Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [14]
At any rate, the crystals, which were of museum quality, caused Father to utter these famous last words after he spread them out on the coffee table in our living room, gloatingly: “Son, there is no way we can lose.”
WELL, AS JEAN-PAUL Sartre says in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, “Hell is other people.” Other people made short work of Father’s and my invincible contest entry in Cleveland 43 years ago.
Generals George Armstrong Custer at the Little Bighorn, and Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg, and William Westmoreland in Vietnam all come to mind.
SOMEBODY SAID 1 time, I remember, that General Custer’s famous last words were, “Where are all these blankety-blank Injuns comin’ from?”
FATHER AND I, and not our pretty crystals, were for a little while the most fascinating exhibit in Moellenkamp Auditorium. We were a demonstration of abnormal psychology. Other contestants and their mentors gathered around us and put us through our paces. They certainly knew which buttons to push, so to speak, to make us change color or twist and turn or grin horribly or whatever.
One contestant asked Father how old he was and what high school he was attending.
That was when we should have packed up our things and gotten out of there. The judges hadn’t had a look at us yet, and neither had any reporters. We hadn’t yet put up the sign that said what my name was and what school system I represented. We hadn’t yet said anything worth remembering.
If we had folded up and vanished quietly right then and there, leaving nothing but an empty table, we might have entered the history of American science as noshows who got sick or something. There was already an empty table, which would stay empty, only 5 meters away from ours. Father and I had heard that it was going to stay empty and why. The would-be exhibitor and his mother and father were all in the hospital in Lima, Ohio, not Lima, Peru. That was their hometown. They had scarcely backed out of their driveway the day before, headed for Cleveland, they thought, with the exhibit in the trunk, when they were rear-ended by a drunk driver.
The accident wouldn’t have been half as serious as it turned out to be if the exhibit hadn’t included several bottles of different acids which broke and touched off the gasoline. Both vehicles were immediately engulfed in flames.
The exhibit was, I think, meant to show several important services that acids, which most people were afraid of and didn’t like to think much about, were performing every day for Humanity.
THE PEOPLE WHO looked us over and asked us questions, and did not like what they saw and heard, sent for a judge. They wanted us disqualified. We were worse than dishonest. We were ridiculous!
I wanted to throw up. I said to Father, “Dad, honest to God, I think we better get out of here. We made a mistake.”
But he said we had nothing to be ashamed of, and that we certainly weren’t going to go home with our tails between our legs.
Vietnam!
So a judge did come over, and easily determined that I had no understanding whatsoever of the exhibit. He then took Father aside and negotiated a political settlement, man to man. He did not want to stir up bad feelings in our home county, which had sent me to Cleveland as its champion. Nor did he want to humiliate Father, who was an upstanding member of his community who obviously had not read the rules carefully. He would not humiliate us with a formal disqualification, which might attract unfavorable publicity, if Father in turn would not insist on having my entry put in serious competition with the rest as though it were legitimate.
When the time came, he said, he and the other judges would simply pass us by without comment. It would be their secret that we couldn’t possibly win anything.
That was