Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [51]
And then his son Bruce, Tarkington Class of ’85, who was a homosexual, joined the Ice Capades as a chorus boy. That was all right with Ed, who understood that some people were born homosexual and that was that. And Bruce was so happy with the ice show. He was not only a good skater but maybe the best male or female dancer at Tarkington. Bruce used to come over to the house and dance with my mother-in-law sometimes, just for the sake of dancing. He said she was the best dance partner he had ever had, and she returned the compliment.
I didn’t tell her when, 4 years after he graduated, he was found strangled with his own belt, and with something like 100 stab wounds, in a motel outside of Dubuque. So there was Dubuque again.
18
SHAKESPEARE.
I THINK WILLIAM Shakespeare was the wisest human being I ever heard of. To be perfectly frank, though, that’s not saying much. We are impossibly conceited animals, and actually dumb as heck. Ask any teacher. You don’t even have to ask a teacher. Ask anybody. Dogs and cats are smarter than we are.
If I say that the Trustees of Tarkington College were dummies, and that the people who got us involved in the Vietnam War were dummies, I hope it is understood that I consider myself the biggest dummy of all. Look at where I am now, and how hard I worked to get here and nowhere else. Bingo!
And if I feel that my father was a horse’s fundament and my mother was a horse’s fundament, what can I be but another horse’s fundament? Ask my kids, both legitimate and illegitimate. They know.
I DIDN’T HAVE a Chinaman’s chance with the Trustees, if I may be forgiven a racist cliche—not with the sex stuff Wilder had concealed in the folder. When I defended myself against him, I had no idea how well armed he was—a basic situation in the funniest slapstick comedies.
I argued that it was a teacher’s duty to speak frankly to students of college age about all sorts of concerns of humankind, not just the subject of a course as stated in the catalogue. “That’s how we gain their trust, and encourage them to speak up as well,” I said, “and realize that all subjects do not reside in neat little compartments, but are continuous and inseparable from the one big subject we have been put on Earth to study, which is life itself.”
I said that the doubts I might have raised in the students’ minds about the virtues of the Free Enterprise System, when telling them what my grandfather believed, could in the long run only strengthen their enthusiasm for that system. It made them think up reasons of their own for why Free Enterprise was the only system worth considering. “People are never stronger,” I said, “than when they have thought up their own arguments for believing what they believe. They stand on their own 2 feet that way.”
“Did you or did you not say that the United States was a crock of doo-doo?” said Wilder.
I had to think a minute. This wasn’t something Kimberley had gotten on tape. “What I may have said,” I replied, “is that all nations bigger than Denmark are crocks of doo-doo, but that was a joke, of course.”
I NOW STAND behind that statement 100 percent. All nations bigger than Denmark are crocks of doo-doo.
JASON WILDER HAD heard enough. He asked the Trustees to pass the folder from hand to hand down the table to me. He said, “Before you see what’s inside, you should know that this Board promised me that its contents would never be mentioned outside this room. It will remain in your sole possession, provided that you submit your