APRIL / 1 MAY YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT 3 page

FREAK STATUE OF LIBERTY ACCIDENT KILLS FED ENGINEER — Header; BRAVE MAN ON CRANE CRUSHED BY 5 TON CAST IRON BURGER — 12-point Subheader; GENTLE PROMISES SKEPTICAL CUB SCOUT CONVENTION ‘YOU’LL BE ABLE TO EAT RIGHT OFF’ TERRITORIAL U.S. BY END OF TERM’S FIRST YEAR — Header; ANOTHER LOVE CANAL? — 24-point Superheader; TOXIC HORROR ACCIDENTALLY UNCOVERED IN UPSTATE NEW HAMPSHIRE — 16-point Header-sized Subheader; ‘New Hampshire environmental officials yesterday flatly denied that vast collections of drums leaking industrial solvents, chlorides, benzenes and oxins had been quote “stumbled on” by 18 federal EPA staffers playing a casual game of softball east of Berlin, NH, claiming instead that the corroded receptacles had been placed there against statute by large men with white body suits and short haircuts in long shiny trailer trucks with O.N.A.N.’s official crest, a sombreroed eagle with a maple leaf in its mouth, stencilled on the sides. In the nation’s capital, a quote “full and energetic investigation” has been promised by the Gentle administration into claims by residents of Berlin, NH and Rumford, ME that the incidence of soft-skulled and extra-eyed newborns in the toxicly affected area far exceeds the national average.’ — $3.75 U.S. Nightly-Rental News Cartridge Anchor Lead; SUB ROSA FUSION-IN-POISONOUS-ENVIRONMENT TEST SITE ALLEGED AT MONTPELIER, VT — Scientific North American Header; MY BABY HAS SIX EYES AND BASICALLY NO SKULL — Lurid Color 32-point Tabloid Header, Dateline Lancaster NH;FED EPA SOFTBALLERS ALLEGE TWO MORE ‘POISONOUS WASTE HORRORFEST’ ILLEGAL DUMP SITES ‘STUMBLED OVER’ NEAR NORTH SYRACUSE, HISTORIC TICONDEROGA — NYC Daily Header; THE FINE ART OF FEDERAL STUMBLING: A WHOLE LOT OF SOFTBALL GOING ON — Editorial Header in Syracuse NY’s Post-Standard;CANADIAN P.M. DENIES SECRET MINIATURE GOLF OUTING WITH OUTRAGED NEW ENGLAND GOVS — Surprisingly Small 3rd-Page 10-point Header;GENTLE SHOCKER — Pearl-Harbor-Sized 32-point Super-superheader Almost Too Big to Read Clearly; MAYFLOWER, RED BALL, ALLIED, U-HAUL STOCKS SOAR — 16-point Financial Daily Subheader; TWO NORTHEAST GOVS HOSPITALIZED FOR INFARCTION, ANEURISM — 10-point Subheader; GENTLE DECLARES ALL U.S. TERRITORY NORTH OF LINE FROM SYRACUSE TO TICONDEROGA, NY, TICONDEROGA, NY TO SALEM, MA FEDERAL DISASTERS, OFFERS FEDERAL AID FOR UPSTATE AND NEW ENGLAND RESIDENTS WISHING TO RELOCATE, CLAIMS FUNDS FOR EPA CLEAN-UP ‘ARE NOT WITHIN THE MAP OF WHAT’S POSSIBLE’ [SIC] — Header from Chemically Over-Garrulous Headliner Eventually Fired Even from Sub-header Dept. for Exceeding Verbal Parameters and Now Starting to Get in the Same Hot Water All Over Again at a Much Less Prestigious Daily Paper; and so on and so forth. Himself’s old optical editing lab has imposing Compugraphic typesetting and matteing facilities: it’s hard to tell which of the headlines and other stuff are for real and which have been dickied with, usually, if you’re too young to recall the actual chronology. At least some of the headlines are phony, the kids know; miniature golf indeed. But the accuracy of Mario’s puppeteered account of the seminal meeting of what’s come to be known as ‘The Concavity Cabinet’ gets to stand uncontested by fact. Nobody who wasn’t actually there at the 16 January meeting knows just what was said when or by whom, the Gentle administration being of the position that extant Oval Office recording equipment was a veritable petri dish of organisms. Gentle’s claque of doo-wopping Motown cabinet-puppets have purple dresses and matching lipstick and nail polish, and bouffants so blindingly Afrosheened that there had been special lighting and film-speed problems in the custodial closet:

