BOOGERMANIA

     I knew, when I took on the task of writing an article about America's newest religious leader, Sugar booger, that I was cutting myself a hard row to hoe. Had I realized just how hard, no doubt I would never have ventured to his palace in Boogeratia -formerly known as Bodine Louisiana, nor would I have become so wrapped up in what I found there. But America is full of Monday rnorning quarterbacks, and I am no different. We all see best in hindsight, even the strongest souls among us
.      Not that I count myself in that exalted group. Perhaps at one time, yes. Not now, or ever more. I have seen the light.
     Well hell, Boogermania swept the country like a plague. Its buzzwords sprang up in the concrete canyons of the Big Apple and on the golden plains of Kansas, from the ancient redwoods of the northwest to the humid swamplands of the southeast. Five-high split, double clutch, "Lawton Lowhum is the mainstay but Booger is the way."
     The proponents of Boogerism, mainly young and near windless children (I then thought), began to make their presence felt around air terminals and bus stations, in back alleys behind parts houses and at the side entrances to funeral establishments. They smiled and chanted and passed out pieces of broken fan belts -each of which was alleged to have come from the pile near Indio, California where Sugar Booger received (according to legend) the enlightenment in the year 1983, while gazing upon the burnt generators and broken bolts and such which comprised the huge junk pile. They did little dances purportedly choreographed by their religious leader while under the influence of massive doses of Benzedrine. Some of the more devoted draped their bodies with truck parts: alternators hung from belts, spark plugs became earrings, a few wore entire dash panels upon their backs, complete with instruments.
     A man by the name of Lawton Lowhum became the Booger's "High Priest." Lowhum had owned the truck stop where Booger found salvation on that sizzling July desert day. According to the legend, Booger had understood at the moment of revelation that Lowhum had been directed by the Coligog himself - the highest of the high - to toss the debris in that certain inimitable fashion. According to Booger's sudden explosion of total understanding, the Coligog lived in a dimension known as Piddlestrip and drove a massive tractor-trailer rig larger than the solar system.
     I must admit that when I first heard all this I thought it was but another in a long succession or idiotic religious movements. I had survived the Moonies, the Poonies, and the croakers1 a small band in Georgia who worshipped bullfrogs. I had written about all the various groups because I was the religion editor of the Como (Tennessee) Leader. At a younger age I had been an ordained Baptist minister, although I suffered finally a total burnout and sought refuge in agnosticism. It seemed to be the sanest position in a world literally exploding with new dogmas.
     And my agnosticism was not shaken by anything I saw in all these other cults - indeed, it was strengthened if anything. They were without exception either products of minds tuned to the texture of ripoff, or the living dreams of psychotics. I had expected Boogerism to be more of the same.
     How wrong can a fellow be? Don't ask me. I've just tickled the fringes of that subject.

     My wife was not especially pleased to learn that I was once again going off into the wilds to explore some new religious cult.
     "I guess the kids and I will have to form a religion of our own just to get the opportunity to see you occasionally." she said.
      "Why don't you do that?" I replied. "You could all get together and adore the wallpaper, or maybe the shower handle."
      "I think that one's already been done," she replied, referring to the shower handle.
     As a matter of fact, she was right. I distinctly recall reading an article in Time about that. "Anyway,"' she continued, "'why can't Carl cover some of these idiotic stories?"
     "They're not idiotic, they're news," I replied. "And besides, I'm religion editor, not Purvis."
     "A defrocked minister, no less." She had a way of getting my goat when she was of half a mind to, and that seemed to be more and more frequently.
     "I was not defrocked," I replied hotly. "I resigned. There is a difference."
     "It was one or the other, you know that," she said, wrinkling up her nose the way she does when observing something distasteful.
     She pointed at the pinstripe-on-blue suit I was folding neatly into my two-suiter, "Do you think that's sensible attire for noogermadia?"
     "Boogeratia," I corrected, "And I do have to have something to wear to my audience with the Godhead."
     "The Godhead, no less!"
     "Well, he believes himself to be that, anyway. I'm taking some jeans, for Christ's sake, don't get your bowels in an uproar!"
     She smiled. "I'm not, but do you think you have the bod for jeans now? I mean, you are a middle-aged man, complete with spread."
     "Thanks," She really wanted to get my goat now. "I've noticed you've begun to spread out a little lately," I said.
     She laughed, caught up in the game of cutting.
     "I didn't know you'd noticed." she replied, her eyes frosty behind the smile. Bless her heart, Marge could never, like some women, hide her true feeling. Of all the things I liked about her - and they were many - perhaps I liked that best or all. "It seems," she continued, "you seldom see my body anymore...: can't remember the last time."
     "Last Thursday night," I replied. 'We went to the movies with the Pillsburys, and then later we did the dirty thing."
     "Oh, yeah, you got horny looking at that horrid girl in the movie...the one with the big tits. Ugh, big and ugly!'

