The Champion of Reason
By Jim Riva
Copyright 2009 Jim Riva
Smashwords Edition
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was purchased for your use only, please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the author.
PROLOGUE
Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Leslie Giese. I’m a freelance photographer, a writer, and a physicist. At birth, I was twenty-one inches long, which is average. My height remained average until I was thirteen, when I was cursed with an overactive pituitary gland that was left uncontrolled and eventually resulted in giantism. When I graduated from John Wayne Elementary School, I was more than two feet taller than my father, who was a dwarf as a result of an underactive pituitary gland. By the time I was a junior at Central Addleton High School, I had reached my present height of six-foot-eleven and three-quarter inches.
As you would expect, I was the center of the basketball team in both elementary school and high school and, not surprisingly, I was the top scorer on the team. Unfortunately, a lack of coordination made it impossible for me to compete beyond the high-school level. At Illinois State University, I was shamefully the first player cut from the freshman team.
For some time afterwards, I was despondent. My despondence exacerbated back problems that had plagued me for years because I had to spend so much of my time stooping. I cursed my mother for not making me take ballet lessons (like Kareem Abdul Jabbar’s mother made him) to improve my coordination so I could become a professional basketball player. As it was, I didn’t know what I could or should or would become.
I went to a guidance counselor, who went page by page with me through a book that gave information about professions from aeronautical engineers to zoologists. Just to make a selection, I told him that I wanted to become a gynecologist. He complimented me for having made a wonderful decision and sent me on my way with the encouragement that the field was wide open.
Wide open or not, I knew that the profession required a lot of stooping, so I knew that it really wasn’t for me. Many sleepless nights I spent with my long legs hanging over the end of my dormitory bed, trying to think of a profession that was for me—one in which my height could be an advantage rather than a disadvantage. Then one day I found myself in the middle of a street among a crowd of people looking at the body of a young lady who had leapt to her death from a tall building. All of a sudden, a guy with a camera asked me to do him a favor and take a picture of the sickening scene from my towering viewpoint—and that’s when the answer came to me.
So back I went to the guidance counselor. I told him that I hadn’t known what I was getting myself into when I said that I wanted to become a gynecologist and, anyway, I had decided that what I really wanted to become was a photographer. He complimented me for having made a wonderful decision and sent me on my way with the encouragement that the sky was the limit.
Although I earned the nickname ‘Butterfingers’ during my basketball-playing days, I gained a reputation, as a Photography major, for having steady hands that enabled me to take very long exposures without the aid of a tripod, and I went on to win several awards for technique and creativity.
After graduation, I took a teaching position at the New York State College of Art and spent three years teaching Principles of Photography to students who didn’t know their apertures from their ass holes. The only good thing about the job was that I had summers off to travel around with my ever-growing collection of camera equipment and build up a rather impressive travel stock file. Before long, I was providing pictures to five agencies for use in travel brochures, magazines, and calendars, and the agencies were sending me checks that were getting bigger and bigger. Confident that I no longer needed my teacher’s salary, I strutted into the office of the Chairman of the Photography Department, handed him my resignation, and told him where he could stick a telephoto lens. Then I began my career as a freelance photographer.
As the tallest freelance photographer in the world, I have traveled to about fifty countries with my usual gear: three 35mm SLR bodies, an 80-200 zoom lens, a wide range of fixed focal-length lenses from 21mm to 135mm, lots of skylight and UV filters, a lightmeter, a lightweight tripod, a tabletop tripod, plenty of fresh film from ASA 25 to ASA 125, and a change of underwear.
It never ceases to amaze me that I get paid for traveling around, and paid very well I might add. I can easily afford to fly First Class wherever I go so that I have sufficient leg room. But between arrivals and departures, I prefer to get off the beaten path to avoid the tourists and have more interesting experiences, which often, too often, go beyond interesting to outrageous.
I have written a book about my traveling experiences entitled The Adventures (and Misadventures) of Leslie Giese, Photographer, which justifies my claim to be a writer—and then, of course, there’s this book. My claim to be a physicist is justified by my discovery of Giese’s Law, which states that the vast majority of outrageous things that happen to people happen to a very small minority of people. True, the people in this very small minority are often their own worst enemies, but I prefer to think that I, a member of the very small minority to be sure, am not. Instead, I prefer to think that outrageousness follows me around—like my shadow.
I live in the town I grew up in, Addleton, Illinois, which was built on landfill over a garbage dump. I share my house with my dog Noodles, a mean Pomeranian. (She once bit the postman in the crotch and he had to get stitches.) Noodles doesn’t like me much and, to tell you the truth, I don’t like her much either. Nevertheless, it’s nice having her around the house while I’m in Addleton. When I’m gone, she stays with my uncle, Nicky, which is to say that she’s with Nicky more often than she’s with me.
I live in Addleton because it’s interesting. Actually, it’s outrageous, which makes me wonder if perhaps I follow outrageousness rather than the other way around. Anyway, there always seems to be something outrageous going on in Addleton, and when I’m in town very little of it escapes my attention because people are always phoning me to tip me off about things they think should be photographed by a professional like myself. Almost all of these ‘should be photographed’ things, however, are not even worth seeing. What do I care about some numskull who has been strumming a banjo for two days so he can get his name in the Guinness Book of World Records or a couple of scuba-diving screwballs who are getting married underwater? I couldn’t care less.
I would have gotten an unlisted telephone number a long time ago if I did not, every now and then, receive a good tip. A tip given to me a couple of years ago in the middle of an atmospherically weird night by Partying Bob Supan, the greatest partier in the history of the area, enabled me to get some spectacular pictures of the seldom-seen phenomenon of ball lightning. (A collection of the best of the pictures, taken with high-speed film at f-5.6 as the potentially destructive fireball floated over farm land northeast of the city, later appeared in Paranormal Monthly with the heading UFO PHOTOGRAPHED.) But that’s quite enough about Partying Bob, and it’s quite enough about me too—at least for now. It’s time to start telling the story that could have no other title than The Champion of Reason.
CHAPTER 1
It was dark in Addleton, very dark, and getting darker—but I like to think that a moonbeam shone down on Jake Leander as he went into the Church of the Sacred Sacrament with a Stetson on. “Nothing more than tap water over which religious mumbo jumbo has been recited,” Jake muttered as he dunked his fingers into the holy-water cistern and then tried to wash away a mustard stain from his threadbare tweed sports jacket that he was wearing over a not-so-white, white T-shirt.
