Wayne Trout Was An Insurance Salesman From Cateechee, South Carolina
This Was My Second Unpublishable Novel After Marvin And The River Pirates.
Frontal Matter
All Rights Reserved. Copyright © 1975-2024, Elio Emiliano Ligi
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Literary Easter Eggs:
Cat Words cartoon in epigraphs, © Copyright, B. Kliban.
In Chapter 1, the author paraphrases a line from “I am writing to you from a far off country” by Henri Michaux, translated by some dude who was crushed by a hailstone the size of an Isetta.
The tale of Shawn LeFaire in Chapter 2 comes from memory of a tape recording played to the author by Blake Praytor. Also in the same chapter are a few words from that great Temptation’s hit: “My Girl,” written by someone who was flash frozen while fleeing New Jersey.
In Chapter 4, one of Alfred Jarry’s valuable insights into the nature of mankind’s addiction to sobriety is used by Wayne to challenge a lady from the Salvation Army.
The opening words from Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., appear as a thought in the author’s mind in Chapter 5, as do the opening words from one of Robert Frost’s better known poems.
Excerpt from “For A Dancer” by Jackson Browne appears in the background music playing on the Palace jukebox while the author sleeps in Chapter 8.
More words from “For A Dancer” appear in Chapter 9. Also in this chapter, the author has apparently appropriated entire passages from several of Shakespeare’s plays (portions of which may have been written by Christopher Marlowe or Sir Francis Bacon), as well as the journals of David Crockett and Samuel Sewell. See the Hall of Records for further discussion of the author’s plagiaristic tendencies based upon his reading of Bertold Brecht.
In Chapter 11, much of the work of Alfred Jarry is pataphrased in discussing the history of 20th century America as revealed in the lives and times of Gottlieb Goforth and Cindy Gnoumoure.
Jarry’s life and work are again used as the basis for Gottlieb Goforth’s very existence in Chapter 12.
In Chapter 14, the curious weapon called Ice-Nine comes from Kurt Vonnegut’s master’s thesis in anthroplogy, a book called Cat’s Cradle, previously cited.
The text of the message from outer space is based on the actual message beamed ever-outward by well-intentioned and supposedly healthy individuals in our space program.
Chapter 22 contains a pataphrasings of an instruction manual found in a backgammon game purchased at a Goodwill store in Pittsboro, N.C.
A line from “those sons of bitches” by Charles Bukowski appears in Chapter 31.
Dedication
for Jean as always in memory of Neal Spearman and Frank Stanford two awe-inspiring ends for any world and for Bill DesChamps who gave me the names to begin with
Epigraphs
And Theng sie desired to know: “Which had answered correctly?” And Kung said, “They have all answered correctly, “That is to say, each in his nature.” –Ezra Pound, “Canto XIII” Their question was frivolous and my answer was not clear: but the thought in it was to some extent right. –Feodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov Rosewater said an interesting thing to Billy one time about a book that wasn’t science fiction. He said that everything there was to know about life was in The Brothers Karamazov, by Feodor Dostoevsky. “But that isn’t enough anymore,” said Rosewater. –Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Slaughterhouse Five
–B. Kliban, Cat
Foreword
A good story, like vintage wine, often leaves a faint indescribable aftertaste. The sensation is delicious, ephemeral, and felicitous. Of course, this could be a sign someone has fucked with your wine, either by introducing mild psychotropic pharmaceuticals, as the NSA did in a series of experimental actions involving the American public during the 1960’s, or by poisoning it, as the CIA did with Iraqis relief shipments during the 1990’s.
This is not a good story. No one writes good stories any more, now that Bukowski and Vonnegut are dead. They were the last great American story-tellers. To paraphrase what W.B. Yeats’ once wrote upon the death of W. H. Auden: After them, the Savage God.
It is a tale of terror and deceit, of incompetence and stupidity strung through the very fabric of American culture.
If there is one book you read during the current ice age, let this be it. Then let there be light.
Someone just informed me that Kurt Vonnegut is not dead. As he himself might tell you: what does that matter? He will be, soon enough.
