What Might Have Been, page 31
Burroughs rises to his feet like a figure in a well-greased Swiss clock. “There is scrabbling,” goes Bill. “There is scrabbling behind the dimensions. Bastards made a hole somewhere. You ever read Lovecraft’s ‘Colour Out of Space,’ Jack?”
“I read it in jail,” says Neal, secretly proud. “Dig, Bill, your mention of that document ties in so exactly with my most recent thought mode that old Jung would hop a hard-on.”
“Mhwee-heee-heee,” says Jack. “The Shadow knows.”
“I’m talking about this bomb foolishness,” harrumphs Burroughs, stalking stiff-legged over to stand on the steps. “The paper on the floor in the roadhouse John last night said there’s a giant atom-bomb test taking place tomorrow at White Sands. They’re testing out the fucking ‘trigger bomb’ to use on that god-awful new hydrogen bomb Edward Teller wants against the Rooshians. Pandora’s box, boys, and we’re not talking cooze. That bomb’s going off in New Mexico tomorrow, and right here and now the shithead meat-flayers’ noon whistle is getting us all ready for World War Three, and if we’re all ready for that, then we’re by Gawd ready to be a great civilian army, yes, soldiers for Joe McCarthy and Harry J. Anslinger, poised to stomp out the Reds ‘n’ queers ‘n’ dope fiends. Science brings us this. I wipe my queer junkie ass with science, boys. The Mayans had it aaall figured out a loooong time ago. Now take this von Neumann fella. ...”
“You mean Django Reinhardt?” goes Jack, stoned and rude. “Man, this is your life, their life, my life, a dog’s life, God’s life, the life of Riley. The army’s genius von Neumann of the desert, Bill, it was in the Sunday paper Neal and I were rolling sticks on in Tuscaloosa, I just got an eidetic memory flash of it, you gone wigged cat, it was right before Neal nailed that cute Dairy Queen waitress with the Joan Crawford nose.”
Neal goes: “Joan Crawford, Joan Crawfish, Joan Fishhook, Joan Rawshanks in the fog. McVoutie!” He’s taking a hydrant roach, and his jay-wrapping fingers are laying rapid cable. Half the damn box is already twisted up.
Jack warps a brutal moodswing. There’s no wine. Ti Jack could use a widdly sup pour bon peek, like please, you ill cats, get me off this Earth. ... Is he saying this aloud, in front of Neal and Burroughs?
“And fuck the chicken giblets,” chortles Neal obscurely, joyously, in there, and then suggests, by actions as much as by words, Is he really talking, Jack? “That we get back to what’s really important, such as rolling up this here, ahem, um, urp, Mexican see-gar, yes!”
Jack crab-cakes slideways on fingertips and heels to Neal’s elbow, and they begin to lovingly craft and fashion and croon upon—and even it would not be too much to say give birth to—a beautiful McDeVoutieful hair-seeded twat of a reefer, the roach of which will be larger than any two normal sticks.
They get off good.
Meanwhile, Bill Burroughs is slacked back in his rocker, refixed and not quite on the nod because he’s persistently irritated, both by the thought of the hydrogen bomb and, more acutely, by the fly-buzz derry Times Square jive of the jabbering teaheads. Time passes, so very slowly for Sal and Dean, so very fast for William Lee.
So Doctor Miracle and Little Richard are barreling along the Arizona highway, heading east on Route 40 out of Vegas, their pockets full of silver cartwheels from the grinds they’ve thimblerigged, and also wallets bulging with the in-denom bills they demanded when cashing in their chips after beating the bank at the roulette wheels of six different casinos with their unpatented probabilistic scams that are based on the vectors of neutrons through six inches of lead as transferred by spacetime Feynman diagrams to the workings of those rickety-clickety simple-ass macroscopic systems of balls and slots.
Doctor Miracle speaks. He attempts precision, to compensate for the Hungarian accent and for the alcohol-induced spread in bandwidth.
“Ve must remember to zend Stan Ulam a postcard from Los Alamos, reporting za zuccess of his Monte Carlo modeling method.”
“It woulda worked even better over in Europe,” goes Little Richard. “They got no double-zero slots on their wheels.”
