Bill Lee: 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, a bubbly, thick, stagnant sound. A sound you could smell. This man worked the carnival, you dig? At first it was like a novelty ventriloquist act. After a while, the ass started 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 teethlike, little raspy in-curving hooks and started eating. He thought this was cute and built an act aroud it. But the asshole would eat his 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. It would want to be kissed, same as any other mouth. All the time,day and night. You could hear him for blocks, screaming at it to shut up, beating at it with his fists, and sticking candles up: but nothing did any good. Then the asshole said to him: it is you who will shut-up in the end because we don't need you around here because I can talk, and eat, and shit. After that, he began waking up in the morning with transparent jelly, like a tadpole's tail, all over his mouth. He would tear it off his mouth, and the pieces would stick to his hands like burning gasoline jelly and grow there. So finaly, his mouth sealed over and his whole head would have amputated spontaniously except for the eyes, you dig: the one thing the asshole couldn't do was see. It needed the eyes. Nerve connections were blocked and infiltrated and atrophied. So the brain couldn't give orders anymore. It was trapped inside the skull and sealed off. For a while you could see the silent, helpless, suffering of the brain behind the eyes... and then, finally, the brain must have died, because the eyes went out, and there was no more feeling in them than in a crab's eye at the of a stalk.