Uncollected Works Page 3
“I’m afraid,” she was saying. “I get so depressed, so exhausted. Even as a little girl I used to be scared of being hit by a meteorite, isn’t that silly? This terror of the unfamiliar, this sort of arbitrary Act of God or something. It got bad, very bad, two years ago and I tried to straighten everything out with an act of Debby Considine, by taking rather more than the prescribed amount of Seconal. Then when it didn’t work I rode up on another crest and I’ve been there for two years and I guess now I’m about due for a trough again.”
Siegel sat up suddenly and glared straight ahead of him, at the crossed BAR’s on the wall. He was getting fed up with this. Lupescu was wrong: you did not pick this sort of thing up quickly at all. It was a slow process and dangerous because in the course of things it was very possible to destroy not only yourself but your flock as well. He took her hand. “Come on,” he said, “I’d like to meet Irving. Say for your penance ten Hail Mary’s and make a good Act of Contrition.”
“Oh my God,” she murmured. “I am heartily sorry… .” and apparently she was, but probably only because the interview had been cut short. They threaded their way between several inert bodies in the kitchen. The cha cha side had been replaced by Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra and Siegel smiled grimly because of its appropriateness; because he knew he could listen to anything else but this mad Hungarian without getting bugged, but at the sound of an entire string section run suddenly amok, shrieking like an uprooted mandrakes trying to tear itself apart, the nimble little Machiavel inside him would start to throw things at the mensch who had just cast off adolescence and who still sat perpetual shivah for people like Debby Considine and Lucy and himself and all the other dead, trying to goad it into action; and he wondered if perhaps Lucy’s diagnosis of Lupescu’s trouble hadn’t been correct and if someday he, Siegel, might not find himself standing in front of some mirror with a pig foetus under one arm, reciting Freudian cant at himself to get the right inflection.
“Irving Loon,” Debby said, “Cleanth Siegel.” Irving Loon stood motionless, seemingly unaware of their presence. Debby put her hand on the Ojibwa’s arm and caressed it. “Irving,” she said softly, “please say something.” Damn the torpedoes, Siegel thought. Full speed ahead. “Windigo,” he said quietly and Irving Loon jumped as if an ice cube had been dropped down his neck. He looked intently at Siegel, probing suddenly with black, piercing eyes. Then he shifted his gaze to Debby and smiled wanly. He put his arm around her waist and nuzzled her cheek. “Debby,” he murmured, “my beautiful little beaver.”
“Isn’t that sweet,” Debby said, smiling over her shoulder at Siegel. Oh my God, Siegel thought. Oh no. Beaver? Now wait a minute. Somebody was tugging at Siegel’s coat sleeve and he turned swiftly, nervously, and saw Brennan. “Can I see you alone for a minute,” Brennan said. Siegel hesitated. Irving Loon and Debby were whispering endearments to one another. “Sure, okay,” Siegel said absently. They crunched over the broken glass from the French windows and went out on a small balcony, which was just as well, because Siegel was beginning to get a little sick of the bedroom. The rain had dwindled to a light mist and Siegel pulled his coat collar up. “I hear you’re a pretty sympathetic guy,” Brennan began, “and I guess you know how it is with me and Debby. The truth is I’m worried about that Indian.”
“So am I,” Siegel started to say and then caught himself. This theory about why Irving Loon was not talking was based only on suspicion; and this whole absurd, surrealist atmosphere had after all been working on an imagination known occasionally to go off the deep end. So instead he said, “I could see where you might.” Brennan turned crafty. “I think he’s using hypnosis on her,” he confided, darting quick glances back inside to see if anyone was listening. Siegel nodded profoundly.
Brennan went on to explain his side of the tree-climbing episode and by the time he was through Siegel, who had not been paying attention, was surprised to find, on looking at his watch for the first time that evening, that it was almost eleven. A few people had left and the party was showing the first signs of slowing down. Siegel wandered out into the kitchen where he found half a fifth of scotch, and made a scotch on the rocks; his first drink, as a matter of fact, since he had arrived. He stood in the kitchen, alone, trying to assess things. First stage, melancholia. Second stage, direct violence. How much had Irving Loon been drinking? How much did starvation have to do with the psychosis once it got under way? And then the enormity of it hit him. Because if this hunch were true, Siegel had the power to work for these parishioners a kind of miracle, to bring them a very tangible salvation. A miracle involving a host, true, but like no holy eucharist. He was the only one, besides Irving Loon, who knew. Also, a sober voice reminded him, he was apparently the only one who had the Windigo psychosis as his sole piece of information about the Ojibwa. It might be a case of generalization, there might be any number of things wrong with Irving Loon. Still, perhaps … a case of conscience.