The church appeared to be empty. Jake took off his Stetson and walked in the dimness down the aisle. He came alongside the confessional and shook his head. It had been many years since he, as a good Catholic boy, had entered the dark cubicle and waited for the shutter to slide open so he could confess his sins to the silhouette of a priest. It had always made him feel uncomfortable, but through all the discomfort he had been able to joice and rejoice—because the Absolution Cleaning Service washed away the stains from his soul, caused mostly by having impure thoughts and touching himself in an impure manner, with even better results than Woolite might have had in removing the stains from his sports jacket.
He was scanning the enormous stained-glass windows that flanked the Stations of the Cross when he heard mumbling. An elderly woman, holding a rosary, was saying a Hail Mary. He thought about the dogma that Mary bodily ascended to Heaven, and then fumbled around in his cluttered pants pockets until he located a pencil and a piece of paper. He set his hat on a pew and pondered as he did a calculation: “Let’s see, if she assumed the velocity of the speed of light shortly after takeoff about two-thousand years ago ... she should now be about one-seventieth of the way to the Megellanic galaxies.” Putting the pencil and paper into the pocket of his sports jacket, he noticed a pizza stain near the lapel. So he grabbed his hat and headed back to the holy-water cistern. On his way there, he asked himself a rhetorical question: “How much farther will she have to go to get to Heaven?”
* * *
“Through this holy anointing, may the Lord in His love and mercy help you with the grace of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”
Father Ralph Ryan removed his stole and put away his sesame oil as Mrs. Cornbloom sobbed beside the deceased.
“I don’t know how I’ll get along without my Robert,” Mrs. Cornbloom said.
“Time heals all wounds, Mrs. Cornbloom,” Father Ralph replied.
Robert lay in repose on his canopy bed with the covers pulled up to his neck. Mrs. Cornbloom tried to hold back the tears.
“He was a good dog, Father.”
“Yes he was, Mrs. Cornbloom, and I’m sure he’s now in a heaven for dogs.”
Tears fell onto the yellow pages of the telephone book as Mrs. Cornbloom skimmed past FINGERNAIL SALONS, FLORISTS, FORMAL WEAR RENTAL, and FUND-RAISING ORGANIZATIONS before coming to FUNERAL DIRECTORS. She ran her index finger down the page and stopped at:
BOSWELL FUNERAL HOME
PRE-ARRANGED FUNERALS WITH ALL THE TRIMMINGS
FUNERAL DIRECTOR: JEROME BOSWELL
ASK ABOUT OUR NEW MUMMIFICATION SERVICE
“Father, you’ll deliver the eulogy at the funeral, won’t you?”
“Of course I will, Mrs. Cornbloom. Good-bye and God bless you.”
Father Ralph got into his Porsche and squealed the tires as he sped off. He snipped off the end of a Cuban cigar, then looked at his face in the rear-view mirror and snipped off a hair inside his nose.
He was in no hurry to get home because his housekeeper, Flo, was dusting—and sneezing as she dusted because she put herself in the center of a dust storm with feather dusters rather than using a liquid cleaner and a dust rag. “Perhaps I should pay a visit to Charlotte Cobbett this evening,” he mused as he examined his capped teeth. “She certainly has big tits,” he added while checking his toupee.
Father Ralph was the most popular man of the cloth in Addleton because of the brevity of his church services—Thirteen minutes was his average—which drove flocks of Addletonians, Protestants as well as Catholics, to switch churches and become churchgoers at the Church of the Sacred Sacrament. His popularity went beyond the consecrated confines of the church to the magnificent parlor of Addleton’s most distinguished socialite, Constance ‘the Duchess’ Mazur, whose soirees were considered incomplete if not graced with Father Ralph’s presence.
He turned onto Main Street and drove past Madam Leta’s House of Seance, the George Hamilton Tanning Salon, and the Self-Realignment Center before double-parking in front of Sonny’s Tavern. He wanted to get a bottle of vintage wine for the next day’s service, as he was of the opinion that Christ’s blood tastes better if it is transubstantiated from good wine. On the same principle, he had the Eucharist wafers made from Jewish rye.
Bells jingled as he entered, but Sonny, the owner, and his six regular sports-minded patrons, viz. John Doe, Joe Blow, Richard Rowe, and Tom, Dick, and Harry, were too enthralled in a televised football game to notice him. A commercial break, beginning with an advertisement for a he-man’s laxative, finally enabled Sonny and his regulars to divert their attention from the television. “Hello, guys,” Father Ralph said, and the guys responded in turn: “How’s it goin?”, “What’s happenin’?”, “How ya doin’?”, “What’s up?”, “Whata ya know?”, and “What’s new?”
“The usual, Father?” asked Sonny.
“Yeah, Sonny, and uncork it for me, will you?” Father Ralph replied.
“Can’t wait until Mass, can you, Father?” said Sonny with a smirk as he reached for a corkscrew.
Father Ralph sometimes joined the men at the bar and granted indulgences in exchange for martinis, but on this particular night he had other things, two other things, on his mind. So he explained that he had a housecall to make—“The Lord’s work is never done”—and left.
He squealed his tires as he sped off to the Church of the Sacred Sacrament to lock the doors for the night. Ever since a pervert chiseled off the clothes of the statue of the Blessed Virgin, precautions had to be taken against vandalism. He arrived at the church in a screeching halt and ran inside in such a rush that he collided with Jake Leander.
“Oh, I’m terribly sorry,” Father Ralph said. “I’ve spilled some wine on your sports jacket.”
“That’s all right. Don’t worry about it,” Jake replied.
“If it will make you feel any better, I’ll transubstantiate it into Christ’s blood.”
“No, thanks. That would make it even more difficult to wash out.”
“Ha ha ha,” Father Ralph laughed, and then he stared at the young, good-looking Jake, making him wish that he had youth again—and good looks for the first time. “I don’t believe I’ve seen you before,” he said.
“I just arrived in town.”