     "Hey weren't ugly, " I protested. "Too big maybe. But ugly? Never!"
     "She looked like a sick cow, " Marge retorted. "I didn't know you were so impressed by cows, you never told me."
     "You know the old saying." I replied, jamming at half dozen pairs or socks into my overstuffed case. All over a mouthful et cetera, et cetera, et cetera."
     She shook her head in mock sadness. "A former minister, no less, that's what this world is coming to."
     "No, dear, that's not what this world's coming to. Boogerism, that's it. That's what it's coming to."
     I was met at the Baton Rogue airport by a cross-eyed fellow named Festus Ray Parker., Festus, I soon learned, was chief pilot for Sugar Booger, flying him to this and that engagement in a long, lean Mitsubishi JU-2I.
     "This sumbitch really gets it on!" Festus Ray cried out above the roar of the Garrett turboprops as he rotated the underslung aircraft and climbed out over Red Stick in a steep and sicking fashion. I was wondering how a fellow with such obvious visual problems ever managed to get licensed to fly an aircraft when, as though reading my mind, he said, "I'm gonna get my license one of these days, soon's I get to where I can remember if it's the runway on the right that's the real one, or the one on the left." He smiled a smile that reminded me or a possum I'd seen as a child, knocked out of a tree and surrounded by a pack of howling dogs.

     I soon learned that an audience with the Godhead required a two-hour visit with the High priest, Lawton Lowhum, during which was explained the proper protocol to be used with the Divine One at all times.
     Lawton Lowhum was not a handsome man. He had the cauliflower ears of an old wrestler. He reminded me of an old bailbondsman I had once met, a man who tracked down many a bail jumper and returned them, slightly battered for all their evasive efforts, to justice.
     "Have another drink," Lowhum said, pushing a bottle of Jack Daniels across the table. I took the bottle and filled my glass. He then took it and drank straight from the neck.
     "One good thing about this religion, we're partial to drink," he said.
     "That should work in your favor," I replied. "I mean, a lot of people drink nowadays.
     Lowhum nodded. "Yeah, that and everything else. That's the good thing about Boogerism, we ain't against everything, we're for everything, just about. If a fellow wants to take dope and have sex and shoot his mother-in-law, we're all for it..Man's got to do his on thing." The High Priest took another massive swallow of whiskey, then burped appreciatively.
     "You do understand I'm a writer, here to do a piece on Sugar Booger and his religion, don't you?" I asked incredulously. I couldn't believe he was saying such things.
     "Sure, I know all about that," he said. "You'll find that we're honest if nothing else. Nobody will try to bullshit you here - cursing is absolutely fine too, but Booger teaches that one should never do it in the presence of Abraham Lincoln."
     "But he's dead, " I said.
     "Yeah," Lowhum grinned, "that's the good part, Booger lays down rules that are easy to live by, don't he?"
     During my two hours with Lowhum I learned, beyond the fact that he could consume massive quantities of corn whiskey with no apparent ill effect, the proper way to act in the presence or Sugar Booger. That was, in essence, any damned way you pleased.
     "Booger's into spontaneity," Lowhum said. "He's apt to jump up and run through the wall if the notion strikes him, especially if he's been dropping a lot of blacks."
     "Blacks?"
     "Yeah, you know. Black widows, black beauties, amphetamine. Booger was a trucker, he eats speed like it was candy."
     No wonder he was so spontaneous!
     "The thing is," Lowhurn continued, "Booger is apt to respond to anything you do, so you have to watch yourself. You do something too odd and it's apt to set him off. Last week, a fellow was in talking to him and all of a sudden the fellow broke wind real loud. Well, Booger took that as a sign of the Komo - which is a special moment in time that requires a special reaction - and he hit the guy in the face with a two by four. Damned near killed him, too. So, you do or say whatever you want, but be ready for anything."
     "That all sounds a little scary tome," I replied uneasily.      "Yeah, it is," Lowhum grinned. "That's why it's so damned much fun!"
     When the moment arrived, I was close to forgetting the whole thing and catching the first plane back to Atlanta. I've never been partial, as we say in the South, to being struck across the face with lumber. It's not even something I care to think about.
     But I must admit, the Tennessee sipping whiskey - which had not been sipped at all, bolstered my courage to some degree. Imagine what Genghis Khan could have accomplished with an unlimited supply of that stuff. We would all be speaking some form of Mongolian today.
     And so I went to meet Sugar Booger and fate on legs steadied and made bold by fermented corn.

