Wicked King Dick

Here's a nostalgia piece, my personal foray into Jean Shepherd Americana. WICKED KING DICK is the story of Johnny Wolfe, a kid from a small town in the American Midwest who goes away to college and falls hopelessly in love with Beth Trajan, a goddess from the Olympus known as the Northern Suburbs of Chicago. Beth cannot be won without a full-fledged commitment to her student radical activities, so Johnny—more Dobie Gillis than Che Guevara—joins the Movement on campus. His devotion to Beth gets Johnny expelled and into full-time bomb making. Deeply conflicted, he masquerades as a graduate student in the chemistry department and slips into the chem lab every night, pretending to make bombs while he tries to delay the inevitable confrontation with Beth and with his own conscience. The bombing of the ROTC building is intended to cause no more than property damage. When a man dies in the explosion, Johnny panics and goes on the run for thirty-three years. On the road he becomes an itinerant evangelist and hooks up with a carnival, which brings him back to his old home town and to Maggie, the girl he left behind. But will his past ever allow him to truly go home again?