Wanda Japan, Kickapoo National Monument Ladies Room, 11 December, 2002
Preface
Although every name in this grim history was once proudly worn by a person, place, or thing within the territorial United States during the thin years immediately preceding the current ice age, and although every incident recorded herein may have actually happened to people in places with equally unbelievable names, no one believes people really act like this. Hence Trout’s Tale is a fully prefabricated fiction, and though the abundance of fact in these glacial equivalent of pages may render it less than original, it attempts to remain novel nevertheless.
To paraphrase Wanda Japan: if you laugh at the lives and times of Wayne Trout and his fellow victims, it is only because they should not have happened, they could not have happened. Since they should not and could not have happened, they did not happen, and so it follows, there was no harm in them. Any reader foolish enough to take exception with this disclaimer can fuck Materex.
The Author, The Palace, May 16, 1967
Chapter 1
According to the Hall of Records, the first flakes began to fall at 4:35 AM Eastern Daylight Savings Time. Wayne Trout finished brushing his teeth and went into the kitchen where the grits thickened on the stove. He got a slab of longhorn cheese out of the freezer (“Keeps it from molding,” someone had told him), hacked off two quail-egg-sized hunks, dropped them in a cereal bowl, and poured the hot grits on top. Misty-In-The-Morning was saying: “The front stretches from Newport News south along the entire Eastern Seaboard to Key West where accumulations of up to seven inches are expected.” It was August 17th in Cateechee, South Carolina, and Wayne could see the snow already beginning to gather in the furrows of the terraced pasture. “Goddamn crazy weather,” he said.
He took his bowl of cheese grits and a cup of black Sanka to the kitchen table where he sat down to cram a couple of hours of architectural trivia through his eyes in preparation for a 9:10 exam in Historic Arches 894. As he opened his text, he heard Black Jackrack call from the front porch.
“Wacka wacka,” Jackrack said.
***
Probably the most revealing statement Wayne ever made was: “And then she sold my dog. She sold my goddamn dog.” True, taken out of context, and although they are on file as such in the Hall of Records, despite their presence in the first sentence of this paragraph, these words may seem less than memorable to the experienced reader, but Wayne’s most revealing statement was easily forgotten. He was the kind of guy who only hung out in bars and newsstands, and unless he actually came up and tried to start a conversation, you probably never noticed him at all. Wayne asked eight questions which could be answered with a simple yes or no:
1 — Hi. Anybody sitting here?
2 — Really?
3 — Mind if I sit here?
4 — You going to school now?
5 — Married?
6 — Got any roommates?
7 — Not really?
8 — You don’t say?
He was not much of a conversationalist.
***
The best way to avoid Wayne was to make sure you never ran into him on three consecutive days, for Wayne’s mind didn’t accept an object’s reality until that object had crystallized, and the process took 72 hours. Perhaps it was a sensory birth defect, something the behaviorists had not yet discovered, but it seemed as if Wayne’s world emerged slowly out of a thick vapor, and only after that vapor had condensed did any object hidden in it enter Wayne’s life as a permanent fixture.
To give you some idea of Wayne’s problem — for nearly 13 years, he had attended the monthly Independent Insurance Agents’ meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, but if you mentioned Atlanta around Wayne, he inevitably said: “Oh yes, Atlanta. I hear it’s a wonderful city. That is the one they rebuilt on a platform off England, isn’t it?”
New York was a total myth to Wayne.
“New York?” he asked Rapid Ray one Tuesday after lunch, “Isn’t that what they turned New Amsterdam into when George Washington Irving Carver died?”
You might have avoided Wayne by drinking in a different bar every day. Still you had no guarantee of avoiding him completely, since he seemed to be in every bar at once. This presupposes there was some reason to avoid Wayne, when the truth is that Wayne never materialized for others until he asked his eight questions. “Hi,” he’d begin, taking a seat, “Anybody sitting here?” Otherwise, people never noticed him at all.
