THE JOINT FBI/LAPD ANNOUNCEMENT of Escobar's arrest as the prime suspect in Doris Darlinge's disappearance convinced the press the Missing Moviestar Mystery wasn't an MGM publicity stunt for adding more fuel to its already inflammatory treatment of that most combustible of all sociocultural issues—miscegenation. With the result that banner headlines such as those which follow¹⁸⁰ sent earthquakelike shockwaves of scandal rumbling through the City of Angels and, to a somewhat less turbulent extent, the farthest corners of the moviegoing world.

     Slightly less than 48 hours after she vanished Doris' Duesenberg was found abandoned on a dock in San Pedro. While no note was found this "ominous development" had to be taken seriously as evidence of a suicide; especially since not a single sign of foul play was discovered at the scene—and no ransom demands had as yet been made. Plans were set in motion by the Doris Darlinge Task Force to drag the harbor for what was beginning to look like would be her bloated remains. Meanwhile, after analyzing the same set of facts the LAPD Vice Squad came to a radically (and alarmingly) different conclusion. The Vice Squad was no stranger to that most disreputable portion of San Pedro's nefarious waterfront where the missing Duesenberg turned up. Pier 14 was the embarkation point from which, since Hollywood began making movies, thousands of aspiring starlets who never made it beyond—or even onto—a Casting Director's couch were shipped like so much cattle on the hoof to the whiteslave markets of Yokohama, Bangkok and Shanghai. This trafficking in human live stock was masterminded from a rundown building on the edge of LA's Chinatown advertising itself as "The PanPacific Trading Company: Importers & Exporters Of Alimentary Delicacies." In reality this socalled "Trading Company" was just another front for the wide range of criminal activities carried on within what were tacitly recognized as Chinatown's "more or less sovereign" borders. The west coast whiteslave trade was run by a tong originally from Tientsin known as Chu Fu¹⁸¹—the Southern California chapter of which exploited its proximity to Hollywood by enticing the hordes of wideeyed, starstricken and cornfed maidens migrating from smalltown America's dusty mainstreets to the goldpaved boulevards of Angel City into their dastardly Chinese clutches with fake beauty and talent contests; the prize for which was always some version of "AN ALLEXPENSE-PAID TRIP¹⁸² To The Fabulous Film Studios Of The Legendary Orient Where Beautiful Young White Women Are Truly Worshipped As Living Goddesses."

     These sordid activities were no secret to the Vice Squad who turned a blindeye toward them in keeping with an unwritten LAPD policy, the purpose of which was to let the Chu Fu control what would otherwise be Hollywood's surplus population of vagrant jailbait, amateur streetwalkers and freelance shakedown artists by turning them into grist for their whiteslave mill. With the tacit understanding, of course, such "population & crime control measures" would be conducted discreetly—and accompanied by a generous percentage of the proceeds therefrom donated (anonymously) to the Widows & Orphans Fund of The Fraternal Brotherhood of Los Angeles Peace Officers.  Before the Vice Squad could pursue this worrisome matter it was stopped in its tracks by an even more surprising—this time pleasantly so—development when Max Meier arrived at police headquarters bearing a letter he received in his afternoon mail.¹⁸³ One which, although he hadn't opened it (so as not to contaminate the envelope and to preserve any evidence it might hold), he was convinced by the familiar handwriting, lavender stationary and matching scent, Doris herself had sent him!  After gingerly removing the contents with a tweezer so the envelope could be rushed to the crime lab for a print check, the Police Chief spread what turned out to be 22 pagelets of schoolgirlish handwriting on his desk and, putting on a pair of glasses, prepared to read them aloud to the hushed audience which had by now packed his office from wall to wall. Which he did as follows:¹⁸⁴

