Memoir of a Bunyan Timber Beast

The narrative that has fallen into my hands has created a storm of emotion even before I have published it.
There were many manuscript around - a large number to protect the innocent - me.perhaps. The family - if you can call the Bunyan wasp nest a family - has spawned various versions, some hastily created forgies. The struggle for legitmacy is raging.
Leadership there is not. Bunyan's oldest two children - a son and daughter - are both long dead. The son was named Paul Bunyan the Sixth and should have ascended smoothly to control of the Empire. There are otherwise five known living Bunyan boys - the results of Paul the Fifth's "polygomistical habits" (his own term) that also netted him 11 daughters. THe grandchildren were multiple - and plentiful. But of all this vast population - a veritible primate troop - there was not a single Paul the sixth. (There were however 2 unorthodox Paulas.)
Why was all this so important? Here is how the memoir of the 5th Paul Bunyan begins:

" It's been pretty important being me. An Icon. Like the Phantom, Paul
Bunyan is the ghost who walks and one who must always be ready in the wings to slip into the spandex tights and adjust the flannel shirt, pull over the bulging jeans and settle into the steel-toed stanleys. There are faces out there waiting to be stepped on, loins to be thrust into, chests to be collapsed by pointed fingers.
"The Emperor, starring the ultimate male - me Paul Bunyan - is dead, Long live the Emperor.
"The Owner I mean. Immortal Owner with green money dressing. Almost a Nature Spirit, relentlessly destroying Nature. the wholly Scion of Mammon, above the law. Architect Ruark had nothing on me. He was a derivitive modeled after my father - Paul the fourth.
"Here's my first claim to fame -I took sloppy seconds after my father fucked Ayn Rand who was slavishly devoted to him and gave me a piece here and again for which my father always paid handsomely to my Sexual Tutor in chief - Auntie Ayn. In other words the second turned into minutes and the minutes turned into whores.
"I fucked everything that moved in those days, and more than a few that, like my teacher Ayn, didn't. (She was not the only one who shouted instructions in my ear but she did so with the authority of a Russian Lotte Lenya)
"With jutting jaw and biceps like foothills, I'm an Adonis. 6 foot 4 and haven't weighted less than 200 lbs since I was 16.
"All American in four college sports for three straight years while I was at Princeton. Summers I was a Rodeo Performer. My specialty was throwing a smallish Brahma Bull, a friend of mine named Filly. The Rodeo belonged to my father of course and made a ton of money for Buncorp.
"I'm a Don Juan with more kids than Norman Mailer. But I've only been married once. Her children died but she lives on and has - it seems - outlived me. But I have infinitely outloved her. I've spilled more seed in the right places than Genghis Khan or the Irish O'Neill."
"I knew Hugh Hefner when he was humping sofa cushions. Mine was the first Bunny Mansion he ever saw. I have eleven Bunyan Bunnies in attendance right now but I won't bother to name them since there's bound to be a change by the time this comes out. I will tell you that I regularly shop the Russian girl yellow pages. Second of course are the ICE lockers where I make my choice through a satellite hook-up. A variety of Eastern European girls. I also have a great Nigerian contact and a Hong Kong agent."

