Please Save This Chapter To Read Just Before Thanksgiving Dinner
Sausage Ain't Got Nothing On How Your Stuffed Turkey Gets Made
Chapter 30
One day while Wayne sat at the bar not talking to anybody while the bar gorged and disgorged, Wanda came in, slid the paper out from under Wayne’s slovenly arm, and began working the crossword. “You through with the paper asshole?” she said, politely.
“Not really,” Wayne said.
“Christ,” Wanda mumbled and finished the puzzle in 286 seconds, well off her regular time. She had the hardest time figuring out that 43 down, “A pugilistic revolt?” was “THEBOXERREBELLION.”
She read Gil Thorp, where Huey Baugh had just recovered a fumble in the end zone to give Milford the AA State Championship. Huey gave the game ball to Chipper D’Rocco. Chipper had forced the fumble. He had also disowned his underworld heritage, become a born-again Christian, and vowed to spend the rest of his life combatting wickedness and evil wherever he might encounter them.
Chipper was touched by the linebacker’s selfless gesture, and reciprocated by giving Huey his favorite girlfriend, Sweetmeats Liveright, the most popular girl in Milford, head cheerleader, and President of the Young Republicans.
Basketball season was just getting underway.
“Hey, Wanda,” said Rapid Ray, jauntily snapping his wet rag on the counter as Wanda got to her horoscope. “How they hanging?”
“Just fine, Ramon, just fine,” smiled Wanda, reaching inside her sweater and cupping her right breast, the big one.
“Nicest tits in town,” Ray admitted as he punched up a beer, calling over his shoulder, “See the latest on Idi yet? Check out 8-B.”
There was a recent survey conducted at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in London, which had revealed the visitors’ overwhelmingly favorite hero was Elvis Presley. Previous winners of the popular vote had included Joan of Arc, Jesus Christ, Willie Mays, Guy Fawkes, and Henry Kissinger.
The most fervently despised villain was, not surprisingly, Field Marshal and President for Life Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, and Commander-In-Chief of the Nicaraguan Armed Forces. Past winners of this curious honor included such disagreeable figures as Richard Nixon, Adolph Hitler, George Allen, Jane Fonda, and Henry Kissinger.
“Curiously enough,” Wanda read, “Neither Presley, the father of rock and roll, nor Amin, the father of modern Ugandan cuisine, are currently on display in the museum.
“A spokesman for Madame Tussaud’s Creations, Incorporated, announced a replica of Presley is due to be unveiled later this year near the Henry Ford exhibit, but no plans have been finalized concerning Africa’s Nicaraguan chief of state.
“‘If we’ve got to include that son-of-a-bitch, I’d just as soon have the real thing stuffed as waste good wax on that guy,’ an unidentified spokesman said.”
Nevertheless, despite all popular odds, Idi Amin joined the collection in the only museum that really counts, considering the crippling effect the current ice age has had upon attendance at surface repositories.
Last night, Big Daddy dined on oreilles d’homme farcies en tortue.
***
Lazlo Stroud, son of the last wild Indian in the United States and the last janitor at Berkeley, finally froze to death in the basement of the Physical Plant while he dreamed of the Great Eagle.
Hejaz LeBourgoise has joined the list of those missing in the Palace.
Since things normally occur in multiples of threes, the punch line from space should be arriving any day now. The last terran transmission was received about a month ago, a curious missive now considered by Materex a hoax perpetrated by the commandos. This message clearly placed responsibility for the current ice age and its ramifications squarely on the shoulders of Moammar Gaddafi.
“American Troglodytes,” the message began, “Why hide? We know who you are and what you think you are doing. How shall we put this? The ultimate weapon is ours. Divvy up, as you say, or you shall truly pay. Mark our words. Quiver before our lunatic might or shiver in the endless night. Your master, Mo.”
***
It wasn’t that Gaddafi was incapable of precipitating the current ice age that led Materex to file this transmission in the hoax bank. The majority of survivors, in fact, hold Gaddafi responsible for the current ice age. But the facts don’t support their beliefs.
It just so happens that on the morning of August 19th nearly 200 cubic miles of sky over Libya froze solid and crashed with fickle ferocity to the desert floor, wiping out 92% of that nation’s population. Gaddafi’s bed was located at the epicenter of that plummeting mass. All evidence suggests he was in that bed.
