I want to read from a novel that will be published next month
entitled The Terrible Threes, a sequel to The Terrible Twos.
It gets worse.
[LAUGHTER]
And by the time I write The Terrible Fours,
it's going to be in a state of collapse.
Anyway, I use my Afro-Native American heritage,
and I have animal characters in this novel.
And I start-- I thought it was appropriate to begin
the novel with a quote from Johnny Carson.
And he says--
[LAUGHTER]
You know, I'm not a modernist, so you won't
find me quoting Saint Paul--
[LAUGHTER]
Or Saint Augustine, or Pascal, or Kafka.
OK, John Johnny Carson said, "When turkeys mate,
they think of swans."
[LAUGHTER]
This-- I want to give you a little background
on this novel.
I have to--
I asked somebody to-- somebody said, how does the first--
give me a plot [INAUDIBLE].
She said, I'll go read Terrible Twos.
OK, in Terrible Twos-- it's been three years since Christmas
of The Terrible Twos, a Christmas which
saw amazing events transpire in the White House of Dean
Clift, a former fashion model who
rose from Congress into Vice President,
and then to the presidency, after the death of General
Walter Scott, a hero of Dominica.
And they went into Dominica, invaded Dominica,
and found that there was only one communist.
And he was sort of like a CIA plant.
[LAUGHTER]
They filmed the whole thing in Marin County, anyway.
Dean Clift was a hands-off president
who didn't know and didn't care to know
about the activities of his advisors, Admiral Matthews, Bob
Krantz, Vice President Hatch, Jesse Hatch, and Reverend
Clement Jones, the administration's
spiritual advisor.
Clift changed, however, after his wife, Elizabeth,
the first lady, was electrocuted while lighting the White House
Christmas tree, and was visited by Saint Nicholas, who
reveals to him the fate of former leaders
who made terrible and tragic mistakes.
Nicholas, out to remove his Protestant image
as a buffoon in a red suit, also warns
Clift of a covert operation developed by Krantz, Jones,
and Matthews code named Two Birds, a plan
to rid America of surplus people and an African country's
possession of nuclear weapons at the same time.
Nobody believes Dean Clift when he discusses
his vision for a nation-- well, he goes on television,
tells everybody, saying Santa Claus told them
that this operation was going on.
So they invoke the 25th Amendment
regarding presidential disability
to remove him from office to a private sanatorium
about 50 miles from Washington.
And then I introduce a character named Black Peter, which
if you're German or if you're of northern European ancestry
in Europe, this Nicholas is accompanied by a companion
named Black Peter.
I saw this ceremony in Amsterdam,
and Nicholas rides a white horse and Black Peter rides a sports
car behind him.
[LAUGHTER]
And he's the one who passes out the gifts,
and he's the one that also goes on a chimney, wouldn't you
know--
does all the dirty work.
So I introduce Black Peter into the American Christmas
through this novel.
Former university professor-- former president
of the University of California named
Charles Jones, who wrote the definitive book on Nicholas,
said the reason that you don't find
Black Peter in the Nicholas or the American Christmas
is because he couldn't get hotel reservations.
[LAUGHTER]
I'll do the best I can, pal.
Black Peter learns, though, the--
so there's an imposter Black Peter.
And he comes-- the real Black Peter
emerges from an island of Guinea, an island
beneath the Caribbean Ocean, to challenge
this other Peter, who's been living underground in Manhattan
since the riot that happened during a Christmas party
at Madison Square Garden, which is precipitated
by Jack Frost and his goons.
Jack Frost makes-- works for the toy manufacturers, Christmas
card merchants.
OK.
Nance Saturday, a wannabe detective-- and it
goes on and on.
I'll just read from the first chapter here,
and this is from The Terrible Threes.
And the character here is Nance Saturday, who's
an incompetent detective, doesn't solve
the case in The Terrible Twos.
As a matter of fact, one of my friends, a feminist critic,
said this character-- what kind of detective is this?
The clues are always getting ahead of him.
So in this novel, I had the clues getting ahead of him.
I've learned from critics.
And it says--
OK, I'll go on with--
I'll read some of this.
"Nance Saturday agreed with Genesis,
where it said that man should not be alone.
He spent a lot of time interacting
with his electronic playmates.
