You Think You Got It Bad? This Ain't So Bad.
You Should Try Shambling Along A Few Hundred Feet In The Author's Imaginary Shoes
Chapter 23
Imagine the author’s surprise when he discovered that 30 days had passed since last he worked on this grim history. He has been playing backgammon, doing crosswords and staying out of the bar.
This regimen was prescribed by Materex. It was hoped the author could be rehabilitated, and at one point he did confess to a sense of well-being he couldn’t remember having felt since earning his Life-Saving Merit Badge to become an Eagle Scout.
He worked as the evening lifeguard at the Parkside Y, and one night, feeling alive and invincible, he lied about his age and enlisted in the United States Marine Corps.
Sixteen weeks later, he lay motionless in an intensive care unit in the Philippines, recovering from eight rounds of M-60 machine-gun fire, the depersonalization of two fragmentation grenades, and a savage bayonetting which commenced at his groin and was raked up through his breastbone on an unnamed hill in the endless Vietnamese night. Although he never knew it, his bed formed the exact geographic center of a complex of 162 clapboard wards identical to his own.
The overly suspicious reader may choose to view these facts as metaphors, but accounts of the author’s struggle to regain marginal utility and self-esteem were routine two decades before the ice age slammed in. Few experts had given him a liver’s chance in Kampala of ever sitting up straight in a wheelchair, but there he was, less than three years back in the States, fresh from 33 innovative surgical procedures at the North Carolina Memorial Hospital in Chapel Hill, slouching slowly across Bowman Field in Clemson, South Carolina, on his crutches toward a class in political science: Wage Slavery: Why The Civil War Still Matters.
“This is one vet who has profited immensely from the war,” wrote Marshall Lawes in The New York Times, “for he has learned much about the courage and diligence of the American Way. We should only hope our hero devotes one third as much energy to learning what makes our country great as we did on his remarkable rehabilitation. With such loyal citizens at the helm, we might yet realize the true blessings of that remarkable war.”
The truth is the author seldom attended a lecture during his four years at Clemson on the GI Bill. He passed what courses he passed with A’s awarded him by instructors who felt guilty at having avoided the war: liberals, conscientious objectors, progressive Democrats, libertarians. Most of his grades were D’s and F’s, however, given him by full professors, combat veterans of WWII, who were really the kinds of guys described by Marshall Lawes.
According to Materex, the only reason the author attended Clemson at all was the school actively recruited him and offered him a stipend in addition to his G.I. Bill benefits in exchange for his participation in a public relations campaign. The author just wanted to live and enjoy himself, but that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t have died if medical technology hadn’t prevented his body from giving up the ghost on a blood-drenched hill in the endless Vietnamese night.
He would have died if not for dust-off, and it took four years’ constant monitoring of his vital signs before the powers that be were convinced they’d won their war against his death. And without so much as a thank you for all the valuable data his drawn-out recovery afforded medical science, the author was sent out into the real world to find a job.
He grew increasingly bitter about the way he was treated by his preglacial government, for what kind of job could a rebuilt alcoholic and drug addict with limited mobility hope to find in the preglacial world? He’d have his hands full just trying to keep his head above water in a moderate flood. The author was corporate product without any discernible market. His reality was as close to the manufactured survivor praised in the corporate media as it was to candied yams. Students often melted in laughter at the sight of him, pointing, and gasping: “What did I tell you? Some hero, huh? All he ever does is puke and piss himself!”
***
The public service announcements and the hero campaign presented the Squeaky Clean face of the author while ignoring his Squeaky Fromme side. So the reader, had one existed back then, would never have seen the author hunch over the battered aluminum rails of his walker and mess himself on the six o’clock news.
The author was never a journalist. It took nearly four years of constant badgering just to get him propped up nearly straight in a wheelchair. Few newsworthy subjects could be expected to drop a quarter in this degenerate’s cup, much less consent to an interview. He was, in fact, a commercial cropper and spent nearly the last quarter century cutting out notices of industrial and commercial openings from daily newspapers in small towns with unbelievable names from all over the United States.
Although it took four years for the author to master a socially acceptable posture in his wheel chair, it took less than five months to get him scuttling from bar stool to stool with the accomplished ease of a history professor or a graduate assistant in English Literature. Today the reader would have a difficult time distinguishing the author from those incredible Busters—Crabbe and Keaton—and, as Wanda herself might put it: “You couldn’t tell jackshit was wrong with that fucker you used a cattleprod.”
The author’s notoriety peaked a few years prior to the debut of the current ice age when, almost as suddenly as it had escalated from investment guard duty to an exercise in senseless airborne brutality, the Vietnam war was forgotten, replaced in the papers and TV by Tylenol terrorists, colliding aircraft, malfunctioning spacecraft, indestructible viruses, incredible droughts, widespread starvation, proliferating madmen, cluster dumps, and freeway murders, as the really important news of the day.
Less than 18 months after enrolling at Clemson, the author was cornered by a young blonde woman in a $500 suit, with a gold inlay decorating her right incisor in the shape of a dollar sign. This special correspondent from Time Magazine asked the author if he wondered why it cost half a million dollars to put him back together again.
“How much did it cost for Humpty Dumpty?” the author asked and puked on the newswoman’s blouse.
***
Nothing important occurred during the author’s absence. Gottlieb Goforth and Cindy Gnomoure have entered another dimension. Wanda and the survivors of her arrogant band have apparently abandoned their original aim of striking directly at the Heart of Materex, moving further from the public access areas and deeper into the air shafts and service routes, even though Materex has extended amnesty to the rebels, now that Gottlieb is finally gone.
Wanda declined the offer, but said she would be willing to negotiate an agreement for the mutual cessation of hostilities in the spirit of peaceful coexistence. Unfortunately, peaceful coexistence is another concept that has not been incorporated into Materex’s opulent memory—“You’re either for us or against us” is how Materex usually puts it.
Furthermore, Materex is unable to sign an agreement, since it has no signature, per se, for even at its Heart there is only one hardcopy output device in The Palace, and it cannot be accessed without additional programming.
Of course, there are no programmers in The Palace, now that Gottlieb is gone.
The commandos have let it be known they would accept the cold green spray of acknowledgment on a remote terminal as a display of good faith, but Materex refuses to acknowledge the offer, since to do so would admit it is incapable of overriding its single preprogrammed duty to provide a single Wall Street Journal each and every day for the late Wayne Trout.
—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 13Chapter 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