SO DEAR READER, WHAT BEGAN as the sensational Missing Moviestar Mystery ended banglessly when MGM issued a press release stating that "for personal reasons" Doris Darlinge had returned to her birthplace "somewhere in Europe." The disparaging—Hollywoodphoninesswise—details of her farewell letter were (not unlike those surrounding the Klutz Affair) suppressed to prevent what could have become a public relations disaster for the town which prided itself as "an oasis of artistic purity" and a "shining beacon of showbusiness integrity." Any lingering suspicions about the sudden eclipse of Doris' stardom were brushed aside or superceded by the growing stampede of 1937 headlines¹⁸⁵ thundering their way toward the cliff's edge of that apocalyptic abyss known as World War II. After the deaths of Thalberg and Harlow—and now with Doris' bizarre exit—Mayer needed no more convincing.  There was a curse on the making of TABOO! even he was powerless to overcome. Accordingly, Selznick's Gone With The Wind "contingency plan" was activated and, 2 years later, on December 17, 1939, Hollywood's Greatest Motion Picture had its Gala Premiere in Atlanta, Georgia. With the result that: As Hitler's Polish blitzkrieg was opening the curtains on an actual holocaust of Biblical magnitude, millions of those fat, dumb & happy Americans Doris and a teenaged J. D. Salinger (need we pretend any longer who "Holden Caulfield" really was?) had discussed during their Paradise Cove conversation were treated to the spectacle of seeing their epic struggle against the curse of slavery turned into a secondrate soapopera in which all those who fell for such a righteous cause became just so much scenery for a trashy romance between a willful Southern Belle and an equally headstrong Yankee Soldier of Fortune.

     One can only speculate on what might have happened if TABOO! had been released on schedule in 1938—and those same Americans had flocked in their millions to see a movie with the kind of hardhitting egalitarian¹⁸⁶ message for which Schindler's List won its bevy of Oscars some 55 years later. Could a work of cinematic art have prevented WWII—and by doing so changed the course of Hollywood's mindless moviemaking history to one whereby MGM's more honored in the breach motto, Ars Gratia Artis, became the battlecry for launching America's Second—NeoEgalitarian—Revolution; about which all future generations would say: This was Western Civilization's Finest Hour!"?

     Before we end this chapter on such a sobering note, however, there remains that question I've been promising you I would answer at the proper time and place—a question on which nothing less than your continued faith in my credibility hinges, namely: How was I able to obtain all the factual evidence on which the otherwise implausible contents of this chapter are based? Leaving aside the controversy over whether Alex Cobar did or did not write an autobiography— or indeed whether he ever existed,¹⁸⁷ there is that farewell letter Doris wrote to Max Meier; a letter whose "disparaging contents" Hollywood was determined to suppress at all costs. "How," I can hear you asking me, "could such a dangerous document not only escape certain destruction (a single match would have turned it to ashes on the spot) but nearly 6 decades later find its way into my hands?" What follows, dear reader, is a true account of the way that most improbable sequence of events actually came about.

ONE SUNDAY NIGHT IN 1942 when Doris and I had finished our weekly foreplay experiments—we'd only been at it for some 45 minutes since, in those "pioneering" days, my repertoire of amatory techniques was rather limited—to fill the awkward silence that always followed my failure to fully satisfy her (but more about that later) she began telling me the story of her brilliant but brief career in Hollywood as "Moronia's answer to Jean Harlow." I listened politely and when she was finished told her it was a tale some Moron might find credible but no American would swallow in a million years. "Don't forget," I reminded her, "in 1937 I was still a student at Princeton. And while the latest showbusiness gossip was of little or no interest to me I would surely have heard something about your sensational 'Sexgoddess exploits' via the under graduate grapevine."

     "Lots of things happen in Hollywood they never find out about in New Jersey," she answered impudently to remind me of my frequent lamentations over spending so much of my (then young) life in both of the civilized world's sociocultural armpits—New Jersey and Moronia. "Besides which, as you keep telling me," she continued, "throughout those 4 years at Princeton your Talmudic nose was buried in some book or other to the complete exclusion of what was going on outside that private little ivory tower you built for yourself."  Despite the enormous gap between our mental capacities—not to mention the handicaps of her gender and Moronic upbringing—Doris had an annoying habit of making some remark from the top of her pretty blonde head now and then whose lamebrained logic I found quite irrefutable. On this occasion she caught me with my conversational pants completely down. My college life had in fact been devoted strictly to acquiring the knowledge needed for the role I thought fate was preparing me to play as one of those JewishIntellectuals who worm their bookish way into the woodwork of an American ethos that couldn't be more impervious to literary ideas which can't be instantly understood by someone with an IQ of 100 or less. The result of which was my extracurricular activities—including those with the opposite sex—were, even by IvyLeague standards, so negligible they might as well have been nonexistent.¹⁸⁸

     "Fortunately," she said while suddenly leaping starknaked from under the covers to open a bureau drawer on the other side of her bedroom,¹⁸⁹ "you don't have to take my word for this Hollywood Sexgoddess 'fairytale' of mine!" Whereupon she procured a thickish scrapbook which she clutched lovingly to her bosom while returning bedward. Before sharing the scrapbook's contents with me she explained that her recently deceased former agent, Max Meier, had left it to her in his Last Will & Testament as "a memento of their ragstorichesbacktoragsagain relationship." An act which she thought was "truly touching—considering how my return to the Main Street CoffeeShop probably dashed whatever hopes poor Max might have had for hitching his talent scout's wagon to a client with my naturally platinumblonde bombshell prospects for Harlowesque superstardom."

