Hocus Pocus (19 page)

“The war did that to you,” she said.

“Who knows?” I said.

 

 

AS WE CHATTED in the sunshine, a powerful motorcycle came to life with a roar in the valley, in the region of the Black Cat Café. Then another one spoke, and yet another.

“Hell’s Angels?” she said. “You mean it’s really going to happen?”

The joke was that Tex Johnson, the College President, having seen one too many motorcycle movies, believed that the campus might actually be assaulted by Hell’s Angels someday. This fantasy was so real to him that he had bought an Israeli sniper’s rifle, complete with a telescopic sight, and ammunition for it from a drugstore in Portland, Oregon. He and Zuzu were visiting Zuzu’s half sister. That was the same weapon which would eventually get him crucified.

But now Tex’s anticipation of an assault by Hell’s Angels didn’t seem so comical after all. A mighty doomsday chorus of basso profundo 2-wheelers was growing louder and louder and coming closer and closer. There could be no doubt about it! Whoever it was, whatever it was, its destination could only be Tarkington!

IT WASN’T HELL’S Angels.

It wasn’t lower-class people of any kind.

It was a motorcade of highly successful Americans, most on motorcycles, but some in limousines, led by Arthur Clarke, the fun-loving billionaire. He himself was on a motorcycle, and on the saddle behind him, holding on for dear life, her skirt hiked up to her crotch, was Gloria White, the 60-year-old lifelong movie star!

Bringing up the rear were a sound truck and a flatbed carrying a deflated hot-air balloon. When the balloon was inflated at the center of the Quadrangle it would turn out to be shaped like a castle Clarke owned in Ireland!

 

 

COUGH, COUGH. SILENCE. Two more: Cough, cough. There, I’m OK now. Cough. That’s it. I really am OK now. Peace.

THIS WASN’T ARTHUR C. Clarke, the science fiction writer who wrote all the books about humanity’s destiny in other parts of the Universe. This was Arthur K. Clarke, the billionaire speculator and publisher of magazines and books about high finance.

 

 

COUGH. I BEG your pardon. A little blood this time. In the immortal words of the Bard of Avon:

“Out, damned spot! out, I say! One; two: why, then, ’tis time to do’t. Hell is murky! Fie, my lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account? Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?”

Amen. And especial thanks to Bartlett’s
Familiar Quotations.

 

 

I READ A lot of science fiction when I was in the Army, including Arthur C. Clarke’s
Childhood’s End,
which I thought was a masterpiece. He was best known for the movie 2001, the very year in which I am writing and coughing now.

I saw
2001
twice in Vietnam. I remember 2 wounded soldiers in wheelchairs in the front row at 1 of those showings. The whole front row was wheelchairs. The 2 soldiers had had their feet wrecked some way, but seemed to be OK from the knees on up, and they weren’t in any pain. They were awaiting transportation back to the States, I guess, where they could be fitted with prostheses. I don’t think either of them was older than 18. One was black and 1 was white.

After the lights went up, I heard the black one say to the white one, “You tell
me:
What was that all about?”

The white one said, “I dunno, I dunno. I’ll be happy if I can just get back to Cairo, Illinois.”

He didn’t pronounce it “
ky
-roe.” He pronounced it “
kay
roe.”

My mother-in-law from Peru, Indiana, pronounces the name of her hometown “
pee
-roo,” not “puh-
roo
.”

Old Mildred pronounces the name of another Indiana town, Brazil, as “brazzle.”

 

 

ARTHUR K. CLARKE was coming to Tarkington to get an honorary Grand Contributor to the Arts and Sciences Degree.

The College was prevented by law from awarding any sort of degree which sounded as though the recipient had done serious work to get it. Paul Slazinger, the former Writer in Residence, I remember, objected to real institutions of higher learning giving honorary degrees with the word “Doctor” in them anywhere. He wanted them to use “Panjandrum” instead.

When the Vietnam War was going on, though, a kid could stay out of it by enrolling at Tarkington. As far as Draft Boards were concerned, Tarkington was as real a college as MIT. This could have been politics.