“And you came to the Church of the Sacred Sacrament on your very first day in town. Well, that’s wonderful, just wonderful. Where are you off to now?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, you might be interested in going to Central Addleton High School—I mean Addleton Central High. I always make that mistake. You see, Central Addleton High was torn down a year and a half ago, and a new school, Addleton Central High, was constructed in its place. Anyway, tonight the school board is conducting a hearing regarding a science teacher who refuses to teach intelligent design on an equal basis with the theory of evolution. Well, it was nice talking to you. I hope you won’t be a stranger here at the Church of the Sacred Sacrament.”
“I’m not a believer.”
Father Ralph looked at Jake as if he had just confessed that he was a pedophile. “Well, someday you’ll see the light and come back to us,” he said.
“Why do you assume that seeing the light involves—Oh, never mind. Good-bye.”
“Oh, before you go, you should know about my Sunday Evening Healing Hour. Here’s a brochure. If you’re troubled with gout, cancer, impotence—”
“Good-bye.”
“I ALSO PERFORM EXORCISMS! WITH A ONE-YEAR WARRANTY!”
CHAPTER 2
Roger Wagner stared at the floor of the auditorium stage as he faced the Addleton Central High School Board. Lucille Simpson, Chairperson of the Board, as well as head of the local chapter of the Flat Earth Society, had just finished saying that everything came into existence about ten thousand years ago in accordance with the Book of Genesis. Applause arose from her fellow members of the Board and the God-fearing parents who filled the auditorium. No applause arose from me, though. That’s right, I, Leslie Giese, was there, and I was much too busy to applaud even if I had wanted to. Near the stairs at the right side of the stage, I was taking pictures from behind Roger as he faced the Board. “Down in front!” someone hollered as I crouched my way in front of the first row of seats with one camera strapped around my neck and another one in my hands.
While loading one of my cameras with black-and-white film to take advantage of sidelighting and thereby heighten contrast, I couldn’t help feeling sorry for Monkeyman—I mean Roger—who was in the same class that I was in at both John Wayne Elementary School and Central Addleton High. He was so precocious as a child that he towered over his classmates during the early years of elementary school. He reached puberty when he was ten years old and was shaving daily by the time he was eleven. Seeing him naked in the boys’ room at the public swimming pool was the biggest shock of my childhood. He had thick black hair, not only on his pubic area, but everywhere, and I mean everywhere. He had hairy arms, hairy legs, a hairy chest, and a hairy ass. He even had a hairy back. That’s why we called him Monkeyman. Of course, back in those days no one dared call him Monkeyman to his face. After all, he was the biggest kid in the class. But when we were in the sixth grade, he mysteriously stopped growing and never grew another inch. When we graduated from Central Addleton High, he was the shortest kid in the class. I, by far the tallest kid in the class, was almost two feet taller than the little shrimp that had once seemed so big. Nevertheless, he was still the hairiest kid in the class, even though his high-school graduation picture shows him with a receded hairline.
As I thought back, I couldn’t help thinking that if the Board could see Roger as I once shockingly saw him, they might give up their argument about a missing link. “Down in front!” someone hollered, probably the same someone as before, as I stood up and took a shot of the Board and Roger in opposite sides of the composition to capture the confrontational mood. Ducking back down, I crouched my way to the left side of the stage. When I got behind the Board, I looked up at Roger.
The cards were stacked against him, and he knew it. He’d been teaching science for eleven years at what used to be Central Addleton High, but, because the school was renamed Addleton Central High less than two years before, the Board maintained that he didn’t have tenure at Addleton Central High and that they could therefore fire him.
I listened to Chairperson Simpson warn Roger of the consequences of refusing to teach intelligent design on an equal basis with evolution, and then I saw Roger do something completely out of character: He stood up, turned around, dropped his pants, spread apart the cheeks of his hairy ass, and shouted, “Here’s to you and your myths!”
One never knows when a superb composition will suddenly present itself. That’s why I never go anywhere without carrying a camera with a zoom lens. It saves me the time that’s needed to put on a fixed, focal-length lens. Still, it takes at least a few seconds to get perfect exposure from the best angle with the best frame, and sometimes even a few seconds are a few seconds too many. There is nothing that bothers me more than missing a chance to get an excellent photograph. On the other hand, there is nothing that gives me more pleasure than capturing a great moment on film. On this particular occasion, I couldn’t have been more pleased. With the zoom set at about 75mm, I had Roger perfectly in focus at exactly the moment he gave the board a piece of his—er—mind, and I pushed the shutter-release button with his bum right where I wanted it in the viewfinder. Then I watched him run down from the stage and out of the auditorium.
Jake Leander happened to be driving past Addleton Central High in his beat-up, old Buick when Roger Wagner ran across the street while zipping up his fly. “The world is full of nuts,” Jake said to himself after applying the brakes.
Jake’s Buick had to be seen to be believed. If there had been a Society for Mistreated Automobiles, his car would have been impounded, but the trunk was neat and clean because it contained the rock-’n’-roll records he spun as a traveling DJ, the legendary DJ Jake. When it came to kick-ass rock-’n’-roll dance songs, nobody could scratch, as they say in the trade, like DJ Jake.
Jake turned onto Main Street and drove past the Nostrodamus Institute, Aphrodisiacs Unlimited, and the Drive-Thru Wedding Chapel before seeing the Unicorn Club. Feeling like having a drink, he parked his car and went on in.
The Unicorn Club was presently open only for bar-business while the dance floor was being remodeled. The owner, Glenn Daugherty, wanted to inject new life into the place after the club’s hip-hop-playing DJ, Mixmaster Flash, died in the bathroom from a heroin overdose.
With Wittgenstein’s Tractatus in hand, the Stetson-wearing Jake went to the bar for a draught beer. All they had on tap was Bud, Bud Light, Coors, and Coors Light, so he changed his mind and ordered Jack on the rocks. On his way to a table, a guy bumped into him and sent half of the whiskey onto his sports jacket. Figuring that he deserved at least a minor apology, Jake looked the guy—and the guy gave him a confrontational glare and said, “What’s the problem?”
