*
So I had Beatrice Keedsler say to Rabo Karabekian there at the piano bar, "This is a dreadful confession, but I don't even know who Saint Anthony was. Who was he, and why should anybody have wanted to tempt him?"
"I don't know, and I would hate to find out," said Karabekian.
"You have no use for truth?" said Beatrice.
"You know what truth is?" said Karabekian. "It's some crazy thing my neighbor believes. If I want to make friends with him, I ask him what he believes. He tells me, and I say, 'Yeah, yeah--ain't it the truth?'"
*
I had no respect whatsoever for the creative works of either the painter or the novelist. I thought Karabekian with his meaningless pictures had entered into a conspiracy with millionaires to make poor people feel stupid. I thought Beatrice Keedsler had joined hands with other old-fashioned storytellers to make people believe that life had leading characters, minor characters, significant details, insignificant details, that it had lessons to be learned, tests to be passed, and a beginning, a middle, and an end.
As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I had become more and more enraged and mystified by the idiot decisions made by my countrymen. And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave so abominably, and with such abominable results: They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books.
Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as paper facial tissues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales.
And so on.
Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would also be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done.
If all writers would do that, then perhaps citizens not in the literary trades will understand that there is no order in the world around us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.
It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done.
*
Adapting to chaos there in the cocktail lounge, I now had Bonnie MacMahon, who was exactly as important as anybody else in the Universe, bring more yeast excrement to Beatrice Keedsler and Karabekian. Karabekian's drink was a Beefeater's dry martini with a twist of lemon peel, so Bonnie said to him, "Breakfast of Champions."
"That's what you said when you brought me my first martini," said Karabekian.
"I say it every time I give anybody a martini," said Bonnie.
"Doesn't that get tiresome?" said Karabekian. "Or maybe that's why people found cities in Godforsaken places like this--so they can make the same jokes over and over again, until the Bright Angel of Death stops their mouths with ashes."
"I just try to cheer people up," said Bonnie. "If that's a crime, I never heard about it till now. I'll stop saying it from now on. I beg your pardon. I did not mean to give offense."
Bonnie detested Karabekian, but she was as sweet as pie to him. She had a policy of never showing her anger about anything there in the cocktail lounge. The largest part of her income by far came from tips, and the way to get big tips was to smile, smile, smile, no matter what. Bonnie had only two goals in life now. She meant to recoup all the money her husband had lost in the car wash in Shepherdstown, and she ached to have steel-belted radial tires for the front wheels of her automobile.
Her husband, meanwhile, was at home watching professional golfers on television, and getting smashed on yeast excrement.
*
Saint Anthony, incidentally, was an Egyptian who founded the very first monastery, which was a place where men could live simple lives and pray often to the Creator of the Universe, without the distractions of ambition and sex and yeast excrement. Saint Anthony himself sold everything he had when he was young, and he went out into the wilderness and lived alone for twenty years.
He was often tempted during all those years of perfect solitude by visions of good times he might have had with food and men and women and children and the marketplace and so on.
His biographer was another Egyptian, Saint Athanasius, whose theories on the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the divinity of the Holy Spirit, set down three hundred years after the murder of Christ, were considered valid by Catholics even in Dwayne Hoover's time.
The Catholic high school in Midland City, in fact, was named in honor of Saint Athanasius. It was named in honor of Saint Christopher at first, but then the Pope, who was head of Catholic churches everywhere, announced that there probably never had been a Saint Christopher, so people shouldn't honor him anymore.
*
A black male dishwasher stepped out of the kitchen of the Inn now for a Pall Mall cigarette and some fresh air. He wore a large button on his sweat-soaked white T-shirt which said this:
There were bowls of such buttons around the Inn, for anybody to help himself to, and the dishwasher had taken one in a spirit of levity. He had no use for works of art, except for cheap and simple ones which weren't meant to live very long. His name was Eldon Robbins, and he had a penis nine inches long and two inches in diameter.
Eldon Robbins, too, had spent time in the Adult Correctional Institution, so it was easy for him to recognize Wayne Hoobler, out among the garbage cans, as a new parolee. "Welcome to the real world, Brother," he said gently and with wry lovingness to Wayne. "When was the last time you ate? This mornin'?"
Wayne shyly acknowledged that this was true. So Eldon took him through a kitchen to a long table where the kitchen staff ate. There was a television setback there, and it was on, and it showed Wayne the beheading of Queen Mary of Scotland. Everybody was all dressed up, and Queen Mary put her head on the block of her own accord.
Eldon arranged for Wayne to get a free steak and mashed potatoes and gravy and anything else he wanted, all prepared by other black men in the kitchen. There was a bowl of Arts Festival buttons on the table, and Eldon made Wayne put one on before he ate. "Wear this at all times" he told Wayne gravely, "and no harm can come to you."
*
Eldon revealed to Wayne a peephole, which kitchen workers had drilled through the wall and into the cocktail lounge. "When you get tarred of watchin' television," he said, "you can watch the animals in the zoo."
