Soul Merchants. Certain sorts of not just girls but full-grown women, too, found us glamorous free spirits up on the bandstand, imitating black people and smoking marijuana, and loving ourselves when we made music, and laughing about God knows what just about anytime.
I GUESS MY love life is over now. Even if I could get out of prison, I wouldn’t want to give some trusting woman tuberculosis. She would be scared to death of getting AIDS, and I would give her TB instead. Wouldn’t that be nice?
So now I will have to make do with memories. As a prosthesis for my memory, I have begun to list all the women, excluding my wife and prostitutes, with whom I have “gone all the way,” as we used to say in high school. I find it impossible to remember any conquest I made as a teenager with clarity, to separate fact from fantasy. It was all a dream. So I begin my list with Shirley Kern, to whom I made love when I was 20. Shirley is my datum.
How many names will there be on the list? Too early to tell, but wouldn’t that number, whatever it turns out to be, be as good a thing as any to put on my tombstone as an enigmatic epitaph?
I AM CERTAINLY sorry if I ruined the lives of any of those women who believed me when I said I loved them. I can only hope against hope that Shirley Kern and all the rest of them are still OK.
If it is any consolation to those who may not be OK, my own life was ruined by a Science Fair.
Father asked me if there wasn’t some school-sponsored extracurricular activity I could still try out for. This was only 8 weeks before my graduation! So I said, in a spirit of irony, since he knew science did not delight me as it delighted him, that my last opportunity to amount to anything was the County Science Fair. I got Bs in Physics and Chemistry, but you could stuff both those subjects up your fundament as far as I was concerned.
But Father rose from his chair in a state of sick excitement. “Let’s go down in the basement,” he said. “There’s work to do.”
“What kind of work?” I said. This was about midnight.
And he said, “You are going to enter and win the Science Fair.”
WHICH I DID. Or, rather, Father entered and won the Science Fair, requiring only that I sign an affidavit swearing that the exhibit was all my own work, and that I memorize his explanation of what it proved. It was about crystals and how they grew and why they grew.
His competition was weak. He was, after all, a 43-year-old chemical engineer with 20 years in industry, taking on teenagers in a community where few parents had higher educations. The main business in the county back then was still agriculture, corn and pigs and beef cattle. Barrytron was the sole sophisticated industry, and only a handful of people such as Father understood its processes and apparatus. Most of the company’s employees were content to do what they were told and incurious as to how it was, exactly, that they had worked the miracles that somehow arrived all packaged and labeled and addressed on the loading docks.
I am reminded now of dead American soldiers, teenagers mostly, all packaged and labeled and addressed on loading docks in Vietnam. How many people knew or cared how these curious artifacts were actually manufactured?
A few.
WHY FATHER AND I were not branded as swindlers, why my exhibit was not thrown out of the Science Fair, why I am a prisoner awaiting trial now instead of a star reporter for the Korean owners of The New York Times has to do with compassion, I now believe. The feeling was general in the community, I think, that our little family had suffered enough. Nobody in the county gave much of a darn about science anyway.
The other exhibits were so dumb and pitiful, too, that the best of them would make the county look stupid if it and its honest creator went on to the statewide competition in Cleveland. Our exhibit sure looked slick and tidy. Another big plus from the judges’ point of
I GUESS MY love life is over now. Even if I could get out of prison, I wouldn’t want to give some trusting woman tuberculosis. She would be scared to death of getting AIDS, and I would give her TB instead. Wouldn’t that be nice?
So now I will have to make do with memories. As a prosthesis for my memory, I have begun to list all the women, excluding my wife and prostitutes, with whom I have “gone all the way,” as we used to say in high school. I find it impossible to remember any conquest I made as a teenager with clarity, to separate fact from fantasy. It was all a dream. So I begin my list with Shirley Kern, to whom I made love when I was 20. Shirley is my datum.
How many names will there be on the list? Too early to tell, but wouldn’t that number, whatever it turns out to be, be as good a thing as any to put on my tombstone as an enigmatic epitaph?
I AM CERTAINLY sorry if I ruined the lives of any of those women who believed me when I said I loved them. I can only hope against hope that Shirley Kern and all the rest of them are still OK.
If it is any consolation to those who may not be OK, my own life was ruined by a Science Fair.
Father asked me if there wasn’t some school-sponsored extracurricular activity I could still try out for. This was only 8 weeks before my graduation! So I said, in a spirit of irony, since he knew science did not delight me as it delighted him, that my last opportunity to amount to anything was the County Science Fair. I got Bs in Physics and Chemistry, but you could stuff both those subjects up your fundament as far as I was concerned.
But Father rose from his chair in a state of sick excitement. “Let’s go down in the basement,” he said. “There’s work to do.”
“What kind of work?” I said. This was about midnight.
And he said, “You are going to enter and win the Science Fair.”
WHICH I DID. Or, rather, Father entered and won the Science Fair, requiring only that I sign an affidavit swearing that the exhibit was all my own work, and that I memorize his explanation of what it proved. It was about crystals and how they grew and why they grew.
His competition was weak. He was, after all, a 43-year-old chemical engineer with 20 years in industry, taking on teenagers in a community where few parents had higher educations. The main business in the county back then was still agriculture, corn and pigs and beef cattle. Barrytron was the sole sophisticated industry, and only a handful of people such as Father understood its processes and apparatus. Most of the company’s employees were content to do what they were told and incurious as to how it was, exactly, that they had worked the miracles that somehow arrived all packaged and labeled and addressed on the loading docks.
I am reminded now of dead American soldiers, teenagers mostly, all packaged and labeled and addressed on loading docks in Vietnam. How many people knew or cared how these curious artifacts were actually manufactured?
A few.
WHY FATHER AND I were not branded as swindlers, why my exhibit was not thrown out of the Science Fair, why I am a prisoner awaiting trial now instead of a star reporter for the Korean owners of The New York Times has to do with compassion, I now believe. The feeling was general in the community, I think, that our little family had suffered enough. Nobody in the county gave much of a darn about science anyway.
The other exhibits were so dumb and pitiful, too, that the best of them would make the county look stupid if it and its honest creator went on to the statewide competition in Cleveland. Our exhibit sure looked slick and tidy. Another big plus from the judges’ point of
Similar Books
Her Reluctant Viscount (Rakes and Rogues)
Aliyah Burke
Community
Graham Masterton
ROMAN (Lane Brothers Book 5)
Kristina Weaver
Alone and Afraid (Rocky Mountain Home Series Book 1)
Elizabeth Sherry
The Fifth Victim
Beverly Barton
The Moon Is Down
John Steinbeck
Sorcerer Rising (A Virgil McDane Novel)
E. Nathan Sisk
The Fresco
Sheri S. Tepper
Kushiel's Avatar
Jacqueline Carey