Hocus Pocus Part 4

Both notes said this and nothing more: "My work is done."

In Sam Wakefield's case, that completed work, if he didn't want to count the Vietnam War, consisted of 3 new buildings, which probably would have been built anyway, no matter who was Tarkington's President.

I AM NOT writing this book for people below the age of 18, but I see no harm in telling young people to prepare for failure rather than success, since failure is the main thing that is going to happen to them.

In terms of basketball alone, almost everybody has to lose. A high percentage of the convicts in Athena, and now in this much smaller inst.i.tution, devoted their childhood and youth to nothing but basketball and still got their brains knocked out in the early rounds of some darn fool tournament.

LET ME SAY further to the chance young reader that I would probably have wrecked my body and been thrown out of the University of Michigan and died on Skid Row somewhere if I had not been subjected to the discipline of West Point. I am talking about my body now, and not my mind, and there is no better way for a young person to learn respect for his or now her bones and nerves and muscles than to accept an appointment to any one of the 3 major service academies.

I entered the Point a young punk with bad posture and a sunken chest, and no history of sports partic.i.p.ation, save for a few fights after dances where our band had played. When I graduated and received my commission as a Second Lieutenant in the Regular Army, and tossed my hat in the air, and bought a red Corvette with the back pay the Academy had put aside for me, my spine was as straight as a ramrod, my lungs were as capacious as the bellows of the forge of Vulcan, I was captain of the judo and wrestling teams, and I had not smoked any sort of cigarette or swallowed a drop of alcohol for 4 whole years! Nor was I s.e.xually promiscuous anymore. I never felt better in my life.

I can remember saying to my mother and father at graduation, "Can this be me?"

They were so proud of me, and I was so proud of me.

I turned to Jack Patton, who was there with his b.o.o.by-trapped sister and mother and his normal father, and I asked him, "What do you think of us now, Lieutenant Patton?" He was the goat of our cla.s.s, meaning he had the lowest grade average. So had General George Patton been, again no relative of Jack's, who had been such a great leader in World War II.

What Jack replied, of course, unsmilingly, was that he had to laugh like h.e.l.l.

7.

I HAVE BEEN reading issues of the Tarkington College alumni magazine, The Musketeer, The Musketeer, going all the way back to its first issue, which came out in 1910. It was so named in honor of Musket Mountain, a high hill not a mountain, on the western edge of the campus, at whose foot, next to the stable, so many victims of the escaped convicts are buried now. going all the way back to its first issue, which came out in 1910. It was so named in honor of Musket Mountain, a high hill not a mountain, on the western edge of the campus, at whose foot, next to the stable, so many victims of the escaped convicts are buried now.

Every proposed physical improvement of the college plant triggered a storm of protest. When Tarkington graduates came back here, they wanted it to be exactly as they remembered it. And 1 thing at least never did change, which was the size of the student body, stabilized at 300 since 1925. Meanwhile, of course, the growth of the prison population on the other side of the lake, invisible behind walls, was as irresistible as Thunder Beaver, as Niagara Falls.

Judging from letters to The Musketeer, The Musketeer, I think the change that generated the most pa.s.sionate resistance was the modernization of the Lutz Carillon soon after World War II, a memorial to Ernest Hubble Hisc.o.c.k. He was a Tarkington graduate who at the age of 21 was a nose-gunner on a Navy bomber whose pilot crashed his plane with a full load of bombs onto the flight deck of a j.a.panese aircraft carrier in the Battle of Midway during World War II. I think the change that generated the most pa.s.sionate resistance was the modernization of the Lutz Carillon soon after World War II, a memorial to Ernest Hubble Hisc.o.c.k. He was a Tarkington graduate who at the age of 21 was a nose-gunner on a Navy bomber whose pilot crashed his plane with a full load of bombs onto the flight deck of a j.a.panese aircraft carrier in the Battle of Midway during World War II.

I would have given anything to die in a war that meaningful.

ME? I WAS in show business, trying to get a big audience for the Government on TV by killing real people with live ammunition, something the other advertisers were not free to do.

The other advertisers had to fake everything.

Oddly enough, the actors always turned out to be a lot more believable on the little screen than we were. Real people in real trouble don't come across, somehow.

THERE IS STILL so much we have to learn about TV!

HISc.o.c.k'S PARENTS, WHO were divorced and remarried but still friends, chipped in to have the bells mechanized, so that one person could play them by means of a keyboard. Before that, many people had to haul away on ropes, and once a bell was set swinging, it stopped swinging in its own sweet time. There was no way of damping it.

