So we all could be happy, yes,
Instead of tense.
And I made up lies
So that they all fit nice,
And I made this sad world
A par-a-dise.
There was a tug at my coat sleeve as I read. I looked up. Little Newt Hoenikker was standing in the aisle next to me. “I thought maybe you’d like to go back to the bar,” he said, “and hoist a few.”
So we did hoist and topple a few, and Newt’s tongue was loosened enough to tell me some things about Zinka, his Russian midget dancer friend. Their love nest, he told me, had been in his father’s cottage on Cape Cod.
“I may not ever have a marriage, but at least I’ve had a honeymoon.”
He told me of idyllic hours he and his Zinka had spent in each other’s arms, cradled in Felix Hoenikker’s old white wicker chair, the chair that faced the sea.
And Zinka would dance for him. “Imagine a woman dancing just for me.”
“I can see you have no regrets.”
“She broke my heart. I didn’t like that much. But that was the price. In this world, you get what you pay for.”
He proposed a gallant toast. “Sweethearts and wives,” he cried.
Fasten Your Seat Belts 59
I was in the bar with Newt and H. Lowe Crosby and a couple of strangers, when San Lorenzo was sighted. Crosby was talking about pissants. “You know what I mean by a pissant?”
“I know the term,” I said, “but it obviously doesn’t have the ding-a-ling associations for me that it has for you.”
Crosby was in his cups and had the drunkard’s illusion that he could speak frankly, provided he spoke affectionately. He spoke frankly and affectionately of Newt’s size, something nobody else in the bar had so far commented on.
“I don’t mean a little feller like this.” Crosby hung a ham hand on Newt’s shoulder. “It isn’t size that makes a man a pissant. It’s the way he thinks. I’ve seen men four times as big as this little feller here, and they were pissants. And I’ve seen little fellers—well, not this little actually, but pretty damn little, by God—and I’d call them real men.”
“Thanks,” said Newt pleasantly, not even glancing at the monstrous hand on his shoulder. Never had I seen a human being better adjusted to such a humiliating physical handicap. I shuddered with admiration.
“You were talking about pissants,” I said to Crosby, hoping to get the weight of his hand off Newt.
“Damn right I was.” Crosby straightened up.
“You haven’t told us what a pissant is yet,” I said.
“A pissant is somebody who thinks he’s so damn smart, he never can keep his mouth shut. No matter what anybody says, he’s got to argue with it. You say you like something, and, by God, he’ll tell you why you’re wrong to like it. A pissant does his best to make you feel like a boob all the time. No matter what you say, he knows better.”
“Not a very attractive characteristic,” I suggested.
“My daughter wanted to marry a pissant once,” said Crosby darkly.
“Did she?”
“I squashed him like a bug.” Crosby hammered on the bar, remembering things the pissant had said and done. “Jesus!” he said, “we’ve all been to college!” His gaze lit on Newt again. “You go to college?”
“Cornell,” said Newt.
“Cornell!” cried Crosby gladly. “My God, I went to Cornell.”
“So did he.” Newt nodded at me.
“Three Cornellians—all in the same plane!” said Crosby, and we had another granfalloon festival on our hands.
When it subsided some, Crosby asked Newt what he did.
“I paint.”
“Houses?”
“Pictures.”
“I’ll be damned,” said Crosby.
“Return to your seats and fasten your seat belts, please,” warned the airline hostess. “We’re over Monzano Airport, Bolivar, San Lorenzo.”
“Christ! Now wait just a Goddamn minute here,” said Crosby, looking down at Newt. “All of a sudden I realize you’ve got a name I’ve heard before.”
“My father was the father of the atom bomb.” Newt didn’t say Felix Hoenikker was one of the fathers. He said Felix was the father.
“Is that so?” asked Crosby.
“That’s so.”
“I was thinking about something else,” said Crosby. He had to think hard. “Something about a dancer.”
“I think we’d better get back to our seats,” said Newt, tightening some.
“Something about a Russian dancer.” Crosby was sufficiently addled by booze to see no harm in thinking out loud. “I remember an editorial about how maybe the dancer was a spy.”
