He had fought in World War II! Thats how old he was.
So I said to him, Theyll take dollars if they have to, but youd better have a wheelbarrow.¨
And he wanted to know if the merchants and tradespeople would also accept fellatio. He used a vernacular word for fellatio in the plural.
But the tape began right after that, with my saying, as though out of the blue, and as a joke, of course, only it didnt sound like a joke during the playback, that, in effect, the whole World was for sale to anyone who had Yen or was willing to perform fellatio.
14
S
o that was twice within an hour that I was accused of cynicism that was Paul Sla.zingers, not mine. And
he was in Key West, well out of reach of punishment, having been unemployment-proofed for 5 years with a Genius Grant from the MacArthur Foundation. In saying what I had about Yen and fellatio, I was being sociable with a stranger. I was echoing him to make him feel at home in new surroundings.
As far as that goes, Professor Damon Stern, head of the History Department and my closest male friend here, spoke as badly of his own country as Slazinger and I did, and right into the faces of students in the classroom day after day. I used to sit in on his course and laugh and clap. The truth can be very funny in an awful way, especially as it relates to greed and hypocrisy. Kimberley must have made recordings of his words, too, and played them back for her father. Why wasnt Damon fired right along with me?
My guess is that he was a comedian, and 1 was not. He wanted students to leave his presence feeling good,
not bad, so the atrocities and stupidities he described were in the distant past. There was nothing a student could do about them but laugh, laugh, laugh.
Whereas Slazinger and I talked about the last half of the 20th Century, in which we had both been seriously wounded physically and psychologically, which was nothing anybody but a sociopath could laugh about.
I, too, might have been acceptable as a comedian if all Kimberley had taped was what I said about Yen and fellatio. That was good, topical Mohiga Valley humor, what with the Japanese taking over the prison across the lake and arousing curiosity among the natives about the relative values of different national currencies. The Japanese were willing to pay their local bills in either dollars or Yen. These bills were for small-ticket items, hardware or toiletries or whatever, which the prison needed in a hurry, usually ordered by telephone. Big-ticket items in quantity came from Japanese-owned suppliers in Rochester or beyond.
So Japanese currency had started to circulate in Scipio. The prison administrators and guards were rarely seen in town, however. They lived in barracks to the east of the prison, and lived lives as invisible to this side of the lake as those of the prisoners.
To the limited extent that anybody on this side of the lake thought about the prison at all until the mass escape, people were generally glad to have the Japanese in charge. The new proprietor had cut waste and corruption to almost nothing. What they charged the State for punishing its prisoners was only 75 percent of what the State used to pay itself for identical services.
The local paper, The Valley Sentinel, sent a reporter
over there to see what the Japanese were doing differently. They were still using the steel boxes on the back of trucks and showing old TV shows, including news, in no particular order and around the clock. The biggest change was that Athena was drug-free for the first time in its history, and rich prisoners werent able to buy privileges. The guards werent easily fooled or corrupted, either, since they understood so little English, and wanted nothing more than to finish up their 6 months overseas and go home again.
A normal tour of duty in Vietnam was twice that long and 1,000 times more dangerous. Who could blame the educated classes with political connections for staying home?
One new wrinkle by the Japanese the reporter didnt mention was that the guards wore surgical masks and rubber gloves when they were on duty, even up in the towers and atop the walls. That wasnt to keep them from spreading infections, of course. It was to ensure that they didnt take any of their loathsome charges loathsome diseases back home with them.
When I went to work over there, I refused to wear gloves and a mask. Who could teach anybody anything while wearing such a costume?
So now I have tuberculosis.
Cough, cough, cough.
Before I could protest to the Trustees that I certainly wouldnt have said what Id said about Yen and fellatio if Id thought there was the slightest chance that a student could hear me, the background noises on the tape
changed. I realized that I was about to hear something I had said in a different location. There was the pop-pop-pop of Ping-Pong balls, and a card player asked, Who dealt this mess?¨ Somebody else asked somebody else to bring her a hot fudge sundae without nuts on top. She was on a diet, she said. There were rumblings like distant artillery, which were really the sound of bowling balls in the basement of the Pahlavi Pavilion.
Oh Lordy, was I ever drunk that night at the Pavilion. I was out of control. And it was a disgrace that I should have appeared before students in such a condition. I will regret it to my dying day. Cough.
It was on a cold night near the end of November of 1990, 6 months before the Trustees fired me. I know it wasnt December, because Slazinger was still on campus, talking openly of suicide. He hadnt yet received his Genius Grant.
When I came home from work that afternoon, to tidy up the house and make supper, I found an awful mess. Margaret and Mildred, both hags by then, had torn bedsheets into strips. I had laundered the sheets that morning, and was going to put them on our beds that night. What did they care?
They had constructed what they said was a spider web. At least it wasnt a hydrogen bomb.
White cotton strips spliced end to end crisscrossed every which way in the front hail and living room. The newel post ~f the stairway was connected to the inside doorknob of the front door, and the doorknob was connected to the living room chandelier, and so on ad infinitum.
The day hadnt begun auspiciously anyway. I had found all 4 tires of my Mercedes flat. A bunch of high school kids from down below, high on alcohol or who knows what, had come up during the night like Vietcong and gone what they called coring¨ again. They not only had let the air out of the tires of every expensive car they could find in the open on campus, Porsches and Jaguars and Saabs and BMWs and so on, but had taken out the valve cores. At home, I had heard, they had jars full of valve cores or necklaces of valve cores to prove how often they had gone coring. And they got my Mercedes. They got my Mercedes every time.
So when I found myself tangled in Margaret and Mildreds spider web, my nervous system came close to the breaking point. I was the one who was going to have to clean up this mess. I was the one who was going to have to remake the beds with other sheets, and then buy more sheets the next day. I have always liked housework, or at least not minded it as much as most people seem to. But this was housework beyond the pale!
I had left the house so neat in the morning! And Margaret and Mildred Ľwerent getting any fun out of watching my reactions when I was tangled up in their spider web. They were hiding someplace where they couldnt see or hear me. They expected me to play hide-and-seek, with me as it.¨
Something in me snapped. I wasnt going to play hide-and-seek this time. I wasnt going to take down the spider web. I wasnt going to prepare supper. Let them come creeping out of their hiding places in an hour or whatever. Let them wonder, as I had when I walked into the spider web, what on Earth had happened to their previously dependable, forgiving Universe?
Out into the cold night I went, with no destination in mind save for good old oblivion. I found myself in front of the house of my best friend, Damon Stern, the entertaining professor of History. When he was a boy in Wisconsin, he had learned how to ride a unicycle. He had taught his wife and kids how to ride one, too.