Hocus Pocus

by Kurt Vonnegut

  Plutonium! Now there's the stuff to put hair on a microbe's chest.

  I ENTERED THE Black Cat Cafe for the first time in my life. This was my club now, since I had been busted down to Townie. Maybe, after a few drinks, I'd go back up the hill and let air out of the tires of some of Clarke's motorcycles and limousines.

  I bellied up to the bar and said, "Give me a wop." That was what I had heard people down in the town called Budweiser beer, ever since Italians had bought Anheuser-Busch, the company that made Budweiser. The Italians got the St. Louis Cardinals, too, as part of the deal.

  "Wop coming up," said the barmaid. She was just the kind of woman I would go for right now, if I didn't have TB. She was in her late 30s, and had had a lot of bad luck recently, and didn't know where to turn next. I knew her story. So did everybody else in town. She and her husband restored an old-time ice cream parlor 2 doors up Clinton Street from the Black Cat Cafe. But then her husband died because he had inhaled so much paint remover. The germs inside him couldn't have felt too great, either.

  WHO KNOWS, THOUGH? The Elders of Tralfamadore may have had her husband restore the ice cream parlor just so we could have a new strain of germs capable of surviving a passage through a cloud of paint remover in outer space.

  HER NAME WAS Muriel Peck, and her husband Jerry Peck was a direct descendant of the first President of Tarkington College. His father grew up in this valley, but Jerry was raised in San Diego, California, and then he went to work for an ice cream company out there. The ice cream company was bought by President Mobutu of Zaire, and Jerry was let go. So he came here with Muriel and their 2 kids to discover his roots.

  Since he already knew ice cream, it made perfect sense for him to buy the old ice cream parlor. It would have been better for all concerned if he had known a little less about ice cream and a little more about paint remover.

  MURIEL AND I would eventually become lovers, but not until I had been working at Athena Prison for 2 weeks. I finally got nerve enough to ask her, since she and Jerry had both majored in Literature at Swarthmore College, if either of them had ever taken the time to read a label on a can of paint remover.

  "Not until it was much too late," she said.

  OVER AT THE prison I would encounter a surprising number of convicts who had been damaged not by paint remover but by paint. When they were little they had eaten chips or breathed dust from old lead-based paint. Lead poisoning had made them very stupid. They were all in prison for the dumbest crimes imaginable, and I was never able to teach any of them to read and write.

  Thanks to them, do we now have germs which eat lead?

  I know we have germs which eat petroleum. What their story is, I do not know. Maybe they're that Honduran gonorrhea.

  28

  JERRY PECK WAS in a wheelchair with a tank of oxygen in his lap at the grand opening of the Mohiga Ice Cream Emporium. But he and Muriel had a nice little hit on their hands. Tarkingtonians and Townies alike were pleased by the decor and the luscious ice cream.

  After the place had been open for only 6 months, though, a man came in and photographed everything. Then he pulled out a tape and made measurements which he wrote down in a book. The Pecks were flattered, and asked him if he was from an architectural magazine or what. He said that he worked for the architect who was designing the new student recreation center up on the hill, the Pahlavi Pavilion. The Pahlavis wanted it to have an ice cream parlor identical to theirs, right down to the last detail.

  So maybe it wasn't paint remover that killed Jerry Peck after all.

  THE PAVILION ALSO put the valley's only bowling alley out of business. It couldn't survive on the business of Townies alone. So anybody in this area who wanted to bowl and wasn't connected to Tarkington had to go 30 kilometers to the north, to the alleys next to the Meadowdale Cinema Complex, across the highway from the National Guard Armory.

  IT WAS A slow time of day at the Black Cat Cafe. There may have been a few prostitutes in vans in the parking lot out back but none inside.

  The owner, Lyle Hooper, who was also Chief of the Volunteer Fire Department and a Notary, was at the other end of the bar, doing some kind of bookkeeping. Until the very end of his life, he would never admit that the availability of prostitutes in his parking lot accounted in large measure for the business he did in liquor and snacks, and for the condom machine in the men's room.

