Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins

the tube with a razor blade and patiently extracted is contents. The next evening he spent meticulously refilling the tube with uncolored oleomargarine. He then resealed it. And took it to breakfast. Mess Officer sensed that something was amiss when Purcell cheerfully refused eggs, took a tall stack of toast instead. Raisin bread toast.
    Plucky sat at a table in the center of the dining hall and unwrapped his big tube with the Colgate label. Nonchalantly he began squeezing out coils of slick white stuff onto the toast which, piece by piece, he devoured. Conversation in the mess was first paralyzed, then a fierce buzzing commenced. All eyes were on the madman eating toothpaste. Some of Purcell's fellow jet trainees were amused. Most were aghast. The older officers boiled immediately into a stiff-faced huff. Mess Officer observed this and knew that he must act.
    MESS OFFICER: Ensign, just what in hell do you think you're doing?
    ENSIGN PURCELL: Eating breakfast, sir. The toast is especially palatable this morning. Raisins plump and chewy. (Licks a curlicue of margarine off a grinning lip. Flashes a Colgate smile.) Cleans the breath while it cleans the teeth.
    Mess Officer conferred with three lieutenants at a nearby table. “What can we do?” he asked mournfully. “He's doing this just to bug me. There's no regulation against eating toothpaste.”
    “There's regulations against an officer acting like a gawd-damned billy goat,” said one lieutenant. Call the S. P.'s and have him arrested. We'll think of something to charge him with.”
    As it turned out, Plucky was charged with conduct unbecoming an officer and was confined to quarters for thirty days. His sentence weighed on him lightly. Too lightly for an incorrigible whoremonger, thought Mess Officer, and on the occasion when he was officer of the deck, he pulled a surprise 11 P.M . inspection of Purcell's room, fully expecting to find a bar girl or two stashed away in the ensign's bunk. He found no women. But he did find several ounces of Acapulco gold, a smokable delicacy for which Plucky had acquired a taste while south of the border. Mess Officer's joy in his discovery was tempered, however, by the fact that before he could get to a phone to report it, he had half a loaf of stale raisin bread stuffed down his throat.
    II
    “To a son of the nobility, three fields of endeavor are open,” Plucky reminded himself. “These are: Military, religion and politics. The military has failed me. There is no public office to which I could realistically aspire. As for religion, that is a subject which holds a maximum of fascination for me, but I fear the seminary gates would be bolted at the earliest signal of my approach.”
    He sat down upon his duffel bag and with his dishonorable discharge lit a Havana cigar. It was nearly dark and he was giving up hope of hitching a ride. “There is, however, one occupation where politics, the military and religion overlap; which embodies prominent features of all three.” He blew a target of concentric smoke rings, then threw his stogy over a palm tree. Lugged his suitcase and began to trudge. In the general direction of the Pacific Ocean. Despite (or because of) six months in the brig, he was in good condition and prepared, if necessary, to walk all the way. “But,” he vowed, “I'm blindfolding myself for eight hundred of those three thousand miles so as to shut out the Middle West.”
    And on that note of acute discernment and with no small sense of fatalism, Plucky Purcell embarked upon a life of crime.
    III
    Whether a man is a criminal or a public servant is purely a matter of perspective. Man's peculiarly ambivalent psyche permits him to operate simultaneously according to two opposing codes. There is the code which he professes to live by, and there is the code to whose standards he actually does adhere. The deceit is so ingrained and subtle that most men truly are unaware of it, although to psychologists, philosophers and the