Slapstick or Lonesome No More!

  An old man crawled up to me afterwards and told me how he used to buy life insurance and mutual funds and household appliances and automobiles and so on, not because he liked them or needed them, but because the salesman seemed to promise to be his relative, and so on.

  "I had no relatives and I needed relatives," he said.

  "Everybody does," I said.

  He told me he had been a drunk for a while, trying to make relatives out of people in bars. "The bartender would be kind of a father, you know--" he said. "And then all of a sudden it was closing time."

  "I know," I said. I told him a half-truth about myself which had proved to be popular on the campaign trail. "I used to be so lonesome," I said, "that the only person I could share my innermost thoughts with was a horse named 'Budweiser.'"

  And I told him how Budweiser had died.

  *

  During this conversation, I would bring my hand to my mouth again and again, seeming to stifle exclamations and so on. I was actually popping tiny green pills into my mouth. They were outlawed by then, and no longer manufactured. I had perhaps a bushel of them back in the Senate Office Building.

  They accounted for my unflagging courtesy and optimism, and perhaps for my failure to age as quickly as other men. I was seventy years old, but I had the vigor of a man half that age.

  I had even picked up a pretty new wife, Sophie Rothschild Swain, who was only twenty-three.

  *

  "If you get elected, and I get issued all these new artificial relatives--" said the man. He paused. "How many did you say?"

  "Ten thousand brothers and sisters," I told him. "One-hundred and ninety-thousand cousins."

  "Isn't that an awful lot?" he said.

  "Didn't we just agree we need all the relatives we can get in a country as big and clumsy as ours?" I said. "If you ever go to Wyoming, say, won't it be a comfort to you to know you have many relatives there?"

  He thought that over. "Well, yes--I expect," he said at last.

  "As I said in my speech:" I told him, "your new middle name would consists of a noun, the name of a flower or fruit or nut or vegetable or legume, or a bird or a reptile or a fish, or a mollusk, or a gem or a mineral or a chemical element--connected by a hypen to a number between one and twenty." I asked him what his name was at the present time.

  "Elmer Glenville Grasso," he said.

  "Well," I said, "you might become Elmer Uranium-3 Grasso, say. Everybody with Uranium as a part of their middle name would be your cousin."

  "That brings me back to my first question," he said. "What if I get some artificial relative I absolutely can't stand?"

  *

  "What is so novel about a person's having a relative he can't stand?" I asked him. "Wouldn't you say that sort of thing has been going on now for perhaps a million years, Mr. Grasso?"

  And then I said a very obscene thing to him. I am not inclined toward obscenities, as this book itself demonstrates. In all my years of public life, I had never said an off-color thing to the American people.

  So it was terrifically effective when I at last spoke coarsely. I did so in order to make memorable how nicely scaled to average human beings my new social scheme would be.

  Mr. Grasso was not the first to hear the startling rowdy-isms. I had even used them on radio. There was no such thing as television any more.

  "Mr. Grasso," I said, "I personally will be very disappointed, if you do not say to artificial relatives you hate, after I am elected, 'Brother or Sister or Cousin,' as the case may be, 'why don't you take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut? Why don't you take a flying fuck at the mooooooooooooon?'"

  *

  "You know what relatives you say that to are going to do, Mr. Grasso?" I went on. "They're going to go home and try to figure out how to be better relatives!"

  *

  "And consider how much better off you will be, if the reforms go into effect, when a beggar comes up to you and asks for money," I went on.

  "I don't understand," said the man.

  "Why," I said, "you say to that beggar, 'What's your middle name?' And he will say 'Oyster-19' or 'Chickadee-1,' or 'Hollyhock-13,' or some such thing.

  "And you can say to him, 'Buster--I happen to be a Uranium-3. You have one hundred and ninety thousand cousins and ten thousand brothers and sisters. You're not exactly alone in this world. I have relatives of my own to look after. So why don't you take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut? Why don't you take a flying fuck at the moooooooooooon?'"