Vincent came up to him and wanted to talk but he waved him off. Siegel had had about enough of confessions. He wondered how his predecessor had managed to remain as father confessor for as long as he had. It occurred to him now that Lupescu’s parting comment had been no drunken witticism; but that the man really had, like some Kurtz, been possessed by the heart of a darkness in which no ivory was ever sent out from the interior, but instead hoarded jealously by each of its gatherers to build painfully, fragment by fragment, temples to the glory of some imago or obsession, and decorated inside with the art work of dream and nightmare, and locked finally against a hostile forest, each “agent” in his own ivory tower, having no windows to look out of, turning further and further inward and cherishing a small flame behind the altar. And Kurtz too had been in his way a father confessor. Siegel shook his head, trying to clear it. Somebody had started a crap game in the other room and Siegel sat down on the kitchen table, swinging one leg, looking in at the crowd. “Oh you’re a fine group,” he muttered.
He was beginning to think that maybe he should tell all these people to go to hell and go drop in on Rachel after all when he saw Irving Loon come dreamlike in under the pig foetus, eyes staring straight ahead, unseeing. Siegel, paralyzed, watched Irving Loon go into the bedroom, drag a chair over to one wall, stand on it, and unhook one of the BAR’s. Rapt, entirely absorbed in what he was doing, the Indian began rummaging around in the drawers of Lupescu’s desk. Gingerly Siegel edged himself off the table and tiptoed to the bedroom door. Irving Loon, still singing to himself produced with a smile a box of .30 caliber ammunition. Happily he began putting rounds into the magazine. Siegel counted the rounds as he put them in. The magazine would hold 20. All right, Siegel, he said to himself, here it is. Moment of truth. Espada broken, muleta lost, horse disembowelled, picadors sick with fear. Five in the afternoon, crowd screaming. Miura bull, sharp horns, charging in. He figured there were about sixty seconds to make a decision, and now the still small Jesuit voice, realizing that the miracle was in his hands after all, for real, vaunted with the same sense of exhiliration Siegel had once felt seeing five hundred hysterical freshmen advancing on the women’s dorms, knowing it was he who had set it all in motion. And the other, gentle part of him sang kaddishes for the dead and mourned over the Jesuit’s happiness, realizing however that this kind of penance was as good as any other; it was just unfortunate that Irving Loon would be the only one partaking of any body and blood, divine or otherwise. It took no more than five seconds for the two sides to agree that there was really only one course to take.
Quietly Siegel strolled back through the kitchen, through the living room, taking his time, unnoticed by the crap shooters, opened the door, stepped out into the hall and closed the door behind him. He walked downstairs, whistling. At the first floor landing, he heard the first screams, the pounding of footsteps, the smashing of glass. He shrugged. What the hell, stranger things had happened in Washington. It was not until he had reached the street that he heard the first burst of the BAR fire.
J
uvenalia
“Voice of the Hamster”
“Voice of the Hamster” is a fiction serialized in four issues of Pynchon’s high school newspaper, the Oyster Bay High School Purple and Gold, in 1952-53, begun when Pynchon was only 15 years old (he graduated high school at 16). The text is taken from Clifford Mead’s Thomas Pynchon: A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Materials (Elmwood, IL: The Dalkey Archive Press, 1989), and according to both Mead and our own investigation these stories are in the public domain.
Remarkable for juvenilia, Pynchon’s high school fiction features many of the stylistic flourishes and literary themes he employs to this day: surreally silly names, paranoia, copious drug use, and an oddball sense of humor. These stories were published under pseuodnyms, such as “Roscoe Stein,” “Bose,” or no name at all.
By Thomas Pynchon
Purple and Gold, 13 November 1952, 2. “The Voice of the Hamster.”
Dear Sam,
You may remember me—I don’t know. I met you at that party in Huntington last August. I was the squat individual with the red crewcut who was doing the imitation of Winston Churchill. Anyway, you expressed interest in this school I go to and asked me to get in touch with you. So, here I am.
Hamster High is located on a rock about a half mile off the South Shore, and not a very big rock at that, as anybody can tell you who’s been there at high tide. Nobody seems to know why they call the place Hamster High, other than the highly debatable rumor that its founder, J. Fattington Woodgrouse, had a strong liking for the fuddy little creatures. There is a statue of J. Fattington Woodgrouse in front of the school. He is a little bald-headed man with a pot belly, and he looks like a cross between the last Martian and a hungry barracuda. Last Hallowe’en someone wrote on this statue a very nasty word in bright orange paint. There was a big scandal. I was suspended for four weeks.