     Aside from her occasional flashes of "accidental brilliance" in matters demanding anything but the most cursory analysis Doris' was as thick as that pair of proverbial planks. This was especially true when, like all Morons, she refused to accept the fundamental fact that, if human nature isn't universally corrupt, it's a safe bet the vast majority of those we meet in the normal course of socializing are rotten to their Faustian cores. Whatever "thinking" Doris did concerning the "philanthropic nature" of Meier's motives in leaving her his ragstorichesbacktoragsagain memento wasn't done between her ears but with that heart of gold beating inside her harlot's breast. To any halfway rational person it should be perfectly plain the message Meier was really sending Doris between the covers of that scrapbook was: "Bitch! You and you alone are responsible for my premature death!"¹⁹⁰

     As you've probably guessed by now, dear reader—although at the time, of course, I had no reason to think so—inside that scrapbook was the documentary evidence without which—more than 50 years later—I wouldn't have been able to write this chapter in such a completely credible fashion! For this we have not just my photographic memory to thank, but dear old Doris who, in the face of the sternest warnings from the FIB about getting involved with the Klutz Affair, fearlessly complied with my request for the loan of her most prized possession; the scrapbook establishing beyond all doubt her claim to 15 months of fame. All of which, my dear readers, means that for some of you (at least) this chapter has—at long last, and believe it or not—reached its conclusion.

     Well, not quite. For those who insist a novelist tie all of his loose literary threads neatly together before those climactic chapterending expectations he's raised can be fully satisfied; the following paragraphs should remove any reservations you might still have about being "cheated" by me in that most solemn of all psychosexual bargains—the one an author (or lover) makes with his reader (or mistress) never to betray her blind faith in his fidelity.

     Let us begin with that oath I swore several pages ago to explain how the farewell letter Doris sent to Meier found its way into my hands when, according to the Los Angeles District Attorney's office, it was "inadvertently lost or destroyed as the result of a bureaucratic slipup." In point of fact, and contrary to what he told the police, only minutes after receiving Doris' letter Meier was in his kitchen carefully steaming it open. With so much hanging in the balance it should have been obvious to the police (and to you, dear reader) that no one could resist such a temptation. Moreover, after reading those 22 page(let)s Meier took the precaution of photographing them¹⁹¹ in the (likely) event they were confiscated because of the defamatory reasons Doris gave for renouncing her Hollywood fame & fortune in favor of a life spent slinging hash for the benefit of all those turnipfarmers who, no matter how completely Americanized they might seem to be, lack the mental wherewithall for mastering that most essential aspect of our national character, to wit: The Godgiven talent we Americans have for raising superficiality to a level surpassing that of Motherhood, Baseball, Apple Pie and Old Glory as the proudest of all those Yankee Doodlelike feathers in our sociocultural cap. The "moral" of this shortest of my stories being—as proven by the series of miracles through which I came to write the Great Moronic/American WakeupCall/Manifesto—that: No earthly conspiracy can prevent a man with my evangelical mission in life from preaching the Gospel of Born Again Klutzianity!

     Which brings us to the very last but (for what I'm sure are most of you, my dear readers) by no means least of this chapter's "loose ends," namely: The intimate details of those experiments I conducted with (and on) Doris; experiments which eventually led to my preeminence in the field of Advanced Superprotracted Foreplay. Because of certain "technical" considerations¹⁹² I've chosen to deal with the results of my lifelong pursuit of providing thousands of female Morons with a happiness few—if any—American women have ever enjoyed in the form of a book(let)length Special Appendix XXX, entitled The Housewife's Guide To Marital (And/Or Extramarital) Happiness: An Illustrated StepByStep Manual For Teaching The Fine Art Of Superprotracted Foreplay To Any Pair Of Average American Lovers with High school Diplomas And/or A Combined (StanfordBinet) IQ Exceeding 199.  With the tyingup of that very last of my loose ends those of you who don't focus your attention immediately on Special Appendix XXX can now return with me to the stage of the Moronville Opera House where—in case you've forgotten—poor Maria Bimbeaux is still standing in a state of the most fullyfrontalized nudity!

