Kurt Vonnegut - Hocus Pocus

After GRJOT~put me on Skid Row 15 years ago, I had it try again. I did a little better, but not as well as I was doing here. It had me stay in the Army and become an instructor at West Point, but unhappy and bored. I lost my wife again, and still drank too much, and had a succession of woman friends who soon got sick of me and my depressions. And I died of cirrhosis of the liver a second time.

GRIOT™ didn’t have many alternatives to jail for the escaped convicts, though. If it came up with a parole, it soon put the ex-con back in a cage again.

The same thing happened if GRIOT™ was told that the jailbird was Hispanic. It was somewhat more optimistic about Whites, if they could read and write, and had never been in a mental hospital or been given a Dishonorable Discharge from the Armed Forces. Otherwise, they might as well be Black or Hispanic.

The wild cards among jailbirds, as far as GR1OT~was concerned, were Orientals and American Indians.

When the Supreme Court handed down its decision that prisoners should be segregated according to race, many jurisdictions did not have enough Oriental or American Indian criminals to make separate institutions for them economically feasible. Hawaii, for example, had only 2 American Indian prisoners, and Wyoming, my wife’s home state, had only I Oriental.

Under such circumstances, said the Court, Indians and/or Orientals should be made honorary Whites, and treated accordingly.

This state has plenty of both, however, particularly after Indians began to make tax-free fortunes smuggling drugs over unmapped trails across the border from Canada. So the Indians had a prison all their own at what their ancestors used to call “Thunder Beaver,” what we call “Niagara Falls.” The Orientals have their own prison at Deer Park, Long Island, conveniently located only 50 kilometers from their heroin-processing plants in New York City’s Chinatown.

When you dare to think about how huge the illegal drug business is in this country, you have to suspect that practically everybody has a steady buzz on, just as I did during my last 2 years in high school, and just as General Grant did during the Civil War, and just as Winston Churchill did during World War II.

So Marilyn Shaw and I passed yet again like ships in the night on the Quadrangle. It would be our last encounter there. Without either of us knowing that it would be the last time, she said something that in retrospect is quite moving to me. What she said was derived from our exploratory conversation at the cocktail party that had welcomed us to the faculty so long ago.

I had told her about how I met Sam Wakefield at the Cleveland Science Fair, and what the first words were that he ever spoke to me. Now, as I hastened to my doom, she played back those words to me: “What’s the hurry, Son?”

The Chairman of the Board of Trustees that fired me 10 years ago was Robert W. Moellenkamp of West Palm Beach, himself a graduate of Tarkington and the father of 2 Tarkingtonians, 1 of whom had been my student. As it happened, he was on the verge of losing his fortune, which was nothing but paper, in Microsecond Arbitrage, Incorporated. That swindle claimed to be snapping up bargains in food and shelter and clothing and fuel and medicine and raw materials and machinery and so on before people who really needed them could learn of their existence. And then the company’s computers, supposedly, would get the people who really needed whatever it was to bid against each other, running profits right through the roof. It was able to do this with its clients’ money, supposedly, because its computers were linked by satellites to marketplaces in every corner of the world.

The computers, it would turn out, weren’t connected to anything but each other and their credulous clients like Tarkinglon’s Board Chairman. He was high as a kite on printouts describing brilliant trades he had made in places like Tierra del Fuego and Uganda and God knows where else, when he agreed with the Panjandrum of American Conservatism, Jason Wilder, that it was time to fire me. Microsecond Arbitrage was his angel dust, his LSD, his heroin, his jug of Thunderbird wine, his cocaine.

I myself have been addicted to older women and housekeeping, which my court-appointed lawyer tells me might be germs we could make grow into a credible plea of insanity. The most amazing thing to him was that I had never masturbated.

“Why not?” he said.

“My mother’s father made me promise never to do it, because it would make me lazy and crazy,” I said.

“And you believed him?” he said. He is only 23 years old, fresh out of Syracuse.

And I said, “Counselor, in these fast-moving times, with progress gone hog-wild, grandfathers are bound to be wrong about everything.”

Robert W. Moellenkamp hadn’t heard yet that he and his wife and kids were as broke as any convict in Athena. So when I came into the Board Room back in 1991, he addressed me in the statesmanlike tones of a prudent conservator of a noble legacy. He nodded in the direction of Jason Wilder, who was then simply a Tarkington parent, not a member of the Board. Wilder sat at the opposite end of the great oval table with a manila folder, a tape recorder and cassettes, and a Polaroid photograph deployed before him.

I knew who he was, of course, and something of how his mind worked, having read his newspaper column and watched his television show from time to time. But we had not met before. The Board members on either side of him had crowded into one another in order to give him plenty of room for some kind of performance.

He was the only celebrity there. He was probably the only true celebrity ever to set foot in that Board Room.

There was 1 other non-Trustee present. That was the College President, Henry “Tex” Johnson, whose wife Zuzu, as I’ve already said, I used to make love to when he was away from home any length of time. Zuzu and I had broken up for good about a month before, but we were still on speaking terms.

“Please take a seat, Gene,” said Moellenkamp. “Mr. Wilder, who I guess you know is Kimberley’s father, has a rather disturbing story he wants to tell to you.”

“I see,” I said, a good soldier doing as he was told. I wanted to keep my job. This was my home. When the time came, I wanted to retire here and then be buried here. That was before it was clear that glaciers were headed south again, and that anybody buried here, including the gang by the stable, along with Musket Mountain itself, would eventually wind up in Pennsylvania or West Virginia. Or Maryland.

Where else could I become a Full Professor or a college teacher of any rank, with nothing but a Bachelor of Science Degree from West Point? I couldn’t even teach high school or grade school, since I had never taken any of the required courses in education. At my age, which was then 51, who would hire me for anything, and especially with a demented wife and motherin-law in tow.

I said to the Trustees and Jason Wilder, “I believe I know most of what the story is, ladies and gentlemen.

I’ve just been with Kimberley, and she gave me a pretty good rehearsal for what I’d better say here.

“When listening to her charges against me, I can only hope you did not lose sight of what you yourselves have learned about me during my 15 years of faithful service to Tarkington. This Board itself, surely, can provide all the character witnesses I could ever need. If not, bring in parents and students. Choose them at random. You know and I know that they will all speak well of me.”

I nodded respectfully in Jason Wilder’s direction. “I am glad to meet you in person, sir. I read your columns and watch your TV show regularly. I find what you have to say invariably thought-provoking, and so do my wife and her mother, both of them invalids.” I wanted to get that in about my 2 sick dependents, in case Wilder and a couple of new Trustees hadn’t heard about them.