It must have been politics.

 

 

EVERYBODY KNEW ARTHUR Clarke was going to get a meaningless certificate. But only Tex Johnson and the campus cops and the Provost had advance warning of the spectacular entrance he planned to make. It was a regular military operation. The motorcycles, and there were about 30 of them, and the balloon had been trucked into the parking lot behind the Black Cat Café at dawn.

And then Clarke and Gloria White and the rest of them, including Henry Kissinger, had been brought down from the Rochester airport in limousines, followed by the sound truck. Kissinger wouldn’t ride a motorcycle. Neither would some others, who came all the way to the Quadrangle by limousine.

Just like the people on the motorcycles, though, the people in the limousines wore gold crash helmets decorated with dollar signs.

 

 

IT’S A GOOD thing Tex Johnson knew Clarke was coming by motorcycle, or Tex just might have shot him with the Israeli rifle he had bought in Oregon.

 

 

CLARKE’S BIG ARRIVAL wasn’t a half-bad dress rehearsal for
Judgment Day. St. John the Divine in the Bible could only imagine such an absolutely knockout show with noise and smoke and gold and lions and eagles and thrones and celebrities and marvels up in the sky and so on. But Arthur K. Clarke had created a real one with modern technology and tons of cash!

The gold-helmeted motorcyclists formed a hollow square on the Quadrangle, facing outward, making their mighty steeds roar and roar.

Workmen in white coveralls began to inflate the balloon.

The sound truck ripped the air to shreds with the recorded racket of a bagpipe band.

Arthur Clarke, astride his bike, was looking in my direction. That was because great pals of his on the Board of Trustees were waving to him from the building right behind me. I found myself deeply offended by his proof that big money could buy big happiness.

I yawned elaborately. I turned my back on him and his show. I walked away as though I had much better things to do than gape at an imbecile.

Thus did I miss seeing the balloon snap its cable and, as unattached as myself, sail over the prison across the lake.

 

 

ALL THE PRISONERS over there could see of the outside world was sky. Some of them in the exercise yard saw a castle up there for just a moment. What on Earth could the explanation be?

 

 

“THERE ARE MORE things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”—Bartlett’s
Familiar Quotations

 

 

THAT EMPTY CASTLE with its mooring snapped, a plaything of the wind, was a lot like me. We were so much alike, in fact, that I myself would pay a surprise visit to the prison before the Sun went down.

If the balloon had been as close to the ground as I was, it would have been blown this way and that at first, before it gained sufficient altitude for the prevailing wind to take it across the lake. What caused me to change course, however, wasn’t random gusts but the possibility of running into this person or that one who had the power to make me even more uncomfortable. I particularly did not want to run into Zuzu Johnson or the departing Artist in Residence, Pamela Ford Hall.

But life being what it was, I would of course run into both of them.

 

I WOULD RATHER have faced Zuzu than Pamela, since Pamela had gone all to pieces and Zuzu hadn’t. But as I say, I would have to face them both.

I wasn’t what had shoved Pamela over the edge. It was her 1-woman show in Buffalo a couple of months earlier. What went wrong with it seemed funny to everybody but her, and it was in the papers and on TV. For a couple of days she was the light side of the news, comic relief from reports of the rapid growth of glaciers at the poles and the desert where the Amazon rain forest used to be. And I am sure there was another oil spill. There was always another oil spill.

If Denver and Santa Fe and Le Havre, France, hadn’t been evacuated yet because of atomic wastes in their water supplies, they soon would be.

 

 

WHAT HAPPENED TO Pamela’s 1-woman show also gave a lot of people an opportunity to jeer at modern art, which only rich people claimed to like.

As I’ve said, Pamela worked in polyurethane, which is easy to carve and weighs almost nothing, and smells like urine when it’s hot. Her figures, moreover, were small, women in full skirts, sitting and hunched over so you couldn’t see their faces. A shoe-box could have contained any 1 of them.

So they were displayed on pedestals in Buffalo, but they weren’t glued down. Wind was not considered a problem, since there were 3 sets of doors between her stuff and the main entrance to the museum, which faced Lake Erie.

