Hocus Pocus (13 page)

When one of his guests on the show said something, she froze. Only when Wilder spoke did she start to dance again.

I certainly wasn’t going to tell him that.

 

 

“I WANT TO say first,” said Wilder, “that I am in nothing less than awe, Professor Hartke, of your magnificent record in the Vietnam War. If the American people had not lost their courage and ceased to support you, we would be living in a very different and much better world, and especially in Asia. I know, too, of your kindness and understanding toward your wife and her mother, to which I am glad to apply the same encomium your behavior earned in Vietnam, ‘beyond the call of duty.’ So I am sorry to have to warn you that the story I am about to tell you may not be nearly as simple or easy to refute as my daughter may have led you to expect.”

“Whatever it is, sir,” I said, “let’s hear it. Shoot.”

So he did. He said that several of his friends had attended Tarkington or sent their children here, so that he was favorably impressed with the institution’s successes with the learning-disabled long before he entrusted his own daughter to us. An usher and a bridesmaid at his wedding, he said, had earned Associate in the Arts and Sciences Degrees in Scipio. The usher had gone on to be Ambassador to Iceland. The bridesmaid was on the Board of Directors of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

He felt that Tarkington’s highly unconventional techniques would be useful if applied to the country’s notoriously beleaguered inner-city schools, and he planned to say so after he had learned more about them. The ratio of teachers to students at Tarkington, incidentally, was then 1 to 6. In inner-city schools, that ratio was then 1 to 65.

There was a big campaign back then, I remember, to get the Japanese to buy up inner-city public schools the way they were buying up prisons and hospitals. But they were too smart. They wouldn’t touch schools for unwelcome children of unwelcome parents with a 10-foot pole.

 

 

HE SAID HE hoped to write a book about Tarkington called “Little Miracle on Lake Mohiga” or “Teaching the Unteachable.” So he wired his daughter for sound and told her to follow the best teachers in order to record what they said and how they said it. “I wanted to learn what it was that made them good, Professor Hartke, without their knowing they were being studied,” he said. “I wanted them to go on being whatever they were, warts and all, without any self-consciousness.”

This was the first I heard of the tapes. That chilling news explained Kimberley’s lurking, lurking, lurking all the time. Wilder spared me the suspense, at least, of wondering what all of Kimberley’s apparatus might have overheard. He punched the playback button on the recorder before him, and I heard myself telling Paul Slazinger, privately, I’d thought, that the two principal currencies of the planet were the Yen and fellatio. This was so early in the academic year that classes hadn’t begun yet! This was during Freshman Orientation Week, and I had just told the incoming Class of 1994 that merchants and tradespeople in the town below preferred to be paid in Japanese Yen rather than dollars, so that the freshmen might want their parents to give them their allowances in Yen.

I had told them, too, that they were never to go into the Black Cat Café, which the townspeople considered their private club. It was one place they could go and not be reminded of how dependent they were on the rich kids on the hill, but I didn’t say that. Neither did I say that free-lance prostitutes were sometimes found there, and in the past had been the cause of outbreaks of venereal disease on campus.

I had kept it simple for the freshmen: “Tarkingtonians are more than welcome anywhere in town but the Black Cat Café.”

 

 

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.

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.”

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.