Permanent Exhibit by Matthew Vollmer

Author:Matthew Vollmer
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781942683698
Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.
Published: 2018-07-02T16:00:00+00:00

GONG BANG CLEANSE

The last time I visited my parents, my father, who has been a dentist in a small mountain town for over forty years, told, as he often does, many stories. He told the one about a patient, who may or may not be a relative of blind country star Ronnie Milsap, who drank a case of Coke—two dozen cans—every single day. He told the one about a state trooper who’d been accused of offering the pretty girls he pulled over the chance to trade the tickets he was on the verge of writing for blowjobs. He told the one about the man who was struck by a semi while changing a tire on the side of the road while his wife and child watched, and how the man was then “chewed up” inside one of the truck’s wheel wells. He told the one about the deputy a few towns over, a female jailer who’d witnessed female prisoners hiding things—a carton of cigarettes, an entire bedsheet—in various orifices, and who claimed to know a woman who loved drugs so much she’d have sex with just about anybody, sans protection, in exchange for said drugs, and due to her high fertility, had often become pregnant, and over the course of her life had pumped out twenty children, each of whom had been snatched up by the Department of Social Services, and that this so-called “drug baby” producing mother was just one of many. He told the one about the tiny widow who once asked him to fetch the gold from the mouth of her dead husband, who was lying in a casket at Townsend Rose funeral home, and so even though the gold itself wouldn’t have added up to more than a few dollars, certainly not enough for my father to charge her anything, he’d gone during his lunch break to extract the teeth, but the funeral home was experiencing a power outage, so the staff members there opened the doors and rolled the body into the doorway so that there would be light enough for my father, who looked into the mouth of the dead man and saw that fluid had pooled in the back of his throat, to do his work. He told the one about a man named Purl, who was, at one time, the only black man living in our town, and whose legendary strength granted him the power and endurance to slaughter as many as twenty hogs in a day—killing them, dipping their bodies into boiling water, shaving the hides, gutting them, and butchering them—during which he filled and tossed back cups of blood, at least until he was shown, in Leviticus, that “for the life of every creature is its blood: its blood is its life,” so Purl, from that day forward, gave up his beloved blood drinking. The story that meant the most to me, however, and the one that I kept replaying in my head, was the one about the old woman

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