The Illuminatus! Trilogy

It was clearly time to leave this place. He could try searching the offices, but he doubted whether he'd find anything, and, anyway, he was much too tired and hung over- not only from the alcohol he'd drunk, but also from the strange drug the Oriental girl had given him before the movie. Still, it had been a very nice drug. It had been Joe's habit since 1969, when he wasn't too busy and didn't have to get up early in the morning, to get stoned and watch late movies on television. He found this so enjoyable a pastime that he'd lost two girlfriends to it; they'd both wanted to go to bed when he was just settling down in front of the tube, laughing himself silly at the incredibly clever witticisms, marveling at the profundity of the philosophical aphorisms tossed off by the characters (such as Johnny's line in Bitter Rice: "I work all week and then on Sundays I watch other people ride the merry-go-round"-what a world of pathos had been expressed in that simple summation of a man's life) or appreciating, as one wordsmith does another, the complex subtlety of the commercials and the secret links between them and the movies into which they were inserted (like the slogan: "You can take the Salem out of the country but you can't take the country out of Salem," in the middle of The Wolf Man).

All of this capacity for appreciating movies had been raised to a new high with the drug Mao Tsu-hsi had given him, and added to this it was a full-color movie on a large screen uninterrupted by commercials or, come to think of it, by fnords- and commercials no matter how trickily interwoven with the plot of the movie did tend to seem like interruptions, even to one who was stoned enough to know better. It had been a great movie. The best movie of his life. He would never forget it. Joe tried the knob of the boardroom door and it opened at once. He stopped, considering whether he should take out his pocket knife and carve "Malik was here" or some obscenity into the beautiful wood of the table. That would, he felt in an obscure way, let them know that he knew where they were at. But it would be a shame to spoil the wood, and besides, he was dreadfully tired. He walked through darkened outer corridors, staggered down the stairs and let himself out into the street. Looking toward the East River, he thought he could see light in the sky over Queens. Was the sun coming up? Had he been there that long?

A cab cruised by with its light on. Joe hailed it. Sinking into the back seat as he gave the driver his home address, he noticed that the man's name on his hack license was Albert Feather.

Well, here's that ladder now, Come on, let's climb. The first rung is yours, The rest are mine.

Funny, thought Lieutenant Otto Waterhouse of the State's Attorney's Police. Every time things get hairy, that damn song starts going through my head. I must be an obsessive-compulsive neurotic. He'd first heard the song, "To Be a Man" by Len Chandler, at the home of a chick he was balling back in '65. It expressed pretty well for him his condition as a member of the tribe. The tribe, that was how he thought of black people; he'd heard a Jew refer to the Jews that way, and he liked it better than that soul brother shit. Deep down, he hated other blacks and he hated being black. You had to climb, that was the thing. You had to climb, each man alone.

When Otto Waterhouse was eight years old, a gang of black kids on the South Side had beaten him, knifed him and thrown him into Lake Michigan to drown. Otto didn't know how to swim, but somehow he'd pulled himself along the concrete pilings, clinging to rusty steel where there was nothing to cling to, his blood seeping out into the water, and he'd stayed there, hidden, till the gang went away. Then he pulled himself along to a ladder, climbed up and dragged himself onto the concrete pier. He lay there, almost dead, wondering if the gang would come back and finish him.

Someone did come along. A cop. The cop nudged Otto's body with his toe, rolled it over and looked down. Otto looked up at the Irish face, round, pig-nosed and blue-eyed.

"Oh, shit," said the cop, and walked on.

Somehow Otto lived till morning, when a woman came along and found him and called an ambulance. Years later, it seemed logical enough to him to join the police force. He knew the members of the gang that nearly killed him. He didn't bother with them until after he got on the force. Then he found cause to kill each of the gang members- several of whom had by then become respectable citizens- one by one. Most of them didn't know who he was or why he was killing them. The number he killed made his reputation in the Chicago Police Department. He was a nigger cop who could be trusted to deal with niggers.

Otto never did know who the cop was who'd left him to die- he remembered the face, more or less, but they all looked alike to him.