“Please, gentlemen,” said the stewardess, “you really must get back to your seats and fasten your belts.”
Newt looked up at H. Lowe Crosby innocently. “You sure the name was Hoenikker?” And, in order to eliminate any chance of mistaken identity, he spelled the name for Crosby.
“I could be wrong,” said H. Lowe Crosby.
An Underprivileged Nation 60
The island, seen from the air, was an amazingly regular rectangle. Cruel and useless stone needles were thrust up from the sea. They sketched a circle around it.
At the south end of the island was the port city of Bolivar.
It was the only city.
It was the capital.
It was built on a marshy table. The runways of Monzano Airport were on its water front.
Mountains arose abruptly to the north of Bolivar, crowding the remainder of the island with their brutal humps. They were called the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, but they looked like pigs at a trough to me.
Bolivar had had many names: Caz-ma-caz-ma, Santa Maria, Saint Louis, Saint George, and Port Glory among them. It was given its present name by Johnson and McCabe in 1922, was named in honor of Simon Bolivar, the great Latin-American idealist and hero.
When Johnson and McCabe came upon the city, it was built of twigs, tin, crates, and mud—rested on the catacombs of a trillion happy scavengers, catacombs in a sour mash of slop, feculence, and slime.
That was pretty much the way I found it, too, except for the new architectural false face along the water front.
Johnson and McCabe had failed to raise the people from misery and muck.
“Papa” Monzano had failed, too.
Everybody was bound to fail, for San Lorenzo was as unproductive as an equal area in the Sahara or the Polar Icecap.
At the same time, it had as dense a population as could be found anywhere, India and China not excluded. There were four hundred and fifty inhabitants for each uninhabitable square mile.
“During the idealistic phase of McCabe’s and Johnson’s reorganization of San Lorenzo, it was announced that the country’s total income would be divided among all adult persons in equal shares,” wrote Philip Castle. “The first and only time this was tried, each share came to between six and seven dollars.”
What a Corporal Was Worth 61
In the customs shed at Monzano Airport, we were all required to submit to a luggage inspection, and to convert what money we intended to spend in San Lorenzo into the local currency, into Corporals, which “Papa” Monzano insisted were worth fifty American cents.
The shed was neat and new, but plenty of signs had already been slapped on the walls, higgledy-piggledy.
ANYBODY CAUGHT PRACTICING BOKONONISM IN SAN LORENZO, said one, WILL DIE ON THE HOOK!
Another poster featured a picture of Bokonon, a scrawny old colored man who was smoking a cigar. He looked clever and kind and amused.
Under the picture were the words: WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE, 10,000 CORPORALS REWARD!
I took a closer look at that poster and found reproduced at the bottom of it some sort of police identification form Bokonon had had to fill out way back in 1929. It was reproduced, apparently, to show Bokonon hunters what his fingerprints and handwriting were like.
But what interested me were some of the words Bokonon had chosen to put into the blanks in 1929. Wherever possible, he had taken the cosmic view, had taken into consideration, for instance, such things as the shortness of life and the longness of eternity.
He reported his avocation as: “Being alive.”
He reported his principal occupation as: “Being dead.”
THIS IS A CHRISTIAN NATION! ALL FOOT PLAY WILL BE PUNISHED BY THE HOOK, said another sign. The sign was meaningless to me, since I had not yet learned that Bokononists mingled their souls by pressing the bottoms of their feet together.
And the greatest mystery of all, since I had not read all of Philip Castle’s book, was how Bokonon, bosom friend of Corporal McCabe, had come to be an outlaw.
Why Hazel Wasn’t Scared 62
There were seven of us who got off at San Lorenzo: Newt and Angela, Ambassador Minton and his wife, H. Lowe Crosby and his wife, and I. When we had cleared customs, we were herded outdoors and onto a reviewing stand.
There, we faced a very quiet crowd.
Five thousand or more San Lorenzans stared at us. The islanders were oatmeal colored. The people were thin. There wasn’t a fat person to be seen. Every person had teeth missing. Many legs were bowed or swollen.