CHAPTER 2:
Bottom of the 9th, 2 outs, Bobby Thomson at bat with
men on 1st & 3rd,
a full count and the score—Dodgers 4 Giants
2
Having left her dressingroom while we were busy with
those loose expository ends that needed tying up before this ("For chrissake
will you please cut to the goddam chase
consummatingmyclimacticexpectationswise!") chapter could begin, the Stout
Soprano listens offstage to hear the orchestral cue for her entrance and
singing of the aria which lets the audience know—even if it doesn't
understand German—that: As surely as God made little green apples, come
hell or high water, no ifs, ands or buts about it, without the shadow of
a doubt, in the last analysis, to a metaphysical certainty, finally, officially,
verily, irrevocably, definitely, truly, absolutely, unreservedly, unequivocally,
indisputably, and, best of all—happily—
THE OPERA IS OVER!
"HOW WOULD YOU LIKE SOME HOMEMADE chocolatechip cookies and a glass of milk?" the Mean Old Wife asked Jack, to demonstrate she really didn't harbor any malice toward him, since chocolatechip was far and away the favorite cookie for Morons in every age group. Especially those meltinyourmouth kind made from scratch. "Lord knows," she added, "you look as if you haven't had a decent snack in a coon's age." Her generous offer only increased Jack's apprehensions, however. His memory flashed back instantly to all those spinechilling horrorstories and -films he'd heard and seen about children being lured into the villainous clutches of some mad scientist, deranged doctor, bogeyman, hobgoblin, bodysnatcher, ogre, sorceress, vampire, warlock, necromancer, crone, enchantress, banshee, witch, succubus or pedophile by the allure of freshlybaked gingerbread, a candybar or pack of bubblegum. Although, even in these severely overtaxed circumstances of what was the normally confused state of his Moronic mind, Jack reasoned that by refusing to accept her poisonpill- and/or magicpotionlaced "treats" he would probably force the Mean Old Wife to take more drastic —and painful—measures in sealing his fate.
As it happened Jack was "mercifully" spared from trying to solve this dilemma when, seemingly from nowhere, the Mean Old Man suddenly appeared in the hallway accompanied by a blast of sound and fury whose SirMichaelTippettlike cacophony couldn't have been more disconcerting—or nightmarish for someone of Jack's total ignorance when it came to the theory and/or practice of diatonic serialism as reflected in the dissonant music of Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, Alban Berg, Charles Ives, Igor Stravinski, Pierre Boulez, Milton Babbit, Ernst Krenek, Egon Wellesz and Walter Piston. Whereupon, after the Mean Old Man had seized his other wrist, Jack found himself being torn limb from limb in a Good Cop vs Bad Cop tugofwar to determine the price their victim would pay for his crime. One which, if the Mean Old Man got his way, "Would make Dante's Inferno look like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm!"
"What a ridiculous thing to say!" shrieked the Mean Old Wife, "when its perfectly obvious the boy hasn't read either Dante or Kate Wiggin!"
"Maybe so!" the Mean Old Man shouted back, "But when I get through with this brainless little bastard he'll have earned the equivalent of an advanced degree in the entire literary canon of Western Civilization! Not that it will do him any good!"
For the most part Jack had no idea what the Mean Old Couple were ranting and raving about; except for statements like the "Not that it will do him any good!" one—whose ominous ramifications he deduced intuitively. And, while it seemed to Jack as if their stalemated struggle over him would continue until he was either dismembered or scared to death, the Mean Old Man's victory had always been a foregone conclusion. Not because he could outmuscle his Mean Old Wife, but by virtue of her submission to what she had been taught from girlhood was the mental superiority of all men—even the most dimwitted Moron—over any woman. When the Mean Old Man finally did manage to wrench his other wrist from the Mean Old Wife's grasp Jack offered no resistance as he was pushed and shoved along the dim hallway to a door which, upon its opening, revealed a flight of rickety stairs leading down to the Haunted House's cellar. While any rational person—or even an urchin in the ordinarily perilous course of his Dickensian life—would have perceived the Mean Old Man's refurbished basement (whose "ungodly spookiness" punctuated Jack's sense of certain doom with an apocalyptic exclamation point) as nothing more "sinister" than the subterranean retreats, sanctuaries, hideaways, shelters, studies, bunkers, ashrams, lairs, hidingplaces and dens so many "eccentric intellectuals" and/or henpecked husbands (not unlike the besieged narrator of Kafka's The Burrow) build for themselves; especially one like Cyrus Vanderphd (as henceforth we will refer to "the Mean Old Man") who was branded by his Moronic compatriots as an "antisocial Weisenheimer & Elitist Enemy Of The People" —to the newlyturned 8yearold protagonist of our story it represented nothing less than the comingtrue of his ABSOLUTELY WORST HUMAN GUINEAPIGINANAZICONCENTRATIONCAMPDYING1000DEATHSATTHEHANDSOFSOMENEIGHBORHOODSEXMANIACINHIS SECRETROOTCELLARCUMTORTURECHAMBERSLOWLYROTTINGAWAYCHAINEDTOTHEWALLSOFARAT INFESTEDDUNGEON NIGHTMARE.