Doctor Miracle nods sagely. He’s a plump guy in his fifties: thinning hair, cozy chin, faraway eyes. He’s dressed in a double-breasted suit, with a bright hula-girl necktie that’s wide as a pound of bacon.
Little Richard is younger, skinnier, and more Jewish, and he has a thick pompadour. He’s wearing baggy khakis and a white T-shirt with a pack of Luckys rolled up in the left sleeve.
It is not immediately apparent that these two men are
ATOMIC WIZARDS, QUANTUM SHAMANS, PLUTONIUM PROPHETS, and BE-BOPPIN’ A-BOMB PEE AITCH DEES!
Doctor Miracle, meet Richard Lernmore. Little Richard, say hello to Johnny von Neumann!
There is a case of champagne sitting on the rear seat in between them. Each of the A-scientists has an open bottle from which he swigs, while their car, a brand-new 1950 big-finned land-boat of a two-toned populuxe pink-’n’-green Caddy, speeds along the highway.
There is no one driving. The front seat is empty.
Von Neumann, First Annointed Master of Automata, has rigged up the world’s premier autopilot, you dig. He never could drive very well, and now he doesn’t have to. Fact is, no one has to! The Caddy has front- and side-mounted radar that feeds into a monster contraption in the trunk, baby cousin to Weiner and Ulams’s Los Alamos MANIAC machine, a thing all vacuum tubes and cams, all cogs and Hollerith sorting rods, a mechanical brain that transmits cybernetic impulses directly to the steering, gas, and brake mechanisms.
The Trilateral Commission has rules that the brain in the Cad’s trunk is too cool for Joe Blow, much too cool, and a self-driving car isn’t going to make it to the assembly line ever. The country needs only a few of those supercars, and this one has been set aside for the use and utmost ease of the two genius-type riders who wish to discuss high quantum-physical, metamathematical, and cybernetic topics without the burden of paying attention to the road. Johnny and Dickie’s periodic Alamos-to-Vegas jaunts soak up a lot of the extra nervous tension these important bomb builders suffer from.
“So whadda ya think of my new method for scoring showgirls?” asks Lemmore.
“Dickie, although za initial trials vere encouraging, ve must have more points on the graph before ve can extrapolate,” replies von Neumann. He looks sad. “You may haff scored, you zelfish little prick, but I—I did not achieve satisfactory sexual release. Far from it,”
“Waa’ll,” drawls Lernmore, “I got a fave nightclub in El Paso where the girls are hotter’n gamma rays and pretty as parity conservation. You’ll get what you need for sure, Johnny. We could go right instead of left at Albuquerque and be there before daylight. Everyone at Los Alamos’ll be busy with the White Sands test anyway. Security won’t look for us till Monday, and by then we’ll be back, minus several milliliters of semen.”
“El Paso,” mutters von Neumann, taking a gadget out of his inner jacket pocket. It’s—THE FIRST POCKET CALCULATOR! Things the size of a volume of the Britannica, with Bakelite buttons, and what makes it truly hot is that it’s got all the road distances from the Rand McNally Road Atlas data-based onto the spools of a small wire-recorder inside. Von Neumann’s exceedingly proud of it, and although he could run the algorithm faster in his head, he plugs their present speed and location into the device; calls up the locations of Las Vegas, Albuquerque, El Paso, and Los Alamos; and proceeds to massage the data.
“You’re quite right, Dickie,” he announces presently, still counting the flashes of the calculator’s lights. “Ve can do as you say and indeed eefen return to za barracks before Monday zunrise. Venn is za test scheduled, may I ask?”
“Eight A.M. Sunday.”
Von Neumann’s mouth broadens in a liver-lipped grin.
“How zynchronistic. Ve’ll be passing White Sands just zen. I haff not vitnessed a bomb test since Trinity. And zis is za biggest one yet; zis bomb is, as you know, Dickie, za Ulam cascade initiator for za new hydrogen bomb. I’m for it! Let me reprogram za brain!”
Lernmore crawls over the front seat while the car continues its mad careening down the dizzy interstate, passing crawling tourist Buicks and mom-’n’-dad Studebakers. He lugs the case of champagne into the front seat with him. Von Neumann removes the upright cushion in the backseat and pries off the panel, exposing the brain in the trunk. Consulting his calculator from time to time, von Neumann begins reprogramming the big brain by yanking switchboard-type wires and reinserting them.
