
wouldn't believe the things they pass off as the good stuff. Pigeon

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 Shelley Jackson

meat, snipped and dyed. Garden slugs salt-stiffened and lipsticked

red. I hold a specimen in my hand if the camera would move in
and you can see on the screen we have disguised as a bus shelter a
fine specimen as rubicund as hemorrhoidal dogbottom. The putti
is tacky and I handle it gingerly so none of the skin comes away
on my hand. Putti are plump in the center, tapering toward the
ends. They are firm but flexible; note the torque I can induce with
a simple turn of the wrist. Note the splinter between their clothes
pin "thighs." It looks like a schlong scaled small, but it's just a
wen, a nodule, a bump on a root. Under the thick, spicy skin lies
the meat of a turnip, a radish, a beet. No tiny bones, no tiny lungs
or heart. Just the deep red flesh, ringed with subtle bands of pink.
The rubbery "arms" are forced to the sides and bound there for
drying; at the tip of my nail observe the crease left by the twine.
Ideally tied with hemp to sweet cedar racks and dried in high
desert, more often they are strung up on the back of a chair in
front of a fan in a closet.
As the putti dry their sketchy features sharpen. Their flesh goes
malleable, dark and sticky where pressed. It holds a thumbprint,
turns gummy like hash. The putti contract; go from smooth and
shiny to deeply cleft, awry. They range from delicate rose, said to
be milder, to the deep red approaching black beloved of connois
seurs. Connoisseurs like the late Bitch Henry, whose dealer picked
out the most florid specimens for him, their heads black and heavy
like rotting roses.
If you trim the joint close enough you can hold a match to the
feet and suck the tiny head, pronged and spicy as a juniper berry,
and of a size. Suck it and you'll numb your tongue, while the
peppersmoke, sticky black and resinous, coats lungs faster than
cigars.
Dried like this specimen, putti cost more than cocaine; even
fresh they come at a price, for harvest is lucky, bloody, unsafe.
From a popular underground handbook: "Drug your victim and
hold him down. Slide in your blade until it meets resistance. Keep
ing the slit propped open, extract Junior with tongs. Then run,"
advise the authors,who recently appeared on a talk show in well
ironed pin-striped masks, and were spotted sharing auntie with
the host after the hour.
The desperate poor sometimes pulp their own thighs or abdomen,
because they saw or hoped they saw a faint blush under the skin,
or felt a lump. I once saw a man whose face evaded all features

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Shelley Jackson

limping up the street with blood in his shoes, daintily tweaking

open his overcoat to proffer a putti still smutty with clotting blood
and lymph, still half wed to what it was plucked from. A doll
daubed red in a drenched paper towel. These are the lucky ones,
who make it out of the house with a sales pitch and a stagger.
Bitch Henry bled to death, a kitchen knife in his hand.
Worth less fresh, putti's still a draw, and I've seen businessmen
giddy at the cut-rate commodity empty their lunch bags on the
sidewalk and slip a dribbling packet of red abortion in their suit
pockets. The gutted host hunches off to the health project, where
there's a room always full these days, men and women laid out
under the needle like samplers awaiting cross-stitch Americana,
houses and token cornstalks, verses cautionary or wry. Or he risks
it unsewn with something else to sell, and limps to an hourly rates
motel where someone pays top dollar to point his groin at the gash
in the thigh, to press his thumbs on either side of the cut, part the
rubbery banks lined with razed cells and "put the putti back."
Users brag they can taste the putti's past, can tell aesthete from
prankster from the household handyman who keeps the pages of
the newspaper lying smooth or prevents the cleanser from clump
ing. Never mind that no one knows whether the putti do these
things or do anything at all but grow and wait. The tabloids are
full of doctored photographs of putti on toadstools and bibles,
guarding pilfered toothbrushes, bobby pins and wedding rings, like
bower-birds. The science news is equally fantastic: scientists at
tempt to detect infinitesimal free-roving putti in their cloud cham
bers. Slice specimens like hot dogs. Dunk them in acid, cook them,
crush them in presses, stretch them on racks, plant them, launch
them into orbit, psychoanalyze them, irradiate, explode and oh
most certainly smoke them.
Does the smoke
transmit their seed? But users aren't all carriers,
nor the reverse. Where did the first putti come from? A graft, say
some, information formed into flesh, a top-secret experiment run
amok. A floppy disk gone sticky, sloppy. Self-propagating meat
friendly infochop. They have something to tell us, say some. But
when will they speak?
Dr. Crane, amateur biologist, claims success with shock treat
ment. Stuck with electrodes and pumped full of juice, his speci
mens totter around jerking and sizzling, and choke out a few
glottally inflected phrases in a wheeze that comes from no lungs,
but from some pocket of air expiring under pressure, battered into

