"Kurt Vonnegut - Hocus Pocus" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vonnegut Kurt)

Father about the reason he had a black eye, and his reply had been to slug her. I didn’t think he would ever slug her,
no matter what.
There is a not quite remote possibility that he really did slug her, of course. Lesser men would have slugged her
under similar circumstances. The real truth of the matter became unavailable to historians forever when the falling
ceiling of a gift shop on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls killed both participants, as I’ve said, some 20 years ago.
They were said to have died instantly. They never knew what hit them, which is the best way to go.
There was no argument about that in Vietnam or, I suppose, on any battlefield. One kid I remember stepped on an
antipersonnel mine. The mine could have been one of our own. His best friend from Basic Training asked him what
he could do for him, and the kid replied: “Turn me off like a light bulb, Sam.”
The dying kid was white. The kid who wanted to help him was black, or a light tan, actually. His features were
practically white, you would have to say.
A woman I was making love to a few years ago asked me if my parents were still alive. She wanted to know more
about me, now that we had our clothes off.
I told her that they had suffered violent deaths in a foreign country, which was true. Canada is a foreign country.
But then I heard myself spinning this fantastic tale of their being on a safari in Tanganyika, a place about which I
know almost nothing. I told that woman, and she believed me, that my parents and their guide were shot by poachers
who were killing elephants for their ivory and mistook them for game wardens. I said that the poachers put their
bodies on top of anthills, so that their skeletons were soon picked clean. They could be positively identified only by
their dental work.
I used to find it easy and even exhilarating to lie that elaborately. I don’t anymore. And I wonder now if I didn’t
develop that unwholesome habit very young, and because my parents were such an embarrassment, and especially
my mother, who was fat enough to be a circus freak. I described much more attractive parents than I really had, in
order to make people who knew nothing about them think well of me.
And during my final year in Vietnam, when I was in Public Information, I found it as natural as breathing to tell
the press and replacements fresh off the boats or planes that we were clearly winning, and that the folks back home
should be proud and happy about all the good things we were doing there.
I learned to lie like that in high school.

Another thing I learned in high school that was helpful in Vietnam: Alcohol and marijuana, if used in modera
tion, plus loud, usually low-class music, make stress and boredom infinitely more bearable. It was
manna from Heaven that I came into this world with a gift for moderation in my intake of mood-modifying
substances. During my last 2 years in high school, I don’t think my parents even suspected that I was half in the bag
a lot of the time. All they ever complained about was the music, when I played the radio or the phonograph or when
The Soul Merchants rehearsed in our basement, which Mom and Dad said was jungle music, and much too loud.
In Vietnam, the music was always much too loud. Practically everybody was half in the bag, including Chaplains.
Several of the most gruesome accidents I had to explain to the press during my last year over there were caused by
people who had rendered themselves imbecilic or maniacal by ingesting too much of what, if taken in moderation,
could be a helpful chemical. I ascribed all such accidents, of course, to human error. The press understood. Who on
this Earth hasn’t made a mistake or 2?

The assassination of an Austrian archduke led to World War I, and probably to World War II as well. Just as
surely, my father’s black eye brought me to the sorry state in which I find myself today. He was looking for some
way, almost any way, to recapture the respect of the community, and to attract favorable attention from Barrytron’s
new owner, Du Pont. Du Pont, of course, has now been taken over by I. G. Farben of Germany, the same company
that manufactured and packaged and labeled and addressed the cyanide gas used to kill civilians of all ages,
including babes in arms, during the Holocaust.
What a planet.
So Father, his injured eye looking like a slit in a purple and yellow omelet, asked me if I was likely to receive any
sort of honors at high school graduation. He didn’t say so, but he was frantic for something to brag about at work.
He was so desperate that he was trying to get blood out of the turnip of my nonparticipation in high school sports,