Well, I was sore, and when I heard about the incredible scope of the act, I guessed I wasn’t alone. I saw trouble ahead. We got it. The very next day, there was the Cat in the Hat, raining pink ink all over a hostile confrontation of whites and blacks in Jacksonville. Very funny, but it didn’t go over in Jacksonville, since it turned out both sides had been spoiling for that fight for a long time. And the Cat’s ambivalent blackness, heretofore a political asset, now turned on him: he was suddenly an upstart nigger to whites, a Tom to blacks. Moreover, people like Joe were pretty upset about the pink ink, being sensitive on the Communist issue. On toilet walls across the nation: Only a Fink Would Piss Pink Ink.
Actually, the reaction had begun to set in as early as a week before on some university campuses, though more subtly. Under We Want Mighty Cat in a Berkeley toilet, somebody had written: To Hell with Mighty Cat—All I Want’s a Cat-amite! The Lampoon was calling him “The Kook in the Kocked Hat.” The Tube Boob Team at Ohio State now hung him in effigy with a sign attached: I Can Beat It All By Myself. A Columbia professor delivered a lecture on the Cat, entitled “A New View, or Old Mold?” and a regional meeting of political scientists in Iowa City demanded that the Cat declare himself on the Monroe Doctrine, the United Nations, American military alliances, counterinsurgency, and tariffs. Educators, it turned out, had a lot at stake in the conventional wisdom, had located for themselves a kind of stable verity, if not comfort, in the external desubjectivized physical “reality,” and weren’t all that excited about romantic journeys into inner realms. They didn’t like being ridiculed, either. Neither did the labor leaders, businessmen, minority groups, priests, poets, bureaucrats, warriors, or journalists. And they all got their turn.
What was worse, the Cat could be pretty offensive. Like the time he popped bouncily out of a pregnant womb during an obstetrics lecture at Johns Hopkins, or his feeding of the rats in the city ghettos, or the time he dropped six planeloads of unsweetened chocolate pies on Disneyland. Taking a crap onstage in a sandbox while addressing the Daughters of the American Revolution in Boston didn’t go over very big either. His nakedness was a minor problem from the outset, of course (“The Nude Dude in the Snood” was one news headline that never quite made it), but cats are cats—or so we argued until that Sunday morning in October when he carried a stiff red peenie through all the churches in Indianapolis, crying:
“Look at me!
Look at me !
Look at me NOW!
It is fun to have fun
But you have to know how!”
I rushed in on Clark. “Stop him before it’s too late!” I cried.
“Too late for what, Mr. Brown?”
I showed him the latest poll. The Cat was down to sixty-one percent. Which, with no visible opponent, was anything but overwhelming. “See? You’ve been wrong, Clark!”
“Wrong? Why, not at all, Mr. Brown.” Clark’s calm was spine-shaking. “Oh, by the way, look at this letter we’ve just received.”
I snatched it up. Oakland postmark. “Hey, man, your krazy kat turns me on wow like next time try the late late show send me old lionel barrymoor in a wheelchair I want to turn him on, man, I mean put me in orbit with carol lombard and I’ll go to bat, man, I really will! Me-yeah!” I threw it down in disgust. “Aw, goddamn it, Clark, that’s just some hippie! He probably won’t even bother to vote!”
“So?” The hint of a smile flickered across Clark’s pale face. “Now, don’t pout like that, Mr. Brown.”
It was hopeless. I stalked out. And the next day, while Joe was speaking in Washington on the importance of military preparedness (“Only the strong and the brave are free!”), the Cat arrived on a tricycle, blowing a rusty fife, raised the Pentagon off the ground, and spun it like a top—hilarious to disaffected potheads maybe, but not to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all of whom in their cold commitment ended up in Walter Reed Hospital. Played havoc with all the Pentagon computers, too, a pretty penny and a lot of history shot to hell.
