Chaingang

“—a way you can earn up to a million dollars a year just by letting your friends and neighbors in on the secret. And best of all—"

“—order before midnight tonight and you'll not only get those wonderful steak knives, but you'll also get, absolutely free, and at no charge, this marvelous potato peeler as well—"

“—remarkable low price of only twenty-nine ninety-nine. With these spectacular new miracle wipers, you will never again have the problem of—"

“—earn while you learn this richly lucrative business from the ground up. In a moment we'll introduce you to the man who pioneered the dynamic no-money-down method of purchasing—"

“—Gabe, I want you to go ahead and rub it all over the hood. That's right. Just rub in anywhere on there. Now, Margo, you rub your side. There you go. Start in anywhere and cover those hoods with wax. We're going to let both coats set under the hot lights, and in a few minutes we'll come back and take a look at—"

“—lost over a hundred pounds with this amazing new product. There was never any between-meal hunger because of the—"

“—many who wished they could play but didn't have time to study the piano. Now you can start in playing songs right away! It only takes—"

One scam after another. Political scams. Snake oil scams. Art scams. Music scams. Costume jewelry scams. Every greed-targeted con job, bogus shuck, and jive sting that had ever been conceived of was right there on that weird tube.

The monkey people scammed each other all day, scammed themselves all night, and in between they watched people scamming one another on a little box. They were idiots!

He turned the channels. Puzzled somewhat, as always, by the obvious insincerity of the hair-care hucksters and car salesmen and televangelists whom he perceived as parts of the same great network of con games:

“God says we must wage war against Satan! We must take back what the devil has stolen. Our ministry must spread to the far corners of the world.” The strange, extremely earnest-looking evangelist spoke with a voice that rose and fell like ocean waves, but now he hardened his pitch and spoke in no-nonsense tones. “Here is what it will take to reach out and take back what belongs to the Lord. It will take ... fifty-two million dollars!"

He switched to another channel where a beautiful dancer moved across the small screen to a driving hard-rock audio track. An incredible montage of graphic images blinked above and behind her. The combination of the music and the imagery was intensely compelling and he turned the volume up. It was sensual, somehow, the way the pulsing rock pounded in tempo with his own strong heartbeat, and without thinking, it brought him to his feet and he was aping the movements of the dancer—Chaingang Bunkowski was dancing to MTV! Almost five hundred pounds of lard and muscle bouncing and boogieing across Mrs. Irby's floor. Another first! Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski rocking out stark naked. What a sight!

He didn't like the next video and he switched channels again and got a man extolling the virtues of B-12 spray packets, switched again and a woman, an actress on one of the daytime soaps, sat sobbing for the camera's eye.

Chaingang had all the actor's gifts, among them observation and memory, talents that he had in enormous abundance. An actor prepares by observing, for example, and his powers of observation were unequaled, but he hated those humans who were the object of observation—yet he found them fascinating. Even when he was not incarcerated, he preferred to spend most of his time alone, having little stomach for personal interaction—and yet so closely had he observed his fellow humans, and so painstakingly had he filed away the memory of their behavior patterns, that he could mimic them precisely—and on cue!

The soap opera actress wept, and Daniel Bunkowski allowed himself to remember the sadness of his past, contorting his fat, rubbery mask of a face in a mocking parody of the close-up on the screen, holding his huge head as she held hers, shaking with sobs the way she was, as he opened the fawcett on a waterworks of weeping. He killed the audio of the television set, and the sound of his crying filled the Irby home.

It was strangely pleasant and he gave in to the emotion, milking it at first as an actor would, enjoying the fact that his dimpled cheeks were covered in real tears and not glycerine. He soon realized that this thing he had never done in his entire adult life, this inarticulate expression of pain or distress known as crying, whether ridiculous or not, was tinged with genuine sadness that such an act was a rare outpouring from all that remained of his humanity.