As I learned when I read on, briefly, Bokonon knew exactly who Charles Atlas was. Bokonon was, in fact, an alumnus of his muscle-building school.
It was the belief of Charles Atlas that muscles could be built without bar bells or spring exercisers, could be built by simply pitting one set of muscles against another.
It was the belief of Bokonon that good societies could be built only by pitting good against evil, and by keeping the tension between the two high at all times.
And, in Castle’s book, I read my first Bokononist poem, or “Calypso.” It went like this:
“Papa” Monzano, he’s so very bad,
But without bad “Papa” I would be so sad;
Because without “Papa’s” badness,
Tell me, if you would,
How could wicked old Bokonon
Ever, ever look good?
Just Like Saint Augustine 48
Bokonon, I learned from Castle’s book, was born in 1891. He was a Negro, born an Episcopalian and a British subject on the island of Tobago.
He was christened Lionel Boyd Johnson.
He was the youngest of six children, born to a wealthy family. His family’s wealth derived from the discovery by Bokonon’s grandfather of one quarter of a million dollars in buried pirate treasure, presumably a treasure of Blackbeard, of Edward Teach.
Blackbeard’s treasure was reinvested by Bokonon’s family in asphalt, copra, cacao, livestock, and poultry.
Young Lionel Boyd Johnson was educated in Episcopal schools, did well as a student, and was more interested in ritual than most. As a youth, for all his interest in the outward trappings of organized religion, he seems to have been a carouser, for he invites us to sing along with him in his “Fourteenth Calypso”:
When I was young,
I was so gay and mean,
And I drank and chased the girls
Just like young St. Augustine.
Saint Augustine,
He got to be a saint.
So, if I get to be one, also,
Please, Mama, don’t you faint.
A Fish Pitched Up by an Angry Sea 49
Lionel Boyd Johnson was intellectually ambitious enough, in 1911, to sail alone from Tobago to London in a sloop named the Lady’s Slipper. His purpose was to gain a higher education.
He enrolled in the London School of Economics and Political Science.
His education was interrupted by the First World War. He enlisted in the infantry, fought with distinction, was commissioned in the field, was mentioned four times in dispatches. He was gassed in the second Battle of Ypres, was hospitalized for two years, and then discharged.
And he set sail for home, for Tobago, alone in the Lady’s Slipper again.
When only eighty miles from home, he was stopped and searched by a German submarine, the U-99. He was taken prisoner, and his little vessel was used by the Huns for target practice. While still surfaced, the submarine was surprised and captured by the British destroyer, the Raven.
Johnson and the Germans were taken on board the destroyer and the U-99 was sunk.
The Raven was bound for the Mediterranean, but it never got there. It lost its steering; it could only wallow helplessly or make grand, clockwise circles. It came to rest at last in the Cape Verde Islands.
Johnson stayed in those islands for eight months, awaiting some sort of transportation to the Western Hemisphere.
He got a job at last as a crewman on a fishing vessel that was carrying illegal immigrants to New Bedford, Massachusetts. The vessel was blown ashore at Newport, Rhode Island.
By that time Johnson had developed a conviction that something was trying to get him somewhere for some reason. So he stayed in Newport for a while to see if he had a destiny there. He worked as a gardener and carpenter on the famous Rumfoord Estate.
During that time, he glimpsed many distinguished guests of the Rumfoords, among them, J. P. Morgan, General John J. Pershing, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Enrico Caruso, Warren Gamaliel Harding, and Harry Houdini. And it was during that time that the First World War came to an end, having killed ten million persons and wounded twenty million, Johnson among them.
When the war ended, the young rakehell of the Rumfoord family, Remington Rumfoord, IV, proposed to sail his steam yacht, the Scheherazade, around the world, visiting Spain, France, Italy, Greece, Egypt, India, China, and Japan. He invited Johnson to accompany him as first mate, and Johnson agreed.