[EDITORESS' NOTE. Before you start searching in vain for "Special Appendix XXX," ladies, I regret to inform you that, for the reasons which follow, the publisher has been compelled to delete it from this one volume edition of Morons Awake!

1. THE TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING PARADOX. Because Special Appendix XXX runs to some 250 pages—and my efforts to cut this novel down to the size of even 2 or 3 of the thickest bestsellers have, as you can see for yourself, failed miserably—it is physically impossible to squeeze both Morons Awake! and The Housewife's Guide To Marital (And/Or Extramarital) Happiness &c between the covers of a single book whose Brobdingnagian^G dimensions have already stretched the ancient art of bookbinding well beyond its breaking point.

2. THE PUBLIC VS. PRIVATE WELFARE QUESTION. Having asked ourselves if the redeeming social value of educating millions of American women about the techniques of Superprotracted Foreplay outweighs its sleazier side effects in a novel with Moron Awake!'s "lofty pretensions" we've decided—by a vote (strictly along gender lines) of 7 to 6—it doesn't. Once again, ladies, as women have been doing since The Creation, we must sacrifice our "personal" cravings for marital (and/or extramarital) happiness to the "higher sociocultural goal" of preventing mankind from plunging us all into the abyss of a new and permanent Dark Age that will make America's Vast Intellectual Waste land look like the Garden of Eden, Eldorado, Shangri-la and Camelot! But who knows, ladies? If Morons Awake! does indeed turn out to be "the first shot in a Second American Revolution"—by putting our foreplay curiosity on the backburner now we may end up spending the rest of our (love)lives in a NeoEgalitarian Paradise of Romantic Bliss on Earth!

3. THE FOOD & DRUG ADMINISTRATION HITCH. That's right, ladies: Believe it or not, the FDA (our author refers to it as "the Foreplay Disapproval Agency") has joined the CIA, KGB, Interpol, Mossad, MI-5, FBI and FIB in the global conspiracy to prevent Morons Awake! from blowing the lid off the Klutz Affair! The FDA is claiming some of the herbal preparations—most of them derived from turnips!—used to enhance the climactic effects of Super protracted Foreplay are, "contrary to 'Dr.' Goldberg's claims, medicinal in nature and require extensive clinical testing before they can be marketed, or even given away to the wretched women who've been smoothtalked into believing they need them so desperately." In its typically fascistic way the FDA has obtained an injunction against us by whose terms we are "prohibited from advertising—or in any other way, manner, shape or form promoting—the use of said HERBAL PREPARATIONS and the alleged therapeutic properties of Superprotracted Foreplay." It's that last (italicized) bit of legal jargon which has not only thrown a monkeywrench into whatever plans we may have had for including a "condensed version" of The Housewife's Guide &c as a (more or less) standard appendix to Morons Awake!—it precludes me from satisfying your curiosity about my personal experiences (if any) with the said "herbal preparations." Or, for that matter, exploring the equally fascinating subject of whatever foreplay activities I might (or might not) have engaged in with the author—which (if I did) were strictly for the editorial purpose of verifying his claims to a level of lovemaking expertise that seemed too good to be true.¹⁹³

4. THE BUSINESS BEFORE PLEASURE DIKTAT. In the last analysis, of course, "spinning off" The Housewife's Guide To Marital (And/ or Extramarital) Happiness &c from Morons Awake! is a Publishing House Bonanza whose effect on our bottomline we simply couldn't ignore. If this strikes you as the crassest kind of commercialism maybe it is. But for you information, ladies, a substantial portion of all that beautiful black ink generated by a runaway bestseller like Morons Awake! is used for underwriting the work of unknown novelists whose sales rarely cover the cost of printing their first books, let alone—if they're lucky!—the paltry (never more than 4figure) advances they are (occasionally) paid to keep them alive just long enough for someone like me to take a peek at the first draft of what could be her ticket to editorial immortality.

Finally, I hope all the time and trouble I've taken in crafting this explanatory note at least partially compensates you for what must be the keenest of your disappointments in having Special Appendix XXX jerked away at the very moment you were led to believe it was the answer to your Superprotracted Foreplay prayers. And, now that the foregoing distraction has been put behind us, we can all turn to the next chapter and discover what new surprises the author has in store for us1 as we continue hurtling toward the (hopefully) blissful end to our climactic expectations on this (runaway) train of his divinelyinspired thoughts on the neoEgalitarian nature of true sociocultural happiness!