SEC. TREAS.: You’re looking vigorous and hale today, sir. GENTLE: Hhhaaahh Hhhuuuhh Hhhaaahh Hhhuuuhh. PRES. MEX./SEC. MEX./V-C O.N.A.N.: May I ask, Señor, why my distinguished co-Vice Chair of O.N.A.N. is not with us in attendance today. GENTLE: Hhhaaahh Hhhuuuhh. MR. RODNEY TINE, CHIEF, U.S. OFFICE OF UNSPECIFIED SERVICES: The president’s taking a little pure oxygen today, boys, and has authorized me as his oral proxy on this may I say historically opportune day. The Canadian P.M.’s in a bit of a snit. He prefers to whinge in the media surrounded by Mounted Reserves and is off somewhere far from Québec in a Kevlar vest doing whatever the Canadian word is for pouting, doubtless poring over opinion polls prepared by chinless guys in Canadian hornrims. MEX. AND SOME OTHER SECS.: [Various puzzled apprehensive noises.] TINE: I’m sure you’ve all been briefed on the unprecedented but not unopportune crisis that obtains north of the almost perfectly horizontal line between Buffalo and Northeast Mass. TINE arranges photos on seal-crested easels: a New Hampshire runoff-ditch running off stuff a color nobody’s quite ever seen before; a wide-angle horizon-stretching vista of skull-embossed drums, with short-haired guys in white body-suits walking around adjusting knobs and reading dials on shiny hand-held devices; a very weird chemical sunrise, close in hue to the Cabinet members’ lipstick, over some forests in southern Maine that look way taller and generally lusher than January forests ought properly to be; a couple indoor-lit snapshots of a multi-eyed infant crawling backwards, its ear to the carpet, dragging its shapeless head like a sack of spuds. The last display’s a real heartstringplucker. ALL SECS.: [Various concerned and sympathetic noises.]GENTLE: Hhhaaahh Hhhuuuhh.TINE: Gentlemen, let the president just say that no one’s prepared to say they’re quite sure what’s happened, or just which quote unquote loyal part of the Union or Organization might reasonably be said to be culpable, but it’s not the administration’s immediate concern to point the levelling finger of blame or aspersion just yet or right now. Our concern is to act, to respond, and act and respond decisively. Swiftly. And decisively. SEC. INT.: We’ve come up with some extremely preliminary projections on the costs of detoxifying and/or deradiating the better part of four U.S. states, sir, and I have to tell you gentlemen that even with the atmosphere of uncertainty at this point in time of not yet having a definitive handle on just what kinds and combinations of compounds were — umm — found there and how wide your — not ‘your’ personally, sir, J.G., ‘your’ just being a shorthand way for — to say something like I suppose simply ‘the’ — how wide the dispersal- and toxicity-parameters are shaping up to look — umm — I have to relate that the figures we’re looking at are almost staggeringly multi-zeroed, sir, gentlemen. TINE: Tighten in and expand on staggering if you will, Blaine. SEC. INT.: We’re talking at bare minimum a staggering amount of Private-Sector-caliber guys in white suits and helmets, not unlike your own helmet, sir, with a commensurately massive tab for the suits and helmets, plus gloves and throwaway booties, and a lot of really shiny equipment with a great many knobs and dials. Sir. GENTLE: Hhhaaahh Hhhuuuhh.TINE: Gentlemen, let’s pay the president the due tribute of proceeding right to the bone of the matter. I think the president’s position is rendered patently clear by the pure oxygen he’s been forced to take here with us today. No way we can possibly permit territory publicly exposed as this befouled and waste-impacted to continue to besmirch the already tight and tidier territory of a new era’s U.S. of A. The president shudders at the mere thought. Just the mere thought of it forces him to resort to