The Undefeated Rough-and-Tumble Champion of Kansas

I seen this story the other night on the television about this dude who holed himself up in his apartment with a shotgun and various other assorted lethal weaponry, including a gallon of muscatel and some dope his girlfriend said he'd been smoking all night with the wine and some rum before he broke out the firearms and started shooting out streetlights.

About a million cops showed up, it looked like to me on the tube, and Jesus! was it noisy. And there was maybe two million rubberneckers out to watch the fun, which was to see the poor sucker get blown away. Well—with all them cops, they could of taken the guy out with no sweat, but they had this special unit which they actually talked that poor crazy nut into walking out of that apartment with his hands on top of his head, and it took something like fourteen hours to do, which when you think about it in a city like New York, which is where this thing happened, is a lot of time for an army of cops to waste on one screwball when there's so many running around perpetrating their perpetrations.

When they took the guy out on the street to a patrol car I seen this one cop give the guy a cigarette. The guy was about thirty, thirty-five and wore this beard and a checkered shirt and jeans and no shoes and he was crying and the cops—you could see it even on television—looked like they was sorry for him. And when they showed the crowd you seen kids grinning and making waggle-ears at the camera and the older people with beer bellies and some with curlers in their hair looking mad and shaking their fists at the guy. His girlfriend was there too and she had long stringy hair and could of been pretty except for a wiped-out look on her face. The cops wouldn't let her get in the car with her boyfriend and some news guy stuck a mike at her mouth so quick, she had to back away or she might of got a couple of teeth knocked out. And I read in the paper the next day that the boyfriend was a Viet Nam veteran and couldn't hold a job or anything and was strung out on dope and booze. Well—that Viet Nam thing was so long ago he should of gotten himself all straightened away by this time. At least that was the way it looked like to me that people was thinking and that the best thing they could of done for that poor bastard was to lock him up in a rubber room and weld the door shut. And I got mad at that. I mean, what did they know about what was going on inside that poor guy's head? I don't just mean the Viet Nam thing. I mean that maybe was his monkey. And the monkey turned into a gorilla and before you know it—ZAP!

I got to thinking about that whole thing and how people really didn't give one goddam about what was bugging the guy. You couldn't hear the words but you just knew they was calling him some pretty bad names or they was laughing at him. Laughing! Except the cops. They felt sorry for him. Them and his girlfriend. And I got to remembering a thing like that that happened a long time ago when I happened to be in Kansas.

It ain't really a part of the story but I was in a combat engineers regiment attached to