Having said all that, and given the exotic nature of Vanderphd's "subversive" activities (as a selftaught musicologist specializing in the neoclassical period he was considered "a clear & present danger" to upsetting Moronia's postElvis applecart culturalorthodoxywise)—Jack's worst nightmare fears were confirmed when he noticed 5 or 6 "black boxes" closely resembling (actually they contained nothing more sinister than the components of Vanderphd's homemadebutstate oftheart if not futuristic by Moronia's 1972 standards—HiFi system) those built by mad scientists bent on destroying the entire civilized world unless it gives in to their doomsday demands for global rulership. Added to this already bleak picture was an assortment of malevolent looking appliances, devices and "gizmos" which, while their specific functions eluded him, Jack had no doubt about the horrific role they would play in the Haunted House scheme of things torturechamber instrumentswise. And while these enigmatic objects were in fact "instruments," they were the (relatively) harmless kind comprising Vanderphd's lifetime collection of musical oddities; a few of which—most notably a contrabassoon of 1625 vintage and the original donnerrundblitzenmaschine Richard Strauss designed for the windiest moments in his Alpine Symphony—could have been mistaken for the implements used by such inquisitorial virtuosi as Felix Dzerzhinsky, Tomas de Torquemada and Heinrich Himmler for squeezing blood from even the most lithologicG of heretics, antifascists and counterrevolutionaries.
What alarmed Jack more than any other aspect of the basement's diabolical decor, however, were the shelves filled with books lining its 4 walls from floor to ceiling. Unlike the paperbacks popular among Moronville's middlebrowed house wifery (which, because of their trashy nature, were—at least tacitly—exempted from the labels pasted on the dustjackets of highbrow literary fiction by Moronia's Surgeon General warning the public about "THE MENTAL HEALTH HAZARDS ASSOCIATED WITH ACQUIRING MORE WISDOM THAN THE AVERAGE MORON NEEDS TO SAFELY CROSS A STREET OR KNOW WHEN TO COME IN OUT OF THE RAIN") the frayed leather bindings, turgid titles, musty odor and, above all, sheer thickness of these books clearly identified them as the cabalistic kind consulted by witch doctors, voodooers, wizards, warlocks, hoodooists, blackmagicians, sorcerers and necromancers when brewing a potion, casting a spell, composing a malediction or fabricating some talisman to protect them from even the most Georgian of their sainted enemies
SO ABSORBED WAS JACK IN THESE THOUGHTS (and the novelty of thinking them) that when he finally returned to the normal nonIntellectual state of his Moronic mind he was astonished to find himself not only sitting on a wooden chair but tied to it so securely he was unable to move a single muscle; except those unavailing ones from the neck up which only succeeded in producing a terrified expression on his face that in turn brought a wicked smile to Vanderphd's lips. "Well, my young friend," he gloated, "we are making some progress after all! For a while it seemed as if that skull of yours was so thick you would remain totally oblivious during this little 'educational' experiment we are about to conduct!" Ordinarily those words—EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENT—would ring the loudest of an urchin's survivalinstinctalarm bells. But Jack found it difficult to hear anything Vanderphd said because, as he now realized, his cloth cap had been replaced by some sort of fiendish headgear whose springloaded ends pressed against his ears with what felt like a pair of those coonskin muffs adults wore when the weather was so cold "polar bears were putting on their longjohns."
