Hocus Pocus Part 7

WHAT DO I myself make of that reply nowadays? It was an inane reply.

SHE ASKED ME about my own lecture in Chapel only a month earlier. She hadn't attended and so hadn't taped it. She was seeking confirmation of things other people had said I said. My lecture had been humorous recollections of my maternal grandfather, Benjamin Wills, the old-time Socialist.

She accused me of saying that all rich people were drunks and lunatics. This was a garbling of Grandfather's saying that Capitalism was what the people with all our money, drunk or sober, sane or insane, decided to do today. So I straightened that out, and explained that the opinion was my grandfather's, not my own.

"I heard your speech was worse than Mr. Slazinger's," she said.

"I certainly hope not," I said. "I was trying to show how outdated my grandfather's opinions were. I wanted people to laugh. They did."

"I heard you said Jesus Christ was un-American," she said, her tape recorder running all the time.

So I unscrambled that one for her. The original had been another of Grandfather's sayings. He repeated Karl Marx's prescription for an ideal society, "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." And then he asked me, meaning it to be a wry joke, "What could be more un-American, Gene, than sounding like the Sermon on the Mount?"

"WHAT ABOUT PUTTING all the Jews in a concentration camp in Idaho?" said Kimberley.

"What about what-what-what?" I asked in bewilderment. At last, at last, and too late, too late, I understood that this stupid girl was as dangerous as a cobra. It would be catastrophic if she spread the word that I was an anti-Semite, especially with so many Jews, having interbred with Gentiles, now sending their children to Tarkington.

"In all my life, I never said anything like that," I promised.

"Maybe it wasn't Idaho," she said.

"Wyoming?" I said.

"OK, Wyoming," she said. "Lock 'em all up, right?"

"I only said 'Wyoming' because I was married in Wyoming," I said. "I've never been to Idaho or even thought about Idaho. I'm just trying to figure out what you've got so all mixed up and upside down. It doesn't sound even a little bit like me."

"Jews," she said.

"That was my grandfather again," I said.

"He hated Jews, right?" she said.

"No, no, no," I said. "He admired a lot of them."

"But he still wanted to put them in concentration camps," she said. "Right?"

The origin of this most poisonous misunderstanding was in my account in Chapel of riding around with Grandfather in his car one Sunday morning in Midland City, Ohio, when I was a little boy. He, not I, was mocking all organized religions.

When we pa.s.sed a Catholic church, I recalled, he said, "You think your dad's a good chemist? They're turning soda crackers into meat in there. Can your dad do that?"

When we pa.s.sed a Pentecostal church, he said, "The mental giants in there believe that every word is true in a book put together by a bunch of preachers 300 years after the birth of Christ. I hope you won't be that dumb about words set in type when you grow up."

I would later hear, incidentally, that the woman my father got involved with when I was in high school, when he jumped out a window with his pants down and got bitten by a dog and tangled in a clothesline and so on, was a member of that Pentecostal church.

WHAT HE SAID about Jews that morning was actually another kidding of Christianity. He had to explain to me, as I would have to explain to Kimberley, that the Bible consisted of 2 separate works, the New Testament and the Old Testament. Religious Jews gave credence only to what was supposedly their own history, the Old Testament, whereas Christians took both works seriously.

"I pity the Jews," said Grandfather, "trying to get through life with only half a Bible."

And then he added, "That's like trying to get from here to San Francisco with a road map that stops at Dubuque, Iowa."

I WAS ANGRY now. "Kimberley," I asked, "did you by any chance tell the Board of Trustees that I said these things? Is that what they want to see me about?"

"Maybe," she said. She was acting cute. I thought this was a dumb answer. It was in fact accurate. The Trustees had a lot more they wanted to discuss than misrepresentations of my Chapel lecture.

I found her both repulsive and pitiful. She thought she was such a heroine and I was such a viper! Now that I had caught on to what she had been up to, she was thrilled to show me that she was proud and unafraid. Little did she know that I had once thrown a man almost as big as she out of a helicopter. What was to prevent me from throwing her out a tower window? The thought of doing that to her crossed my mind. I was so insulted! That would teach her not to insult me!

The man I threw out of the helicopter had spit in my face and bitten my hand. I had taught him not to insult me.

SHE WAS PITIFUL because she was a dimwit from a brilliant family and believed that she at last had done something brilliant, too, in getting the goods on a person whose ideas were criminal. I didn't know yet that her Rhodes Scholar father, a Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton, had put her up to this. I thought she had noted her father's conviction, often expressed in his columns and on his TV show, and no doubt at home, that a few teachers who secretly hated their country were making young people lose faith in its future and leaders.h.i.+p.

I thought that, just on her own, she had resolved to find such a villain and get him fired, proving that she wasn't so dumb, after all, and that she was really Daddy's little girl.

