Help, I Am Being Held Prisoner

2

MY NAME IS Harold Albert Chester Kunt. I am thirty-two years old and unmarried, though three times in my early twenties I did propose marriage to girls I’d become emotionally involved with. All three rejected me, two with embarrassments and evasions that were in a way worse than the fact of the rejection itself. Only one was honest with me, saying, “I’m sorry. I do love you, Harry, but I just can’t see spending the rest of my life as Mrs. Kunt.”

“Koont,” I said. “With an umlaut.” But it was no use.

I don’t blame my parents. They’re German, they know their name only as an ancient Germanic variation on the noun Kunst, which means art. They came to this country in 1937, Aryan anti-Nazis who emigrated not because they loved America but because they hated what had become of Germany. So far as possible, they have remained German from that day to this, living at first in Yorkville, which is the German section of Manhattan, and later in German neighborhoods in a number of smaller upstate towns. My father eventually learned to speak English almost as well as a native, but my mother is still more German than American. Neither of them has ever seemed aware of any undercover implications in the name we all share.

Well, I have. The wisecracks started when I was four years old-at least I don’t remember any from further back than that-and they haven’t stopped yet. I would have loved to change my name, but how could I explain such a move to my parents? I’m an only child, coming to them rather late in their lives, and I just couldn’t hurt them that way. “When they die,” I’d tell myself, but they’re a long-lived pair; besides, thoughts like that put me in the position of wishing for my parents’ death, which only made things worse.

I came to the early conclusion that my name was nothing more than a practical joke played on me by a rather sophomoric God. There wasn’t any way I could get even with Him directly, of course, but much could be done against that God’s wisecracking creatures here below. Over my life, much has been done.

The first practical joke I myself performed was in my eighth year, the victim being my second grade teacher, a woman with a rotten disposition and no heart, who regimented the children in her charge like a Marine Sergeant with a bunch of stockade misfits to contend with. She had a habit of sucking the eraser end of a pencil while thinking up some group punishment for a minor individual misdemeanor, and one day I gouged the gray-black eraser out of an ordinary yellow Ticonderoga pencil and replaced it with a gray-black dollop of dried dog manure carefully shaped to match. It took two days to infiltrate my loaded pencil onto her desk, but the time and planning and concentration were well worth it. Her expression when at last she put that pencil into her mouth was so glorious -she looked like a rumpled photograph of herself-that it kept the entire class happy for the rest of the school year, even without the array of frogs, thumbtacks, whoopee cushions, leaking pens, limburger cheese and dribble glasses which marched in the original eraser’s wake. That woman flailed away at her students day after day like a drunk with the d.t.’s but it didn’t matter. I was indefatigable.

And anonymous. I've read where Chairman Mao says the guerilla is a fish who swims in the ocean of the populace, but I was already aware of that by the age of eight. The teacher invariably gave group punishments in response to my outrages, and I knew of several of my classmates who would have been happy to turn in the ‘guilty’ party if they’d had the chance, so I maintained absolute security. Besides, my activities weren’t limited to authority figures; my classmates, too, spent much of that school year awash in molasses, sneezing powder, chewing gum and exploding light bulbs, and would have loved an opportunity to chat en masse with the originator of all the fun. But I was never caught, and only once did discovery even come close; that was when a group of three fellow students entered the boys’ room while I was stretching Saran Wrap over the toilets. But I was a bright eight- year-old, and claimed to be taking the Saran Wrap off the toilets, having discovered it there just in time to avoid a nasty accident. I was congratulated on my narrow escape, and was not suspected.

So. In the second grade, the main elements of my life were already firmly established. My name would be an object of crass humor, but I would return the insult with humor just as crass but much more decisive. And I would do so anonymously.

Until, in my thirty-second year, I would leave a carefully painted naked female mannequin sprawled leggily on the hood of a parked Chevrolet Impala on the verge of the Long Island Expressway just west of the Grand Central Parkway interchange on a sunny Sunday afternoon in early May. Returning from a neighborhood bar forty-five minutes later, I would find that one result of my prank had been a seventeen-car collision in which twenty-some people were injured, including the three children referred to by Warden Gadmore, plus two members of the Congress of the United States and the unmarried young ladies who had been sharing their car with them.

Neither the warden nor I had mentioned those Congressmen, but they were the deciding factor. Even with the injured children I might have gotten off with a suspended sentence and a warning; the Congressmen got me five to fifteen in the state pen.