Interface (74 page)

Detasseling was a common practice in Iowa; it was the mass
castration of corn plants by the forcible removal of their tassels. The
actual yanking was done by hand, by individual detasselers walking
up and down the rows, endlessly, beneath the hot August sun.

Floyd Wayne Vishniak would drive out to the fields early each
morning to put in a couple of hours before the sun became hot, go back into Davenport to feed rolls of quarters into the newspaper machines, read the papers and drink Mountain Dew all day, then
drive back out to the fields in the cool of the evening to continue
his work. For the first couple of weeks of the detasseling season, the
evening shift had been rather dull, but things perked up when
Cozzano's National Town Meeting finally got started, and he
began to get coverage two or three hours a night.

The Town Meeting had seemed a little bit hokey when they
announced it, but in practice it turned out to be damn impressive. Some very important people were showing up at this thing. They
had a couple of so-called surprise appearances every evening, as
movie stars, ex-football heroes, captains of industry, and even a few
renegade politicians began to show up at the Meeting and throw
their support behind Cozzano.

By the third or fourth evening, a clear pattern emerged in the
coverage. At seven
p.m.
the PIPER watch would come on, with
the familiar logo and theme music. For fifteen minutes or so it
would show an edited broadcast of that day's events at McCormick
Place, Chicago's huge lakeside convention center, the site of the
National Town Meeting. Then there would be fifteen minutes of
analysis from a team of pundits, some pro-Cozzano, some anti-. Then half an hour of taped stuff, like a speech by Cozzano from
earlier in the day. Then the program would cut to a hotel suite
somewhere, a living-room-type environment, and Cozzano would
sit down with various groups of Americans who wanted to bitch
about their problems: unemployment, lack of heath insurance,
shitty public schools, and so on. Cozzano would sit there and listen
to them ventilate, jot down the occasional note, ask the occasional question, and then he would usually deliver some kind of a little
sermon that was intended to calm them down and make them
believe that he cared about their problems and would certainly do
something about them at the White House.

The PIPER watch beamed out these little images as he made his way across a vast flat cornfield, completely alone, the only thing
moving within several miles. His hands bobbed up and down
rhythmically as he shuffled down the mile-long rows, reaching out
with both arms to grip and yank the tassels, and when something
especially interesting came on the screen - a surprise appearance by
a major star, for example - he would stop for a minute and stand
motionless, staring at his wrist. At the beginning of these evening
shifts, the images on the little screen were pale and washed-out, but
as he inched his way across the field, and the sun sank into the flat horizon, the light from the watch became brighter, its colors purer,
until finally the moon and the stars came out and Vishniak was
groping his way across the field in darkness, the images of the
National Town Meeting radiating in pure intense colors as though the wristwatch were a bracelet of rubies, emeralds, and sapphires.

Tonight, Governor Cozzano was meeting with a group of black
persons who had organized themselves out of the undifferentiated
mass of Americans gathered together for the National Town
Meeting. They had got together and formed their own little
organization which had then promptly splintered into little groups
who all hated each other. Now, the leaders of the little factions
were meeting with Governor Cozzano over a nice dinner in his
hotel suite. They were eating tiny little miniature chickens and
drinking wine.

One of the black people was using an analogy to explain why black people were not becoming successful executives in large enough numbers. In the game of football, he pointed out, black
people were often valued as wide receivers and running backs, but
coaches were resistant to making them quarterbacks. Governor
William A. Cozzano listened to this analogy soberly and thought
fully, chewing on a morsel of the miniature chicken and nodding
his head from time to time, never taking his gaze off the face of the
man who was speaking. When the man was done, Cozzano sat
back in his chair, took a sip of wine, and went on a little stroll down
memory lane.

"You know, that business about quarterbacks really hits home to
me. I can remember back in about 1963 when I was on the Illinois
team, and we traveled to Iowa City to play a game against the
Hawkeyes. They had a starting quarterback and two others on the
bench, all of them white, and they also had a few black players
recruited from across the river, here in Illinois. In particular they had a young man named Lucullus Campbell, who had been the
starting quarterback for his high-school team in Quincy, Illinois, a
river town. He had been splendid in that role - an incredible passer
who could also run the ball. Well, before the game even started, the
Hawkeyes' starting quarterback was out with the stomach flu. They started their second-string quarterback, and sometime in the second
quarter of the game, he took a very serious hit and went down with
a knee injury that knocked him out of the game. And so they put
in their third-string quarterback.