     Although, while there's still some space left on this page, I might as well use it by making a few comments about the title of the next chapter ("War & Piece") before you blame me "as an editoress and a woman for letting the author get away with such a dirty male chauvinist trick on our sex." Believe me, ladies, I fought him with every fiber in my female body to change what I thought was a swinish act of the most gratuitous insensitivity on his part. "Not only," I argued, "is this crude pun on Tolstoy's Russian Gone With The Wind bound to antagonize our readers—after all, how many average American housewives enjoy being perceived as nothing more than "a piece of a*s" (not to mention such equally disgusting terms as c**t, t**l, l*y, s***h, w**e, or even dame, broad, skirt, chick, bimbo, pinup girl, centerfold, bathing beauty, bomb shell and sexgoddess)—more importantly it cheapens what you keep telling them is a book whose Biblical nature will forever alter the course of human history!" When he (uncharacteristically) asked me to "suggest a title for the next chapter that would better epitomize its intertwined motifs of love and death more tastefully," all I could come up with was "Love & Death" and—even worse—"Liebestod." Moreover, I didn't have an answer to the point he made to me (rather profoundly) that: "Don't you see, my dear Jayne; I'm deliberately cheapening my WakeupCall to avoid that selfrighteous solemnity which for 2,000 years has prevented the wise words of Christ, Mahomet, Confucius, Buddha and MarxEngels from reversing the downward spiral of Western Civilization? Besides, Miss Playne; you may be deceiving yourself but, as a result of even my limited lovemaking experience with American women, I know for a fact most of them don't mind being referred to (now and then by some tall, dark and handsome stranger) as: a piece of a*s, c**t, t**l, l*y, s***h, w**e, dame, broad, skirt, chick, bimbo, pinupgirl, centerfold, bathingbeauty, blondebombshell and/or sexgoddess."

     I suppose I should have at least tried pulling my editorial rank on him, but all my previous attempts at doing so only made matters worse. So there we are, ladies. This is, after all—and as he reminds me so frequently—his novel. And, whether we like such a state of literary affairs or not, he can do with it—and I suppose us—as he "damned well pleases."—J. P.]

Book Two Chapter 5   Return to Index

Footnotes

180 Given my previous statements regarding the (all too) successful efforts of the antiGoldberg/Morons Awake! conspiracy to completely sanitize the historical record of Doris Darlinge's Hollywood career, the authenticity of these headlines might seem questionable—to say the least. For certain technical reasons, however, this is neither the time nor the place for me to mend this "apparent" chink in my credibility armor. But believe me, dear reader, at the proper time and place your faith in my candor will be fully restored—and, moreover, in a way that won't fail to impress you with how my storytelling skill prolongs the alleviation of your angst over this most crucial matter until the very last possible moment.

181 Literally, "master scavenger" A modern meaning given to their ancient ideograms in tribute to the Tang Dynasty chef, Hwang chu-fu, of whom it was said: "From the poorest coolie's kitchen scraps he could make a meal fit for the most fastidious of mandarin gourmets. The earliest Chu Fu arrived on these shores in the aftermath of the 1849 Gold Rush to criminalize what was rapidly becoming San Francisco's acquired taste for Chinese cuisine. Eventually their evil influence extended into the galleys—and cash registers—of every High Class Cantonese restaurant and neighborhood chop suey parlor from Bangor to San Diego.

182 Significantly missing were the words "ROUND TRIP."

183 In those bygone days when we Americans didn't enjoy the benefits of living in a service economy the mail was delivered twice daily, 6 days a week. And a letter posted from San Pedro before 9 a.m. would—more often than not—reach its Los Angeles destination that same afternoon.

184 Once again, dear reader, I must ask—indeed beg!—you to stretch your patience beyond what you think is its breaking point by not insisting that I stop here to explain how Doris' letter found its way from the Police Chief's hands into mine when one would logically expect a document so vitally important to proving my "fictitious" version of these "nonevents" couldn't have escaped being shredded by those conspiring against me and this "dreaded" book of mine. As you can easily see for yourself if you don't trust me, we are only a few pages from the end of this chapter; where you will be amply rewarded for this "excruciating torture" I'm asking you to endure—for our mutual benefit.

185 Among them: Guernica Bombed by Luftwaffe!  Mussolini & Hitler Sign AntiComintern Pact! U.S.S. Panay "accidentally" Bombed & Sunk by Japs While Patrolling China's Yangtze River!

186 i.e., That all men are created equal. Which, as Klutz and other neoEgalitarians have correctly indicated, should not be confused with the pernicious ideology of the same name by which the mediocrity of massman is glorified as "the holiest state of sociocultural grace."