“I’m tired of plugging chust metal sockets, Richard. Viz za next girl, I go first.”
Now it’s night, and the stoned beats are drunk and high on bennies, too. Neal, his face all crooked, slopes through Burroughs’s shack and picks Bill’s car keys off the dresser in the dinette where Joan is listening to the radio and scribbling on a piece of paper. Crossing the porch, thievishly heading for the Buick, Neal thinks Bill doesn’t see, but Bill does.
Burroughs the beat morphinist, whose weary disdain has shaded catastrophically with the Benzedrine and alcohol into fried impatience, draws the skeletized sawed-off shotgun from the tube of hidden gutterpipe that this same Texafied Burroughs has suspended beneath a large hole drilled in the eaten wood of his porch floor. He fires a twelve-gauge shotgun blast past Neal and into Neal’s cleaned and twisted box of Mary Jane, barely missing Jack.
“Whew, no doubt,” goes Neal, tossing Burroughs the keys.
“Have ye hard drink, mine host?” goes Jack, trying to decide if the gun really went off or not. “Perhaps a pint of whiskey in the writing desk, old top? A spot of sherry?”
“To continue my afternoon fit of thought,” says Burroughs, pocketing his keys, “I was talking about thermonuclear destruction and about the future of all humanity, which species has just about been squashed to spermaceti in the rictal mandrake spasms of Billy Sunday’s pimpled ass-cheeks.”
He pumps another shell into the shotgun’s chamber. His eyes are crazed goofball pinpoints. “I am sorry I ever let you egregious dope-suckin’ latahs crash here. I mean you especially, jailbird con man Cassady.”
Neal sighs and hunkers down to wail on the bomber Jack’s lit off a smoldering scrap of shotgun wadding. Before long he and Jack are far into a rap, possibly sincere, possibly jive, a new rap wrapped around the concept that the three hipsters assembled here on the splintery porch ‘neath the gibbous prairie moon have formed or did or will form or, to be quite accurate, were forming and still are forming right then and there, an analogue of those Holy B-Movie Goofs,
THE THREE STOOGES!
“Yes,” goes Jack, “those Doomed Saints of Chaos, loosed on the work-a-daddy world to scramble the Charles Dickens cark and swink of BLOOEY YER FIRED, those Stooge Swine are the anarchosyndicalist truly wigged sub-Marxists, Neal man, bikkhu Stooges goosing ripeassmelons and eating fried chicken for supper. We are the Three Stooges.”
“Bill is Moe,” says Neal, hot on the beam, batting his eyes at Bill, who wonders if it’s time to shed his character-armor. “Mister Serious Administerer of Fundament Punishments and Shotgun Blasts, and me with a Lederhosen ass!”
“Ah you, Neal,” goes Jack, “you’re Curly, angelic madman saint of the uncaught mote-beam fly-buzz fly!”
“And Kerouac is Larry,” rheums Burroughs, weary with the knowledge. “Mopple-lipped, lisped, muxed, and completely flunk is the phrase, eh, Jack?”
“Born to die,” goes Jack. “We’re all bom to die, and I hope it do be cool, Big Bill, if we goam take yo cah. Vootie-oh-oh.” He holds out his hand for the keys.
“Fuck it,” says Bill. “Who needs this noise.” He hands Jack the keys, and before you know it, Neal’s at the wheel of the two-ton black Buick, gunning that straight-eight mill and burping the clutch. Jack’s at his side, and they’re on the road with a long honk good-bye.
In the night there’s reefer and plush seats and the radio, and Neal is past spaced, off in his private land that few but Jack and Alan can see. He whips the destination on Jack.
“This car is a front-row seat to the A-blast.”
“What.”
“We’ll ball this jack to White Sands, New Mexico, dear
Jack, right on time for the bomb test Sunday 8 A.M. I stole some of Bill’s M, man, we’ll light up on it.”
In Houston they stop and get gas and wine and benny and Bull Durham cigarette papers and keep flying west.
