Kurt Vonnegut - Hocus Pocus

I was called into the Warden’s Office first. When I came back out, with not only a job but a place to live, the TV set was displaying a program I had watched when I was a boy, Howdy Doody. Buffalo Bob, the host, was about to be sprayed with seltzer water by Clarabell the Clown.

They were in black and white. That’s how old that show was.

I told Donner the Warden wanted to see him, but he didn’t seem to know who I was. I felt as though I were trying to wake up a mean drunk. I used to have to do that a lot in Vietnam. A couple of times the mean drunks were Generals. The worst was a visiting Congressman.

I thought I might have to fight Donner before he realized that Howdy Doody wasn’t the main thing going on.

Warden Hiroshi Matsumoto was a survivor of the atom-bombing of Hiroshima, when I was 5 and he was 8. When the bomb was dropped, he was playing soccer during school recess. He chased a ball into a ditch at one end of the playing field. He bent over to pick up the ball. There was a flash and wind. When he straightened up, his city was gone. He was alone on a desert, with little spirals of dust dancing here and there. But I would have to know him for more than 2 years before he told me that.

His teachers and schoolmates were executed without trial for the crime of Emperor Worship.

Like St. Joan of Arc, they were burned alive.

Crucifixion as a mode of execution for the very worst criminals was outlawed by the first Christian Roman Emperor, who was Constantine the Great.

Burning and boiling were still OK.

If I had had more time to think about it, I might not have applied for a job at Athena, realizing that I would have had to admit that I had served in Vietnam, killing or trying to kill nothing but Orientals. And my interviewer would surely be Oriental.

Yes, and no sooner did Warden Matsumoto hear that I was a West Pointer than he said with terrible heaviness, “Then of course you spent time in Vietnam.”

I thought to myself, “Oh oh. There goes the ball game.”

I misread him completely, not knowing then that the Japanese considered themselves to be as genetically discrete from other Orientals as from me or Donner or Nancy Reagan or the pallid, hairy Ainus, say.

“A soldier does what he is ordered to do,” I said. “I never felt good about what I had to do.” This wasn’t entirely true. I had gotten high as a kite on the fighting now and then. I actually killed a man with my bare hands I time. He had tried to kill me. I barked like a dog and laughed afterward, and then threw up.

My confession that I had served in Vietnam, to my amazement, made Warden Matsumoto feel that we were almost brothers! He came out from behind his desk to take me by the hand and stare into my eyes. It was an odd experience for me, simply from the physical standpoint, since he was wearing a surgical mask and rubber gloves.

“So we both know what it is,” he said, “to be shipped to an alien land on a dangerous mission of vainglorious lunacy!”

What an afternoon!

Only 3 hours before, I had been so at peace in my bell tower. Now I was inside a maximum-security prison, with a masked and gloved Japanese national who insisted that the United States was his Vietnam!

What is more, he had been in the middle of student antiwar protests over here when the Vietnam War was going on. His corporation had sent him to the Harvard Business School to study the minds of the movers and shakers who were screwing up our economy for their own immediate benefit, taking money earmarked for research and development and new machinery and so on, and putting it into monumental retirement plans and year-end bonuses for themselves.

During our interview, he used all the antiwar rhetoric he had heard at Harvard in the ‘60s to denounce his own country’s overseas disaster. We were a quagmire. There was no light at the end of the tunnel over here, and on and on.

Until that moment, I had not given a thought to the mental state of members of the ever-growing army of Japanese nationals in this country, who had to make a financial go of all the properties their corporations had bought out from under us. And it really must have felt to most of them like a war overseas about Heaven knows what, and especially since, as was my case in Vietnam, they were color-coded in contrast with the majority of the native population.

On the subject of color-coding: You might have expected that a lot of black people would be shot after the prison break, even though they weren’t escaped convicts. The state of mind of Whites in this valley, certainly, was that any Black male had to be an escapee.

Shoot first, and ask questions afterward. I sure used to do that.

But the only person who wasn’t an escapee who got shot just for being black was a nephew of the Mayor of Troy. And he was only winged. He lost the use of his right hand, but that has since been repaired by the miracle of microsurgery.

He was left-handed anyway.

He was winged when he was where he wasn’t supposed to be, where nobody of any race was supposed to be. He was camping in the National Forest, which is against the law. He didn’t even know there had been a prison break.

And then: Bang!

And here I am capitalizing “Black” and “White” sometimes, and then not capitalizing them, and not feeling right about how the words look either way. That could be because sometimes race seems to matter a tremendous lot, and other times race seems to matter a little less than that. And I keep wanting to say “so-called Black” or “so-called black.” My guess is that well over half the inmates at Athena, and now in this prison here, had white or White ancestors. Many appear to be mostly white, but they get no credit for that.

Imagine what that must feel like.

I myself have claimed a black ancestor, since this is a prison for Blacks only, and I don’t want to be transferred out of here. I need this library. You can imagine what sorts of libraries they must have on the aircraft carriers and missile cruisers which have been converted into prison ships.

This is home.

My lawyer says I am smart not to want to be’transferred, but for other reasons. A transfer might put me back in the news again, and raise a popular clamor for my punishment.

As matters stand now, I am forgotten by the general public, and so, for that matter, is the prison break. The break was big news on TV for only about 10 days.

And then it was displaced as a headliner by a lone White girl. She was the daughter of a gun nut in rural northern California. She wiped out the Prom Committee of her high school with a Chinese handgrenade from World War II.

Her father had one of the World’s most complete collections of handgrenades.

Now his collection isn’t as complete as it used to be, unless, of course, he had more than 1 Chinese handgrenade from the Finale Rack.

Warden Matsumoto became chattier and chattier during my job interview. Before he was sent to Athena, he said, he ran a hospital-for-profit his corporation had bought in Louisville. He loved the Kentucky Derby. But he hated his job.

I told him I used to go to the horse races in Saigon every chance I got.

He said, “I only wish our Chairman of the Board back in Tokyo could have spent just one hour with me in our emergency room, turning away dying people because they could not afford our services.”

“You had a body count in Vietnam, I believe?” he said.

It was true. We were ordered to count how many people we killed so that higher headquarters, all the way back to Washington, D.C., could estimate how much closer, even if it was only a teeny-weeny bit closer, all our efforts were bringing us to victory. There wasn’t any other way to keep score.