Hocus Pocus

4

Regardless of whether Henry Moellenkamp came out of his mother’s womb dyslexic or not, I was born in Wilmington, Delaware, 18 months before this country joined the fighting in World War II. I have not seen Wilmington since. That is where they keep my birth certificate. I was the only child of a housewife and, as I’ve said, a chemical engineer. My father was then employed by E. I. Du Pont de Nemours & Company, a manufacturer of high explosives, among other things.

When I was 2 years old, we moved to Midland City, Ohio, where a washing-machine company named Robo-Magic Corporation was beginning to make bomb-release mechanisms and swivel mounts for machine guns on B-I 7 bombers. The plastics industry was then in its infancy, and Father was sent to Robo-Magic to determine what synthetic materials from Du Pont could be used in the weapons systems in place of metal, in order to make them lighter.

By the time the war was over, the company had gotten out of the washing-machine business entirely, had changed its name to Barrytron, Limited, and was making weapon, airplane, and motor vehicle parts composed of plastics it had developed on its own. My father had become the company’s Vice-President in Charge of Research and Development.

When I was about 17, Du Pont bought Barrytron in order to capture several of its patents. One of the plastics Father had helped to develop, I remember, had the ability to scatter radar signals, so that an airplane clad in it would look like a flock of geese to our enemies.

This material, which has since been used to make virtually indestructible skateboards and crash helmets and skis and motorcycle fenders and so on, was an excuse, when I was a boy, for increasing security precautions at Barrytron. To keep Communists from finding out how it was made, a single fence topped with barbed wire was no longer adequate. A second fence was put outside that one, and the space between them was patrolled around the clock by humorless, jack-booted armed guards with lean and hungry Dobermans.

When Du Pont took over Barrytron, the double fence, the Dobennans, my father and all, I was a high school senior, all set to go to the University of Michigan to learn how to be a journalist, to serve John Q. Public’s right to know. Two members of my 6-piece band, The Soul Merchants, the clarinet and the string bass, were also going to Michigan.

We were going to stick together and go on making music at Ann Arbor. Who knows? We might have become so popular that we went on world tours and made great fortunes, and been superstars at peace rallies and love-ins when the Vietnam War came along.

Cadets at West Point did not make music. The musicians in the dance band and the marching band were Regular Army enlisted men, members of the servant class.

They were under orders to play music as written, note for note, and never mind how they felt about the music or about anything.

For that matter, there wasn’t any student publication at West Point. So never mind how the cadets felt about anything. Not interesting.

I was fine, but all kinds of things were going wrong with my father’s life. Du Pont was looking him over, as they were looking over everybody at Barrytron, deciding whether to keep him on or not. He was also having a love affair with a married woman whose husband caught him in the act and beat him up.

This was a sensitive subject with my parents, naturally, so I never discussed it with them. But the story was all over town, and Father had a black eye. He didn’t play any sports, so he had to make up a story about falling down the basement stairs. Mother weighed about 90 kilograms by then, and berated him all the time about his having sold all his Barrytron stock 2 years too soon. If he had hung on to it until the Du Pont takeover, he would have had $1,000,000, back when it meant something to be a millionaire. If I had been learning-disabled, he could easily have afforded to send me to Tarkington.

Unlike me, he was the sort of man who had to be in extremis in order to commit adultery. According to a story I heard from enemies at high school, Father had done the jumping-out-the-window thing, hippity-hopping like Peter Cottontail across backyards with his pants around his ankles, and getting bitten by a dog, and getting tangled up in a clothesline, and all the rest of it. That could have been an exaggeration. I never asked.

I myself was deeply troubled by our little family’s image problem, which was complicated when Mother broke her nose 2 days after Father got the black eye. To the outside world it looked as though she had said something to Father about the reason he had a black eye, and his reply had been to slug her. I didn’t think he would ever slug her, no matter what.