Well, that did it. Within hours we had received rumors and then anonymous confirmation of an Army-centered takeover plot, and shortly after, we got that other phone call, telling us that the so-called moderate wing of our party—which in reality was just about everybody—was pulling out to support the Opponent.
So the situation that afternoon was this: (1) if the Cat in the Hat threatened to win, and to be sure he still had over fifty percent of the people behind him, the Army would pull their coup the week before elections and install the Opponent as President pro tem, until a new Constitutional Convention could be held; and (2), whether the Opponent won more or less legally or by fiat, we were faced with the prospect of a driveling idiot for President, the virtual political bankruptcy of our party and thus of the American two-party system, and personal lifelong ignominy for each of us.
“A military takeover? Here in the United States?” Sam had asked disbelievingly on answering the earlier call. “Easiest thing in the world,” the voice on the other end had replied. Calmly. Coolly. Sam said after, he’d heard the rattle of hospital carts and trays. And true: it no doubt was easy. Who could stop them if they wanted to do it?
“I can stop them
With my tricks!
With my kicks
And pricks and sticks!”
We stared at the Cat. He sat there in that floppy striped Hat, parody of Uncle Sam’s, gloved hands folded over his skinny chest, grinning that silly grin. What about it? Tip the media, expose the generals’ plans? Pull a counter-coup? But who’d be with us? That freak from Oakland maybe. I envied old Riley and Boone their way out.
“Could he do it, Clark?” Sam asked softly.
Clark was staring at us intensely. I’m sure, if it had been pitch dark, we could have seen his glowing eyes. “Why not?” he said. “Dismantling of a few outmoded systems, like the military, the Cabinet, police and espionage organiza—”
“Jesus Christ, Clark!” Joe blurted out angrily. “You’re talking about a total violent disruption, man!”
“Of course.” That fierce burning gaze. “What did you think this was?”
“But what would we do without an army?” Ned asked incredulously.
“Let’s try it and find out.”
“Now, goddamn it, Clark—!”
“But wait, Clark,” Sam interceded, “doesn’t a nation in a world like ours need a good defense system? I mean, I know what you’ve been saying about the debasement and insanity of machine-like military and production systems, but how else can we survive as a society?”
“What’s more important? Physical survival of an accidental human horde or idea survival? So what if nations more barbarian than ours defeat us militarily? Probably we should just lie down and let them come. Because sooner or later, they’ll get it, the exemplary message will sink in—”
“Ohh shiitt!” Joe moaned softly.
And then that phone call from the rump group of benedict moderates came, the Cat got booted out, I talked Sam as heir-apparent into absenting himself, and we sat down to some really serious talk. “All right, Sooth, we’re listening,” Ned said.
A WEEK LATER, THE CAT APPEARED AT A RALLY OUTSIDE A small town in Mississippi, along the banks of the Pearl River. We had alerted the personnel of a nearby airbase, the White Citizens Council and the Black Nationalists, the local Minutemen, Klan, Nazis, Black Muslims, and Zionists, the National Guard and the VFW, the different student groups, the local churches, sheriffs, shopkeepers, cops, Mafia interests, farmers, Cubans, Choctaws, country singers, and evangelists, in short, all the Good Folk of the valley. Our precautions were hardly necessary—the same thing would have happened in Walla Walla or Concord by then—but it was only a week before the threatened coup, and since the Cat had a habit of skipping out on scheduled appearances, we were pretty nervous about it. By flattery, cajolery, and just plain
hanging on to him, we kept him in sight until we could get him on the scene. Even Clark helped, though I’ll never know why exactly.
That they’d kill him, we knew. That they’d do it by skinning him alive we hadn’t foreseen, but those folks along the Pearl are pretty straightforward people. I guess we’d been around him too long and had begun to forget he was a cat. Another thing we hadn’t counted on was Sam’s showing up. I knew he was upset about the thing but I thought I’d convinced him to stay away. I have my flaw, I’ve told you about it, and Sam had his: he believed in reason. He came there to talk to those people, for Christ’s sake! Oh, poor sweet Sam! “Violence solves nothing!” he cried out, standing in front of the Cat, and somebody shot him in the head. Right between the eyes. Clark talks about reality. Nothing has ever been nor ever will be so real to me as that sick disbelieving expression on Sam’s face the instant before the hole opened up. I was backing away, but I came up against a solid wall of people. There was no getting through.
