Mr. Big

It has been nearly three months now since Mr. Big brought America to its knees.  Insurance companies are still trying to assess  fully the property damage, now estimated in the trillions of dollars.  Whole neighborhoods were trashed out, homes burned down to nubs of charcoal. Everywhere, the numberless overturned cars and buses, millions of smashed windows, countless looted liquor stores, and public buildings gutted out and deserted, now looming eerily like great concrete monoliths, dreary and lifeless in the cold April drizzle.  In a single four hour period, more property was wrecked than in the World War II firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo combined.  And the genius of it – the sheer genius of it – was that all of it, nearly all of it was accomplished at the hands of the owners and occupants, at the hands of those very persons who stood most to lose in the rioting.  What scores of foreign despots failed to accomplish over  the course of more than two centuries, Mr. Big managed almost effortlessly in the blink of an eye.  He knew exactly where to strike, and when.  In retrospect, it was all so obvious.  Our soft underbelly had always been exposed, we had always been vulnerable to this kind of ruthless, unconventional attack.  It took Mr. Big’s audacity and cunning to pull it off.

Where were the police?  Where was the fire department? everyone asked at first, and then the horror struck home.  The police and fire fighters had become a part of it almost immediately. They had been neutralized as effectively as though someone had dropped a planeload of doughnuts on their station houses. After all, they were only human, like the rest of us.  Hurled over the brink right along with everyone else, thanks to Mr. Big’s singularly diabolical scheme.  It was an orgy of insane destruction.  It is said that thousands of fans all across the country experienced massive cerebral hemhorrages during that four hour period.  Tens of thousands more suffered heart attacks of varying degrees of severity.  Ambulances and paramedics were unable to respond in most cases due to the rioting and arson, and then thousands more were injured by rocks and bottles, or when their cars were overturned by the shrieking mobs that issued, drunken and bawling from the sports bars and neighborhood watering holes, like effluvium from a storm gutter, into the streets.

“Bloody Sunday” they call it.  But even more damaging than the incalculable quantity of ruined property, than all the physical injuries, is the permanent, ugly scar on the national psyche.  From Bloody Sunday on, Americans must live with the terrifying knowledge of what they became, for a few short hours.  Mr. Big reduced them to primitive, bestial savages – worse; he reduced them to unconscionable animals, howling, thrashing, and blood-crazed.  And finally, in the last whimperings of their impotent rage, he reduced them to cowering, gibbering apes huddled together in the rain forest, fearing the onset of a self-made darkness that hung over the land like a pall of doom.

He proved that sanity is but a thin, unprotected membrane that barely holds all our ugliest cravings in check.  He pricked that membrane, and all the madness, all the sick, cruel, twisted, hideous bile that dwells inside us gushed out, poured forth.  He transformed Americans into a Mt. St. Helens of unparalleled violence.  He made our counterfeit civilization vomit us out in the throes of a turbulent, incandescent mob rage that fed on itself and grew by the moment, becoming a hot, torrential lava of blind, self-destructive hatred and frustration, leveling and consuming everything in its way.

I was the closest thing he had to a friend.  I’d known Mr. Big since we were in college together.  At once brilliant and piteously out of touch with his peers, he would actually spend Sunday afternoons in the library studying while the rest of us huddled around small television sets in our dorm rooms, watching football.  Happening to pass by, he’d look in on us with a disdainful sneer.  “How can you waste your lives watching that crap?” he’d snarl, and we’d respond to his blasphemy by throwing things at him, or we’d chase him down the corridors until he’d dart into his room, slam the door, and lock it.  He hated sports.

“Gonna watch the Super Bowl?” some innocent grocery clerk would ask him, and fastening his cold dark eyes on the offender, he’d hiss in a raspy, throaty whisper filled with menace, “I hate football.” And then, as the well-wisher would gulp with astonishment, he’d add, “And I hate even worse anybody who pretends to like it.”  Even if he’d been queried in a more lighthearted moment – if, indeed, any of his moments can be characterized as that – he’d have issued a merely sarcastic reproach, asking “Super Bowl?  Super Bowl?  What is that – some kind of new toilet?”  Or he’d simply declare, flatly and without emotion, “I’ve got better things to do than watch a bunch of colored guys with double digit I.Q.’s chase each other around a lawn with stripes painted on it.  Don’t you?”