There is a not quite remote possibility that he really did slug her, of course. Lesser men would have slugged her under similar circumstances. The real truth of the matter became unavailable to historians forever when the falling ceiling of a gift shop on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls killed both participants, as I’ve said, some 20 years ago. They were said to have died instantly. They never knew what hit them, which is the best way to go.

There was no argument about that in Vietnam or, I suppose, on any battlefield. One kid I remember stepped on an antipersonnel mine. The mine could have been one of our own. His best friend from Basic Training asked him what he could do for him, and the kid replied: “Turn me off like a light bulb, Sam.”

The dying kid was white. The kid who wanted to help him was black, or a light tan, actually. His features were practically white, you would have to say.

A woman I was making love to a few years ago asked me if my parents were still alive. She wanted to know more about me, now that we had our clothes off.

I told her that they had suffered violent deaths in a foreign country, which was true. Canada is a foreign country.

But then I heard myself spinning this fantastic tale of their being on a safari in Tanganyika, a place about which I know almost nothing. I told that woman, and she believed me, that my parents and their guide were shot by poachers who were killing elephants for their ivory and mistook them for game wardens. I said that the poachers put their bodies on top of anthills, so that their skeletons were soon picked clean. They could be positively identified only by their dental work.

I used to find it easy and even exhilarating to lie that elaborately. I don’t anymore. And I wonder now if I didn’t develop that unwholesome habit very young, and because my parents were such an embarrassment, and especially my mother, who was fat enough to be a circus freak. I described much more attractive parents than I really had, in order to make people who knew nothing about them think well of me.

And during my final year in Vietnam, when I was in Public Information, I found it as natural as breathing to tell the press and replacements fresh off the boats or planes that we were clearly winning, and that the folks back home should be proud and happy about all the good things we were doing there.

I learned to lie like that in high school.

Another thing I learned in high school that was helpful in Vietnam: Alcohol and marijuana, if used in moderation, plus loud, usually low-class music, make stress and boredom infinitely more bearable. It was manna from Heaven that I came into this world with a gift for moderation in my intake of mood-modifying substances. During my last 2 years in high school, I don’t think my parents even suspected that I was half in the bag a lot of the time. All they ever complained about was the music, when I played the radio or the phonograph or when The Soul Merchants rehearsed in our basement, which Mom and Dad said was jungle music, and much too loud.

In Vietnam, the music was always much too loud. Practically everybody was half in the bag, including Chaplains. Several of the most gruesome accidents I had to explain to the press during my last year over there were caused by people who had rendered themselves imbecilic or maniacal by ingesting too much of what, if taken in moderation, could be a helpful chemical. I ascribed all such accidents, of course, to human error. The press understood. Who on this Earth hasn’t made a mistake or 2?

The assassination of an Austrian archduke led to World War I, and probably to World War II as well. Just as surely, my father’s black eye brought me to the sorry state in which I find myself today. He was looking for some way, almost any way, to recapture the respect of the community, and to attract favorable attention from Barrytron’s new owner, Du Pont. Du Pont, of course, has now been taken over by I. G. Farben of Germany, the same company that manufactured and packaged and labeled and addressed the cyanide gas used to kill civilians of all ages, including babes in arms, during the Holocaust.

What a planet.

So Father, his injured eye looking like a slit in a purple and yellow omelet, asked me if I was likely to receive any sort of honors at high school graduation. He didn’t say so, but he was frantic for something to brag about at work. He was so desperate that he was trying to get blood out of the turnip of my nonparticipation in high school sports, student government, or school-sponsored extracurricular activities. My grade average was high enough to get me into the University of Michigan, and on the honor roll now and then, but not into the National Honor Society.

It was so pitiful! It made me mad, too, because he was trying to make me partly responsible for the family’s image problem, which was all his fault. “I was always sorry you didn’t go out for football,” he said, as though a touchdown would have made everything all right again.

“Too late now,” I said.

“You let those 4 years slip by without doing anything but making jungle music,” he said.

