The Sugar Cow
Gutbloom
For Made Up Words
Since making an efficiency apartment above the Chesterfield Tea Room his home in the early 1980s, John Ashton’s morning routine had remained largely unchanged. The first thing he did when he woke up was sit on the edge of his bed and put on socks and garters. He didn’t bathe in the morning. Bathing at night, after a day’s work, was, to his mind, part of a country upbringing. Though he had spent most of his life living in Richmond, he resisted citification. It was OK to grow with regard to sophistication and worldliness, but there were many things about the city, and the rest of life, that he resisted.
In lieu of bathing he made his ablutions in the front room. There were just three rooms in his apartment; the front room, the bedroom, and a bathroom. There was a small, “efficiency” kitchen, but it was really more of a nook outfitted with a small ice box and cook stove. The front room had a porcelain sink with hot and cold running water in the corner, a holdover from the days when plumbing was novel and expensive, and it was here that the elderly gentleman shaved and brushed his teeth in the morning while listening to the radio.
He neither ate nor drank while he was getting dressed. He attended to putting on his clothes with efficiency and precision. He believed that being neat and well groomed was important, so long as it didn’t bleed into vanity. He guarded against vanity by making sure that practicality, quality, and fit were the primary considerations when buying clothes, and so had, through many years of buying, settled on Brooks Brothers shirts, Joseph Banks suits, and Johnston & Murphy shoes. When asked by others about his clothing choices, he often said that he “liked the weave” of these clothes. The weave was important to him. He liked the weight and tightness of broadcloth oxford shirts, and would have worn white shirts every day, but owned two blue shirts and a yellow one that he occasionally mixed in. He kept his suits neat, brushed them with a silver military brush he was given as a graduation present in high school. He shined his shoes regularly, but not obsessively. He thought overly shined shoes were silly. “We’re not in the military, thank god,” he would joke to himself.
Once dressed he went downstairs to the tea room and had breakfast. Morning meals were included in his rent, and most mornings he had a soft-boiled egg, toast, and coffee. For the past four years a woman named Charise had served him most days, including weekends. She was neat, quiet, hardworking, and smelled of cocoa butter. He liked her very much, in part because she called him “Mr. Ashton”, which he preferred but didn’t insist on. He also like that she didn’t try to make conversation. Almost every morning he left her a three dollar tip.
From the Chesterfield he took a bus to work, carrying a boxy briefcase and wearing a hat. The hat was vanity. He was well aware that nobody wore a hat anymore. He enjoyed the anachronism of it. Bear Bryant wore a hat. Tom Landry wore a hat. Sinatra wore a hat. He wasn’t particularly a fan of any of those men, but he liked the way they resisted the winds of fashion, and they looked good in their hats, he thought, though he bought his hats from Lock & Co. in London, which was, again, an acknowledged vanity. He resisted Anglophilia. He had tried a number of American hatters, but on a trip to London he had gone to Lock & Co. and bought a hat. “They have my size on file,” he liked to say, though it was against his normal habit of eschewing anything foreign, not because of parochial chauvinism, but because foreign fashions were frivolous and insubstantial. His hats, however, were good hats. He had three.
He worked at the Department of Mines, Minerals, and Energy auditing the project bonds and insurance policies of mining and energy contractors throughout the state. He had been at the job for forty years, and was two years away from the mandatory retirement age of 70. He worked alone, with several peers but nobody who reported to him directly. His supervisor, Mrs. Osgood, was content to leave him alone. She often said, “Nobody has to supervise Ashton. If the building burned down around him he would still get his reports done.” He was thankful that he had been successful enough within the organization to be granted an office, though he wished he had gotten it before they stopped painting names on the door glass. His office only had a small plastic name plate next to the door. It was one of the few things in his life that he loathed. No amount of considered thought on the subject was able to dispel the particular annoyance of his name badly etched on flimsy plastic.