Of course, his real name wasn’t “Mr. Big.” People only started to call him that after Bloody Sunday.   He was Harrison Mumford, former child prodigy, boy wonder, zillionaire extraordinaire.  And it didn’t take him long after we’d graduated from college to amass his fortune.  I’ll never forget the day I got the telephone call from him asking me to go to work for Mumford International.  I just couldn’t believe it.  We’d been in a few courses together, but we were never close in school, never what you’d call friends.  But Harrison hadn’t had many real friends.  The only thing he ever really respected was intelligence, and I was long on brains, at least in his estimation.

Joining Mumford International was a kind of culture shock.  The employees were all brilliant.  Harrison had made sure that his personnel recruiters picked only the brightest, most creative applicants.  And as far as work was concerned, there were very few constraints on what we could do.  He encouraged innovation.  He  constantly invited us to think outside the box.  It was only in that one narrow little sector that Harrison ruled his company with an iron fist, but with the salaries we were pulling down, it was a small concession to make.  The unwritten, unspoken rule was, you don’t talk about football or any other sports at work.  Anywhere.  Not in the men’s room, not in the cafeteria, not on coffee breaks, not in the elevator down to the parking garage, and certainly not right before a board meeting.  Of course, there were laws to protect us from outright discrimination, but Harrison’s personnel people and his lawyers were clever, and if you’d ever once disgraced yourself talking football at work, it was only a matter of weeks before some iron-clad, impenetrable pretext was manufactured for getting rid of you, legally and above board.  Either that, or you were simply shunned like a pariah, and your life thereafter became a living hell, until you simply walked away from Mumford International on your own.

Perhaps the worst of it was Super Bowl Sunday at Harrison’s home.  Every Mumford corporate executive knew what that meant.  The T.V. never came on until five minutes after the game had ended.  That’s when we got to see all the shots of the crowds going wild, only with the sound turned off and Harrison droning on and on about how ashamed this kind of spectacle made him to be numbered among the human race.  Once, he entertained us during dinner on Super Bowl Sunday with a little film he’d commissioned.  It contained clips from Leni Reifenstahl’s documentary of the Nazi Party rally at Nuremburg, cleverly and artfully interspersed with scenes of rioting football fans and some old footage of Amazon headhunters dancing around a bonfire.  There was no narration.   Just this soft, funereal violin music in the background, and the whole effect was calculated to give you a most depressing, disturbing impression of modern man as sports fan.  It told you:  Man is a tribal grunt lacking in any intelligence whatsoever, just waiting to be led by any madman toward any dark and sadistic purpose.  We were all very glad to get home after Super Bowl Sunday at Harrison’s house.

How did he do it?  How did he pull off Bloody Sunday?  It was quite simple, really.  Harrison had once confided in me about a drive he’d taken around town during the pregame preliminaries one Super Bowl Sunday a few years earlier.  And about how the streets were uncannily deserted, as though someone had set off a neutron bomb, killing all the people and leaving all the buildings intact.  Chills still run through my body when I remember him summing up by saying, “Glen, you can take almost any kind of situation, no matter how insane and irrational it may seem, and twist it to your advantage if you have the wit to do it.”

On the Friday afternoon before Bloody Sunday, before that last Super Bowl game, workers returning to their cars in the underground lot at Mumford International were met with the ominous spectacle of armor clad military vehicles being parked up against one wall.  The garage was teeming with strange men in black bulletproof vests and black baseball caps.  Something was up.

We never saw any of it, of course, because our attendance at Harrison’s party was expected on Sunday afternoon.  While the whole country went insane, we sat quietly in Harrison’s country estate with our wives and children (it was almost impossible to keep the kids from mentioning football, but somehow, we all managed), listening to the string quartet he’d hired and dining on lobster thermidor.  We learned only afterward what had been going on.

