Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [58]
He still hadn’t told them when he spilled the beans in Music Appreciation.
“You know what you have described to perfection?” I asked him.
“No,” he said.
I said, “What it was like to come home from the Vietnam War.”
22
I READ ABOUT World War II. Civilians and soldiers alike, and even little children, were proud to have played a part in it. It was impossible, seemingly, for any sort of person not to feel a part of that war, if he or she was alive while it was going on. Yes, and the suffering or death of soldiers and sailors and Marines was felt at least a little bit by everyone.
But the Vietnam War belongs exclusively to those of us who fought in it. Nobody else had anything to do with it, supposedly. Everybody else is as pure as the driven snow. We alone are stupid and dirty, having fought such a war. When we lost, it served us right for ever having started it. The night I went temporarily insane in a Chinese restaurant on Harvard Square, everybody was a big success but me.
BEFORE I BLEW up, Mildred’s old friend from Peru, Indiana, spoke as though we were in separate businesses, as though I were a podiatrist, maybe, or a sheet-metal contractor, instead of somebody who had risked his life and sacrificed common sense and decency on his behalf.
As it happened, he himself was in the medical-waste disposa game in Indianapolis. That’s a nice business to learn about in a Chinese restaurant, with everybody dangling who knows what from chopsticks.
He said that his workaday problems had as much to do with aesthetics as with toxicity. Those were both his words, “aesthetics” and “toxicity.”
He said, “Nobody likes to find a foot or a finger or whatever in a garbage can or a dump, even though it is no more dangerous to public health than the remains of a rib roast.”
He asked me if I saw anything on his and his wife’s table that I would like to sample, that they had ordered too much.
“No, thank you, sir,” I said.
“But telling you that,” he said, “is coals to Newcastle.”
“How so?” I said. I was trying not to listen to him, and was looking in exactly the wrong place for distraction, which was the face of my mother-in-law. Apparently this potential lunatic with no place else to go had become a permanent part of our household. It was a fait accompli.
“Well—you’ve been in war,” he said. The way he said it, it was clear that he considered the war to have been my war alone “I mean you people must have had to do a certain amount of cleaning up.”
That was when the kid patted my bristles. My brains blew up like a canteen of nitroglycerin.
MY LAWYER, MUCH encouraged by the 2 lists I am making, and by the fact that I have never masturbated and like to clean house, asked me yesterday why it was that I never swore. He found me washing windows in this library, although nobody had ordered me to do that.
So I told him my maternal grandfather’s idea that obscenity and blasphemy gave most people permission not to listen respectfully to whatever was being said.
I repeated an old story Grandfather Wills had taught me, which was about a town where a cannon was fired at noon every day. One day the cannoneer was sick at the last minute and was too incapacitated to fire the cannon.
So at high noon there was silence.
All the people in the town jumped out of their skins when the sun reached its zenith. They asked each other in astonishment, “Good gravy! What was that?”
My lawyer wanted to know what that had to do with my not swearing.
I replied that in an era as foulmouthed as this one, “Good gravy” had the same power to startle as a cannon shot.
THERE ON HARVARD Square, back in 1975, Sam Wakefield again made himself the helmsman of my destiny. He told me to stay out on the sidewalk, where I felt safe. I was shaking like a leaf. I wanted to bark like a dog.
He went into the restaurant, and somehow calmed everybody down, and offered to pay for all damages from his own pocket right then and there. He had a very rich wife, Andrea, who