Robert Coover - Public Burning

BERCEN: I can’t see one little reason why we should ask Marilyn Monroe to be in this skit with us, Charlie…

CHARLIE: I can see two pretty big ones, Bergen!

BERGEN: ( through the laughter ) Now, Charlie…!

CHARLIE: Say, Bergen…?

BERGEN: Yes, Charlie?

CHARLIE: That chair works by electricity, doesn’t it?

BERGEN: Yes.

CHARLIE: Well, what’ll happen if it doesn’t kill ’em? They’re only singers, you know, not conductors…

( Laughter and light applause. )

BERGEN: ( chuckling loosely ) Well, I don’t think you have to worry about that, Charlie. Even if they did survive the chair, there are other ways…

CHARLIE: You mean, there’s more than one way to cook a crook — I mean, juice a goose…!

( Laughter and appreciative applause. )

BERGEN: Yes, Charlie, only twenty-six states use electrocution. Thirteen prefer hanging, and eight use lethal gas.

CHARLIE: I get it, Bergen: you either yoke ’em, choke ’em, or coke ’em!

( Prolonged laughter and applause. )

BERGEN: Yes, that’s the idea, Charlie. But I confess I find it rather depressing to talk about it. Somehow, ever since I passed my fortieth birthday, I—

CHARLIE: Fortieth! The last time you passed forty, Bergen, they were still using Roman numerals!

BERGEN: ( through the laughter ) Now, Charlie…!

CHARLIE: Well, chin up, Bergen, we all have to go some time.

BERGEN: Yes, I suppose so…

CHARLIE: Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, sawdust to sawdust…

BERGEN: ( through the loose laughter ) Yes, well…

CHARLIE: When it comes my turn, Bergen, I hope they give me a choice. If I gotta croak, I don’t wanna be smoked, broke, soaked, or choked to death!

BERGEN: No? Then how—?

CHARLIE: I wanna be stroked to death, Bergen — by Marilyn Monroe!

BERGEN: ( through the uproar ) Charlie—!

The naughty boy who gets away with it, the old man who needn’t try, the dumb broad who doesn’t know what’s happened when it’s happened, plus a little danger, a little violence, anticipation and surprise: these are the things that open the Whale’s mouth. As when Buster Keaton, sitting deadpan in the electric chair, calmly turns and throws a custard pie at the Executioner just as he’s about to throw the switch: SPLAT! Some have contended that it was America’s love of pie-throwing that led the nation to develop the atomic bomb. This may or may not be true, but certainly it does help explain the country’s current panic over the possible proliferation of the bombs to unfriendly nations: it’s a cardinal rule of the act that one custard pie leads to another, and he who throws one must sooner or later face one coming from the other direction. Which is what’s happening to Buster Keaton right now, though he seems unaware of it. The Executioner, forgetting his office, has grabbed up another pie and is rearing back to hurl it at Keaton, who has meanwhile settled back in the chair to await, stonily, his electrocution. One foot, however, is loose from its strap, and after thinking about this foot for a moment, Keaton leans forward to buckle it in — just that split second before the pie would have hit him: it hits the prison chaplain instead. Buster, apparently oblivious to what’s happening at either side of him, satisfies himself that his foot is securely buckled to the chair, then sits back once more like a patient bridegroom to await the shock. But now the chaplain has a pie…

While this is going on, the countdown has begun—55 minutes to Zero Hour…54…53—and backstage there is a frenzied shuffling about as Betty Crocker, wielding a soup ladle, lines up all the bigwigs for their Grand Processional. All the major officials who are assigned, according to the Dead Sea statutes, “to attend to the burnt-offerings and the sacrifices, to set out the incense of ‘pleasant savor’ for God’s acceptance, to perform rites of atonement in behalf of His congregation, and constantly to clear away the fat ashes which lie before Him on the ‘table of glory,’” must now be introduced and guided to their respective places, and who better to set this table than America’s matron saint of the kitchen? Sprung full-formed and all buttoned up from the fat fertile head of General Mills in 1936, Betty is everything one would want in a Holy Mother: sober, efficient, old-fashioned, unblemished, bountiful, and the only undoubted virgin in all America (indeed, it’s been said she hasn’t even changed her corset since ’36), as protective as Athena, as merciful and mild as Mary, as resourceful as the pioneer women who settled America — she is, it could be said, their reincarnation. Her name, which sounds like bullfrogs burping on soft prairie nights, suggests crockery, Crockett, rocking chairs, rockets. “Betty” is a down-home version of traditional majesty, a country nickname for the Mother Country’s greatest monarch and now her newest one. A pie, flung from the stage into the wings, slaps the wall inches from her face, causing Cabinet members and their wives to shriek and duck, but Betty, unruffled, only gazes at it with her cool imperturbable blue eyes, sticks a finger in it and tastes the filling: mm, as she suspected, too much cornstarch.

Virtually every significant political figure in the nation is back here tonight, ready to go on, ready to demonstrate their wholehearted enthusiasm for Uncle Sam’s purification-by-fire spectacular…all but a few like Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black and Vice President Richard M. Nixon. Black, boycotting the show from his hospital bed, is a lousy loser, just about everybody’s given up on him long ago, but the absence of that old rocking socking Phantom-fighter and Early Warning Sentinel Dick Nixon is a more disturbing matter. Uncle Sam himself, backstage briefly during the Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland act, is heard to mutter: “Maybe a boxcar of pussyfooters woulda been better after all!” Which is all Harold Stassen needs: “I say, let’s dump the sonuvabitch! Nobody likes him anyway, he just drags us all down! I don’t want anything for myself, of course — I’m only thinking of what’s good for the country…” This provokes a lot of harsh nervous laughter, and the next time a pie comes flying into the wings, everybody ducks and lets Stassen take it on the snoot.

Out front meanwhile, a lot of famous people have had a go at the prize money, but the performers who steal the show (and anything else they can get their hands on) are the fabulous Marx Brothers. Partly it’s their act, catching the mood of the night; partly it’s the deep affection felt toward these local boys, downtrodden city Jews like the Rosenbergs, but without their crybaby ways; and partly it’s simply the astonishing cartoon resemblance Groucho and Harpo bear to Julius and Ethel — so real that people gasp when they first appear onstage, Harpo (Ethel) sitting in the electric chair and writing desperate letters to Groucho (Julius), which Chico (the Executioner) reads aloud in his Jewish-Italian accent as Groucho goes stalking restlessly about the set in his famous bent-kneed crouch, puffing a cigar and bobbing his eyebrows…

CHICO: “Canna we ever forget da turbulence and struggle, da joy and beauty uvva da early years of our relationship whenna you courted me?”

GROUCHO: I dunno, but we can try…

CHICO: “Togedder we hunted down da answers to alia da seemingly insoluble riddles w’ich a complex and callous society presented.”

GROUCHO: The answer’s a cracked egg.

CHICO: “It’sa because we did’n’ hesitate to blazon fort’ dose answers datta we sit wit’in da wallsa Sing Sing!”

GROUCHO: Loudmouth…

CHICO: “It’sa incredible dat I should sit in a cell inna Sing Sing awaitin’ my own legal murder, after da twelf’ yearsa da kinda principled, connastructive, wholesome livin’ dat we did!”