***
One day Wayne’s house burned down while he was at the monthly Independent Insurance Agents’ meeting in Atlanta. When he finally got back in late afternoon, only the cinderblock foundation remained, but Wayne wheeled into the driveway, got out of the car, and was taking his briefcase out of the trunk of his red Alfa Romeo, when one of his neighbors approached him, saying: “Gee, Wayne, we’re real sorry about your house. If there’s anything we can do to help…”
“Hi,” said Wayne, plopping his gabardine ass on the right rear fender of his car, “Anybody sitting here?”
That’s the kind of guy Wayne was.
***
From the third day on, the three-day rule ceased to apply. Once an object had crystallized, it could disappear for a month, a year; it could wither and die altogether. Wayne was the kind of guy who viewed the entire world as a casual acquaintance. To become real in Wayne’s mind was to achieve a kind of immortality most people would rather do without. Among the thirteen sentences Wayne came up with the day his house burned down were these: “Hell, what are you so worried about? It’s not like it’s gone. It’s insured.”
***
The lobotomy, for those who no longer remember, was developed specifically to excise the individual’s will to resist. The term most commonly substituted for “the individual’s will to resist” is “aggression”. The reason for this substitution is simple enough to explain: not many people know what the individual’s will to resist implies, but just about everyone is certain what aggression means. Since normal people see aggression as a manifestation of deranged behavior, since aggression represents perhaps the most painful of its manifestations to people who behave normally, and since many normal people tend to find certain forms of treatment for deranged behavior — including stupefaction, electroshock, solitary confinement, starvation, flaying, and (in extreme cases) execution — arbitrary, not to mention barbaric, crass, depraved, evil, and so on up the alphabet to Zwinglian — the lobotomy came to be viewed as the most humane and least punitive of treatments for deranged human behavior. After all, the aggressive was himself a victim — it was as if he had a hemorrhoid behind his eyes. With his terrible need to scratch and all that bone and cartilage and flesh in the way, it was no wonder he hit people with axes and bullets and clubs. The lobotomy worked just fine: a little etching on the frontal lobe of the brain, and before you could say Hare Krishna, you couldn’t pick the former psychotic out of a line at Wiener King or the panel for Hollywood Squares.
The first lobotomy was performed for quite different reasons. It wasn’t even a frontal lobotomy, but it reveals the efficiency and poise of preglacial culture at work. Mr. _____, an accountant from Philadelphia, reported to his physician with a cyst on his ear drum. The physician prescribed antibiotics, but when these failed to work, Mr. _____ was admitted to Philadelphia Memorial Hospital for observation and treatment. Observation quickly made it clear treatment wasn’t effective and surgery was ordered. The infection had passed beyond the inner ear and spread to the right temporal lobe. This lobe was removed.
In the meantime, the infection had spread through the Eustachian tube to infect not only the middle ear but the temporal lobe on the left side as well. This lobe was also removed. The surgeons and nurses in the operating room were ecstatic. Not only was it the first time such an operation had been attempted; it had been a success. Mr. _____, against all odds, including those in the fifth floor pool, was still alive.
This initial elation turned to gloom, however, when Mr. _____ regained consciousness several days later.
“How do you feel?” a physician asked Mr. _____.
“I don’t know,” Mr. _____ responded, “Who am I?”
“You’re at Philadelphia Memorial Hospital, Mr. _____. The operation was a complete success.”
“You don’t say. But who am I?”
***
Subsequent research concluded the temporal lobes of the human brain, although they do not themselves store information, serve as a kind of switchyard between the conscious and unconscious worlds. What had happened to Mr. _____ was this: his nervous system remained perfectly capable of assimilating and storing new information. Previously gathered information was stockpiled in the same old cells as meticulously as ever. Mr. _____’s brain was simply unable to call up any material for his conscious use.
If not for the current ice age, Mr. _____ would today be at Philadelphia Memorial Hospital with a candy-striper scolding him: “No, no, Mr. _____. When you take it out, aim it here.”
