Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [75]
But all the way to Palm Beach, where Handy had a waterfront estate, down the East River, down Barnegat Bay, up Delaware Bay and down Chesapeake Bay, down the Dismal Swamp Canal, and on and on, the yacht had to nuzzle its way through a shore-to-shore, horizon-to-horizon carpet of bobbing plastic bottles. They had contained brake fluid and laundry bleach and so on.
Father had had a lot to do with the development of those bottles. He knew, too, that they could go on bobbing for 1,000 years. They were nothing to be proud of.
In a way, those bottles called him what the Freedom Fighters called Lyle Hooper.
Lyle’s despairing last words as he was led out of the bell tower to be executed in front of Samoza Hall might be an apt epitaph for my father:
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LYLE HOOPER’S LAST words, I think we can say with the benefit of hindsight in the year 2001, might serve as an apt epitaph for a plurality of working adults in industrialized nations during the 20th Century. How could they help themselves, when so many of the jobs they or their mates could get had to do with large-scale deceptions, legal thefts from public treasuries, or the wrecking of the food chain, the topsoil, the water, or the atmosphere?
AFTER LYLE HOOPER was executed, with a bullet behind the ear, I visited the Trustees in the stable. Tex Johnson was still spiked to the cross-timbers in the loft overhead, and they knew it.
But before I tell about that, I had better finish my story of how I got a job at Athena.
SO THERE I was back in 1991, nursing a Budweiser, or “wop,” at the bar of the Black Cat Café. Muriel Peck was telling me how exciting it had been to see all the motorcycles and limousines and celebrities out front. She couldn’t believe that she had been that close to Gloria White and Henry Kissinger.
Several of the merry roisterers had come inside to use the toilet or get a drink of water. Arthur K. Clarke had provided everything but water and toilets. So Muriel had dared to ask some of them who they were and what they did.
Three of the people were Black. One Black was an old woman who had just won $57,000,000 in the New York State Lottery, and the other 2 were baseball players who made $3,000,000 a year.
A white man, who kept apart from the rest, and, according to Muriel, didn’t seem to know what to make of himself, was a daily book reviewer for The New York Times. He had given a rave review to Clarke’s autobiography, Don’t Be Ashamed of Money.
One man who came in to use the toilet, she said, was a famous author of horror stories that had been made into some of the most popular movies of all time. I had in fact read a couple of them in Vietnam, about innocent people getting murdered by walking corpses with axes and knives and so on.
I passed 1 of them on to Jack Patton, I remember, and asked him later what he thought of it. And then I stopped him from answering, saying, “You don’t have to tell me, Jack. I already know. It made you want to laugh like hell.”
“Not only that, Major Hartke,” he replied. “I thought of what his next book should be about.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“A B-52,” he said. “Gore and guts everywhere.”
ONE USER OF the toilet, who confessed to Muriel that he had diarrhea, and asked if she had anything behind the bar to stop it, was a retired Astronaut whom she recognized but couldn’t name. She had seen him again and again in commercials for a sinus-headache remedy and a retirement community in Cocoa Beach, Florida, near Cape Kennedy.
So Arthur K. Clarke, along with all his other activities, was a whimsical people-collector. He invited people he didn’t really know, but who had caught his eye for 1 reason or another, to his parties, and they came, they came. Another one, Muriel told me, was a man who had inherited from his father a painting by Mark Rothko that had just been sold to the Getty Museum in Malibu, California,