Jake walked away because he didn’t want to cause a scene, but he could have taught the fellow a lesson he wouldn’t have soon forgotten, for Jake’s oversized sports jacket concealed the body of an outstanding natural athlete. In his first year of secondary school in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Jake set regional records for 13-year-olds in the 50-meter dash, the 100-meter dash, the long jump, and the triple jump. As good as he was on the cinder track, he was even better on the pitching mound, and that same year, he took his Little League baseball team to the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pennsylvania and pitched a no-hitter in the championship game to win it. After his first year in secondary school, he went out for baseball instead of track and field because he dreamed of someday playing in the Major Leagues. When he was just sixteen years old, he was already being scouted by the Toronto Blue Jays, the St. Louis Cardinals, the Los Angeles Dodgers, the Chicago White Sox, and the Seattle Mariners. That was eleven years before, but he was still physically fit without an ounce of fat on him.
He took a seat at a table in the corner with Jack Daniel’s and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The Jake Leanders of this world almost always sit in corners, and they often have a sad story to tell. In the summer between Jake’s third and fourth years of secondary school, his mother, father, and little sister were killed in a car crash by a drunken driver with five previous drunken-driving convictions. He went to live with his aunt and uncle and stayed with them until he finished secondary school. Then he bought the Buick, loaded the trunk with his record collection, and hit the road as DJ Jake. In the ten years since then, he had traveled 100,000 miles. That’s just a guess because the odometer hadn’t worked in years.
Jake took a sip of the whiskey and looked around at the remodeling. It looked like it was just a day or two away from being ready for action, so he decided to talk to the owner about offering to do his thing and give the place a rock-’n’-roll club-warming.
* * *
He backed up so he could scrutinize his creation. “That’s the worst painting I’ve ever done,” he yelled. He put his palette down and paced back and forth in his room. “The tone is all wrong. My message doesn’t come across.” He tore the canvas off the easel, crumpled it up, and threw it, and then his beret, into the garbage can. Then he looked at his enraged face in the mirror and said, “It’s a wonder I’ve still got both ears.”
Albert Mavis was a retired electrician, now receiving a moderate pension after working for thirty-five years for the Addleton Electric Company. Thirty-five years—that’s also how long he was married to a nagging woman named Connie. He probably would have still been putting up with her if she hadn’t won a hundred and fifty million dollars in the state lottery and made a change of Jekyll/Hyde proportions.
Dubbing herself the Duchess, she bought a luxurious mansion and became the cog around which the social life of Addleton turned. Her coterie consisted of ‘aristocrats’ who assumed titles of nobility. There was a prince, a princess, a count, a countess, a baron, a baroness, an earl, marquis, a marquesa, a regent, a viceroy, a viscount, a viscountess, a lord, and several others. Often arriving at her soirees and fetes in horse-drawn carriages, they greeted each other in French they learned in books that should have had titles like French for Idiots.
Albert got so fed up with the elitism that he packed his bags and left—and those bags were not stuffed with cash because one of the terms on the Duchess’s side of a prenuptial agreement was that if she should ever happen to win the lottery, the money was all hers.
Since walking out, Albert had been living on the second floor of the home of Mrs. Knutson, a superstitious octogenarian. He probably could have supplemented his pension by charging admission to his room because it was like a museum, filled with things he had bought at garage sales, flea markets, Army and Navy surplus stores, government surplus stores, government auctions, the Salvation Army, and secondhand stores. There was hardly enough room for him to sleep, much less paint.
Albert was more of a painter in form than in substance, having gone through his impressionist stage by drinking absinthe from Paris. Nevertheless, he managed to produce enough paintings to have some of them entered in exhibitions. I once went to an avant-garde exhibition and saw a ‘painting’ of his called The Mind of the Masses, which consisted of nothing more than human excrement smeared on canvas. While standing before the dried shit, I overheard two intellectuals discussing the symbolism of two or three kernels of corn in the work.
When he wasn’t working in his room on what he considered masterpieces, Albert could often be found riding around town on his unicycle. There was an outcry, cried out mainly by his ex-wife, the Duchess, to have him committed to the Addleton Psychiatric Center. “He’s nuttier than a fruitcake,” she made a point of telling people.
“ALBERT!”
“WHAT IS IT, MRS. KNUTSON?”
“IT’S ALMOST 6:30.”
“OKAY. I’LL BE RIGHT DOWN.”
Every evening at 6:30, Albert and Mrs. Knutson watched the local news together while munching on Mrs. Knutson’s homemade cookies. This particular day was Pink Day on Mrs. Knutson’s eight-day, fixed color-cycle: pink tablecloth, pink napkins, pink flowers, pink candles, pink this and pink that—even a pink cover on her toaster.
“Oh, there you are,” Mrs. Knutson said and saw that Albert was wearing the top hat he always wore in public. “Haven’t you forgotten something, Albert?” she added while pointing to the top of her head, prompting Albert to take off his hat while in the house.
Albert was becoming concerned about his forgetfulness—not excessively so, however, because he kept forgetting about it. They say that Albert Einstein once absent-mindedly walked out of his house without his pants on. I assume that he was at least wearing underwear. Mr. Mavis once went one step farther (not just in distance, mind you) than Mr. Einstein did. Even then, it took an aghast expression on the face of Rosa Shuck, a psychologically fragile woman who, not long before, had once again been released from the Addleton Psychiatric Center (and, immediately afterward, had to once again be readmitted) to divert Albert’s attention to the fact that, aside from his shoes, socks, and top hat, he was stark naked. Being a modest fellow, he scurried back the ten blocks he had nonchalantly sauntered, all the way dodging behind trees, ducking behind bushes and, in instances in which there was no place to hide, impersonating statues. The incident had intensified efforts by his ex-wife to have him committed.
Upon sitting down and joining Mrs. Knutson for the local news, Albert felt that he had forgotten something important, but he wasn’t going to worry about it because he was looking forward to Mrs. Knutson’s cookies as much as a dying man in the desert looks forward to water. There was a bowl of oatmeal-maple cookies on the coffee table. Albert grabbed several of them and began shoving them into his mouth, and Mrs. Knutson saw cookie crumbs landing all over her pink tablecloth and matching pink napkins. Then the news came on.
