Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [42]
Prince did not move a muscle. He batted his eyes, but those were reflexes, and not free will, like me and the chicken noodle soup. One thing Prince was thinking, by his own account, was that if he moved a muscle, he might find himself in the New York State Maximum Security Adult Correctional Facility at Athena back in 1991 again.
Understandable!
So Trout bypassed Prince for the moment, confessedly still looking out for numero uno. A smoke alarm was raising hell. if the building was really on fire, and the fire could not be brought under control, then Trout was going to have to find someplace else where a senior citizen could hunker down until whatever was going on outside died down some.
He found a lit cigar resting on a saucer in the picture gallery. The cigar, although illegal everywhere in New York County, was not yet, and probably never would be, a danger to anyone but itself. Its midpoint was centered in the saucer, so it wasn’t going anywhere else as it oxidized. But the smoke alarm was yelling about the end of civilization as we had known it.
Trout, in My Ten Years on Automatic Pilot, would synthesize what he should have said to the smoke alarm that afternoon: “Nonsense! Get a grip on yourself, you brainless nervous breakdown.”
Here’s the spooky part: There wasn’t anybody but Trout in the gallery!
Could it be that the American Academy of Arts and Letters was haunted by poltergeists?
38
I got a good letter today, Friday, August 23rd, 1996, from a young stranger named Jeff Mihalich, one would guess of Serb or Croat descent, who is majoring in physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana. Jeff says he enjoyed his physics course in high school, and got top grades, but “ever since I have had physics at the university I have had much trouble with it. This was a huge blow to me because I was used to doing well in school. I thought there was nothing I couldn’t do if I just wanted it bad enough.”
My reply will go like this: “You might want to read the picaresque novel The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow. The epiphany at the end, as I recall, is that we shouldn’t be seeking harrowing challenges, but rather tasks we find natural and interesting, tasks we were apparently born to perform.
“As for the charms of physics: Two of the most entertaining subjects taught in high school or college are mechanics and optics. Beyond these playful disciplines, however, lie mind games as dependent on native talent as playing the French horn or chess.
“Of native talent itself I say in speeches: ‘If you go to a big city, and a university is a big city, you are bound to run into Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Stay home, stay home.’ ”
To put it another way: No matter what a young person thinks he or she is really hot stuff at doing, he or she is sooner or later going to run into somebody in the same field who will cut him or her a new asshole, so to speak.
A boyhood friend of mine, William H. C. “Skip” Failey, who died four months ago and is up in Heaven now, had good reason when a high school sophomore to think of himself as unbeatable at Ping-Pong. I am no slouch at Ping-Pong myself, but I wouldn’t play against Skip. He put so much spin on his serve that no matter how I tried to return it, I already knew it would go up my nose or out the window or back to the factory, anywhere but on the table.
When Skip was a junior, though, he played a classmate of ours, Roger Downs. Skip said afterward, “Roger cut me a new asshole.”
Thirty-five years after that, I was lecturing at a university in Colorado, and who should be in the audience but Roger Downs! Roger had become a businessperson out that way, and a respected competitor on the Senior Men’s Tennis Circuit. So I congratulated him on having given Skip a table tennis lesson so long ago.
Roger was eager to hear anything Skip might have said after that showdown. I said, “Skip said you cut him a new asshole.”
Roger was enormously satisfied, as well he might have been.
I did not ask, but the surgical metaphor could not have been unfamiliar