MICHAEL FALKIRK: DEAF CON ONE
Back in the spring of 1986, when Mike Falkirk’s 11th grade Participation in Government teacher Mrs. Osier put Mike’s name forward to be sent off to something called Leaders of the Forthcoming Future, he felt very honored. Other kids from his school were being sent off to computer camp, basketball camp, drama camp, trombone camp, etc. Mike didn’t really know what Leaders of the Forthcoming Future was, but from the impression that Mrs. Osier gave him, it was a sort of “leadership and government camp.” It was supposed to be a weeklong exercise devoted to learning about state government. A college campus would give over its dormitories and its campus for one week of the summer to a huge body of teenaged delegates from high schools all over the state of New York. “These are the cream of the crop,” Mrs. Osier told him after class as he looked at his acceptance envelope. “You should be proud to be selected for this.”
Mike had gained the prestige in Mrs. Osier’s eyes because he’d won several awards in public speaking in the ninth grade, when he would (with written permission) take time off from his studies to go from school to school speaking to elementary school students. Some were in New York, some were in Pennsylvania, since he lived on the border. He spoke to the youngsters about the value of friendship and how precious it is, due to his experience of having lost a good friend, Huey Thoroughgood, at age twelve. Huey had died in a terrible accident Mike opted not to describe to the young students due to its somewhat gory nature. But he said Huey’s death had taught him something: that life was precious and that kids shouldn’t fight amongst each other and should cherish their differences while they still could because it wasn’t known when God would come along and suddenly take away that special person in your life. The gathered kids sitting Indian style around him would all stare at him solemnly as he would close his talks by reading some aphorisms on friendship and a few verses from the Bible. And maybe the kids got it. But maybe they were, on the inside, actually thinking hungrily about the Ritz crackers their Moms had lovingly placed in their lunchboxes, or thinking about the domestic troubles between Garfield and Odie, or perhaps (if they were girls, advancing into the jungles of puberty ahead of the boys) they daydreamed about how hot Kirk Cameron really was. But the teachers and parents who came to hear Mike Falkirk speak all had definite quantifiable moisture in their eyes as he finished the talks. At one engagement, a thin quiet woman, who Mike discovered later had lost her son to a horrifically protracted battle with bone cancer, had stalked up to Mike and given him a long intense blubbering hug afterward, a hug that he was worried someone would have to pry him up out of.
So he was given the privilege of attending the 1986 session of Leaders of the Forthcoming Future.
The details of the camp were vague: You were assigned a roommate. You were randomly given an ID number, the last digit of which would determine your political party, the Odds or the Evens. The dormitory you were assigned to live in was considered your “County” and the floor you lived on within the dorm was your “Town.”
He showed up at the preordained bus station in downtown Binghamton NY early that June morning in 1986. He had a backpack full of clothes and a toothbrush and a copy of Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. Even in 1986 he was a little pudgy. He sat on the bus alone, gnawing on a Snickers bar, watching the trees of New York’s Southern Tier woosh by as the bus driver steered the busload of kids westward along State Highway 17. They were headed toward the vacant campus of Alfred State, which clings to a very steep hillside overlooking the small town of Alfred, NY. There were two things Mike, along with quite a few other delegates, didn’t yet realize as he watched the scenery change outside his window: (1) that Leaders of the Forthcoming Future (LFF) was a yearly event funded and sponsored by the American Legion; and (2) that, if they’d taken the time to peruse the LFF literature the delegates would read there, proclaimed in proud black and white, that LFF was intended, both in theory and in cold hard practice, “…to inculcate patriotism and an unflinching love and respect for America, American ideals, and the spirit which these boys’ fathers and grandfathers sacrificed their youth – and sometimes, their lives – in defending.”
