Kurt Vonnegut - Hocus Pocus

No sooner had I returned to our table than a young man passing behind me could not resist the impulse to touch my bristly haircut. I went absolutely ape-poop! He was slight, and had long hair, and wore a peace symbol around his neck. He looked like the singer Bob Dylan. For all I know or care, he may actually have been Bob Dylan. Whoever he was, I knocked him into a waiter carrying a heavily loaded tray.

Chinese food flew everywhere!

Pandemonium!

I ran outside. Everybody and everything was my enemy. I was back in Vietnam!

But a Christ-like figure loomed before me. He was wearing a suit and tie, but he had a long beard, and his eyes were full of love and pity. He seemed to know all about me, and he really did. He was Sam Wakefield, who had resigned his commission as a General, and gone over to the Peace Movement, and become President of Tarkington College.

He said to me what he had said to me so long ago in Cleveland, at the Science Fair: “What’s the hurry, Son?”

Remembering my homecoming from Vietnam always puts me in mind of Bruce Bergeron, a student of mine at Tarkington. I have already mentioned Bruce. He joined the Ice Capades as a chorus boy after winning his Associate in the Arts and Sciences Degree, and was murdered in Dubuque. His father was President of the Wildlife Rescue Federation.

When I had Bruce in Music Appreciation I played a recording of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. I explained to the class that the composition was about an actual event in history, the defeat of Napoleon in Russia. I asked the students to think of some major event in their own lives, and to imagine what kind of music might best describe it. They were to think about it for a week before telling anybody about the event or the music. I wanted their brains to cook and cook with music, with the lid on tight.

The event Bruce Bergeron set to music in his head was getting stuck between floors in an elevator when he was maybe 6 years old, on the way with a Haitian nanny to a post-Christmas white sale at Bloomingdale’s department store in New York City. They were supposed to be going to the American Museum of Natural History, but the nanny, without permission from her employers, wanted to send some bargain bedding to relatives in Haiti first.

The elevator got stuck right below the floor where the white sale was going on. It was an automatic elevator. There was no operator. It was jammed. When it became obvious that the elevator was going to stay there, somebody pushed the alarm button, which the passengers could hear clanging far below. According to Bruce, this was the first time in his life that he had ever been in some kind of trouble that grownups couldn’t take care of at once.

There was a 2-way speaker in the elevator, and a woman’s voice came on, telling the people to stay calm. Bruce remembered that she made this particular point:

Nobody was to try to climb out through the trapdoor in the ceiling. If anybody did that, Bloomingdale’s could not be responsible for whatever might happen to him or her afterward.

Time went by. More time went by. To little Bruce it seemed that they had been trapped there for a century. It was probably more like 20 minutes.

Little Bruce believed himself to be at the center of a major event in American history. He imagined that not only his parents but the President of the United States must be hearing about it on television. When they were rescued, he thought, bands and cheering crowds would greet him.

Little Bruce expected a banquet and a medal for not panicking, and for not saying he had to go to the bathroom.

The elevator suddenly jolted upward a few centimeters, stopped. It jolted upward a meter, an aftershock. The doors slithered open, revealing the white sale in progress behind ordinary customers, who were simply waiting for the next elevator, without any idea that there had been something wrong with that one.

They wanted the people in there to get out so that they could get in.

There wasn’t even somebody from the management of the store to offer an anxious apology, to make certain that everybody was all right. All the actions relative to freeing the captives had taken place far away—wherever the machinery was, wherever the alarm gong was, wherever the woman was who had told them not to panic or climb out the trapdoor.

That was that.

The nanny bought some bedding, and then she and little Bruce went on to the American Museum of Natural History. The nanny made him promise not to tell his parents that they had been to Bloomingdale’s, too—and he never did.

He still hadn’t told them when he spilled the beans in Music Appreciation.

“You know what you have described to perfection?” I asked him.

“No,” he said.

I said, “What it was like to come home from the Vietnam War.”

Iread about World War II. Civilians and soldiers alike, and even little children, were proud to have played a part in it. It was impossible, seemingly, for any sort of person not to feel a part of that war, if he or she was alive while it was going on. Yes, and the suffering or death of soldiers and sailors and Marines was felt at least a little bit by everyone.

But the Vietnam War belongs exclusively to those of us who fought in it. Nobody else had anything to do with it, supposedly. Everybody else is as pure as the driven snow. We alone are stupid and dirty, having fought such a war. When we lost, it served us right for ever having started it. The night I went temporarily insane in a Chinese restaurant on Harvard Square, everybody was a big success but me.

Before I blew up, Mildred’s old friend from Peru, Indiana, spoke as though we were in separate businesses, as though I were a podiatrist, maybe, or a sheetmetal contractor, instead of somebody who had risked his life and sacrificed common sense and decency on his behalf.

As it happened, he himself was in the medical-waste disposal game in Indianapolis. That’s a nice business to learn about in a Chinese restaurant, with everybody dangling who knows what from chopsticks.

He said that his workaday problems had as much to do with aesthetics as with toxicity. Those were both his words, “aesthetics” and “toxicity.”

He said, “Nobody likes to find a foot or a finger or whatever in a garbage can or a dump, even though it is no more dangerous to public health than the remains of a rib roast.”

He asked me if I saw anything on his and his wife’s table that I would like to sample, that they had ordered too much.

“No, thank you, sir,” I said.

“But telling you that,” he said, “is coals to Newcastle.”

“How so?” I said. I was trying not to listen to him, and was looking in exactly the wrong place for distraction, which was the face of my mother-in-law. Apparently this potential lunatic with no place else to go had become a permanent part of our household. It was a fait accompli.

“Well—you’ve been in war,” he said. The way he said it, it was clear that he considered the war to have been my war alone. “I mean you people must have had to do a certain amount of cleaning up.”

That was when the kid patted my bristles. My brains blew up like a canteen of nitroglycerin.

My lawyer, much encouraged by the 2 lists I am making, and by the fact that I have never masturbated and like to clean house, asked me yesterday why it was that I never swore. He found me washing windows in this library, although nobody had ordered me to do that.

So I told him my maternal grandfather’s idea that obscenity and blasphemy gave most people permission not to listen respectfully to whatever was being said.

I repeated an old story Grandfather Wills had taught me, which was about a town where a cannon was fired at noon every day. One day the cannoneer was sick at the last minute and was too incapacitated to fire the cannon.