GRIOT~ wont work without certain pieces of information. If you leave out race, for instance, it flashes the words ethnic origin¨ on its screen, and stops cold. If it
doesnt know that, it cant go on. The same with education.
I didnt tell GRIOTTM that I had landed a job I loved here. I told it only about my life up to the end of the Vietnam War. It knew all about the Vietnam War and the sorts of veterans it had produced. It made me a burned-out case, on the basis of my length of service over there, I think. It had me becoming a wife-beater and an alcoholic, and winding up all alone on Skid Row.
If I had acces~ to GRJOTTM now, I might ask it what might have happened to Marilyn Shaw if Sam Wakefield hadnt rescued her. But the escaped convicts smashed up the one in the Pavilion soon after I showed them how to work it.
They hated it, and I didnt blame them. I was immediately sorry that I had let them know of its existence. One by one they punched in their race and age and what their parents did, if they knew; and how long theyd gone to school and what drugs theyd taken and so on, and GRIOTTM sent them straight to jail to serve long sentences.
I have no idea how much GRIOTIM back then may have known about Vietnam nurses. The manufacturers claimed then as now that no program in stores was more than 3 months old, and so every program was right up-to-date about what had really happened to this or that sort of person at the time you bought it. The programmers, supposedly, were constantly updating GRJOT~ with the news of the day about plumbers, about podiatrists, about Vietnam boat people and Mexican wetbacks, about drug smugglers, about paraplegics,
about everyone you could think of within the continental limits of the United States and Canada.
There is some question now, Ive heard, about whether GMOT~ is as deep and up-to-date as it used to be, since Parker Brothers, the company that makes it, has been taken over by Koreans. The new owners are moving the whole operation to Indonesia, where labor costs next to nothing. They say they will keep up with American news by satellite.
One wonders.
I dont need any help from GRIOPTM to know that Marilyn Shaw had a much rougher war than I did. All the soldiers she had to deal with were wounded, and all of them expected of her what was more often than not impossible: that she make them whole again.
I know that she was married, and that her husband back home divorced her and married somebody else while she was still over there, and that she didnt care. She and Sam Wakefield may have been lovers over there. I never asked.
That seems likely. After the war he went looking for her and found her taking a course in Computer Science at New York University. She didnt want to be a nurse anymore. He told her that maybe she should try being a teacher instead. She asked him if there was a chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous in Scipio, and he said there was.
After he shot himself, Marilyn, Professor Shaw, fell off the wagon for about a week. She disappeared, and I was given the job of finding her. I discovered her downtown, drunk and asleep on a pool table in the back room of the Black Cat Caf?. She was drooling on the felt. One hand was on the cue ball, as though she meant
to throw it at something when she regained consciousness.
As far as I know, she never took another drink.
GIUOT~, in the old days anyway, before the Koreans promised to make Parker Brothers lean and mean in Indonesia, didnt come up with the same biography every time you gave it a certain set of facts. Like life itself, it offered a variety of possibilities, spitting out endings according to what the odds for winning or losing or whatever were known to be.
After GRJOT~ put me on Skid Row 15 years ago, I had it try again. I did a little better, but not as well as I was doing here. It had me stay in the Army and become an instructor at West Point, but unhappy and bored. I lost my wife again, and still drank too much, and had a succession of woman friends who soon got sick of me and my depressions. And I died of cirrhosis of the liver a second time.
GRIOT~ didnt have many alternatives to jail for the escaped convicts, though. If it came up with a parole, it soon put the ex-con back in a cage again.
The same thing happened if GRIOTTM was told that the jailbird was Hispanic. It was somewhat more optimistic about Whites, if they could read and write, and had never been in a mental hospital or been given a Dishonorable Discharge from the Armed Forces. Otherwise, they might as well be Black or Hispanic.
The wild cards among jailbirds, as far as GR1OT~ was concerned, were Orientals and American Indians.
When the Supreme Court handed down its decision that prisoners should be segregated according to race, many jurisdictions did not have enough Oriental or American Indian criminals to make separate institutions for them economically feasible. Hawaii, for example, had only 2 American Indian prisoners, and Wyoming, my wifes home state, had only I Oriental.
Under such circumstances, said the Court, Indians and/or Orientals should be made honorary Whites, and treated accordingly.
This state has plenty of both, however, particularly after Indians began to make tax-free fortunes smuggling drugs over unmapped trails across the border from Canada. So the Indians had a prison all their own at what their ancestors used to call Thunder Beaver,¨ what we call Niagara Falls.¨ The Orientals have their own prison at Deer Park, Long Island, conveniently located only 50 kilometers from their heroin-processing plants in New York Citys Chinatown.
When you dare to think about how huge the illegal drug business is in this country, you have to suspect that practically everybody has a steady buzz on, just as I did during my last 2 years in high school, and just as General Grant did during the Civil War, and just as Winston Churchill did during World War II.
So Marilyn Shaw and I passed yet again like ships in the night on the Quadrangle. It would be our last encounter there. Without either of us knowing that it would be the last time, she said something that in retrospect is quite moving to me. What she said was derived
from our exploratory conversation at the cocktail party that had welcomed us to the faculty so long ago.
I had told her about how I met Sam Wakefield at the Cleveland Science Fair, and what the first words were that he ever spoke to me. Now, as I hastened to my doom, she played back those words to me: Whats the hurry, Son?¨
13
T
he Chairman of the Board of Trustees that fired me 10 years ago was Robert W. Moellenkamp of West Palm Beach, himself a graduate of Tarkington and the father of 2 Tarkingtonians, 1 of whom had been my student. As it happened, he was on the verge of losing his fortune, which was nothing but paper, in Microsecond Arbitrage, Incorporated. That swindle claimed to be snapping up bargains in food and shelter and clothing and fuel and medicine and raw materials and machinery and so on before people who really needed them could learn of their existence. And then the companys computers, supposedly, would get the people who really needed whatever it was to bid against each other, running profits right through the roof. It was able to do this with its clients money, supposedly, because its computers were linked by satellites to marketplaces in every corner of the world.
The computers, it would turn out, werent connected to anything but each other and their credulous clients like Tarkinglons Board Chairman. He was high as a
kite on printouts describing brilliant trades he had made in places like Tierra del Fuego and Uganda and God knows where else, when he agreed with the Panjandrum of American Conservatism, Jason Wilder, that it was time to fire me. Microsecond Arbitrage was his angel dust, his LSD, his heroin, his jug of Thunderbird wine, his cocaine.
I myself have been addicted to older women and housekeeping, which my court-appointed lawyer tells me might be germs we could make grow into a credible plea of insanity. The most amazing thing to him was that I had never masturbated.
Why not?¨ he said.
My mothers father made me promise never to do it, because it would make me lazy and crazy,¨ I said.
And you believed him?¨ he said. He is only 23 years old, fresh out of Syracuse.