Timequake

  If self-respect breaks a leg, the leg can never heal. Its owner has to shoot it. My mother and Ernest Hemingway and my former literary agent and Jerzy Kosinski and my reluctant thesis advisor at the University of Chicago and Eva Braun all come to mind.

  But not Kilgore Trout. His indestructible self-respect is what I loved most about Kilgore Trout. Men loving men can happen, in peacetime as well as war. I also loved my war buddy Bernard V. O'Hare.

  Many people fail because their brains, their three-and-a-half-pound blood-soaked sponges, their dogs' breakfasts, don't work well enough. The cause of a failure can be as simple as that. Some people, try as they may, can't cut the mustard! That's that!

  I have a male cousin my age who was doing miserably back in Shortridge High School. He was a hulking interior lineman, and very sweet. He brought home an awful report card. His father asked him, "What is the meaning of this?" My cousin responded as follows: "Don't you know, Father? I'm dumb, I'm dumb."

  Put this in your pipe and smoke it: My maternal great-uncle Carl Barus was a founder and president of the American Physical Society. A building at Brown University is named in his honor. Uncle Carl Barus was a professor there for many years. I never met him. My big brother did. Until this summer of 1996, Bernie and I had thought of him as a serene contributor to modest but tidy increases in human understanding of the laws of Nature.

  Last June, though, I asked Bernie to tell me some specific discoveries, however small, made by our distinguished great-uncle, whose genes Bernie had inherited so outstandingly. Bernie's response was anything but schnip-schnop, anything but prompt. Bernie was bemused to realize at such a late date that Uncle Carl, while making a career in physics attractive, had never told him about anything he himself had accomplished.

  "I'll have to look him up," said Bernie.

  Hold on to your hats!

  Listen: Uncle Carl, in 1900 or thereabouts, experimented with the effects of X rays and radioactivity on condensation in a cloud chamber, a wooden cylinder filled with a fog he himself had concocted. He concluded and published as a certainty that ionization was relatively unimportant in condensation.

  At about the same time, friends and neighbors, the Scottish physicist Charles Thomson Rees Wilson performed similar experiments with a cloud chamber made of glass. The canny Scot proved that ions produced by X rays and radioactivity had a lot to do with condensation. He criticized Uncle Carl for ignoring contamination from the wood walls of his chamber, for his crude method of making clouds, and for not shielding his fog from the electrical field of his X-ray apparatus.

  Wilson went on to make paths of electrically charged particles visible to the naked eye by means of his cloud chamber. In 1927, he shared a Nobel Prize for Physics for doing this.

  Uncle Carl must have felt like something the cat drug in!

  56

  A Luddite to the end, as was Kilgore Trout, as was Ned Ludd, the possibly but not certainly fictitious workman who smashed up machinery, supposedly, in Leicestershire, England, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, I persist in pecking away at a manual typewriter. That still leaves me technologically several generations ahead of William Styron and Stephen King, who, like Trout, write with pens on yellow legal pads.

  I correct my pages with pen or pencil. I have come into Manhattan on business. I telephone a woman who has been doing my retyping for years and years now. She doesn't have a computer, either. Maybe I should can her. She has moved from the city to a country town. I ask her what the weather is like out that way. I ask if there have been any unusual birds at her bird feeder. I ask if squirrels have found a way to get at it, and so on.

  Yes, the squirrels have found a new way to get at the feeder. They can become trapeze artists, if they have to.

  She has had back trouble in the past. I ask her how her back is. She says her back is OK. She asks how my daughter Lily is. I say Lily is OK. She asks how old Lily is now, and I say she'll be fourteen in December.

  She says, "Fourteen! My gosh, my gosh. It seems like only yesterday she was just a little baby."

  I say I have a few more pages for her to type. She says, "Good." I will have to mail them to her, since she doesn't have a fax. Again: Maybe I should can her.

  I am still on the third floor of our brownstone in the city, and we don't have an elevator. So down the stairs I go with my pages, clumpity, clumpity, clumpity. I get down to the first floor, where my wife has her office. Her favorite reading when she was Lily's age was stories about Nancy Drew, the girl detective.