For years he had worked at a large metal desk on the floor, alongside a group of men and women who did nothing but talk. Now, he could close his office door if their talking bothered him. It didn’t always. He didn’t mind the noise. He didn’t like the gossip, the talk of digestion, or the constant complaints about work. He thought they all did a lot of what the kids called “oversharing”. It was silly talk, and he didn’t partake, but, he wasn’t anti-social. He was reasonably certain that he was well regarded by his co-workers. Why wouldn’t he be? He was polite and socially capable. He often didn’t join in their talk, but he was pleasant in all interactions. He ate lunch at his desk, a sandwich from the canteen on the first floor, but once or twice a month he would go to lunch with them at a Chinese restaurant or some other eatery and then dazzle them with a parlor trick. The trick was this; he would show off the fact that he was incredibly well versed on the Internet. It seemed incongruous to them and so it made for easy humor, and they came to expect it. Still, it worked, so if someone said, “My son was telling me about what it means to get goatse’d… do you know what goatse’d is, John?” He would reply by saying something like, “I’m afraid I do”, but would resist any pressure to explain such things or talk further on them. He would politely, and firmly, tell them to go to Urban Dictionary or Know Your Meme if they wanted to find out. They enjoyed his company. They told him so.
He was good at his job. The people in the insurance companies often praised him. An actuary once said that he was the only non-actuary who understood actuaries. He liked that comment, repeated it to himself at times, and took interest in keeping his skills up to date. Though he was quite good at math and had taken calculus in college, he never anticipated working with numbers as much as he did, though, to his mind, it was reasoning and character that were the most important aspects of his job. He had majored in economics, but had a love of history and could, at one time, read and write both Latin and Greek. His Greek had been lost, more or less, from disuse, save for a few of the letters of St. Paul that he occasionally re-read, but his Latin was still in full vigor, and he often reread the works of Ovid and Seneca in the evenings, in a chair by a window that offered only pale light reflected by the taller building across the street.
After work, he often got off of the bus far short of his building and walked one or two miles back to the Chesterfield. Most evenings he had a light supper of soup and salad in the Tea Room, but sometimes he ate at other restaurants. After dinner he had, for years, smoked a single cigarette during an after-dinner walk, but had stopped at age 58 at his doctor’s suggestion because of a diagnosis of hypertension.
Though much of his life was stable and little changing, there was one area where he made constant modifications and innovations. John Ashton was what the members of the IT department at Mines, Minerals, and Energy called a “power user.”
He had, since the inception of the personal computer, always maintained his skills. The immersion began with courses in BASIC when the department migrated some functions onto an early IBM Office System, and then had gradually learned each iteration of software and operating system as each progressed. He had taken classes to learn WordPerfect and Lotus 1–2–3 on DOS computers, and bought an early IBM personal computer for use at home. He switched to using the Office Applications when he moved to Windows 3.0. He was completely at home with a command line, could partition a hard drive, had monkeyed with the BIOS. He had used operating systems long since forgotten, like IBM OS/2 and Walnut Creek Free BSD. Computers were not the only technology he adopted. He was quick to get and use a debit card, finding the ability to use a cash machine far superior to going into a bank. While he lamented the death of the handwritten note, he preferred e-mail to many face-to-face encounters. He was quick to adopt online shopping, online banking and bill pay, and the use of e-books. While early cell phones were of little interest to him, he was quick to get a smartphone and was quickly converted to texting. He had never been a fan of the landline.
His relationship with the Internet was more complicated than his comportment toward technology in general. He had used ANARCHIE searches and history bulletin boards very early, but the existence of pornography made him wary about such places. He saw the Internet as a temptation, and early on in his usage restricted himself to no more than 50 minutes a day. Fifty minutes was, to his mind, a significant interval less than an hour. Given that major constraint, he enjoyed his time online, participating in history communities, searching for public domain works of his liking, such as the works of Tacitus, and answering trivial questions that occurred to him throughout the day. His phone made his self-imposed restrictions more complicated, since more and more applications were Internet applications. Over time his rules and constraints became complicated and Byzantine. He never read news on the Internet because he preferred to read the newspaper, but he did check the weather and ticket prices for the symphony. He didn’t load or play any games, but did allow daily push notifications and quotations from a poetry site that he liked. And so his life retained its characteristic stability and procedural safety, even as he became softened to more complicated and enriching activities. That is, until he fell in love with Sugar Cow.
It took a long time, a very long time, really. Years, in fact, but by the time he was 67 it was clear even to himself. He was in love with Sugar Cow.
He often tried to think about when he had first seen the image. He couldn’t remember. He felt like he always knew what Sugar Cow was. He knew many characters on the Internet in which he had no interest. He knew who Squidward and Spongebob were. He knew what a Domokun was, he could recognize both Will Wheaton and Joss Whedon and tell you why they were loved on the Internet.