All of which is fine. Mike has no quarrel with any of that. But, Mike was not expecting to be necessarily “inculcated” with anything. Kind of a scary verb. Mike was not expecting, for example, to learn how to march in formation at LFF. Mrs. Osier either hadn’t known about the marching part of it or she had judiciously left it out of her explanation. Either way, Mike planned to pay her a visit when he got back. Mike puked and puked after the first savage round of exercises, which all the boys were forced to do as soon as they stepped off their buses. Mike’s luggage was, along with everyone else’s, heaped in a pile behind some stern hard-jawed men in camouflage, men who stood in identical at-rest postures with their hands behind their backs and their legs thrust slightly apart, as if in feline readiness to spring into hand-to-hand combat with any chubby desperate young intellectual who might try to leap up out of his 230th consecutive squat thrust to grab his backpack and escape off into the Alleghany underbrush. Some of the LFF delegates were able to keep pace with the wiry black drill sergeant who led their calisthenics. Those boys were probably from military academies, and were therefore West Point-bound anyway, so this was just like a normal day to them. But a large cross-section of the boys, with Mike Falkirk, Esq. solidly included among their numbers, collapsed onto the pavement of the campus parking lot under the cruel June sun, quivering and crying out for their mamas. Once the whole horrid ordeal was over, the wiry black drill sergeant stood and evaluated the huge throng of boys splayed there, slowly moving his marble eyes over their upturned faces. He summed up what he saw in one loud sentence: “The whole bunch of y’all look like a freaking abortion!” before stalking off to stand stock-still behind a group of portly older men all wearing reflector sunglasses and veteran’s caps with little pins and badges attached. One of these men stepped forward with a bullhorn and introduced himself as Sergeant Mackey. Sgt. Mackey told the boys to remove their shirts. Mike silently wished for death. They peeled off their sticky shirts and gave them to a squadron of younger subordinate-type men who went around with big laundry baskets collecting the shirts.
Sgt. Mackey looked like that type of man in the neighborhood who lives on a corner lot and comes out on the porch in a yellowing t-shirt and yells at kids for cutting across even a centimeter of his meticulous lawn. “These shirts will be destroyed, as a symbol of your individulality and your social class differences,” Sgt. Mackey told them all through the bullhorn. Mackey’s potbelly would rise up with clenched exertion as he shouted each statement through the bullhorn, and then would drop back down to rest between statements. “No one here is different. No one here is equal.” One of the other veterans looked puzzled at this last statement and stepped forward to whisper a correction in Sgt. Mackey’s ear. He paused before resuming: “You’re all equal. Nobody here is special. You young men will be issued, along with your iD numbers and your barracks assignment, new T-shirts emblazoned with the approved Leaders of the Forthcoming Future logo.” He held up one of the shirts. “You will neatly tuck these shirts into your belt or waistband. There’ll be consequences if you refuse to follow orders with regard to soldierly appearance.” Some of the boys had been wearing, for their first day at LFF, quite flashy collegiate or athletic shirts obtained at no small expense from campus bookstores at MIT or Yale, shirts worn as a sign not so much of their individuality and social class but of their ambitions, of their nascent leadership and their achievements and their plans after graduated from high school in 1987. These boys were perturbed to learned that these really quite expensive shorts would be ritually incinerated in a furnace in Alfred State’s physical plant later that night, by a bunch of fat old men in dorkwad hats living out some military fantasy about whipping boys into shape.
There were no girls at LFF. Evidently all the female delegates were stationed at Skidmore College, in Saratoga Springs, NY, and Mike discovered years later from a woman named Laurel Trind who worked on a campaign with him and was an LFF ’86 to boot, that the female LFFs that year had a swimming pool. They had indoor tracks and tennis courts at Skidmore for their exercise. They were never forced to exercise in the first place, were allowed to go the college library whenever they wished without being screamed at by psychotic drill sergeants, and they were encouraged to form debate groups about William James and Hume and “is-ought” gaps in ethical models.
Meanwhile, back in Alfred, the boys were formed into lines that passed by little tables and desks where they would state their names and be given their new shirts and ID badges and bunking assignments. Some kids were resigned, broken. Other boys seemed to openly defy their new regime with laughter and goofing around. These kids were forcibly removed from the rest and ordered by camouflaged men to drop to the asphalt and give them twenty. Mike stepped up to the T-shirt table. “You look like an Extra Large,” the hawk-nosed man at the desk said to him, handing him his shirt and his ID badge, which read M. FALKIRK—775. He was an Odd.
For some reason being forced to tuck the shirt in was the worst indignity of them all. Falkirk looked down at his bellybutton withdrawn into his gut and wondered what having a tucked-in shirt possibly had to do with state politics or checks and balances between the three branches of government.
