Hocus Pocus Read online

  IF KIMBERLEY RECORDED that good advice, her father did not play it back for me. He didn't even play back what Slazinger had said to me, and it was during a coffee break, that stimulated me to name the planet's two most acceptable currencies. He was the agent provocateur.

  What he said, as I recall, was, "They want to get paid in Yen?" He was as new to Scipio as any freshman, and we had just met. I hadn't read any of his books, and so far as I knew, neither had anybody else on the faculty. He was a last-minute choice for Writer in Residence, and had come to orientation because he was lonesome and had nothing else to do. He wasn't supposed to be there, and he was so old, so old! He had been sitting among all those teenagers as though he were just another rich kid who had bottomed out on his Scholastic Aptitude Test, and he was old enough to be their grandfather!

  He had fought in World War II! That's how old he was.

  So I said to him, "They'll take dollars if they have to, but you'd better have a wheelbarrow."

  And he wanted to know if the merchants and tradespeople would also accept fellatio. He used a vernacular word for fellatio in the plural.

  But the tape began right after that, with my saying, as though out of the blue, and as a joke, of course, only it didn't sound like a joke during the playback, that, in effect, the whole World was for sale to anyone who had Yen or was willing to perform fellatio.

  14

  SO THAT WAS twice within an hour that I was accused of cynicism that was Paul Slazinger's, not mine. And he was in Key West, well out of reach of punishment, having been unemployment-proofed for 5 years with a Genius Grant from the MacArthur Foundation. In saying what I had about Yen and fellatio, I was being sociable with a stranger. I was echoing him to make him feel at home in new surroundings.

  As far as that goes, Professor Damon Stern, head of the History Department and my closest male friend here, spoke as badly of his own country as Slazinger and I did, and right into the faces of students in the classroom day after day. I used to sit in on his course and laugh and clap. The truth can be very funny in an awful way, especially as it relates to greed and hypocrisy. Kimberley must have made recordings of his words, too, and played them back for her father. Why wasn't Damon fired right along with me?

  My guess is that he was a comedian, and I was not. He wanted students to leave his presence feeling good, not bad, so the atrocities and stupidities he described were in the distant past. There was nothing a student could do about them but laugh, laugh, laugh.

  Whereas Slazinger and I talked about the last half of the 20th Century, in which we had both been seriously wounded physically and psychologically, which was nothing anybody but a sociopath could laugh about.

  I, TOO, MIGHT have been acceptable as a comedian if all Kimberley had taped was what I said about Yen and fellatio. That was good, topical Mohiga Valley humor, what with the Japanese taking over the prison across the lake and arousing curiosity among the natives about the relative values of different national currencies. The Japanese were willing to pay their local bills in either dollars or Yen. These bills were for small-ticket items, hardware or toiletries or whatever, which the prison needed in a hurry, usually ordered by telephone. Big-ticket items in quantity came from Japanese-owned suppliers in Rochester or beyond.

  So Japanese currency had started to circulate in Scipio. The prison administrators and guards were rarely seen in town, however. They lived in barracks to the east of the prison, and lived lives as invisible to this side of the lake as those of the prisoners.

  TO THE LIMITED extent that anybody on this side of the lake thought about the prison at all until the mass escape, people were generally glad to have the Japanese in charge. The new proprietor had cut waste and corruption to almost nothing. What they charged the State for punishing its prisoners was only 75 percent of what the State used to pay itself for identical services.

  The local paper, The Valley Sentinel, sent a reporter over there to see what the Japanese were doing differently. They were still using the steel boxes on the back of trucks and showing old TV shows, including news, in no particular order and around the clock. The biggest change was that Athena was drug-free for the first time in its history, and rich prisoners weren't able to buy privileges. The guards weren't easily fooled or corrupted, either, since they understood so little English, and wanted nothing more than to finish up their 6 months overseas and go home again.

  A NORMAL TOUR of duty in Vietnam was twice that long and 1,000 times more dangerous. Who could blame the educated classes with political connections for staying home?

  ONE NEW WRINKLE by the Japanese the reporter didn't mention was that the guards wore surgical masks and rubber gloves when they were on duty, even up in the towers and atop the walls. That wasn't to keep them from spreading infections, of course. It was to ensure that they didn't take any of their loathsome charges' loathsome diseases back home with them.

  WHEN I WENT to work over there, I refused to wear gloves and a mask. Who could teach anybody anything while wearing such a costume?

  So now I have tuberculosis.

  Cough, cough, cough.

  BEFORE I COULD protest to the Trustees that I certainly wouldn't have said what I'd said about Yen and fellatio if I'd thought there was the slightest chance that a student could hear me, the background noises on the tape changed. I realized that I was about to hear something I had said in a different location. There was the pop-pop-pop of Ping-Pong balls, and a card player asked, "Who dealt this mess?" Somebody else asked somebody else to bring her a hot fudge sundae without nuts on top. She was on a diet, she said. There were rumblings like distant artillery, which were really the sound of bowling balls in the basement of the Pahlavi Pavilion.