He thought he remembered the first time he really took notice of Sugar Cow, but he wasn’t certain if this memory was manufactured, a snippet of self-mythologizing that might give context to what came after. He remembered a Spring evening, his apartment still dim, but the smell and light of the street available through an open window, pungent, wet, and laced with the scent of the Callery Pear trees outside, a musky, unpleasant odor that he knew well from his walks around the city. On that night, he began looking at Sugar Cow with real interest. He thought she looked cute. He became fascinated by the simplicity of the original cartoon image, for that was all Sugar Cow was originally, an image for marketing caramels in Japan, but the image, as far as he was concerned, was almost hypnotically perfect. The allure of the big round eyes, the lack of mouth, the round head, the gentle plumpness of her figure. He began looking for better pictures of her. Some were clearly superior to others, and after quite a bit of searching he realized that he had gone over his time limit by 25 minutes, a rare occurrence. He got up, somewhat ashamed, and said to himself, “that was a waste of time,” and began his normal bedtime routine. The very next evening he went right back to searching for Sugar Cow pictures. Soon he began to download the images he thought were best. He explored Sugar Cow fan art sites and merchandise offerings. He looked at the plush toys and posters. His spring was punctuated by the image of the white cow looking at him and, without fail, the wide eyed expression gave him a sense of expectant joy.
At first he was sure there was nothing wrong with what he was doing. He frequently said to himself that the picture fascination was “silly, just silly, nothing else.” But, as the length of his sessions grew and he felt more and more preoccupied by thoughts of Sugar Cow he began to worry. Did his fascination with Sugar Cow betray some underlying pathology? Was he a pedophile? Was he sexually attracted to the cow? This line of thinking led to no small amount of anxiety, and brought to the surface the complicated contemplation of his own sexuality, with which he was not friendly.
Again, the existence of the Internet had ameliorated his self-condemnation on the topic of sex, but it was still a source of pain and anxiety for him. He was not afraid of being gay, as he once had been. There were several homosexual encounters when he was in college, but he was certain then, as he was now, that he was not homosexual. There had been other, furtive, affairs with women when he was younger. Some involved what was once called “petting”… and there was more than that… some nudity, a discharge… he was confused and ashamed by all of it… but the important thing, the thing he now understood, was that he had never been in love with anyone romantically. The genital side of things he could, to some degree, control. He didn’t like to think about sex, but when the pressure got too great he took matters in hand, and liked to quote Diogenes by saying “I wish that rubbing my belly relieved hunger with as much ease.” When he did so, what he thought about was women from his youth; a swim instructor from summer camp with long blond hair and a wide smile who had held him around the waist while teaching him the dolphin kick; a geology graduate student with smooth tan legs and big hiking boots that had led his class through the Blue Ridge mountains and bent over to pick up rocks. These were the images of his limited, constrained, and reserved sexuality, and none of them, as far as he was concerned, had any relation to Sugar Cow.
And yet, it was a crush. He had to admit. He liked to just look at Sugar Cow and think about holding it. He imagined talking to Sugar Cow, but the imaginary conversations were mostly once sided. He would speak, and imagine Sugar Cow looking back at him with its large, luminous eyes. When it did speak, the voice in his imagination was that of a low and melodious overtone. A soothing lowing voice that, he imagined, spoke in aphorisms, solid advice, and agreement. Most of the phrases he projected on her were things he often said to himself, such as, “you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear,” or “when you take free advice, you get what you pay for,” and in doing so, in making Sugar Cow the voice of his inner wisdom, he grew even more fond of her.
He downloaded a game for his phone and played it. It was a silly game. The image of Sugar Cow simply moved across the screen and as it encountered obstacles specific tones and patterns had to be made to either extinguish or incinerate the obstacles. It was a music game, and when it got moving quickly it was quite sophisticated and took considerable skill. John Ashton was familiar with music. He had sung in college. He liked Church hymns. The game gave him much joy, and he found himself playing it late into the night. So late, in fact, that he started sleeping in on Saturdays, sometimes until 9:00 A.M. When he shaved he often hummed the Sugar Cow theme song. “It’s my new hymn,” he said with a laugh.
