Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [62]
I wasn’t what had shoved Pamela over the edge. It was her 1-woman show in Buffalo a couple of months earlier. What went wrong with it seemed funny to everybody but her, and it was in the papers and on TV. For a couple of days she was the light side of the news, comic relief from reports of the rapid growth of glaciers at the poles and the desert where the Amazon rain forest used to be. And I am sure there was another oil spill. There was always another oil spill.
If Denver and Santa Fe and Le Havre, France, hadn’t been evacuated yet because of atomic wastes in their water supplies, they soon would be.
WHAT HAPPENED TO Pamela’s 1-woman show also gave a lot of people an opportunity to jeer at modern art, which only rich people claimed to like.
As I’ve said, Pamela worked in polyurethane, which is easy to carve and weighs almost nothing, and smells like urine when it’s hot. Her figures, moreover, were small, women in full skirts, sitting and hunched over so you couldn’t see their faces. A shoe-box could have contained any 1 of them.
So they were displayed on pedestals in Buffalo, but they weren’t glued down. Wind was not considered a problem, since there were 3 sets of doors between her stuff and the main entrance to the museum, which faced Lake Erie.
THE MUSEUM, THE Hanson Centre for the Arts, was brand-new, a gift to the city from a Rockefeller heir living in Buffalo who had come into a great deal of money from the sale of Rockefeller Center in Manhattan to the Japanese. This was an old lady in a wheelchair. She hadn’t stepped on a mine in Vietnam. I think it was just old age that knocked the pins out from under her, and all the waiting for Rockefeller properties to be sold off so she could have some dough for a change.
The press was there because this was the Centre’s grand opening. Pamela Ford Hall’s first 1-woman show, which she called “Bagladies,” was incidental, except that it was mounted in the gallery, where a string quartet was playing and champagne and canapes were being served. This was black-tie.
The donor, Miss Hanson, was the last to arrive. She and her wheelchair were set down on the top step outside. Then all 3 sets of doors between Pam’s bagladies and the North Pole were thrown open wide. So all the bagladies were blown off their pedestals. They wound up on the floor, piled up against the hollow baseboards which concealed hot heating pipes.
TV cameras caught everything but the smell of hot polyurethane. What a relief from mundane worries! Who says the news has to be nothing but grim day after day?
24
PAMELA WAS SULKING next to the stable. The stable wasn’t in the shadow of Musket Mountain yet. It would be another 7 hours before the Sun went down.
This was years before the prison break, but there were already 2 bodies and 1 human head buried out that way. Everybody knew about the 2 bodies, which had been interred with honors and topped with a tombstone. The head would come as a complete surprise when more graves were dug with a backhoe at the end of the prison break.
Whose head was it?
THE 2 BODIES everybody knew about belonged to Tarkington’s first teacher of Botany and German and the flute, the brewmaster Hermann Shultz and his wife Sophia. They died within 1 day of each other during a diphtheria epidemic in 1893. They were in fairly fresh graves the day I was fired, although their joint grave marker was 98 years old. Their bodies and tombstone were moved there to make room for the Pahlavi Pavilion.
The mortician from down in town who took charge of moving the bodies back in 1987 reported that they were remarkably well preserved. He invited me to look, but I told him I was willing to take his word for it.
CAN YOU IMAGINE that? After all the corpses I saw in Vietnam, and in many cases created, I was squeamish about looking at 2 more which had absolutely nothing to do with me. I am at a loss for an explanation. Maybe I was thinking like an innocent little boy again.
I have leafed through the Atheist’s Bible,