The dinner guests broke into spontaneous applause. Floyd Wayne Vishniak, standing two hundred miles away in a cornfield, who did not give a damn about black persons, got a lump in his throat.
The next day, after he had bought all of his newspapers and read them over a bottomless cup of coffee in a diner, he went to the public library and, with some assistance from a librarian, looked up the microfilms for The Des Moines Register during the fall of 1963. He searched back and forth, the photographed pages zooming across the screen of the microfilm reader, until he found the account of the Illini-Hawkeye game.
An hour later he was out on the road in his truck, headed south along the river, toward the town of Quincy.
After he returned from his night detasseling shift, he sat down at his kitchen table with a beer and a fresh white piece of paper and relayed the results of his research activities to the one man who could make the best use of the information.
Floyd Wayne Vishniak
R.R. 6 Box 895
Davenport, Iowa
Aaron Green
Ogle Data Research
Pentagon Towers
Arlington, Virginia
Dear Mr. Green:
Yesterday night your friend and mine Governor Cozzano told a very interesting dinnertime story about the 1963 Illini-Hawkeye football game and one Lucullus Campbell. This story put a lump in my throat and so I went down to the public library to read more about it, as they often encourage us to do at the end of important TV shows.
Imagine my surprise to discover that the young William A. Cozzano did not even participate in the 1963 game because he was suffering from the stomach flu. He did not even set foot in Iowa City on that day.
Perhaps he just got the year wrong. Well, I checked 1962, '61, and '60 also. In '60 and '62, the game was held in Champaign. In '61, it was held in Iowa City. Cozzano was there all right, but according to the Des Moines Register, the starting quarterback played the whole game.
Perhaps it happened in Champaign? Well, in '60, the starting quarterback for the Hawkeyes got hurt and the second-string quarterback played very well for the entire game. And in '63, the starting quarterback played the entire game.
There was no Lucullus Campbell playing for Iowa ever.
I took a little drive down to Quincy and found out that there was a Lucullus Campbell who played for their high school and who was on the 1959 Illinois Ail-Star team. That was the same year Cozzano was an All-Star. He was a halfback. He never played college ball because he got killed in a car crash on the night of his graduation from high school.
So a person might think that William A. Cozzano is making up lies. That he is a dishonest politician like all the others.
But I do not agree with this idea because I believe in Cozzano and I could see the strong emotion on his face when he told that story. No doubt, he believed in the sincerity of his own words.
Then how to explain it? Is Cozzano crazy?
No, I do not think so. But it is a well-known fact that Cozzano had a stroke earlier this year and that his Jew lawyer covered it up and secretly ran the state of Illinois for some time.
Then Cozzano went and had him a special hightech operation and got better. OR SO THEY SAY. But maybe things aren't completely fixed inside of his head. Maybe his brain's memory banks have been scrambled. Maybe that new chip or whatever that they used to fix up his brain is actually playing tricks with his memory!
I trust that you will provide this info to Governor Cozzano as soon as possible so that he can take steps to have the problem fixed before he becomes President and begins to run the entire country with his faulty brain. This is a matter of total importance.
I cannot sleep anymore.
You will be hearing again from me soon, I am sure.
Sincerely, Floyd Wayne Vishniak
44
Chase Merriam, the High-Metabolism World Dominator and squire of Briarcliff Manor, New York, actually knew some people who seriously thought that the way to beat the crime problem in New York was to drive a junky old car. Most of these misguided people were rather young - kids who had come up in the eighties and had a lot of cleverness but no real intelligence, when it came to money. At a certain point along their sharply rising income curves, they had all gone out and bought BMWs or the equivalent. Not top-of-the-line BMWs, but mediocre ones. Sports sedans. And, inevitably, within a couple of weeks, someone smashed out a window, the alarm went off, they had to get up in the middle of the night, sweep up the glass, call the insurance company - the whole ritual.
Then they pontificated. It was easy enough to understand the psychology of it: all of these people were still young enough to think that life was terribly meaningful, that every little event had some role to play in the tightly written plot-line of the universe. You were supposed to learn from these things. Smash went the window, whoop-whoop-whoop went the car alarm, and then the yuppie came out of his brownstone, put his chin in his hand, and thought deep thoughts. The conclusion they always came to was that, by buying a nice car, they had somehow offended God with their dirty materialism, and now they were being punished. As if the dumpster colonists who roamed the streets at three a.m., punching out windows and scooping up people's tollbooth change to buy crack, were righteous angels dispatched by an avenging God.
Chase Merriam drove a Mercedes-Benz the size of an aircraft carrier and he made no apologies for it. It had a built-in alarm system, but he had no idea how to work it. He never used it. In fact, he never even bothered to take the keys from the ignition or lock the doors, because he never parked it more than fifty feet away from a good man with a gun. His parking space in Manhattan cost more than a three-bedroom split-level in the upper Midwest and was probably a better investment.
A really, really expensive car emitted a powerful psychological force field of its own. Smashing out the driver's-side window of a BMW 535i was a routine and insignificant New York gesture, on the level of vaulting a turnstile. Chase Merriam himself was often tempted to give it a try, to wrap his jacket around his hand and poke it through the glass just to see the little blue diamonds spray. But people were still awed by a big Mercedes sedan, Rolls Royce, or Ferrari. They respected these things intuitively. Maybe they harbored just a bit of fear, deep inside their hearts, that such cars were owned by Mob bosses or Colombian drug lords. But Chase Merriam liked to think that it wasn't just the fear of retribution. He liked to think that deep inside their battered, blackened hearts, people still harbored a respect for Quality.