It happened Monday, April 4th, 1983, at St. Clements Church, in the heart of Hell’s Kitchen. The scene: Smoke Signals’ 3rd annual FEAST OF UNBRAINING (for the benefit of the Audience). Hundreds of depressed, suicidal, anti-social creative misfits suddenly found themselves out of their womb-caves and transformed into the middle of a celebration that had nothing to celebrate other than the act of celebrating itself, as an exercise in will. Sensing perhaps that they were on the edge of a footnote in history, the audience grew quiet as (tapdancing) MC Buddy Godeaus began explaining the recent literary scandal involving Jerzy Kosinski. Briefly, Kosinski has been charged with not writing his own novels, of using numerous students as ghost writers, and then taking all the credit himself. In response to these charges, the audience opened its collective heart to Kosinski and volunteered to write his next novel, royalty free, as an Exquisite Corpse: The first sentence was given, the paper and pens passed out, and then, as The Feast continued with Lewis (the great gandson of Alfred) Jarry rocking out, the audience wrote, folded, and passed the novel on to the person next to them. At he end of the evening the unedited novel was read out loud to its co-authors. Here now is what our own literary pundid, Cecil B. Coble, called “the first concrete contribution to “Post Freak Mutant Lit.”

WINNING POLO
by Jerzy Kosinski

It was a cold day in Poland when the old cow died. * The sky is redder in Cuba. * Light over the mountain. Bright brown. *

It had rained steadily for several days. He was in a state of terrivle depression, the horse having died the day before. He pondered accepting the job that his brother offered him in Schenectady working in a resort hotel, but he paled at the thought of leaving Grizelda, the Irish Polis waitress he had met while vacationing in Prague the previous summer.

At this moment, his father Tomas arrives, with a cartload of potatoes. “Yo” he shouts to his son. But the house was strangely quiet. His son was laying face-down in the kitchen in deep despair. What to do – Should he follow his brother to fame and fortune, or run off with Grizelda? *

The cow! The cow!
Even now,
as his well-honed blade
slit the landlord’s throat
and he himself thought back
on simpler, happier days in Cracow,
the cow pervaded his perfect skull. *

It was only a matter of time before the question arose, was the cow really dead? *

And I still had a bad case of prickly-heat from the night before. * I used to know this guy named Chuck, but everyone called him “P.D.” It stood for POTATO-DICK. He used to get embarrassed when he was with a girl and everyone called him P.D., and she would ask him what it meant. *

When last seen, Jessica was wearing a silk blouse in blue with a frog pattern and black patch over his left ear. She can also be identified by the rope she wears around her knee with such abandon. *

Purple snapdragons breathe lava breath
flowering financial freezes
on your fat thighs *

Bonnie learned to hambone in the bebop. * The rain water continued to spill out of the gutters, but the bull was saved. *

Suddenly without a moments notice the cow burped. * There’s yellowing countryside ablazin’, and mystery abounds. * The Russians took her cow tit and squeezed the last bit of sour milk from her mother’s udder -- Sad day in Poland! *

After he left, his fish jumped out of the window and flew away. * And at that instant he knew, he ceased to know. *