“Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”: Adventures of a Curious Character

by Richard Phillips Feynman

  They all honored me. I was “on the wagon” now, and had the guts to enter that bar, with all its “temptations,” and just order Coke—because, of course, I had to see my friends. And I maintained that for a month! I was a real tough bastard.

  One time I was in the men’s room of the bar and there was a guy at the urinal. He was kind of drunk, and said to me in a mean-sounding voice, “I don’t like your face. I think I’ll push it in.”

  I was scared green. I replied in an equally mean voice, “Get out of my way, or I’ll pee right through ya!”

  He said something else, and I figured it was getting pretty close to a fight now. I had never been in a fight. I didn’t know what to do, exactly, and I was afraid of getting hurt. I did think of one thing: I moved away from the wall, because I figured if I got hit, I’d get hit from the back, too.

  Then I felt a sort of funny crunching in my eye—it didn’t hurt much—and the next thing I know, I’m slamming the son of a gun right back, automatically. It was remarkable for me to discover that I didn’t have to think; the “machinery” knew what to do.

  “OK. That’s one for one,” I said. “Ya wanna keep on goin’?”

  The other guy backed off and left. We would have killed each other if the other guy was as dumb as I was.

  I went to wash up, my hands are shaking, blood is leaking out of my gums—I’ve got a weak place in my gums—and my eye hurt. After I calmed down I went back into the bar and swaggered up to the bartender: “Black and White, water on the side,” I said. I figured it would calm my nerves.

  I didn’t realize it, but the guy I socked in the men’s room was over in another part of the bar, talking with three other guys. Soon these three guys—big, tough guys—came over to where I was sitting and leaned over me. They looked down threateningly, and said, “What’s the idea of pickin’ a fight with our friend?”

  Well I’m so dumb I don’t realize I’m being intimidated; all I know is right and wrong. I simply whip around and snap at them, “Why don’t ya find out who started what first, before ya start makin’ trouble?”

  The big guys were so taken aback by the fact that their intimidation didn’t work that they backed away and left.

  After a while one of the guys came back and said to me, “You’re right, Curly’s always doin’ that. He’s always gettin’ into fights and askin’ us to straighten it out.”

  “You’re damn tootin’ I’m right!” I said, and the guy sat down next to me.

  Curly and the other two fellas came over and sat down on the other side of me, two seats away. Curly said something about my eye not looking too good, and I said his didn’t look to be in the best of shape either.

  I continue talking tough, because I figure that’s the way a real man is supposed to act in a bar.

  The situation’s getting tighter and tighter, and people in the bar are worrying about what’s going to happen. The bartender says, “No fighting in here, boys! Calm down!”

  Curly hisses, “That’s OK; we’ll get ‘im when he goes out.”

  Then a genius comes by. Every field has its first-rate experts. This fella comes over to me and says, “Hey, Dan! I didn’t know you were in town! It’s good to see you!”

  Then he says to Curly, “Say, Paul! I’d like you to meet a good friend of mine, Dan, here. I think you two guys would like each other. Why don’t you shake?”

  We shake hands. Curly says, “Uh, pleased to meet you.”

  Then the genius leans over to me and very quietly whispers, “Now get out of here fast!”

  “But they said they would …”

  “Just go!” he says.

  I got my coat and went out quickly. I walked along near the walls of the buildings, in case they went looking for me. Nobody came out, and I went to my hotel. It happened to be the night of the last lecture, so I never went back to the Alibi Room, at least for a few years.

  (I did go back to the Alibi Room about ten years later, and it was all different. It wasn’t nice and polished like it was before; it was sleazy and had seedy-looking people in it. I talked to the bartender, who was a different man, and told him about the old days. “Oh, yes!” he said. “This was the bar where all the bookmakers and their girls used to hang out.” I understood then why there were so many friendly and elegant-looking people there, and why the phones were ringing all the time.)