oxygen. PRES. MEX./SEC. MEX./V-C O.N.A.N.: I do not anticipate what options your federal and our continental government might consider options to this permitting, señors. OTHER SECS.: [Tentative puzzled nods and slightly off-key agreement-noises.]TINE: Having been elected and conferred with a mandate on the clear and public anti-waste platform of the C.U.S.P., the president is inexorably driven to see the only viable option being to give it away. SEC. STATE: Give it away?TINE: Expressly.SEC. STATE: You mean simply tell the truth? That Johnny’s C.U.S.P. platform necessitates — given the unfeasibility of shooting national wastes into space, since NASA hasn’t put a successful launch on in over a decade and the rockets simply fall over and blow up and become more waste — that — given the amount of additional waste annular fusion’s start-up is going to start putting in circulation the minute start-up commences — that his platform all but necessitates the second-tier option of transforming certain vast stretches of U.S. territory into uninhabitable and probably barbed-wired landfills and fly-shrouded dumps and saprogenic magenta-fogged toxic-disposal sites? Concede publicly that those EPA softball games weren’t casual or pick-up in the least? That you allowed Rod the God here to convince you ¹⁵⁶ to authorize Unspecified Services to undertake massive toxic dumping and skull-softening against local statute for basically the same hard-choice, Greater-Good-of-the-Union reasons that prompted Lincoln to suspend the Constitution and jail Confederate activists without charge for the duration of the last great U.S. territorial crisis? And/or not least that these particular territories were chosen essentially because New Hampshire and Maine didn’t let C.U.S.P. on their Independent ballots and the Mayor of Syracuse had the misfortune to sneeze on the president during a campaign swing? Give away the entire strategy the two of you have apparently huddled in some sterilized corner and mapped out? Can this be what you mean by Give it away, Rod? TINE: Bôf. Don’t be a maroon, Billingsley. The it in the president’s Give it away signifies the territory. GENTLE: Hhhaaaahhh.TINE: We’re going to give away the whole benighted smirch of ground.SEC. INT.: Export it, one might venture to sally.TINE: It’s a novel and pro-active resource no prior statesman’s had the vision or environmental cojones to envision. If there’s one natural resource we’ve still got in spades, it’s territory. PRES. MEX./SEC. MEX./V-C O.N.A.N. AND SEVERAL OTHER SECS.: [Attempt to bring eyebrows back down below hairlines.]TINE: President Gentle’s decided we’re going to reinvent not just government but history. Torch the past. Manifest a new destiny. Boys, we’re going to institute some serious intra-O.N.A.N. interdependence. GENTLE: Hhhaaahh hhhuuuhh.TINE: Gentlemen, we’re going to make an unprecedented intercontinental gift of certain newly expendable northeast American territories, in return for the faute-de-mieux continuation of U.S. waste-displacement access to those territories. Allow me to illustrate what Lur— just what the president means. TINE places two large maps (also courtesy of Ms. Heath’s crafts class) on Govt.-issue easels. They look both to be of the good old U.S.A.. The first map is your more or less traditional standard issue, with the U.S. looking really big in white and Mexico’s northern fringes a tasteful ladies’-room pink and Canada’s brooding bottom hem a garish, almost menacing red. The second North American map looks neither old nor all that good, traditionally speaking. It has a concavity. It looks sort of like some person or persons have taken a deep wicked canine-intensive bite out of its upper right bit, in which an ascending and then descending line has its near-right-angle at what