"And let me tell you, that young man - with all due respect to
him - was just no good as a quarterback. He dropped the ball. He
threw interceptions. He tried to hand off the ball to people who weren't even there." Cozzano paused for a moment and dabbed at
his mouth with his napkin while the people around the table laughed. "Now, I was an offensive player, and so, when their
offense was on the field - while this poor fellow was making all of
these mistakes - I was on the sidelines, looking straight across the
field at poor Lucullus Campbell. He was watching this third-string quarterback in disbelief. I could clearly read the frustration on his face. Finally he got up and approached the coach and spoke to him.
I couldn't hear his words, but I knew what he was saying. It's a
universal plea: 'Put me in, Coach. I can do it.' And you know
what? The coach didn't even look up at him. He wouldn't look
Lucullus Campbell in the eye. He just shook his head no and kept
going through his clipboard. And I remember thinking that that
was just about the most unfair thing I had ever seen. I went up to
him after the game and I told him so, and I'd like to think that he
took a bit of comfort in my words." Cozzano had delivered the first
part of this story with kind of a wry humorous tone, then turned
sad. But at this point he became angry at the memory, sat up
straight in his chair, and began pounding his index finger into the
dinner table. His guests sat riveted. Cozzano, pissed off, was a
formidable presence. "Ever since that day, I have found it heart
rending to see talented, ambitious black people, willing and able to
compete in whatever field, held back by tired old white men who
don't want to give them a chance. And I vow to you that I will
never become one of those tired old white men - and I won't allow
any of them to serve under me either."

The dinner guests broke into spontaneous applause. Floyd Wayne
Vishniak, standing two hundred miles away in a cornfield, who did
not give a damn about black persons, got a lump in his throat.

The next day, after he had bought all of his newspapers and read
them over a bottomless cup of coffee in a diner, he went to the
public library and, with some assistance from a librarian, looked up
the microfilms for
The Des Moines Register
during the fall of 1963.
He searched back and forth, the photographed pages zooming
across the screen of the microfilm reader, until he found the
account of the Illini-Hawkeye game.

An hour later he was out on the road in his truck, headed south
along the river, toward the town of Quincy.

After he returned from his night detasseling shift, he sat down at
his kitchen table with a beer and a fresh white piece of paper and
relayed the results of his research activities to the one man who could make the best use of the information.

Floyd Wayne Vishniak

R.R. 6 Box 895

Davenport, Iowa

Aaron Green

Ogle Data Research

Pentagon Towers

Arlington, Virginia

Dear Mr. Green:

Yesterday night your friend and mine Governor Cozzano told
a very interesting dinnertime story about the 1963 Illini-
Hawkeye football game and one Lucullus Campbell. This
story put a lump in my throat and so I went down to the
public library to read more about it, as they often encourage
us to do at the end of important TV shows.

Imagine my surprise to discover that the young William A.
Cozzano did not even participate in the 1963 game because he
was suffering from the stomach flu. He did not even set foot
in Iowa City on that day.

Perhaps he just got the year wrong. Well, I checked 1962,
'61, and '60 also. In '60 and '62, the game was held in
Champaign. In '61, it was held in Iowa City. Cozzano was
there all right, but according to the
Des Moines Register,
the
starting quarterback played the whole game.

Perhaps it happened in Champaign? Well, in '60, the
starting quarterback for the Hawkeyes got hurt and the second-
string quarterback played very well for the entire game. And in '63, the starting quarterback played the entire game.

There was no Lucullus Campbell playing for Iowa ever.

I took a little drive down to Quincy and found out that
there was a Lucullus Campbell who played for their high
school and who was on the 1959 Illinois Ail-Star team. That
was the same year Cozzano was an All-Star. He was a
halfback. He never played college ball because he got killed in
a car crash on the night of his graduation from high school.

So a person might think that William A. Cozzano is making
up lies. That he is a dishonest politician like all the others.

But I do not agree with this idea because I believe in
Cozzano and I could see the strong emotion on his face when
he told that story. No doubt, he believed in the sincerity of his
own words.

Then how to explain it? Is Cozzano crazy?

No, I do not think so. But it is a well-known fact that
Cozzano had a stroke earlier this year and that his Jew lawyer
covered it up and secretly ran the state of Illinois for some
time.

Then Cozzano went and had him a special hightech
operation and got better. OR SO THEY SAY. But maybe
things aren't completely fixed inside of his head. Maybe his
brain's memory banks have been scrambled. Maybe that new
chip or whatever that they used to fix up his brain is actually playing tricks with his memory!

I trust that you will provide this info to Governor Cozzano
as soon as possible so that he can take steps to have the
problem fixed before he becomes President and begins to run
the entire country with his faulty brain. This is a matter of total
importance.

I cannot sleep anymore.

You will be hearing again from me soon, I am sure.

Sincerely, Floyd Wayne Vishniak

44

Chase Merriam, the High-Metabolism World Dominator and
squire of Briarcliff Manor, New York, actually knew some people
who seriously thought that the way to beat the crime problem in New York was to drive a junky old car. Most of these misguided people were rather young - kids who had come up in the eighties
and had a lot of cleverness but no real intelligence, when it came to
money. At a certain point along their sharply rising income curves,
they had all gone out and bought BMWs or the equivalent. Not top-of-the-line BMWs, but mediocre ones. Sports sedans. And,
inevitably, within a couple of weeks, someone smashed out a
window, the alarm went off, they had to get up in the middle of
the night, sweep up the glass, call the insurance company - the
whole ritual.