(More ed.note): Like the story so far? This situation created a major scandal long before the memoir manusript surfaced. For one thing, the Bunnies spilled out into the public eye. Paul's sister - of the successful cable show "Babe Blue" - signed up all the girls - 17 at this point - for a fabulous Reality Show on VH1 (it's more Bimbo than entertaining, so maybe it is MTV) Babe Bunyan Blue is a notable hasbeen with a second flowering of career on Cable, after a string of B and X movies sucesses. Babe and Paul haven't spoken for decades (she claims that father and brother did her from puberty on) but in his dotage Paul allowed a quartet of stunning TV camera crews to take up residence in the Bunyan Mansion.
With Paul's death the show, which never really needed him - the focus went to the selection of Paul the 6th. There was a string of mothers with children sometimes in tow, DNA in hand, claiming the Throne. The program's current zinger is that one of the girls is 9 months pregnant and everyone is waiting for the possible birth of a boy - to be named Paul Bunyan the Sixth.
The mother is a latecomer - a teen-age Palestinian girl named Hagar who has since fallen under the managerial eye of Bunyan's only wife, Maggie Bunyan (she says she's 59 but she's really 74, goes the family joke) She features in Bunyan's memoirs - which he called "The Private Life of the Fifth Bunyan", written with the aid of a fifth of bourbon the text continues in smaller itlics. About Maggie he says:
"I pen thses reminiscences so that people will stop their mouths. i am not a murder or a rapist. At least not legally. I guess my relationship with Maggie was all rape and a bed wide. She never like sex, or me and after our honeymoon in Las Vegas in 1959 she got a room of her own in the old Mansion where I grew up and knew a secret door she never found. A devout Christian at the time, she couldn't divorce me, and her minister who was one of my father's toadies told her she had to stick it out and wait for god to change me into a gentleman.
"I of course was a timber beast, unable to change. My chemistry threw me at her in one assault wave after the other. A noble husband I climbed her breastworks and ungirded her loins quite a few times.I also like to punch her about before after during and without sex. The violence probably was a lot more regular but ultimately - though she was certainly a better fuck than Ayn Rand - I went back to working girls. Not working hookers, just local girls who had to work for a living and didn't mind doing IT on their own fabulous bed in their own fabulous room in my own fabulous house.
"Working girls had been my lot between Ayn and Maggie. I was 14 when I fucked one of my father's bookkeepers, a Buncorp office worker age 23 transferred from the LA office. Her name was Sheila and she wore so much stuff, all starched and Doris Day like that it was like what disrobing a nun might have been like. I acuired a taste for executive secretaries and clerical pool girls (here they had a real wet pool as well). Of course, I entrust these memoirs to a male secretary however.
"Sheila's main attraction were her unrelentingly long legs, excessively encased in nylons, thrillingly attached to a black garter belt. It was fifties' boy porno. apotheosis


Maggie Bunyan's main opponent is Buncorp CEO, Jack Knight, a onetime Australian spook who's invested the corporation heavily in Indonesian oil, Asian heroin and Hawaiin hash.He claims the memoirs are a forgery. Or does he claim that he wrote them? I can 't sort out Jack's stories which alwaystake me down, down, into the underworld of global princes, presidents, hitmen and jackals.
Even without the Comic strip touches, the key word here is Buncorp. Says the fith Bunyan:
"I'm better than the best - a Scion from the fabulously wealthy and influential Buncorp family. I epitomize the family's ongoing status as epic Robber Barons."

The only person I trust to sort all this out for me is my close friend Aloyoishis West Whitehead, "Wishy" - the Quaker detective. Fearless and unarmed except with the truth- he nonetheless judiciously promises his enemies an infinity of tripwires to embarrassing stories should he suddenly become an inert corpse.
It was he that authenticated the manuscript for me and arranged for its dissemination. I used to visit him on the bleak Slavage Ridge where he had built an immense driftwood castle. It was a glorious spot where the saucers ran on a nightly basis and interdeminsional beings manuevered against each other in a politics which our own earthly politics only mimiced. Now I hang out in his office in Taft located in a corner of the top floor of the old Opera House.I can look down through his glass wall to view the cobwebbed stage below.
Said West whitehead: "The third Bunyan built this palace back when Taft was the Coho County seat. He built another in his spankin new town - Bunyana - when the city fathers here pissed him off and he decided to use his plethora of wood to build a competitor. It worked out. Bunyana is now the County seat and poor little Taft has had to use guile to survive against the malice of a family that makes the Medici look like the Brady Bunch.Just listen to this guy.
Wishy read me the conclusion of the memoirs preface:

"Accept me as a Superman - a blond Nietschean timber beast - a Jack London Tree Wolf. I wield a supernatural saw with a secret name that levels forests at a sweep. I have improved on my industrious ancester, Paul Bunyan the first. These Redwoods were his last refuge - emgerging from his French Canadian nest to ravage far and wide, a glacier of destruction finally coming to earth in a coastal California corner.
"I'm the John Henry of Logging still!"

West Whitehead shook his head. He was no fan of the upcoming Timber Bragging Days, where the theater of destruction is rehearsed by competing bands of loggers for possession of the silver ax and the golden saw of the orginal Paul Bunyan.
"It's hard to escape the past when it has its hands around the throat of the present," he mourned.