Kurt Vonnegut - Hocus Pocus

The accident wouldn’t have been half as serious as it turned out to be if the exhibit hadn’t included several bottles of different acids which broke and touched off the gasoline. Both vehicles were immediately engulfed in flames.

The exhibit was, I think, meant to show several important services that acids, which most people were afraid of and didn’t like to think much about, were performing every day for Humanity.

The people who looked us over and asked us questions, and did not like what they saw and heard, sent for a judge. They wanted us disqualified. We were worse than dishonest. We were ridiculous!

I wanted to throw up. I said to Father, “Dad, honest to God, I think we better get out of here. We made a mistake.”

But he said we had nothing to be ashamed of, and that we certainly weren’t going to go home with our tails between our legs.

Vietnam!

So a judge did come over, and easily determined that I had no understanding whatsoever of the exhibit. He then took Father aside and negotiated a political settlement, man to man. He did not want to stir up bad feelings in our hOme county, which had sent me to Cleveland as its champion. Nor did he want to humiliate Father, who was an upstanding member of his community who obviously had not read the rules carefully. He would not humiliate us with a formal disqualification, which might attract unfavorable publicity, if Father in turn would not insist on having my entry put in serious competition with the rest as though it were legitimate.

When the time came, he said, he and the other judges would simply pass us by without comment. It would be their secret that we couldn’t possibly win anything.

That was the deal.

History.

The person who won that year was a girl from Cincinnati. As it happened, she too had an exhibit about crystallography. She, however, had either grown her own or gathered specimens herself from creek beds and caves and coal mines within 100 kilometers of her home. Her name was Mary Alice French, I remember, and she would go on to place very close to the bottom in the National Finals in Washington, D.C.

When she set off for the Finals, I heard, Cincinnati was so proud of her and so sure she would win, or at least place very high with her crystals, that the Mayor declared “Mary Alice French Day.”

I have to wonder now, with so much time in which to think about people I’ve hurt, if Father and I didn’t indirectly help set up Mary Alice French for her terrible disappointment in Washington. There is a good chance that the judges in Cleveland gave her First Prize because of the moral contrast between her exhibit and ours.

Perhaps, during the judging, science was given a backseat, and because of our ill fame, she represented a golden opportunity to teach a rule superior to any law of science: that honesty was the best policy.

But who knows?

Many, many years after Mary Alice French had her heart broken in Washington, and I had become a teacher at Tarkington, I had a male student from Cincinnati, Mary Alice French’s hometown. His mother’s side of the family had just sold Cincinnati’s sole remaining daily paper and its leading TV station, and a lot of radio stations and weekly papers, too, to the Sultan of Brunei, reputedly the richest individual on Earth.

This student looked about 12 when he came to us. He was actually 21, but his voice had never changed, and he was only 150 centimeters tall. As a result of the sale to the Sultan, he personally was said to be worth $30,000,000, but he was scared to death of his own shadow.

He could read and write and do math all the way up through algebra and trigonometry, which he had taught himself He was also probably the best chess player in the history of the college. But he had no social graces, and probably never would have any, because he found everything about life so frightening.

I asked him if he had ever heard of a woman about my age in Cincinnati whose name was Mary Alice French.

He replied: “I don’t know anybody or anything. Please don’t ever talk to me again. Tell everybody to stop talking to me.”

I never did find out what he did with all his money, if anything. Somebody said he got married. Hard to believe!

Some fortune hunter must have got him.

Smart girl. She must be on Easy Street.

But to get back to the Science Fair in Cleveland: I headed for the nearest exit after Father and the judge made their deal. I needed fresh air. I needed a whole new planet or death. Anything would be better than what I had.

The exit was blocked by a spectacularly dressed man. He was wholly unlike anyone else in the auditorium. He was, incredibly, what I myself would become: a Lieutenant Colonel in the Regular Army, with many rows of ribbons on his chest. He was in full-dress uniform, with a gold citation cord and paratrooper’s wings and boots. We were not then at war anywhere, so the sight of a military man all dolled up like that among civilians, especially so early in the day, was startling. He had been sent there to recruit budding young scientists for his alma mater, the United States Military Academy at West Point.

The Academy had been founded soon after the Revolutionary War because the country had so few military officers with mathematical and engineering skills essential to victories in what was modem warfare way back then, mainly mapmaking and cannonballs. Now, with radar and rockets and airplanes and nuclear weapons and all the rest of it, the same problem had come up again.

And there I was in Cleveland, with a great big round badge pinned over my heart like a target, which said:

ExmBrroR.

This Lieutenant Colonel, whose name was Sam Wakefield, would not only get me into West Point. In Vietnam, where he was a Major General, he would award me a Silver Star for extraordinary valor and gallantry. He would retire from the Army when the war still had a year to go, and become President of Tarkington College, now Tarkington Prison. And when I myself got out of the Army, he would hire me to teach Physics and play the bells, bells, bells.

Here are the first words Sam Wakefield ever spoke to me, when I was 18 and he was 36:

“What’s the hurry, Son?”

“What’s the hurry, Son?” he said. And then, “If you’ve got a minute, I’d like to talk to you.”

So I stopped. That was the biggest mistake of my life. There were plenty of other exits, and I should have headed for 1 of those. At that moment, every other exit led to the University of Michigan and journalism and music-making, and a lifetime of saying and wearing what I goshdarned pleased. Any other exit, in all probability, would have led me to a wife who wouldn’t go insane on me, and kids who gave me love and respect.

Any other exit would have led to a certain amount of misery, I know, life being what it is. But I don’t think it would have led me to Vietnam, and then to teaching the unteachable at Tarkington College, and then getting fired by Tarkington, and then teaching the unteachable at the penitentiary across the lake until the biggest prison break in American history. And now I myself am a prisoner..

But I stopped before the 1 exit blocked by Sam Wakefield.

There went the ball game.

Sam Wakefield asked me if I had ever considered the advantages of a career in the military. This was a man who had been wounded in World War II, the 1 war I would have liked to fight in, and then in Korea. He would eventually resign from the Army with the Vietnam War still going on, and then become President of Tarkington College, and then blow his brains out.

I said I had already been accepted by the University of Michigan and had no interest in soldiering. He wasn’t having any luck at all. The sort of kid who had reached a state-level Science Fair honestly wanted to go to Cal Tech or MIT, or someplace a lot friendlier to freestyle thinking than West Point. So he was desperate. He waS going around the country recruiting the dregs of Science Fairs. He didn’t ask me about my exhibit. He didn’t ask about my grades. He wanted my body, no matter what it was.