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By Root 1246 0

that de church was de market, and that de man was talking to him, you know, because de man say Jesus and de little boy his name was Jesus. Do you understand?) Tenk you veddy much. And then there was the one about the four men on de aeroplane and it was going to, um, sink, so the men needed to get out and so the first man, from Texas, jumps and, as he does, he says “Remember the Alamo!” And the next man, from France, jumps and says “Vive la France!” So eet was only a man from England and a man from New York. So de man from England push out de man from New York. And as he push him, he say … eehh, something dat was very funny, but I don’t remember what eet was. But but eet was very funny. Tenk you veddy much!

On May 23 (2:00 A.M.), he had begun to diagram on five-by-eight index cards many strange and ambitious new ideas for the act, first inventorying the plethora of people who lived within him and his various plans for each—BRITISH MAN (reads book, is interrupted by dissatisfied audience, continues reading, is humiliated, closes book); TONY CLIFTON (raps, “funny” stories, sings Charlie Brown, women’s lib argument, threatened by husband, punched down by lady); LAUGHING MAN (comes out, laughs, tries to speak, raps about kids these days, takes encores & begs off); FOREIGN MAN (tells jokes, stories, Mighty Mouse, Conga Drums, retires from show business > Crying—OR becomes Elvis); BLISS NINNY (talks nice—I love you all, etc., repeat after me: Hello trees, etc., Oohhh); DUMB MAN; PRESIDENT (?); SLEEPING MAN (?); BORED ANGRY MAN; NEBBISH MAN (funny pathetic voice); PARANOID COMEDIAN; SOUTHERN MAN (cowboy country singer); DRUNK (?); WRESTLERS; CRYING MAN; NERVOUS MAN (wears earplugs, can’t stand noise); CRAB (cigar-smoking, thick-lipped grouch); THE TELEVISION (have a TV character pop out of screen and become live—maybe the bad guy). This last would require greater technical advancement than had been developed by 1974, especially for nightclub stages—but a mad visionary appeared to be at work. And for the next three weeks, in the hours just before sunrise, he drew up plot-twist scenarios that placed these people onstage, one after the other, and sometimes all at once, and sometimes all of them coming through the television screen, and sometimes getting into wrestling matches with each other, or appearing on a mock Dating Game, and there would be Applause & Reaction signs that lit up (at inappropriate times so as to goad audiences) and an anticlimax wherein character unresolved yet forgotten (possibly disliked by audience) returns to be resolved, or else there could also even be an onstage Tornado changing everyone’s lives in the middle (or maybe end).

Certain people inside him had been showing up in clubs by now—not with him or anywhere near him, because he wasn’t there when they were, which came to be understood when they did not respond to conspiratorial winks or hey Andys. Tony Clifton was making himself known, as was British Man, whose clipped accent faltered as often as his starched readings of The Great Gatsby—British Man was, for reasons unknown, a proponent of Great American Literature. “He would start by reading all the copyright information and small print in the front of the book,” said Rick Newman. “The crowd would seem amused at first, then as he kept reading and got two pages into the first chapter, some people would get up to leave. But he wanted that.” A protracted negotiation with the audience ever ensued, during which a rattled British Man always tried to press on through the indignation—“Everyone would go booooo boooooo,” he later explained. “And I’d say, ‘Now, look! If you’re not quiet, I will have to close the book and forget about the whole thing!’ And there would be cheers. Um, you know, I would just do it for their reactions.” (Years afterward, a false legend circulated that he had read the entire book to an audience in Fairfield, Iowa—home of Maharishi International University—because the Midwestern bliss people were simply too polite to leave. In fact, he rarely finished the first chapter anywhere, much