  Nancy Drew is to Jill what Kilgore Trout is to me, so Jill says, "Where are you going?"

  I say, "I am going to buy an envelope."

  She says, "You are not a poor man. Why don't you buy a thousand envelopes and put them in a closet?" She thinks she is being logical. She has a computer. She has a fax. She has an answering machine on her telephone, so she doesn't miss any important messages. She has a Xerox. She has all that garbage.

  I say, "I'll be back real soon."

  Out into the world I go! Muggers! Autograph hounds! Junkies! People with real jobs! Maybe an easy lay! United Nations functionaries and diplomats!

  Our house is near the UN, so there are all kinds of really foreign-looking people getting in or out of illegally parked limousines, doing the best they can, like all the rest of us, to hold their self-respect together. As I saunter a half-block to the news store on Second Avenue, which also sells stationery, I can feel, if I so choose, because of all the foreigners, like Humphrey Bogart or Peter Lorre in Casablanca, the third-greatest movie ever made.

  The greatest movie ever, as anybody with half a brain knows, is My Life as a Dog. The second-greatest movie ever is All About Eve.

  There is a chance, moreover, that I will see Katharine Hepburn, a real movie star! She lives only one block from us! When I speak to her, and tell her my name, she always says, "Oh yes, you're that friend of my brother's." I do not know her brother.

  No such luck today, though, but what the heck. I am a philosopher. I have to be.

  Into the news store I go. Relatively poor people, with lives not strikingly worth living, are lined up to buy lottery tickets or other crap. All keep their cool. They pretend they don't know I'm a celebrity.

  The store is a Ma-and-Pa joint owned by Hindus, honest-to-God Hindus! The woman has a teeny-weeny ruby between her eyes. That's worth a trip. Who needs an envelope?

  You must remember this, a kiss is still a kiss, a sigh is still a sigh.

  I know the Hindus' stock of stationery as well as they do. I didn't study anthropology for nothing. I find one nine-by-twelve manila envelope without assistance, remembering simultaneously a joke about the Chicago Cubs baseball team. The Cubs were supposedly moving to the Philippine Islands, where they would be renamed the Manila Folders. That would have been a good joke about the Boston Red Sox, too.

  I take my place at the end of the line, chatting with fellow customers who are buying something other than lottery tickets. The lottery ticket suckers, decorticated by hope and numerology, may as well be victims of Post-Timequake Apathy. You could run them over with an eighteen-wheeler. They wouldn't care.

  57

  From the news store I go one block south to the Postal Convenience Station, where I am secretly in love with a woman behind the counter. I have already put my pages in the manila envelope. I address it, and then I take my place at the end of another long line. What I need now is postage! Yum, yum, yum!

  The woman I love there does not know I love her. You want to talk about poker faces? When her eyes meet mine, she might as well be looking at a cantaloupe!

  Because she works sitting down, and because of the counter and the smock she wears, all I have ever seen of her is from the neck up. That's enough! From the neck up she is like a Thanksgiving dinner! I don't mean she looks like a plateful of turkey and sweet potatoes and cranberry sauce. I mean she makes me feel like that is what has just been set before me. Dig in! Dig in!

  Unadorned, I believe,
her neck and face and ears and hair would still be Thanksgiving dinner. Every day, though, she hangs new dingle-dangles from her ears and around her neck. Sometimes her hair is up, sometimes it's down. Sometimes it's frizzy, sometimes it's straight. What she can't do with just her eyes and lips! One day I'm buying a stamp from Count Dracula's daughter! The next day she's the Virgin Mary.

  This time she's Ingrid Bergman in Stromboli. But she is a long way off still. There are many addled old poops, no good at counting money anymore, and immigrants talking gibberish, maddeningly imagining it to be English, in line ahead of me.

  One time I had my pocket picked in that Postal Convenience Center. Convenient for whom?