  Oh Lordy, was I ever drunk that night at the Pavilion. I was out of control. And it was a disgrace that I should have appeared before students in such a condition. I will regret it to my dying day. Cough.

  IT WAS ON a cold night near the end of November of 1990, 6 months before the Trustees fired me. I know it wasn't December, because Slazinger was still on campus, talking openly of suicide. He hadn't yet received his Genius Grant.

  When I came home from work that afternoon, to tidy up the house and make supper, I found an awful mess. Margaret and Mildred, both hags by then, had torn bedsheets into strips. I had laundered the sheets that morning, and was going to put them on our beds that night. What did they care?

  They had constructed what they said was a spider web. At least it wasn't a hydrogen bomb.

  White cotton strips spliced end to end crisscrossed every which way in the front hall and living room. The newel post of the stairway was connected to the inside doorknob of the front door, and the doorknob was connected to the living room chandelier, and so on ad infinitum.

  THE DAY HADN'T begun auspiciously anyway. I had found all 4 tires of my Mercedes flat. A bunch of high school kids from down below, high on alcohol or who knows what, had come up during the night like Vietcong and gone what they called "coring" again. They not only had let the air out of the tires of every expensive car they could find in the open on campus, Porsches and Jaguars and Saabs and BMWs and so on, but had taken out the valve cores. At home, I had heard, they had jars full of valve cores or necklaces of valve cores to prove how often they had gone coring. And they got my Mercedes. They got my Mercedes every time.

  SO WHEN I found myself tangled in Margaret and Mildred's spider web, my nervous system came close to the breaking point. I was the one who was going to have to clean up this mess. I was the one who was going to have to remake the beds with other sheets, and then buy more sheets the next day. I have always liked housework, or at least not minded it as much as most people seem to. But this was housework beyond the pale!

  I had left the house so neat in the morning! And Margaret and Mildred weren't getting any fun out of watching my reactions when I was tangled up in their spider web. They were hiding someplace where they couldn't see or hear me. They expected me to play hide-and-seek, with me as "it."r />
  Something in me snapped. I wasn't going to play hide-and-seek this time. I wasn't going to take down the spider web. I wasn't going to prepare supper. Let them come creeping out of their hiding places in an hour or whatever. Let them wonder, as I had when I walked into the spider web, what on Earth had happened to their previously dependable, forgiving Universe?

  OUT INTO THE cold night I went, with no destination in mind save for good old oblivion. I found myself in front of the house of my best friend, Damon Stern, the entertaining professor of History. When he was a boy in Wisconsin, he had learned how to ride a unicycle. He had taught his wife and kids how to ride one, too.

  The lights were on, but nobody was home. The family's 4 unicycles were in the front hall and the car was gone. They never got cored. They were smart. They drove one of the last Volkswagen Bugs still running.

  I knew where they kept the liquor. I poured myself a couple of stiff shots of bourbon, in lieu of their absent body warmth. I don't think I had had a drink for a month before that.

  I got this hot rush in my belly. Out into the night I went again. I was automatically looking for an older woman who would make everything all right by becoming the beast with two backs with me.

  A coed would not do, not that a coed would have had anything to do with somebody as old and relatively poor as me. I couldn't even have promised her a better grade than she deserved. There were no grades at Tarkington.

  But I wouldn't have wanted a coed in any case. The only sort of woman who excites me is an older one in uncomfortable circumstances, full of doubts not only about herself but about the value of life itself. Although I never met her personally, the late Marilyn Monroe comes to mind, maybe 3 years before she committed suicide.

  Cough, cough, cough.

  IF THERE IS a Divine Providence, there is also a wicked one, provided you agree that making love to off-balance women you aren't married to is wickedness. My own feeling is that if adultery is wickedness then so is food. Both make me feel so much better afterward.

  JUST AS A hungry person knows that somewhere not far away somebody is preparing good things to eat, I knew that night that not far away was an older woman in despair. There had to be!

  Zuzu Johnson was out of the question. Her husband was home, and she was hosting a dinner party for a couple of grateful parents who were giving the college a language laboratory. When it was finished, students would be able to sit in soundproof booths and listen to recordings of any one of more than 100 languages and dialects made by native speakers.

  THE LIGHTS WERE on in the sculpture studio of Norman Rockwell Hall, the art building, the only structure on campus named after a historical figure rather than the donating family. It was another gift from the Moellenkamps, who may have felt that too much was named after them already.

  There was a whirring and rumbling coming from inside the sculpture studio. Somebody was playing with the crane in there, making it run back and forth on its tracks overhead. Whoever it was had to be playing, since nobody ever made a piece of sculpture so big that it could be moved only by the mighty crane.

  After the prison break, there was some talk on the part of the convicts of hanging somebody from it, and running him back and forth while he strangled. They had no particular candidate in mind. But then the Niagara Power and Light Company, which was owned by the Unification Church Korean Evangelical Association, shut off all our electricity.

  OUTSIDE ROCKWELL HALL that night, I might have been back on a patrol in Vietnam. That is how keen my senses were. That was how quick my mind was to create a whole picture from the slightest clues.