It occurs to me now, a mere 43 years later, that I might have said to him that at least I managed my sex life better than he had managed his. I was getting laid all the time, thanks to jungle music, and so were the other Soul Merchants. Certain sorts of not just girls but full-grown women, too, found us glamorous free spirits up on the bandstand, imitating black people and smoking marijuana, and loving ourselves when we made music, and laughing about God knows what just about anytime.

I guess my love life is over now. Even if I could get out of prison, I wouldn’t want to give some trusting woman tuberculosis. She would be scared to death of getting AIDS, and I would give her TB instead. Wouldn’t that be nice?

So now I will have to make do with memories. As a prosthesis for my memory, I have begun to list all the women, excluding my wife and prostitutes, with whom I have “gone all the way,” as we used to say in high school. I find it impossible to remember any conquest I made as a teenager with clarity, to separate fact from fantasy. It was all a dream. So I begin my list with Shirley Kern, to whom I made love when I was 20. Shirley is my datum.

How many names will there be on the list? Too early to tell, but wouldn’t that number, whatever it turns out to be, be as good a thing as any to put on my tombstone as an enigmatic epitaph?

I am certainly sorry if I ruined the lives of any of those women who believed me when I said I loved them. I can only hope against hope that Shirley Kern and all the rest of them are still OK.

If it is any consolation to those who may not be OK, my own life was ruined by a Science Fair.

Father asked me if there wasn’t some school-sponsored extracurricular activity I could still try out for. This was only 8 weeks before my graduation! So I said, in a spirit of irony, since he knew science did not delight me as it delighted him, that my last opportunity to amount to anything was the County Science Fair. I got Bs in Physics and Chemistry, but you could stuff both those subjects up your fundament as far as I was concerned.

But Father rose from his chair in a state of sick excitement. “Let’s go down in the basement,” he said. “There’s work to do.”

“What kind of work?” I said. This was about midnight.

And he said, “You are going to enter and win the Science Fair.”

Which I did. Or, rather, Father entered and won the Science Fair, requiring only that I sign an affidavit swearing that the exhibit was all my own work, and that I memorize his explanation of what it proved. It was about crystals and how they grew and why they grew.

His competition was weak. He was, after all, a 43-year-old chemical engineer with 20 years in industry, taking on teenagers in a community where few parents had higher educations. The main business in the county back then was still agriculture, corn and pigs and beef cattle. Barrytron was the sole sophisticated industry, and only a handful of people such as Father understood its processes and apparatus. Most of the company’s employees were content to do what they were told and incurious as to how it was, exactly, that they had worked the miracles that somehow arrived all packaged and labeled and addressed on the loading docks.

I am reminded now of dead American soldiers, teenagers mostly, all packaged and labeled and addressed on loading docks in Vietnam. How many people knew or cared how these curious artifacts were actually manufactured?

A few.

Why Father and I were not branded as swindlers, why my exhibit was not thrown out of the Science Fair, why I am a prisoner awaiting trial now instead of a star reporter for the Korean owners of The New York Times has to do with compassion, I now believe. The feeling was general in the community, I think, that our little family had suffered enough. Nobody in the county gave much of a darn about science anyway.

The other exhibits were so dumb and pitiful, too, that the best of them would make the county look stupid if it and its honest creator went on to the statewide competition in Cleveland. Our exhibit sure looked slick and tidy. Another big plus from the judges’ point of view, maybe, when they thought about what the county’s best was going to be up against in Cleveland: our exhibit was extremely hard for an ordinary person to understand or find at all interesting.

I remained philosophical, thanks to marijuana and alcohol, while the community decided whether to crucify me as a fraud or to crown me as a genius. Father may have had a buzz on, too. Sometimes it’s hard to tell. I served under 2 Generals in Vietnam who drank a quart of whiskey a day, but it was hard to detect. They always looked serious and dignified.

