Hocus Pocus

29

J4 yle Hooper’s last words, I think we can say with the benefit of hindsight in the year 2001, might serve as an apt epitaph for a plurality of working adults in industrialized nations during the 20th Century. How could they help themselves, when so many of the jobs they or their mates could get had to do with large-scale deceptions, legal thefts from public treasuries, or the wrecking of the food chain, the topsoil, the water, or the atmosphere?

After Lyle Hooper was executed, with a bullet behind the ear, I visited the Trustees in the stable. Tex Johnson was still spiked to the cross-timbers in the loft overhead, and they knew it.

But before I tell about that, I had better finish my story of how I got a job at Athena.

So there I was back in 1991, nursing a Budweiser, or “wop,” at the bar of the Black Cat Café. Muriel Peck was telling me how exciting it had been to see all the motorcycles and limousines and celebrities out front. She couldn’t believe that she had been that close to Gloria White and Henry Kissinger.

Several of the merry roisterers had come inside to use the toilet or get a drink of water. Arthur K. Clarke had provided everything but water and toilets. So Muriel had dared to ask some of them who they were and what they did.

Three of the people were Black. One Black was an old woman who had just won $57,000,000 in the New York State Lottery, and the other 2 were baseball players who made $3,000,000 a year.

A white man, who kept apart from the rest, and, according to Muriel, didn’t seem to know what to make of himself, was a daily book reviewer for The New York Times. He had given a rave review to Clarke’s autobiography, Don’t Be Ashamed of Money.

One man who came in to use the toilet, she said, was a famous author of horror stories that had been made into some of the most popular movies of all time. I had in fact read a couple of them in Vietnam, about innocent people getting murdered by walking corpses with axes and knives and so on.

I passed 1 of them on to Jack Patton, I remember, and asked him later what he thought of it. And then I stopped him from answering, saying, “You don’t have to tell me, Jack. I already know. It made you want to laugh like hell.”

“Not only that, Major Hartke,” he replied. “I thought of what his next book should be about.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“A B-52,” he said. “Gore and guts everywhere.”

One user of the toilet, who confessed to Muriel that he had diarrhea, and asked if she had anything behind the bar to stop it, was a retired Astronaut whom she recognized but couldn’t name. She had seen him again and again in commercials for a sinus-headache remedy and a retirement community in Cocoa Beach, Florida, near Cape Kennedy.

So Arthur K. Clarke, along with all his other activities, was a whimsical people-collector. He invited people he didn’t really know, but who had caught his eye for 1 reason or another, to his parties, and they came, they came. Another one, Muriel told me, was a man who had inherited from his father a painting by Mark Rothko that had just been sold to the Getty Museum in Malibu, California, for $37,000,000, a new record for a painting by an American.

Rothko himself had long since committed suicide.

He had had enough.

He was out of here.

“She’s so short,” Muriel said to me. “I was so surprised how short she was.”

“Who’s so short?” I said.

“Gloria White,” she said.

I asked her what she thought of Henry Kissinger. She said she loved his voice.

I had seen him up on the Quadrangle. Although I had been an instrument of his geopolitics, I felt no connection between him and me. His face was certainly familiar. He might have been, like Gloria White, somebody who had been in a lot of movies I had seen.

I dreamed about him once here in prison, though. He was a woman. He was a Gypsy fortune-teller who looked into her crystal ball but wouldn’t say anything.

I said to Muriel, “You worry me.”

“I what?” she said.

“You look tired,” I said. “Do you get enough sleep?”

“Yes, thank you,” she said.

“Forgive me,” I said. “None of my business. It’s just that you were so full of life while you were talking about the motorcycle people. When you stopped, it was as though you took off a mask, and you seemed as though you were suddenly all wrung out.”

Muriel knew vaguely who I was. She had seen me with Margaret and Mildred in tow at least twice a week during the short time the ice cream parlor was in business. So I did not have to tell her that I, too, practically speaking, was without a mate. And she had seen with her own eyes how kind and patient I was with my worse than useless relatives.

So she was already favorably disposed to me. She trusted me, and responded with undisguised gratitude to my expressions of concern for her happiness.

“If you want to know the truth,” she said, “I hardly sleep at all, I worry so much about the children.” She had 2 of them. “The way things are going,” she said, “I don’t see how I can afford to send even 1 of them to college. I’m from a family where everybody went to college and never thought a thing about it. But that’s all over now. Neither I is an athlete.”

We might have become lovers that night, I think, instead of 2 weeks from then, if an ugly mountain of a man hadn’t entered raging, demanding to know, “All right, where is he? Where’s that kid?”

He was asking about the kid who worked at Tarkington’s stable after school, whose bicycle I had stolen. I had left the kid’s bike in plain view out front. Every other place of business on Clinton Street was boarded up, from the barge terminal to halfway up the hill. So the only place the boy could be, he thought, was inside the Black Cat Café or, worse, inside one of the vans out back in the parking lot.

I played dumb.

We went outside with him to find out what bicycle he could possibly be talking about. I offered him the theory that the boy was a good boy, and nowhere near the Black Cat Café, and that some bad person had borrowed the bike and left it there. So he put the bike on the back of his beat-up pickup truck, and said he was late for an appointment for ajob interview at the prison across the lake.

“What kind of a job?” I asked.

And he said, “They’re hiring teachers over there.”

I asked if I could come with him.

He said, “Not if you’re going to teach what I want to teach. What do you want to teach?”

“Anything you don’t want to teach,” I said.

“I want to teach shop,” he said. “You want to teach shop?”

“No,” I said.

“Word of honor?” he said.

“Word of honor,” I said.

“OK,” he said, “get in, get in.”