looks to be the historic and now hideously befouled Ticonderoga NY; and the areas north of that jagged line look to be that pushy shade of Canadian red, now. Some little rubber practical-joke-type flies, the blue-bellied kind that live on filth, are stapled in a raisinesque dispersal over the red Concavity. TINE has a trademark telescoping weatherman’s pointer that he plays with instead of using to point at much of anything. SEC. STATE: A kind of ecological gerrymandering?TINE: The president invites you gentlemen to conceive these two visuals as a sort of before-and-after representation of ‘projected intra-O.N.A.N. territorial re-allocations,’ or some public term like that. Redemisement’s probably too technical. SEC. STATE: Still respectfully not quite sure we at State see how inhabited territories can be sold to the public as quote expendable when a decent slice of that public by all reports inhabits that territory, Rod. GENTLE: Hhhaaahh.TINE: The president’s pro-actively chosen not to hedge that high-cost tough-choice possibly unpopular lonely-at-the-top fact one bit, guys. We’ve been moving forward full-bore on anticipating various highly involved relocation scenarios. Scenaria? Is it scenarios or scenaria? ¹⁵⁷ Marty’s on-task on the scenario front. Care to bring us to speed, Marty? SEC. TRANSP.: We foresee a whole lot of people moving south really really fast. We foresee cars, light trucks, heavier trucks, buses, Winnebagos — Winnebaga? — commandeered vans and buses, and possibly commandeered Winnebagos or Winnebaga. We foresee 4-wheel-drive vehicles, motorcycles, Jeeps, boats, mopeds, bicycles, canoes and the odd makeshift raft. Snowmobiles and cross-country skiers and roller-skaters on those strange-looking roller-skates with only one line of wheels down each skate. We foresee backpack-type folks speed-walking in walking-shorts and boots and Tyrolean hats and a stick. We foresee some folks just outright running like hell, possibly, Rod. We foresee homemade wagons piled high with worldly goods. We foresee BMW war-surplus motorcycles with sidecars and guys in goggles and leather helmets. We foresee the occasional skateboard. We foresee a strictly temporary breakdown in the thin veneer of civilization over the souls of essentially frightened stampeding animals. We foresee looting, shooting, price-gouging, ethnic tensions, promiscuous sex, births in transit. SEC. H.E.W.: Rollerblades I think you mean, Marty.SEC. TRANSP.: All feedback and input welcome, Trent. Someone junior in the office foresaw hang-gliders. I don’t foresee demographically significant hang-gliding, personally, at this juncture. Nor I need to stress do we foresee anything you could call true refugees. GENTLE: Hhhaaahh hhhuuuhhhhhhh. TINE: Absolutely not, Mart. No way a downer-association-rife term like refugee is going to be applicable here. I cannot overstress this too assertively. Eminent nondomain: yes. Renewal-grade brand of sacrifice: you bet. Heroes, new era’s breed of new pioneers, striking in bravely for already-settled good old settled but unfoul American territory: bien sûr.SEC. STATE: Bien sûr?PRESS SEC. [w/ queer combination of bangs and bouffant and pair of bifocals on slim bead chain around neck and resting in cleavage]: Neil over in Spin has been poring through resource materials. Apparently the term refugee can be plausibly denied if both — I’m quoting direct from Neil’s memo here — if both, a, no homemade wagons piled high with worldly goods are pulled by slow bovine animals with curvy horns, and b, if the percentage of children under six who are either, a, naked, or b, squalling at the top of their lungs, or c, both, is under 20% of the total number of children under six in transit. It’s true that Neil’s key resource here is Pol and Diang’s Totalitarian’s Guide