  I put the waiting time to good use. I learn about stupid bosses and jobs I will never have, and about parts of the world I will never see, and about diseases I hope I will never have, and about different kinds of dogs people have owned, and so on. By means of a computer? No. I do it by means of the lost art of conversation.

  I at last have my envelope weighed and stamped by the only woman in the whole wide world who could make me sincerely happy. With her I wouldn't have to fake it.

  I go home. I have had one heck of a good time. Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!

  58

  I have taught creative writing during my seventy-three years on automatic pilot, rerun or not. I did it first at the University of Iowa in 1965. After that came Harvard, and then the City College of New York. I don't do it anymore.

  I taught how to be sociable with ink on paper. I told my students that when they were writing they should be good dates on blind dates, should show strangers good times. Alternatively, they should run really nice whore-houses, come one, come all, although they were in fact working in perfect solitude. I said I expected them to do this with nothing but idiosyncratic arrangements in horizontal lines of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numbers, and maybe eight punctuation marks, because it wasn't anything that hadn't been done before.

  In 1996, with movies and TV doing such good jobs of holding the attention of literates and illiterates alike, I have to question the value of my very strange, when you think about it, charm school. There is this: Attempted seductions with nothing but words on paper are so cheap for would-be ink-stained Don Juans or Cleopatras! They don't have to get a bankable actor or actress to commit to the project, and then a bankable director, and so on, and then raise millions and millions of buckareenies from manic depressive experts on what most people want.

  Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer: Many people need desperately to receive this message: "I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don't care about them. You are not alone."

  Steve Adams, one of my three adopted nephews, was a successful TV comedy writer in Los Angeles, California, a few years back. His big brother Jim is an ex--Peace Corps guy and now a psychiatric nurse. His kid brother Kurt is a veteran pilot with Continental Airlines, with scrambled eggs on his cap, gold braid on his sleeves. All Steve's kid brother ever wanted to do for a living was fly. A dream came true!

  Steve learned the hard way that all his jokes for TV had to be about events that had been made much of by TV itself, and very recently. If a joke was about something that hadn't been on TV for a month or more, the watchers wouldn't have a clue, even though the laugh track was laughing, as to what they themselves were supposed to laugh about.

  Guess what? TV is an eraser.

  Having even the immediate past erased may indeed make it more comfortable for most people to get through this thing, whatever it is. Jane, my first wife, won her Phi Beta Kappa key at Swarthmore College over the objections of the History Department. She had written, and then argued in oral examinations, that all that could be learned from history was that history itself was absolutely nonsensical, so study something else, like music.

  I agreed with her, and so would have Kilgore Trout. But history still hadn't been erased back then. And when I started out as a writer, I could refer to events and personalities in the past, even the distant past, with a reasonable expectation that a fair number of readers would respond with some emotion, whether positive or negative, when I mentioned them.

  Case in point: The murder of the greatest President this country will ever have, Abraham Lincoln, by the twenty-six-year-old ham actor John Wilkes Booth.

  That assassination was a major event in Timequake One. Who is there left under the age of sixty, and not in a History Department, to give a damn?

  59

  Elias Pembroke, a fictitious Rhode Island naval architect who was Abraham Lincoln's Assistant Secretary of the Navy during our Civil War, was a character in Timequake One. I said he made significant contributions to the design of the power train of the ironclad warship Monitor, but was neglectful of his wife, Julia, who fell in love with a dashing young actor and rakehell named John Wilkes Booth.

  Julia wrote love letters to Booth. A tryst was arranged for April 14th, 1863, two years before Booth shot Lincoln from behind with a derringer. She went to New York City from Washington with a chaperone, the alcoholic wife of an admiral, ostensibly to shop, and to escape the tensions in the besieged capital. They checked into the hotel where Booth was staying, and attended his performance that night, as Marc Antony in Julius Caesar, by William Shakespeare.

  As Marc Antony, Booth would speak lines horrifyingly prophetic in his case: "The evil that men do lives after them."