     I should say here that I am seldom guilty or overstatement.Having said that, I will say this: all things considered, Sugar Booger was undoubtedly the most bizarre human being I had ever seen.
     I think it was the headgear that most gave that impression. He wore an old World War One aviator's cap with the flaps pulled down and buckled beneath the chin. Over this were worn huge bug-eyed goggles.
     He was a small and skinny man, dressed in old khaki trousers and shirt. The trousers had thousands of tiny cigarette burns all over the lap and the leg fronts. The bottoms of the trousers were stuffed into what appeared to be a pair of size 15 brown and white cowboy boots. They were the kind of boots with the wide tops, not "leg huggers" such as the ones I wore.
     So this, I thought, was the great Sugar Booger, AKA Tullis Ray Woodbury, the Godhead, the Divine One, the man who had come to the point of know-all and see-all behind a truck stop in Indio, California while gazing into a pile of broken auto parts. The man who now, according to conservative estimates, had more than 16 million followers world wide, and an income of more that $4 million dollars a month.
     "Hidy set yoreselr down here feller have a drink have a pill or sornethin' by god ain't it a bitch man done come all the way down here to write up a piece on the Booger by God America's newest saint by cracky pour up a shot an' less talk some trash!" He waved his cigarette about, ashes and fire falling all over him. He was, I observed, half past freaked on speed.
     "When I was pushin' iron nobody'd piss on me if I was on fire by god. Used to have to go 'round in cafes introducin' myself to all the sumbitches and didn't nobody give a good damn 'bout the Booger now everybody wants a piece of him, wants to know all about the enlightenin' have a friggin' smoke government's after me too draggin' in too much tax-free glom to suit them sumbitches, sent a ringer down here and I struck a blow for religious freedom with a two-by-four, I did, don't nobody fool with the Booger for I'm truly the Godhead by god," all said in one short breath.
     He continued, "There ain't no way and there ain't no light, there's just what there is and it's somethin' I base my whole life on...that's the second precept of Boogerism and by god it's my formula for success but that's all in the mind too!"
     I sat, fascinated as a cobra by the soft swaying of a snake charmer, and understood not one word of what I heard. Sugar Booger rattled on at top speed for over three hours, the only pauses coming when he chain-lit another cigarette - he burned at least 50 new holes in his clothing during that span of time. My brain began to feel like a rotten sponge dipped too long in a toilet bowl. My throat began to constrict. My eyes watered. Had I not been completely terrorized I would have been bored beyond tears.
     The man was totally, hopelessly insane. Massive overdoses of speed had burned gaping rents in his psyche and through these holes poured out his mindless dogma. He was as close to the joked-about "Jehovah's Witness on speed" as I have ever encountered.
     I almost wept from relief when he stammered to a stop and fell sideways in a dead faint!