Maybe the fact that we’re fairly well isolated accounts for why Hamster High is—well, not exactly crazy, but—slightly odd. Take for example our trig teacher, Mr. Faggiaducci. He’s a quiet respectable young man who wears thick glasses with chartreuse rims. He also wears peg pants, satin shirt, cool cardigan, and bop beret. He tears around in a long, baby-blue hotrod sedan, and he’s always telling be-bop jokes in class. There’s nothing actually wrong with him, it’s just that he used to be a bop drummer, and now he wishes he were back with the boys at Birdland and Eddie Condon’s. He talks to himself a lot and I’ve heard rumors he takes heroin. A real “gone guy.”
Then of course there’s our principal, Mr. Sowfurkle. This boy also has music leanings—he plays the bagpipes. The bad thing about it is that he uses school hours to practice. He’s very devoted to the bloody instrument. He locks himself in his office for about an hour every day to play it. Somehow one gets the idea he doesn’t like interruptions. He was born in the hills of Tennessee, and he still carries a shotgun with him, a nasty thing with a sawed-off barrel. Anyway, one day the chemistry teacher somehow wandered into his inner sanctum and started banging on the door, and old Furk got real excited. Poor Miss Phipps. We had to get a new door, too.
You might think we’re pretty limited as far as sports go, being out on a rock like we are, but that isn’t so. Of course, we can’t have our own football or baseball fields, so we use the ones in the nearest town, Riverhampton. I feel sorry for Coach Willis. He turned down a chance to coach Football at one of the Big Ten colleges and came to Hamster High instead. Coach Willis drinks a lot.
He smokes like a fiend, too, so that the Alumni Association is screaming to fire him for setting a bad example for the boys. Coach Willis claims that it’s the teams that have driven him to drink. He says: “What can you do with a football team that consistently runs the wrong way, a basketball team which refuses to dribble the ball, and a track team which is afraid to high jump, and throws the shot-put underhand?” In a way, I think he’s right, about football at least. In the past three years we’ve lost every game except one, and that was a tie with some grade school. The only reason we were able to tie them was because the grade school team was continually being penalized for unnecessary roughness.
But still the crowds come out and cheer for our boys, so colorful and manly-looking in their brown fur football uniforms, and they cheer our loyal little team mascot, Talleyrand the Hamster. We keep Tallyrand muzzled and on a long leash, for he is a vicious little monster. This hamster has razor sharp fangs which must be at least an inch long. If you don’t believe me, I can show you the scars where Tallyrand autographed my wrist.
But now I must say so long because I am getting tired, and I have a lot of trig homework to do. Not that it has to be done for tomorrow, as chances are Mr. Faggiaducci won’t be there; he’s out on another binge. Remind me sometime to tell you about the time the State Education Inspector came to Hamster High. Poor fellow—he’s in an institution now. And remember me to Beer-belly MacPherson and the rest of the mob.
Your drunken amigo,
Boscoe Stein.
Purple and Gold, 18 December 1952, 3. “Voice of the Hamster.”
Dear Sam,
In your last letter you mentioned that you wanted to hear about the time the State Education Inspector came to Hamster High. Well, it was sort of ironic since the grandfather, J. Fattington Woodgrouse, founded our school. This guy was little and fat, like the original, and he wore a stupid-looking pork-pie hat. Mr. Sowfurkle greeted him warmly and proceeded to take him on a tour of the school.
It seems the first class he went to was Miss Phipps’ chemistry class. I don’t take chemistry myself, but I got this straight from Sid Scully, who is at present engaged in an exhaustive study of the physiological effects of complex nicotine compounds upon the human body. He is also a chain smoker. Anyway, Crazy Harrigan was doing some work in the lab with unstable plutonium isotopes. You remember Crazy—the guy who blew up the Farmingdale Bank. Just as Mr. Woodgrouse opened the lab door, out tore Crazy, yelling at the top of his lungs, and he cannonballed into the inspector. It’s a good thing he knocked the inspector down because a minute later there was a terrific explosion from inside the lab, and half the wall came down on him. Crazy had got away down the hall, and it seemed that Mr. Woodgrouse was the only casualty. He took him down to the infirmary and patched him up.
