A Confederacy of Dunces: Chapters 12–14

Every asylum in this nation is filled with poor souls who simply cannot stand lanolin, cellophane, plastic, television, and subdivisions.

He had blackmailed another ten dollars out of the urchin, also forcing the waif to watch the wagon while he spent the afternoon at Loew’s State watching a film about drag-racing teenagers.

“I thought that you might react like that. Therefore I have kept all of this paraphernalia stashed at Paradise Vendors, Incorporated.”

“Oh, my God. Are you going mad? Get away from me this instant. I hope that you’ve noticed that scimitar dangling from my uniform.”

At St. Peter Street he got out and first heard the noise, dim yet frenetic singing and laughing coming from the three-story yellow stucco building.

His ears shrank from the bedlam of singing, cackling, and giggling that was going on behind the closed black patent leather shutters.

There’s going to be a mass exodus for Mexico City in the morning.

“I certainly hope that no one has tried to inflict any warmongering resolutions upon the gathering.”

Well, at least we have a gathering place for our coup. Now that I’ve seen the place, however, I would have preferred your renting an American Legion hall or something equally appropriate.

Some obsessed military officer may have slipped into the meeting incognito and may be trying to extricate our secrets from some faithful party member by means of torture.

“I doubt whether any hack, under pressure, could pen such atrocious melodrama,” Ignatius observed.

“Our little convention seems to be getting rather unwieldy,” Ignatius said of the mad noises issuing from Dorian’s apartment.

The only voluptuous element in the large room was the champagne-colored velvet drapes tied back with white ribbons.

You know that we dearly love parties with a motif

Just as he was about to evanesce completely, Frieda, Liz, and Betty burst in from the kitchen.

Now, like the abortive Crusade for Moorish Dignity, he had another debacle on his itching hands.

Looking at his Mickey Mouse wristwatch which was, as usual, moribund, he wondered what time it was.

Just then the three members of the defunct ladies’ auxiliary, Frieda, Betty, and Liz, stomped into the crowd surrounding Ignatius.

I told you long ago that that mongoloid Mancuso was our nemesis. Now he has struck his final blow.

Dr. Talc had had them both in separate classes one grim semester, during which they had disrupted his lectures with strange noises and impertinent, venomous questions that no one, aside from God, could possibly have answered.

“Can I have my camera back?” he asked almost incoherently when his larynx was at last clear.

That’s him? In the gutter? This is tragic. Carousing, drunken, hopeless, already a bloated derelict.

Mrs. Levy yawned and said, “Can I fight what you’ve been leading up to all your life? This really proves to the girls that what I’ve said about you all along was right. The more I think about Abelman’s suit, the more I realize that the whole thing is inevitable, Gus.

She wanted to see Abelman victorious; she would see in the victory some peculiar justification.

How unsuspecting, how ingenuous I’ve been. For weeks now I’ve been the dupe of a conspiracy.

No wonder you’ve turned on me so savagely. I suspect that you are using me as a scapegoat for your own feelings of guilt.

Many times when we were alone, she would babble for hours about plans to ‘get’ Levy Pants. Her resentment surfaced in the form of vitriolic attacks upon your corporate structure.

Because that old tyrant wouldn’t change a thing in that plant. Because he destroyed whatever initiative I had.

From now on we make Bermuda shorts only. Less trouble, higher profits on lower expenditures.

“We’ll make an award. What were they supposed to be for, meritorious service and bravery?”

She went up to his bedroom door and listened to the wildly twanging bedsprings as they reached a crescendo, as they built toward a finale worthy of Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King.”

The thirty dollars was gone, apparently confiscated by his mother at the hospital.

He scratched the bumps on his paws and peered through the shutters, expecting to see several hirsute brutes from the hospital.

Somehow she had summoned and flushed Myrna minx from a subway tube, from some picket line, from the pungent bed of some Eurasian existentialist, from the hands of some epileptic Negro Buddhist, from the verbose midst of a group therapy session.

I’ve gained pounds lying continuously in bed, seeking surcease and sublimation in food.

He could see that she was beside herself with joy over finding a legitimate cause, a bona fide case history, a new movement.

“I’ve tried to describe you to my friends in the group therapy group, working away in this room, sealed off from society. This strange medieval mind in its cloister.”

Just think of the great thought that is going to come streaming out of that head when we’ve finally cleared away all the cobwebs and taboos and crippling attachments.

“Aren’t you even going to leave your mother some very bitter note, some articulate protest or something?”