BAD BEHAVIOR
Midnight in a young man’s sensual garden of behavioral Analysis. A young man so serious, so seriously self involved.
I am at work. Entombed every week night from 9 to 1 in the morning in the far reaches of the behavioral science building, University of Kansas, a prairie Brutalist affair without personality, lacking all character.
Indistinguishable to the silence about me is a cover-up white noise. The droning seems implanted in my brain. It’s an insidious John Cage-like music made by the bank of computers. It’s their military industrial-complex clenching of digital teeth.
Computers run to the results of those people’s ongoing experiments. Computers like monoliths range opposite the line of test chambers, in which subjects, the pigeons, cower in their bird stink. The pigeons are having their behavior analyzed.
This part of the laboratory makes for a narrow aisle. They have me perched at one end on a stool, high enough for me to ostensibly keep an eye on both the computer clicks and, through small windows into each chamber, on the birds themselves. I see the pigeons go dancing under a mustard-gas light to an abstract expressionism of random programming.
Down the smudged linoleum, reminding me of tears on grimy cheeks, a partly filled trashcan tenaciously rivets my attention. It’s a grim metal, army issue, the same to be found surely in every room of the Pentagon.
At the trashcan one may turn and taking a few more strides escape out the lab’s always secured door to freedom. Here, I the pigeons and their friends the rats who are not my business, are under lock and key.
That door always seems profoundly closed to me. Not once since I began this job has it ever opened during my shift. This gives secrecy. Otherwise, mightn’t I and a controversial work be exposed? It makes me feel guilty by association.
I often come to do this bizarre work buzzed, lightly cooked over the fire of a joint. The combo, work and weed, gives me an outlaw kick.
This job is all that keeps me. Without it I would be destitute, consigned as before to living at home 40 miles away a commuting student lonely and sad.
Work of any kind is hard to find in this plague town. The university is the only employer. Any employment opening is sought after hysterically like gold in the Sierra Nevadas.
Working for the lab only came my way because an acquaintance from high school works here and tipped me off to the opening. Jim Green is not a friend. He is damaged.
He’s taken way too much acid, done a stint in a sanitarium, released altered. Jim gravitated to me even though I didn’t like him, had not liked him even in high school before the acid.
I live off campus in the student ghetto. It’s a gaunt and dilapidated student tenement– cheap rooms with a shared kitchen and toilet. It’s Victorian. Decayed stately. Without doubt once ago it had been a professor’s house.
No locks in it. So in the night I sometimes awaken in the dark to find Jim Green in the room, uninvited. Just sitting, watching me, darkness himself. Brooding on acid. This when the horror of the Cielo Drive murders is fresh wet red in the mind.
But Jim Green had been my proxy headhunter. Through him I’d arrived here in the lab. For that I deal with Jim Green’s creepiness, his halting ‘Igor’ presence. I owe Jim Green.
My hatred of the Behavioral Lab is out of control. Recently I began writing on its toilet stall walls in black magic marker, slogans from Jose Ortega y Gasset and other rebellious minds. My most recent scrawling is my own blather, “DOWN WITH TECHNOXITY.”
The job is to take a pigeon from its cage and attach electrode leads to the snap-in attachments that have been imbedded surgically behind the bird’s legs. The implants run upward toward its anus.
This done I pop open a test box door to attach dangling leads to corresponding wires inside the box. The pigeon is secured with a small harness so it cannot turn away from the windows.
My fear in this manipulation is for a bird to escape. To see an angel fluttering above me winging in a berserk flight plan. Thus far none have.
The experiments are based on a randomized flashing of lights– red, yellow and blue. Below the lights is a feed hopper for dispensing grain when the correct light is pecked. Hitting the wrong light brings a punishment of an electric shock up the ass. The third light causes nothing to happen—my own preference to nullify it all.
These pigeon eyes, how incredibly innocent. The birds look stoned themselves.
The pigeons are one-offs, designer labels, some are ugly, some pretty. They have numbers but I give a few names. Stupid ones like Barbie and Ken, Nixon and Agnew. Through time I note that some rare birds, pigeon geniuses, respond to the sequence of lights while others keep failing miserably.
Also through time I watch the birds deteriorate in phases passing from robust to an abnormal molt, down to deviant puny and bald. None last long.
Each box has its own computer. As the test runs the results for each bird are monitored and displayed in numbers on the machine’s screen. At end my job is to write down results from various data screens on each bird’s individual worksheet. Then tear off the printed results and attach them to each pigeon’s record for the night, in a hard back ring binder.
Such is the core of behavioral analysis.