to Iron-Fisted Spin, but they’re thinking this fact can be spun away from without much to-do, over in Spin. GENTLE: Hhhuuuhh.TINE: Marty and Jay’s staffs have been day-and-nighting on strategies to forestall anything like ostensible refugeeism.PRESS SEC. [Holding brillantined head at that angle people in bifocals have to, to read]: Anything bovine with curvy horns gets shot on sight. Rod’s top U.S.O. operatives in shiny trucks at strategic intervals handing out free toddler-wear courtesy of Sears’ Winnie-the-Pooh line, to nip nakedness in the bud. SEC. TREAS.: Still hammering out the boilerplate on the Sears agreement, Rod.TINE: The president has every confidence, Chet. I believe Marty and Jay were just getting to the transportational coup de grâce. SEC. TRANSP.: We’re soliciting bids for signs for up there making it legal to drive really really fast in the breakdown lanes.PRESS SEC.: South-bound breakdown lanes.ALL SECS.: [Harmonic murmurs.]SEC. STATE: Still don’t see why not just retain cartographic title to the toxified areas, relocate citizenry and portable capital, use them as our own designated disposal area. Sort of the back of the hall closet or special wastebasket underneath the national kitchen sink as it were. Hammer out systems for delivering all national refuse and waste into the area, cordon it off, keep the rest of the nation edible-off as per Johnny’s platform. SEC. H.E.W.: Why cede vitally needed waste-disposal resources to a recalcitrant ally?TINE: Billingsley, Trent, and yet who as I stated says we can’t utilize these territories for just this purpose no matter whose nation’s name they’re in? Interdependence is as Interdependence does, after all. PRES. MEX./SEC. MEX./V-C O.N.A.N.: ¿Qué?GENTLE: Hhhaaahh?TINE: Yet Billingsley’s right that this kind of sprawling, depopulated, newly Canadian territory can accommodate the tidiness-needs of this whole great continental alliance for decades to come. After that, look out Yukon! PRES. MEX./SEC. MEX./V-C O.N.A.N. [Face green and mask wetly dark over upper lip]: May I respectfully ask President Gentle how you are proposing to ask my newly succeeded Co-Vice Chair of our continental Organization to possibly be able to accept vast arenas of egregiously poisoned terrain on behalf of his peoples? TINE: Valid question. Simple answer. Three answers. Statesmanship. Gamesmanship [counting, now, on fine strong white clean fingers]. Brinksmanship. W/ now more — and rather more jejune — journalistic f/x spinning out of the black at high-camp speeds to a 45-rpm playing of custodian Dave (‘F.D.V.’) Harde’s ¹⁄3-rpm disc of ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’:

GENTLE TO CANADIAN PM: HAVE SOME TERRITORY — Header;CANADIAN P.M. TO GENTLE: NO, REALLY, THANKS ANYWAY — Header;GENTLE TO CANADIAN P.M.: BUT I INSIST — Header;BLOC QUEBECOIS TO CANADIAN P.M.: ACCEPT TOXICLY CONVEX ADDITION TO OUR PROVINCE AND WE ARE OUT OF HERE SO FAST YOUR HEAD WILL SPIN ALL THE WAY AROUND — Header from That Guy Again; CANADIAN P.M. TO GENTLE: LOOK, WE’RE SWIMMING IN TERRITORY ALREADY, HAVE A LOOK AT AN ATLAS WHY DON’T YOU, WE HAVE WAY MORE TERRITORY THAN WE KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH ALREADY, PLUS I DON’T MEAN TO BE RUDE EITHER BUT WE’RE ESPECIALLY UNKEEN ON ACCEPTING HOPELESSLY BEFOULED TERRITORY FROM YOU GUYS, INTERDEPENDENCE RHETORIC OR NO, THERE’S REALLY JUST NO WAY — And Again; abon26-MEMBER EEC ACCUSES U.S. OF ‘EXPERIALIST DOMINATION’ — Header; THIRD-WORLD VEGETABLES HURLED IN U.N. IMBROGLIO — 10-point Subheader; GENTLE TO P.M.: LOOK, BABE, TAKE THE TERRITORY OR YOU’RE GOING TO BE REALLY REALLY SORRY — Header;SIN CITY SHRINK: NATION’S VELVETIEST VOCALIST WAS HOSPITALIZED TWICE FOR MENTAL ILLNESS — Tabloid Header;PRESIDENTIAL HISTORY OF ‘EMOTIONAL INSTABILITY’ ALLEGED BY LAS