The Quest for Burt’s Buttocks

I suppose I might as well get this over with, if I can.

I have to say, it's been a stressful few decades for me, and the strain is beginning to tell. I was walking along by the river just the other day when I felt something sting my neck. Immediately reaching up to the source of the pain, I found a cocktail stick with a message wrapped round it, obviously fired from a blowpipe. I looked around but could see no sign of the blowpipe sniper. Unfurling the message, I read the following:

Your deadmeat, Loonface.

"My deadmeat? What about my deadmeat?" I muttered to myself. I could tell from the handwriting that it was from a former pupil. "She must mean 'you're'," I concluded. "I told her about that a hundred times. Think about what you're saying. 'You're' is a contraction of 'you are'; 'You are dead meat'."

It occurred to me that the note might mean that the cocktail stick had been tipped with poison. I sighed. That really would be typical.

Miriam, for that was the pupil in question, had had some sort of vendetta against me ever since I taught her English about seven years ago. Apparently I had somehow "ruined her life", and had received a number of communications from her to the effect that she wished me to know the true meaning of spiritual anguish. As far as I could gather, it all began with my giving her the English name Miriam in class (all the children were to be given English first names by the teacher, and one had to be peremptory about it, or the whole procedure would have taken weeks).

In the training we had received, it was stressed that our job as teachers was not merely to educate. In the classroom, one had to engage, to entertain. I felt quite daunted by this. Were we all expected to be Robin Williams, and know the finer points of English grammar? No, we weren't. We were only expected to be Robin Williams. Anyway, since I wished to take a pride in my work, I decided I would throw myself into the whole task of entertaining my pupils body and soul. I noticed that those teachers who had come from the States seemed to consider it their mission to impress the natives with how wacky they were. "I can do better than that," I thought. "They think they've flummoxed Oriental tradition by hitting themselves on the head with a bendy comedy hammer. I'll show them!"

I decided that my entertainment would be rich in content as well as humour, and would contain high levels of obscurity. Therefore, I wrote my own curriculum based on King Diamond's 1987 Gothic horror concept album, Abigail. Miriam, of course, is one of the main characters in King Diamond's skilfully rendered tale of ghostly pregnancy, demonic foetuses, murder and horsemen, the woman, in fact, destined to carry the malevolent Abigail in her accursed womb. I thought it might, you see, help in the learning of the curriculum, if some of the pupils were named after characters in the story. And so, Miriam was born. Miriam was, at first, a very keen student, and I showed favour to all teacher's pets, so, on the occasions that I stood by the blackboard and tried to imitate King Diamond's trademark bass-growl and falsetto-swoop vocals in an a cappella re-enactment of the album Abigail, I would often turn to Miriam, as she frantically scribbled notes in her exercise book, and screech out my favourite couplet from the entire album, "Miriam's dead/I am her head!" Often I would adopt full King Diamond outfit and make-up, just to enhance the effect of the educational entertainment. "Ha!" I thought to myself. "Even Robin fucking Williams never went this far!" It occurred to me, also, that King Diamond had overlooked some of the possibilities of the Abigail concept, and I began to create my own variations of the story, often spending all night rehearsing, and coming into class dressed as the various characters I had introduced – a time-travelling sumo wrestler, Annette Funicello dancing Swan Lake, Yariman and so on – each time, taking especial care to turn to Miriam and sing, "Miriam's dead/I am her head!", since it now seemed to me a killer of a catchphrase.

I suppose that I can only blame myself. There must have been some infinitessimal, but ultimately tragic flaw in my comic timing. It seems that poor Miriam was hounded thereafter, wherever she went, by children and adults singing to her the words, "Miriam's dead/I am her head!" It was regrettable, admittedly, but just one of the hazards of teaching (and studying) English. The last I heard of Miriam before she disappeared into the wastes of forbidden Leng, to study, it was rumoured, under an immortal master of Kung Fu, she had been fired from her job in a textbook publishing house for stabbing her immediate superior to death across a photocopying machine, with an ornamental letter-opener, after tortuting him for some hours with a hole punch. Naturally, she was not allowed to keep her job, despite mitigating circumstances relating to stress and so forth. It was a terrible shame, as, some minor grammar points aside, she had been such a promising student.

After reading the note attached to the cocktail stick, I trudged home with a heavy heart. There was nothing to do, I supposed, other than wait to learn whether I had, in fact, been poisoned. The knowledge that I might soon be dead led me to reflect upon my life, and how it was that, so often, meaning to do well, I had somehow managed to cause such harm, and all because of things quite beyond analysis, such as a failure of comic timing.

