How About Critical Species Theory? Could We Maybe Do Critical Species Theory Before Time Expires?
How A Man Occupies The Time He's Been Given To Waste Living In This Nation Of Miserable Fucks Is The True Measure Of The Intrinsic Value Of All God's Creations
Chapter 25
While Dewitt Madison was known as Deadeye, Dias the Mechanic was noted for three things:
The ability to repair, without grumbling, whatever went wrong with the Palace;
The flair for creating incredible crosswords on a daily basis (with help from Materex, of course) and
The luck of the alphabet.
Dias had rolled three identical games of backgammon in succession, travelling around the board unmolested from start to finish without wasting a single face of the dice. He had once beaten Paul Bare in one turn with the miraculous assistance of doubles on doubles, and Paul never got to roll the dice at all.
In a recent game, Dias seemed hopelessly beaten. At one point, the author had already borne off five white stones while Dias had 12 of his trapped on the bar. And yet, before even Materex knew what was happening, Dias established a backgame prime by squashing his opponent’s suddenly indefensible blots with bar reserves.
And then, to everyone’s astonishment, Dias marched this impossible prime around the board as effortlessly as one might walk a poodle, crashing the author’s bar-besotted blots as soon as they stumbled onto the inner table, still reeling from barbaric action at the other end of our silly civilization.
Of course, when the game ended, the author was backgammoned, three of his stones stuck in the bar watching re-runs of the Kentucky Derby with Howard Cosell, as Dias bore off his concluding four stones with double sixes.
To quote Materex: This was a most magnificent display of one palatial resident’s inability to misunderstand the teachings of the Ethiopians.
***
Shortly after the massacre in the Heart of Materex, Wanda was sitting on the plasticene shoreline of Kickapoo Lake with her head buried in the nest she had made with her elbows propped on her knees, when Wayne said: “Hi,” and plopped down on the Timothy-Green of Astroturf National Park, asking: “Anybody sitting here?”
“There was no one before you came,” said Wanda Japan, not looking up, “and there will be no one when you have gone.”
“Really?” asked Wayne.
“You know, you can be a total fuckhead, Wayne,” said Wanda, slowly looking over at Wayne.
Just then, Wayne’s back stiffened and his entire flabby torso gave a spastic shudder as he snapped his head around, stared directly into Wanda’s immaculately inquisitive face, and started waggling.
“You know what tomorrow is?” Wayne said, “Tomorrow’s the day your best friend turns out to be an asshole. That’s what it is. It’s Global Friends of Total Assholes day.
“Tomorrow you’ll get up and put on the cheese grits just like you always do, but it won’t be the same because your best friend is going end up being an asshole. You’ll want to think you’re just imagining things, your mind is playing tricks on you, you’ve made a terrible mistake, but you won’t be able to convince yourself because you always were afraid your best friend was an asshole. So it’s not like the idea is new.
“And right from the second you open your eyes tomorrow morning—even if your best friend is a girl or a cat or a dog—you’ll know right off he’s going to turn out being an asshole. And all the wishing and praying you do isn’t gonna change a goddam thing. An asshole is an asshole. It’s really that simple. You can see one winking at you from three blocks off.”
“Wayne,” Wanda Japan replied, “All I said was you’re a fuckhead. That’s all I said. What the fuck you talking about?”
“I don’t know,” Wayne admitted, “I can’t get much beyond being an asshole.”
****
Materex is right about one thing. Actually, Materex is right about a lot more than one thing. But one of those things is this: Wayne was the kind of guy you could start writing a book about, and he’d get run over by a truck or eaten alive by Field Marshall and President for Life Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, and Commander In Chief Of The Martian Armed Forces.
You’d have just begun to catalog his mannerisms, to suspect you maybe made a hasty decision in tackling this project, that there were more monumental subjects upon which to waste one’s time—there really wasn’t anything at all important about the life and times of Wayne Bo Trout…
And pooff! He’d be gone.
You’d be sitting at home convincing yourself you were better off, no good would come of it. But then you’d look up and notice the line you’d typed at the top of the sheet in your typewriter.
“Hi,” it would say, staring up from the carriage like one of those sad-eyed orphans from an improbable country where 20th century conflict continued to rage, “Anybody sitting here?”
