Hocus Pocus Read online

  It was as though I had entered the Soapbox Derby over in Akron, Ohio, in a car for coasting down hills that I had supposedly built myself but was actually my dad's Ferrari Gran Turismo.

  WE HADN'T MADE any of the exhibit in the basement. When, at the very beginning, Father said that we should go down in the basement and get to work, we had actually gone down in the basement. But we stayed down there for only about 10 minutes while he thought and thought, growing ever more excited. I didn't say anything.

  Actually, I did say one thing. "Mind if I smoke?" I said.

  "Go right ahead," he said.

  That was a breakthrough for me. It meant I could smoke in the house whenever I pleased, and he wouldn't say anything.

  Then he led the way back up to the living room. He sat down at Mother's desk and made a list of things that should go into the exhibit.

  "What are you doing, Dad?" I said.

  "Shh," he said. "I'm busy. Don't bother me."

  SO I DIDN'T bother him. I had more than enough to think about as it was. I was pretty sure I had gonorrhea. It was some sort of urethral infection, which was making me very uncomfortable. But I hadn't seen a doctor about it, because the doctor, by law, would have had to report me to the Department of Health, and my parents would have been told about it, as though they hadn't had enough heartaches already.

  Whatever the infection was, it cleared itself up without my doing anything about it. It couldn't have been gonorrhea, which never stops eating you up of its own accord. Why should it ever stop of its own accord? It's having such a nice time. Why call off the party? Look how healthy and happy the kids are.

  TWICE IN LATER life I would contract what was unambiguously gonorrhea, once in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and then again in Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City, in Vietnam. In both instances I told the doctors about the self-healing infection I had had in high school.

  It might have been yeast, they said. I should have opened a bakery.

  SO FATHER STARTED coming home from work with pieces of the exhibit, which had been made to his order at Barrytron: pedestals and display cases, and explanatory signs and labels made by the print shop that did a lot of work for Barrytron. The crystals themselves came from a Pittsburgh chemical supply house that did a lot of business with Barrytron. One crystal, I remember, came all the way from Burma.

  The chemical supply house must have gone to some trouble to get together a remarkable collection of crystals for us, since what they sent us couldn't have come from their regular stock. In order to please a big customer like Barrytron, they may have gone to somebody who collected and sold crystals for their beauty and rarity, not as chemicals but as jewelry.

  At any rate, the crystals, which were of museum quality, caused Father to utter these famous last words after he spread them out on the coffee table in our living room, gloatingly: "Son, there is no way we can lose."

  WELL, AS JEAN-PAUL Sartre says in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, "Hell is other people." Other people made short work of Father's and my invincible contest entry in Cleveland 43 years ago.

  Generals George Armstrong Custer at the Little Bighorn, and Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg, and William Westmoreland in Vietnam all come to mind.

  SOMEBODY SAID 1 time, I remember, that General Custer's famous last words were, "Where are all these blankety-blank Injuns comin' from?"

  FATHER AND I, and not our pretty crystals, were for a little while the most fascinating exhibit in Moellenkamp Auditorium. We were a demonstration of abnormal psychology. Other contestants and their mentors gathered around us and put us through our paces. They certainly knew which buttons to push, so to speak, to make us change color or twist and turn or grin horribly or whatever.

  One contestant asked Father how old he was and what high school he was attending.

  That was when we should have packed up our things and gotten out of there. The judges hadn't had a look at us yet, and neither had any reporters. We hadn't yet put up the sign that said what my name was and what school system I represented. We hadn't yet said anything worth remembering.

  If we had folded up and vanished quietly right then and there, leaving nothing but an empty table, we might have entered the history of American science as noshows who got sick or something. There was already an empty table, which would stay empty, only 5 meters away from ours. Father and I had heard that it was going to stay empty and why. The would-be exhibitor and his mother and father were all in the hospital in Lima, Ohio, not Lima, Peru. That was their hometown. They had scarcely backed out of their driveway the day before, headed for Cleveland, they thought, with the exhibit in the trunk, when they were rear-ended by a drunk driver.

  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.

  5

  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 resul
t 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 modern 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:

  EXHIBITOR.

  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?"

  6

  "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.

  And then Father came along, looking for me. The next thing I knew, Father and Sam Wakefield were laughing and shaking hands.

  Father was happier than I had seen him in years. He said to me, "The folks back home will think that's better than any prize at a Science Fair."

  "What's better?" I said.

  "You have just won an appointment to the United States Military Academy," he said. "I've got a son I can be proud of now."