In the old days 4 of the bells were famously off-key, but beloved, and were known as "Pickle" and "Lemon" and "Big Cracked John" and "Beelzebub." The Hisc.o.c.ks had them sent to Belgium, to the same bell foundry where Andre Lutz had been an apprentice so long ago. There they were machined and weighted to perfect pitch, their condition when I got to play them.

It can't have been music the carillon made in the old days. Those who used to make whatever it was described it in their letters to The Musketeer The Musketeer with the same sort of batty love and berserk grat.i.tude I hear from convicts when they tell me what it was like to take heroin laced with amphetamine, and angel dust laced with LSD, and crack alone, and on and on. I think of all those learning-disabled kids in the old days, hauling away on ropes with the bells clanging sweet and sour and as loud as thunder directly overhead, and I am sure they were finding the same undeserved happiness so many of the convicts found in chemicals. with the same sort of batty love and berserk grat.i.tude I hear from convicts when they tell me what it was like to take heroin laced with amphetamine, and angel dust laced with LSD, and crack alone, and on and on. I think of all those learning-disabled kids in the old days, hauling away on ropes with the bells clanging sweet and sour and as loud as thunder directly overhead, and I am sure they were finding the same undeserved happiness so many of the convicts found in chemicals.

And haven't I myself said that the happiest parts of my life were when I played the bells? With absolutely no basis in reality, I felt like many an addict that I'd won, I'd won, I'd won!

WHEN I WAS made carillonneur, I taped this sign on the door of the chamber containing the keyboard: "Thor." That's who I felt like when I played, sending thunderbolts down the hillside and through the industrial ruins of Scipio, and out over the lake, and up to the walls of the prison on the other side.

There were echoes when I played-bouncing off the empty factories and the prison walls, and arguing with notes just leaving the bells overhead. When Lake Mohiga was frozen, their argument was so loud that people who had never been in the area before thought the prison had its own set of bells, and that their carillonneur was mocking me.

And I would yell into the mad clas.h.i.+ng of bells and echoes, "Laugh, Jack, laugh!"

AFTER THE PRISON break, the College President would shoot convicts down below from the belfry. The acoustics of the valley would cause the escapees to make many wrong guesses as to where the shots were coming from.

8.

IN MY DAY, the bells no longer swung. They were welded to rigid shafts. Their clappers had been removed. They were struck instead by bolts thrust by electricity from Niagara Falls. Their singing could be stopped in an instant by brakes lined with neoprene.

The room in which a dozen or more learning-disabled bell-pullers used to be zonked out of their skulls by h.e.l.lishly loud cacophony contained a 3-octave keyboard against 1 wall. The holes for the ropes in the ceiling had been plugged and plastered over.

Nothing works up there anymore. The room with the keyboard and the belfry above were riddled by bullets and also bazooka sh.e.l.ls fired by escaped convicts down below after a sniper up among the bells shot and killed 11 of them, and wounded 15 more. The sniper was the President of Tarkington College. Even though he was dead when the convicts got to him, they were so outraged that they crucified him in the loft of the stable where the students used to keep their horses, at the foot of Musket Mountain.

So a President of Tarkington, my mentor Sam Wakefield, blew his brains out with a Colt .45. And his successor, although he couldn't feel anything, was crucified.

One would have to say that that was extra-heavy history.

AS FOR LIGHT history: The no longer useful clappers of the bells were hung in order of size, but unlabeled, on the wall of the foyer of this library, above the perpetual-motion machines. So it became a college tradition for uppercla.s.spersons to tell incoming freshmen that the clappers were the petrified p.e.n.i.ses of different mammals. The biggest clapper, which had once belonged to Beelzebub, the biggest bell, was said to be the p.e.n.i.s of none other than Moby d.i.c.k, the Great White Whale.

Many of the freshmen believed it, and were watched to see how long they went on believing it, just as they had been watched when they were little, no doubt, to see how long they would go on believing in the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and Santa Claus.

VIETNAM.

MOST OF THE letters to The Musketeer The Musketeer protesting the modernization of the Lutz Carillon are from people who had somehow hung on to the wealth and power they had been born to. One, though, is from a man who admitted that he was in prison for fraud, and that he had ruined his life and that of his family with his twin addictions to alcohol and gambling. His letter was like this book, a gallows speech. protesting the modernization of the Lutz Carillon are from people who had somehow hung on to the wealth and power they had been born to. One, though, is from a man who admitted that he was in prison for fraud, and that he had ruined his life and that of his family with his twin addictions to alcohol and gambling. His letter was like this book, a gallows speech.