VEGAS M.D. — Respectable Header;MY GARDEN NOW’S GOT TOMATOES I COULDN’T LIFT EVEN IF I COULD HACK THROUGH THEIR VINES WITH A MACHETE TO EVEN REACH THEM — Tabloid Header, Dateline Montpelier VT, with Photo That Simply Has Got to Have Been Doctored; F.E.C. CALLED TO INVESTIGATE C.U.S.P.s — Header; ‘STRATEGIC MISREPRESENTATION’ OF CANDIDATE’S PSYCH HISTORY HAS PUT NATION, CONTINENT AT RISK, DEMS CHARGE — 12-point Supersubheader; TOP AIDES HUDDLE AS WORRIES OVER GENTLE’S ‘PATHOLOGICAL INABILITY TO DEAL PROACTIVELY WITH ANY SORT OF REAL OR IMAGINED REJECTION’ MOUNT IN FACE OF CANADIAN SHOWDOWN — Meth-Dependent Headliner, Now at Third Daily in 17 Months; ‘Both financial and diplomatic communities have reacted with increasing concern to reports that President Gentle has isolated himself in a small private suite at Bethesda Naval Hospital with several thousand dollars’ worth of sound and sterilization equipment and is spending all day every day singing morose show-tunes in inappropriate keys to the U.S.M.C. Colonel who stands near the Dermalatix Hypospectral sterilization appliance handcuffed to the Black Box of United States nuclear codes. Unspecified Services Office spokespersons have declined to comment on reports of such erratic Executive directives as: ordering the Defense Department to commandeer department store giant Searsco’s entire inventory of Winnie-the-Pooh toddler wear under National Security Emergency Proviso 414; requiring Armed Forces personnel to take target practice at cardboard silhouettes of what appear to be oxen, water buffalo, or Texas longhorn cattle; preparing the release of a Presidential Address to the Nation cartridge that purportedly consists entirely of the president seated at his desk with his head in his gloves intoning “What’s the point of going on?” over and over; instructing silo personnel at all S.A.C. installations north of 44° to remove their missiles from the silos and then reinsert them upside-down; and ordering the installation of massive “air displacement effectuators” 28 km. south of each such silo, facing north.’ — Anchor’s Lead for Kind of Semi-Cheesy Weekly Lurid-News-Intensive Summary Cartridge; ‘UNPRECEDENTED’ WHOPPER REVENUES IN THIRD QUARTER CREDITED BY PILLSBURY/BK TO GENTLE’S ‘CREATIVELY PRO-ACTIVE’ RESUSCITATION OF POST-NETWORK ADVERTISING — Ad Week 14-point Full-Color Header; GENTLE HAS COMPLETELY LOST MIND, CLAIMS CONFIDANT, O.U.S. CHIEF TINE AT PRESS CONFERENCE: THREATENS TO DETONATE UPSIDE-DOWN MISSILES IN U.S. SILOS, IRRADIATE CANADA W/ AID OF ATHSCME HELL-FANS — Header; ‘WILLING TO ELIMINATE OWN MAP OUT OF SHEER PIQUE’ IF CANADA NIXES RECONFIGURATIVE TRANSFER OF ‘AESTHETICALLY UNACCEPTABLE’ TERRAIN — Pretty Obviously Homemade Subheader. This catastatic feature of the puppet-film’s plot — that Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner threatens to bomb his own nation and toxify neighbors in an insane pout over Canada’s reluctance to take redemised title over O.N.A.N.’s very own vast dump — resonates powerfully with those members of the movie’s E.T.A. audience who know that this whole parodic pseudo-ONANtiad scenario is actually a puppet-à-clef-type allusion to the dark legend of one Eric Clipperton and the Clipperton Brigade. In the very last couple years of solar, Unsubsidized Time, this kid Eric Clipperton appeared for the first time as an unseeded sixteen-year-old in East Coast regional tournament play. The little Town-or-Academy-Hailed-From slot after Clipperton’s name on tournament draw-sheets just said ‘Ind.,’ presumably for ‘Independent.’ Nobody’d heard of him before or knew where he came from. He’d just sort of seepily risen, some sort of human radon, from someplace low and unknown, whence he lent the cliché ‘Win or Die in the Attempt’ grotesquely literal new levels of sense.

