Hocus Pocus

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

ELIAS TARKINGTON WAS a tall and skinny man with chin whiskers and a stovepipe hat. He was shot through the right chest at Gettysburg, but not fatally. The man who shot him was 1 of the few Confederate soldiers to reach the Union lines during Pickett’s Charge. That Johnny Reb died in ecstasy among his enemies, believing that he had shot Abraham Lincoln. A crumbling newspaper account I have found here in what used to be the college library, which is now the prison library, gives his last words as follows: “Go home, Bluebellies. Old Satan’s daid.” During my 3 years in Vietnam, I certainly heard plenty of last words by dying American footsoldiers. Not 1 of them, however, had illusions that he had somehow accomplished something worthwhile in the process of making the Supreme Sacrifice. One boy of only 18 said to me while he was dying and I was holding him in my arms, “Dirty joke, dirty joke.”

SAM WAKEFIELD ASKED me if I had ever considered the advantages of a career in the military. This was a man who had been wounded in World War II, the 1 war I would have liked to fight in, and then in Korea. He would eventually resign from the Army with the Vietnam War still going on, and then become President of Tarkington College, and then blow his brains out.

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 institution, 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.

Judging from letters to The Musketeer, I think the change that generated the most passionate resistance was the modernization of the Lutz Carillon soon after World War II, a memorial to Ernest Hubble Hiscock. 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 Japanese 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!

WHEN WE TALKED at the prison, he had a running joke that was the assumption 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 sexual 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?” HE WAS THE first convict I heard use the expression “the PB.” He told me that sometimes he wished he had “the PB.” I thought he meant “TB,” short for “tuberculosis,” another common affliction at the prison—common enough that I have it now. It turned out that “PB” was short for “Parole Board,” which is what the convicts called AIDS.

When we passed a Catholic church, I recalled, he said, “You think your dad’s a good chemist? They’re turning soda crackers into meat in there. Can your dad do that?”