  Seventeen years later, in 1975, I was a Lieutenant Colonel on the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon, keeping everybody but Americans off helicopters that were ferrying badly rattled people out to ships offshore. We had lost a war!

  LOSERS!

  I WASN'T THE worst young scientist Sam Wakefield persuaded to come to West Point. One classmate of mine, from a little high school in Wyoming, had shown early promise by making an electric chair for rats, with little straps and a little black hood and all.

  That was Jack Patton. He was no relation to "Old Blood and Guts" Patton, the famous General in World War II. He became my brother-in-law. I married his sister Margaret. She came with her folks from Wyoming to see him graduate, and I fell in love with her. We sure could dance.

  Jack Patton was killed by a sniper in Hue--pronounced "whay." He was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Combat Engineers. I wasn't there, but they say he got it right between the eyes. Talk about marksmanship! Whoever shot him was a real winner.

  The sniper didn't stay a winner very long, though, I heard. Hardly anybody does. Some of our people figured out where he was. I heard he couldn't have been more than 15 years old. He was a boy, not a man, but if he was going to play men's games he was going to have to pay men's penalties. After they killed him, I heard, they put his little testicles and penis in his mouth as a warning to anybody else who might choose to be a sniper.

  Law and order. Justice swift and justice sure.

  Let me hasten to say that no unit under my command was encouraged to engage in the mutilation of bodies of enemies, nor would I have winked at it if I had heard about it. One platoon in a battalion I led, on its own initiative, took to leaving aces of spades on the bodies of enemies, as sort of calling cards, I guess. This wasn't mutilation, strictly speaking, but still I put a stop to it.

  What a footsoldier can do to a body with his pipsqueak technology is nothing, of course, when compared with the ordinary, unavoidable, perfectly routine effects of aerial bombing and artillery. One time I saw the severed head of a bearded old man resting on the guts of an eviscerated water buffalo, covered with flies in a bomb crater by a paddy in Cambodia. The plane whose bomb made the crater was so high when it dropped it that it couldn't even be seen from the ground. But what its bomb did, I would have to say, sure beat the ace of spades for a calling card.

  I DON'T THINK Jack Patton would have wanted the sniper who killed him mutilated, but you never know. When he was alive he was like a dead man in 1 respect: everything was pretty much all right with him.

  Everything, and I mean everything, was a joke to him, or so he said. His favorite expression right up to the end was, "I had to laugh like hell." If Lieutenant Colonel Patton is in Heaven, and I don't think many truly professional soldiers have ever expected to wind up there, at least not recently, he might at this very moment be telling about how his life suddenly stopped in Hue, and then adding, without even smiling, "I had to laugh like hell." That was the thing: Patton would tell about some supposedly serious or beautiful or dangerous or holy event during which he had had to laugh like hell, but he hadn't really laughed.
He kept a straight face, too, when he told about it afterward. In all his life, I don't think anybody ever heard him do what he said he had to do all the time, which was laugh like hell.

  He said he had to laugh like hell when he won a science prize in high school for making an electric chair for rats, but he hadn't. A lot of people wanted him to stage a public demonstration of the chair with a tranquilized rat, wanted him to shave the head of a groggy rat and strap it to the chair, and, according to Jack, ask it if it had any last words to say, maybe wanted to express remorse for the life of crime it had led.

  The execution never took place. There was enough common sense in Patton's high school, although not in the Science Department, apparently, to have such an event denounced as cruelty to dumb animals. Again, Jack Patton said without smiling, "I had to laugh like hell."

  HE SAID HE had to laugh like hell when I married his sister Margaret. He said Margaret and I shouldn't take offense at that. He said he had to laugh like hell when anybody got married.

  I am absolutely sure that Jack did not know that there was inheritable insanity on his mother's side of the family, and neither did his sister, who would become my bride. When I married Margaret, their mother seemed perfectly OK still, except for a mania for dancing, which was a little scary sometimes, but harmless. Dancing until she dropped wasn't nearly as loony as wanting to bomb North Vietnam back to the Stone Age, or bombing anyplace back to the Stone Age.

  MY MOTHER-IN-LAW MILDRED grew up in Peru, Indiana, but never talked about Peru, even after she went crazy, except to say that Cole Porter, a composer of ultrasophisticated popular songs during the first half of the last century, was also born in Peru.

  MY MOTHER-IN-LAW RAN away from Peru when she was 18, and never went back again. She worked her way through the University of Wyoming, in Laramie, of all places, which I guess was about as far away from Peru as she could get without leaving the Milky Way. That was where she met her husband, who was then a student in the university's School of Veterinary Science.