For the Clipperton legend derived from the fact that this Clipperton kid owned a hideous and immaculately maintained Glock 17 semiautomatic sidearm that came in a classy little leather-handled blond-wood case with German High-Gothic script on it and a velvet gun-shaped concavity inside where the Glock 17 lay nestled in plush velvet, gleaming, with another little rectangular divot for the 17-shot clip; and that he brought the gun-case and Glock 17 out on the court with him along with his towels and water-jug and sticks and gear bag, and from his very first appearance on the East Coast jr. tour made clear his intention to blow his own brains out publicly, right there on court, if he should lose, ever, even once.

Thus there came to be, in most every tournament with an initial draw of 64, a group of three boys, then four, and by the semifinals five, then finally six boys who for that tournament formed the Clipperton Brigade, players who’d had the misfortune to draw and meet Eric Clipperton and Clipperton’s well-oiled Glock 17, and who understandably declined to be the player to cause Clipperton to eliminate his own map for keeps in public for something as comparatively cheesy as a tournament win over Clipperton. A win over Clipperton had no meaning because a loss to Clipperton had no meaning and didn’t hurt anybody’s regional and U.S.T.A. ranking, not once the guys in the U.S.T.A. computer center caught on to the Clipperton strategic M.O. Thus an early exit from a tournament because of a loss to Clipperton came to be regarded as sort of like a walk in baseball, stats-wise; and a boy who found himself in the Clipperton Brigade and defaulted his round tended to view that tournament as a kind of unexpected vacation, a chance to rest and heal, to finally get some sun on the chest and ankles, to work on chinks in his game’s armor, to reflect a little on what it all might mean.

Clipperton’s first meaningless victory ever came at sixteen, unseeded, at the Hartford Jr. Open, first round, against one Ross Reat, of Maddox OH and the just-opened Enfield Tennis Academy. For some reason it’s Struck who sort of specializes in this story and never misses a chance to tell new E.T.A.s the tale of Clipperton v. Reat. Clipperton’s an OK player, nothing spectacular but also not like absurdly out of place at a regional-grade tour-ney; but Reat is at fifteen seasoned and high-ranked, and the third seed at Hartford; and Reat is, for a while — as would be S.O.P. for a high seed in the first round — basically cleaning under his nails with this unseeded unknown Eric Clipperton. At 1–4 in the second set, Clipperton sits down at the side-change and, instead of toweling off, reaches into his gear bag and extracts his classy little blond-wood case and gets out the Glock 17. Fondles it. Takes out the clip and hefts it and rams it home in its slot at the base of the grip with a chillingly solid-sounding click. Caresses his left temple with the thing’s blunt shiny barrel. Everybody watching the match agrees it is one ugly and all-business-looking piece of personal-defense hardware. Clipperton climbs up the rungs of the lifeguardish chair the umpire in his blue blazer ¹⁵⁸ sits in and uses the umpire’s mike to make public his intention of blowing his personal brains out all over the court with the hideous Glock, should he lose. The small first-round gallery stiffens and inhales and doesn’t exhale for a long time. Reat audibly gulps. Reat is tall, densely freckled, a good kid, one of Incandenza’s fair-haired boys, not too bright, with the Satellite Tour so clearly in his future that at only fifteen he’s already starting cholera shots and mastering Third World exchange rates. And but for the remainder of the match (which lasts exactly eleven more games) Clipperton plays tennis with the Glock 17 held steadily to his left temple. The gun makes tossing kind of a hassle, on Clipperton’s serve, but Reat is letting the serves go by untouched anyway. None of the E.T.A. staff has bothered to show up and coach Reat through what was supposed to be a standard first-round fingernail-cleaning, and so Reat is strategically and emotionally all alone out there, and he’s opted for not even pretending to make an effort, given what the unseeded Clipperton seems willing to sacrifice for a win. Ross Reat was the first and last junior player ever to shake Clipperton’s free hand at the end of a match, and the moment’s captured in a Hartford Courant staff photo that some E.T.A. wiseacre’d later glued to the door of Struck’s room with so much Elmer’s all over the back that taking it off would gut the varnish, so the thing stays up for all in the hall to see, Reat here up at net on one knee, one arm over his eyes, the other hand extended upward to a Clipperton who’d simply obliterated him psychologically. And Ross Reat was never quite exactly the same ever again after that, both Schtitt and de Lint have assured all future potentially mercy-minded E.T.A. males.

