Kurt Vonnegut - Hocus Pocus

Actually, I was laying it on pretty thick. Although Margaret and her mother read to each other a lot, taking turns, and usually by flashlight in a tent they’d made inside the house out of bedspreads and chairs or whatever, they never read a newspaper. They didn’t like television, either, except for Sesame Street, which was supposedly for children. The only time they saw Jason Wilder on the little screen as far as I can remember, my mother-in-law started dancing to him as though he were modern music.

When one of his guests on the show said something, she froze. Only when Wilder spoke did she start to dance again.

I certainly wasn’t going to tell him that.

“I want to say first,” said Wilder, “that I am in nothing less than awe, Professor Hartke, of your magnificent record in the Vietnam War. If the American people had not lost their courage and ceased to support you, we would be living in a very different and much better world, and especially in Asia. I know, too, of your kindness and understanding toward your wife and her mother, to which I am glad to apply the same encomium your behavior earned in Vietnam, ‘beyond the call of duty.’ So I am sorry to have to warn you that the story I am about to tell you may not be nearly as simple or easy to refute as my daughter may have led you to expect.”

“Whatever it is, sir,” I said, “let’s hear it. Shoot.”

So he did. He said that several of his friends had attended Tarkington or sent their children here, so that he was favorably impressed with the institution’s successes with the learning-disabled long before he entrusted his own daughter to us. An usher and a bridesmaid at his wedding, he said, had earned Associate in the Arts and Sciences Degrees in Scipio. The usher had gone on to be Ambassador to Iceland. The bridesmaid was on the Board of Directors of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

He felt that Tarkington’s highly unconventional techniques would be useful if applied to the country’s notoriously beleaguered inner-city schools, and he planned to say so after he had learned more about them. The ratio of teachers to students at Tarkington, incidentally, was then I to 6. In inner-city schools, that ratio was then 1 to 65.

There was a big campaign back then, I remember, to get the Japanese to buy up inner-city public schools the way they were buying up prisons and hospitals. But they were too smart. They wouldn’t touch schools for unwelcome children of unwelcome parents with a 10-foot pole.

He said he hoped to write a book about Tarkington called “Little Miracle on Lake Mohiga” or “Teaching the Unteachable.” So he wired his daughter for sound and told her to follow the best teachers in order to record what they said and how they said it. “I wanted to learn what it was that made them good, Professor Hartke, without their knowing they were being studied,” he said. “I wanted them to go on being whatever they were, warts and all, without any self-consciousness.”

This was the first I heard of the tapes. That chilling news explained Kimberley’s lurking, lurking, lurking all the time. Wilder spared me the suspense, at least, of wondering what all of Kimberley’s apparatus might have overheard. He punched the playback button on the recorder before him, and I heard myself telling Paul Slazinger, privately, I’d thought, that the two principal currencies of the planet were the Yen and fellatio. This was so early in the academic year that classes hadn’t begun yet! This was during Freshman Orientation Week, and I had just told the incoming Class of 1994 that merchants and tradespeople in the town below preferred to be paid in Japanese Yen rather than dollars, so that the freshmen might want their parents to give them their allowances in Yen.

I had told them, too, that they were never to go into the Black Cat Café, which the townspeople considered their private club. It was one place they could go and not be reminded of how dependent they were on the rich kids on the hill, but I didn’t say that. Neither did I say that free-lance prostitutes were sometimes found there,

and in the past had been the cause of outbreaks of venereal disease on campus.

I had kept it simple for the freshmen: “Tarkingtonians are more than welcome anywhere in town but the Black Cat Café.”

If Kimberley recorded that good advice, her father did not play it back for me. He didn’t even play back what Slazinger had said to me, and it was during a coffee break, that stimulated me to name the planet’s two most acceptable currencies. He was the agent provocateur.

What he said, as I recall, was, “They want to get paid in Yen?” He was as new to Scipio as any freshman, and we had just met. I hadn’t read any of his books, and so far as I knew, neither had anybody else on the faculty. He was a last-minute choice for Writer in Residence, and had come to orientation because he was lonesome and had nothing else to do. He wasn’t supposed to be there, and he was so old, so old! He had been sitting among all those teenagers as though he werejust another rich kid who had bottomed out on his Scholastic Aptitude Test, and he was old enough to be their grandfather!

He had fought in World War II! That’s how old he was.

So I said to him, “They’ll take dollars if they have to, but you’d better have a wheelbarrow.”

And he wanted to know if the merchants and tradespeople would also accept fellatio. He used a vernacular word for fellatio in the plural.

But the tape began right after that, with my saying, as though out of the blue, and as a joke, of course, only it didn’t sound like a joke during the playback, that, in effect, the whole World was for sale to anyone who had Yen or was willing to perform fellatio.

So that was twice within an hour that I was accused of cynicism that was Paul Slazinger’s, not mine. And he was in Key West, well out of reach of punishment, having been unemployment-proofed for 5 years with a Genius Grant from the MacArthur Foundation. In saying what I had about Yen and fellatio, I was being sociable with a stranger. I was echoing him to make him feel at home in new surroundings.

As far as that goes, Professor Damon Stern, head of the History Department and my closest male friend here, spoke as badly of his own country as Slazinger and I did, and right into the faces of students in the classroom day after day. I used to sit in on his course and laugh and clap. The truth can be very funny in an awful way, especially as it relates to greed and hypocrisy. Kimberley must have made recordings of his words, too, and played them back for her father. Why wasn’t Damon fired right along with me?

My guess is that he was a comedian, and 1 was not. He wanted students to leave his presence feeling good,

not bad, so the atrocities and stupidities he described were in the distant past. There was nothing a student could do about them but laugh, laugh, laugh.

Whereas Slazinger and I talked about the last half of the 20th Century, in which we had both been seriously wounded physically and psychologically, which was nothing anybody but a sociopath could laugh about.

I, too, might have been acceptable as a comedian if all Kimberley had taped was what I said about Yen and fellatio. That was good, topical Mohiga Valley humor, what with the Japanese taking over the prison across the lake and arousing curiosity among the natives about the relative values of different national currencies. The Japanese were willing to pay their local bills in either dollars or Yen. These bills were for small-ticket items, hardware or toiletries or whatever, which the prison needed in a hurry, usually ordered by telephone. Big-ticket items in quantity came from Japanese-owned suppliers in Rochester or beyond.