Eldon himself had a look through the peephole, told Wayne that there was a man seated at the piano bar who had been paid fifty thousand dollars for sticking a piece of yellow tape to a green piece of canvas. He insisted that Wayne take a good look at Karabekian. Wayne obeyed.
And Wayne wanted to remove his eye from the peephole after a few seconds, because he didn't have nearly enough background information for any sort of understanding of what was going on in the cocktail lounge. The candles puzzled him, for instance. He supposed that the electricity in there had failed, and that somebody had gone to change a fuse. Also, he did not know what to make of Bonnie MacMahon's costume, which consisted of white cowboy boots and black net stockings with crimson garters plainly showing across several inches of bare thigh, and a tight sequin sort of bathing suit with a puff of pink cotton pinned to its rear.
Bonnie's back was to Wayne, so he could not see that she wore octagonal, rimless trifocals, and was a horse-faced woman forty-two years old. He could not see, either, that she was smiling, smiling, smiling, no matter how insulting Karabekian became. He could read Karabekian's lips, however. He was good at reading lips, as was anyone who had spent any time in Shepherds town. The rule of silence was enforced in the corridors and at meals in Shepherdstown.
*
Karabekian was saying this to Bonnie, indicating
Beatrice Keedsler with a wave of his hand: "This distinguished lady is a famous storyteller, and also a native of this railroad junction. Perhaps you could tell her some recent true stories about her birthplace."
"I don't know any," said Bonnie.
"Oh come now," said Karabekian. "Every human being in this room must be worth a great novel." He pointed at Dwayne Hoover. "What is the life story of that man?"
Bonnie limited herself to telling about Dwayne's dog, Sparky, who couldn't wag his tail. "So he has to fight all the time," she said.
"Wonderful," said Karabekian. He turned to Beatrice. "I'm sure you can use that somewhere."
"As a matter of fact, I can," said Beatrice. "That's an enchanting detail."
"The more details the better," said Karabekian. "Thank God for novelists. Thank God there are people willing to write everything down. Otherwise, so much would be forgotten!" He begged Bonnie for more true stories.
Bonnie was deceived by his enthusiasm and energized by the idea that Beatrice Keedsler honestly needed true stories for her books. "Well--" she said, "would you consider Shepherdstown part of Midland City, more or less?"
"Of course," said Karabekian, who had never heard of Shepherdstown. "What would Midland City be without Shepherdstown? And what would Shepherdstown be without Midland City?"
"Well--" said Bonnie, and she thought she had what was maybe a really good story to tell, "my husband is a guard at the Shepherdstown Adult Correctional Institution, and he used to have to keep people who were going to be electrocuted company--back when they used to electrocute people all the time. He'd play cards with them, or read parts of the Bible out loud to them, or whatever they wanted to do, and he had to keep a white man named Leroy Joyce company."
Bonnie's costume gave off a faint, fishy, queer glow as she spoke. This was because her garments were heavily impregnated with fluorescent chemicals. So was the bartender's jacket. So were the African masks on the walls. The chemicals would shine like electric signs when ultraviolet lights in the ceiling were energized. The lights weren't on just now. The bartender turned them on at random times, at his own whim, in order to give the customers a delightful and mystifying surprise.
The power for the lights and for everything electrical in Midland City, incidentally, was generated by coal from strip mines in West Virginia, through which Kilgore Trout had passed not many hours before.
*
"Leroy Joyce was so dumb," Bonnie went on, "he couldn't play cards. He couldn't understand the Bible. He could hardly talk. He ate his last supper, and then he sat still. He was going to be electrocuted for rape. So my husband sat out in the corridor outside the cell, and he read to himself. He heard Leroy moving around in his cell, but he didn't worry about it. And then Leroy rattled his tin cup on the bars. My husband thought Leroy wanted some more coffee. So he got up and went over and took the cup. Leroy was smiling as though everything was all right now. He wouldn't have to go to the electric chair after all. He'd cut off his whatchamacallit and put it in the cup."
*
This book is made up, of course, but the story I had Bonnie tell actually happened in real life--in the death house of a penitentiary in Arkansas.
As for Dwayne Hoover's dog Sparky, who couldn't wag his tail: Sparky is modeled after a dog my brother owns who has to fight all the time, because he can't wag his tail. There really is such a dog.
*
Rabo Karabekian asked Bonnie MacMahon to tell him something about the teen-age girl on the cover of the program for the Festival of the Arts. This was the only internationally famous human being in Midland City. She was Mary Alice Miller, the Women's Two Hundred Meter Breast Stroke Champion of the World. She was only fifteen, said Bonnie.
Mary Alice was also the Queen of the Festival of the Arts. The cover of the program showed her in a white bathing suit, with her Olympic Gold Medal hanging around her neck. The medal looked like this:
Mary Alice was smiling at a picture of Saint Sebastian, by the Spanish painter El Greco. It had been loaned to the Festival by Eliot Rosewater, the patron of Kilgore Trout. Saint Sebastian was a Roman soldier who had lived seventeen hundred years before me and Mary Alice Miller and Wayne and Dwayne and all the rest of us. He had secretly become a Christian when Christianity was against the law.