187 The conspiratorial efforts to completely nullify Cobar's existence have been so successful almost all his films have been destroyed. And the few I did manage to locate have had their credits altered to delete any reference to him and/or the character he played. As for his book, it seems I own the only copy still in existence; a fact which makes verifying it as such extremely difficult, if not impossible.

188 During my freshman year I was a member of the Debating Society. And, thanks to the blizzard of '38, there was that October weekend (which began as just an afternoon hike up Vermont's Mt. Mansfield for a view of the Autumn foliage) I spent snowbound in a ski hut with a coed from Vassar. While for "body heat" purposes we shared the same sleepingbag throughout those 36 hours, most of that time was devoted to a marathon discussion of our mutual admiration for the leisure class theories of Thorstein Veblen and Karl Marx's on dialectical materialism. In defense of my celibate lifestyle as a collegian it must be said that for all its lipservice to the Principles of Enlightened Humanitarianism, like every other IvyLeague school in those days, Princeton was anything but a bowl of academic cherries for a "jumpedup Jewboy" like me who was "trying to pass himself off as a cardcarrying (and grayflanneled) member of the WASP establishment."

189 Most of our foreplay experiments were conducted in Doris' bachelorette apartment. In addition to a romantic view of the Main Stream its 2 rooms (and communal lavatory/kitchen facilities "within spitting distance") were positively palatial compared to what the State Department (euphemistically) described as my "private residence" inside the American Embassy.  The socalled "Embassy" itself was nothing more than a converted shoestore whose socalled "living quarters" were comprised entirely of a back room separated from my socalled "ambassadorial offices" by a (soiled) black curtain. Its prisoncelllike furnishings consisted of a sink, a toilet, 2 wooden chairs, a kitchen table, a hot plate and a folding cot. Hardly the kind of ambiance conducive to the extremely delicate sexual matters Doris and I were dealing with.
     To spare us both the nuisance of using another footnote to deal with what remains of Doris' half finished sentence, dear reader, let me take advantage of this opportunity to tell you: That after watching Doris do what she just did in her state of (the most fullyfrontal- and, even more convincingly, posteriorized) nudity I didn't need any more proof she did indeed have what it took to be the Hollywood Sexgoddess she came so close to actually becoming.

190 Paradoxically, if Doris had possessed the intelligence needed for decoding Meier's cryptic message she could have argued that: In sending it to her he should have known she wasn't bright enough to do so. She might also have made this even more telling point to Meier: Was he not paying her the supreme compliment by conceding that, while her vital statistics (42-22-38) were overlyvoluptuous by classical femme fatale standards their effect on him proved to be no less lethal than those of a Delilah, Salome or Mata Hari.

191 With the Minox camera he always kept in his vest pocket. Meier had learned from bitter experience not to trust the carbon copies of any legal documents he executed with even some of Hollywood's most "respectable" studios, let alone those flybynight types with whom his shadier show business deals were made.

192 Not unlike those cited by G. B. Shaw in his Epistle Dedicatory to Man and Superman for putting Jack Tanner's "metaphysical tubthumping" into a pamphletsized appendix (for the edification of those who care to read it.) entitled The Revolutionist's Handbook.

193 In all honesty, however, I must tell you: Even if the FDA hadn't upset your foreplay applecart I would have asserted the "privacy privileges" mentioned in my Brief Introductory Remarks as they apply to the confidential nature of that most intimate working relationship between an author and an editoress as they collaborate on the writing of a literary masterpiece. Notwithstanding the fact that, as when one pleads the 5th Amendment, by doing so I run the risk your imagination will imbue such a purely platonic arrangement with the "burning passions" found in those lurid bestsellers about "the steamy loveaffairs going on behind the otherwise straightlaced walls of a Manhattan Publishinghouse." If that is the case, ladies, all I can do is paraphrase Hamlet's caveat to Horatio: The author of any book like Morons Awake! has more psychosexual surprises up his literary sleeve than any imagined in the wettest of your Sleeping Beauty dreams!

194 One of which, by the way, should be that "loose end" which has been dangling since the end of Chapter 1—when the author told us he would settle the "torchpassing" controversy surrounding those 2 photographs in which JFK appears with the infant Josef (soon to become Jack) Bimbeaux-Klutz and an adolescent Bill Clinton.—J. P.

Glossary
Brobdingnagian adjective Immense; enormous. [After Brobdingnag, a country in Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, where (unlike Moronia) everything was on a vast scale.]