Football fans, tens of millions of them, were settling in for the big game in homes and in sports bars all over the country.  The first few plays went off, and then, just as Denver was about to put the first points on the scoreboard, the picture blipped out and snow filled the screens of every television set that had been tuned in to the Super Bowl, with a sound like “krwshhheeeswshhrrrrrkrrrrr” hissing out of he speakers.  Just as real men were jumping up in a rage to adjust their sets, cursing and screaming unprintable obscenities, the nerdy image of Fred Rogers suddenly and inexplicably appeared, and like kerosene poured onto a roaring fire, the words he casually lisped were something like, “And now boys and girls, we’re going to sing a little song together …”

It is estimated that in that thirty second period alone, more than twenty million television sets were demolished.  They were demolished by feet, by fists hurling them through windows, by flying mugs of watery beer, by bowls of corn chips that had suddenly become deadly missiles.

And it only got worse.  The game would flicker back on for a few moments, but every time the action got exciting, or someone was about to score, the picture would again vanish and the static would issue forth from the set, and men, their faces purpled and murderous with rage, would leap up from their armchairs and swear, or pitch half-full cans of beer at the wall.  It was then, too, that thousands of men, choking with an unmanageable hysteria of frustration, began battering their uncomprehending wives and children in earnest.  They became screaming, only marginally coherent thugs.  And as the game wore on, they emptied into the streets, brawling and killing and pulverizing everything in their paths.  Many, unable to conceive any other kind of protest, deliberately  set fire to their own homes.  Wives watched in horror as their husbands, sputtering inarticulately, grotesquely overweight and in no condition to be going through something like this, heaved up from their thickly upholstered recliners, and lurching, faltering, their eyes bulging, the corners of their mouths foaming with saliva, blew out the big arteries in their brains, keeling over heavily onto the junk food-laden coffee tables, dying pathetically with their contorted faces pressed firmly into bowls of shit-colored bean dip.

On Monday morning it was all over.  Morning television news shows were filled with the images of lingering smoke, of streets and sidewalks strewn with myriad diamonds of shattered glass.  Somber voices declaimed the fathomless destruction, the incomprehensible insanity that had seized the entire nation.  Poor Mr. Rogers, whisked into hiding for his own safety, meekly protested his unfeigned innocence.  Only gradually was the real explanation forthcoming to the general public, but we, the executive officers of Mumford International, learned the behind-the-scenes details beginning at 8:00 a.m. sharp, when the emergency board of directors meeting began.  Awkwardly, vice presidents and other executive officers, all board members, eyed one another across the big table.  No one had the courage to broach the subject that was on everyone’s mind:  what on earth happened last night?

Harrison Mumford stood impassively at the head of the table, nattily attired in his custom tailored Saville Row suit.

“You are probably curious about the security precautions that were going into effect here last Friday afternoon,” he began.  “As you noted coming into work today, our headquarters is surrounded by a protective cordon of heavy armor.  That will remain in effect indefinitely.”

We all looked at one another nervously.

“I need to advise you that Mumford International was responsible for Sunday afternoon’s interruption of that event,” he continued, referring to the Super Bowl.  We infiltrated our own broadcast technicians into the network responsible for airing the spectacle, and by arranging for a few unexpected illnesses and accidents among the crew originally assigned to handle it, our people were manning the vans outside the stadium when it began.  None of this goes beyond this room.  You know the rest.”

No one breathed.  All eyes followed Harrison as he cleared his throat and continued.

“Of course, the industry that was responsible for all  those Sundays  – a private industry, I might add – was always indirectly subsidized by the taxpayer.  We built their stadiums.  We cleaned up the messes after their orgiastic victory parades.  But when was the last time the government offered to build a new headquarters building for Mumford International?”  It was a rhetorical question, and none of us ventured an answer.

“We’re well positioned to take maximum advantage of what happened.  We’ve shifted a lot of our capital into construction, needless to say.  As a part of the rebuilding effort, we’ll profit handsomely.  We took all our investments out of insurance last Tuesday and Wednesday, even though most of the damage was the consequence of civil unrest, and therefore not covered by the usual policies.  And as you know, our own manufacturing and holdings have been shifted in recent years almost entirely overseas.  None of this . . . insanity will have the slightest negative impact on our corporate profitability.  Quite to the contrary.  Quite to the contrary,” he repeated, smiling faintly.

And then, mischievously, Mr. Big leaned over, cocked his head, and in a barely audible voice asked us mockingly, “Anybody see the big game yesterday?  How ‘bout them Broncos?”

And as we all sat there, too terrified to move, Harrison Mumford laughed.