  To the Elders of Tralfamadore, of course, that condom machine would represent a threat to their space program.

  LYLE HOOPER SURELY knew about my sexual exploits, since he had notarized the affidavits in my portfolio. But he never mentioned them to me, or so far as I know to anyone. He was the soul of discretion.

  Lyle was probably the best-liked man in this valley. Townies were so fond of him, men and women alike, that I never heard one call the Black Cat Cafe a whorehouse. Up on the hill, of course, it was called almost nothing else.

  The Townies protected the image he had of himself, in spite of State Police raids and visits from the County Health Department, as a family man who ran a place of refreshment whose success depended entirely on the quality of the drinks and snacks he served. This kindly conspiracy protected Lyle's son Charlton, as well. Charlton grew to be 2 meters tall, and was a New York State High School All-Star basketball center in his senior year at Scipio High School, and all he ever had to say about his father was that he ran a restaurant.

  Charlton was such a phenomenal basketball player that he was invited to try out for the New York Knickerbockers, which were still owned by Americans back then. He accepted a full scholarship to MIT instead, and became a top scientist running the huge subatomic particle accelerator called "the Supercollider" outside Waxahachie, Texas.

  AS I UNDERSTAND it, the scientists down there forced invisible particles to reveal their secrets by making them go splat on photographic plates. That isn't all that different from the way we treated suspected enemy agents in Vietnam sometimes.

  Have I already said that I threw one out of a helicopter?

  THE TOWNIES DIDN'T have to protect the sensibilities of Lyle's wife by never saying why the Black Cat Cafe was so prosperous. She had left him. She discovered in midlife that she was a lesbian, and ran off with the high school's girls' gym teacher to Bermuda, where they gave and probably still give sailing lessons.

  I made a pass at her one time at an Annual Town-and-Gown Mixer up on the hill. I knew she was a lesbian before she did.

  AT THE VERY end of his life 2 years ago, though, when Lyle Hooper was a prisoner of the escaped convicts up in the bell tower, he was addressed by his captors as "Pimp." It was, "Hey, Pimp, how you like the view?" and "What you think we ought to do with you, Pimp?" and so on. It was cold and wet up there. Snow or rain blown into the belfry fell down through a myriad of bullet holes in the ceiling. Those had been made from below by escaped convicts when they realized that a sniper was up there among the bells.

  There was no electricity. All electric and telephone service had been shut off. When I visited Lyle up there, he knew the story of those holes, knew the sniper had been crucified in the stable loft. He knew that the escaped convicts hadn't decided yet what to do with him. He knew that he had committed what was in their eyes murder pure and simple. He and Whitey VanArsdale had ambushed and killed 3 escaped convicts who were on their way up the old towpath to the head of the lake, to negotiate with the police and politicians and soldiers at the roadblock there. The would-be negotiators were carrying flags of truce, white pillowcases on broomsticks, when Lyle Hooper and Whitey VanArsdale shot them dead.

  And then Whitey was himself shot dead almost immediately, but Lyle was taken prisoner.

  But what bothered Hooper most when I talked to him up in the bell tower was that his captors called him nothing but "Pimp."

  AT THIS POINT in my story, and in order to simplify the telling, and not to make any political point, let me from now on call the escaped convicts in Scipio what they called themselves, which was "Freedom Fighters."

&
nbsp; SO LYLE HOOPER was without question responsible for the death of 3 Freedom Fighters carrying flags of truce. The Freedom Fighter who was guarding him in the tower when I came to see him, moreover, was the half brother and former partner in the crack business, along with their grandmother, of 1 of the Freedom Fighters he or Whitey had killed.

  But all Lyle could talk about was the pain of being called a pimp. To many if not most of the Freedom Fighters, of course, it was no particular insult to call someone a pimp.

  LYLE TOLD ME that he had been raised by his paternal grandmother, who made him promise to leave the world a better place than when he found it. He said, "Have I done that, Gene?"