  Julia and her chaperone went backstage afterward and congratulated not only John Wilkes, but his brothers, Junius, who had played Brutus, and Edwin, who had played Cassius. The three American brothers, with John Wilkes the baby, in combination with their British father, Junius Brutus Booth, constituted what remains to this day the greatest family of tragedians in the history of the English-speaking stage.

  John Wilkes gallantly kissed the hand of Julia, as though they had just met, and simultaneously slipped her a packet of chloral hydrate crystals, which would be the active ingredient in a Mickey Finn for the chaperone.

  Julia had been given to believe by Booth that all she would receive from him when she came to his hotel room would be a single glass of champagne, and a single kiss she would cherish for the rest of her life after the war, back in Rhode Island, a life that would otherwise be humdrum. Madame Bovary!

  Little did Julia suspect that Booth would mousetrap her champagne, just as she had mousetrapped her chaperone's beddy-bye slug of wartime white lightning, with chloral hydrate.

  Ting-a-ling!

  Booth knocked her up! She had never had a kid before. Something was wrong with her husband's ding-dong. She was thirty-one! The actor was twenty-four!

  Incredible?

  Her husband was delighted. She's pregnant? There was nothing wrong with Assistant Secretary of the Navy Elias Pembroke's ding-dong after all! Anchors aweigh!

  Julia returned to Pembroke, Rhode Island, a town named in honor of an ancestor of her husband's, to have the kid. She was scared to death that the upper rims of the kid's ears would be like those of John Wilkes Booth, pointed like a devil's, instead of curved. But the kid had normal ears. It was a boy. It was christened Abraham Lincoln Pembroke.

  That the only descendant of the most egomaniacal and destructive villain in American history should bear that name did not become supremely ironical until, exactly two years from the night Booth ejaculated in Julia's birth canal while she was massively sedated, Booth sent a wad of lead into Lincoln's dog's breakfast, into Lincoln's brain.

  At Xanadu in 2001, I asked Kilgore Trout for his ballpark opinion of John Wilkes Booth. He said Booth's performance in Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C., on the night of Good Friday, April 14th, 1865, when he shot Lincoln and then jumped from a theater box to the stage, breaking his leg, was "the sort of thing which is bound to happen whenever an actor creates his own material."

  60

  Julia shared her secret with no one. Did she have regrets? Of cou
rse she did, but not about love. When she turned fifty, in 1882, she founded as a memorial for her only love affair, however brief and star-crossed, without saying that's what it was, an amateur acting group, the Pembroke Mask and Wig Club.

  And Abraham Lincoln Pembroke, ignorant of whose son he actually was, in 1889 founded Indian Head Mills, which became the largest textile mill in New England until 1947, when Abraham Lincoln Pembroke III locked out his striking ing employees and moved the company to North Carolina. Abraham Lincoln Pembroke IV subsequently sold it to an international conglomerate, which moved it to Indonesia, and he died of drink.

  Not an actor in the bunch. Not a murderer in the bunch. No pixie ears.

  Before Abraham Lincoln Pembroke III departed the town of Pembroke for North Carolina, he knocked up an unmarried African-American housemaid, Rosemary Smith. He paid her handsomely for her silence. He was gone when his child Frank Smith was born.

  Hold on to your hats!

  Frank Smith has pointed ears! Frank Smith has to be one of the greatest actors in the history of amateur theatricals! He is half black, half white, and only five feet, ten inches tall. But in the summer of 2001 he gave a stunningly convincing matinee performance in the title role in the Pembroke Mask and Wig Club's production of Abe Lincoln in Illinois, by Robert E. Sherwood, with Kilgore Trout doing the sound effects!

  The cast party afterward was a clambake on the beach at Xanadu. As in the last scene of 81/2, the motion picture by Federico Fellini, tout le monde was there, if not in person, then represented by look-alikes. Monica Pepper resembled my sister Allie. The bakemaster, a local man who is paid to stage such parties in the summertime, resembled my late publisher Seymour Lawrence (1926--1993), who rescued me from certain oblivion, from smithereens, by publishing Slaughterhouse-Five, and then bringing all my previous books back into print under his umbrella.