The Bonfire of the Vanities

by Tom Wolfe

You ever talk to a logical lunatic before? They’re much worse than a plain lunatic.”

The telephone blasted Peter Fallow awake inside an egg with the shell peeled away and only the membranous sac holding it intact. Ah! The membranous sac was his head, and the right side of his head was on the pillow, and the yolk was as heavy as mercury, and it rolled like mercury, and it was pressing down on his right temple and his right eye and his right ear. If he tried to get up to answer the telephone, the yolk, the mercury, the poisoned mass, would shift and roll and rupture the sac, and his brains would fall out.

Something had happened last night. These days he often woke up like this, poisonously hung over, afraid to move an inch and filled with an abstract feeling of despair and shame. Whatever he had done was submerged like a monster at the bottom of a cold dark lake. His memory had drowned in the night, and he could feel only the icy despair. He had to look for the monster deductively, fathom by fathom. Sometimes he knew that whatever it had been, he couldn’t face it, and he would decide to turn away from it forever, and just then something, some stray detail, would send out a signal, and the beast would come popping to the surface on its own and show him its filthy snout.

With his eyes fixed on the newspaper, he brought the cigarette to his lips in the candle position, between his thumb and forefinger, took a deep drag, twirled his fingers and—bingo!—the cigarette popped out between the knuckles of his forefinger and middle finger. Sherman was amazed. How had he done it? Then he was furious. He turns into a tobacco acrobat—in the middle of my crisis!

Kramer couldn’t believe what he was watching. Here they were in the South Bronx, thirty minutes away from a demonstration protesting the shortcomings of White Justice, and Martin throws down the gauntlet to a black youth twice his size with a lug wrench in his hand.

Nevertheless, Kramer knew he couldn’t have done what this outrageous little featherweight champion of the breed had done, and for the five hundredth time in his career as an assistant district attorney in the Bronx he paid silent homage to that most mysterious and coveted of male attributes, Irish machismo.

“Well, this is no big deal. This is part of the routine. We check the cars.” “I know, but if there’s a routine—then that’s what I should do, too, follow a routine. Or that would be the logical thing, it seems to me.” Sherman was acutely aware of sputtering nonsense, but he hung on to this word routine for dear life. If only he could control the muscles around his mouth— “I’m sorry, I don’t get it,” said Martin. “What routine?” “Well, you mentioned a routine, your routine, for investigating a case like this. I don’t know how these things work, but there must be a routine for the owner of a car in this situation—I mean, I happen to own a car of a make and a license number—with a license number—and I know there must be a routine. That’s what I’m trying to say. I think that’s what I need to consider. The routine.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Not a lot—but I guess reasonably often, comparatively.” “Not a lot but reasonably often comparatively,” said the little detective in a monotone.

He was experiencing the resentment of those who discover that, despite their own grave condition, the world goes on about its business, heartless, without even so much as a long face.

Then she saw him. Startled! But of course!—it was a sign of social failure for one spouse to be reduced to joining another in a conversational cluster.

“Well—you two! What are you trying to cook up!” Hack hack hack hack hack hack hack. Inez Bavardage took them both by their arms. For a moment, before she could get her fireproof grin back onto her face, Judy looked stricken. Not only had she ended up in a minimal cluster with her husband, but New York’s reigning hostess, this month’s ring-mistress of the century, had spotted them and felt compelled to make this ambulance run to save them from social ignominy.

He was facing social death once more. He was a man sitting utterly solo at a dinner table. The hive buzzed all around him. Everyone else was in a state of social bliss. Only he was stranded. Only he was a wallflower with no conversational mate, a social light of no wattage whatsoever in the Bavardage Celebrity Zoo…My life is coming apart!—and yet through everything else in his overloaded central nervous system burned the shame—the shame!—of social incompetence.

It was the classic case. The man wants to confine matters to a quiet private argument, but the woman decides to play one of her trump cards, which is Making a Scene. There is Making a Scene, and there is Tears. This was Making a Scene. The woman’s voice became louder and louder, and at last the man’s rose, too.

Yale is terrific for anything you wanna do, so long as it don’t involve people with sneakers, guns, dope, lust, or sloth.”

Suppose he comes to—and he looks at the fucking table—and here’s half a dozen middle-aged white men in suits and ties staring at him! The fucking kid’s gonna stroke out for sure! He’s gonna say, ‘Holy shit!’ and give up the fucking ghost! I mean, have a fucking heart, Abe!”

A beer would, in fact, be fine. Beer was practically a health-food drink, like chamomile tea. His hangover today wasn’t serious at all, no more than a thick fog. No pain; just the fog.

How very American it was to assume that these unsmiling Chinese would be pleased if one showed a preference for their native implements…How very American it was to feel somehow guilty unless one struggled over rice noodles and lumps of meat with things that looked like enlarged knitting needles.

yes

“A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested.”

“Can’t depend on him,” said Reverend Bacon. “He’s like the bat. You know the fable of the bat? The birds and the beasts were having a war. As long as the birds were winning, the bat says he’s a bird, because he can fly. When the beasts were winning, the bat says he’s a beast, because he got teeth. That’s why the bat don’t come out in the daytime. Don’t nobody want to look at his two faces.”

It made Fallow’s flesh crawl, this American penchant for the personal and the sentimental. The Yanks couldn’t even let the dead depart with dignity. Everyone in the hall would be in for it now. He could feel it coming, the pointless bathos, the dripping spoonfuls of soul. It was enough to drive an Englishman back into the bosom of the Church of England, wherein death and all the major junctures of life were dealt with upon the high ground of the Divine, an invariable and admirably formal eminence.

“That’s a neat trick, walking on your back,” said Killian. “What’s C. S. Lewis’s emergency night-line number? We got a whole new concept of morality going here.”

“It’s that bad,” said Sherman. “But I swear to you, I feel better about it now. You know the way they can take a dog, a house pet, like a police dog that’s been fed and pampered all its life, and train it to be a vicious watchdog?” “I’ve heard of it,” said Killian. “I’ve seen it done,” said Quigley. “I saw it done when I was on the force.” “Well, then you know the principle,” said Sherman. “They don’t alter that dog’s personality with dog biscuits or pills. They chain it up, and they beat it, and they bait it, and they taunt it, and they beat it some more, until it turns and bares its fangs and is ready for the final fight every time it hears a sound.” “That’s true,” said Quigley. “Well, in that situation dogs are smarter than humans,” said Sherman. “The dog doesn’t cling to the notion that he’s a fabulous house pet in some terrific dog show, the way the man does. The dog gets the idea. The dog knows when it’s time to turn into an animal and fight.”