Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his 
asshole to talk? His whole abdomen would move up and 
down you dig farting out the words. It was unlike 
anything I ever heard.
This ass talk had sort of a gut frequency. It hit you 
right down there like you gotta go. You know when the 
old colon gives you the elbow and it feels sorta cold 
inside, and you know all you have to do is turn loose? 
Well this talking hit you right down there, a bubbly, 
thick stagnant sound, a sound you could smell.
This man worked for a carnival you dig, and to start 
with it was like a novelty ventriliquist act. Real 
funny, too, at first. He had a number he called “The 
Better ‘Ole” that was a scream, I tell you. I forget 
most of it but it was clever. Like, “Oh I say, are you 
still down there, old thing?”
“Nah I had to go relieve myself.”
After a while the ass start talking on its own. He 
would go in without anything prepared and his ass would 
ad-lib and toss the gags back at him every time.
Then it developed sort of teeth-like little raspy in-
curving hooks and started eating. He thought this was 
cute at first and built an act around it, but the 
asshole would eat its way through his pants and start 
talking on the street, shouting out it wanted equal 
rights. It would get drunk, too, and have crying jags 
nobody loved it and it wanted to be kissed same as any 
other mouth. Finally it talked all the time day and 
night, you could hear him for blocks screaming at it to 
shut up, and beating it with his fist, and sticking 
candles up it, but nothing did any good and the asshole 
said to him: “It's you who will shut up in the end. Not 
me. Because we dont need you around here any more. I 
can talk and eat and shit.”
After that he began waking up in the morning with a 
transparent jelly like a tadpole's tail all over his 
mouth. This jelly was what the scientists call un-D.T., 
Undifferentiated Tissue, which can grow into any kind 
of flesh on the human body. He would tear it off his 
mouth and the pieces would stick to his hands like 
burning gasoline jelly and grow there, grow anywhere on 
him a glob of it fell. So finally his mouth sealed 
over, and the whole head would have have amputated 
spontaneous — (did you know there is a condition occurs 
in parts of Africa and only among Negroes where the 
little toe amputates spontaneously?) — except for the 
eyes you dig. Thats one thing the asshole couldn't do 
was see. It needed the eyes. But nerve connections were 
blocked and infiltrated and atrophied so the brain 
couldn't give orders any more. It was trapped in the 
skull, sealed off. For a while you could see the 
silent, helpless suffering of the brain behind the 
eyes, then finally the brain must have died, because 
the eyes went out, and there was no more feeling in 
them than a crab's eyes on the end of a stalk.