***
While the hospital staff was alarmed at the results, the government was not. A research grant was awarded to the Philadelphia Memorial Hospital “to further the cause of neurological research.” What the grant did, more or less, was allow government certified neurosurgeons to fiddle around in the heads of terminally afflicted welfare recipients to locate that lobe (or those lobes) in the human brain which, to wit: “controls (control) the individual’s will to resist, hereafter in this agreement expressed as aggression.”
Several hundred chronically unemployable patients later, aggression was discovered to reside in the frontal lobe of the human brain. Lobotomies became as common as nose jobs according to at least one high-ranking source cited in the Hall of Records, and although none of the data to which the author is privy may be fact, that is not the point.
The point is Wayne was that kind of guy.
***
The worst thing Wanda Japan ever did was leave her husband. “It was a bummer,” she said, “Just him and the cat in that great big house. No wonder he hanged himself. You know what the note said? The note said: ‘Wanda, please, don’t take this personally. I can’t get the cat to quit crying and I don’t have any money left to drink.’ Isn’t that pathetic?”
***
On the other hand, if for some reason you started to talk about Wayne, never mentioning his name or what he looked like or how he drank from a mug with his pinky held out like a peg on a hat rack, if you started to talk about Wayne to a complete stranger anywhere along the Atlantic coast, and you wanted to make a point about despair, ennui, frustration — isolation, jaundice, kickshaws, loneliness, and the meaninglessness of life in general — but you didn’t want anyone to take you seriously enough to suggest you get a lobotomy so you tried to put it across in a joke — well, immediately you thought of Wayne if you ever thought of him at all, and you’d say: “You know, I met this guy once who…” and before you got to the point, whoever you were talking to would say: “Oh, you mean Wayne. The insurance salesman.”
***
Wanda Japan tells about the time the poet crystallized in the bar as Wayne asked the eight questions. The poet said yes or no until the questions ran out, and Wayne finished his beer and left. The next night, the poet engaged several squirmy young girls to listen to his views concerning the role of art in society. Among other things, the poet said: “Poetry is the art of lying to get at the truth. In nature there is no completeness. Do you realize Thomas Chatterton was not yet twenty when he died? I recall a story about Robert Frost,” and so on. As the poet got to the part about the ineluctable modality of the visible, Wayne came in and sat down and said: “Hi. Anybody sitting here?” and started in on the remaining questions.
Wayne had gotten to Mind if I sit here? when the poet asked: “Who the hell are you?”
“Me?” asked Wayne, as if he had never heard the question before, when in fact he had heard it as many as a dozen times a day every day of his life.
“Yes, you,” said the poet.
“I’m Wayne Trout,” Wayne said, “But my friends call me Bo.”
“Oh, barf,” choked one of the squirmy young girls, “Isn’t that precious. A fish. In a bar. That take you long to think up?”
“It wasn’t my idea,” Wayne blushed. “It was my mother’s idea,” he lied, just as he lied whenever he said his friends called him Bo. Wayne had no friends, and everyone called him Wayne. The insurance salesman. Moreover, Wayne was an orphan, and even his foster parents were kinder than to have made his life into such a terrible pun. This is not to say that Wayne had any hand in the creation of his nickname. Quite the contrary. Wayne’s Bo had been bestowed upon him in Vietnam despite his most strident objections. It was only after several months trying it out on Vietnamese farmers that Wayne finally decided the nickname was both subtle and clever enough to occupy a place in his world, but now — once again stung by the barroom laughter — Wayne was as befuddled as ever to find his most intricate puzzles so easily solved by anyone he tried to talk to. He asked the five remaining questions, said: “Well, I guess I’ve got some important business to take care of,” finished his beer, and left.
***
Wayne once got very drunk and sat at the bar not talking to anyone while the bar filled up and emptied and filled up and emptied again. During one of the filled up periods, a girl sat down on his right and leaned forward and shouted at a guy on Wayne’s left because the jukebox was loud enough to kill most plants and many small animals. Nobody knew why the jukebox was so loud, but that’s a different story. “I’m in abnormal,” the girl yelled, “How about you?”
“What you say?” the guy belched.
“I asked what you taking.”
“Nothing,” the guy said, “Just a little drunk.”
