Kurt Vonnegut - Hocus Pocus

“‘To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them?

“‘To die: to sleep; no more; and by a sleep to say we end the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, ‘tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.

“‘To die, to sleep; to sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub; for in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause.’”

There was more to that speech, of course, but that was all the teacher, whose name was Mary Pratt, required us to memorize. Why overdo? It was certainly enough for the occasion, raising as it did the specter of having yet another Vietnam veteran on the faculty killing himself on school property.

I fished the key to the bell tower from my pocket and threw it into the middle of the circular table. The table was so big that somebody was going to have to climb up on it to retrieve the key, or maybe find a long stick somewhere.

“Good luck with the bells,” I said. I was out of there.

I departed Samoza Hall by the same route Tex Johnson had taken. I sat down on a bench at the edge of the Quadrangle, across from the library, next to the Senior Walk. It was nice to be outside.

Damon Stem, my best friend on the faculty, happened by and asked me what I was doing there.

I said I was sunning myself. I wouldn’t tell anybody I had been fired until I found myself sitting at the bar of the Black Cat Café. So Professor Stem felt free to talk cheerful nonsense. He owned a unicycle, and he could ride it, and he said he was considering riding it in the academic procession to the graduation ceremonies, which were then only about an hour in the future.

“I’m sure there are strong arguments on both sides,” I said.

He had grown up in Shelby, Wisconsin, where practically everybody, including grandmothers, could ride a unicycle. The thing was, a circus had gone broke while playing Shelby 60 years earlier and had abandoned a lot of its equipment, including several unicycles. So more and more people there learned how to ride them, and ordered more unicycles for themselves and their families. So Shelby became and remains today, so far as I know, the Unicycling Capital of the World.

“Do it!” I said.

“You’ve convinced me,” he said. He was happy. He was gone, and my thoughts rode the breeze and the sunbeams back to when I was still in uniform, but home from the war, and was offered ajob at Tarkington. That happened in a Chinese restaurant on Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I was dining with my mother-in-law and my wife, both of them still sane, and my two legitimate children, Melanie, 11, and Eugene, Jr., 8. My illegitimate son, Rob Roy, conceived in Manila only 2 weeks before, must have been the size of a BB shot.

I had been ordered to Cambridge in order to take an examination for admission as a graduate student to the Physics Department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I was to earn a Master’s Degree, and then return to West Point as a teacher, but still a soldier, a soldier to the end.

My family, except for the BB, was awaiting me at the Chinese restaurant while I walked there in full uniform, ribbons and all. My hair was cut short on top and shaved down to the skin on the sides and back. People looked at me as though I were a freak. I might as well have been wearing nothing but a black garterbelt.

That was how ridiculous men in uniform had become in academic communities, even though a major part of Harvard’s and MIT’s income came from research and development having to do with new weaponry. I would have been dead if it weren’t for that great gift to civilization from the Chemistry Department of Harvard, which was napalm, or sticky jellied gasoline.

It was near the end of the humiliating walk that somebody said to somebody else behind me, “My goodness! Is it Halloween?”

I did not respond to that insult, did not give some draft-dodging student burst eardrums and a collapsed windpipe to think about. I kept on going because my mind was swamped with much deeper reasons for unhappiness. My wife had moved herself and the kids from Fort Bragg to Baltimore, where she was going to study Physical Therapy at Johns Hopkins University. Her recently widowed mother had moved in with them. Margaret and Mildred had bought a house in Baltimore with money left to them by my father-in-law. It was their house, not mine. I didn’t know anybody in Baltimore.

What the heck was I supposed to do in Baltimore? It was exactly as though I had been killed in Vietnam, and now Margaret had to make a new life for herself. And I was a freak to my own children. They, too, looked at me as though I were wearing nothing but a black garter-belt.

And wouldn’t my wife and kids be proud of me when I told them that I hadn’t been able to answer more than a quarter of the questions on the examination for admission to graduate studies in Physics at MIT?

Welcome home!

As I was about to go into the Chinese restaurant, two pretty girls came out. They, too, showed contempt for me and my haircut and my uniform. So I said to them, “What’s the matter? Haven’t you ever before seen a man wearing nothing but a black garterbelt?”

Black garterbelts were on my mind, I suppose, because I missed Jack Patton so much. I had survived the war, but he hadn’t, and the present he sent me only a few days before he was shot dead, as I said before, was a skin magazine called Black Garterbelt.

So there we were in that restaurant, with me on my third Sweet Rob Roy. Margaret and her mother, again acting as though I were 6 feet under in Arlington National Cemetery, did all the ordering. They had it served family style. Nobody asked me how I had done on the exam. Nobody asked me what it was like to be home from the war.

The others gabbled on to each other about all the tourist sights they had seen that day. They hadn’t come along to keep me company and give me moral support. They were there to see “Old Ironsides” and the belfry where Paul Revere had waved the lantern, signaling that the British were coming by land, and so on.

Yes, and, speaking of belfries, it was on this same enchanted evening that I was told that my wife, the mother of my children, had a remarkable number of ancestors and collateral relatives with bats in their belfries on her mother’s side. This was news to me, and to Margaret, too. We knew that Mildred had grown up in Peru, Indiana. But all she had ever said about Peru was that Cole Porter had been born there, too, and that she had been very glad to get out of there.

Mildred had let us know that her childhood had been unhappy, but that was a long way from saying that she, which meant my wife and kids, too, was from a notorious family of loonies there.

It turned out that my mother-in-law had run into an old friend from her hometown, Peru, Indiana, during the tour of “Old Ironsides.” Now the old friend and his wife were at the table next to ours. When I went to urinate, the old friend came with me, and told me what a hard life Mildred had had in high school, with both her mother and her mother’s mother in the State Hospital for the Insane down in Indianapolis.

“Her mother’s brother, who she loved so much,” he went on, shaking the last droplets from the end of his weenie, “also went nuts in her senior year, and set fires all over town. If I was her, I would have taken off like a scalded cat for Wyoming, too.”

As I say, this was news to me.

“Funny thing—” he went on, “it never seemed to hit any of them until they were middle-aged.”

“If I’m not laughing,” I said, “that’s because I got out on the wrong side of the bed today.”