One thing he had still looked forward to, he said, after he had paid his debt to society, was returning to Scipio to ring the bells with ropes again.

"Now you take that away from me," he said.

ONE LETTER IS from an old bell-puller, very likely dead by now, a member of the Cla.s.s of 1924 who had married a man named Marthinus de Wet, the owner of a gold mine in Krugersdorp, South Africa. She knew the history of the bells, that they had been made from weapons gathered up after the Battle of Gettysburg. She did not mind that the bells would soon be played electrically. The bad idea, as far as she was concerned, was that the sour bells, Pickle and Lemon and Big Cracked John and Beelzebub, were going to be turned on lathes in Belgium until they were either in tune or on the sc.r.a.p heap.

"Are Tarkington students no longer to be humanized and humbled as I was day after day," she asked, "by the cries from the bell tower of the dying on the sacred, blood-soaked grounds of Gettysburg?"

The bells controversy inspired a lot of purple prose like that, much of it dictated to a secretary or a machine, no doubt. It is quite possible that Mrs. de Wet graduated from Tarkington without being able to write any better than most of the ill-educated prisoners across the lake.

IF MY SOCIALIST grandfather, nothing but a gardener at Butler University, could read the letter from Mrs. de Wet and note its South African return address, he would be grimly gratified. There was a clear-as-crystal demonstration of a woman living high on profits from the labor of black miners, overworked and underpaid.

He would have seen exploitation of the poor and powerless in the growth of the prison across the lake as well. The prison to him would have been a scheme for depriving the lower social orders of leaders.h.i.+p in the Cla.s.s Struggle and for providing them with a horrible alternative to accepting whatever their greedy paymasters would give them in the way of working conditions and subsistence.

By the time I got to Tarkington College, though, he would have been wrong about the meaning of the prison across the lake, since poor and powerless people, no matter how docile, were no longer of use to canny investors. What they used to do was now being done by heroic and uncomplaining machinery.

So an appropriate sign to put over the gate to Athena might have been, instead of "Work Makes Free," for example: "Too bad you were born. n.o.body has any use for you," or maybe: "Come in and stay in, all you burdens on Society."

9.

A FORMER ROOMMATE of Ernest Hubble Hisc.o.c.k, the dead war hero, who had also been in the war, who had lost an arm as a Marine on Iwo Jima, wrote that the memorial Hisc.o.c.k himself would have wanted most was a promise by the Board of Trustees at the start of each academic year to keep the enrollment the same size it had been in his time.

So if Ernest Hubble Hisc.o.c.k is looking down from Heaven now, or wherever it is that war heroes go after dying, he would be dismayed to see his beloved campus surrounded by barbed wire and watchtowers. The bells are shot to h.e.l.l. The number of students, if you can call convicts that, is about 2,000 now.

WHEN THERE WERE only 300 "students" here, each one had a bedroom and a bathroom and plenty of closets all his or her own. Each bedroom was part of a 2-bedroom, 2-bathroom suite with a common living room for 2. Each living room had couches and easy chairs and a working fireplace, and state-of-the-art sound-reproduction equipment and a big-screen TV.

At the Athena state prison, as I would discover when I went to work over there, there were 6 men to each cell and each cell had been built for 2. Each 50 cells had a recreation room with one Ping-Pong table and one TV. The TV, moreover, showed only tapes of programs, including news, at least 10 years old. The idea was to keep the prisoners from becoming distressed about anything going on in the outside world that hadn't been all taken care of one way or the other, presumably, in the long-ago.

They could feast their eyes on whatever they liked, just so long as it wasn't relevant.

HOW THOSE LETTER-WRITERS loved not just the college but the whole Mohiga Valley-the seasons, the lake, the forest primeval on the other side. And there were few differences between student pleasures in their times and my own. In my time, students didn't skate on the lake anymore, but on an indoor rink given in 1971 by the Israel Cohen Family. But they still had sailboat races and canoe races on the lake. They still had picnics by the ruins of the locks at the head of the lake. Many students still brought their own horses to school with them. In my time, several students brought not just 1 horse but 3, since polo was a major sport. In 1976 and again in 1980, Tarkington College had an undefeated polo team.

