Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [72]
Do I resent rich people? No. The best or worst I can do is notice them. I agree with the great Socialist writer George Orwell, who felt that rich people were poor people with money. I would discover this to be the majority opinion in the prison across the lake as well, although nobody over there had ever heard of George Orwell. Many of the inmates themselves had been poor people with money before they were caught, with the most costly cars and jewelry and watches and clothes. Many, as teenage drug dealers, had no doubt owned bicycles as desirable as the one I found in the weeds in the highlands of Scipio.
When convicts found out that my car was nothing but a 4-door, 6-cylinder Mercedes, they often scorned or pitied me. It was the same with many of the students at Tarkington. I might as well have owned a battered pickup truck.
SO I WALKED that bicycle out of the weeds and onto the steep slope of Clinton Street. I wouldn’t have to pedal or turn a corner in order to deliver myself to the front door of the Black Cat Café. I would have to use the brakes, however, and I tested those. If the brakes didn’t work, I would go off the end of the dock of the old barge terminal and, alley-oop, straight into Lake Mohiga.
I straddled the banana-shaped saddle, which turned out to be surprisingly considerate of my sensitive crotch and hindquarters. Sailing down a hill on that bicycle in the sunshine wasn’t anything like being crucified.
I PARKED THE bike in plain view in front of the Black Cat Café, noting several champagne corks on the sidewalk and in the gutter. In Vietnam they would have been cartridge cases. This was where Arthur K. Clarke had formed up his motorcycle gang for its unopposed assault on Tarkington. The troops and their ladies had first drunk champagne. There were also remains of sandwiches, and I stepped on one, which I think was either cucumber or watercress. I scraped it off on the curbing, left it there for germs. I’ll tell you this, though: No germ is going to leave the Solar System eating sissy stuff like that.
Plutonium! Now there’s the stuff to put hair on a microbe’s chest.
I ENTERED THE Black Cat Café for the first time in my life. This was my club now, since I had been busted down to Townie. Maybe, after a few drinks, I’d go back up the hill and let air out of the tires of some of Clarke’s motorcycles and limousines.
I bellied up to the bar and said, “Give me a wop.” That was what I had heard people down in the town called Budweiser beer, ever since Italians had bought Anheuser-Busch, the company that made Budweiser. The Italians got the St. Louis Cardinals, too, as part of the deal.
“Wop coming up,” said the barmaid. She was just the kind of woman I would go for right now, if I didn’t have TB. She was in her late 30s, and had had a lot of bad luck recently, and didn’t know where to turn next. I knew her story. So did everybody else in town. She and her husband restored an old-time ice cream parlor 2 doors up Clinton Street from the Black Cat Café. But then her husband died because he had inhaled so much paint remover. The germs inside him couldn’t have felt too great, either.
WHO KNOWS, THOUGH? The Elders of Tralfamadore may have had her husband restore the ice cream parlor just so we could have a new strain of germs capable of surviving a passage through a cloud of paint remover in outer space.
HER NAME WAS Muriel Peck, and her husband Jerry Peck was a direct descendant of the first President of Tarkington College. His father grew up in this valley, but Jerry was raised in San Diego, California, and then he went to work for an ice cream company out there. The ice cream company was bought by President Mobutu of Zaire, and Jerry was let go.