The World Idiot Read Online Free Page B

our hearts... From a balcony a woman cried. An asthmatic played a 12-string catarrh. We listened. He blew it. We moved on. We ate tropical fish from the pink pages of National Hagiograph and Yak Hatred Yearly . The candles died and the colours dropped an octave.
    In a bar grown soiled with long exposure to drunken laughter and tall stories, we sipped vermouth and crême de la neige. A blind crooner played Gnat King Cole numbers on his dislocated trombone. I say... I mean, do you play any... Indigo blues only eh? Well when you’ve been stung once... His voice buzzed through the curved air, as warped as the beams, our vision. Posters on the walls winked tired eyes. We dropped our glasses and trod them to an adequate sugar.
    Wilson wondered aloud whether it would be possible to replace the waters of the indoor swimming pool (cheap rate, Wednesday) with some corrosive mixture. A bare bones solution. A churning yearn. Newby suggested monstrous puppets, worked from behind. Grant had been won over to Dalton’s concept of self-mutilation. I procrastinated with my face in my hands, my ears full of micropolyphonic rhythms. Grant tried to win me over to Dalton’s concept of self-mutilation. Dalton chained himself to a tram while we held onto his legs. We travelled across half the city...
    Well the management was firmly on my back now... The others had shirked their responsibilities. They fled one night in a hot air balloon bound for some land far away. The Svelte Veldt. I could not stop them. So I was alone. And I bore up the weight of the entire management. All alone. I picked up the telephone, many telephones, and begged relatives, friends, strangers. I tried to look a chicken in the neck. I tried to squeeze a rainbow from my eye.
    (This is always the way, is it not, when deadlines cannot be met? I managed a feather-lick, but not a rumination. I completed a spectrum, but not a rainbow. Through the window rickshaws hurried to the hospital (a leprosarium that charged an arm and a leg (cheap rate)) and vendors hawked basted voles and cheese omelettes. Herders chased grasshoppers into vats of cider with long poles.)
    At last, on the eve of the great event, I collected together a package of dubious merit. They included a family of migrant workers, paid in advance, and thirty-three beekeepers press ganged from a local Variety Theatre (“The Fable Of The Wannabees”, cheap rate) not to mention a couple of split-infinitives, split down the middle; very beautiful, very wise. I turned to them and waved my bamboo cane in the humid air. I say... I mean, do you have any... Amateur experience only eh? Well when you’ve experienced one amateur... How can we balk? There is life to resist yet.
    What has gone wrong with the world? Do you think I could find a single freak in all the ranks of the unemployed? Not one, not a lonely boobie, not a solitary oddball. So I study my package of dubious merit, my last chance, and I weep. There is The Overzealous Lounge Lizard, The Male Female-Man, The Gigolo As Old As His Mistress, The Tallest Midget In Christendom, The Microscopic Giant. There is The Radical Reactionary and The Glummest Of Optimists. There is The Bearded Lady After A Shave. Tears stalking my lips, I dismiss them all with vigorous strokes of the cane...
    So the day dawns and I make a final attempt to please. Well it is painful but I don’t complain... I don’t complain... The sun breaks its shell in the west and the fireworks crack over our heads. Hancock, the futures tycoon, is roaring; and Grimes the natural death baron. There is food and drink and dancing girls and fountains and music and gossip and McGuire the incest comedian (“you know your sister’s menstruating when your father tastes different”) and Purdy Absurdy, the actress, and her latest boyfriend, Philip Pew, pedicurist to the stars and lots and lots of needy gerbils shipped over from the islands.
    And I ache. And I throb (pulse rate.)
    And there I am, at the top of the