John Toole - A Confederacy of Dunces

Until later,

Gary, Your Militant Working Boy

Dr. Talc lit a Benson and Hedges, looking out of the window of his office in the Social Studies Building. Across the dark campus he saw some lights from the night classes in other buildings. All night he had been ransacking his desk for his notes on the British monarch of legend, notes hurriedly copied from a hundred-page survey of British history that he had once read in paperback. The lecture was to be given tomorrow, and it was now almost eight-thirty. As a lecturer Dr. Talc was renowned for the facile and sarcastic wit and easily disgested generalizations that made him popular among the girl students and helped to conceal his lack of knowledge about almost everything in general and British history in particular.

But even Talc realized that his reputation for sophistication and glibness would not save him in the face of his being unable to remember absolutely anything about Lear and Arthur aside from the fact that the former had some children. He put his cigarette in the ashtray and began on the bottom drawer again. In the rear of the drawer there was a stack of old papers that he had not examined very thoroughly during his first search through the desk. Placing the papers in his lap, he thumbed through them one by one and found that they were, as he had imagined, principally unreturned essays that had accumulated over a period of more than five years. As he turned over one essay, his eye fell upon a rough, yellowed sheet of Big Chief tablet paper on which was printed with a red crayon:

Your total ignorance of that which you profess to teach merits the death penalty. I doubt whether you would know that St. Cassian of Imola was stabbed to death by his students with their styli. His death, a martyr’s honorable one, made him a patron saint of teachers.

Pray to him, you deluded fool, you “anyone for tennis?” golf-playing, cocktail-quaffing pseudo-pedant, for you do indeed need a heavenly patron. Although your days are numbered, you will not die as a martyr—for you further no holy cause—but as the total ass which you really are.

ZORRO

A sword was drawn on the last line of the page.

“Oh, I wonder whatever happened to him,” Talc said aloud.

Mattie’s Ramble Inn was on a corner in the Carrollton section of the city where, after having run parallel for six or seven miles, St. Charles Avenue and the Mississippi River meet and the avenue ends. Here an angle is formed, the avenue and its streetcar tracks on one side, the river and levee and railroad tracks on the other. Within this angle there is a separate little neighborhood. In the air there is always the heavy, cloying odor of the alcohol distillery on the river, an odor that becomes suffocating on hot summer afternoons when the breeze blows in from the river. The neighborhood grew haphazardly a century or so ago and today looks hardly urban at all. As the city’s streets cross St. Charles Avenue and enter this neighborhood, they gradually change from asphalt to gravel. It is an old rural town that has even a few barns, an alienated and microcosmic village within a large city.

Mattie’s Ramble Inn looked like all the buildings on its block; it was low, unpainted, imperfectly vertical. Mattie’s rambled slightly to the right, tilting toward the railroad tracks and the river. Its façade was almost invulnerable, covered as it was with tin advertising posters for a variety of beers and cigarettes and soft drinks. Even the screen on the door advertised a brand of bread. Mattie’s was a combination bar and grocery, the grocery aspect limited to a sparse selection of goods, soft drinks, bread, and canned foods for the most part. Beside the bar there was an ice chest that cooled a few pounds of pickled meat and sausage. And there was no Mattie; Mr. Watson, the quiet, tan, cafe au lait owner, had sole authority over the restricted merchandise.

“The problem come from not havin no vocation skill,” Jones was saying to Mr. Watson. Jones was perched on a wooden stool, his legs bent under him like ice tongs ready to pick up the stool and boldly carry it away before Mr. Watson’s old eyes. “If I had me some trainin I wouldn be moppin no old whore flo.”

“Be good,” Mr. Watson answered vaguely. “Be well behave with the lady.”

“Wha? Ooo-wee. You don understan at all, man. I got a job workin with a bird. How you like workin with a bird?” Jones aimed some smoke over the bar. “I mean, I’m glad that girl gettin a chance. She been workin for that Lee mother a long time. She need a break. But I bet that bird be makin more money than me. Whoa!”

“Be nice, Jones.”

“Whoa! Hey, you really been brainwash,” Jones said. “You ain got nobody to come in and mop your flo. How come? Tell me that.”

“Don’t get yourself in no trouble.”

“Hey! You soun just like the Lee mother. Too bad you two ain met. She love you. She say, ‘Hey, boy, you the kinda fool oldtimey nigger I been lookin for all my life.’ She say, ‘Hey, you so sweet, how’s about waxin my floor and paintin my wall? You so darlin, how’s about scrubbin my tawlet and polishin my shoe?’ And you be sayin, ‘Yes, ma’m, yes, ma’m. I’m well behave.’ And you be bustin your ass fallin off a chandelier you been dustin and some other whore frien of her comin in so they can compare they price, and Lee star throwin some nickel at your feet and say, ‘Hey boy, that sure a lousy show you puttin on. Han us back them nickel before we call a po-lice.’ Ooo-wee.”

“Didn that lady say she call a po-lice if you give her trouble?”

“She got me there. Hey! I think that Lee got some connection with the po-lice. She all the time tellin me about her frien on the force. She say she got such a high class place a po-lice never stick a foot in her door.” Jones formed a thundercloud over the little bar. “She operatin somethin with that orphan crap, though. As soon as somebody like Lee say, ‘Chariddy,’ you know they somethin crooker in the air. And I know they somethin wron cause all of a sudden the Head Orphan stop showin up cause I’m axing plenty question. Shit! I like to fin out what goin on. I tire of bein caught in a trap payin me twenny dollar a week, workin with a bird as big as a eagle. I wanna get someplace, man. Whoa! I want me a air condition, some color TV, sit around drinkin somethin better than beer.”

“You want another beer?”

Jones looked at the old man through his sunglasses and said, “You tryina sell me another beer, a poor color boy bustin his ass for twenny dollar a week? I think i’ about time you gimme a free beer with all the money you make sellin pickle meat and sof drink to po color peoples. You sen you boy to college with the money you been makin in here.”

“He a schoolteacher now,” Mr. Watson said proudly, opening a beer.

“Ain that fine. Whoa! I never go to school more than two year in my life. My momma out washing other people clothin, ain nobody talkin about school. I spen all my time rollin tire aroun the street. I’m rollin, momma washin, nobody learnin nothin. Shit! Who lookin for a tire roller to give them a job? I end up gainfully employ workin with a bird, got a boss probly sellin Spanish fly to orphan. Ooo-wee.”

“Well, if conditions really bad…”

“‘Really bad’? Hey! I’m workin in modren slavery. If I quit, I get report for bein vagran. If I stay, I’m gainfully employ on a salary ain even startin to be a minimal wage.”

“I tell you what you can do,” Mr. Watson said confidentially; leaning over the bar and handing Jones the beer. The other man at the bar bent toward them to listen; he had been silently following their conversation for several minutes. “You try you a little sabotage. That’s the only way you fight that kinda trap.”