The Millarville Racing and Agricultural Society Times-Gazette sent your intrepid reporter and gallant lad-about-the-place to the trial of cowboy actor John Wayne, who smokes constantly and mutters like an overgrown toddler in need of a throttling and a talking to. Perhaps I was forged in a more traditional and less compromised furnace. Who, sir or madame, is to say?
Here are some of the things I saw in the hour leading up to the trial of disgraced cowboy actor and known war apologist John "If That is Your Real Name" Wayne: soldiers drinking tea next to artillery; a journalist working studiously on that day's crossword; clipboard busybodies busily busy at their business; the big stentorian judge and his mighty quivering jowl, the whole package fresh from the gardens of Luxembourg. Enter legal council, choir, children of war torn and also famine-ravaged Cosumel, the district attorney's suicide blonde mistress who also works for him, and then finally armed Zapatista women to cover the perimeter.
Moustaches now cease to writhe, ye heathen horde, in their ubiquitous suspicion and disdain. The man behind me says: "Give these motherfuckers a trampoline and some turpentine and they go and try to put over a three-ring circus like this was Duck Soup or the Skull and Bones society."
"Shut it with the chatter, harpies," says the seven-foot bailiff with the hairlip and his hands on his hips. "Go outside and clutch your prayer beads down in the gravel with God pummelled to incognizant dust if you can't stop openly bleating."
A slow and perhaps drugged fly buzzes out the in door.
We should be above trials and such. Can you dig it? This is a time-consuming activity!
The cowboy actor John Wayne enters in his workaday chains, a little sheepish, hat in his hands...except for his having no hat. Behold, good people, the toddler chastened!
A long time passes.
Shelling has started up again nearby and artillery near the courthouse is being fired at a solid tempo. Buildings shed brick like dandruff. God the Insensible, long may he thunder and roar in the divine downpour!
When all the audience has left John Wayne looks bereft, like he knew he'd caused that himself with his bitterness, cigarettes, and grotty lowborn heft. Mr. Wayne turned to the judge and said: "Please, whatever you do, just don't characterize me as a militant, 'cause that would make me plain sick." He added: "There can't be no matter of there being any jury of my peers; don't nobody know the trouble I've seen."
Some ranchers and young folk come in because they think it's a bar...apologize...leave...
Suddenly my dear Reba runs in and she's proper liquored and no I damn well cannot believe it, but she is screaming presently the following to my awe and astonishment: "John Wayne, you cheap, cheatin' two-bit half-assed cowboy-actin' bastard, you owe my and little Jim alimonies. If you keep having second thoughts it's over, lard ass, and look at me, a prize horse's ass, 'cause you didn't even have the dadblasted brainpower sufficient to so much as try and seduce me."
The district attorney's mistress goes by and I get a curious chill up my spine. She's built like a jackhammer. A grim thought flashes through my head: the next lunch break is permanent.
The judge: "Very illuminating, but I hardly manage to see how..."
Part of a helicopter crashes through the ceiling of the courthouse. "Who brought the reefer?" quips some wag two rows behind me.
Asked for any final words, the disgraced and now convicted cowboy actor John Wayne complains in grief that it was never any more a case of his having thrown away his badge in order to confront the authorities and the powers that be than it was a contrary gesture meant to antagonize the outlaws who to a man overestimated the extent to which "the Duke" was handcuffed to the badge.
In an interview from prison, incarcerated former cowboy star John Wayne, who works in the commissary, said the following to me personally: "I loved Reba very much, I think, and I wasn't yanking her chain or anything. I fucked it up very badly but also she became irritating to me, slowly and progressively until my last goddamn nerve had had it. She became much less desirable every time she spoke. You didn't find that? I get jealous and suspicious and paranoid. On occasion. She'd then poke at me like I were the proverbial bear. I'm not going to lie, I hit her a few times. In the mouth, the stomach. One of my things is I can't stand to let somebody leave a room so...uh...I could never let her, you know, leave a room. I wouldn't even let her go to the bathroom alone. I was sure one of us was going to kill the other at some point, like a basic and crude law of nature, but that never did happen. Ha ha. Wheel of life! Sheesh."
Oh my God, I cannot believe this, don't look now, but that same guy is still working on that fucking crossword puzzle...
Can, "Nineteen Century Man"
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