Chapter 20

What else I want people to know before my plane crash is I didn’t dream up the idea for the PornFill. The agent is always pushing paper in front of me and saying, sign this. He tells me, sign here. And here. Here. And here.

The agent tells me to just initial next to each paragraph. He tells me, don’t bother reading this bit, I won’t understand. That’s how the PornFill happened. It was not my idea to take all twenty thousand acres of the Creedish church district and turn it into the repository for this nation’s outdated pornography. Magazines. Playing cards. Videocassettes. Compact disks. Worn-out dildos. Punctured blowup dolls. Artificial vaginas. The bulldozers are out there twenty-four hours a day pushing mountains of that around. This is twenty thousand acres. Two-zero-zero-zero-zero acres. Every square foot of Creedish property. Wildlife is displaced. The groundwater is contaminated. It’s being compared to Love Canal, and it’s not my fault. Before the flight recorder tape runs out, people need to know who to blame. It’s the agent. The Book of Very Common Prayer. The Peace of Mind television show. The American PornFill Corporation. The Genesis Campaign. The Tender Branson Dashboard Statuette. Even my botched Super Bowl halftime special, the agent brain-stormed them all. And they all made tons of money. But what’s important is none of them was my idea. With the PornFill, the agent pitches it to me one day in Dallas or Memphis. My whole life at that point was stadiums and hotel rooms separated by time on airplanes instead of real distance. The whole world was just carpet patterns rushing by under my feet. Low-pile poly-nylon florals or corporate logos on a field of dark blue or gray that won’t show cigarette burns or dirt. The whole world was just public toilets with Fertility in the stall next to mine, whispering: “There’s a cruise ship hitting an iceberg tomorrow night.” Whispering, “At two o’clock p.m., eastern standard time, next Wednesday, the Bolivian gray panther will become extinct.” The agent is saying, a major problem for most Americans is disposing of pornographic material in a safe, private manner. Throughout America, he says, are vast collections of Playboy magazines or Screw magazines that don’t excite anybody anymore. There are warehouses and shelves full of videotaped nobodies with long sideburns or blue eye shadow humping away to bad pirated music. What America needs, he says, is a place to ship this stale smut where it can decompose out of the sight of children and prudes. His pitch to me comes after the agent’s already run a feasibility study on landfilling paper, plastic, elastic, latex, rubber, leather, steel fasteners, zippers, chrome rings, Velcro, vinyl, petroleum– and water-based lubricants, and nylon. His idea is to set up collection sites where people can drop off porno, no questions asked. From there, local franchises will ship the porno in the same type of specialized biohazard containers used for sharps and dressings contaminated with infectious disease. The porno will be hauled to the former Creedish church district colony in central Nebraska where it’ll be sorted. The three categories will include: Soft Core. Hard Core. And Child. The first category will be allowed to rot on the surface of the ground. The second category will be bulldozed into the ground. The third will be handled only by uninterested people wearing full-body disposable rip-stop coveralls including 50-mil rubber gloves and boots and breathing through masks, who’ll seal the kiddie porn in underground vaults where it can sit out its bazillion-year half-life. According to the agent, we need to get people panicking about the porno threat. We’re going to push for government action that makes it mandatory to dispose of porno in safe, clean ways. Our ways. The same as used motor oil or asbestos, if people want to get rid of it, they’ll have to pay. We’ll show people discarded porno filling the streets, corrupting children, inspiring sex crimes. We’ll charge by the ton to accept the stuff. The local collection franchises will pass the cost on to their customers, plus an extra margin for profit. We make money. The local franchises make money. Joe Blow is free to shop for fresh porno. The porno industry gets rich. Okay, the agent told me. Richer. According to the agent, it was all going to be a win, win, win, win situation. Then it wasn’t. The agent was already drafting the federal law that now requires you to pay a deposit on all pornographic material. The deposit funnels back through the government to pay for the interment of pornographic materials found abandoned. Money from this special porno tax was earmarked for a porno super-fund to clean up illegal dump sites. Some special user tax dollars were going to rehabilitate sex addicts, but not very much. Before I ever heard word one about the PornFill, the environmental impact statement was already dummied up. The perc*** tests were faked. The publicist had faxes going out to church groups day and night, testing the waters. The lobbyists were making a discreet push. There was the twenty thousand acres of the Creedish church district with its ghosts nobody wanted to buy. And there were the millions of personal stockpiles of pornography that no one wanted. It made sense to everybody except me. It wasn’t a decision I made. I explored some alternatives. I said The Prayer to Create Extra Storage Space. I swallowed 4000 milligrams of chocolate Gamacease prototypes. I thought that might solve the problem for America. I said The Prayer to Recycle Accumulated Newspapers, but this wasn’t the same. I said The Prayer to Procrastinate, but the agent just would not let the issue drop. According to the newspaper one morning, the Sensitive Materials Interment Bill had passed the House and the Senate and the president was signing it into law. The agent just kept telling me, sign this. Initial here. And here. And here. I said the Prayer for Signing Important Documents You Don’t Read. According to Fertility, it was the PornFill that drove my brother Adam out of hiding. My only part in the project was I signed some papers. Since then, everybody in America thinks it’s my fault they have to pay an extra two-dollar deposit when they buy a skin magazine. After that, Adam Branson came out of hiding and put a gun to Fertility’s bored head to force her to track me down. As if Fertility couldn’t see that coming. Fertility knew everything. Fertility said to describe my brother’s threat to kill her as well-intentioned. Later on, when it was my turn to hold the same gun to the pilot’s head on this airplane, then I understood how fast these things happen. Still. I’m the one people hate. Me, I’m the brother with the Tender Branson National Sensitive Materials Sanitary Landfill named after me. The last time Fertility saw the new buffed, bulked, tanned, and shaved me in person, she said I was improved beyond recognition. She said, “You need a disaster?” She said, “Look in a mirror.” Adam was still out hunting me for sport. Adam is the brother Fertility told me to describe as “a saint.”