Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [44]
I climbed up on the studio’s loading dock. I thumped my fist on its enormous sliding door. The door was motor driven. She had only to press a button to let me in.
The crane stopped going back and forth. There was a hopeful sign!
She asked through the door what I wanted.
“I wanted to make sure you were OK in there,” I said.
“Who are you to care whether I’m OK or not in here?” she said.
“Gene Hartke,” I said.
She opened the door just a crack and stared out at me, but didn’t say anything. Then she opened the door wider, and I could see she was holding an uncorked bottle of what would turn out to be blackberry brandy.
“Hello, Soldier,” she said.
“Hi,” I said very carefully.
And then she said, “What took you so long?”
15
PAMELA SURE GOT me drunk that night, and we made love. And then I spilled my guts about the Vietnam War in front of a bunch of students at the Pahlavi Pavilion. And Kimberley Wilder recorded me.
I HAD NEVER tasted blackberry brandy before. I never want to taste it again. It did bad things to me. It made me a crybaby about the war. That is something I swore I would never be.
IF I COULD order any drink I wanted now, it would be a Sweet Rob Roy on the Rocks, a Manhattan made with Scotch. That was another drink a woman introduced me to, and it made me laugh instead of cry, and fall in love with the woman who said to try one.
That was in Manila, after the excrement hit the air-conditioning in Saigon. She was Harriet Gummer, the war correspondent from Iowa. She had a son by me without telling me.
His name? Rob Roy.
After we made love, Pamela asked me the same question Harriet had asked me in Manila 15 years earlier. It was something they both had to know. They both asked me if I had killed anybody in the war.
I said to Pamela what I had said to Harriet: “If I were a fighter plane instead of a human being, there would be little pictures of people painted all over me.”
I should have gone straight home after saying that. But I went over to the Pavilion instead. I needed a bigger audience for that great line of mine.
So I barged into a group of students sitting in front of the great fireplace in the main lounge. After the prison break, that fireplace would be used for cooking horse meat and dogs. I got between the students and the fire, so there was no way they could ignore me, and I said to them, “If I were a fighter plane instead of a human being, there would be little pictures of people painted all over me.”
I went on from there.
I WAS SO full of self-pity! That was what I found unbearable when Jason Wilder played back my words to me. I was so drunk that I acted like a victim!
THE SCENES OF unspeakable cruelty and stupidity and waste I described that night were no more horrible than ultrarealistic shows about Vietnam, which had become staples of TV entertainment. When I told the students about the severed human head I saw nestled in the guts of a water buffalo, to them, I’m sure, the head might as well have been made of wax, and the guts those of some big animal which may or may not have belonged to a real water buffalo.
What difference could it make whether the head was or was not wax, or whether the guts were or were not those of a water buffalo?
No difference.
“PROFESSOR HARTKE,” JASON Wilder said to me gently, reasonably, when the tape had reached its end, “why on Earth would you want to tell such tales to young people who need to love their country?”
I wanted to keep my job so much, and the house which came with it, that my reply was asinine. “I was telling them history,” I said, “and I had had a little too much to drink. I don’t usually drink that much.”
“I’m sure,” he said. “I am told that you are a man with many problems,