Wrong.

"Kimberley," I said, as an alternative to throwing her out the window, "this is ridiculous."

Wrong.

"ALL RIGHT," I said, "we're going to settle this in a hurry."

Wrong.

I would stride into the Trustees' meeting, I thought, shoulders squared, and radiant with righteous indignation, the most popular teacher on campus, and the only faculty member who had medals from the Vietnam War. When it comes right down to it, that is why they fired me, although I don't believe they themselves realized that that was why they fired me: I had ugly, personal knowledge of the disgrace that was the Vietnam War.

None of the Trustees had been in that war, and neither had Kimberley's father, and not one of them had allowed a son or a daughter to be sent over there. Across the lake in the prison, of course, and down in the town, there were plenty of somebody's sons who had been sent over there.

12.

I MET JUST 2 people when I crossed the Quadrangle to Samoza Hall. One was Professor Marilyn Shaw, head of the Department of Life Sciences. She was the only other faculty member who had served in Vietnam. She had been a nurse. The other was Norman Everett, an old campus gardener like my grandfather. He had a son who had been paralyzed from the waist down by a mine in Vietnam and was a permanent resident in a Veterans Administration hospital over in Schenectady.

The seniors and their families and the rest of the faculty were having lunch in the Pavilion. Everybody got a lobster which had been boiled alive.

I NEVER CONSIDERED making a pa.s.s at Marilyn, although she was reasonably attractive and unattached. I don't know why that is. There may have been some sort of incest taboo operating, as though we were brother and sister, since we had both been in Vietnam.

She is dead now, buried next to the stable, in the shadow of Musket Mountain when the Sun goes down. She was evidently hit by a stray bullet. Who in his right mind would have taken dead aim at her?

Remembering her now, I wonder if I wasn't in love with her, even though we avoided talking to each other as much as possible.

MAYBE I SHOULD put her on a very short list indeed: all the women I loved. That would be Marilyn, I think, and Margaret during the first 4 years or so of our marriage, before I came home with the clap. I was also very fond of Harriet Gummer, the war correspondent for The Des Moines Register, The Des Moines Register, who, it turns out, bore me a son after our love affair in Manila. I think I felt what could be called love for Zuzu Johnson, whose husband was crucified. And I had a deep, thoroughly reciprocated, multidimensioned friends.h.i.+p with Muriel Peck, who was a bar-tender at the Black Cat Cafe the day I was fired, who later became a member of the English Department. who, it turns out, bore me a son after our love affair in Manila. I think I felt what could be called love for Zuzu Johnson, whose husband was crucified. And I had a deep, thoroughly reciprocated, multidimensioned friends.h.i.+p with Muriel Peck, who was a bar-tender at the Black Cat Cafe the day I was fired, who later became a member of the English Department.

End of list.

Muriel, too, is buried next to the stable, in the shadow of Musket Mountain when the Sun goes down.

Harriet Gummer is also dead, but out in Iowa.

Hey, girls, wait for me, wait for me.

I DON'T EXPECT to break a world's record with the number of women I made love to, whether I loved them or not. As far as I am concerned, the record set by Georges Simenon, the French mystery writer, can stand for all time. According to his obituary in The New York Times, The New York Times, he copulated with 3 different women a day for years and years. he copulated with 3 different women a day for years and years.

MARILYN SHAW AND I hadn't known each other in Vietnam, but we had a friend in common there, Sam Wakefield. Afterward, he had hired both of us for Tarkington, and then committed suicide for reasons unclear even to himself, judging from the plagiarized note he left on his bedside table.

He and his wife, who would become Tarkington's Dean of Women, were sleeping in separate rooms by then.

SAM WAKEFIELD, IN my opinion, saved Marilyn's and my lives before he gave up on his own. If he hadn't hired both of us for Tarkington, where we both became very good teachers of the learning-disabled, I don't know what would have become of either of us. When we pa.s.sed yet again like s.h.i.+ps in the night on the Quadrangle, with me on my way to get fired, I was, incredibly, a tenured Full Professor of Physics and she was a tenured Full Professor of Life Sciences!

When I was still a teacher here, I asked GRIOT, the most popular computer game at the Pahlavi Pavilion, what might have become of me after the war instead of what really happened. The way you play GRIOT, of course, is to tell the computer the age and race and degree of education and present situation and drug use, if any, and so on of a person. The person doesn't have to be real. The computer doesn't ask if the person is real or not. It doesn't care about anything. It especially doesn't care about hurting people's feelings. You load it up with details about a life, real or imagined, and then it spits out a story about what was likely to happen to him or her. This story is based on what has happened to real persons with the same general specifications.

GRIOT won't work without certain pieces of information. If you leave out race, for instance, it flashes the words "ethnic origin" on its screen, and stops cold. If it doesn't know that, it can't go on. The same with education.