Wayne lifted his head off the bar and started jabbering right into the guy’s face: “You know what tomorrow is? Tomorrow’s the day you do everything in reverse. It’s global reverse day. That’s what it is. If you want to take a shit, you got to puke. If you want to turn right, you got to turn left. But it’s worse than that. If you want to turn left going forward, you got to turn right going backward. You’ll have to get up tomorrow morning and go to sleep if you want to do it right.”
“What the fuck are you talking about, man?” the guy said.
“I don’t know,” Wayne admitted. “That’s about as far as my imagination can carry me.”
***
The next night the poet was sitting with Wanda Japan when Wayne walked in. Immediately, the poet got up to take a leak, although there was no need. A construction worker had crystallized, and Wayne walked over to the construction worker, sat down, and asked: “Hi. Anybody sitting here?”
When the poet got back to the bar, he sat down next to Wanda Japan and said: “You see that guy over there?”
“Wayne? The insurance salesman?”
“You mean you know him?” the poet asked.
“Wayne?” laughed Wanda Japan. “Nobody knows Wayne.”
“Oh,” the poet smiled, “You mean he’s the town character, am I right?”
“No,” Wanda huffed, and the poet was amazed to see real anger flashing in her auburn eyes. “I mean exactly what I say,” she said. “I’m not a poet,” she spat, and then she left the bar.
***
A few nights later the poet asked: “Don’t you think it’s sad?”
“What’s sad?” asked Wanda Japan.
“Wayne,” said the poet, “Just look at him.” Wayne was sitting in the corner near the keg cooler, reading the sports pages in The Greenville News, wearing a London Fog trenchcoat and a bright white and orange baseball cap with a tiger’s paw on the crown.
“Oh, Wayne’s all right,” said Wanda Japan, “but positively sleep city.”
“Sleep city!” the poet chuckled, “What a delightful choice of words!”
“God,” sighed Wanda Japan, “You’re so full of shit, I can smell it on your breath.”
***
A few nights later, Wanda overheard the poet plotting a novel he was working on for a new crop of squirmy young girls. The novel would be “a really different kind of thing,” the poet said. “None of this hero and villain bullshit. None of this beginning and middle and end. It’ll be about the common man, about the kind of guy you’d never notice unless somebody pointed him out,” the poet said.
“Oh,” one of the squirmy girls said, “Like, you mean Wayne. The insurance salesman.”
***
If history truly records past events for the victors, it is curious Wayne Bo Trout has been mentioned at all. Wayne was the kind of guy who never won a single hand of solitaire. And sometimes he cheated. He was an Independent Insurance Agent taking courses toward a masters in city planning. His major concentration was historic reclamation. “What Wayne wanted, the poor dope,” Wanda once said, “was to get in on one of those government grants where they go in and tear down all the new buildings and put up a bunch of old ones.”
***
Wayne Bo Trout isn’t really the kind of character you’d expect to read about at all, except perhaps as a case study in autism. Here are a few random comments about Wayne:
“Wayne is the kind of guy who only exists when you’re looking at him and nobody’s ever seen him alone.”
“I once saw Wayne walk into an empty house and when a bunch of us checked, the house was still empty.”
“Wayne is just like everybody else. Well, that’s not really true.”
“I don’t know. How would you describe Wayne? You know what I mean?”
“You mean like Wayne, right? The insurance salesman?”
***
The author does not present these facts to be cruel. In the ancient words of Henri Michaux: he could say other things if he really wanted to be cruel. He merely wishes to document the difficulty he faces in attempting to compile an objective narrative in which the central character is an unknown quantity. True, Wanda Japan has offered several Wayne Trout anecdotes and is, thus far, the only surviving human who claims to have had a conversation with him which did not begin with the eight questions, but to what extent can Wanda’s testimony be trusted? She has resisted all attempts at reconditioning and is at this very moment the reputed leader of a small but dangerous band of commandos committed to destroying the Palace.
***
Wayne was the kind of guy who was saved but probably won’t survive in the current ice age.
—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