The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [211]
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