Gaddafi was a madman. No one ever doubted that assertion, but he wasn’t immortal. It was Gaddafi who created Amin, for better or worse. Exactly which Amin he was responsible for still hasn’t been determined at this late date, but Gaddafi had created him nonetheless.
Gaddafi Says was Milton Bradley’s second most popular board game in the incredible hours just before the dawn of the current ice age. Trivial Pursuit was the first. Backgammon didn’t even rate in the top twenty-five.
***
Materex was stunned when the second message arrived, but no one in the Palace gives a damn about these curious missives from space. If Rapid Ray were alive and the author were sitting in the Civic Auditorium while the bar inflated and shrunk, Ray would flick his wet rag in the author’s puffy face.
“What the fuck you reading, fishface?” Ray would ask.
“A letter,” he’d reply, “Just a letter.”
“A letter,” Ray guffawed. “Now that’s ripe. Who the fuck’d send you a letter?”
“Beats the hell out of me,” he confessed, “It’s from outer space.”
***
“You’re all here today because you’re the best there is,” the Life Protector’s speech began. “You’re not quitters. You’re not losers. You’re not lazy slobs want something for nothing. You like hard work, and it hurts getting laid off and waiting in line for unemployment.
“You hate getting drunk, and you pray to God every night. You want to best for your kids, your country. You’re honest, decent, law-abiding Americans, and you don’t care who knows it.
“You bust your ass, and you come back for more, because when push comes to shove, you’ll pitch in with your hearts and minds, your heads and shoulders. Because you’ve got backbone, and that’s what counts.
“You may not be smart. You may not always pay the rent on time, but you’ll pay it eventually. You’ll borrow the money if you have to, because that’s the American Way.
“So sure, life’s maybe dealt you a shitty hand, but you can remember the middle ages. When you think about the middle ages, you realize how far we’ve come. And you know in your heart things are getting better, even if you can’t see it, because you believe in progress. And you know what that means. It means everybody pushing in the same direction and nobody rocking the boat.
“So that’s why you’re here.
“You may not be smart. You may not even be functional, and you’ll always be poor, but we’re damn proud to know you,” the Life Protector said. “So let’s get to work.”
***
Materex was totally unprepared for the truckloads of drunks and drug addicts which started arriving on August 19th. Materex had fully expected the President of the United States, his immediate family, several close personal friends and Field Marshall Idi Amin.
In a burst of Ubu brilliance, when Gottlieb finished monkeying around with the Master Program, he neglected to inform anyone of the makeover he’d done on Eagle II, who, as Materex, remained prepared to receive and host an entirely different population from the one it ordered Sam and Dave to assemble.
This community had been programmed into Materex by a small OCR unit Gottlieb had designed into his suspender clasp. It fed information back to the Civilian Computation Center using cellular modem technology which was still science fiction at the time.
The initials “OCR” stand for Optical Character Recognition. Gottlieb’s OCR took these three concepts literally and recognized the genetic make-up, mass/energy coefficients, and even the personalities of the beings it encountered. These traits were then translated into the long strings of zeroes and ones computers converse in.
So when Gottlieb and Cindy entered the bar after viewing Jaws, the first 159 Clemson characters the unit identified were etched indelibly in the Master Catalog as the nation’s most valuable species. They were also targetted for future retrieval and long-term storage.
***
The first time Sean Locke ever heard the Life Protector’s speech it was given by Weldon Power, the Vice President in charge of Production Motivation and Labor Behavior Modification at the Ralston Purina processing plant in Springdale, Arkansas.
Locke worked there for $2.35 an hour, between 4 p.m. and 3 a.m., six days a week. He hauled live turkeys from specialized trucks and hung them by their feet on a line of moving shackles. The birds flopped and squawked and spurred and shit as they moved toward the blood tunnel where their throats were cut by several men with sharp knives and pinched foreheads.
Then the birds twitched and splattered blood as they travelled the length of the tunnel five times, their stupid white feathers slowly turning burgundy. At the endless of this epic journey, drained and usually dead, they were dragged through the scalder to loosen their feathers before continuing into the main eviscerating area. At the end of a 1.3 mile journey, the unbruised birds were wrapped in plastic and blast frozen to await the holiday shopping season. The waste was used to make pot pies and fertilizer. That was the American Way.
