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"It's against the law in this state," Cagliostro intoned somberly, causing heads to turn. "And I would advise the young gentleman from Antioch to restrain his sense of humor in the future."
And don't marry Suzie from Red Lion
The second voice was-and-yet-wasn't Cagliostro's.
Mounty took quite a riding from the other students on their way back to Yellow Springs that night. "How did he know you were young?" "How did he know you were from Antioch-where was that in the code?" "Christ, a condom-you coulda got us all arrested." But nobody said anything about Suzie from Red Lion, Pe
It was as he had feared: nobody else had heard anything about a lion, or about Suzie.
It was simple logic, then. ESP is fraud. Hearing voices in your head is insanity. Mountbatten Babbit, he told himself, you are in need of psychiatric help.
But a psychiatric record would be a handicap in the career he already had mapped out for himself.
Self-control, then, was the answer. Nobody really goes bananas, after all, except weaklings.
A man like Mountbatten Babbit simply would not go mad.
But Mountbatten Babbit never did marry Suzie from Red Lion; there was a rather nasty war concluded with the exclamation point of a rather nasty bomb and then there was a marriage to a more suitably upward-mobile partner and eventually there was a title of Chief Engineer at Weishaupt Chemicals in Chicago. It was 1967 and he was no longer a brash young atheist-scientist but a middle-aged scientist-businessman who knew enough to keep his mouth shut about controversial issues and steadily feed a growing six-figure savings account. He had it made. If Cagliostro didn't keep getting in the newspapers for one shocking incident or another, Babbit might even have been able to forget the whole episode in which he had thought he might be going mad.
Then he crossed the boundary again.
A juvenile delinquent named Franklin Delano Roosevelt Stuart, from the black ghetto on the South Side, stole Mounty's car from in front of the Babbit residence in Rogers Park at precisely a moment when Mounty was looking out the window. In his trained and methodical way Mounty memorized fifteen details about the boy as he ran out the front door only to catch the briefest glimpse of the car zooming away (at least six feet, blue sweater with turtleneck, Afro hairstyle, very black skin, nose more Caucasian than Negroid, drives well, face more narrow than norm, high forehead, no beard, slim build to judge from shoulders, ring on left hand with green stone, clenched-fist button on sweater, earring in right ear, get more, damn there he goes around the corner…).
At the trial Mounty pronounced his positive identification in the same tones he used specifying materiel orders at Weishaupt Chemicals. The jury brought in a guilty verdict in five minutes.
That was the second time Mounty went mad.
For as the boy was led away Mounty glanced at him one more time and saw a blue halo form around his head just like in Catholic art.
Two weeks later he was promoted to Vice President of Weishaupt and began to see halos around random individuals in the street.
LED, LED, LED
If every case of aging can be corrected, we might all be Methuselahs, living 1,000 years or more.
–dr. robert prehoda, 1969
A Chinese named Wing Lee Chee was Cagliostro's closest friend in those early carnival days. Wing was the world's great master of karate, kung fu, aikido, and Comprehensive Advanced Machismo, but a gentle soul when not pushed too hard. In Bad Ass, Texas, he got pushed too hard by local cops, who objected to his use of the white toilet facilities at a gas station. They told him "A chink is just a yellowed-out nigger," roughed him up, and accidentally knocked his right eye out in their enthusiasm. At that point Wing lost his temper and was subsequently apprehended and quickly tried and convicted for the murder of four police officers.
Judge Draconic V. Wasp pronounced sentence in this wise: "Young feller, you've been tried and convicted and every man in this courtroom knows your guilt is as black as hell. I have no regret in passing sentence in such a case. Soon, you little bastard, it will be spring and the robin will sing again, the flowers will bud, little children will laugh on their way to school-and you will hear and know nothing of that, for you will be dead, dead, dead.
You chink bastard. Sheriff, take the yellow son-of-a-bitch out and hang him."
Wing Lee Chee received this with no show of emotion, but then he arose and addressed the court in a steady and terrible voice. "As I rook upon the whiskey-fogged faces of judge and July in the tlavesty of a civirized coult," he said, "I know furr werr that I was foorish to ever expect justice from such degenelates. You, Judge Wasp, speak of the sweet singing of lobins in the spling and the brooming of the prants, but what can you know of the gleat Tao that moves arr of us, you four-mouthed, cunt-ricking, donkey-fucking led-neck? You desclibe the gentre voices of chirden, you glafting, thieving, monkey-faced, frat-nosed idiot offspring of a feebre-minded goat by pulple-plicked baboon! What do you know of the i
It is said that nineteen peace officers were torn limb from limb in the course of the hanging of Wing Lee Chee.
FRANK. But he was hanged anyway.
ERNEST: But they knew they had hanged a man.
FRANK: Like hell. They thought they'd just hanged a crazy gook.
THE VALUE OF THE CONTENT
When a people begin to cut down their trees without making any provision for reforestation, you may be sure it is a sign of the begi
–furbish lousewart V, Unsafe Wherever You Go
In the weeks following the car theft in 1968, Mounty Babbit's luck at poker became so pronounced that he had to start losing by deliberation on occasion to avoid the suspicion of cheating. Halos were everywhere on earth; UFOs everywhere above.
I am a genuine mad scientist, Mounty Babbit thought. Well, nobody is ever going to know about it.
Then, a month later, it all passed. He didn't know what cards the other poker players had, and he wasn't seeing halos. He moved his family to Evanston, settled into his new job as Vice President at Weishaupt Chemicals, worked actively for the Nixon-Agnew campaign, and finally quit smoking.
The pickets outside the walls of Weishaupt Chemicals (which was now the nation's second-largest producer of napalm) were the only harassment in an otherwise perfectly satisfactory life.
The Invasion (as he came to call it) began in early 1969. He was driving home from work, came off Lake Shore Drive onto Sheridan, crossed the Howard Street border into Evanston, and noted a large billboard with an eye atop a pyramid. A teaser campaign, he thought. The reverse side of the dollar bill. After a month or so of making people wonder, the advertisers would add their slogan. Probably another Friendly Loan Company.
The next morning he awoke in total horror. He recalled the symptoms from some of the psychology books he had read back when he had feared for his sanity. The Activation Syndrome: thirst, rapid heartbeat, dizzy wobbles- the body preparing for emergency. What emergency? He couldn't remember anything from the previous evening.