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 Shelley Jackson

consonants by whatever masses can come together like lip and

tongue. He surrounds them with microphones and recording de
vices, he compiles glossaries of whoosh and hiss and analyzes
them with a code-breaking program, claims to have deciphered
one such utterance as "Bring it to Jerome," and makes much of this
Jerome, whose name resounds with religious associations. The
putti don't stick around to make sure their message is understood.
A few seconds at that voltage and they're jerky, flamingo filet.
It is my elegy to Bitch Henry that reflective particles have been
released from nozzles camouflaged with faux pigeonshit in the
facades of the surrounding buildings and are forming a cloud that
will take some hours to disperse (those experiencing respiratory
difficulty will be issued oxygen masks in flattering pastels) and in
moments you will see and here it is now from horizon to horizon
a realistically tinted electron microscope image of a fraction of a
centimeter of Henry's skin, taken from his left hip by Dr. Crane
some months before his death. Stroll under this flesh canopy lit
by sourceless electron light while noshing on the scale models of
human skin flakes and shed hairs provided gratis by the talented
bakers of our catering service, enjoying the illusion that you are
the size of dust mites or indeed of putti.
Look closely at the horny thickening around the base of the
nearest magnified hair. Most scientists agree the putti have no
means of locomotion and no sensible life as we know it, but ob
serve: a putti lounges against the hair, his legs lolling wide, jaw
askew. Another hangs on with one hand, swings wide, wrinkling
his nose at the camera. Tinted too energetic a fuchsia. Phony, like
A.C. Doyle's fairies with their backwards shadows and fingertips
lost to the scissors?
A pit opens in the surface nearby. Round and fuzzy viral bunnies
are nudged into crevices three, four at a time, or cling to a ridge,
contravening gravity. They're dyed acid green. The purple hot dog
buns are probably bacteria. Their needs are simple. This is their
KOA, rugged enough to smack of the outdoors, but safe as houses.
Wedged between bunnies, however, and with none of their out
doorsy freshness or beach ball/kitty toy esprit, the putti lounge
on and under one another with opium negligence. They jam the
crannies and festoon the ledges of the whorl. They're a nest of
earwigs, pincers agape with insouciance. They're the Brownies
without the will to fun. They're beggars with a trust fund. Some
one should do something, rout them with a fingernail, hose them

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off the White House lawn. They issue in. droves from strings of
eggs, says the doctor, cruising each other, causing dandruff and
waxy buildup, but only the ones that lodge a foot or a fist in a
cranny will survive. The resultant abscess admits the putti further.
Tucking head, shoulders, knee into the pocket, the putti extends
itself until it is completely embedded and stretched to its full
length, at which time it rests and stilly grows.
The doctor's viewpoint is not widely shared. Please attend to
an old but unsurpassed scientific treatise on the topic at hand:
"Whether fanciful Stories of the Nesting habits of Putti have any
basis in fact is doubtful. No Eggs have ever been found; nor is
there any sign of organs in the putti capable of their production.
Nor can this theory account for the sometime presence of the
putti in places so far Internal to the human body that it is wonder
ful that Science ever thought she could explain this, by recourse
to an account of such noble burrowing as rivals the excavation of
the famed Sewers of Paris, in a creature as little given to energetic
exertion as we have seen the Placid putti to be."
Rival theories evoke the plant that sprouts new roots from its
elbows where they touch down on the mulch. Filaments probe the
tenderized meat around the putti and extend throughout the host,
until the tip thickens and begins to scratch a seat for a new mem
ber. This fist of aggravated flesh twinges, "like teething all over,"
victims report. The encysted putti grows steadily, sustained by
the surrounding tissues, until it reaches its mature size of approxi
mately three and one half inches, at which point the growing
stops, though the putti continues to nourish itself, and retains its
body mass up until the death of the host, or until it is removed by
a surgeon or harvested, illegally, by traffickers.
Look down the alleys to observe our evocative tableaux: illus
trating subsistence-level production techniques the harvesters
bend over their hutches, forked sticks dipping and turning. They
wink over their shoulders as they work, with the eyes of babies,
glossy and pudged. The peppery fumes fret the lids, enter the
bloodstream and make the whole body thicker and meatier. The
harvesters jut without letup. We fear them but we scrub ourselves
scarlet in our beds dreaming of them; their dicks are said to be
thicker and more pointed than most. Uncut, they breed pink
devilish smegma. Jenny and Lydia, neighborhood whores and
lovers, roll on double-thick condoms and cut open the sticky bag
afterwards in motel ashtrays with their nail scissors to look for