And, the legend’s story goes, Eric Clipperton never henceforth loses. No one is willing to beat him and risk going through life with the sight of the Glock going off on his conscience. Nobody ever knows where Clipperton comes from, to play. Never seen at airports or Interstate exit ramps or ever even spotted carb-loading at any Denny’s between matches. He just starts materializing, always alone, at increasingly high-level junior tournaments, appears on draw-sheets with ‘Ind.’ by his name, plays competitive tennis with a Glock at his left temple; ¹⁵⁹ and his opponents, unwilling to sacrifice Clipperton’s hostage (Clipperton même), barely even try, or else they go for impossible angles and spins, or else talk on mobile phones while they play or try to hit every ball between their legs or behind their backs; and the matches’ galleries tend to boo Clipperton just as much as they dare; and Clipperton sits and hefts his 17-shot clip and takes the brass-jacketed 9-mm. cartridges out sometimes and clicks a few together ruminatively in his hand in the sideline chair at all the odd-game breaks, and sometimes he tries little Western-gunslinger triggerguard-spins during the breaks; but when play resumes Clipperton’s deadly serious once more and has the Glock 17 at his temple, playing, and mows through the lackadaisical Clipperton Brigade round by round, and wins the whole tournament by what is essentially psychic default, and then right after collecting his trophy vanishes like the ground itself inhaled him. His only even remote friend on the jr. tour is eight-year-old Mario Incandenza, whom Clipperton meets because, even though Disney Leith and an early prorector named Cantrell are shepherding the male tournament contingent (including a solid but sort of plateau-stuck and no longer much improving seventeen-year-old Orin Incandenza) that summer, E.T.A. Headmaster Dr. J. O. Incandenza shows up at quite a few of the events on the domestic circuit, doing under ostensible U.S.T.A. auspices a two-part documentary on jr. competitive tennis, stress, and light, and so Mario’s tottering around with lens-cases and Tuffy tripods etc. at most of that late summer’s meaningful events, and meets Clipperton, and finds Clipperton intriguing and in ways he can’t be very articulate about hilarious, and is kind to him and seeks out his company, Clipperton’s, or at any rate at least treats Clipperton like he exists, whereas by late July everybody else’s attitude toward Clipperton resembled that kind of stiffly conspicuous nonrecognition that e.g. accompanies farts at formal functions. One of Himself’s short test-cartridges — shot to check out transverse aberration at various sun-angles, the case’s little adhesive sticker says — contains the only available footage of the late Eric Clipperton ¹⁶⁰ — from the preponderance of salt-tablet dispensers and littered Pledge husks and Dade County ambulances it was pretty likely shot at the hideous Sunkist Jr. Inv. cramp-fest in August in Miami — just a couple overexposed meters of Clipperton, head down and hunched on a low orange bleacher, bony-shouldered, in no shirt and untied Nikes, his Gothic-scripted case in his lap, his elbows on his knees and his hands spidered across both cheeks, staring down between his feet and trying not to smile as a withered-toddler-sized and forward-listing Mario stands beside him, supported by his portable police lock, holding a light-meter and something else too halated to make out on the tape, open very wide for a homodontic laugh at something funny Clipperton has apparently just let slip.

Date: 2016-03-03; view: 622