  I said he had. Since he was facing execution, I certainly wasn't going to tell him that, in my experience anyway, ambushes made the world seem an even worse place than it was before.

  "I ran a nice, clean place, raised a wonderful son," he said. "Put out a lot of fires."

  IT WAS THE Trustees who told the Freedom Fighters that Lyle ran a whorehouse. Otherwise they would have thought he was just a restaurateur and Fire Chief.

  LYLE HOOPER'S MOOD up there in the bell tower reminded me of my father's mood after he was let go by Barrytron, and he went on a cruise down the Inland Waterway on the East Coast, from City Island in New York City to Palm Beach, Florida. This was on a motor yacht owned by his old college roommate, a man named Fred Handy. Handy had also studied chemical engineering, but then had gone into junk bonds instead. He heard that Father was deeply depressed. He thought the cruise might cheer Dad up.

  But all the way to Palm Beach, where Handy had a waterfront estate, down the East River, down Barnegat Bay, up Delaware Bay and down Chesapeake Bay, down the Dismal Swamp Canal, and on and on, the yacht had to nuzzle its way through a shore-to-shore, horizon-to-horizon carpet of bobbing plastic bottles. They had contained brake fluid and laundry bleach and so on.

  Father had had a lot to do with the development of those bottles. He knew, too, that they could go on bobbing for 1,000 years. They were nothing to be proud of.

  In a way, those bottles called him what the Freedom Fighters called Lyle Hooper.

  Lyle's despairing last words as he was led out of the bell tower to be executed in front of Samoza Hall might be an apt epitaph for my father:

  29

  LYLE HOOPER'S LAST words, I think we can say with the benefit of hindsight in the year 2001, might serve as an apt epitaph for a plurality of working adults in industrialized nations during the 20th Century. How could they help themselves, when so many of the jobs they or their mates could get had to do with large-scale deceptions, legal thefts from public treasuries, or the wrecking of the food chain, the topsoil, the water, or the atmosphere?

  AFTER LYLE HOOPER was executed, with a bullet behind the ear, I visited the Trustees in the stable. Tex Johnson was still spiked to the cross-timbers in the loft overhead, and they knew it.

  But before I tell about that, I had better finish my story of how I got a job at Athena.

  SO THERE I was back in 1991, nursing a Budweiser, or "wop," at the bar of the Black Cat Cafe. Muriel Peck was telling me how exciting it had been to see all the motorcycles and limousines and celebrities out front. She couldn't believe that she had been that close to Gloria White and Henry Kissinger.

  Several of the merry roisterers had come inside to use the toilet or get a drink of water. Arthur K. Clarke had provided everything but water and toilets. So Muriel had dared to ask some of them who they were and what they did.

  Three of the people were Black. One Black was an old woman who had just won $57,000,000 in the New York State Lottery, and the other 2 were baseball players who made $3,000,000 a year.

  A white man, who kept apart from the rest, and, according to Muriel, didn't seem to know what to make of himself, was a daily book reviewer for The New York Times. He had given a rave review to Clarke's autobiography, Don't Be Ashamed of Money.

  One man who came in to use the toilet, she said, was a famous author of horror stories that had been made into some of the most popular movies of all time. I had in fact read a couple of them in Vietnam, about innocent people getting murdered by walking corpses with axes and knives and so on.

  I passed 1 of them on to Jack Patton, I remember, and asked him later what he thought of it. And then I stopped him from answering, saying, "You don't have to tell me, Jack. I already know. It made you want to laugh like hell."

  "Not only that, Major Hartke," he replied. "I thought of what his next book should be about."

  "What's that?" I asked.

  "A B-52," he said. "Gore and guts everywhere."

  ONE USER OF the toilet, who confessed to Muriel that he had diarrhea, and asked if she had anything behind the bar to stop it, was a retired Astronaut whom she recognized but couldn't name. She had seen him again and again in commercials for a sinus-headache remedy and a retirement community in Cocoa Beach, Florida, near Cape Kennedy.