I learn to run the tests so that the six test chambers run together. This so I can record all data, wire the birds and refill the chambers in one quick step and consequently gain more than half an hour of free time to be used as I, not ‘they’ the unseen scientists, see fit.
Supposedly this job gives me study time, given how I manage the work it often does. But some evenings, like tonight, I am dangerously idle, nothing to task my mind except an old copy of Hustler magazine.
Such is the case tonight, and explains my restlessness. I leave the poor pigeons to rustle and peck in their benighted chambers feeling both indolent and rebellious. Airplane sings “Got To Revolution.” Grace Slick turns me on.
The restless part most assuredly being caused by what young men most think of, sex. The moment is stimulus and reward.
And I believe I think of sex more than most. This is why now at midnight I am perched on my high lab stool, computers click-clicking, birds flutter-fluttering, with a hand in my jeans.
Getting close, I hop down the work aisle to that trashcan at the end of time. This orgasm is to be free and open. Exhibitionism as pure anarchy. I’m defiant and joyous, loopy on rebellion, nerves twanging aloud.
Between my dropped jeans and boot toes the can is a big vagina target. It’s a collection of odds and ends, sundry academic detritus including wadded-up test results, Styrofoam coffee cups, spilled pigeon feed, a smattering of feathers.
I aim with care. Turning inside out . . . Jaw drops. Spending my last it’s an outlaw orgasm, absolutely the best kind.
“Jonathan?” The baritone voice comes from behind me, harmonizing with my young man’s cheapest thrill.
Self preservation sends me in another giant leap for mankind, over to my lab stool. Pants are snatched up, somewhat, on the go. No time to stuff my stuff back in them. Instead, I grab the bird record book clasping it tight over my exposed lap, a fig leaf of yore over my shame.
“Hi Dr. Sherman . . .” I trill in a pigeon call.
Yes, it is the professor. My boss. Dr. James E. Sherman, head of the Department of Behavioral Science. A rising star of academia. A campus God. A man in his early 40s, handsome, vainly well kept.
This man is an imminence! He ranks among the national doges of behaviorism.
Years later taking free fall into New York without a place to stay, no money, not one person I knew, I would land incredibly in an apartment on 86th street, West Side, where four young divorcees split the rent—all students of Behavioral Analyses at Columbia. When they learned I actual knew Dr. James Sherman, had even worked in his lab, their enthusiasm for me knew no bounds.
My life links in such chromosomal strands, identical to the DNA still quivering in the trashcan.
Dr. Sherman stands at the end of my aisle. Rather than looking at me he is leaning forward head down to peer quizzically into the trashcan. Don’t do that you fool!
In an agony of dread, and embarrassment, I focus on a nearby computer face with wild intent. I do my best to smile. I’m certain he’s on to me. I cringe small and dumbfounded.
“Just thought I’d stop by tonight to see how you’re doing. Must get boring?”
My telltale heart pounds wildly. He must hear it. So this is how a pigeon feels?
He’s come over to stand beside me! He seems to be pondering what to do! For sure if he takes up the record book he’ll get a good look at how I wile away my hours. I wither up. But no, he merely gives the book what I take to be a playful tug. I don’t need to look to know my knuckles have gone white in clenching dread.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you. Jim Green, what do you think of him? You know him.”
I nod autonomically. At this point, if my flesh weren’t glued to the stool I’d make a dash for it to the door.
“Someone’s been writing on the bathroom walls. Do you suppose it could be him?”
As if pondering the matter deeply I say nothing.
“That’s what I thought.”
This conversation is far from clear to me.
First thing when he’s gone I zipper up. Wet spots on jeans are already drying in the industrial warmth of the lab.
But oh what have I done? Anxiety’s rising up in my mouth strong as cheese burger vomit.
I can’t resist the urgency to go back and look at the scene of my crime. What exactly did the professor just see?
Fuck! Looking into the trashcan there can be no doubt. There’s no denying the nature of those drops on a crumpled Payday wrapper. My brain shoots a still of that, a souvenir for my life’s scrap book.
My literary elite of the time includes Wallace Stevens and so I’m seeing in frantic hilarity his words writ on the lab walls,
“Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.”
It comes to me that perhaps there are ultimate concerns at work in this laboratory beyond my understanding. Could there be hidden cameras? Were the pigeons and rats meant to camouflage from me the actual subject of quantification? My dear self!
Far far worse, I’ll probably be fired tomorrow. No more money for rent nor for beer and marijuana.
But I wasn’t. They fired Jim Green instead. Great relief that although mixed with shame and guilt.
In summation, I’d been caught pecking the wrong light that night at work in the behavioral lab and my butt took the voltage in full.