Other men in camouflage were searching through everybody’s luggage before returning it to the LFF delegates. One gruff drill sergeant with a grey crew cut quizzed Mike as he went through his backpack.
“You got a radio in here boy?”
“No.”
“You got any drugs in here boy?”
He tried to think whether he should say yes since technically aspirin qualified as a drug.
The drill sergeant pulled out his copy of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and handed it to an older veteran with huge white eyebrows, who flipped through the book and seemed very concerned to know what it was about, until Mike, with puke on his chin, informed the man that he didn’t know what it was about because he hadn’t read it yet. His lower lip trembled. The veteran with the white eyebrows commented on the author’s foreign-sounding last name and coldly eyed Mike for signs of communism. Due to regulations LFF staff couldn’t confiscate books. Mike was handed the book back and allowed to go join the stream of boys headed for their counties.
After stashing his backpack and other belongings in his dorm room, and catching a horrible vomit-stained sight of himself in the room’s full-length mirror, he went back outside to wait on the blacktop until they were assembled into a perfect 7 x 12 person rectangle to be taught how to march in rank-and-file. Each county was assigned its own drill sergeant. The drill sergeants were on leave from active duty in the Marines, some for disciplinary violations and behavioral problems that nobody knew about but that by the end of the week would become all too clear to most of the delegates. Mike felt a wave of silent curses go up to heaven from the rectangle of boys around him when they all learned that their county, unnamed thus far, would be led by the same wiry black drill sergeant who had taken them all on an odyssey of pain earlier in the day when they’d first arrived. The wiry black drill sergeant informed the rectangle of boys that his name was Sgt. Manson and that they should all stand an arm’s-length away from each other in all four directions.
They began to learn how to march. Sgt. Manson’s favorite word, which he used whenever describing something he did not like the looks of, was: abortion. He used the word over and over again in various grammatical modes. Sgt. Manson taught them how to about face and company halt and all the rest. They were, to nobody’s surprise, an absolute mess for the first hour or so, but once they began tightening up, Mike’s own personal disabilities began to stand out against the growing rectitude of the boys around him. He became one of the first objects of ridicule when he persisted in colliding with the delegates immediately in front of him and to either side during commands to halt or about face. “Will the abortion who is turning my formation into a freaking abortion please get his ass screwed on correctly? Damn! Who is that, making all that mess?” Mike was crudely shoved forward. “What’s your name?”
“Mike Falkirk, sir. I have a hearing problem. Ringing—“
“Speak up, son!”
“MIKE FALKIRK. HEARING PROBLEM. RINGING IN MY EARS. I’VE ALWAYS HAD IT. SIR.”
Groans from some of the other boys in his County. But most of the other boys were grim and silent, knowing it could just as easily be them.
“A hearing problem? Well, well. We just have to put you at one of the corners of my formation, so your hearing problem don’t mysteriously develop into an ass-kicking problem from four soldiers. So only two soldiers be necessary to kick yo little deaf ass.”
Mike moved toward one corner of the formation.
“No, the ass-end, go to the ass-end!”
Mike shrank into his position of ignominy at the ass-end. He felt like an object about to fall off a table, an object that no one will notice or try to catch before it goes over the edge. Manson seemed about to resume the marching lesson when he stopped and said, chuckling a bit, “You know what I think, sheeit, I think we just call you Deaf Con One from now on. How bout it y’all, we call him Deaf Con One?”
So Mike Falkirk officially became Deaf Con One. Deaf Con One was a person Mike didn’t like too well, he learned.
Cruelty has an inevitable momentum all its own, and with it, other boys collected nicknames too. One skinny kid with longish sideburns from Elbridge NY got the nickname Elvis. Being from Brooklyn or Queens entitled a delegate to be called “Brooklyn” or “Queens.” Deaf Con One would have given a left gonad to be called Queens instead of Deaf Con One. The name stuck as some of the meaner kids from his County would come up to Falkirk in the mess hall, and try to speak to him, but even with his clinically diagnosed tinnitus Falkirk could still easily tell that they were just moving their lips without making a sound, deliberately, intentionally, just to play a joke on him.