Sometime in the night, Jack starts to fade in and out of horror dreams. There’s a lot of overtime detox dream-work that he’s logged off of too long. One time he’s dreaming he’s driving to an atom-bomb test in a stolen car, which is of course true, and then after that he’s dreaming he’s the dead mythic character in black and white that he’s always planned to be. Not to mention the dreams of graves and Memere and the endless blood sausages pulled out of Jack’s gullet by some boffable blonde’s sinister boyfriend ...
“. . . been oh rock and roll gospeled in on the bomb foolishness ...” Neal is going when Jack screams and falls off the backseat he’s stretched out on. There’s hard wood and metal on the floor. “... and Jack, you do understand, bucka-roo, that I have hornswoggled you into yet another new and unprecedentedly harebrained swing across the dairy fat of her jane’s spreadness?”
“Go,” goes Jack feebly, feeling around on the backseat floor. Short metal barrel, lightly oiled. Big flat disk of a magazine. Fuckin’ crazy Burroughs. It’s a Thompson submachine gun Jack’s lying on.
“And, ah Jack, man, I knew you’d know past the suicidal norm, Norm, that it was . . . DeVoutie!” Neal fishes a Bakelite ocarina out of his shirt pocket and tootles a thin, horrible note. “Goof on this, Jack, I just shot M, and now I’m so high I can drive with my eyes closed.”
Giggling Leda Atomica tugs at the shoulders of her low-cut peasant blouse with the darling petit-point floral embroidery, trying to conceal the vertiginous depths of her cleavage, down which Doctor Miracle is attempting to pour flat champagne. What a ride this juicy brunette is having!
Leda had been toking roadside Albuquerque monoxide till 11:55 this Saturday night, thumb outstretched and skirt hiked up to midthigh, one high-heel foot perched on a little baby blue hand case with nylons and bra straps trailing from its crack. Earlier that day she’d parted ways with her employer, an Oakie named Gather. Leda’d been working at Gather’s juke joint as a waitress and as a performer. Gather had put her in this like act wherein she strutted on the bar in high heels while a trained swan untied the strings of her atom-girl costume, a cute leatherette two-piece with conical silver lame tit cups and black shorts patterned in intersecting friendly-atom ellipses. Sometimes the swan bit Leda, which really pissed her off. Saturday afternoon the swan had escaped from his pen, wandered out onto the road, and been mashed by a semi full of hogs.
“That was the only bird like that in Arizona,” yelled Gather. “Why dintcha latch the pen?”
“Maybe people would start payin’ to watch you lick my butt,” said Leda evenly. “It’s about all you’re good for, limp-dick.”
Et cetera.
Afternoon and early evening traffic was sparse. The drivers that did pass were all upstanding family men in sensible Plymouths, honest salesmen too tame for the tasty trouble Leda’s bod suggested.
Standing there at the roadside, Leda almost gave up hope. But then, just before midnight, the gloom parted and here came some kind of barrel-assing Necco-Wafer-colored Caddy!
When the radars hit Leda’s boobs and returned their echoes to the control mechanism, the cybernetic brain nearly had an aneurysm. Not trusting Lernmore’s promises, von Neumann had hard-wired the radars for just such a tramp-girl eventuality, coding hitchhiking Jane Russell T&A parameters into the electronic brain’s very circuits. The Caddy’s headlights started blinking like zfettah in a sandstorm, concealed sirens went off, and Roman candles mounted on the rear bumper discharged, shooting rainbow fountains of glory into the night.
“SKIRT ALERT!” whooped Doctor Miracle and Little Richard.
Before Leda knew what was happening, the cybernetic Caddy had braked at her exact spot. The rear door opened, Leda and her case were snatched on in, and the car roared off, the wind of its passage scattering the tumbleweeds.
Leda knew she was hooked up with some queer fellas as soon as she noticed the empty driver’s seat.
She wasn’t reassured by their habit of reciting backward all the signs they passed.
“Pots!”
“Egrem!”
“Sag!”
But soon Leda takes a shine to Doctor Miracle and Little Richard. Their personalities grow on her in direct proportion to the amount of bubbly she downs. By the time they hit Truth or Consequences, N.M., they’re scattin’ to the cool sounds of Wagner’s Nibelungenlied on the long-distance radio, and Johnny is trying to baptize her tits.
“Dleiy!” croons Doctor Miracle.
“Daeha thgil ciffart!” goes Lernmore, all weaseled in on Leda’s other side.