Johnson saw many wonders of the world on the voyage. The Scheherazade was rammed in a fog in Bombay harbor, and only Johnson survived. He stayed in India for two years, becoming a follower of Mohandas K. Gandhi. He was arrested for leading groups that protested British rule by lying down on railroad tracks. When his jail term was over, he was shipped at Crown expense to his home in Tobago.
There, he built another schooner, which he called the Lady’s Slipper II.
And he sailed her about the Caribbean, an idler, still seeking the storm that would drive him ashore on what was unmistakably his destiny.
In 1922, he sought shelter from a hurricane in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, which country was then occupied by United States Marines.
Johnson was approached there by a brilliant, self-educated, idealistic Marine deserter named Earl McCabe. McCabe was a corporal. He had just stolen his company’s recreation fund. He offered Johnson five hundred dollars for transportation to Miami.
The two set sail for Miami.
But a gale hounded the schooner onto the rocks of San Lorenzo. The boat went down. Johnson and McCabe, absolutely naked, managed to swim ashore. As Bokonon himself reports the adventure:
A fish pitched up
By the angry sea,
I gasped on land,
And I became me.
He was enchanted by the mystery of coming ashore naked on an unfamiliar island. He resolved to let the adventure run its full course, resolved to see just how far a man might go, emerging naked from salt water.
It was a rebirth for him:
Be like a baby,
The Bible say,
So I stay like a baby
To this very day.
How he came by the name of Bokonon was very simple. “Bokonon” was the pronunciation given the name Johnson in the island’s English dialect.
As for that dialect …
The dialect of San Lorenzo is both easy to understand and difficult to write down. I say it is easy to understand, but I speak only for myself. Others have found it as incomprehensible as Basque, so my understanding of it may be telepathic.
Philip Castle, in his book, gave a phonetic demonstration of the dialect and caught its flavor very well. He chose for his sample the San Lorenzan version of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”
In American English, one version of that immortal poem goes like this:
Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are,
Shining in the sky so bright,
Like a tea tray in the night,
Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are.
In San Lorenzan dialect, according to Castle, the same poem went like this:
Tsvent-kiul, tsvent-kiul, lett-pool store,
Ko jy tsvantoor bat voo yore.
Put-shinik on lo shee zo brath,
Kam oon teetron on lo nath,
Tsvent-kiul, tsvent-kiul, lett-poll store,
Ko jy tsvantoor bat voo yore.
Shortly after Johnson became Bokonon, incidentally, the lifeboat of his shattered ship was found on shore. That boat was later painted gold and made the bed of the island’s chief executive.
“There is a legend, made up by Bokonon,” Philip Castle wrote in his book, “that the golden boat will sail again when the end of the world is near.”
A Nice Midget 50
My reading of the life of Bokonon was interrupted by H. Lowe Crosby’s wife, Hazel. She was standing in the aisle next to me. “You’ll never believe it,” she said, “but I just found two more Hoosiers on this airplane.”
“I’ll be damned.”
“They weren’t born Hoosiers, but they live there now. They live in Indianapolis.”
“Very interesting.”
“You want to meet them?”
“You think I should?”
The question baffled her. “They’re your fellow Hoosiers.”
“What are their names?”
“Her name is Conners and his name is Hoenikker. They’re brother and sister, and he’s a midget. He’s a nice midget, though.” She winked. “He’s a smart little thing.”
“Does he call you Mom?”
“I almost asked him to. And then I stopped, and I wondered if maybe it wouldn’t be rude to ask a midget to do that.”
“Nonsense.”
O.K., Mom 51
So I went aft to talk to Angela Hoenikker Conners and little Newton Hoenikker, members of my karass.
Angela was the horse-faced platinum blonde I had noticed earlier.
Newt was a very tiny young man indeed, though not grotesque. He was as nicely scaled as Gulliver among the Brobdingnagians, and as shrewdly watchful, too.
He held a glass of champagne, which was included in the price of his ticket. That glass was to him what a fishbowl would have been to a normal man, but he drank from it with elegant ease—as though he and the glass could not have been better matched.