  The next morning, when I got up and looked in the mirror, I discovered that a black eye takes a few hours to develop fully. When I got back to Ithaca that day, I went to deliver some stuff over to the dean’s office. A professor of philosophy saw my black eye and exclaimed, “Oh, Mr. Feynman! Don’t tell me you got that walking into a door?”

  “Not at all,” I said. “I got it in a fight in the men’s room of a bar in Buffalo.”

  “Ha, ha, ha!” he laughed.

  Then there was the problem of giving the lecture to my regular class. I walked into the lecture hall with my head down, studying my notes. When I was ready to start, I lifted my head and looked straight at them, and said what I always said before I began my lecture—but this time, in a tougher tone of voice: “Any questions?”

  I Want My Dollar!

  When I was at Cornell I would often come back home to Far Rockaway to visit. One time when I happened to be home, the telephone rings: it’s LONG DISTANCE, from California. In those days, a long distance call meant it was something very important, especially a long distance call from this marvelous place, California, a million miles away.

  The guy on the other end says, “Is this Professor Feynman, of Cornell University?”

  “That’s right.”

  “This is Mr. So-and-so from the Such-and-such Aircraft Company.” It was one of the big airplane companies in California, but unfortunately I can’t remember which one. The guy continues: “We’re planning to start a laboratory on nuclear-propelled rocket airplanes. It will have an annual budget of so-and-so-many million dollars …” Big numbers.

  I said, “Just a moment, sir; I don’t know why you’re telling me all this.”

  “Just let me speak to you,” he says; “just let me explain everything. Please let me do it my way.” So he goes on a little more, and says how many people are going to be in the laboratory, so-and-so-many people at this level, and so-and-so-many Ph.D’s at that level …

  “Excuse me, sir,” I say, “but I think you have the wrong fella.”

  “Am I talking to Richard Feynman, Richard P. Feynman?”

  “Yes, but you’re.”

  “Would you please let me present what I have to say, sir, and then we’ll discuss it.”

  “All right!” I sit down and sort of close my eyes to listen to all this stuff, all these details about this big project, and I still haven’t the slightest idea why he’s giving me all this information.”

  Finally, when he’s all finished, he says, “I’m telling you about our plans because we want to know if you would like to be the director of the laboratory.”

  “Have you really got the right fella?” I say. “I’m a professor of theoretical physics. I’m not a rocket engineer, or an airplane engineer, or anything like that.”

  “We’re sure we have the right fellow.”

  “Where did you get my name then? Why did you decide to call me?”

  “Sir, your name is on the patent for nuclear-powered, rocket-propelled airplanes.”

  “Oh,” I said, and I realized why my name was on the patent, and I’ll have to tell you the story. I told the man, “I’m sorry, but I would like to continue as a professor at Cornell University.”

  What had happened was, during the war, at Los Alamos, there was a very nice fella in charge of the patent office for the government, named Captain Smith. Smith sent around a notice to everybody that said something like, “We in the patent office would like to patent every idea you have for the United States government, for which you are working now. Any idea you have on nuclear energy or its application that you may think everybody knows about, everybody do
esn’t know about: Just come to my office and tell me the idea.”

  I see Smith at lunch, and as we’re walking back to the technical area, I say to him, “That note you sent around: That’s kind of crazy to have us come in and tell you every idea.”

  We discussed it back and forth—by this time we’re in his office—and I say, “There are so many ideas about nuclear energy that are so perfectly obvious, that I’d be here all day telling you stuff.”

  “LIKE WHAT?”

  “Nothin’ to it!” I say. “Example: nuclear reactor … under water.. water goes in … steam goes out the other side … Pshshshsht—it’s a submarine. Or: nuclear reactor … air comes rushing in the front… heated up by nuclear reaction … out the back it goes … Boom! Through the air—it’s an airplane. Or: nuclear reactor.. you have hydrogen go through the thing … Zoom!—it’s a rocket. Or: nuclear reactor … only instead of using ordinary uranium, you use enriched uranium with beryllium oxide at high temperature to make it more efficient … It’s an electrical power plant. There’s a million ideas!” I said, as I went out the door.