  I knew that the sculpture studio was locked up tight after 6:30 P.M., since I had tried the door many times, thinking that I might sometime bring a lover there. I had considered getting a key somehow at the start of the semester and learned from Buildings and Grounds that only they and that year's Artist in Residence, the sculptress Pamela Ford Hall, were allowed to have keys. This was because of vandalism by either students or Townies in the studio the year before.

  They knocked off the noses and fingers of replicas of Greek statues, and defecated in a bucket of wet clay. That sort of thing.

  SO THAT HAD to be Pamela Ford Hall in there making the crane go back and forth. And the crane's restless travels had to represent unhappiness, not any masterpiece she was creating. What use did she have for a crane, or even a wheelbarrow, since she worked exclusively in nearly weightless polyurethane. And she was a recent divorcee without children. And, because she knew my reputation, I'm sure, she had been avoiding me.

  I climbed up on the studio's loading dock. I thumped my fist on its enormous sliding door. The door was motor driven. She had only to press a button to let me in.

  The crane stopped going back and forth. There was a hopeful sign!

  She asked through the door what I wanted.

  "I wanted to make sure you were OK in there," I said.

  "Who are you to care whether I'm OK or not in here?" she said.

  "Gene Hartke," I said.

  She opened the door just a crack and stared out at me, but didn't say anything. Then she opened the door wider, and I could see she was holding an uncorked bottle of what would turn out to be blackberry brandy.

  "Hello, Soldier," she said.

  "Hi," I said very carefully.

  And then she said, "What took you so long?"

  15

  PAMELA SURE GOT me drunk that night, and we made love. And then I spilled my guts about the Vietnam War in front of a bunch of students at the Pahlavi Pavilion. And Kimberley Wilder recorded me.

  I HAD NEVER tasted blackberry brandy before. I never want to taste it again. It did bad things to me. It made me a crybaby about the war. That is something I swore I would never be.

  IF I COULD order any drink I wanted now, it would be a Sweet Rob Roy on the Rocks, a Manhattan made with Scotch. That was another drink a woman introduced me to, and it made me laugh instead of cry, and fall in love with the woman who said to try one.

  That was in Manila, after the excrement hit the air-conditioning in Saigon. She was Harriet Gummer, the war correspondent from Iowa. She had a son by me without telling me.

  His name? Rob Roy.

  After we made love, Pamela asked me the same question Harriet had asked me in Manila 15 years earlier. It was something they both had to know. They both asked me if I had killed anybody in the war.

  I said to Pamela what I had said to Harriet: "If I were a fighter plane instead of a human being, there would be little pictures of people painted all over me."

  I should have gone straight home after saying that. But I went over to the Pavilion instead. I needed a bigger audience for that great line of mine.

  So I barged into a group of students sitting in front of the great fireplace in the main lounge. After the prison break, that fireplace would be used for cooking horse meat and dogs. I got between the students and the fire, so there was no way they could ignore me, and I said to them, "If I were a fighter plane instead of a human being, there would be little pictures of people painted all over me."

  I went on from there.

  I WAS SO full of self-pity! That was what I found unbearable when Jason Wilder played back my words to me. I was so drunk that I acted like a victim!

  THE SCENES OF unspeakable cruelty and stupidity and waste I described that night were no more horrible than ultrarealistic shows about Vietnam, which had become staples of TV entertainment. When I told the students about the severed human head I saw nestled in the guts of a water buffalo, to them, I'm sure, the head might as well have been made of wax, and the guts those of some big animal which may or may not have belonged to a real water buffalo.

  What difference could it make whether the head was or was not wax, or whether the guts were or were not those of a water buffalo?

  No difference.

  "PROFESSOR HARTKE," JASON Wilder said to me gently, reasonably, when the tape had reached its end, "why on Earth would you want to tell such t
ales to young people who need to love their country?"

  I wanted to keep my job so much, and the house which came with it, that my reply was asinine. "I was telling them history," I said, "and I had had a little too much to drink. I don't usually drink that much."

  "I'm sure," he said. "I am told that you are a man with many problems, but that alcohol has not appeared among them with any consistency. So let us say that your performance in the Pavilion was a well-intended history lesson of which you accidentally lost control."

  "That's what it was, sir," I said.

  His balletic hands flitted in time to the logic of his thoughts before he spoke again. He was a fellow pianist. And then he said, "First of all, you were not hired to teach History. Second of all, the students who come to Tarkington need no further instructions in how it feels to be defeated. They would not be here if they themselves had not failed and failed. The Miracle on Lake Mohiga for more than a century now, as I see it, has been to make children who have failed and failed start thinking of victory, stop thinking about the hopelessness of it all."

  "There was just that one time," I said, "and I'm sorry."

  COUGH. ONE COUGH.

  WILDER SAID HE didn't consider a teacher who was negative about everything a teacher. "I would call a person like that an 'unteacher.' He's somebody who takes things out of young people's heads instead of putting more things in."

  "I don't know as I'm negative about everything," I said.

  "What's the first thing students see when they walk into the library?" he said.

  "Books?" I said.

  "All those perpetual-motion machines," he said. "I saw that display, and I read the sign on the wall above it. I had no idea then that you were responsible for the sign."