He tried watching the cartoon Sugar Cow and Friends, but that didn’t appeal to him at all. The cartoon gave Sugar Cow a voice that he thought was freakishly inappropriate. Upbeat, perky, unsubstantial, sounding like a fourteen-year-old girl that was both sassy and precociously wise. “What rubbish,” he thought to himself, but, in fact, he watched the nine episodes of the first season and almost half of the second season before genuinely getting fed up and refusing to watch more.
What consumed more of his time, and his thoughts, were the figurines and merchandising objects associated with Sugar Cow. It started simply. He bought a key chain with Sugar Cow on it. He had debated about it for a long time. It seemed so silly, but why not? But it was silly. He was 68 after all. He didn’t need a key-chain, but what was the harm? Should he trust the site? He was careful about online shopping. The site could be anything. He stopped twice when confronted with the page for credit card information, once backing out while in the process of entering his three digit security code. He went back. He finally mustered the courage to pull the trigger on the key-chain purchase, and tracked it with both anticipation and excitement. From work he could see that it had been delivered and took the bus all the way home to get it. Sitting on his bed, the key-chain dangling in his out turned palm, he was disappointed. It was cheap, garish and poorly made. It didn’t look anything like the picture. The size and colors were off, and, worse, the depiction of Sugar Cow made her look goofy instead of cute. He was reminded of buying X-ray vision glasses as a child. He felt ashamed and cheated.
That knowledge did nothing to slake his increasing thirst. The psychological dam now broken, he got in the habit of buying Sugar Cow paraphernalia frequently, and soon had a tee shirt, a tie, a set of coffee mugs, and three or four plastic figurines, all of which he genuinely liked, even though they didn’t satiate his desire to find the thing he could not find. His search continued. He often sat huddled over his computer, not changed out of his work clothes, long into the night, a news program playing on the radio as background noise, searching forums and shopping sites trying to identify the Sugar Cow items that were canonical, well made, and appealing to him. It was in one of these forums that he fell upon a discussion of plush toys.
He was well aware of the danger. Plush toys, he understood, were the gateway to a large constellation of paraphilias that ranged from the absurd to the depraved. His dignity didn’t allow him to even consider plush toys in the early days of his Sugar Cow obsession, but now, softened up by seven months of gradual consumerism, he could not contain himself. He began researching which one to get. It took him four days to pick the first. He paid twenty-seven dollars for it. He considered doing an “unboxing video” of it so that he could relive his excitement at a later date, but on the day it came he could not contain himself. He went directly to the parlor sink, opened the box with the pen knife from his toilet kit, and was disappointed to find that the toy was imprisoned in a plastic bag. It seemed gross, antiseptic, and junky, but it’s presence just increased his fervor. He ripped open the bag, reached in and pulled out a Sugar Cow toy the size of a small loaf of bread. He held it immediately to his face, rubbed it against his cheek, and felt an incredible softness and joy. He began to cry. At first it was a sob of relief and excitement, of embarrassment and fulfillment, and of shame pushed aside in the service of desire, but it soon catalyzed a spasmodic series of erupting waves. His mouth turned down in an awful open scowl, his eyes full and bent like those of a clown, and explosive squeaking noises emerging from his throat, waves of long disregarded feelings spewed like magma from the bubbling crucible of his overrun superego only to abruptly stop, and then start again moments later for reasons he could neither fathom nor comprehend. He cried for maybe ten minutes. It seemed like eternity.
That night he slept with the plush toy wrapped in his arms, next to his face. The cheap silicone smell filled his face with soft, modern perfume and scented his dreams.
It wasn’t long until he had a collection of Sugar Cows in his apartment. His bed held six, the largest being the size of a small dog. All conformed to the dictates of his increasingly rigid demands. The eyes, which were nothing more than circles in the iconic drawing, had to be totally opaque but slightly luminous. The ears had to be pointed, the nose properly pink, etc. He was quite sure he had reviewed every Sugar Cow ever manufactured, even the ones on E-bay from 1998. Three months after his first unboxing, he was inching towards the inevitable. He knew it deep down in his gut, and the idea sat there, causing disease and distraction throughout his days and nights. He had already seen it. Had already looked, although he could barely admit it to himself. He knew about it. There were people, one woman in particular, that catered to furries. They would dress up, for a price, and then do things. What things they did seemed to be some function of negotiation. Some of it must be illegal. He wasn’t sure, and wasn’t interested in that. Horrified by the whole thing, but unable to stop himself, he responded to a Craigslist ad. He began an exchange with a woman named Kerthy. She seemed very nice. Her grammar was horrendous, he thought, but she was forceful and bright in the e-mails they exchanged. He admitted his fear and trepidation. She assured him that there was nothing wrong with his desires and interests. He protested, she refused and swept away many of his misgivings. “It’s simple,” she said, “you pay me and I come to your apartment and put on the costume. What else happens we can talk about then. It will be fun.”