     "Took almost three weeks this time," Lawton Lowbum said, a tone of awe in his voice. "That1s the longest Booger has ever kept at it. You're lucky - one time a Chinaman caught him on the front end of a meth rush and Booger plumb talked that sonuvabitch into the ground! Chink sat there for three days, afraid to close his eyes. Finally had himself a heart attack and died. Booger took that as a sign of the spiritual nature and named his new institute after the Chinaman. Maybe you've heard of it, the Yang Chung Lee Institute, in Rochester, New York?"
     "I'm afraid not," At the moment, I wasn't absolutely sure what my own name was, so hammered was my brain.
     "Anyhow, it's a famous institute where they study flyin' saucers and witchcraft and stuff like that. Booger believes in those things, you know. In fact, he thinks maybe he was brought here via a flyin' saucer as an infant and deposited outside Burning Bush, Kentucky, his home town."
     "Do you think that's true?" I asked Lowhum.
     He shrugged, turning up his palms. Perhaps 12 carats of real rock glittered on his fingers.
     "Well, let's just say I don't disbelieve anything," he said with a smile. "I'm doin' pretty well as it is."
     He wasn't lying there.
     Sometime later I discovered there was a whole other aide to Lawton Lowhum, former truckstop operator and now high priest to the Divine One. In flact, years before Lowhum had been something of a renowned man. In those days his name was Clyde Wheaton, and he had been a professor at Cornell University with a doctorate in psychology. He had given up that prestigious position in the summer of 1939 and gone to Albania to live with a group of cave dwelling cretins. Me returned to the United States in 1941, changed his name to Lawton Lowbum and dropped out of sight.
     Clyde Wheaton was never heard from again, with the exception of a paper that appeared in the Scientific American in 1947. It detailed a study of a band of cretinous outlaws who lived in caves in eastern Albania. Their leader was a thick-limbed gentleman with a head large as a small washtub, named Mongo Yulie. Acoording to the paper. Mongo Tulie had discovered, in the vast depths of his stupiditya a new way of life. While gazing upon a piece of slimy substance he had extracted from his nose, he had muttered the word "booger."
     And so, after months of work, I had discovered the truth: Boogerism was not born out of the speed-lashed brain of one Tullis Ray Woodbury. AKA Sugar Booger, nor was it the brainchild of his right-hand man, Lawton Lowhurn. No. A nose picking Albanian cretin named Mongo Tulie had created the new religion spreading like wildfire around the world in the year 1941.
     God only knows why I had to be the one to discover all this. And perhaps even He doesn't know why I was foolish enough to write what I knew. I have made many mistakes in my life, but I shall never make another so great.

     Things began going awry the moment my story was released. First came the calls, thousands of them. Most were hostile, death threats and such. I had gored a noble man, I had poked run at a deep and serious religious leader and his entire movement. I was a bastard and a psychotic, a liar and a creep.
     The publisher of my paper called me into hit office two days after the story broke and fired me, just like that, after 12 years of working my butt to the bone for him
.      'You're a deficit, Trudlow," he growled, pointing at a stack of hate mail. "We'll be damned lucky if we don't get sued over this mess!"      "But every word of it's the truth!" I protested. "Haven't you read the banner on your own paper lately? It Says, 'Truth and justice and the right of free speech.'''
     "That's the trouble with you, Jack, you take everything too goddamn literally," he snapped. "Truth's fine1 long as it don't go screwin' up the advertising revenue."
     My only reply was an obscene street gesture that is made with the middle finger.
     He tossed an envelope containing my final pay across the desk. "You'll never work again. Asshole," he said coldly.
     Marge left me the next day.
     "You've gone too far this time," she said, stuffing more clothing into a suitcase. "I could take the being away, I could take the neglect. But I can't take these insults to our children!"
     "What in hell are you talkin' about?" I asked. It seemed that I had stepped through a time warp into some insane dimension. I wondered for a moment if perhaps Festus Ray had determined the correct runway with his pitifully cocked eyes. Maybe I was dead and just didn't know it.
     At that moment my 13-year-old son Lester stuck his head into the room. "Hi Dad," he said, "boy you're a real asshole."
      My only son was wearing a fan belt around his neck. He had his trouser legs stuffed into a horrible pair of brown and white cowboy boots. It was too much.

     I've been in the home six months now. The rest of the world is going absolutely nuts, but it's mildly pleasant in here. We do very little but watch television and finger-paint. Sometimes they let us weave baskets but I'm not very good at that.
     There is a movement afoot to have sugar Booger declared "King of the world." I saw that on the evening news, so it might or may not be true. After all, they have to account to somebody too.
     Lawton Lowhum changed his name back to Clyde Wheaton and moved to Argentina. He took a planeload of gold with him. I understand he and Marge are doing quite well down there, they've fallen in with some of the few remaining Nazi war criminals.
     Festus Ray Parker is the new High Priest. I like old Festus Pay, in tact he sent me a box of cigars on my birthday last month.
Unfortunately I don't smoke.

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