Hocus Pocus

27

Here is how I got a job at the prison across the lake on the same day Tarkington College fired me:

I came out of the garage, having read that germs, not people, were the darlings of the Universe. I got into my Mercedes, intending to go down to the Black Cat Café to pick up gossip, if I could, about anybody who was hiring anybody to do practically any kind of work anywhere in this valley. But all 4 tires went bloomp, bloomp, bloomp.

All 4 tires had been cored by Townies the night before. I got out of the Mercedes and realized that I had to urinate. But I didn’t want to do it in my own house. I didn’t want to talk to the crazy people in there. How is that for excitement? What germ ever lived a life so rich in challenges and opportunities?

At least nobody was shooting at me, and I wasn’t wanted by the police.

So I went into the tall weeds of a vacant lot across the street from and below my house, which was built on a slope. I whipped out my ding-dong and found it was aimed down at a beautiful white Italian racing bicycle lying on its side. The bicycle was so full of magic and innocence, hiding there. It might have been a unicorn.

After urinating elsewhere, I set that perfect artificial animal upright. It was brand-new. It had a seat like a banana. Why had somebody thrown it away? To this day I do not know. Despite our enormous brains and jam-packed libraries, we germ hotels cannot expect to understand absolutely everything. My guess is that some kid from a poor family in the town below came across it while skulking around the campus. He assumed, as would I, that it belonged to some Tarkington student who was superrich, who probably had an expensive car and more beautiful clothes than he could ever wear. So he took it, as would I when my turn came. But he lost his nerve, as I would not, and hid it in the weeds rather than face arrest for grand larceny.

As I would soon find out the hard way, the bike actually belonged to a poor person, a teenage boy who worked in the stable after school, who had scrimped and saved until he could afford to buy as splendid a bicycle as had ever been seen on the campus of Tarkington.

To play with my mistaken scenario of the bike’s be-longing to a rich kid: It seemed possible to me that some rich kid had so many expensive playthings that he couldn’t be bothered with taking care of this one. Maybe it wouldn’t fit into the trunk of his Ferrari Gran Turismo. You wouldn’t believe all the treasures, diamond earrings, Rolex watches, and on and on, that wound up unclaimed in the college’s Lost and Found.

Do I resent rich people? No. The best or worst I can do is notice them. I agree with the great Socialist writer George Tarwell, who felt that rich people were poor people with money. I would discover this to be the majority opinion in the prison across the lake as well, although nobody over there had ever heard of George Orwell. Many of the inmates themselves had been poor people with money before they were caught, with the most costly cars and jewelry and watches and clothe~. Many, as teenage drug dealers, had no doubt owned bicycles as desirable as the one I found in the weeds in the highlands of Scipio.

When convicts found out that my car was nothing but a 4-door, 6-cylinder Mercedes, they often scorned or pitied me. It was the same with many of the students at Tarkington. I might as well have owned a battered pickup truck.

So I walked that bicycle out of the weeds and onto the steep slope of Clinton Street. I wouldn’t have to pedal or turn a corner in order to deliver myself to the front door of the Black Cat Café. I would have to use the brakes, however, and I tested those. If the brakes didn’t work, I would go off the end of the dock of the old barge terminal and, alley-oop, straight into Lake Mohiga.

I straddled the banana-shaped saddle, which turned out to be surprisingly considerate of my sensitive crotch and hindquarters. Sailing down a hill on that bicycle in the sunshine wasn’t anything like being crucified.

I parked the bike in plain view in front of the Black Cat Café, noting several champagne corks on the sidewalk and in the gutter. In Vietnam they would have been cartridge cases. This was where Arthur K. Clarke had formed up his motorcycle gang for its unopposed assault on Tarkington. The troops and their ladies had first drunk champagne. There were also remains of sandwiches, and I stepped on one, which I think was either cucumber or watercress. I scraped it off on the curbing, left it there for germs. I’ll tell you this, though:

No germ is going to leave the Solar System eating sissy stuff like that.

Plutonium! Now there’s the stuff to put hair on a microbe’s chest.

I entered the Black Cat Café for the first time in my life. This was my club now, since I had been busted down to Townie. Maybe, after a few drinks, I’d go back up the hill and let air out of the tires of some of Clarke’s motorcycles and limousines.

I bellied up to the bar and said, “Give me a wop.” That was what I had heard people down in the town called Budweiser beer, ever since Italians had bought Anheuser-Busch, the company that made Budweiser. The Italians got the St. Louis Cardinals, too, as part of the deal.

“Wop coming up,” said the barmaid. She was just the kind of woman I would go for right now, if I didn’t have TB. She was in her late 30s, and had had a lot of bad luck recently, and didn’t know where to turn next. I knew her story. So did everybody else in town. She and her husband restored an old-time ice cream parlor 2 doors up Clinton Street from the Black Cat Café. But then her husband died because he had inhaled so much paint remover. The germs inside him couldn’t have felt too great, either.

Who knows, though? The Elders of Tralfamadore may have had her husband restore the ice cream parlor just so we could have a new strain of germs capable of surviving a passage through a cloud of paint remover in outer space.

Her name was Muriel Peck, and her husband Jerry Peck was a direct descendant of the first President of Tarkington College. His father grew up in this valley, but Jerry was raised in San Diego, California, and then he went to work for an ice cream company out there. The ice cream company was bought by President Mobutu of Zaire, and Jerry was let go. So he came here with Muriel and their 2 kids to discover his roots.

Since he already knew ice cream, it made perfect sense for him to buy the old ice cream parlor. It would have been better for all concerned if he had known a little less about ice cream and a little more about paint remover.

Muriel and I would eventually become lovers, but not until I had been working at Athena Prison for 2 weeks. I finally got nerve enough to ask her, since she and Jerry had both majored in Literature at Swarthmore College, if either of them had ever taken the time to read a label on a can of paint remover.

“Not until it was much too late,” she said.

Over at the prison I would encounter a surprising number of convicts who had been damaged not by paint remover but by paint. When they were little they had eaten chips or breathed dust from old lead-based pains. Lead poisoning had made them very stupid. They Wéré all in prison for the dumbest crimes imaginable, and I was never able to teach any of them to read and write.

Thanks to them, do we now have germs which eat lead?

I know we have germs which eat petroleum. What their story is, I do not know. Maybe they’re that Honduran gonorrhea.