Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

This also happened to be 1998, and when I wasn’t watching movies on it the TV had turned into little else but a window gazing onto the sordid vista of the president’s sexual liaisons, specifically his dalliances with a plump young thing who stood accused of repeatedly fellating our commander in chief and allowing him to insert a cigar into one or more of her orifices. There he was on television, rosy-faced, butt-nosed and silver-haired, sheepishly shrugging, denying all, as if he was not his nation’s leader but rather her philandering husband caught with the babysitter. Leon and I watched in amusement as the news played and replayed footage of Bill Clinton assuring us that he did not have sexual relations with that woman. Leon had just returned from Artie’s, where he had picked up a double order of shrimp and a bottle of wine. The shrimp were nestled in a Styrofoam container in the lap of the terry-cloth bathrobe Leon usually wore while at leisure. Between cramming fistfuls of shrimp into his cheeks, Leon drank wine in gulps and shouted at the TV.

“Damn-blast it!” he roared. “Why does the Supreme Court get in such a tizzy when the president receives a blowjob? And why does he not simply say, ‘Leave me alone, get your own blowjobs!’? Really, Bruno. This whole business is so mind-bogglingly insipid. It’s nothing short of a sexual crucifixion. They may as well nail his penis to a cross. Think about JFK, for God’s sake. His sexual goings-on make Bill Clinton look like a fifties teenager groping in the back of a Plymouth convertible.”

I wasn’t entirely sure what the Supreme Court was.

“Gadzooks, Bruno, your education is riddled with holes!”

I didn’t deny it. It wasn’t my fault. As I’ve said, this is the curse of the autodidact.

“What’s the Supreme Court?” I demanded.

“I’m no civics teacher, but I shall do my best: the Supreme Court is a panel of political whores. You see, there are such things in our government as checks and balances. That’s why we have three branches of government: the executive, the legislative, and the judgmental. When I was a child, my teachers made it abundantly clear to me that this was why I was lucky to have been born in America. I supposed that British royals were as nasty as my grade school teachers, and so the Queen might see me walking to school one day and say, ‘I don’t like the looks of that boy. Cut his head off!’ Whereas here, even if both houses of Congress voted unanimously to have my head cut off, the Supreme Court could intervene. And that’s checks and balances. Now do you understand?”

A commercial came on. It was a commercial advertizing a certain brand of mobile telephones, which were at the time ascending to widespread popularity. The commercial opened with a shot of a theatre, an expectantly hushed audience sitting before a red velvet curtain. The curtains raised and parted, and what followed was a version of Romeo and Juliet abbreviated to thirty seconds because all the characters had cellular phones. The joke was that wireless communication technology speeds things up. Leon was appalled. He threw a shrimp at the TV, which briefly stuck to the screen before sliding off, leaving a wet mark.

“Of course these cellular telephones speed up communication! Why the blazes would you want to do that , you vicious bastards? The whole blasted plot of Romeo and Juliet —nay, of all great literature! — I daresay hinges on miscommunication. Flawed information, crossed signals, late and undelivered messages! What these infernal things are doing is paving over all the beautiful mountains and valleys of confusion in the landscape of human society! It’s disgusting! I’m sure that in a few years every idiot on the street will be puttering around like a somnambulist with one of these hideous devices nailed to his ear. And then we will at long last have entered the final phase of the decay of human civilization. Once everyone owns a cellular telephone, great literature will no longer be written, due to the end of miscommunication.”

“Perhaps,” I offered, “the advent of cell phones will not eliminate miscommunication, but simply speed it up. Much more efficient.”

“Curses! To hell with efficiency! To hell with convenience! To hell with communication! What kind of future are we making for ourselves, Bruno? What is this great supposed virtue we attach to these values — efficiency, convenience, communication? These are not human virtues — these are the debauched virtues of commerce ! It’s a shopkeeper’s virtue! Listen, Bruno!” Leon gingerly brushed his long hair back with his fingertips and cupped a hand to his ear. “Listen,” he whispered.

“What?”

“ Shh .” Leon’s voice sank to a stage whisper: “I hear something! I hear something occurring outside the sanctum of our little home.”

“I don’t hear anything.”

Leon raised his voice to full theatric boom: “Listen, Bruno, and despair , for what I hear is the flaccid language of business osmotically replacing every syllable of poetry still alive in the human heart!”

“Oh.”

“To hell with it all!” he thundered at the TV, waving his glass of wine in the air in front of him so histrionically that some of it slopped into the lap of his bathrobe. “Give me miscommunication! Give me confusion! Give me a world rife enough with errata to fuel the great tragedies of bygone eras! Where has the tragedy gone in our world? Tell me that! Everything is comedy! And you cannot truly appreciate comedy if you suck all the tragic out of life. Just look at this buffoon who lives in our TV. I mean our ‘president,’ Bruno. Look at him: he knows this is all mere comedy! Yes, he faces impeachment and so on, oh yes, you naughty boy, you’re really in trouble this time! But you can see that thin mask of concern on his face only scarcely conceals a smirk. A smirk ! Inside, he’s thinking, ‘Tiddly-dee, this whole thing is actually funny.’ And, devil take him, he’s right ! It is funny! ‘That’s right — acts of fellatio have been administered in this very office! Beneath this desk! What do you think of that, America? Aren’t you just a little jealous of your alpha male in chief? That’s right — suck it, America!’ We live in an age of comic unreality. Nothing’s real to us. It’s all jokes. I am sure — mark my word, Bruno — I’m sure some great tragedy is quietly brewing beneath it all. Go ahead and laugh, America, laugh your moronic heads off. But when tragedy befalls us — which it invariably must, for all our cellular telephones and World Wide Web sites have not jammed a very stick in the Rota Fortunae —when it happens, we will all be so sick and stupid from years of laughing that we won’t have a clue how to behave. Only then can true comedy begin again. We need tragedy to show us what’s really funny. Oh, God!” Leon turned his eyes to the ceiling in wistful abandon. “To live in an earlier world! I would put up with the horseshit! Really!”

After over a week my period of convalescence came to an end. After the first few days the swelling went down, my two black eyes healed, and a few days after that the pain had decreased from grating to almost bearable. A few days later I removed my bandages.

I waited until Leon was out of the house. I don’t remember where he was, maybe on a wine-and-donut run. I wanted to be alone with my nose. I climbed up on my little stepladder that led to the bathroom sink and stood before the mirror. The middle section of my face — just below my eyes, just above my mouth — was covered in bandages. I snipped at it with Leon’s plastic-handled children’s safety scissors, and gradually unpeeled the bandages from my face. Then I unraveled them in fistfuls. The bandages were sticky and wet on the inside and darkly mottled with dried blood. The bandages dropped to the bathroom floor, flap, flap, flap . The bandages smelled bad. The flesh of my face was wet and wrinkled from marinating in sweat under the bandages for a week.