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  • A Shoving Leopard
  • David Kirby (bio)

When people say they don’t like something, usually it means they wouldn’t want to do it themselves: my dad always mistrusted artists and called them fakes and phonies, so that if you showed him a picture of William Burroughs or Salvador Dalí, he’d say, “Looks like a fake to me” or “What a phony!” though what I finally figured out he meant is that my dad would have felt like

a phony if he’d been a gay heroin addict who dressed like a mortician and wrote about junkies and criminals and sexual deviants and steam-powered dildos or if he’d plucked his eyebrows and worn a cape and painted pictures of Shirley Temple with the body of a sphinx and a purple bat on her head. But since that’s pretty much all I wanted to do when I was fourteen

and therefore didn’t appreciate my dad’s tacit disapproval of the world-class fake and phony I was yet to be, I knew even then that it’s good to be true to thine own self, as the fellow said, even though you’re not quite sure who that self is. Yet, I mean: in The Gospel of Judas, Jesus tells his betrayer, “Step away from the others” and then “You will exceed all of them, for you will sacrifice the man

who clothes me. . . .” The man who clothes me! See, Jesus knew who he was. The Reverend W. A. Spooner may have said our Lord is a shoving leopard, but Jesus knew. And if self-knowledge was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough as well for philosopher-to-be Colin Wilson, who, as a boy on the verge of swallowing hydrocyanic acid, has an insight: there are two Colin Wilsons, he realizes, [End Page 78]

one a self-pitying teenager and the other a thinking man, his real self, but the idiot is about to kill them both, and “in that moment, I glimpsed the marvelous, immense richness of reality, extending to distant horizons.” I think my father would not mind the fact that I’m a poet now because I don’t look like a poet, at least in the Burroughs-and-Dalí sense, which is why I’ll always

have a soft spot for those movies in which one character dons a latex mask and wig and eyebrows and swallows a voice reprogrammer and turns into another character, an evil one, and infiltrates the evil guy’s crime or terrorist or spy organization and confuses the hell out of the other criminals and terrorists and spies, none of whom can believe that their leader is so . . . different now, so ready to deviate

from the plan to steal from or blow up or gather intelligence on the art museum or airport or . . . or . . . or spy organization, not theirs, of course, but their counterpart on the other side, the bad side, or the good side, depending on what side you’re on. Once a stranger stopped Peggy Lee on her way to get made up and have her hair done and to don the gown she’d sing in, and the stranger said, “Are you Peggy Lee?”

and Peggy Lee said, “Not yet, I’m not.” Why, just the other day, I read that, in West Africa, if a man died who’d been impotent, they’d cut off his little finger and insert it in his anus to horrify him so much that he’d try to get reincarnated as a woman. Boy, that’d do it for me. I wouldn’t know who I was! Jesus said to Judas, “You will be cursed by other generations, and you will come

to rule over them.” I wonder what he meant by that, since I don’t notice anybody who looks like Judas running things [End Page 79] these days, though maybe that’s the point. Thank you, Judas! And thank you, too, Jesus. You’re so smart! No wonder everyone always speaks so well of you, and I’m not just talking about that bunch down at Parkway Baptist, a pack of...

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