So off Father and I went to Cleveland. His spirits were high. I knew we would go smash up there. I don’t know why he didn’t know we would go smash up there. The only advice he gave me was to keep my shoulders back when I was explaining my exhibit and not to smoke where the judges might see me doing it. He was talking about ordinary cigarettes. He didn’t know I smoked the other kind.

I make no apologies for having been zapped during my darkest days in high school. Winston Churchill was bombed out of his skull on brandy and Cuban cigars during the darkest days of World War II.

Hitler, of course, thanks to the advanced technology of Germany, was among the first human beings to turn their brains to cobwebs with amphetamine. He actually chewed on carpets, they say. Yum yum.

Mother did not come to Cleveland with Father and me. She was ashamed to leave the house, she was so big and fat. So I had to do most of the marketing after school. I also had to do most of the housework, she had so much trouble getting around. My familiarity with housework was useful at West Point, and then again when my mother-in-law and then my wife went nuts. It was actually sort of relaxing, because I could see that I had accomplished something undeniably good, and I didn’t have to think about my troubles while I was doing it. How my mother’s eyes used to shine when she saw what I had cooked for her!

My mother’s story is 1 of the few real success stories in this book. She joined Weight Watchers when she was 60, which is my age now. When the ceiling fell on her at Niagara Falls, she weighed only 52 kilograms!

This library is full of stories of supposed triumphs, which makes me very suspicious of it. It’s misleading for people to read about great successes, since even for middle-class and upper-class white people, in my experience, failure is the norm. It is unfair to youngsters particularly to leave them wholly unprepared for monster screw-ups and starring roles in Keystone Kop comedies and much, much worse.

The Ohio Science Fair took place in Cleveland’s beautiful Moellenkamp Auditorium. The theater seats had been removed and replaced with tables for all the exhibits. There was a hint of my then distant future in the auditorium’s having been given to the city by the Moellenkamps, the same coal and shipping family that gave Tarkington College this library. This was long before they sold the boats and mines to a British and Omani consortium based in Luxembourg.

But the present was bad enough. Even as Father and I were setting up our exhibit, we were spotted by other contestants as a couple of comedians, as Laurel and Hardy, maybe, with Father as the fat and officious one and me as the dumb and skinny one. The thing was, Father was doing all the setting up, and I was standing around looking bored. All I wanted to do was go outside and hide behind a tree or something and smoke a cigarette. We were violating the most basic rule of the Fair, which was that the young exhibitors were supposed to do all the work, from start to finish. Parents or teachers or whatever were forbidden in writing to help at all.

It was as though I had entered the Soapbox Derby over in Akron, Ohio, in a car for coasting down hills that I had supposedly built myself but was actually my dad’s Ferrari Gran Turismo.

We hadn’t made any of the exhibit in the basement. When, at the very beginning, Father said that we should go down in the basement and get to work, we had actually gone down in the basement. But we stayed down there for only about 10 minutes while he thought and thought, growing ever mere excited. I didn’t say anything.

Actually, I did say one thing. “Mmd if I smoke?” I said.

“Go right ahead,” he said.

That was a breakthrough for me. It meant I could smoke in the house whenever I pleased, and he wouldn’t say anything.

Then he led the way back up to the living room. He sat down at Mother’s desk and made a list of things that should go into the exhibit.

“What are you doing, Dad?” I said.

“Shh,” he said. “I’m busy. Don’t bother me.”

So I didn’t bother him. I had more than enough to think about as it was. I was pretty sure I had gonorrhea. It was some sort of urethral infection, which was making me very uncomfortable. But I hadn’t seen a doctor about it, because the doctor, by law, would have had to report me to the Department of Health, and my parents would have been told about it, as though they hadn’t had enough heartaches already.

Whatever the infection was, it cleared itself up without my doing anything about it. It couldn’t have been gonorrhea, which never stops eating you up of its own accord. Why should it ever stop of its own accord? It’s having such a nice time. Why call off the party? Look how healthy and happy the kids are.