He's watching his ex-wife's show.
She's interviewing a woman whose hairstyle resemble that
of a baby chick's.
And she says, 'Thanksgiving is just
an excuse for all the misogynists
and female fools in the country to keep women over a hot stove.
And in the shopping aisles, searching
for bargains on turkey, the American men
are fully capable of obtaining their own cranberry sauce.
Most of them don't know how to carve a turkey,
and so the woman must also perform this chore.
And so when people wish me a happy Thanksgiving,
under the circumstances, I wonder what there is to be
so thankful about.'
She's wearing a white shirt, buttoned
at the collar, tight, shiny black pants, no socks,
and black shoes.
She folded her arms and crossed her legs.
She then lit a cigarette.
'I agree with you, Becky,' Virginia said.
'My ex-husband didn't even earn enough money to buy a turkey.
He was always doing odd jobs.
I paid his way through a year in law school,
but then he dropped out.
But now I found a man who really knows how to carve the turkey.
He's sensitive.
He's considerate.
And he's 10 years younger than I am.'
[LAUGHTER]
Nance got up and turn off the television set.
To think that he spent those years sleeping
next to a woman who will later tell all their secrets
to a nationwide audience.
Her ratings were as high as those of her only rival, Oprah
Hippo--
[LAUGHTER]
Who had to be moved into the studio for appearances
on a network by piano movers.
[LAUGHTER]
He switched-- That one'll make me friends, right?
He switched to another channel.
An Asian-American man was speaking heatedly
to an Asian-American woman.
The man was furious.
The camera kept cutting away to the audience
of mostly women, who were giving the man a cool response.
The woman calmly sat in a chair, ignoring
her debating opponent's fury.
She was wearing a black suit and a man's tie.
The moderator ask her a question.
Nance turned up the audio.
And she says, 'I think Mr. Hamimoto's arguments are
absurd.
To suggest that the American government owes
the Japanese-American community reparations--
as usual, Mr. Hamimoto ignores the facts.
He speaks of internment.'
Identification came on the screen--
Beechiko Mizuni.
This a Japanese woman who wanders
through the novel searching for the great blonde wig.
[LAUGHTER]
Beechiko: 'He fails to distinguish between internment
and relocation.
Only a few thousand Japanese-Americans
were actually interned, but speaking
of the larger question, which was the worse, the relocation
and the internment?
I say that the United States did Japanese-American women
a great favor.
They remove them from homes in which they are being brutalized
by Japanese-American men, a far greater imprisonment,
next to which relocation or internment were
minor inconveniences.
So instead of receiving $20,000, Japanese-Americans should be
donating that amount to our generous government.'
The audience erupted into wild applause.
The camera cut to the man, who was shaking his head sadly.
Nance didn't care about the battle
between the sexes that has spilled over from the '80s
into the '90s.
As far as he was concerned, he was AWOL from the war.
He was keeping his to himself and not sticking it nowhere.
The mysterious black Russian he'd been seeing since he
and Virginia separated had also left.
He remembered the last night of their lovemaking.
She yelled out something that sounded like [? yabatza, ?]
[? yabatza. ?] He was on her like a coyote--
he was on her like a coyote on a chicken that night.
Limbs were flying.
[LAUGHTER]
And the heels of her feet were facing the ceiling.
Their buttocks are rolling, gyrating.
At one point, when their rhythm was perfectly synchronized,
he gave a nasty shift, like the pot-bellied flamenco
dancer he'd once seen do.
And she shrieked like someone who'd
walked into the kitchen in Florida on Sunday morning
and found an alligator on the floor."
It's my tribute to Faulkner.
He has long similes, you know?
It's pretty good modernism.
I'm not against them.
"The cognac-- there were lots of French kisses
and Russian fingers.
The cognac had spilled on the floor.
They were so weak that they almost
missed a Soviet airliner that was to return her
to a family in Kiev.
She was wearing a black dress decorated red roses, black
'40s hat, and she'd carried a black handbag.
Their sporadic lovemaking had become
victim of yet another liberalizing trend
in Russian politics, the 1980s trend
having been ruthlessly repressed towards the end
of the decade"-- profit, right?
"She was out with her relatives because she
wanted to claim her Tartar heritage,
while they wanted to be thought of as European.
