“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?’ “
Chapter 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 presto!, 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:
[graphic of a badge bearing the Amercian flag and the words “Lonesome No More!”]
Chapter 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 He, far upstream from now, in which I received a chatty letter from the President of my country, who happened to be me. Like any other citizen, I had keen 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 be 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.
Chapter 36
WAS there 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:
[graphic of a badge bearing the Amercian flag and the words “Lonesome Thank God!”]
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.