Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [73]
Since he already knew ice cream, it made perfect sense for him to buy the old ice cream parlor. It would have been better for all concerned if he had known a little less about ice cream and a little more about paint remover.
MURIEL AND I would eventually become lovers, but not until I had been working at Athena Prison for 2 weeks. I finally got nerve enough to ask her, since she and Jerry had both majored in Literature at Swarthmore College, if either of them had ever taken the time to read a label on a can of paint remover.
“Not until it was much too late,” she said.
OVER AT THE prison I would encounter a surprising number of convicts who had been damaged not by paint remover but by paint. When they were little they had eaten chips or breathed dust from old lead-based paint. Lead poisoning had made them very stupid. They were all in prison for the dumbest crimes imaginable, and I was never able to teach any of them to read and write.
Thanks to them, do we now have germs which eat lead?
I know we have germs which eat petroleum. What their story is, I do not know. Maybe they’re that Honduran gonorrhea.
28
JERRY PECK WAS in a wheelchair with a tank of oxygen in his lap at the grand opening of the Mohiga Ice Cream Emporium. But he and Muriel had a nice little hit on their hands. Tarkingtonians and Townies alike were pleased by the decor and the luscious ice cream.
After the place had been open for only 6 months, though, a man came in and photographed everything. Then he pulled out a tape and made measurements which he wrote down in a book. The Pecks were flattered, and asked him if he was from an architectural magazine or what. He said that he worked for the architect who was designing the new student recreation center up on the hill, the Pahlavi Pavilion. The Pahlavis wanted it to have an ice cream parlor identical to theirs, right down to the last detail.
So maybe it wasn’t paint remover that killed Jerry Peck after all.
THE PAVILION ALSO put the valley’s only bowling alley out of business. It couldn’t survive on the business of Townies alone. So anybody in this area who wanted to bowl and wasn’t connected to Tarkington had to go 30 kilometers to the north, to the alleys next to the Meadowdale Cinema Complex, across the highway from the National Guard Armory.
IT WAS A slow time of day at the Black Cat Café. There may have been a few prostitutes in vans in the parking lot out back but none inside.
The owner, Lyle Hooper, who was also Chief of the Volunteer Fire Department and a Notary, was at the other end of the bar, doing some kind of bookkeeping. Until the very end of his life, he would never admit that the availability of prostitutes in his parking lot accounted in large measure for the business he did in liquor and snacks, and for the condom machine in the men’s room.
To the Elders of Tralfamadore, of course, that condom machine would represent a threat to their space program.
LYLE HOOPER SURELY knew about my sexual exploits, since he had notarized the affidavits in my portfolio. But he never mentioned them to me, or so far as I know to anyone. He was the soul of discretion.
Lyle was probably the best-liked man in this valley. Townies were so fond of him, men and women alike, that I never heard one call the Black Cat Café a whorehouse. Up on the hill, of course, it was called almost nothing else.
The Townies protected the image he had of himself, in spite of State Police raids and visits from the County Health Department, as a family man who ran a place of refreshment whose success depended entirely on the quality of the drinks and snacks he served. This kindly conspiracy protected Lyle’s son Charlton, as well. Charlton grew to be 2 meters tall, and was a New York State High School All-Star basketball center in his senior year at Scipio High School, and all he ever had to say about his father was that he ran a restaurant.
Charlton was such a phenomenal basketball player that he was invited to try out for the