  Nothing happened.

  About three months later, Smith calls me in the office and says, “Feynman, the submarine has already been taken. But the other three are yours.” So when the guys at the airplane company in California are planning their laboratory, and try to find out who’s an expert in rocket-propelled whatnots, there’s nothing to it: They look at who’s got the patent on it!

  Anyway, Smith told me to sign some papers for the three ideas I was giving to the government to patent. Now, it’s some dopey legal thing, but when you give the patent to the government, the document you sign is not a legal document unless there’s some exchange, so the paper I signed said, “For the sum of one dollar, I, Richard P. Feynman, give this idea to the government …”

  I sign the paper.

  “Where’s my dollar?”

  “That’s just a formality,” he says. “We haven’t got any funds set up to give a dollar.”

  “You’ve got it all set up that I’m signing for the dollar,” I say. “I want my dollar!”

  “This is silly,” Smith protests.

  “No, it’s not,” I say. “It’s a legal document, You made me sign it, and I’m an honest man. There’s no fooling around about it.”

  “All right, all right!” he says, exasperated. “I’ll give you a dollar, from my pocket!”

  “OK.”

  I take the dollar, and I realize what I’m going to do. I go down to the grocery store, and I buy a dollar’s worth—which was pretty good, then—of cookies and goodies, those chocolate goodies with marshmallow inside, a whole lot of stuff.

  I come back to the theoretical laboratory, and I give them out: “I got a prize, everybody! Have a cookie! I got a prize! A dollar for my patent! I got a dollar for my patent!”

  Everybody who had one of those patents—a lot of people had been sending them in—everybody comes down to Captain Smith: they want their dollar!

  He starts shelling them out of his pocket, but soon realizes that it’s going to be a hemorrhage! He went crazy trying to set up a fund where he could get the dollars these guys were insisting on. I don’t know how he settled up.

  You Just Ask Them?

  When I was first at Cornell I corresponded with a girl I had met in New Mexico while I was working on the bomb. I got to thinking, when she mentioned some other fella she knew, that I had better go out there quickly at the end of the school year and try to save the situation. But when I got out there, I found it was too late, so I ended up in a motel in Albuquerque with a free summer and nothing to do.

  The Casa Grande Motel was on Route 66, the main highway through town. About three places further down the road there was a little nightclub that had entertainment. Since I had nothing to do, and since I enjoyed watching and meeting people in bars, I very often went to this nightclub.

  When I first went there I was talking with some guy at the bar, and we noticed a wholetable full of nice young ladies—TWA hostesses, I think they were—who were having some sort of birthday party. The other guy said, “Come on, let’s get up our nerve and ask them to dance.”

  So we asked two of them to dance, and afterwards they invited us to sit with the other girls at the table. After a few drinks, the waiter came around: “Anybody want anything?”

  I liked to imitate being drunk, so although I was completely sober, I turned to the girl I’d been dancing with and asked her in a drunken voice, “YaWANanything?”

  “What can we have?” she asks.

  “Annnnnnnnnnnnything you want—ANYTHING!”

  “All right! We’ll have champagne!” she says happily.

  So I say in a loud voice that everybody in the bar can hear, “OK! Ch-ch-champagne for evvverybody!”

  Then I hear my friend talking to my girl, saying what a dirty trick it is to “take all that dough from him because he’s drunk,” and I’m beginning to think maybe I made a mistake.

  Well, nicely enough, the waiter comes over to me, leans down, and says in a low voice, “Sir, that’s sixteen dollars a bottle.”

  I decide to drop the idea of champagne for everybody, so I say in an even louder voice than before, “NEVER MIND!”

  I was therefore quite surprised when, a few moments later, the waiter came back to the table with all his fancy stuff—a white towel over his arm, a tray full of glasses, an ice bucket full of ice, and a bottle of champagne. He thought I meant, “Never mind the price,” when I meant, “Never mind the champagne!”