You’d try to recall everything anyone had ever said about him… Everyone you’d ever seen him with… Everything you’d ever heard him say… But after months of rummaging around in three pounds of spongy gray matter aching in your skull, you’d be embarrassed to find your notes came to three small pages.
Especially since the only conversation you’d managed to recall for all your phenomenal effort contained the same dreadful eight questions you now refuse to acknowledge in the same deadening order you no longer wish to recall.
***
Wayne was the kind of guy you could come to despise either because he was there or he wasn’t. He was the kind of guy who’d get bitten by a flea in Cateechee in December and succumb to bubonic plague.
He’d manage a fatal case of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever at Daytona Beach in January.
He’d be signing a flood protection policy for the Winslow Oddfellow’s on Grandmother’s Mountain in February and his Papermate No-Nonsense pen would malfunction, sending a tiny sliver of plastic through Wayne’s eye and into his impenetrable brain.
He was the kind of guy who could have died at almost any moment in the most ludicrous manner. Really. Or he’d be a complete vegetable while doctors debated whether to attempt removing the debilitating fragment. Either way, who’d be stuck holding the colostomy pouch, hoping against hope itself that one day Wayne would open his eyes, smile weakly, and sputter: “Jack would have loved this!”? Your doomed author.
“You know something?” said Wanda Japan, peering incredulously into the featureless wasteland of Wayne’s flaccid face, “Sometimes it really feels good having you around. Gives me a sense of perspective.”
“You going to school now?”
“I mean you’re just like that,” Wanda smiled, snapping her fingers. “No one could fault you for inconsistency. You may be a dope, but at least you’re your own dope.”
“Got any roommates?”
***
“This is wonderful. It’s like I’m not even here. Like neither one of us is here. That’s what you are, Wayne. It’s what you mean. I don’t know how you learned to tie your shoelaces—I would have bet against it—but you did,” Wanda continued, “And somehow you muddle by.
“Like some impossible species God had no plan for and Nature has no need to extinguish. Nobody else in the universe could do as good a job at being you as you, Wayne. And that’s all there is to this puzzle.”
“Not really,” laughed Wayne.
“I’m serious,” Wanda smiled. “How many other Independent Insurance Agents you met in the Palace? Who else ever looked as out of place in an Alfa? I can remember that day…” she began, and proceeded to tell Wayne the funniest thing she ever saw.
***
That was the day Wanda gave up on Clemson for good. Dr. C. M. Yakopf had refused to accept her term paper for “Theatre of the Absurd.”
“It’s not acceptable, Miss Japan. It’s not, not, not acceptable,” he repeated, wheezing down the hall to his office where he flopped in his fat recliner. “You were supposed to use the Chicago Style Sheet,” he said. “Everyone else followed my instructions,” he smirked, his hands clasped over a copy of the Cliff Notes for Moby Dick.
That’s when Wanda noticed Yakopf’s desk was piled with Cliff Notes, Monarch Review Guides, Martin S. Day.
“What’s this shit?” she fumed, grabbing a stack of mimeo masters and shaking them in his warty face. “You’re taking our exam out of Reader’s Digest? You worthless scumbag, you bugfucker, you. I bust my ass doing solid research and five weeks of writing, and you toss it out for the wrong style sheet?
“But you can sit here making up our final from crib sheets? You slimeball reptilian turd. You ought to be exposed.”
“I needn’t remind you, Miss Japan,” Yakopf hissed, “that I am a tenured full professor at this institution while you are but an attractive tart. Let’s say you made your accusations. Who would believe you?”
Wanda’s eyes narrowed and her chest heaved. She seemed to consider risking life imprisonment to resolve this dispute when she recklessly jammed three fingers down her throat and disgorged a lapfull of cheese grits and redeye gravy on Yakopf and his desk.
***
Later, having finished a dozen cheap drafts at the bar, Wanda weaved out of the bar and down Sloan Street to scream at Stephen-At-The-Newsstand. There was no one Wanda liked yelling at better than Stephen. He had been born without a sense of humor. Joking with Stephen was like giving mouth to mouth resuscitation to a drill press. But he was fun to yell at.
And on the day Wanda saw the funniest thing, Stephen, of course, defended Dr. Yakopf’s position. Wanda needed to view the problem from a different perspective. Even the Ethiopians believed in rules. Without rules nothing would matter. How could you compete? Life would be meaningless. Chaos would reign.
