Thoughts Upon Meeting David Appelman

Like most of us, I knew him only as the almost spectral presence who delivered sex-drenched commands and remorseless taunts from on high. He paid us in corsair’s doubloons. He claimed to have invented new smells and colors. He lifted not barbells but paid whores left pliant from hours of driving coitus. He carried a razor in his sock. His voice was so gravelly that actual gravel spewed from his maw. If a man is something dimensionless and awful to behold, then he was man. He was David Appelman.

This past weekend, in the deserts of America, I met him. By way of introduction, he beat me with a cactus and then kissed my fresh wounds. Such is his power. Such is his malaise. Like someone from a Garcia Marquez novel, Appelman is followed everywhere by a pack of menacing tarantulas. “My spider-sons,” he calls them. His appetite for illegal drugs and sex as locus of control is both boundless and without bound. As he ravishes you on whim, the only consoling knowledge is that whatever he’s doing to you at that moment is but a taste of the horrors ahead. You can always buy another bodice, he tells you. I saw him brawl with Christ. David Appelman is an animated urge.

We are not equipped to remember our births, which is a necessary survival device. We are also not equipped to remember the precise things that David Appelman does to, at and on us. We cannot, lest we combust from vice and rot. Every so often, though, the gossamer parts, if only for a moment, and you remember something about him. He is hairy beyond plausibility. His member is untold and prehensile. It turns out there is an eighth deadly sin.

I am in need of physicians.