They tied the Cat’s feet together and hung him over a peg pounded into the upright beam of a tall cross. He put up no resistance, merely smiled benignly through it all. Oddly, though he was upside down, his Hat did not fall off. For some reason, this enraged the crowd. They all gave a pull on it, including a huge black man, said to be the strongest sonuvabitch this side of the Yazoo. But it wouldn’t give. They kicked the Cat in the face, spat on him, punched his belly with pig-stickers, slammed his balls with the blunt end of an ax. But the Hat stayed on. And the Cat just smiled back at them, blinking his long lashes, twiddling his thumbs.
They’d apparently decided on a simple slaying, and a wizened IO7-year-old redneck from up in Sunflower County had been handed the knife, but, their blood boiling now, they all went after him with whatever they had at hand, switchblades, hatpins, goads, hatchets, scissors, rusty razor blades. “That is that,” the Cat in the Hat was heard to say, and they closed in. There was a mad frenzy of pulling and ripping, cursing and gut-flinging, and they weren’t too neat maybe, but it was a thorough job of skinning a cat. Except for the Hat: when they were done, it was still there. And the gloved hands, still folded over a now glistening pink chest. And the placid grin, though now a bit macabre. Ned, Joe, and I, unable to break free, had pulled together. Clark, we noticed, had disappeared.
The crowd stood around now, panting, staring at the dead cat, still dissatisfied somehow. There was a lot of corn liquor getting passed around. Survival, Clark, that’s what it’s all about, goddamn it, I was saying to myself. Fuck your revelations, I want outa here! About then, somebody thought of matches. As I recall, it was a little kid, about eight years old. They heaped up leaves and old newspapers at the foot of the cross, tossed on the Cat’s skin. They were about to light it, when a fat black woman slipped up timidly and dropped her kerchief on the pile. An old sunburned farmer pulled off his straw sun hat, hesitated, then tossed it on. Someone kicked off his boots and pitched them forward. A cop threw his belt on. A man pulled off his shirt. A woman unzipped her dress. A youngster tore off his pants. Before I could grasp what was happening, the whole mob was stark naked. Joe and Ned and I stood out like the strangers we were. Not for long: they jumped us, hogtied us over tree branches, cut our clothes off us, and threw them on the now mountainous pile, put the match to it all.
What followed was a pretty marvelous orgy, spoiled only by the stink of all those burning rags and the pall Sam cast, and I regretted that my situation forced me to play such a passive role in it. While the Cat burned, the throng fucked in a great conglobation of races, sexes, ages, and convictions; it was the Great American Dream in oily actuality, and magically, every time an orifice was newly probed, it uttered the Me-You! Cat-Call.
Nor was the Cat in the Hat done with us. His roasted corpse was rescued from the flames, ripped apart, and passed around. I objected, but to no avail, and the burnt flesh was jammed down my throat, ruining forever my taste for charred hamburger. Then . . . VOOM!