Following on the heels of that unsettling discovery (hatlessness itself was a matter of the gravest concern among even the lowliest of Moronia's Lowbrows who had everything to gain by displaying their nonexistent foreheads in public) was the—quite literally—shocking one that: Each of those "earmuffs" were connected to 1 of the blackboxes clustered around Vanderphd's desk by what looked suspiciously like an electrical wire! To which blackbox Vanderphd had removed himself and was now in the process of adjusting its knobs to optimize the readings they registered on a panel of illuminated dials, meters and gauges resembling those a mad (or Nazi) scientist adjusts before switching on the "juice" that either zaps his helpless victim's brains into a state of irreversible zombiefication or slowly fries them to a terminal crisp. When he finished fiddling with the controls on the large blackbox Vanderphd took a smaller one from a cabinet behind his desk and brought it to Jack so he could examine what was depicted there. A facsimile thereof you are about to see for yourself, dear reader —after this explanation of why, contrary to everything I've previously told you about "the superior value of one meticulously chosen word over an infinite number of pictures trainofthought- and/or psychosexuallywise, I am violating that Holiest of Novelwriting Canons. To wit:
We have arrived at that point in our story where its telling is governed by the even more Sacrosanct Principle of Superprotracted Foreplay stating: "Any and all methods, means, measures, procedures, devices, tools, tactics, techniques and stratagems—including those of an electromechanical, cardiovascular, gynopharmacological, hypnotelepathic, gastrointestinal and/or audiovisual nature are appropriate for insuring the Big Bang one has been laboring so long and hard to achieve doesn't result in a whimper because its oversuperprotraction turns out to be too much of a good thing."
Or, as the Morons put it in one of their simplerminded nutshells: "There is a limit to the number of turnips even a starving man will eat before he starts biting the hand that feeds him if it doesn't add some red meat to his diet."
In operatic terms this sudden shift of storytelling gears just before the Fat Lady's final entrance is signified by the abrupt elimination of any orchestral and/or literary "frills" that don't lead directly to the singing of her Climactic Aria. [And if Morons Awake! were a Major Motion Picture (as no doubt it will someday become) rather than "just one more artsy fartsy 'Great American Novel/Manifesto whose utopian bubble will burst like all those other 'didactic' messages that did nothing to reverse the socalled 'decline' of Western Civilization," this most profoundly pregnant of its Epiphanal Moments might be described by some cigarchewing Hollywood producer as "cutting to the goddam chase just before the goddam audience falls fast asleep in its goddam chairs or heads for the goddam exits to ask for its goddam money back!"
Accordingly, the picture:
For Jack whose Englishreading "skills" were limited to those needed by an urchin when filling in the occasional storyline gap left by the illustrator of a comicbook this historic (the first complete recording of Wagner's Ring Cycle) album cover meant little more than it [or a copy of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ortega y Gasset's La Rebelión de las Masas, Rousseau's Discourse sur l'origine de l'inégalité des hommes, Nietzsche's Also Spracht Zarathustra—or even Jefferson's Declaration of Independence ("with that stuff in it about all of us being equal irregardless of how smart or dumb we really are?")] would to 99.9% of America's highschool graduates. [A group which, should it include you, my dear reader, I strongly recommend before we proceed any further you listen to no less than the first 5 or 6 hours of Wagner's Magnum Opus to gain at least an elementary appreciation for the "excrutiating torture" young Jack is about to undergo] Nevertheless that "meant little more" I used just now when comparing Jack's first impression of Der Ring Des Nibelungen album cover with that of an average American housewife wasn't added merely to embellish an otherwise prosaic sentence with a touch of poesy.G I did it because in his case he had acquired a knowledge, no matter how superficial, of both German diacritics (the umlauted U, A, & O) and Teutonic semiologyG (those swords & winged helmets) through the playing of Jews & Nazis. A game, by the way, which also taught him about the "medical & scientific" experiments conducted on the inmates of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belsen-Bergen, Dachau, Buchenwald and Ravensbrueck by the real life maniacal likes of Doctors Karl Gebhardt, Fritz Fischer, Adolf Pokorny, August Hirt, Sigmund Rascher, Edwin Katzenellenbogen and Josef Mengele.
All of which, when combined with a more or less steady diet of horror films, comics and stories—not to mention the fact Vanderphd had returned to the large blackbox with the smaller one and, after he took something from the latter and put it into the former, now stood poised to throw the master switch—convinced Jack his worst nightmare was indeed beginning to unfold!
Book 9 Chapter 3 Return to Index
Glossary
lithology noun 1. The gross physical character of a rock or rock formation. 2. The microscopic study, description, and classification of rock. - lithologic or lithological adjective - litholog«cally adverb - lithologist noun
poesy noun plural poesies 1. Poetical works; poetry. 2. The art or practice of composing poems. 3. The inspiration involved in composing poetry. [Middle English poesie, from Old French, from Latin poesis, from Greek poiesis, from poiein, to create.]
semiology also semeiology noun 1. a. The science that deals with signs or sign language. b. The use of signs in signaling, as with a semaphore. 2. Medicine. Symptomatology. [Greek semeion, sign. See SEMIOTIC + -LOGY.]