***
One evening, after a hanger had his juggler torn by ten-inch spur and sailed backwards off the scaffolding through a window and knocked over a drum of sulfuric acid and died, Sean Locke turned into Karl Marx and lectured his fellow workers on the dangers of unregulated capitalism.
If you added all the weight piled in the freezer each night and divided it into all the wages paid, the human cost of producing a pound of turkey came to less than three cents. Workers got a discount of seven cents off the 33¢ a pound retail price. That left 23¢ unaccounted for. Where, Marx demanded, did all that money go?
“Who the fuck cares,” growled Brutus Dacus. “I buy a truckload every week and sell them to the queers down in Fayetteville for three cents more than I pay here.”
“But don’t you see what they are doing?” Karl pleaded, “When you play their game, you become a stupid running-dog lackey of these imperial capitalistic pigs!”
“Who you calling stupid?” Brutus snarled, “If I wasn’t working here I’d be paying full price. I’d be losing three cents a pound on every load I took to Faggotville.”
When Marx tried to press his argument after the meeting during which Weldon Powers gave the Life Protector’s speech, Brutus sent Karl Marx to the Fayetteville Memorial Emergency Room with two extra joints in his left arm.
When Sean reported back to work after his arm had healed, he found the plant shut down. It only operated one day less than six months a year. Saved on the costs of unemployment insurance, since no employee could qualify for benefits. Reduced costs meant increased profits. That was the American Way.
***
When Sean stumbled into Brutus Dacus at the Crooked Cue later that day, Brutus told him about his job with the Swanson Foods Company near Winslow, twelve miles south.
“If’n you wasn’t such a communist, I could put in a word edgewise for ya,” Brutus smiled. “They got an eight-cent discount at Swanson’s. I buy a truckload of frozen dinners and sell them in Faggotville. It’s like getting a raise.”
Two weeks later Sean Locke began his job at Swanson’s after Brutus Dacus suffered a nervous breakdown and was shot dead while attacking a highway patrolman with his shovel.
For transferring breaded chicken pieces from one bin to another, from 4 p.m. to 4 a.m. seven days a week, Sean Locke was paid $2.24 an hour. This came to roughly 160 dollars take-home, twenty dollars more than Ralston for only eighteen hours more work. He could almost see Brutus’s point.
***
When he arrived each day at 3:45, he entered a green chamber in which he removed his clothing. When the green light glowed over the green doorway, Sean pushed the green button, the door slid open, and he became a naked Neil Armstrong as he trudged into the blue shower.
Here he scrubbed himself with blue soap under hot blue water before entering the red drying chamber through which he would walk toward the red door behind which his uniform hung.
The Swanson uniform resembled those worn by NASA astronauts and the workers who loaded Amin’s stolen tanker at the Duke Oconee Power Installation.
Once inside his snow white uniform, complete with snow-white helmet linked to its fully self-contained life-support system, Neil Armstrong took hold of his shovel and waited for the buzzer to sound at precisely 4 p.m., when two and a half tons of breaded chicken pieces rumbled into the large bin on his right. He scooped shovels full of chicken parts from the large bin and slung them into the smaller bin each time the buzzer sounded. This went on for two hours, at which time Neil took a 15 minute break without pay and sat on the white bench until a red light and buzzer told him to get back to work.
Neil Armstrong saw no one between 4 p.m. and 4 a.m. seven days a week, and after six weeks, his life-support system failed, turning him into Mac the Knife. He was shovelling as fast as he could, and the buzzer turned into a siren. The lights blinked off and on. Loudspeakers began shrieking.
Mac continued to shovel chicken madly, as a man in black entered the room, shouting: “You are under arrest. Put your hands up.”
But Mac the Knife whirled and raised his shovel. He brought it slicing down alongside the head of the man in black, through his collarbone, and deep into his chest.
Arrested and charged with manslaughter, it was Mac the Knife the jury found guilty, but it was Sean Locke spent the next seven years in prison.