  So Arthur K. Clarke, along with all his other activities, was a whimsical people-collector. He invited people he didn't really know, but who had caught his eye for 1 reason or another, to his parties, and they came, they came. Another one, Muriel told me, was a man who had inherited from his father a painting by Mark Rothko that had just been sold to the Getty Museum in Malibu, California, for $37,000,000, a new record for a painting by an American.

  Rothko himself had long since committed suicide.

  He had had enough.

  He was out of here.

  "SHE'S SO SHORT," Muriel said to me. "I was so surprised how short she was."

  "Who's so short?" I said.

  "Gloria White," she said.

  I ASKED HER what she thought of Henry Kissinger. She said she loved his voice.

  I had seen him up on the Quadrangle. Although I had been an instrument of his geopolitics, I felt no connection between him and me. His face was certainly familiar. He might have been, like Gloria White, somebody who had been in a lot of movies I had seen.

  I dreamed about him once here in prison, though. He was a woman. He was a Gypsy fortune-teller who looked into her crystal ball but wouldn't say anything.

  I SAID TO Muriel, "You worry me."

  "I what?" she said.

  "You look tired," I said. "Do you get enough sleep?"

  "Yes, thank you," she said.

  "Forgive me," I said. "None of my business. It's just that you were so full of life while you were talking about the motorcycle people. When you stopped, it was as though you took off a mask, and you seemed as though you were suddenly all wrung out."

  Muriel knew vaguely who I was. She had seen me with Margaret and Mildred in tow at least twice a week during the short time the ice cream parlor was in business. So I did not have to tell her that I, too, practically speaking, was without a mate. And she had seen with her own eyes how kind and patient I was with my worse than useless relatives.

  So she was already favorably disposed to me. She trusted me, and responded with undisguised gratitude to my expressions of concern for her happiness.

  "If you want to know the truth," she said, "I hardly sleep at all, I worry so much about the children." She had 2 of them. "The way things are going," she said, "I don't see how I can afford to send even 1 of them to college. I'm from a family where everybody went to college and never thought a thing about it. But that's all over now. Neither 1 is an athlete."

  We might have become lovers that night, I think, instead of 2 weeks from then, if an ugly mountain of a man hadn't entered raging, demanding to know, "All right, where is he? Where's that kid?"

  He was asking about the kid who worked at Tarkington's stable after school, whose bicycle I had stolen. I had left the kid's bike in plain view out front. Every other place of business on Clinton Street was boarded up, from the barge terminal to halfway up the hill. So the only place the boy could be, he thought, was inside the Black Cat Cafe or, worse, inside one of the vans out back in the parking lot.

  I PLAYED DUMB.

  We went o
utside with him to find out what bicycle he could possibly be talking about. I offered him the theory that the boy was a good boy, and nowhere near the Black Cat Cafe, and that some bad person had borrowed the bike and left it there. So he put the bike on the back of his beat-up pickup truck, and said he was late for an appointment for a job interview at the prison across the lake.

  "What kind of a job?" I asked.

  And he said, "They're hiring teachers over there."

  I asked if I could come with him.

  He said, "Not if you're going to teach what I want to teach. What do you want to teach?"

  "Anything you don't want to teach," I said.

  "I want to teach shop," he said. "You want to teach shop?"

  "No," I said.

  "Word of honor?" he said.

  "Word of honor," I said.

  "OK," he said, "get in, get in."

  30

  TO UNDERSTAND HOW the lower ranks of guards at Athena in those days felt about White people, and never mind Black people, you have to realize that most of them were recruited from Japan's northernmost island, Hokkaido. On Hokkaido the primitive natives, the Ainus, thought to be very ugly because they were so pallid and hairy, were White people. Genetically speaking, they are just as white as Nancy Reagan. Their ancestors long ago had made the error, when humiliated by superior Asiatic civilizations, of shambling north instead of west to Europe, and eventually, of course, to the Western Hemisphere.