And somebody squealed on him. The Emperor Diocletian had him shot by archers. The picture Mary Alice smiled at with such uncritical bliss showed a human being who was so full of arrows that he looked like a porcupine.
Something almost nobody knew about Saint Sebastian, incidentally, since painters liked to put so many arrows into him, was that he survived the incident. He actually got well.
He walked around Rome praising Christianity and bad-mouthing the Emperor, so he was sentenced to death a second time. He was beaten to death by rods.
And so on.
And Bonnie MacMahon told Beatrice and Karabekian that Mary Alice's father, who was a member of the Parole Board out at Shepherdstown, had taught Mary Alice to swim when she was eight months old, and that he had made her swim at least four hours a day, every day, since she was three.
Rabo Karabekian thought this over, and then he said loudly, so a lot of people could hear him, "What kind of a man would turn his daughter into an outboard motor?"
*
And now comes the spiritual climax of this book, for it is at this point that I, the author, am suddenly transformed by what I have done so far. This is why I had gone to Midland City: to be born again. And Chaos announced that it was about to give birth to a new me by putting these words in the mouth of Rabo Karabekian: "What kind of a man would turn his daughter into an outboard motor?"
Such a small remark was able to have such thundering consequences because the spiritual matrix of the cocktail lounge was in what I choose to call a pre-earthquake condition. Terrific forces were at work on our souls, but they could do no work, because they balanced one another so nicely.
But then a grain of sand crumbled. One force had a sudden advantage over another, and spiritual continents began to shrug and heave.
One force, surely, was the lust for money which infested so many people in the cocktail lounge. They knew what Rabo Karabekian had been paid for his painting, and they wanted fifty thousand dollars, too. They could have a lot of fan with fifty thousand dollars, or so they believed. But they had to earn money the hard way, just a few dollars at a time, instead. It wasn't right.
Another force was the fear in these same people that their lives might be ridiculous, that their entire city might be ridiculous. Now the worst had happened: Mary Alice Miller, the one thing about their city which they had supposed was ridicule-proof had just been lazily ridiculed by a man from out-of-town.
And my own pre-earthquake condition must be taken into consideration, too, since I was the one who was being reborn. Nobody else in the cocktail lounge was reborn, as far as I know. The rest got their minds changed, some of them, about the value of modern art.
As for myself: I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or about any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide. For want of anything better to do, we became fans of collisions. Sometimes I wrote well about collisions, which meant I was a writing machine in good repair. Sometimes I wrote badly, which meant I was a writing machine in bad repair. I no more harbored sacredness than did a Pontiac, a mousetrap, or a South Bend Lathe.
I did not expect Rabo Karabekian to rescue me. I had created him, and he was in my opinion a vain and weak and trashy man, no artist at all. But it is Rabo Karabekian who made me the serene Earthling which I am this day.
Listen:
"What kind of a man would turn his daughter into an outboard motor?" he said to Bonnie MacMahon.
Bonnie MacMahon blew up. This was the first time she had blown up since she had come to work in the cocktail lounge. Her voice became as unpleasant as the noise of a handsaw's cutting galvanized tin. It was loud, too. "Oh yeah?" she said
. "Oh yeah?"
Everybody froze. Bunny Hoover stopped playing the piano. Nobody wanted to miss a word.
"You don't think much of Mary Alice Miller?" she said. "Well, we don't think much of your painting. I've seen better pictures done by a five-year-old."
Karabekian slid off his barstool so he could face all those enemies standing up. He certainly surprised me. I expected him to retreat in a hail of olives, maraschino cherries and lemon rinds. But he was majestic up there "Listen--" he said so calmly, "I have read the editorial against my painting in your wonderful newspaper. I have read every word of the hate mail you have been thoughtful enough to send to New York."
This embarrassed people some.
"The painting did not exist until I made it," Karabekian went on. "Now that it does exist, nothing would make me happier than to have it reproduced again and again, and vastly improved upon, by all the five-year-olds in town. I would love for your children to find pleasantly and playfully what it took me many angry years to find.
"I now give you my word of honor," he went on, "that the picture your city owns shows everything about life which truly matters, with nothing left out. It is a picture of the awareness of every animal. It is the immaterial core of every animal--the 'I am' to which all messages are sent. It is all that is alive in any of us--in a mouse, in a deer, in a cocktail waitress. It is unwavering and pure, no matter what preposterous adventure may befall us. A sacred picture of Saint Anthony alone is one vertical, unwavering band of light. If a cockroach were near him, or a cocktail waitress, the picture would show two such bands of light. Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.
"I have just heard from this cocktail waitress here, this vertical band of light, a story about her husband and an idiot who was about to be executed at Shepherds town. Very well--let a five-year-old paint a sacred interpretation of that encounter. Let that five-year-old strip away the idiocy, the bars, the waiting electric chair, the uniform of the guard, the gun of the guard, the bones and meat of the guard. What is that perfect picture which any five-year-old can paint? Two unwavering bands of light."
Breakfast of Champions Page 13