I didn't tell GRIOT that I had landed a job I loved here. I told it only about my life up to the end of the Vietnam War. It knew all about the Vietnam War and the sorts of veterans it had produced. It made me a burned-out case, on the basis of my length of service over there, I think. It had me becoming a wife-beater and an alcoholic, and winding up all alone on Skid Row.

IF I HAD access to GRIOT now, I might ask it what might have happened to Marilyn Shaw if Sam Wakefield hadn't rescued her. But the escaped convicts smashed up the one in the Pavilion soon after I showed them how to work it.

They hated it, and I didn't blame them. I was immediately sorry that I had let them know of its existence. One by one they punched in their race and age and what their parents did, if they knew, and how long they'd gone to school and what drugs they'd taken and so on, and GRIOT sent them straight to jail to serve long sentences.

I HAVE NO idea how much GRIOT back then may have known about Vietnam nurses. The manufacturers claimed then as now that no program in stores was more than 3 months old, and so every program was right up-to-date about what had really happened to this or that sort of person at the time you bought it. The programmers, supposedly, were constantly updating GRIOT with the news of the day about plumbers, about podiatrists, about Vietnam boat people and Mexican wetbacks, about drug smugglers, about paraplegics, about everyone you could think of within the continental limits of the United States and Canada.

There is some question now, I've heard, about whether GRIOT is as deep and up-to-date as it used to be, since Parker Brothers, the company that makes it, has been taken over by Koreans. The new owners are moving the whole operation to Indonesia, where labor costs next to nothing. They say they will keep up with American news by satellite.

One wonders.

I DON'T NEED any help from GRIOT to know that Marilyn Shaw had a much rougher war than I did. All the soldiers she had to deal with were wounded, and all of them expected of her what was more often than not impossible: that she make them whole again.

I know that she was married, and that her husband back home divorced her and married somebody else while she was still over there, and that she didn't care. She and Sam Wakefield may have been lovers over there. I never asked.

That seems likely. After the war he went looking for her and found her taking a course in Computer Science at New York University. She didn't want to be a nurse anymore. He told her that maybe she should try being a teacher instead. She asked him if there was a chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous in Scipio, and he said there was.

After he shot himself, Marilyn, Professor Shaw, fell off the wagon for about a week. She disappeared, and I was given the job of finding her. I discovered her downtown, drunk and asleep on a pool table in the back room of the Black Cat Cafe. She was drooling on the felt. One hand was on the cue ball, as though she meant to throw it at something when she regained consciousness.

AS FAR AS I know, she never took another drink.

GRIOT? IN THE old days anyway, before the Koreans promised to make Parker Brothers lean and mean in Indonesia, didn't come up with the same biography every time you gave it a certain set of facts. Like life itself, it offered a variety of possibilities, spitting out endings according to what the odds for winning or losing or whatever were known to be.

After GRIOT put me on Skid Row 15 years ago, I had it try again. I did a little better, but not as well as I was doing here. It had me stay in the Army and become an instructor at West Point, but unhappy and bored. I lost my wife again, and still drank too much, and had a succession of woman friends who soon got sick of me and my depressions. And I died of cirrhosis of the liver a second time.

GRIOT DIDN'T HAVE many alternatives to jail for the escaped convicts, though. If it came up with a parole, it soon put the ex-con back in a cage again.

THE SAME THING happened if GRIOT was told that the jailbird was Hispanic. It was somewhat more optimistic about Whites, if they could read and write, and had never been in a mental hospital or been given a Dishonorable Discharge from the Armed Forces. Otherwise, they might as well be Black or Hispanic.

THE WILD CARDS among jailbirds, as far as GRIOT was concerned, were Orientals and American Indians.

WHEN THE SUPREME Court handed down its decision that prisoners should be segregated according to race, many jurisdictions did not have enough Oriental or American Indian criminals to make separate inst.i.tutions for them economically feasible. Hawaii, for example, had only 2 American Indian prisoners, and Wyoming, my wife's home state, had only 1 Oriental.

Under such circ.u.mstances, said the Court, Indians and/or Orientals should be made honorary Whites, and treated accordingly.

This state has plenty of both, however, particularly after Indians began to make tax-free fortunes smuggling drugs over unmapped trails across the border from Canada. So the Indians had a prison all their own at what their ancestors used to call "Thunder Beaver," what we call "Niagara Falls." The Orientals have their own prison at Deer Park, Long Island, conveniently located only 50 kilometers from their heroin-processing plants in New York City's Chinatown.

WHEN YOU DARE to think about how huge the illegal drug business is in this country, you have to suspect that practically everybody has a steady buzz on, just as I did during my last 2 years in high school, and just as General Grant did during the Civil War, and just as Winston Churchill did during World War II.