And as Stephen went on and on, Wanda climbed up and started pissing on the poetry rack. Stephen screamed and dragged her from the store, called her a barbarian (“You’re a hun, Wanda, a beastly hun!”), and threatened to sue for damage to his only numbered and signed copy of Marge Piercy’s Gathering of the Tribes.
Wanda responded by threatening to smash all the windows in the newsstand, but Stephen kept on. She deserved an “F” on her paper. In fact, she should have flunked the entire course. If she had any shame, she’d go home and drink a bottle of Lysol. What did she think she was doing, pissing on the poetry rack?
At some point that day, according to the Hall of Records, Wanda staggered over to the construction site near Fort Hill Federal Savings and Loan, grabbed a cinder block, and hauled it back to the Newsstand.
***
Stephen yelled that she better not be doing what he thought she was doing, because he’d have to call the cops. He’s calling them right now. Right now. And as Wanda stopped in front of the plate glass windows behind which hid a mural of dragons and dogs, she could see Stephen on the phone, talking fast, glowering at her, shaking his head, and gesturing wildly.
Wanda raised the block over her head and was about to heave it, when Wayne arrived in his red Alfa, a black cat perched on the red headrest of the driver’s seat, its thick white tail thunking against the side of his head.
***
On the day Wanda Japan finally gave up on Clemson, Wayne was bringing Black Jackrack back from Vet Jim Bob Aryan’s One Stop Pet Shop and Car Wash three days after the death of Neal Downer. Wanda reflected upon the emotional foment of that inebriate day in Astroturf National Park, on the plasticene shores of Kickapoo Lake, in the stultifying tranquility which followed the Heart of Materex Massacre.
The massacre is listed in the Hall of Records under the heading “Clearance Sales,” at which time the human inventory of the Palace was “drastically reduced” according to Materex, although the population was, in fact, slashed by a mere 11%. Authentic sales in preglacial malls offered discounts of as much as 70%. Off inflated retail, of course. That’s the American Way!
***
On the day Wanda Japan finally gave up on Clemson, puked on Dr. Yakopf, pissed on poetry, and was about to smash the window of the Clemson Newsstand, Black Jackrack was sporting a huge plaster cast on his tail. It was shaped oddly like a petrified johnny mop. Jack spit his wacka wacka over and over into Wayne’s left ear, while battering the right side of his fat face with a supposedly immobilized tail.
Wayne leaned over and looked out the passenger’s window, saying: “Looks like it’s fixing to rain.”
“Jesus, Wayne,” Wanda laughed, remembering that crazy preglacial day when she pissed on poetry, puked on Yakopf, and almost smashed the windows of the Clemson Newsstand, “You know, it didn’t even hurt when I dropped that cinder block? Broke three toes. And still didn’t hurt. You and that cat in that red Alfa Romeo was the funniest thing I ever saw.”
“You don’t say,” Wayne responded. “Jack would have loved this.”
***
Wayne was the kind of guy who might have lived just long enough to sample his own intestines. They’d be prepared by Field Marshal and President for Life Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, and Commander-In-Chief of the Venusian Armed Forces.
Just before the final spark in Wayne’s disemboweled body had fizzled, Idi would fork a tidbit of tripes de truites en villeroi de ris a la amin between Wayne’s quivering lips and ask: “Well then, our porcine rascal, you, our deliciously esteemed friend and colleague. How do you like that?”
And Wayne’s final words would be “Jack would have loved this.”
—30—
Epilog In Media Res
It occurs to me that some straggler might want to read all of Trout’s Tale in its God-given order, assuming I live long enough to publish all of it. I guess I could start another stack and publish it in order there, but where’s the fun in that?
Instead, what I’ve currently decided to do is add this epilog as an index to previous posts in the order in which they were not written, but in the most recent order they have appeared in the Hall of Records. Links will become active as new URLs are generated.
Pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions.
Trout’s Tale thus far…
Frontal Matter And Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33
“Chapter 25 is so wickedly funny it brought me back from the dead just long enough for me to acknowledge what a cunt I was to everybody I knew when I was alive.”
—Kellyanne Tim-Conway “Just The Alternative Facts Ma’am”