Now, I’ve smoked pot, chewed peyote, and even with an F.B.I. investigative team tripped once on LSD, but the Cat’s meat was truly something else. For one thing, like the Cat himself, the vision was all red, white, and blue, shot through with stars, bars, and silver bullets. The whole hoopla of American history stormed through our exploded minds, all the massacres, motherings, couplings, and connivings, all the baseball games, PTA meetings, bloodbaths, old movies, and piracies. We lived through gold-digging, witch-burning, lumberjacking, tax-collecting, and barn-raising. Presidents and prophets fought for rostrums by the dozens. We saw everything, from George Washington reading the graffiti while straining over a constipated shit in Middlebrook, New Jersey, to Teddy Roosevelt whaling his kids, from Johnson and Kennedy shooting it out on a dry dusty street in a deserted cowtown to Ben Franklin getting struck by lightning while jacking off on a rooftop in Paris. It was all there, I can’t begin to tell it, all the flag-waving, rip-staving, truck-driving, gun-toting, ram-squaddled, ringtail-roaring, bronc-breaking, A-bombing, drag-racing, Christ-kissing, bootlegging, coffee-drinking, pig-fucking tale of it all. And through it all, I kept catching glimpses of the Cat in the Hat, gunning Japs out of the sky over Hollywood, humping B’rer Rabbit’s tar-baby, giving Custer what-for at Little Big Horn, pulling aces out of his sleeves in New Orleans; now he was in a peruke signing the Declaration of Independence with a ballpoint pen, then in a sou’wester going down with the Maine, next leaping with a smirk and a daisy in his teeth out of the President’s box onto the stage of Ford’s Theater, inventing the cotton gin, stoking Casey Jones’ fires, lopping off heads at Barnegat with Captain Kidd, boohooing with Sam Tilden and teeing off with Bing Crosby.
Too much, and the effect finally wasn’t so much entertainment as mere exhaustion, and I wonder now, sitting here in my Attorney General’s office in Washington, if the Cat’s whole act wasn’t mainly to leave you just sitting quietly, staring blankly out a window, with an empty mind and a body gratefully at rest. Those good Pearl River folks were so tuckered, it was all they could do to smear a little tar on our hind ends, slap on a handful of chicken feathers, and prod us, if not out of the county, at least up the road a little piece.
The Cat in the Hat as candidate was a national calamity; as martyr, he took us to the White House. His death shocked the nation. Sam’s should have, but no one paid much attention to it; it was like a normal and almost proper supporting casualty. I wept like a goddamn baby about it. I kept seeing Sam’s gentle face with that hole in it. I blamed the Cat. For a couple of weeks, Mississippi was policed by federal troops. The F.B.I. investigated. Our party reconvened solemnly in Philadelphia, where, after stirring tributes to the Cat in the Hat from leaders of every political persuasion, Riley was nominated for President with Boone as his running mate. Our central platform promise was “The New View.” The Cat’s Hat became a somber symbol, the Cat-Call a moving chant, the Campaign Song a kind of party hymn. Ned penned a new rhyme—he thought of it merely as a last-minute campaign slogan, but it was eventually to enter the American canon, immortalizing that one-time St. Louis shoe salesman . . .
“Do not fear!
The Cat is here!
Where?
There!
Near?
Here!
There and here!
Here and there!
The Cat in the Hat
Is EVERYWHERE!”
We won in a walk, a cat-walk, as Joe and Ned might have it, backed by the military, labor, Wall Street, the press, the peace movement, the black caucus, and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. President Riley, as his first act of office, declared October 31 as Cat in the Hat Day. What about Sam’s day? I asked. He shrugged. The Imperial Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan turned the Cat’s Hat over to the National Cat in the Hat Museum and Library in Princeton, New Jersey. Was it the real hat, or just a campaign forgery? Who can tell? Certainly no magic has come of i
t. Joe, I might mention, is now Undersecretary of State for Latin American Affairs, and Ned is with Bell Telephone.
Ironically, one of my jobs as Attorney General is to keep under constant surveillance my old friend Clark, who is in effect, though he may not be aware of it, under a kind of permanent house arrest; well, that’s politics. Legend has it, it’s he who has the real Cat’s Hat, and that inside it are twenty-six other Cats, ready to be sprung on an unsuspecting world. Oh boy. And where will we go then, Sam, where’ll we go?
•••
A L S O A V A I L A B L E F R O M F O X R O C K
Stirrings Still
Samuel Beckett
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The Man Sitting in the Corridor
Marguerite Duras
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Seventeen and J: Two Novels
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Eleuthéria
Samuel Beckett
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The Cat in the Hat for President Page 5