Twice in later life I would contract what was unambiguously gonorrhea, once in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and then again in Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City, in Vietnam. In both instances I told the doctors about the self-healing infection 1 had had in high school.

It might have been yeast, they said. I should have opened a bakery.

So Father started coming home from work with pieces of the exhibit, which had been made to his order at Barrytron: pedestals and display cases, and explanatory signs and labels made by the print shop that did a lot of work for Barrytron. The crystals themselves came from a Pittsburgh chemical supply house that did a lot of business with Barrytron. One crystal, I remember, caine all the way from Burma.

The chemical supply house must have gone to some trouble to get together a remarkable collection of crystals for us, since what they sent us couldn’t have come from their regular stock. In order to please a big customer like Barrytron, they may have gone to somebody who collected and sold crystals for their beauty and rarity, not as chemicals but as jewelry.

At any rate, the crystals, which were of museum quality, caused Father to utter these famous last words after he spread them out on the coffee table in our living room, gloatingly: “Son, there is no way we can lose.”

Well, as Jean-Paul Sartre says in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, “Hell is other people.” Other people made short work of Father’s and my invincible contest entry in Cleveland 43 years ago.

Generals George Armstrong Custer at the Little Bighorn, and Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg, and William Westmoreland in Vietnam all come to mind.

Somebody said I time, I remember, that General Custer’s famous last words were, “Where are all these blankety-blank Injuns comin’ from?”

Father and I, and not our pretty crystals, were for a little while the most fascinating exhibit in Moellenkamp Auditorium. We were a demonstration of abnormal psychology. Other contestants and their mentors gathered around us and put us through our paces. They certainly knew which buttons to push, so to speak, to make us change color or twist and turn or grin horribly or whatever.

One contestant asked Father how old he was and what high school he was attending.

That was when we should have packed up our things and gotten out of there. The judges hadn’t had a look at us yet, and neither had any reporters. We hadn’t yet put up the sign that said what my name was and what school system I represented. We hadn’t yet said anything worth remembering.

If we had folded up and vanished quietly right then and there, leaving nothing but an empty table, we might have entered the history of American science as no-shows who got sick or something. There was already an empty table, which would stay empty, only 5 meters away from ours. Father and I had heard that it was going to stay empty and why. The would-be exhibitor and his mother and father were all in the hospital in Lima, Ohio, not Liina, Peru. That was their hometown. They had scarcely backed out of their driveway the day before, headed for Cleveland, they thought, with the exhibit in the trunk, when they were rear-ended by a drunk driver.

The accident wouldn’t have been half as serious as it turned out to be if the exhibit hadn’t included several bottles of different acids which broke and touched off the gasoline. Both vehicles were immediately engulfed in flames.

The exhibit was, I think, meant to show several important services that acids, which most people were afraid of and didn’t like to think much about, were performing every day for Humanity.

The people who looked us over and asked us questions, and did not like what they saw and heard, sent for a judge. They wanted us disqualified. We were worse than dishonest. We were ridiculous!

I wanted to throw up. I said to Father, “Dad, honest to God, I think we better get out of here. We made a mistake.”

But he said we had nothing to be ashamed of, and that we certainly weren’t going to go home with our tails between our legs.

Vietnam!

So a judge did come over, and easily determined that I had no understanding whatsoever of the exhibit. He then took Father aside and negotiated a political settlement, man to man. He did not want to stir up bad feelings in our hOme county, which had sent me to Cleveland as its champion. Nor did he want to humiliate Father, who was an upstanding member of his community who obviously had not read the rules carefully. He would not humiliate us with a formal disqualification, which might attract unfavorable publicity, if Father in turn would not insist on having my entry put in serious competition with the rest as though it were legitimate.

When the time came, he said, he and the other judges would simply pass us by without comment. It would be their secret that we couldn’t possibly win anything.

That was the deal.

History.