  34

  THE FUEL SHORTAGE was so severe when I was elected, that the first stiff problem I faced after my inauguration was where to get enough electricity to power the computers which would issue the new middle names.

  I ordered horses and soldiers and wagons of the ramshackle Army I had inherited from my predecessor to haul tons of papers from the National Archives to the powerhouse. These documents were all from the Administration of Richard M. Nixon, the only President who was ever forced to resign. I myself went to the Archives to watch. I spoke to the soldiers and a few passers-by from the steps there. I said that Mr. Nixon and his associates had been unbalanced by loneliness of an especially virulent sort.

  "He promised to bring us together, but tore us apart instead," I said. "Now, hey prestol, he will bring us together after all."

  I posed for photographs beneath the inscription on the facade of the Archives, which said this:

  "THE PAST IS PROLOGUE."

  "They were not basically criminals," I said. "But they yearned to partake of the brotherhood they saw in Organized Crime."

  *

  "So many crimes committed by lonesome people in Government are concealed in this place," I said, "that the inscription might well read, 'Better a Family of Criminals than No Family at All.'

  "I think we are now marking the end of the era of such tragic monkeyshines. The Prologue is over, friends and neighbors and relatives. Let the main body of our noble work begin.

  "Thank you," I said.

  *

  There were no large newspapers or national magazines to print my words. The huge printing plants had all shut down--for want of fuel. There were no microphones. There were just the people there.

  Hi ho.

  *

  I passed out a special decoration to the soldiers, to commemorate the occasion. It consisted of a pale blue ribbon from which depended a plastic button.

  I explained, only half-jokingly, that the ribbon represented "The Bluebird of Happiness." And the button was inscribed with these words, of course:

  35

  IT IS MID-MORNING here in Skyscraper National Park. The gravity is balmy, but Melody and Isadore will not work on the baby's pyramid today. We will have a picnic on top of the building instead. The young people are being so companionable with me because my birthday is only two days away now. What fun!

  There is nothing they love more than a birthday!

  Melody plucks a chicken which a slave of Vera Chipmunk-17 Zappa brought to us this morning. The slave also brought two loaves of bread and two liters of creamy beer. He pantomimed how nourishing he was being to us. He pressed the bases of the two beer bottles to his nipples, pretending that he had breasts that gave creamy beer.

  We laughed. We clapped our hands.

  *

  Melody tosses pinches of feathers skyward. Because of the mild gravity, it appears that she is a white witch. Each snap of her fingers produces butterflies.

  I have an erection. So does Isadore. So does every male.

  *

  Isadore sweeps the lobby with a broom he has made of twigs. He sings one of the only two songs he knows. The other song is "Happy Birthday to You." Yes, and he is tone-deaf, too, so he drones.

  "Row, row, row your boat," he drones,

  "Gently down the stream.

  "Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily--

  "Life is but a dream."

  Yes, and I now remember a day in the dream of my life, far upstream from now, in which I receiv
ed a chatty letter from the President of my country, who happened to be me. Like any other citizen, I had been waiting on pins and needles to learn from the computers what my new middle name would be.

  My President congratulated me on my new middle name. He asked me to use it as a regular part of my signature, and on my mailbox and letterheads and in directories, and so on. He said that the name was selected at immaculate random, and was not intended as a comment on my character or my appearance or my past.

  He offered deceptively homely, almost inane examples of how I might serve artificial relatives: By watering their houseplants while they were away; by taking care of their babies so they could get out of the house for an hour or two; by telling them the name of a truly painless dentist; by mailing a letter for them; by keeping them company on a scary visit to a doctor; by visiting them in a jail or a hospital; by keeping them company at a scary picture show.

  Hi ho.

  *

  I was enchanted by my new middle name, by the way. I ordered that the Oval Office of the White House be painted pale yellow immediately, in celebration of my having become a Daffodil.

