Hocus Pocus

30

To understand how the lower ranks of guards at Athena in those days felt about White people, and never mind Black people, you have to realize that most of them were recruited from Japan’s northernmost island, Hokkaido. On Hokkaido the primitive natives, the Ainus, thought to be very ugly because they were so paffid and hairy, were White people. Genetically speaking, they are just as white as Nancy Reagan. Their ancestors long ago had made the error, when humiliated by superior Asiatic civilizations, of shambling north instead of west to Europe, and eventually, of course, to the Western Hemisphere.

Those White people on Hokkaido had sure missed a lot. They were way behind practically everybody. And when the man who wanted to teach shop and I presented ourselves at the gate to the road that led through the National Forest to the prison, the 2 guards on duty there were fresh from Hokkaido. For all the respect our being Whites inspired in them, we might as well have been a couple of drunk and disorderly Arapahos.

The man who wanted to teach shop said his name was John Donner. On the way over he asked me ill had seen him on the Phil Donahue show on TV. That was a 1-hour show every weekday afternoon, which featured a small group of real people, not actors, who had had the same sort of bad thing happen to them, and had triumphed over it or were barely coping or whatever. There were 2 very similar programs in competition with Donahue, and the old novelist Paul Slazinger used to watch all 3 simultaneously, switching back and forth.

I asked him why he did that. He said he didn’t want to miss the moment when, suddenly, there was absolutely nothing left to talk about.

I told John Donner that, unfortunately, I couldn’t watch any of those shows, since I taught Music Appreciation in the afternoon, and then Martial Arts after that. I asked him what his particular Donahue show had been about.

“People who were raised in foster homes and got beat up all the time,” he said.

I would see plenty of Donahue reruns at the prison, but not Donner’s. That show would have been coals to Newcastle at Athena, where practically everybody had been beaten regularly and severely when he was a little kid.

I didn’t see Donner on TV over there, but I did see myself a couple of times, or somebody who looked a whole lot like me in the distance, on old footage of the Vietnam War.

I even yelled 1 time at the prison, “There I am! There I am!”

Convicts gathered behind me, looking at the TV and saying, “Where? Where? Where?”

But they were too late. I was gone again.

Where did I go?

Here I am.