Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [19]
“Her living room had a cathedral ceiling, which is to say it went all the way up to the roof peak, with rustic rafters spanning the air space below.” Trout paused. It was as though he were as caught up in the tale as his father must have been.
He went on, there in the suite named in honor of the suicide Ernest Hemingway: “She was a widow, and he stripped himself naked while she went to fetch some of her husband’s clothes. But before he could put them on, the police were hammering on the front door with their billy clubs. So the fugitive hid on top of a rafter. When the woman let in the police, though, his oversize testicles hung down in full view.”
Trout paused again.
“The police asked the woman where the guy was. The woman said she didn’t know what guy they were talking about,” said Trout. “One of the cops saw the testicles hanging down from a rafter and asked what they were. She said they were Chinese temple bells. He believed her. He said he’d always wanted to hear Chinese temple bells.
“He gave them a whack with his billy club, but there was no sound. So he hit them again, a lot harder, a whole lot harder. Do you know what the guy on the rafter shrieked?” Trout asked me.
I said I didn’t.
“He shrieked, ‘TING-A-LING, YOU SON OF A BITCH!’ ”
15
The Academy should have moved its staff and treasures to a safer neighborhood when the Museum of the American Indian did so with its genocide mementos. It was still stuck way-the-hell-and-gone uptown, amid nothing but people with lives not worth living for miles in every direction, because its dwindling and demoralized membership couldn’t bestir itself to OK a move.
To be perfectly frank, the only people who cared what became of the Academy were its staff, office workers, cleaning and maintenance people, and armed guards. Nor were most of them enraptured by old-fashioned art practices. They needed the jobs, no matter how pointless the work might be, and so were reminiscent of people during the Great Depression of the 1930s, who celebrated when they got any kind of work at all.
Trout characterized the sort of work he was able to get back then as “cleaning birdshit out of cuckoo clocks.”
The Academy’s Executive Secretary certainly needed the work. Monica Pepper, who looked so much like my sister Allie, was the sole support of herself and her husband Zoltan, whom she had rendered hors de combat with a swan dive. So she had fortified the building by replacing the wooden front door with half-inch steel armorplate, fitted with a whoozit, or peephole, which could also be closed and locked.
She had done all she could to make the place look as abandoned and looted as the ruins of Columbia University two miles to the south. The windows, like the front door, were shuttered with steel, and the shutters were concealed in turn by rough plywood painted black and camouflaged with graffiti, which ran continuously across the whole façade. The staff had done the garish artwork. Monica herself had spray-painted “FUCK ART!” in orange and purple across the steel front door.
It so happened that an African-American armed guard named Dudley Prince was looking out through that door’s whoozit when Trout put “The Sisters B-36” in the trash receptacle out front. Bums interacting with the receptacle were no novelty, God knows, but Trout, whom Prince mistook for a bag lady rather than a bag gentleman, put on an unusual show out there.
Here’s the thing about Trout’s appearance from a distance: Instead of trousers, he wore three layers of thermal underwear, revealing the shapes of his calves below the hem of his unisex war-surplus Navy overcoat. Yes, and he wore sandals rather than boots, another seemingly feminine touch, as was his babushka, fashioned from a crib blanket printed with red balloons and blue teddy bears.
Trout was out there talking to and gesturing at the lidless wire basket as though it were an editor in an old-fashioned book-publishing house, and as though his four-page handwritten yellow manuscript