  And, as I was telling my private secretary, Hortense Muskellunge-13 McBundy, to have the place repainted, a dishwasher from the White House kitchen appeared in her office. He was bent on a very shy errand, indeed. He was so embarrassed that he choked every time he tried to speak.

  When he at last managed to articulate his message, I embraced him. He had come out of the steamy depths to tell me ever-so-bravely that he, too, was a Daffodil-11.

  "My brother," I said.

  36

  WAS THREE NO substantial opposition to the new social scheme? Why, of course there was. And, as Eliza and I had predicted, my enemies were so angered by the idea of artificial extended families that they constituted a polyglot artificial extended family of their own.

  They had campaign buttons, too, which they went on wearing long after I was elected. It was inevitable what those buttons said, to wit:

  *

  I had to laugh, even when my own wife, the former Sophie Rothschild, took to wearing a button like that.

  Hi ho.

  *

  Sophie was furious when she received a form letter from her President, who happened to be me, which instructed her to stop being a Rothschild. She was to become a Peanut-3 instead.

  Again: I am sorry, but I had to laugh.

  *

  Sophie smouldered about it for several weeks. And then she came crawling into the Oval Office on an afternoon of particularly heavy gravity--to tell me she hated me.

  I was not stung.

  As I have already said, I was fully aware that I was not the sort of lumber out of which happy marriages were made.

  "I honestly did not think you would go this far, Wilbur," she said. "I knew you were crazy, and that your sister was crazy, too. But I did not believe you would go this far."

  *

  Sophie did not have to look up at me. I, too, was on the floor--prone, with my chin resting on a pillow. I was reading a fascinating report of a thing that had happened in Urbana, Illinois.

  I did not give her my undivided attention, so she said, "What is it you're reading that is so much more interesting than me?"

  "Well--" I said, "for many years, I was the last American to have spoken to a Chinese. That's not true any more. A delegation of Chinese paid a call to the widow of a physicist in Urbana--about three weeks ago."

  Hi ho.

  *

  "I certainly don't want to waste your valuable time," she said. "You're certainly closer to Chinamen than you ever were to me."

  I had given her a wheelchair for Christmas--to use around the White House on days of heavy gravity. I asked her why she didn't use it. "It makes me very sad," I said, "to have you go around on all-fours."

  "I'm a Peanut now," she said. "Peanuts live very close to the ground. Peanuts are famous for being low. They are the cheapest of the cheap, and the lowest of the low."

  *

  That early in the game, I thought it was crucial the people not be allowed to change their Government-issue middle names. I was wrong to be so rigid about that. All sorts of name-changing goes on now--here on the Island of Death and everywhere. I can't see that any harm is done.

  But I was severe with Sophie. "You want to be an Eagle or a Diamond, I suppose," I said.

  "I want to be a Rothschild," she said.

  "Then perhaps you should go to Machu Picchu," I said. That was where most of her blood relatives had gone.

  *

  "Are you really so sadistic," she said, "that you will make me prove my love by befriending strangers who are now crawling out from damp rocks like earwigs? Like centipedes? Like slugs? Like worms?"

  "Now, now," I said.

  "When was the last time you took a look at the freak show outside the fence?" she said.

  The perimeter of the White House grounds, just outside the fence, was infested daily with persons claiming to be artificial relatives of Sophie or me.

  There were twin male midgets out there, I remember, holding a banner that said "Flower Power."

  There was a woman, I remember, who wore an Army field jacket over a purple evening dress. On her head was an old-fashioned leather aviator's helmet, goggles and all. She had a placard on the end of a stick. "Peanut Butter," it said.

  *

  "Sophie--" I said, "that is not the general American population out there. And you are not mistaken when you say that they have crawled out from under damp rocks--like centipedes and earwigs and worms. They have never had a friend or a relative. They have had to believe all their lives that they were perhaps sent to the wrong Universe, since no one has ever bid them welcome or given them anything to do."

  "I hate them," she said.

  "Go ahead," I said. "There's very little harm in that, as far as I know."