Not that there wasn’t, as Mrs. Osier had promised him, an actual component of the weeklong experience devoted to civics and learning about state government. But Leaders of the Forthcoming Future offered a chaotic, desperate vision of government, political science of the harshest Lord of the Flies variety. Except instead of being trapped on a deserted island surrounded by ocean, they were trapped on a college campus on a huge steep hillside, surrounded by drill sergeants and morning exercises that started at 5:30 am, a wake-up time no adolescent body can abide. Perhaps the philosophy was that adversity and torment would be necessary to bring out the best in these young leaders. If that was so, then Falkirk feared he was not cut out to lead at any time in the forthcoming future. (And the phrase “forthcoming future” was a redundant atrocity Falkirk found solace in privately railing at, in his bleakest moments in Alfred, NY.)
The first order of business that first day was naming counties. Falkirk’s whole dorm collected and met on the dying sun-blanched grass outside and tried to figure out what to name itself. Some wannabe wag put forward the idea of calling their County Bonzo County. “As in ‘Bedtime for Bonzo?’” the wag said, looking from face to face for some recognition of the reference. With the help of some nearby veterans who were listening in and got the facetious reference to the President, who were doing everything they could in the spirit of laissez-faire objectivity to allow the LFF to run themselves as a self-determining governmental body, Bonzo County as an idea was quickly killed, with their help. Freaking Abortion County was likewise roundly vetoed by the men in aviator sunglasses. After some wrangling they settled on North County, because their dormitory was at the northern side of the campus. And also after Oliver North.
The next item was local elections. Whatever glad-handing or reaping of political influence to gain votes had to be done in the inelegant time frame of two hours. Mike ran for Town Representative and won handily as no other boy seemed to be remotely interested in the job whatsoever. Many delegates seemed lost and confused. Mike inwardly chuckled, picturing Hobbes’ Leviathan as a quadriplegic. Other boys seemed to be adolescent embodiments of Machiavelli’s worst principles as they finagled their way into power. One particular coup took place on the very first day when one Edmund Kressler from Glen Cove, Long Island somehow quickly obtained a copy of the records of all that year’s delegates and searched out the boy who’d been issued the ID badge with the number 69 on it, and paid him $70.00 in cold hard tens and twenties for his badge. Kressler knew full well that when it came time for the Leaders of the Forthcoming Future Gubernatorial Election that first evening after supper, the large majority of delegates, upon seeing the number 69 on the ballot, would descend into paroxysms of pubescent dirty-minded mirth and without a second thought would vote for 69 as a joke. So according to his scheme Gov. Kressler was crowned that evening in an auditorium full of dazed-looking teenaged boys, while across campus their T-shirts were being pitchforked into the furnace full of burning fabric.
A significant minority of delegates had evidently led very sheltered lives, had never heard of 69, had never intuited or been shown its true meaning; one could say these boys had never been “inculcated” with the secret meaning of 69. These sheltered boys were the ones who had actually voted with a real purpose, paying serious attention to “the issues.” Therefore their votes were lost, cast to the winds. One of these sheltered individuals, a fellow member of North County, was a well-polished prep school student from Elmira, NY named Vance Twilliard. Twilliard wore khakis and loafers and an expensive watch. Twilliard suffered from devastating acne. Twilliard was what Mike guessed might be called a “mulatto.” Sgt. Manson assigned Vance Twilliard the derisive nickname “Lil Nephew,” and brought down ferocious psychological abuse on the boy. Anyway, whenever somebody said “69,” and everybody fell into the unavoidable sneering idiotic laughter, Twilliard just became puzzled and wondered out loud, nasally, if he had fallen into company with some ingenious cadre of palindrome aficionados or something.
In the auditorium immediately after the election that night, the first statewide party meeting of all the Odds was held. Mike’s already ringing ears were thronged with the chatter and din of adolescent statecraft. Mike as Deaf Con One realized the black depths of his ignorance about the political process as he found himself sitting in the auditorium seats among boys soberly discussing Duverger’s Law and using words like quorum and block vote. Kids in thick-rimmed glasses with clipboards and calculators rushed up and down the aisles to have very harried informal caucuses with kids from other counties. Alliances were being hashed out. It felt like a whole dimension of human existence Mike had known nothing about. Finally a statement was read out loud to the gathered party, by none other than Vance Twilliard (119): “It’s going to be hard to articulate what the Odds platform is, when the Evens don’t have a platform yet against which we can define ourselves.” This ideological gridlock would continue for a day or two. Even the drill sergeants keeping watch over the exits of the auditorium during these emergency platform and policy meetings looked confused as to what exactly was happening, in spite of the fact they had presumably been providing security and oversight at LFF functions for years, and should know by now. Mike watched as Gov. Kressler, looking cagey and shifty-eyed, exited the auditorium through a side door, surrounded by his praetorian guard of beefy lacrosse players who scanned the crowd as they left.
