Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [12]
“What kind of work?” I said. This was about midnight.
And he said, “You are going to enter and win the Science Fair.”
WHICH I DID. Or, rather, Father entered and won the Science Fair, requiring only that I sign an affidavit swearing that the exhibit was all my own work, and that I memorize his explanation of what it proved. It was about crystals and how they grew and why they grew.
His competition was weak. He was, after all, a 43-year-old chemical engineer with 20 years in industry, taking on teenagers in a community where few parents had higher educations. The main business in the county back then was still agriculture, corn and pigs and beef cattle. Barrytron was the sole sophisticated industry, and only a handful of people such as Father understood its processes and apparatus. Most of the company’s employees were content to do what they were told and incurious as to how it was, exactly, that they had worked the miracles that somehow arrived all packaged and labeled and addressed on the loading docks.
I am reminded now of dead American soldiers, teenagers mostly, all packaged and labeled and addressed on loading docks in Vietnam. How many people knew or cared how these curious artifacts were actually manufactured?
A few.
WHY FATHER AND I were not branded as swindlers, why my exhibit was not thrown out of the Science Fair, why I am a prisoner awaiting trial now instead of a star reporter for the Korean owners of The New York Times has to do with compassion, I now believe. The feeling was general in the community, I think, that our little family had suffered enough. Nobody in the county gave much of a darn about science anyway.
The other exhibits were so dumb and pitiful, too, that the best of them would make the county look stupid if it and its honest creator went on to the statewide competition in Cleveland. Our exhibit sure looked slick and tidy. Another big plus from the judges’ point of view, maybe, when they thought about what the county’s best was going to be up against in Cleveland: our exhibit was extremely hard for an ordinary person to understand or find at all interesting.
I REMAINED PHILOSOPHICAL, thanks to marijuana and alcohol, while the community decided whether to crucify me as a fraud or to crown me as a genius. Father may have had a buzz on, too. Sometimes it’s hard to tell. I served under 2 Generals in Vietnam who drank a quart of whiskey a day, but it was hard to detect. They always looked serious and dignified.
So off Father and I went to Cleveland. His spirits were high. I knew we would go smash up there. I don’t know why he didn’t know we would go smash up there. The only advice he gave me was to keep my shoulders back when I was explaining my exhibit and not to smoke where the judges might see me doing it. He was talking about ordinary cigarettes. He didn’t know I smoked the other kind.
I MAKE NO apologies for having been zapped during my darkest days in high school. Winston Churchill was bombed out of his skull on brandy and Cuban cigars during the darkest days of World War II.
HITLER, OF COURSE, thanks to the advanced technology of Germany, was among the first human beings to turn their brains to cobwebs with amphetamine. He actually chewed on carpets, they say. Yum yum.
MOTHER DID NOT come to Cleveland with Father and me. She was ashamed to leave the house, she was so big and fat. So I had to do most of the marketing after school. I also had to do most of the housework, she had so much trouble getting around. My familiarity with housework was useful at West Point, and then again when my mother-in-law and then my wife went nuts. It was actually sort of relaxing, because I could see that I had accomplished something undeniably good, and I didn’t have to think about my troubles while I was doing it. How my mother’s eyes used to shine when she saw what I had cooked for her!
My mother’s story is 1 of the few real success stories in this book. She joined Weight Watchers when she was