Читать онлайн «The Big U»

"WHEN I THINK OF THE MEN WHO WERE MY TEACHERS, I REALIZED THAT MOST OF THEM WERE SLIGHTLY MAD. THE MEN WHO COULD BE REGARDED AS GOOD TEACHERS WERE EXCEPTIONAL. IT'S TRAGIC TO THINK THAT SUCH PEOPLE HAVE THE POWER TO BAR A YOUNG MAN'S WAY. "

German political figure Adolf Hitler, 1889-1945 (from Hitler's Secret Conversations, 1941-44, translated by Norman Cameron and R. H. Stevens. )

I am indebted to the following people for the following things:

My parents for providing several kinds of support.

Edward Gibbon, for writing The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Julian Jaynes, for writing The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

William Blake and William Butler Yeats, for providing Pertinax with inspiration.

Kathrin Day Lassila, for numerous and thoughtful disagreements.

Gordon Lish, for the most productive rejection slip of all time.

Gary Fisketjon, for buying me a beer in Top Hat in Missoula, Montana, on July 1, 1983, and other services beyond the call of editorial duty.

The Go Big Red Fan

The Go Big Red Fan was John Wesley Fenrick's, and when ventilating his System it throbbed and crept along the floor with a rhythmic chunka-chunka-chunk. Fenrick was a Business major and a senior. From the talk of my wingmates I gathered that he was smart, yet crazy, which helped. The description weird was also used, but admiringly. His roomie, Ephraim Klein of New Jersey, was in Philosophy. Worse, he was found to be smart and weird and crazy, intolerably so on all these counts and several others besides.

As for the Fan, it was old and square, with a heavy rounded design suitable for the Tulsa duplex window that had been its station before John Wesley Fenrick had brought It out to the Big U with him. Running up one sky-blue side was a Go Big Red bumper sticker. When Fenrick ran his System— that is, bludgeoned the rest of the wing with a record or tape— he used the Fan to blow air over the back of the component rack to prevent the electronics from melting down. Fenrick was tall and spindly, with a turkey-like head and neck, and all of us in the east corridor of the south wing of the seventh floor of E Tower knew him for three things: his seventies rock-'n'-roll souvenir collection, his trove of preposterous electrical appliances, and his laugh— a screaming hysterical cackle that would ricochet down the long shiny cinderblock corridor whenever something grotesque flashed across the 45-Inch screen of his Video System or he did something especially humiliating to Ephraim Klein.