Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [11]
THE ASSASSINATION OF an Austrian archduke led to World War I, and probably to World War II as well. Just as surely, my father’s black eye brought me to the sorry state in which I find myself today. He was looking for some way, almost any way, to recapture the respect of the community, and to attract favorable attention from Barrytron’s new owner, Du Pont. Du Pont, of course, has now been taken over by I. G. Farben of Germany, the same company that manufactured and packaged and labeled and addressed the cyanide gas used to kill civilians of all ages, including babes in arms, during the Holocaust.
What a planet.
SO FATHER, HIS injured eye looking like a slit in a purple and yellow omelet, asked me if I was likely to receive any sort of honors at high school graduation. He didn’t say so, but he was frantic for something to brag about at work. He was so desperate that he was trying to get blood out of the turnip of my nonparticipation in high school sports, student government, or school-sponsored extracurricular activities. My grade average was high enough to get me into the University of Michigan, and on the honor roll now and then, but not into the National Honor Society.
It was so pitiful! It made me mad, too, because he was trying to make me partly responsible for the family’s image problem, which was all his fault. “I was always sorry you didn’t go out for football,” he said, as though a touchdown would have made everything all right again.
“Too late now,” I said.
“You let those 4 years slip by without doing anything but making jungle music,” he said.
It occurs to me now, a mere 43 years later, that I might have said to him that at least I managed my sex life better than he had managed his. I was getting laid all the time, thanks to jungle music, and so were the other Soul Merchants. Certain sorts of not just girls but full-grown women, too, found us glamorous free spirits up on the bandstand, imitating black people and smoking marijuana, and loving ourselves when we made music, and laughing about God knows what just about anytime.
I GUESS MY love life is over now. Even if I could get out of prison, I wouldn’t want to give some trusting woman tuberculosis. She would be scared to death of getting AIDS, and I would give her TB instead. Wouldn’t that be nice?
So now I will have to make do with memories. As a prosthesis for my memory, I have begun to list all the women, excluding my wife and prostitutes, with whom I have “gone all the way,” as we used to say in high school. I find it impossible to remember any conquest I made as a teenager with clarity, to separate fact from fantasy. It was all a dream. So I begin my list with Shirley Kern, to whom I made love when I was 20. Shirley is my datum.
How many names will there be on the list? Too early to tell, but wouldn’t that number, whatever it turns out to be, be as good a thing as any to put on my tombstone as an enigmatic epitaph?
I AM CERTAINLY sorry if I ruined the lives of any of those women who believed me when I said I loved them. I can only hope against hope that Shirley Kern and all the rest of them are still OK.
If it is any consolation to those who may not be OK, my own life was ruined by a Science Fair.
Father asked me if there wasn’t some school-sponsored extracurricular activity I could still try out for. This was only 8 weeks before my graduation! So I said, in a spirit of irony, since he knew science did not delight me as it delighted him, that my last opportunity to amount to anything was the County Science Fair. I got Bs in Physics and Chemistry, but you could stuff both those subjects up your fundament as far as I was concerned.
But Father rose from his chair in a state of