When Mike returned to his dorm room his two roommates Tad Bennings and Garth Philby were blowing pot-smoke out the window and listening to Duran Duran’s “The Reflex” on the illegal radio that Tad had somehow smuggled into Leaders of the Forthcoming Future. Before that morning Tad and Garth had been as equally unknown to each other as Mike was to both of them, but for some reason Tad and Garth had both discovered a common bond: the similar penchant for aerosol- and mousse-heavy “Euro New Wave” hairstyles: large burrs of platinum hair that leapt out from the forehead and fell down artfully slanted across one eye, creating a sense of mystique. Upon arrival at LFF, Garth Philby’s eye shadow had been confiscated and deep-sixed by a concerned Korean War veteran.
Mike’s own haircut resembled Jerry Falwell’s haircut, the neatly combed haircut of a soldier of Christendom.
“Hey, it’s Deaf Con One!” Garth shrieked out when he saw Mike come in the door. “What do you hear on the street?” By this hour, Mike felt like his nerves had been hacked at relentlessly with an axe made out of ice. He crawled into his cot and put his head under the pillows. He did a fairly decent job of hiding his rhythmic sobbing from his roommates as they gyrated and sang along to Spandau Ballet’s “Gold.”
He felt as though he’d been asleep for all of about three minutes when Sgt. Manson came through North County’s corridor banging a garbage can lid on all the doors with that special hatred one reserves for sleeping teenagers. Mike leapt in a magnificent arc up out of cot and landed on his feet, staring at the door with his dick hanging out of his boxers, feeling simultaneously scared shitless and also like this had happened before, had always been happening every morning of his life, for centuries. Ringing ears had a certain quality in the morning, like Mike had forgotten them while he slept and he had to get acclimated again. White slanting sunlight filled the crowded, stinky dorm room. Somehow it has suddenly become 5:30 in the morning. They jogged around the campus perimeter and practiced their marching orders out in the parking lot while the sun climbed. Through peripheral vision Mike aligned himself in step with the others. He decided Sgt. Manson was an aerobics instructor from the Eighth Circle of Hell, the Sixth Bolgia, which was the Bolgia of Hypocrites:
O weary mantle for eternity!
We turned to the left again along their course,
Listening to their moans of misery,
But they moved so slowly down that barren strip,
Tired by their burden, that our company
Was changed at every movement of the hip.
(canto xxiii, 64-69)
Once Tuesday’s morning exercises were done they went to the mess hall for breakfast. Some of the delegates would go back for seconds and thirds just to catch surreptitious extra glimpses of some of the women working in the kitchen, many of whom were really not all that comely. But these were the only women in sight, and they would have to suffice. By the second day, the dearth of female flesh on the campus began to worry some of the boys, began to become a palpable longing. They discussed it and seemed to agree that it was one of the major social ills plaguing this great State of theirs, and when the Odds and Evens were split up for their next policy platform meeting at 9:30, the Leaders of the Forthcoming Future tried to put their collective political strengths together to contact a solution. After some discussion and debate the Odds finally hammered out a platform that extolled four main points: Decency, Fair Play, a Free Market System, and Legalized Prostitution. When this was announced a cheer went up from the Odds. The drill sergeants and veterans came forward from the shadows at that cheer, like prison guards disturbed from their work station chitchat by the sudden hooting and howling from the prison cells.
When this platform was presented in a speech to the gathered Leaders of the Forthcoming Future populace at a pre-legislative rally at 5:30 that afternoon, it was revealed that the Evens had cooked up a platform that resembled the Odds’ in all points except for that they didn’t stand for Decency and Fair Play. Clearly a desire for access to prostitutes was a bipartisan uniting factor across the entirety of LFF. So now Leviathan was a quadriplegic with a thirst for hookers.