  "I did not think you would go this far, Wilbur," she said. "I thought you would be satisfied with being President. I did not think you would go this far."

  "Well," I said, "I'm glad I did. And I am glad we have those people outside the fence to think about, Sophie. They are frightened hermits who have been tempted out from under their damp rocks by humane new laws. They are dazedly seeking brothers and sisters and cousins which their President has suddenly given to them from their nation's social treasure, which was until now untapped."

  "You are insane," she said.

  "Very likely," I replied. "But it will not be an hallucination when I see those people outside the fence find each other, if no one else."

  "They deserve each other," she said.

  "Exactly," I said. "And they deserve something else which is going to happen to them, now that they have the courage to speak to strangers. You watch, Sophie. The simple experience of companionship is going to allow them to climb the evolutionary ladder in a matter of hours or days, or weeks at most.

  "It will not be an hallucination, Sophie," I said, "when I see them become human beings, after having been for so many years, as you say, Sophie--centipedes and slugs and earwigs and worms."

  Hi ho.

  37

  SOPHIE DIVORCED ME, of course, and skeedaddled with her jewelry and furs and paintings and gold bricks, and so on, to a condominium in Machu Picchu, Peru.

  Almost the last thing I said to her, I think, was this: "Can't you at least wait until we compile the family directories? You're sure to find out that you're related to many distinguished women and men."

  "I already am related to many distinguished women and men," she replied. "Goodbye."

  *

  In order to compile and publish the family directories, we had to haul more papers from the National Archives to the powerhouse. I selected files from the Presidencies of Ulysses Simpson Grant and Warren Gamaliel Harding this time.

  We could not provide every citizen with directories of his or her own. It was all we could do to ship a complete set to every State House, town and City Hall, police department, and public
library in the land.

  *

  One greedy thing I did: Before Sophie left me, I asked that we be sent Daffodil and Peanut directories all our own. And I have a Daffodil Directory right here in the Empire State Building right now. Vera Chipmunk-5 Zappa gave it to me for my birthday last year. It is a first edition--the only edition ever published.

  And I learn from it again that among my new relatives at that time were Clarence Daffodil-11 Johnson, the Chief of Police of Batavia, New York, and Muhammad Daffodil-11 X, the former Light-Heavyweight Boxing Champion of the World, and Maria Daffodil-11 Tcherkassky, the Prima Ballerina of the Chicago Opera Ballet.

  *

  I am glad, in a way, incidentally, that Sophie never saw her family directory. The Peanuts really did seem to be a ground-hugging bunch.

  The most famous Peanut I can now recall was a minor Roller Derby star.

  Hi ho.

  *

  Yes, and after the Government provided the directories, Free Enterprise produced family newspapers. Mine was The Daffy-nition. Sophie's, which continued to arrive at the White House long after she had left me, was The Goober Gossip. Vera told me the other day that the Chipmunk paper used to be The Woodpile.

  Relatives asked for work or investment capital, or offered things for sale in the classified ads. The news columns told of triumphs by various relatives, and warned against others who were child molesters or swindlers and so on. There were lists of relatives who could be visited in various hospitals and jails.

  There were editorials calling for family health insurance programs and sports teams and so on. There was one interesting essay, I remember, either in The Daffy-nition or The Goober Gossip, which said that families with high moral standards were the best maintainers of law and order, and that police departments could be expected to fade away.

  "If you know of a relative who is engaged in criminal acts," it concluded, "don't call the police. Call ten more relatives."

  And so on.

  *

  Vera told me that the motto of The Woodpile used to be this: "A Good Citizen is a Good Family Woman or a Good Family Man."

  *

  As the new families began to investigate themselves, some statistical freaks were found. Almost all Pachysandras, for example, could play a musical instrument, or at least sing in tune. Three of them were conductors of major symphony orchestras. The widow in Urbana who had been visited by Chinese was a Pachysandra. She supported herselfand her son by giving piano lessons out there.