the legend of leonard schmaltz

(origination: at predawn 22dec03)

(updated: 4 feb 04 )

There wasn't much distinctive or extraordinary about the conception, gestation, birth and childhood of Leonard Schmaltz, there where it all took place in the logging camps of Idaho in the mid 50's and sixties.

He was about as average, normal and non-destinct as young caucasian, middle-class redneck gets.

But all that changed when puberty set in.

It is the remarkable distinction of that most mysterious and entrancing appendage of functional males that it can retract...even shrivel...to barely perceptible mass on exposure to cold or fright, and then turn right around and in minutes expand itself to 12 times its original size with little more provocation than fantasy, whim, touch or visual stimulus. Sometimes not even those ingredients are present.

Leonard reached puberty in much the manner of every other normal homosapien male...except for one fact: it wasn't just that part of him that took on these startling and fascinating expansion/contraction capabilities. It was all of him. And it was abrupt.

Leonard, at adult maturity stood just over six feet tall and weighed in just under 200 pounds...in his dormant state. Exposed to any relevant and viable stimulus, he could gain stature in a matter of minutes leading to the systematic multiplication of his body mass by the apparently given design factor of 12 (so typical of the relevant organ)...rendering him capable of achieving weights in excess of 2400 pounds and vertical stature in the neighborhood of 70-80 feet...7 or eight stories...rivaling any commercial building's height in downtown Boise. Not a guy you wanted to invite over for dinner and seat next to a blossoming ripe-breasted nubile young niece.

Medical science (as it has indeed failed us in so many realms) was a complete failure at explaining this one either. The best they could come up with was Paxcil and Zanex...which unfortunately did not curtail Leonard's increase in mass and length when aroused, it only produced a huge lug of a man in a completely debilitating, pathetic and useless state of flaccidity...kind of a one ton wet noodle...like that. Obviously, he had to stop taking the band aid drugs and confront his malady head-on, so to speak.

Not all women shrank from the troubling spectacle of Leonard's hyper-function. Sissy (you know here from "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues") with her huge, out of proportion hitch hiking thumb understood. She often would hunt Leonard down on the QT when her sojourns across the asphalt causeways of American life landed her in Idaho. I guess they compared notes and appendages. Little is known of that connection.

Leonard's mother did, however, abandon him early in his adolescence after her third (she was divorced) home was rendered to splinters by her newly pubescent son's "expanding capabilities"...the first of which happened swinging in a porch swing one balmy august evening bathed in the light of a full moon when Tanya, his longtime childhood playmate returned from boarding school sporting a brand new blouse full of bulging feminine equipment and Leonard's expansive capabilities (as yet unseen) ...suddenly and for the first time erupted, taking off the entire front porch, three elms a tether ball pole and reducing the wooden swing to fireplace tinder. Tanya was never seen in Idaho again.

But little Missy Saunders from down the block thought Leonard was fascinating and this midget four year old became the only female companion Leonard could ever afford to get near.

She would just stand there looking up at the towering vestige of an expanded Leonard during his bouts with ecstasy holding up her little hand like a miniature fantasy character in a Disney movie...obviously in possession of a heart and love for the boy that outstripped any sense of irregularity, fear or image concerning what the neighbors would think.

Pretty soon Leonard...usually touched by the humanness and fidelity of his little companion...would come back down to size, take her tiny hand and for however many minutes, hours or days they would be given until his hormone rocket would launch again they would play in the neighborhood park, swinging and teeter tottering to their innocent heart's content.

Leonard's problem was not lechery, it was simply systemic circuits patched into the wrong control panel. Shopping was out of the question....especially on Sunday afternoons when all those horny single women hovered endlessly over the vegetable sections waiting for a grocery store romance to land in their carts ...hopefully of very limited duration.

Leonard could get contact expansion episodes just driving into the parking lot of the grocery store with that kind of energy going on inside. Needless to say, he drove a convertible with the top down even in winter and had a huge bumper sticker warning followers "This vehicle stops for railroad trains and other large objects without notice". His propensity to display of monumental proportions, of course, had proliferated any number of vehicular incidents...one sadly including the demise of a local minister's grotesquely obese wife whose body was extricated from the tangled remnants of her ford diesel pickup with beads of sweat all over her face and a blood pressure reading, which even in death burst three arm pressure gauges.

Living with the vagaries of a normal male member is enough of a challenge for most of us (both those who have and don't have them). They are erratic, unpredictable, unnervingly persistent in absolutely inappropriate times and uncannily uncooperative in many of the rest. They have obvious minds of their own and may very well (as many women suspect) actually be the dominant driving mechanism in the male physiology and motives.

These aren't criticisms or apologies...simple statements of confirmed condition and facts. It is what it is, whatever that is.

They don't seem to sleep when the host member sleeps. In fact, they often act as if they are just waiting for him to doze off to start their day's (or night's) work.

They never lie, even when the brain thinks so. They are incapable of misrepresenting true issues and emotion...probably the most honest substance in existence...certainly so in the realm of the middle-class christian homo sapien....replete with all its repressive mechanisms and forced grins, platitudes and canned seduction lines.

Leonard turned out to be exactly the same way. There was not a dishonest bone in his body....but his motivations often startled or amazed not only him, but others. He, like most of us who use that as a signpost, was more baffled than elucidated by the vagaries of his expansive indicators. What really did make him tick? Good luck with that one.

But who would have guessed that this horrific malady...this seemingly diabolical trickstering of mother nature...would propel Leonard Schmaltz into the most powerful political position on the face of the planet and result in the pivoting of a ransacked and out of control mankind...and the eventual salvation of a wobbling and singed planet bursting with the byproducts of disastrous and debaucherous over-consumption and sports television addiction.

But then, we all know about that and its place in historic fact...so probably just as well use this a a good place where this story ends.