A friend of the family, who had dinner with them,
drank all the Stoli they'd ordered,
ate the red cabbage and sturgeon,
had returned to Kiev to tell her family that she had a lover.
They were very provincial people,
commented on books they hadn't read
and performances they hadn't seen.
He thought he remembered her telling him
that they were mathematicians.
They had a dacha, housekeeper and a chauffeur
and didn't want to blow it.
He didn't seem to get along with the parents
of the women he dated.
Virginia's mother took the cake.
Virginia said it wasn't til she was 35 that her mother stopped
beating her with an iron cord.
When her relatives visited them when they were married,
he always wondered why they kept on that trench coats.
One night, he awoke and found that she
wasn't sleeping beside him.
He drove to the motel where her family
was staying and peeked into the window of the suite
they'd rented.
Some of his personal items lay on the table.
And her sister, the one with the slow rate of metabolism,
was plucking a long strand of the Russian's
lady's coarse black hair from one of his shirts
marked exhibit A.
Virginia was crying.
They seem to be building up a case against him.
That wasn't the only cause, but he remembered,
in the series of arguments they had
before they broke-- broken up, he said that she was still
shackled by her family.
He dated a series of European-American women,
ranging from the California beauties
you see modeling in bikinis in Sports Illustrated, Herb Gold's
favorites, to the black-haired arty types
who listen to Laurie Anderson and were into [INAUDIBLE]..
Virginia and her friends were right about European-American
women.
They spent a lot of time tossing their hair.
[LAUGHTER]
While vacationing in the Caribbean,
he visited a museum where he came upon a painting
of ancient Carib woman.
The lust in her eyes as she stared at a pig was immaculate.
He fell in love with her fat lips and shiny hair.
She had small breasts, and her legs
looked as though she spent a lot of time running out of craters.
Another painting showed her spearing a wild boar.
Coincidentally, he ran into a woman
who looked just like her at a gallery opening on the Lower
East Side.
She said that she was from Philipichino,
or from a small island in the Pacific
called the Philiphichines.
They began to date, and for a while
they were as happy as two sailors dancing
in a movie with Ann Miller.
[LAUGHTER]
Her mother found out about it.
She began to send strange envelopes to him.
Some were filled with parts of birds.
In a large envelope covered with stamps
with pictures of men wearing the kind of hairstyles
that influenced the punkers, he found
the ear of a large rabbit.
He told her about it, and she said that her mother always
sent horrible material to her lovers
and that her last boyfriend, Richard, had disappeared.
One night, she called to tell him
her mother had flown in from the Philipichino Islands
and wanted to have dinner with them.
That was fine with him, because after dinner, maybe
they'd go to her apartment and put on some Marvin Gaye
records.
[LAUGHTER]
Marvin Gaye would have loved her,
because she was a real healer--
[LAUGHTER]
What Martin Luther King, Jr. Would've called a doctor"--
didn't get that one, huh?
[LAUGHTER]
"The kind that would have sent JFK, with his bad back,
to a chiropractor.
She did all the work.
All you had to do was lay there.
She may not have been the kind of woman
that you found behind every great man,
but she certainly was next to him in a variety of other ways.
[LAUGHTER]
At dinner, her mother said that she--
at dinner, her mother said that she didn't see anything
on the menu that appealed to her and requested
that the waiter bring her the names of the diners.
[LAUGHTER]
He didn't get the import of this incident
until later, when his date went to the ladies room
and he was left alone with his mother-- her mother.
Her mother didn't say anything but glared at him
for a long time.
This made him feel uncomfortable,
and he shifted in his seat.
What was taking her daughter so long in the bathroom?
Finally, her mother pulled out a huge basket
made of straw with a ship design on it and removed something.
It was a miniature head, about the size
of a chestnut, an old wrinkled chestnut or prune.
It was the head of a man.
'Richard?' he said weakly.
The old woman nodded.
[LAUGHTER]
He went out to the parking lot and emptied his dinner
on the ground.
[LAUGHTER]
He never ate shrimp again.
That's when he entered a new celibacy period.
Orifices of the '90s were like those of the '80s, anyway--
they were covered with do not enter signs.
No wonder Cuba was armed."
OK.
It goes on and on like that-- on and on.
[APPLAUSE]