He feared that she would rob him, or perhaps blackmail him after the fact. He was old after all. He could easily be overwhelmed. What if she brought someone with her? What if some man came with her and the two of them robbed him? This line of thinking twinned around an opposite narrative where he tried to convince himself that this was nothing more than a fun frolic. Carpe Diem. A Dionysian experiment. What was wrong with taking a chance? He certainly wanted to do this thing.
On the first appointed night he sent a text cancelling the appointment. He was shaking and dry mouthed when he did it. Sitting alone in his room he said that, of course, he would pay the fee. It was his fault for cancelling. He just couldn’t do it, and then he sat in his room alone holding his favorite Sugar Cow. He stared at the others, and regretted cancelling.
A month later, when he heard footsteps on the stairs he knew that it was her. He seldom had visitors, and he knew the footfall of other residents and their friends. He could hear the steps approaching the door and imagined her walking up the stairs carrying a suitcase. He had never seen her. She had sent a picture, and so, when she knocked on the door and he opened it he was greeted by a face that was both familiar and new to him. She looked quite different than he expected. She was heavier. Her hair was longer and more flaxen than her picture. She had on a backpack and was holding her phone in her hand. Her smile was wide. “John?” she asked, and her voice was bright and lovely. She had big eyes.
He managed to say, “Please, come in” and she did. After that he had great trouble talking, as if struck mute, and he stood in the middle of his front room wearing a dress shirt and a pair of khakis and unable to speak. “I know you are nervous,” she said, looking at him directly and speaking slowly, “It’s OK, this is not weird or bad.” He shook his head in agreement and then managed to say, “I have your fee.” He handed her an envelope of money. She looked at the envelope briefly and said, “Thank you.”
“Do you want me to change here or in the other room?” she asked, pointing to his bedroom.
“You can change in there,” he said.
“Do you want to watch?” She asked.
He could not answer. There was a long silence. She waited patiently and cocked her eyes to provoke a response and, getting none, she went into the bedroom by herself. He stood ramrod still in his front room with his hands in his pockets, heart thumping furiously, and his eyes focused on the patterns of his brocade wall paper which he had looked at for years and which now seemed to swim and pulse in a sickening swirl of vertigo.
He heard Kerthy say, “OK”. The sound was muffled. He waited a bit, unable to move, but then made a shaky step towards his own bedroom. When he turned the corner she was standing next to the bed. The costume, home made and rough in places, was of the whitest white. The fur soft and luminous. Her head was the proper proportion, so large that he couldn’t imagine how it had fit in the backpack. He couldn’t fathom where Kerthy’s head was, whether she was looking through the eyes of the mask or out through some other aperture. He didn’t care. She seemed transformed.
She stood like a Goddess beside the effigies of her hill shrine, the plush toys throughout the room scattered like offerings before the actual deity. Her roundness filled the space. He felt like he was hyperventilating, and was afraid he was going to cry.
“Do you want to masturbate?” She asked him, muffled from within the head, “It’s OK, you can take out your cock. I won’t charge you extra,” she said. He shook his head. He wanted so badly to hug Sugar Cow, but he knew that would not be right, and he was suddenly filled with an empowering sense of decorum. He composed himself, took a deep breath, and stood up straight, the way he had throughout his life. He took her by the hand and led her back into his front room, and with a soft sweep of his hand invited her to sit in his reading chair. She did. He went back into his bedroom and retrieved a silver mirror and hairbrush from his top dresser drawer and then walked back into the front room.
He stood in front of her for what seemed like a long time. Sugar Cow sat quietly in the chair, the roundness of her body forcing her to sit on the edge, expectantly.
“Here,” he said, bowing slightly and handing her the silver objects. “I want you to have these. They were my mother’s.”
