Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (24 page)

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-somany 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 _doesn’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 he 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 _whole table_ 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.)