***
While in prison, Sean Locke turned into Benjamin Franklin and learned how to run a printing press. After five years in Cummings, Ben went on work release at the university’s printing and duplicating department in Little Rock. He was paid $3.71 an hour. Turkey by that time cost between 85 and 98 cents a pound, and he didn’t get a discount.
On his first day on the job, Ben joined seventy other bored, cynical, and depressed employees in the bindery as D. W. Duboise smiled and fumbled with a folder of papers on the table against which he leant. He wore khaki jeans and steel-toed dingo boots. One pants leg was caught on a bootstrap. The other leg was too long.
“Hi,” somebody said, leaning against the folder beside Ben Franklin, “Anybody sitting here?”
Finally, D.W. DuBoise began the Life Protector’s speech:
“Well,” he said, “Looks like just about everyone is here. Glad you all could make it.”
He grinned like Howdy Doody and went on: “Well now. Let’s see a show of hands. How many you all think you’re overworked?”
A few hands went up, but most of the workers shook their heads, snorted, and drilled the air alongside their temples with their index fingers. Arched eyebrows were the facial fashion of the day.
“Okay,” D.W. said, “So most of you think you’re overworked,” although five or six hands had been raised, and those belonged to supervisors who seldom were seen except at meetings like these where they raised their hands when the boss wanted to know who was overworked.
“Now how many you all know why you’re overworked,” DuBoise continued.
Nobody raised a hand.
“Oh, you all know why,” D.W. grinned. “You’re overworked because you’re so damn good. We use you cause you are all the best. You make America proud.”
That’s when Benjamin Franklin farted.
Several of his neighbors broke into hysterics, holding their noses and waving their hands as they ran away.
“Now some of you,” D.W. admitted, frowning through his grim red face, “don’t make us near as proud as some of the others.”
***
Perhaps the Life Protector’s speech would have been better appreciated by the President of the United States and his friends. But its reception by the actual Palace residents was decidedly hostile. Members of the audience belched, coughed and farted a capella. Spittballs were actually throw. It was starting to get ugly, and Sam and Dave had drawn their bogglers.
Just then the door in the back of the Civic Auditorium swung open, and everyone turned to see Wayne Trout walk in smiling, waving his good hand and nodding as if acknowledging the applause of well-wishing fans. He was wearing a London Fog topper, rubbers over his cordovan wingtips, a plastic rain hat, and carrying a briefcase.
Inside the rolled-up copy of The Wall Street Journal under his arm was an old issue of Penthouse. It had a pictorial featuring two young girls dressed as nuns called “Swinging Sisters.”
“Some weather we’ve been having,” Wayne said, closing the door.
No one, not even the Life Protector, had noticed Wayne was missing when the meeting began. That’s the kind of guy he was.
***
During that meeting on August 22nd, after the Life Protector’s speech, after Wayne finally arrived, after all the necessary forms had been filled out, talk eventually turned to the unfortunate series of meteorological accidents which had temporarily rendered the surface of the planet unfit for human habitation or industry.
“Some call it an ice age,“ the Life Protector said, “Others prefer to see it as a brief inconvenience,” noting that in almost no time at all, geologically speaking, man would once again be able to scramble back onto the surface. There he would set himself up in business and rekindle the flame of free-enterprise, showing the Russians once and for all what the American Dream is all about where he left off.
“Excuse us,” Gottlieb interrupted, without raising his hand, “but we couldn’t help but notice you used ‘geologically speaking’ rather than ‘realistically speaking,’ which, if we catch your drift, is quite another thing, is it not?”
***
After the Life Protector’s speech, after Wayne arrived, after all the necessary forms had been filled out, and after all the talk about how an unfortunate series of meteorological accidents had temporarily rendered the surface of the planet unfit for human habitation or industry for the next twenty thousand years, the Life Protector asked: “Now then, are there any other questions?”
That’s when Wanda Japan asked: “What are these goddamn masks for?”
“They are to be bolted to your heads, of course,” the Life Protector responded.
***
It is probably too late to speak of the future. The past is a muddle. The present makes no sense. The author is confused. Everyone is confused. If Wayne Trout were suddenly to crash through the doors and plop down on the edge of the bed, who knows how anyone might respond? Would Wayne’s appearance imply he had risen from the dead?
And if he had arisen from the dead…
—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