On Wednesday Mike tried to get himself elected as North County’s spokesperson for the Odds party, but in that day’s crash elections he was beaten out of the position by Vance Twilliard, the “Lil Nephew” who may not have understood a thing about dirty numerical humor, but who to everyone’s surprise had an expert command of parliamentary procedure. So later that night, Mike Falkirk tried to bone up on Robert’s Rules of Order from a copy he’d found in a wastepaper basket, using a flashlight to read the tattered volume under the covers after lights-out. “Deaf Con One’s jerking off again,” Tad and Garth taunted, their voices sing-song.
That night, Mike awoke in the wee hours, in a freezing sweat, after having a terrifying nightmare in which he had been sitting in session, needing to pee but being prevented from doing so by the ghost of his dead childhood friend Huey. The ghost of Huey checked each one of Mike’s attempts to find a toilet by invoking parliamentary protocol. Huey was dressed in a grown-up’s pinstriped suit and had in fact a grownup adult body, and even had a neatly trimmed Van Dyke, but underneath it, his face was still the same age as it had been when Huey died gruesomely in the church in 1981. Huey’s eyes were jet black, glimmering and without pupils, and his grownup voice was eerily disconnected from the movements of his lips as he spoke, out of sync. Huey’s ghost said: “I will prevent the body from adjourning by calling for the house to recognize that no member may speak twice on the same day in the same debate and that Mikey should be blocked from obtaining the floor due to his disorderly words in debate, words which will be taken down by the secretary and read back to Mikey, and if Mikey denies them the assembly shall decide by a vote whether they are his words or not.” And then a mysterious time shift took place around Huey’s staring face, giving way to the horribly familiar sight from that winter afternoon, which Mike had had from inside the bell tower, looking down at Huey as Huey jumped up to grab the highest knot on the bell-rope to ring the massive frost-coated bell, and the wooden tie serving as the bell’s support beneath Mike cracked because Mike had sabotaged it, sawn it halfway through, and the bell fell in an airless moment in time, connected with Huey’s head and obscured him as it carried him down the abyss of the stairwell like a scarf tied around a boulder. And when it and Huey hit the flagstones of the floor the bell had flipped until its opening pointed back up at Mike and it resounded with the loudest wave of sound Mike could imagine, it was a moment of death which made Mike’s ears ring forever.
Mike lay awake, panting in the dark dorm room. It was early Thursday morning. Tad and Garth lay asleep in their respective cots, blissfully dreaming not about dead childhood friends but instead probably dreaming about being in a band together, a synthpop band, dueling each other with matching keyboard-guitars. Mike rolled in bed onto his side and thought about what Mrs. Osier could have possibly seen in him to make her think that he was a Leader of the Forthcoming Future, that he was cut out to be shipped away to this hell. What was so good about him, what had led him to this paramilitary boot camp, to be teased and derided, to have his one kernel of pride and self-respect taken away from him by Twilliard, a smooth, elegant, sheltered kid from Elmira. Mike didn’t know what his own qualities and strengths were.
Before he was sent away to LFF, Mrs. Osier had told Mike that part of what was admirable about his ninth-grade speeches concerning Huey is the way he refused to talk about the exact circumstances of Huey’s death, only to say he died unexpectedly, and young.
Mike Falkirk’s hatred and envy of Vance Twilliard only escalated on Thursday, at a little debate some of the Leaders were having over in Schultz County’s lounge, a debate about Libya, with Reagan having just that spring bombed Muammar Qadaffi’s suburban villa, and Qadaffi’s “Line of Death” drawn in the Gulf of Sidra and all the rest of it. The boys were just discussing what should be done with Libya in general, until Twilliard, a quick learner, shed some new light on the ubiquitous question of prostitution by raising the following point: “If we ever go to war in a fundamentalist Islamic confessional state, where will all the prostitutes come from? Because they certainly couldn’t be indigenous, as they were in Viet Nam. Will they be airlifted in from Italy, or West Germany or something?” Comments which Mike’s eyes gradually narrowed at and which were transparently designed to curry favor with the obvious pro-prostitution sympathies of the delegates on both sides of the Odd/Even aisle, a value held in common and therefore from Twilliard’s point of view a good ticket to gaining political support. The irreverence of Twilliard’s questions impressed them all, until another smartypants from Buffalo or somewhere came forward with the rebuttal that if we ever did go to war with Libya or Iran or whatever, it would definitely be a nuclear war, and there would hence be no need for ground troops, and hence for that reason no need for the services prostitutes provide. “The only need,” this boy said, “would be to hire large fleets of janitors, to scrape up the carbonized remains of all the Arab towelheads and put their ashes into barrels to be sunk at sea.” Followed by wild raucous laughter that was shared by teenaged delegate and by adult Marine supervisor alike.