Then all through the day, little accidents kept happening to him. It’s fantastic, but it always happens when somebody we don’t want comes wandering around. He saw more of the infirmary than anything else. First, in Mr. McGinty’s physics class, a ten-pound weight rolled off the desk and hit him on the foot. Then in the cafeteria someone bumped him and knocked his meal all over his new Brooks Brothers suit, ruining it quite permanently. Around the first period he mistook the door to the dumbwaiter shaft for the men’s room and took a quick trip from the third floor to the cellar the hard way. He was in pretty bad shape when we found him, so we took him down to the infirmary. Then he wandered into Mr. Faggiaducci’s class while Mr. Faggiaducci was giving us an exhibition of bop drumming. Mr. Faggiaducci’s hand slipped. The inspector looked awful funny with that drumstick halfway down his throat. After that, he wandered out onto the archery course, which was a mistake in the first place, since we had loudspeakers warning people that Crazy Harrigan’s archery team was practicing. I pity the U. S. Army when those guys get drafted. Let Crazy even see any kind of a lethal weapon and he goes “nuts.” I guess that Mr. Woodgrouse couldn’t hear the warnings through the bandages on his head. A rescue party arrived just in time to see him being pursued by a band of madmen, an arrow through his pork-pie hat and another in his shoulder. We took him down to the infirmary again.
He would have left then, but Coach Willis wanted him to watch football practice. Everything went O.K. until Coach Willis caught wind of the fact that Mr. Woodgrouse had played collegiate football. Before the poor inspector knew what was happening, he was in the quarterback position, the ball had been snapped, and he was watching eleven stalwart specimens of American manhood charging at him with blood in their ey
es. I think he had one last fleeting moment of sanity before they hit him, and then he went down beneath a mountain of brown fur football uniforms. And to top it all, Talleyrand the Hamster got loose and bit him. We dragged him down again to the infirmary and fixed up the wound—which required two stiches—and the other injuries he had acquired. I think there was also a couple of vertebrae misplaced.
He went away quite peacefully with the men in the white coats; they didn’t even need a straitjacket for him. He was talking happily to himself and laughing. He was singing a little song, too: “First the wall fell, then all the arrows, then the mob in the hamster skins, then that (here he said a very uncouth word) bit me but I don’t care. They set off an atom bomb on me, they dropped things on my feet, they rammed things down my throat, but I’m stilI happy. They set booby traps on me but I don’t care anymore hahahahaha!”
Poor guy. Every week Mr. Faggiaducci goes over to see him and cheers him up with a drum rendition. Sometimes I think that Mr. Faggiaducci is—but never mind. They say that Mr. Woodgrouse will be out in another month. He was a good guy really. One sad note: somehow he lost that cute little pork-pie hat.
Well, I guess that’s all for this time. Tell me how it’s doing at O.B. H. S., will you?
Be seeing you,
Roscoe Stein.
Purple and Gold, 22 January 1953, 2, 4. “Voice of the Hamster.”
Dear Sam,
Sorry I haven’t written sooner, but I’m in the midst of recovering from a party I attended New Year’s Eve. It was what can only be called a riot, and that’s about what it ended up as. The party was thrown by Sid Scully’s sister Marge, and there must have been over a hundred people there. Everything was quiet until Crazy Harrigan, with some mob from Queens, started a conga line sometime around 1:30 in the morning, and that was about all it took to start an argument. Marge objected to the noise, and Sid agreed with her. Sid got pretty mad and started shoving Crazy around, Crazy threw a punch at Sid, Sid threw one back, Crazy hit Sid over the head with the punch bowl, and pandemonium broke loose—before we knew it we had a full scale free-for-all on our hands. Marge was crying, Sid was sitting on the floor clutching his head and swearing a blue streak, and their St. Bernard, O’Malley by name, was gaily romping through the whole mess and wrecking chairs, lamps—anything that happened to be in the way. The men from Queens, evidently suffering from delusions that they were musketeers or some thing, were happily dueling [sic] with the curtain rods, with Mr. Scully’s imported Oriental drapes as cloaks. Crazy Harrigan was dashing around with a chair like a lion tamer, screaming some nonsense about how he was a jolly good fellow and if anyone denied it Crazy would bash his head in. About that time the men in blue arrived, and we started to calm down a bit—all, that is, except Moe Klonk, who climbed up on a chair and started yelling about how that was capitalistic oppression and bourgeois tyranny, etc. Finally he got acquainted with the business end of a nightstick the hard way, and that sort of put an end to the party. Sid had to have two stitches taken and there were a lot of split lips and bloody noses, and Marge was almost in hysterics. Happy New Year!