Although Addleton was a relatively small city, with a population of 100,000, its chamber of commerce liked to boast that it had two local, half-hour, news programs. The two programs, Channel Five News and Channel Seven News, were forever waged in a ratings war for more lucrative advertising spots. Recently, their efforts were centered around the co-anchor position. Channel Five News hired a beautiful woman. Channel Seven News hired a beautiful black woman. Channel Five News hired a beautiful woman who was half black and half Hispanic. Channel Seven News hired a beautiful woman who was half black and half Hispanic and was married to a Japanese fellow. Channel Five News hired a beautiful woman who was half black and half Hispanic and was married to a Chinese fellow. That’s where things presently stood, although it was rumored that both Channel Five News and Channel Seven News were trying to get their anchorwomen to adopt a child of either Vietnamese or Indian descent.
Mrs. Knutson preferred Channel Seven News, not because she preferred anchorwoman Lewella Washington-Ortega-Kato to Nadine Jefferson-Lopez-Li, but because she preferred anchorman Jack Jones to anchorman Bill Brown. Jack ‘The Anchorman with a Smile’ Jones had shiny, white, capped teeth that glistened when he smiled. He always seemed to be smiling, even when he was reporting something like a terrorist attack in which innocent people were killed. His hair, which was sometimes black with gray roots and sometimes gray with black ends, was grown very long on the left side of his head so that he could pull it over to the right side and hide massive baldness.
While watching Jack and Lewella deliver the news, Mrs. Knutson nibbled on a single cookie and Albert devoured one after another. At the first commercial break, Mrs. Knutson turned to Albert and said, “Albert, I was speaking with Beatrice Burkhart yesterday—you know, the principal of the kindergarten—and she thinks it would be positively wonderful if you would paint murals in the children’s classrooms.”
Albert would have rather starved to death as a serious painter than make a comfortable living painting frogs with umbrellas, horses with party hats, and the like. So he let Mrs. Knutson’s well-meant, but ill-suited, suggestion go into one ear and out another orifice. On its way out, a foreboding disturbance occurred: a crow began fluttering outside the living room window. The superstitious Mrs. Knutson became hysterical. “Oh dear! Oh goodness!” she shrieked. She threw up her arms and ran around her chair three times, then scurried to the kitchen (Oh dears and Oh goodnesses all the way) where she threw salt over her shoulder, then fainted.
By the time Albert revived Mrs. Knustson with smelling salts and assisted her to her bed (which had a crystal under the pillow as a countercharm against nightmares), he had missed a news report about what it was that he had forgotten: the Addleton Central High School Board versus Roger Wagner fiasco. Not bothering to stick around until the end of the news, he stuffed his pants pockets with cookies, put his top hat back on, and went out for his evening unicycle ride.
He pedaled to Rush Limbaugh Street and saw that the newspaper stand in front of the Addleton Sperm Bank still had a couple of newspapers in it. He got a copy of the Addleton Times and saw the front-page headline: INCORRIGIBLE SCIENCE TEACHER GOES BEFORE SCHOOL BOARD. Tightening his lips, he sped to his daughter’s house.
Jennifer Wagner was in the middle of her Richard Simmons workout. On the scale at Ptolemy Planetarium that registered how much a person would weigh on the moon, she weighed sixty pounds, which meant that she weighed a hell of a lot on Earth. She once had a nice figure, but that was before she got married. Nevertheless, her husband, Roger, stood by her in fatness and in thinness because she cooked fish so well.
Wearing black tights and a white tutu, Jennifer was doing buttocks-lifts when a hard knock came on her front door. She relaxed her gluteus maximus, propped herself up, straightened her tutu, and waddled to the door. Upon opening it, she saw Albert.
“Oh, hello, Dad,” she said.
“Don’t hello me,” Albert snapped with cookie crumbs shooting from his mouth. “Why didn’t you remind me that Roger was going before the school board tonight?”
“Don’t get angry, Dad. It—”
“Doggone it. I knew I was forgettin’ something.”
Albert used his tongue to try to dislodge a cookie crumb that was stuck to his dentures, and made a series of squeaks.
“Is he back yet?” he asked.
“No,” Jennifer answered.
“Have you heard from him?”
“No, and I’m getting a little worried.”
“Why didn’t you go?”
“Rog didn’t want me to. He didn’t want you to go either. That’s why I didn’t say anything. Rog was afraid you would’ve caused a scene.”
Albert pulled out his dentures to check for the stuck cookie crumb and shouted with his caved-in mouth, “Well, you’re doggone right I would have caused a scene!”
That caught the attention of Jennifer and Roger’s 7-year-old daughter, Jolly. Wearing a Batman costume, Jolly ran into the living room to greet her grandfather. “Come to my room,” she said. “I want to show you the picture I drew for you.”
Albert put his dentures back in and allowed himself to be pulled to Jolly’s room. Jolly pointed at a picture she had drawn.
“How do you like it, Grampa?”
“It’s very nice, Jolly.”
“It’s Plastic Man. His real name is Eel O’Brian. He used to be a bad guy, but now he’s a good guy. He got shot, and some acid got into him and changed him. So now he can stretch way way out and bounce like a ball and change his face and ...”
Jennifer waddled into the room and whispered to Albert, “Dad, the biggest mistake I ever made was letting her see the video Superman. That’s how it all started. I thought that when she got Superman out of her system it would be the end, but it was only the beginning. Her infatuation with superheroes is driving me crazy. This week, it’s Batman. Last week, it was the Green Hornet. She had me make her a green trench coat! And I think the gas pistol was really working because I sure was getting tired. And the week before that, it was the Shadow. She went around the neighborhood borrowing toilet plungers so she could take the tops off and use them for the Shadow’s wall-scaling suction cups.”
“Harmless fun, Jennifer.”
“Harmless! See that bruise on her neck? She almost killed herself! And three weeks ago, I dropped a baking dish on the kitchen floor when she snuck up behind me and yelled “Shazam!” and accused me of being Doctor Sivana in disguise. A perfectly good eggplant parmesan on the kitchen floor! That’s when she was Captain Marvel, ‘the world’s mightiest mortal’. She had the red costume with the yellow lightning and the yellow cape and belt and everything else. And that’s another thing—it costs a lot of money to keep her in the right costume every time she decides to become a different superhero. Now it sounds like she’s gonna be wanting a Plastic Man costume, whatever that is.”
“Just a phase, Jennifer, just a phase.”
“Well, I hope so.”
Albert and Jennifer turned their attention back to Jolly, who hadn’t stopped talking about Plastic Man.