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 Shelley Jackson
the spawn they think swim with the sperm. They hunch over the
tray, laugh and dump it in the toilet, clear out.
In some people the putti are so close to the skin, or the skin so
thin and so pale, that you can see their shapes, faint, like a minor
rash or a blush that floods one spot with heat. These prodigies fill
pages slick and reeking of chemicals; samples are available for
viewing from the young man in the hairnet. But there are also the
vain or pragmatic of both sexes who fake it, growing skilled with
lipstick pencils, blush and powder, whose towels are a grotty car
mine, whose wastebaskets are full of the putti's imprint on folded
tissues, waxy cream staining the pulped fibers. The Shroud of Turin
in Maybelline ("Scoundrel," or "Cherries in the Snow"). Fetishists
will pay to trace the outlines of these figments (real or not), these
spelunkers of the body, these deep-tissue divers. They cup their
hands over imaginary swellings and persuade themselves they feel
something stirring.
And the fetishist who adores himself? He might scratch the itch
with just the tip of the knife at first, a white tracing that becomes
a welt that becomes a runnel that becomes a gash, until the tip
touches flesh that doesn't touch back, and pries it out: a tiny
greasy badger, a hairless hamster. Men who snuck off in the jungle
to scratch their thighs with sharp sticks and dab Kotex on the
wounds, lying on their sides in their own menstrual huts and
moaning to the moon, are now in luck. They jab their biceps with
fake knives, bleed and cry, clench their muscle and force out a
little red whippersnapper, never mind that it's brainless and doesn't
resemble Daddy. Wash it, hang it upside down, slap its butt if
pantomime appeals to you. The world is reconfigured: the womb
is anywhere flesh is.
Some say the putti is a child that will not be born, that likes it
in there. Some say the putti is a child that hates the world, and
crawls back in to chew the womb in vengeance. Some say the
putti is a sickness we have mistaken for a message. Some say the
putti is a message we are treating like a sickness. Like locoweed,
like mistletoe, it hangs on without ambition. It breeds without
desire. It multiplies because it's good at that. Bit by bit your flesh
becomes another's. Nothing is subtracted, just estranged.
Please remember: it's no parable. The putti are stuff. They're not
even as malignant as a tapeworm; they're vegetable, calm as carrots.
Your own organs may be combative, aggravated, fibrillating over
diddly-squat. They've got the heebie-jeebies, the willies, the shakes.

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Shelley Jackson

Your putti, on the other hand: solid. Did they come from outer
space, did shoals of pink spores die on Pluto, die on Neptune,
Uranus, Jupiter, Mars, before they hit our hospitality? So what?
They've got neither cortex nor Cortez. If they have a will to power,
it's a program appended to their DNA, a genetic cruise control; the
dial is fused to its setting, the needle is stuck.
We can't stop talking about the putti, but they keep mum. Who
killed Bitch Henry? Not they. The putti have no plans. They're a
thickening at the point of intersection of our obsessions. Our
desires have become pregnant with matter. People are not thingly
enough: vision eclipses the eye, the sense of touch retracts the
hand, words recant lips. It's easy to love a thought, but we want
flesh unperplexed with mind. It is not human, but to slice it from
the human exacts a mortal cost.

Our handsome guards will feel you up as you exit. Please empty
your pockets to make their job easier and more enjoyable.

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