Mike didn’t laugh because he was busy focusing all his anger and envy onto Vance Twilliard. He did this for several hours until he realized he would have to get with the program and play dirty. Following Gov. Kressler’s example, Mike paid an vertically challenged informant with shifty eyes and bad breath to determine what Twilliard’s route to and from the mess hall and also to outline Twilliard’s free roamings around the campus between the many caucuses and high-level meetings and debates that were on his legislative plate. Deaf Con One hid behind some bushes, with a towel wrapped around his head, his tube of toothpaste open and ready.
Vance Twilliard and another delegate in huge glasses materialized in the distance, and as they rambled closer Mike could hear their discussion. Evidently the one with huge glasses had seen one of the younger, more nubile female kitchen-maids taking out the garbage from the mess hall, and had said, “Nice rack at 9:00,” to Twilliard. But then Twilliard and the other delegate got into a debate over whether you could use a direction like 9:00 if the person you were speaking to wasn’t facing in the same direction, i.e. “Your 9:00 might be my 4:00”—using these directional terms, Vance Twilliard argued, required spatial consistency, facing in the same direction as whomever you were speaking to, like fighter pilots in an attack formation, in sortie. An old Navy pilot nearby overheard their debate and wanted to step in to clear up one or two things about military usage. He was very helpful even after they admitted they were talking about tits. Still, it was heartwarming to hear the generations sharing.
So Vance Twilliard was brought down by a single squirt of Mike’s toothpaste to the back of the neck as Mike jumped out from behind the bushes and shouted “You’re DEAD!” And Mike’s towel remained wrapped around his head, miraculously, as he outran the sprinting Navy pilot whose fingers always seemed about to close around the tail of Mike’s Extra Large shirt, which had come untucked in all the mayhem. Mike’s evasive maneuvers involved a lot of clever backtracking and feinting and going in and out of various labyrinthine buildings on campus, all inspired by political jealousy, misleading his pursuers until he knew it must be safe to return to North County, where he faked expressions of concern and care as Vance Twilliard used a water fountain to wash the toothpaste out of his hair. All the boys agreed that Twilliard had been “taken out.”
Mike never reclaimed his spot at the legislative table but he was privately validated by the thought that he’d gotten a shard of his dignity back. But his actions had repercussions, as he quickly found out: it was just a matter of time until his politically motivated killing had inspired some other LFFs who began plotting against Governor 69, an elaborate plot involving cutting power to Weinberger County on Thursday night and rushing into the building after lights out with water balloons and shaving cream, and they tossed 69’s room and they stole his wallet and his record player and his bike (an expensive ten-speed that 69 had brought to LFF with him from Glen Cove for some reason, even though he wasn’t allowed to ride it anywhere). They found Gov. 69 in the head whacking off to Kathy Ireland in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition and they bombed him and covered him with shaving cream. His bike was found the next day, down in the town of Alfred where no delegate was supposed to go, in a dumpster in bent pieces behind one of the college bars. Formally Kressler was still Governor but all the kids knew by the end of the week that he had lost his power and respect.
It was an interesting week, a week that taught Mike a lot about himself.