There are no horses in the stable now, of course. The escaped convicts, surrounded and starving a mere 4 days after the prison break, calling themselves "Freedom Fighters" and flying an American flag from the top of the bell tower of this library, ate the horses and the campus dogs, too, and fed pieces of them to their hostages, who were the Trustees of the college.

THE MOST SUCCESSFUL athlete ever to come from Tarkington, arguably, was a horseman from my own time, Lowell Chung. He won a Bronze Medal as a member of the United States Equestrian Team in Seoul, South Korea, back in 1988. His mother owned half of Honolulu, but he couldn't read or write or do math worth a darn. He could sure do Physics, though. He could tell me how levers and lenses and electricity and heat and all sorts of power plants worked, and predict correctly what an experiment would prove before I'd performed it-just as long as I didn't insist that he quantify anything, that he tell me what the numbers were.

He earned his a.s.sociate in the Arts and Sciences Degree in 1984. That was the only degree we awarded, fair warning to other inst.i.tutions and future employers, and to the students themselves, that our graduates' intellectual achievements, while respectable, were unconventional.

LOWELL CHUNG GOT me on a horse for the first time in my life when I was 43 years old. He dared me. I told him I certainly wasn't going to commit suicide on the back of one of his fire-cracker polo ponies, since I had a wife and a mother-in-law and 2 children to support. So he borrowed a gentle, patient old mare from his girlfriend at the time, who was Claudia Roosevelt.

Comically enough, Lowell's then girlfriend was a whiz at arithmetic, but otherwise a nitwit. You could ask her, "What is 5,111 times 10,022, divided by 97?" Claudia would reply, "That's 528,066.4. So what? So what?"

So what indeed! The lesson I myself learned over and over again when teaching at the college and then the prison was the uselessness of information to most people, except as entertainment. If facts weren't funny or scary, or couldn't make you rich, the heck with them.

WHEN I LATER went to work at the prison, I encountered a ma.s.s murderer named Alton Darwin who also could do arithmetic in his head. He was Black. Unlike Claudia Roosevelt, he was highly intelligent in the verbal area. The people he had murdered were rivals or deadbeats or police informers or cases of mistaken ident.i.ty or innocent bystanders in the illegal drug industry. His manner of speaking was elegant and thought-provoking.

He hadn't killed nearly as many people as I had. But then again, he hadn't had my advantage, which was the full cooperation of our Government.

Also, he had done all his killing for reasons of money. I had never stooped to that.

When I found out that he could do arithmetic in his head, I said to him, "That's a remarkable gift you have."

"Doesn't seem fair, does it," he said, "that somebody should come into the world with such a great advantage over the common folk? When I get out of here, I'm going to buy me a pretty striped tent and put up a sign saying 'One dollar. Come on in and see the n.i.g.g.e.r do arithmetic.' " He wasn't ever going to get out of there. He was serving a life sentence without hope of parole.

DARWIN'S FANTASY ABOUT starring in a mental-arithmetic show when he got out, incidentally, was inspired by something 1 of his great-grandfathers did in South Carolina after World War I. All the airplane pilots back then were white, and some of them did stunt flying at country fairs. They were called "barnstormers."

And 1 of these barnstormers with a 2-c.o.c.kpit plane strapped Darwin's great-grandfather in the front c.o.c.kpit, even though the great-grandfather couldn't even drive an automobile. The barnstormer crouched down in the rear c.o.c.kpit, so people couldn't see him but he could still work the controls. And people came from far and wide, according to Darwin, "to see the n.i.g.g.e.r fly the airplane."

He was only 25 years old when we first met, the same age as Lowell Chung when Lowell won the Bronze Medal for horseback riding in Seoul, South Korea. When I was 25, I hadn't killed anybody yet, and hadn't had nearly as many women as Darwin had. When he was only 20, he told me, he paid cash for a Ferrari. I didn't have a car of my own, which was a good car, all right, a Chevrolet Corvette, but nowhere near as good as a Ferrari, until I was 21.

At least I, too, had paid cash.

WHEN WE TALKED at the prison, he had a running joke that was the a.s.sumption that we came from different planets. The prison was all there was to his planet, and I had come in a flying saucer from one that was much bigger and wiser.

This enabled him to comment ironically on the only s.e.xual activities possible inside the walls. "You have little babies on your planet?" he asked.

"Yes, we have little babies," I said.

"We got people here trying to have babies every which way," he said, "but they never get babies. What do you think they're doing wrong?"