Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [38]
THE WILD CARDS among jailbirds, as far as GRIOT™ was concerned, were Orientals and American Indians.
WHEN THE SUPREME Court handed down its decision that prisoners should be segregated according to race, many jurisdictions did not have enough Oriental or American Indian criminals to make separate institutions for them economically feasible. Hawaii, for example, had only 2 American Indian prisoners, and Wyoming, my wife’s home state, had only 1 Oriental.
Under such circumstances, said the Court, Indians and/or Orientals should be made honorary Whites, and treated accordingly.
This state has plenty of both, however, particularly after Indians began to make tax-free fortunes smuggling drugs over unmapped trails across the border from Canada. So the Indians had a prison all their own at what their ancestors used to call “Thunder Beaver,” what we call “Niagara Falls.” The Orientals have their own prison at Deer Park, Long Island, conveniently located only 50 kilometers from their heroin-processing plants in New York City’s Chinatown.
WHEN YOU DARE to think about how huge the illegal drug business is in this country, you have to suspect that practically everybody has a steady buzz on, just as I did during my last 2 years in high school, and just as General Grant did during the Civil War, and just as Winston Churchill did during World War II.
SO MARILYN SHAW and I passed yet again like ships in the night on the Quadrangle. It would be our last encounter there. Without either of us knowing that it would be the last time, she said something that in retrospect is quite moving to me. What she said was derived from our exploratory conversation at the cocktail party that had welcomed us to the faculty so long ago.
I had told her about how I met Sam Wakefield at the Cleveland Science Fair, and what the first words were that he ever spoke to me. Now, as I hastened to my doom, she played back those words to me: “What’s the hurry, Son?”
13
THE CHAIRMAN OF the Board of Trustees that fired me 10 years ago was Robert W. Moellenkamp of West Palm Beach, himself a graduate of Tarkington and the father of 2 Tarkingtonians, 1 of whom had been my student. As it happened, he was on the verge of losing his fortune, which was nothing but paper, in Microsecond Arbitrage, Incorporated. That swindle claimed to be snapping up bargains in food and shelter and clothing and fuel and medicine and raw materials and machinery and so on before people who really needed them could learn of their existence. And then the company’s computers, supposedly, would get the people who really needed whatever it was to bid against each other, running profits right through the roof. It was able to do this with its clients’ money, supposedly, because its computers were linked by satellites to marketplaces in every corner of the world.
The computers, it would turn out, weren’t connected to anything but each other and their credulous clients like Tarkington’s Board Chairman. He was high as a kite on printouts describing brilliant trades he had made in places like Tierra del Fuego and Uganda and God knows where else, when he agreed with the Panjandrum of American Conservatism, Jason Wilder, that it was time to fire me. Microsecond Arbitrage was his angel dust, his LSD, his heroin, his jug of Thunderbird wine, his cocaine.
I MYSELF HAVE been addicted to older women and housekeeping, which my court-appointed lawyer tells me might be germs we could make grow into a credible plea of insanity. The most amazing thing to him was that I had never masturbated.
“Why not?” he said.
“My mother’s father made me promise never to do it, because it would make me lazy and crazy,” I said.
“And you believed him?” he said. He is only 23 years old, fresh out of Syracuse.
And I said, “Counselor, in these fast-moving times, with progress gone hog-wild, grandfathers are bound to be