Heaven, INC: Chapter 57: UNCLE CYRUS' PLAN

SUPER-SAV-A-LOT-AND-MORE-MART,
EL CAJON
1:50 P.M. PDT/UNCLE CYRUS’ PLAN

BILLY JOE, UNCLE CYRUS AND JOE DON JIMMY JACK worked the southern state fair circuit west to Shreveport and south to Gainesville.

Usually, Billy Joe was billed simply as the world’s smartest kid, as in STUMP THE WORLD SMARTEST KID AND WIN! Memory games or races to add up columns of numbers were staples, but the real money was on the multiple chess games, especially when they got suckers who thought they could pull a scam by ganging up on young Billy Joe. In fact, once, a college fraternity took him on and Billy Joe check-mated 22 Sigma Chi’s all at once; that night, Joe Don Jimmy Jack and Uncle Cyrus drank Johnny Walker Red and played games with two strange women Billy Joe could hear giggling through the motel’s bathroom door.

Through all this, Billy Joe wouldn’t see his mama for months at a time, only talking to her now and again when Joe Don Jimmy Jack went to the Western Union to wire money for the farm.

And Billy Joe hated it. Hated the fairs, hated Uncle Cyrus and hated his daddy a little, too. Billy Joe wanted to go back and watch Jiminy Cricket explain geometry with a guy shooting pool and eat mama’s chicken and biscuits. Uncle Cyrus, though, he didn’t want to hear about any of this crybaby sissying and Joe Don Jimmy Jack backed him up, taking turns enforcing their rules.

The money, the state fairs and the beatings lasted three years, until Billy Joe was fifteen and just too big to be beaten anymore.


THE WORLD S TALLEST MAN in history is Robert Wadlow, 8'11". The world’s heaviest man was a woman named Carol Yager, 1600 pounds, or nearly a ton. While neither the tallest or the heaviest man, Billy Joe was big, 6'6 and 330-pounds, the night he finally gave his strongly considered response to Uncle Cyrus and leaving him pretty well stove-in when he went the following morning to join the Marines at the tender age of 15; no one questioned Billy Joe’s lie about his age because, quite frankly, no one could believe someone under 17 could be that damn big. In 1972, he went to Vietnam in Marine Recon where he topped out at 6'8" and could bench-press 600 pounds. People think of someone like that in Vietnam, they think of an elephant rumbling through the jungle, but Billy Joe moved more quietly than half the guys in the unit. His one real weakness as a member of Marine Recon 5th Detachment was that, due to his ass-sweat, he could attract enough flies to alert every VC unit for miles. This, though, had nothing to do with December 1972, when Bravo of the 5th was sent to escort out of the bush a lost ARVN platoon only to be ambushed three clicks outside Cambodia. All were killed except Billy Joe, Sergeant Dent and an ARVN named Tho. That day wasn’t about Billy Joe’s stench, but about the CIA’s stench, about the stink of treachery, CIA spook-shit, crooked Nixonites and the military-industrial complex.

And Billy Joe never forgot.

It took Billy Joe six months to recover from his wounds, spending the time playing cards and checkers with Dent in the VA hospital. Following his recovery and discharge, Billy Joe rotated back to the States and got himself admitted to N.C. State on the GI Bill. Straight A’s in science and math got him a fellowship at MIT. Pot and crazy thinking got him kicked out.

All through the 70's, Billy Joe grooved on great weed, good speed and the Grateful Dead.

Throughout the 70's, Billy Joe remained comfortably convinced nobody on the planet could match him in sheer human computing power.

Then came the 1980's and the incident with Hawking, when he released his much ballyhooed Superstrings theory and Billy Joe wondered if he might be slipping some, since it went directly against his own theory of Harmonic Particles. It forced him to spend an entire weekend checking and rechecking Superstrings equations against Harmonic Particle’s, Billy Joe tapping away at the calculator while subsisting on nothing but a case of old raisins, a box of CheeseNips and some Cactus-Coolers, but in the end he’d proven his mental superiority over Hawking, though he felt no compulsion to run out and get published and say, ‘Look at me, Look at me, See how smart I am’, inviting a lot of strangers and government people to snoop into his business. Hell no, the only reason Billy spent that weekend debunking modern physics theory and the traditionally ascribed value of Pi in the first place was on account Billy Joe wasn’t gonna let that little wheel-chair-bound, talk-box squawking gimp get up on him ever again.

That time at Cambridge was enough.

Other than that, though, the 80s sucked, especially the music. New Wave was pure crap, and the hair-bands, Jesus, you didn’t want to get the man started.

Now the 90's, they were great, because Billy Joe discovered his two loves: neural network computers and the human genome.

By 95, he’d built a neural-network computer from old ham radio parts, processing chips taken from various Radio Shack computers and a dozen clones of his own brain. The brains lived in fish-tanks of specially designed synthetic amniotic fluid and together had more sheer computing power than all the main-frames on the planet combined. It was with this home-made neural-network computer he disassembled and reassembled the human genome like it was his old M-60 while the rest of world took another decade.

Still, working alone without validation, Billy Joe was infrequently subject to doubts about being the World’s Smartest Man, little fears that crept up on him late at night or after a particularly large bong hit, paranoid fears that made him think he might be only the world’s second or third smartest man, something foreboding like that. Fortunately, things would happen to redeem belief in his Most Powerful Mind. Like the time he beat Kasparov in their super-secret on-line chess war of 1995 using the massive four-board set up and the two kings. Boy, that Kasparov sure hated to lose, even more than when Billy Joe called him Kasper The Friendly Toast. Hell, only reason Kasper got over the loss at all was on account Billy Joe agreed to coach him between matches against IBM’s Deep Blue computer unbeknownst to the world. Also unbeknownst to the world, and Kasparov, too was the fact Billy Joe’d hacked into Deep Blue and rigged the whole damn match. At one point, he’d even been kicking Kasparov’s ass through Deep Blue, the day Kasper got pissed off and threw a water glass at that New York Times reporter. Ah. The good ol days.