Perhaps it would not be so bad if I had been poisoned.

Oh well, I supposed I should check my e-mail and so on before I died, just in case there was anything in urgent need of an answer. There was nothing in my in-box, but I did find that I had received an answer, of kinds, from Welsh volleyball champion, Aidan Smith, with regard to the theme of insect erotica that we had been dissecting on his blog. His response was as follows:

Why is that beautiful woman squeezing Burt's bottom Quentin??? I don't understand!!!

Quentin, please explain sex and sexual attraction to me in a misinformative blog

And it better be good! *shakes my fist at you*

The Burt in question here was Burt Reynolds. There was a picture of this well-known film and television actor in the comments section of that entry. However, I was at first puzzled by the reference to a woman, apparently "squeezing Burt's bottom". This mystery was soon resolved, however. She was in a 'hidden picture', behind the first. "I know the answer to this one," I thought. "It's something to do with sexual attraction. That's why Aidan slyly mentioned sexual attraction in his message. It was a kind of clue." However, upon reflection, I decided this was too obvious, an altogether facile explanation, not dissimilar to explaining away creation by referring to turtles.

I began to realise that, in his insolent wisdom, Aidan was attempting to provide me with a new reason to live, with a quest, a search for the knowledge hidden in Burt's buttocks. And no doubt, if I succeeded in my quest, it would heal me on many different levels of my being.

I began to think very hard. I exhausted all the obvious answers to the riddle – money, power, religion, co-incidence, conspiracy and so on. After literally minutes of intense striving, I was still utterly lost. Clearly, if I wished to cleanse my soul, I had to be prepared to roll up my sleeves, and use bleach.

Such was the miracle of Aidan's methods that I did not die. The answer to the riddle, however, continued to elude me. Time passed and soon there was a terrible development in the situation. Aidan seemed to have lost his mind and was threatening to do things to captive chickens:

You better be working on it Quentin boy, I have a short temper of late! I might do something ridiculous if you don't comply. Like stick the letters of the alphabet randomly on chickens, fire 5 shots into the mass of hens and make words out of the resultant mess.

Was Aidan less benevolent than I had thought? Had he gone over to the dank side? I was beginning to doubt the value of my quest, but I knew I had to save those chickens. Then I looked at the threat again. "Make words out of the resultant mess". That had to be a clue. And that was what I had to do. I had to make words out of this whole damned mess. I returned to the picture of the woman engaged in the intense fondling of Burt's buttocks and scoured it for further clues. I found none, and in my frustration, I went for another walk.

"Burt's buttocks," I muttered to myself. "Burt's buttocks. Bur… tocks. Burtocks. Burdocks. Burdock!"

That was it! Burdock. It must be something to do with burdock. But what? What to do with it?

Time passed. I had been given two weeks, and the fate of the chickens was looking very uncertain. I passed sleepless nights poring over the enigmatic picture of the two hands pawing Burt's nether regions.

And then, something began to bubble up into consciousness. Aidan didn't mean chicken, at all. He meant chikan! It had been staring me right in the face. The beautiful woman in the picture was a chikan (or 'chicken', as Aidan referred to her), the Japanese word for 'groper'. It was the chikan, the beautiful woman, who was in danger. No doubt Aidan was holding her captive, using her as the ultimate forfeit in this mystical game of wits. However, if I wished to save her, I still had to answer the question, why was she groping Burt's buttocks? And then it came to me! Of course, the burdock! Burdock, I believe, has medicinal qualities. Searching through Wikipedia, I found that it was especially efficacious in the treatment of dandruff and eczema. The pieces were beginning to fall into place. The beautiful chikan woman, or 'Angel Baby' held captive by Aidan, 'The Man Who Loved Women', was in desperate need of burdock ('Rough Cut'), for the sake of her Deliverance, and it was my job to intercept this Skullduggery and End the Game, in order to receive my Instant Karma. The message could not have been clearer.

But who was this mysterious, beautiful woman? It could have been none other than Miriam herself. Disillusioned with her quest for revenge, she had decided, instead, to mastermind a trial that would elevate both me and her above the terrible karma that had so far joined us. And how had she done this? By adopting the confused and extravagant identity of Aidan Smith. It was herself she had been threatening, in a bizarre, alphabet-related ritual suicide. But if I can get that burdock to her, and release her from the dandruff and eczema of stress and bad karma, then all things will be saved, forever.

Am I right?

I hope that, in telling this tale, I have also, by implication, cleared up the mystery and the irritation of so-called "sex and sexual attraction", which is, in fact, nothing more than a veil to hide the truth.

I am alive inside your wife.
Miriam's dead. I am her head.