 

 

THE MUSEUM, THE Hanson Centre for the Arts, was brand-new, a gift to the city from a Rockefeller heir living in Buffalo who had come into a great deal of money from the sale of Rockefeller Center in Manhattan to the Japanese. This was an old lady in a wheelchair. She hadn’t stepped on a mine in Vietnam. I think it was just old age that knocked the pins out from under her, and all the waiting for Rockefeller properties to be sold off so she could have some dough for a change.

The press was there because this was the Centre’s grand opening. Pamela Ford Hall’s first 1-woman show, which she called “Bagladies,” was incidental, except that it was mounted in the gallery, where a string quartet was playing and champagne and canapes were being served. This was black-tie.

The donor, Miss Hanson, was the last to arrive. She and her wheelchair were set down on the top step outside. Then all 3 sets of doors between Pam’s bagladies and the North Pole were thrown open wide. So all the bagladies were blown off their pedestals. They wound up on the floor, piled up against the hollow baseboards which concealed hot heating pipes.

TV cameras caught everything but the smell of hot polyurethane. What a relief from mundane worries! Who says the news has to be nothing but grim day after day?

PAMELA WAS SULKING next to the stable. The stable wasn’t in the shadow of Musket Mountain yet. It would be another 7 hours before the Sun went down.

This was years before the prison break, but there were already 2 bodies and 1 human head buried out that way. Everybody knew about the 2 bodies, which had been interred with honors and topped with a tombstone. The head would come as a complete surprise when more graves were dug with a backhoe at the end of the prison break.

Whose head was it?

 

 

THE 2 BODIES everybody knew about belonged to Tarkington’s first teacher of Botany and German and the flute, the brewmaster Hermann Shultz and his wife Sophia. They died within 1 day of each other during a diphtheria epidemic in 1893. They were in fairly fresh graves the day I was fired, although their joint grave marker was 98 years old. Their bodies and tombstone were moved there to make room for the Pahlavi Pavilion.

The mortician from down in town who took charge of moving the bodies back in 1987 reported that they were remarkably well preserved. He invited me to look, but I told him I was willing to take his word for it.

 

 

CAN YOU IMAGINE that? After all the corpses I saw in Vietnam, and in many cases created, I was squeamish about looking at 2 more which had absolutely nothing to do with me. I am at a loss for an explanation. Maybe I was thinking like an innocent little boy again.

I have leafed through the Atheist’s Bible, Bartlett’s
Familiar Quotations,
for some sort of comment on unexpected squeamishness. The best I can do is something Lady Macbeth said to her henpecked husband:

“Fie! a soldier, and afeard?”

 

 

SPEAKING OF ATHEISM, I remember one time when Jack Patton and I went to a sermon in Vietnam delivered by the highest-ranking Chaplain in the Army. He was a General.

The sermon was based on what he claimed was a well-known fact, that there were no Atheists in foxholes.

I asked Jack what he thought of the sermon afterward, and he said, “There’s a Chaplain who never visited the front.”

 

 

THE MORTICIAN, WHO is himself now in a covered trench by the stable, was Norman Updike, a descendant of the valley’s early Dutch settlers. He went on to tell me with bow-wow cheerfulness back in 1987 that people were generally mistaken about how quickly things rot, turn into good old dirt or fertilizer or dust or whatever. He said scientists had discovered well-preserved meat and vegetables deep in city dumps, thrown away presumably years and years ago. Like Hermann and Sophia Shultz, these theoretically biodegradable works of Nature had failed to rot for want of moisture, which was life itself to worms and fungi and bacteria.

“Even without modern embalming techniques,” he said, “ashes to ashes and dust takes much, much longer than most people realize.”

“I’m encouraged,” I said.

 

 

I DID NOT see Pamela Ford Hall by the stable until it was too late for me to head off in the opposite direction. I was distracted from watching out for her and Zuzu by a parent who had fled the bagpipe music on the Quadrangle. He commented that I seemed very depressed about something.