“... His friend is Woozy Winks. He’s very fat, but he can’t get hurt cuz nature protects him. DADDY’S HOME!”
Jennifer’s fat cheeks went pale. She had pleaded with Roger to accept the school board’s demands, but he had refused, so she feared the worst. “I’m afraid to find out what happened,” she said to Albert as they followed Jolly to the door.
I, Leslie Giese, your humble narrator, was with Roger. More accurately, Roger was with me. Unable to stand by himself, he had his left arm around my waist, and I had my right arm firmly under his right armpit. I later learned that after agitatedly running out of the Addleton Central High auditorium, he went to Sonny’s Tavern and drank shots of Tequila until he vomited on Richard Rowe. But how he got from Sonny’s Tavern to the railroad tracks is something that I don’t know, and something that he didn’t know either.
I found him passed out on the railroad tracks shortly after leaving Heart and Soul General Hospital, where I had gone after the creationism-versus-evolution fiasco to visit my uncle Nicky, who was recovering from laser surgery for the removal of agonizing, fourth-degree hemorrhoids. At first, I thought it was a dog lying on the train tracks, but even a German sheep dog doesn’t have as much hair as Roger Wagner. Realizing that it was Roger, and that he was alive, I got out of my Lincoln Continental and got to work. I mounted a camera on a tripod, put on a flash attachment, and, using a variety of fixed focal length lenses ranging from 20 to 50mm, took twenty-five or thirty shots from many different angles with slow shutter speeds and aperture settings between f-2.8 and f-5.6. Finally satisfied, I shook Roger to semi-consciousness and asked him what in the hell he was doing sprawled on the train tracks. He answered that he didn’t know but to leave him alone.
With great difficulty, I managed to get him into the passenger seat of my car. After driving him to his house, I managed, with even greater difficulty, to get him out of the car and to his front door. That’s when I found myself looking at a small child in a Batman costume, an obese woman in a tutu, and a nut in a top hat.
They all looked at me as if some explanation ought to be given, so I explained things from the start with a full account of why Uncle Nicky’s hemorrhoids had been beyond the point in which elastic-band ligation could have gotten rid of them—and I continued to the end, adding that they would soon be receiving a cleaning bill for the interior of my car. Then I said good-bye and told them that I had to get going because I had a date with a dizzy but sexy lady, a member of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, who was opposed to people wearing wool because sheep might get nicked during shearing.
After finishing his drink at the Unicorn Club, Jake got back into his beat-up, old Buick and drove west on Main Street all the way out to Balmy Valley Community College, home of the Balmy Valley Blackcats, a gung-ho football team led into battle by their controversial, well-dressed coach, Ron Clancy, a grid-iron general whose outlook on life was contained in Vince Lombardi’s dictum “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing”. The Blackcats’ cheerleaders, the Pink Pussies, a bevy of cartwheeling shallowbrains who considered the most admirable kind of man to be a jock, admired Coach Clancy beyond measure, and he took advantage of their admiration to ‘score’ with each and every one of them. “Rah, Coach! Rah, Clancy! Rah rah, Coach Clancy!”
Tonight, the Pink Pussies were shaking their pompoms out of town because the gung-ho Blackcats were playing an away game. Nevertheless, the campus parking lot was full because a ghost buster was speaking at BVCC about his successes with haunted houses.
On the other side of BVCC, there was a big forest, Lockwood Forest, which would have been deforested in a hurry and ‘developed’ if Addleton had any say on the matter. Unfortunately for Addleton, the singular city sold it years before to the county, which made it a forest preserve, and the county was planning to keep it that way until all of the area’s landfills were used so that they could clearfell it and make it a high-priced landfill.
In Lockwood Forest, there lived a man known far and wide as the Oracle of Addleton. People often came out of his shack with pronounced wrinkles on their foreheads from trying to make sense of the ambiguities and nebulosities designed to protect his prophecies against inaccuracies. No one could be perfectly sure if the Oracle had ever been right, but his business was based on the contention that he’d never been wrong.
Jake turned around at BVCC and went back into town on Main Street, past the Harlequin Romance Book Store, the Spiritual Counseling Clinic, and the Center for Reincarnation. At Martha Stewart Street, he turned right—and got hit broadside by the unicycling Albert Mavis, who then went sailing over the hood of Jake’s car.
Jake got out and ran to the spot where Albert lay motionless on his back. “Are you all right?” he anxiously asked. Albert felt himself from head to toe to see if any parts of him were missing. Finding himself all in one piece, he replied, “Yes, I believe I am.” Jake breathed a sigh of relief and asked, “Can you get up?” Albert twiddled his toes, rolled his ankles, bent his knees, and said, “Yes, I believe I can.” With Jake’s assistance, he slowly got to his feet.
Although a bit unsteady at first, Albert soon regained his equilibrium. He dusted himself off and did a toe touch, a deep knee bend, a jumping jack, and a push up. Then he picked up his top hat and put it back on. Pleasantly shocked that he was unharmed, he started laughing. Not knowing how to react, Jake laughed with him. A few seconds later, they were both laughing uproariously.
CHAPTER 3
The vibrating chair had stopped vibrating, but her massive flab was still jiggling. With one hand, she held a mirror to examine her mudpack treatment; with the other hand, she reached for a tweezers and plucked a facial hair that was protruding through the dried mud. On her lap was a copy of the Addleton Times and a book of French for beginners that was open to a page containing an expression she was trying to memorize: Tout est bien qui finit bien (All’s well that ends well.) Her beautician had gone off to confer with the valet de chamber, leaving her with the maid, who was removing the afternoon snack of half-finished champagne and caviar, her manicurist, who was filing her toenails, and her secretary, who was waiting for a resumption of dictation.
Constance ‘the Duchess’ Mazur was a woman of means—and had been ever since winning one hundred and fifty million dollars in the state lottery and propelling herself from the hub of middle class to the pinnacle of high society. Upon winning the lottery, the first thing she did, after recovering from a mild heart attack, was to buy a mansion. She now had a magnificent ‘Duchy’ that was furnished with the finest, including her prize possession: a nineteenth-century gilt-bronze French table clock of Empire design with figures of Napoleon and Josephine.