On the final day, the drill sergeants kept an even more heavy hand on the boys now than they previously had. That is, except for one drill sergeant, who had been relieved of duty late Thursday night, after intercepting one of 69’s fleeing assassins. The story was that the drill sergeant had reached out and clutched the boy’s trachea in mid-stride, pulling him backwards down onto the pavement outside Weinberger County, springing on top of the boy to execute a hold designed to incapacitate rioting Latin Americans or Lebanese, but it was too late, the back of the boy’s skull had already smacked the concrete sidewalk and both the comatose boy and the drill sergeant were conspicuously missing on Friday. On that final day of their week at Alfred State, their final act as Leaders of the Forthcoming Future was to be corralled into the massive gym where folding chairs had been set up neatly into rows. The boys sat in predetermined spots according to their home zip codes and postcards were systematically distributed to them. The postcards had been pre-addressed to the boys’ Representatives in Congress, Washington DC. Sgt. Mackey came on stage and took a microphone and he had on a uniform the boys hadn’t yet seen. He gave a speech about America, and American defense, and how the number one priority of American government, from federal down through state and local, was to provide defense for these our United States of America and all its properties worldwide. Sgt. Mackey was sure all the boys of this year’s LFF loved God and loved the USA more than anything else in the world, loved it more than any socialist rat ideas about communistic collectives and commie arms races, and likewise hoped they made sure to say a prayer that Russia would keep a mind to all the missiles we’ve got pointed at them, and that if the Russkies ever got out of line by God they could tuck their heads between their knees and kiss their collective Marxist ass goodbye.
And there was such a stupendous explosion of applause. Fierce, uncontrollable, the kind of blind, unquestioning applause Mike had only semi-heard (through his ears’ perpetual ringing) after going to see Rocky IV for $3.00 at the Cineplex near where he lived. Mindless unexamined applause. He looked around and he saw all the kids on their feet and cheering and applauding, there was a quality to this applause, a force, an absolutism that kind of scared him. Then Mackey with the mike repeatedly tried to shout through the applause until it died down enough for him to ask the boys if they wouldn’t mind signing their names to these Congress-bound postcards. The boys didn’t need to write anything else on them, the postcards had all been pre-printed with a message from each Leader of the Forthcoming Future – “No one’s trying to put words in your mouths, just trying to save time…” – to the effect that they just wanted their Congressional representatives to know they were the future of America, and they loved their country, and they’d sure learned about government here this week, and if those Congressmen didn’t mind would they please hurry up and pass legislation making it a felony punishable by law that anyone burning Old Glory be either fined heavily or locked up for fifteen years at least? And Mike was again bodily immersed in that applause, that enormous gymnasium-shaped cube of thrumming air molecules. And there was no dissent in the audience, except for Vance Twilliard, who some special last-minute pummelings had been set aside for. Twilliard was several rows away from Mike, looking indignantly from person to person, asking what Mike could just barely make out was “…what about the fur’s cement mint, didn’t the fur’s cement mint count for anything?” but another boy grinned at Vance, maliciously cupping a hand to his ear, a gesture like he couldn’t hear Vance’s voice. A gesture indicating that the dead have no voices.
And Mike Falkirk suddenly wished he had not murdered Vance Twilliard. Mike took the little golf pencil they’d provided along with the postcards, and it was easy to tune out the stern forehead of the boy to Mike’s left who leaned down to growl what sounded like: “Deaf Con One! Why heart yuke lapping?” at him, and Deaf Cone One ignored the question, scribbling on his postcard perhaps one of the most important statements of his life subsequent to that year 1986, a statement which would become one of the secret touchstones of his political philosophy thenceforth, the insight that shaped his forthcoming future: App. is meaningless, unless the aud. feels free to sometimes withhold app. Or, perhaps put another way: Applause honestly given of one’s own free will is far superior, has greater value than forced applause. Applause should not be “following orders.” Or, on May Day seventeen years later, while in his Manhattan hotel room listening through headphones to his tinnitus retreatment therapy routine, depressed as he nursed a broken heart over a much younger college student he loved from afar, Mike Falkirk groggily looked up from his bed and saw, on the huge TV screen, the President landing on an aircraft carrier and speaking to the wildly applauding military personnel gathered there on deck, and Mike immediately wrote on his ubiquitous tablet: The applause of the military is meaningless, because when would the military ever boo the President?
And aside from leaving behind a legacy of political assassination at Leaders of the Forthcoming Future year after year (a legacy which unfortunately has not to this day died out, and if unchecked will continue on, into the forthcoming future), the only good thing to come out of his time at Alfred State for Mike Falkirk is that it served as the incipience of his critical inquiry into the complex nature of applause. His life’s work. The thing he develops headaches over. His Ultimate Concern.