• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1310 0

the only time in history that he sang the entire lyric) and attempted to begin a round of “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall” (nobody wanted to play along) and told all present that in 1982 he hoped to have enough money to transport an audience around the world. Then, at five o’clock, he returned with seven people to the temporary offices George had set up at the Sheraton City Squire Hotel and told George, “These are the last ones.” And he gave them cookies and milk and went back to his hotel, the Lombardi, where he meditated and then spent the next two nights having sex with Anna the nice hooker.

11

They call me a madman now. That would be a distinct rise in my social position were it not that they still regard me as being ridiculous as ever. But that does not make me angry any more. They are all dear to me now even while they laugh at me—yes, even then they are for some reason particularly dear to me. I shouldn’t have minded laughing with them—not at myself, of course, but because I love them—had I not felt so sad as I looked at them. I feel sad because they do not know the truth, whereas I know it. Oh, how hard it is to be the only man to know the truth!

—Fyodor Dostoyevsky,

The Dream of a Ridiculous Man

George called him an extremist. And he was that. And he became that even more so. He became an extremely extreme extremist. And this would cause much undoing, wherein excess would breed ruin, wherein appetite for whim would devour him. He would sate and sate himself until poison seeped inside—and, although he did not feel it there and could not know it was there, it was there. The eyeglow became red-rimmed and bloodshot and it flickered and dimmed. Fewer and fewer were fooled and fewer still would care to be. Innocence was more elusive than ever. Innocence had become a game of chase and he would have to chase harder to win and he would often bore of that chase and maybe he couldn’t win now, anyway. He had tasted conquest but there was never enough and his idea of conquest did not tend to resemble that of others. Already every one of his heartdreams and boydreams and camera-in-wall-dreams had, more or less, come true—so he had to conjure new ones and these new ones inspired other new ones, larger ones, and the larger they were, the darker they seemed to everyone but him. Now more than ever—for reasons he did not try to comprehend—speed was essential. Thus darkness fell in quick serial thuds and it was, um, fun.

Movies had become the business of primary concern, the next logical career step—as exemplified by the successful crossovers of contemporaries like Chevy Chase (Foul Play), John Belushi (National Lampoon’s Animal House), and Steve Martin (The Jerk). And so three weeks after Carnegie Hall, he began rehearsals in Los Angeles for his role as the corrupt megalomaniacal televangelist Armageddon T. Thunderbird in the Marty Feldman religious satire In God We Tru$t. But he had actually started practicing well before that. He had worked the shimmering rants of Thunderbird into his act, slipping into a white bouffant wig during various March college and club dates, and invoked the wrath of the Lord before congregants who had come to see him do Elvis. In New York, he had stood under an umbrella in front of Carnegie Hall, disguised in the wig plus Groucho Marx nose and mustache, clutching a hotel Bible and screaming at passersby—“I know why it’s raining! It’s raining because the Lord is crying! And he wants you all to buy umbrellas!” He then pointed to a poster advertising his forthcoming concert and declared, “This man should not be allowed onstage! He has no talent; he’s an impostor! He should not be allowed in Carnegie Hall; I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I should be in Carnegie Hall!” (“Most people thought I was a crazy umbrella salesman.”) He flew to London following the concert and positioned himself every afternoon for a week on a soapbox at Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park and told British pedestrians that he was God and argued to unify time zones around the world so it wouldn’t be necessary to always have to