The Duchess had several servants, two of whom lived at the Duchy: Bo-san Watanabe, her gravel raker, who supplemented his salary by teaching Zen archery, and Amelia the maid, who was having a secret affair with Bo-san. Among her many other servants was a chamber-pot cleaner because, in the tradition of yesteryear’s royals, the Duchess used a chamber pot to perform her bodily function. That’s just how traditional she was.
It was hard for her to believe, and discomforting for her to think, that she was once a “commoner”, married to Albert Mavis, of all people. The mere thought caused her blood pressure to rise. Her blood pressure was, as a matter of fact, a matter of concern. Although controlled fairly well by Aldomet, she had palpitations every now and then. She certainly shouldn’t have been eating caviar. Her physician told her to avoid salt, warning that another heart attack might be more major than minor. He also told her not to let things bother her, but how could she not let things bother her when she was subjected to bothersome things?—like the matter concerning her son-in-law, Roger Wagner, whose hairy bare ass appeared on the front page of the Addleton Times. (I sold a picture of Roger mooning the school board to the sensationalistic tabloid, but I had no idea that they would use it for a full-page spread.)
The Duchess picked up the Addleton Times and looked at the ‘hairy’ full-page spread again. Then she said to her secretary, “Oh, yes, where were we? Read back what I’ve dictated so far.”
Her secretary read back: “I hope that you’re satisfied. I blame you entirely for what’s happened. I should never have let you talk me into letting Jennifer marry him. The nerve of him to refuse my financial assistance and try to support Jennifer on the pittance he was making as a teacher. So now he’s out of a job. Serves him right. He ought to be locked up for pulling that stunt he pulled in front of the school board. My God, on the front page! How dare him embarrass me like that! But I suppose you don’t care. You probably think it’s funny. You belong in the Funny Farm, and if it’s the last thing I do, I’ll see that you’re put there.”
The Duchess turned the switch of the vibrating chair back on and said, “Yyyeeesssss, thththaaattttt wwwiillllll ddooooo jjjuuuust fffffiiiinne. Hhhhaaaaavvve iiiitt tttyyyyypped uuuuupp.”
The real reason that the Duchess was so set on getting Albert committed to the Addleton Psychiatric Center was her tarnished pride. Even though four years had passed, she still considered it an embarrassment that Albert walked out on her and the life he could have had as the Duke. She was convinced that he was crazy, but convincing everyone else had become her obsession. If she could succeed in getting Albert committed to the Addleton Psychiatric Center, she could say, “That proves he’s crazy” and matter of factly add that he had been crazy for years, implying that he had some screws loose on the day that he walked out on her.
Unfortunately for her, she was unable to use her influence to get Albert committed because of a technicality in the law. Under a state statute, a person could be involuntarily committed to a psychiatric institution only through the consent of a member of the immediate family, unless, of course, the person presented a danger to himself or to others. Consequently, because they were now divorced and Albert was relatively harmless, the decision on whether or not to have him committed rested on their daughter’s blubbery shoulders. But Jennifer wasn’t completely convinced that Albert was bonkers, and she didn’t have the heart to have him cooped up with people who definitely were.
When the letter was typed up and printed out, the Duchess signed it and rang for her courier. Seconds later, Wilbur, the courier, entered in his livery, clicked his heels, and stood at attention.
“Wilbur, I want you to take this letter to Mr. Mavis immediately,” commanded the Duchess.
“As you will, Duchess,” Wilbur replied before clicking his heels and departing.
The Duchess picked up her snuff box, put some snuff up her nose, and sneezed. Remembering that Halloween was only a couple of weeks away, she told her secretary to bring the invitation list for her annual Halloween masquerade party.
* * *
Albert tightened the bowline knot that fastened the string to the stick and propped up the cardboard box again. After rearranging the bread crumbs into a more enticing arrangement, he fixed his top hat more firmly on his head and went back and sat down in the yard alongside Jolly.
Jolly kept her eyes fixed on the propped-up refrigerator box she was using with greater expectations than Albert. Using a rope for line, a two-by-four for the prop, and full slices of bread for bait, she was hoping to catch a very large bird, perhaps a giant condor.
“Grampa, how come Superman can fly?”
“Because he was injected with a strange serum.”
“Ha ha ha. You’re silly, Grampa. You’re thinkin’ of Captain America.”
“Well, Superman’s got something else in his system then.”
“But he ain’t got no wings.”
“He doesn’t have any wings, Jolly.”
“That’s what I said. So how come he can fly? And Captain Marvel can too, and the Green Lantern, and the Human Torch.”
“They’ve got the power to fly, Jolly.”
“But where does their power come from? Hawkman can fly cuz he’s got great, big wings, but Superman and Captain Marvel and the Green Lantern and the Human Torch ain’t got no wings. So how come they can fly? Larry Atkins—he’s a kid that was in Daddy’s class—is makin’ a rocket belt that he keeps in our garage, and when he finishes it, he’ll be able to fly. But Superman and Captain Marvel and the Green Lantern and the Human Torch, they ain’t got no rocket belt neither. So how come they can fly?”
Jolly’s question went unanswered because a sparrow landed near Albert’s box and began pecking at the bread crumbs. Silence was observed as Albert’s fingers tightened on his end of the string. A second sparrow landed, then a third and a fourth, then a fifth and a sixth and a seventh. Before long, there was a flock of sparrows pecking at the bread crumbs around Albert’s box. Albert waited until three of them were under the box, and then he pulled the string. The stick shot out, but the birds flew away before the box came down. After Albert had propped up his box again, Jolly picked up where she had left off.
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“How come Superman and Captain Marvel and the Green Lantern and the Human Torch can fly?”
“I’m not sure, but I think that their power to fly comes from their costumes.”
“But what is it about their costumes that’s different from Wonder Woman’s?—cuz she can’t fly. And the Spirit and Batman and the Green Arrow and the Blue Beetle and Phantom Lady and Spider-Man and Captain America and Miss Fury, they can’t fly neither.”
“They can’t fly either, Jolly.”
“That’s what I said. So how come?”
“Easy. Some costumes have flying power and some don’t.”
“But I had a Superman costume and I couldn’t fly.”
“I’m not surprised. Your costume was probably made of polyester. Superman’s is made of a different fabric.”
“What’s his made of?”
“I don’t know, but it’s no doubt the same as Captain Marvelous’s and the Green Giant’s.”