  The waiter served champagne to everybody, I paid out the sixteen dollars, and my friend was mad at my girl because he thought she had got me to pay all this dough. But as far as I was concerned, that was the end of it—though it turned out later to be the beginning of a new adventure.

  I went to that nightclub quite often and as the weeks went by, the entertainment changed. The performers were on a circuit that went through Amarillo and a lot of other places in Texas, and God knows where else. There was also a permanent singer who was at the nightclub, whose name was Tamara. Every time a new group of performers came to the club, Tamara would introduce me to one of the girls from the group. The girl would come and sit down with me at my table, I would buy her a drink, and we’d talk. Of course I would have liked to do more than just talk, but there was always something the matter at the last minute. So I could never understand why Tamara always went to the trouble of introducing me to all these nice girls, and then, even though things would start out all right, I would always end up buying drinks, spending the evening talking, but that was it. My friend, who didn’t have the advantage of Tamara’s introductions, wasn’t getting anywhere either—we were both clunks.

  After a few weeks of different shows and different girls, a new show came, and as usual Tamara introduced me to a girl from the group, and we went through the usual thing—I’m buying her drinks, we’re talking, and she’s being very nice. She went and did her show, and afterwards she came back to me at my table, and I felt pretty good. People would look around and think, “What’s he got that makes this girl come to him?”

  But then, at some stage near the close of the evening, she said something that by this time I had heard many times before: “I’d like to have you come over to my room tonight, but we’re having a party, so perhaps tomorrow night …”—and I knew what this “perhaps tomorrow night” meant: NOTHING.

  Well, I noticed throughout the evening that this girl—her name was Gloria—talked quite often with the master of ceremonies, during the show, and on her way to and from the ladies’ room. So one time, when she was in the ladies’ room and the master of ceremonies happened to be walking near my table, I impulsively took a guess and said to him, “Your wife is a very nice woman.”

  He said, “Yes, thank you,” and we started to talk a little. He figured she had told me. And when Gloria returned, she figured he had told me. So they both talked to me a little bit, and invited me to go over to their place that
night after the bar closed.

  At two o’clock in the morning I went over to their motel with them. There wasn’t any party, of course, and we talked a long time. They showed me a photo album with pictures of Gloria when her husband first met her in Iowa, a cornfed, rather fattish-looking woman; then other pictures of her as she reduced, and now she looked really nifty! He had taught her all kinds of stuff, but he couldn’t read or write, which was especially interesting because he had the job, as master of ceremonies, of reading the names of the acts and the performers who were in the amateur contest, and I hadn’t even noticed that he couldn’t read what he was “reading”! (The next night I saw what they did. While she was bringing a person on or off the stage, she glanced at the slip of paper in his hand and whispered the names of the next performers and the title of the act to him as she went by.)

  They were a very interesting, friendly couple, and we had many interesting conversations. I recalled how we had met, and I asked them why Tamara was always introducing the new girls to me.

  Gloria replied, “When Tamara was about to introduce me to you, she said, ‘Now I’m going to introduce you to the real spender around here!’ ”

  I had to think a moment before I realized that the sixteen-dollar bottle of champagne bought with such a vigorous and misunderstood “never mind!” turned out to be a good investment. I apparently had the reputation of being some kind of eccentric who always came in not dressed up, not in a neat suit, but always ready to spend lots of money on the girls.

  Eventually I told them that I was struck by something: “I’m fairly intelligent,” I said, “but probably only about physics. But in that bar there are lots of intelligent guys—oil guys, mineral guys, important businessmen, and so forth—and all the time they’re buying the girls drinks, and they get nothin’ for it!” (By this time I had decided that nobody else was getting anything out of all those drinks either.) “How is it possible,” I asked, “that an ‘intelligent’ guy can be such a goddamn fool when he gets into a bar?”