“Grampa, you’re silly. It’s Captain Marvel and the Green Lantern.”
“Okay, Captain Marvel and the Green Lantern.”
“But if theirs is the same, then how come they have different powers?”
“I don’t know. Why can’t you just accept that different costumes have different powers?”
“Because I want to know the reason.”
Albert raised his eyebrows at the 7-year-old dialectician.
“Well, it’s all too clear to me that you’re being influenced by our resident philosopher.”
“I like Jake. How long’s he gonna live upstairs?”
“Probably not long.”
“But he’s got a job at the Unicorn Club.”
“Yeah, but that’s only temporary. Pretty soon he’ll be playing his records in some other town. He likes to keep on the move.” Noticing for the first time that Jolly was wearing her school uniform and had her Wonder Woman lunch box with her, Albert added, “Hey, why aren’t you in school?”
“Well, um, um—”
“You’re playin’ hooky, aren’t you?”
“Well, um, um—”
“Aren’t you?”
“But my classmates are teasin’ me.”
“About what? ... About what, Jolly?”
“About Daddy.”
Jolly started crying. Albert pulled her close. “Please don’t cry, Jolly,” he said.
“If I had a Spider-Man webshooter, I’d shoot ’em all.”
“That’s not a very nice thing to say.”
“Well I would.”
“It’ll be all right, Jolly. It’ll be all right. Don’t cry.”
Roger had become a pariah following the creationism-versus-evolution clash and the loss of his teaching position at Addleton Central High. The State Board of Education refused to hear his appeal, and Circuit Court Judge Fernuik refused his request for an injunction that would have enabled him to continue teaching while he fought the school board in court. The elders made him an object of ridicule, and the children were quick to follow suit.
Albert tried to get Jolly to stop crying by making some of his bird calls. “This is the morning call of the male Eastern Kingbird,” he said. “T’ t’ tzeer, t’ t’ tzeer, t’ tzeetzeetzee. And this is the territorial call of the mockingbird: Ch’ ch’ chick. Ch’ ch’ ch’ chick.”
Jolly stopped crying and wiped her cheeks with the back of her hands. “I wanna hear you do the greeting call of the Canada Goose. That’s my favorite.”
“Ahonk ahonk ahonk.”
“Ha ha ha. Do it again. Do it again.”
“Ahonk ahonk ahonk.”
“Ha ha ha. Canada Gooses are funny. Do it again.”
“Ahonk ahonk ahonk. Hey, do I smell a batch of Mrs. Knutson’s homemade cookies coming out of the oven? Yes, I believe I do, and if I’m not mistaken, they’re rum-raisin. Jolly, I’ll be back in a minute with some cookies. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Here, take my string, but a word of warning—according to official bird-catching rules, any bird caught in my box is mine.”
“You’re silly, Grampa.”
Albert’s cookie-keen olfactory system had not misled him. Mrs. Knutson had just taken a tray of rum-raisin cookies out of the oven. He observed that it was Green Day on Mrs. Knutson’s eight-day, fixed color-cycle: green tablecloth, green napkins, green flowers, green candles, green this and green that. Upon being prompted by Mrs. Knutson, he removed his top hat.
“And how are you on this fine Friday afternoon, Mrs. Knutson?” Albert asked.
“Just hunky-dory,” Mrs. Knutson replied.
Mrs. Knutson removed her green oven mitts and covered her cookie bowl with a green cloth as Albert salivated.
“Mrs. Knutson, am I mistaken, or are those rum-raisin cookies?”
“You’re not mistaken, Albert, and I put in a little nutmeg.”
“May I sample one, Mrs. Knutson?”
“Yes, but don’t spoil your supper—and remember, we’ll be having them at 6:30.”
“Mrs. Knutson, my memory may not be what it used to be. In fact, I can’t even remember what it used to be. But I could never forget that.”
Albert removed the green cloth and reached for a single cookie, but when Mrs. Knutson turned to set the timer on her oven for another batch, he grabbed cookies with both hands and stuffed them into his pockets.
“Albert, the new lodger seems to be a nice, young man,” Mrs. Knutson said as she turned back around.
“Very nice, Mrs. Knutson,” Albert replied as he reached for one more cookie.
“But that car of his is something else.”
“Something else indeed, Mrs. Knutson.”
Mrs. Knutson set her cookie tray in the sink and picked up the TV Guide that she kept near a small television in the kitchen. Checking the evening programming schedule, she observed that the date was October 13th, whereupon the connection between the day and the date finally registered. “Oh, no! Friday the 13th!”
She ran into the living room and took several things out of a strongbox, a hand mirror among them, until she found what she was looking for: a rabbit’s foot, a Virgin Fairy Cross, and a penny that had been run over by a train. She put those three things into the pocket of her green apron, but her hands were trembling so much that the mirror slipped out of her hand and fell to the floor, shattering into a thousand pieces. Frantic with the thought of seven years of bad luck, she ran around and around, completely out of control, like a chicken with its head cut off ... until her face went white, her eyeballs rolled back, and she fainted.
Albert stuffed some more rum-raisin cookies into his pants pockets and then went for the smelling salts. After reviving Mrs. Knutson, he assisted her to the living-room sofa, and she fell asleep to the tune of Frere Jacques, which was the tune that her doorbell played. Albert answered the door and sighed when he saw the caller, who proceeded to click his heels.
“What is it this time, Wilbur?”
“A message from the Duchess, sir.”
Albert took the letter, read it, blew his nose into it, and deposited it in the waste basket.
“Anything else, Wilbur?”
“What shall I tell the Duchess, sir?”
“Tell Connie to go to hell.”
And the door slammed shut in Wilbur’s face.
* * *
“All rise for His Highness, the exalted Mayor of Addleton,” came the voice of the city clerk. Out rolled a red carpet, and in walked the mayor, donning a shoulder-length periwig, a ruff, and a long robe that trailed five feet behind him.
Eugene Yaroborough had been the mayor of Addleton for six years, before which he owned and operated a successful used-car dealership. It all started when he was overheard saying at a Rotary Club meeting that if he were the mayor, he’d “bust the unions”. That’s all Big Business needed to hear. He was obviously someone they could ‘play ball’ with. They discussed their interests over the table and came to an understanding under the table.