Hocus Pocus

“Rob” and “Roy,” and I was back in the Philippine Islands again, having just been kicked out of Vietnam.

How they hated home. They were more afraid of home than of the enemy.

Crucifixion as a mode of execution for the very worst criminals was outlawed by the first Christian Roman Emperor, who was Constantine the Great.
Burning and boiling were still OK.

Convicts gathered behind me, looking at the TV and saying, “Where? Where? Where?”
But they were too late. I was gone again.
Where did I go?

, and the old novelist Paul Slazinger used to watch all 3 simultaneously, switching back and forth.
I asked him why he did that. He said he didn’t want to miss the moment when, suddenly, there was absolutely nothing left to talk about.

She was gazing up at Musket Mountain. She had a serious alcohol problem. I didn’t blame myself for that. The worst problem in the life of any alcoholic is alcohol.

What’s so negative about it?” I said.
“What could be a more negative word than ‘futility’?” he said.
“‘Ignorance,’” I said.
“There you are,” he said

All I ever wanted to overthrow was ignorance and self-serving fantasies.

He tried to win friends by making expensive gifts to them, but that didn’t work, so he tried to hang himself from a girder of the water tower on top of Musket Mountain. I happened to be up there, in the bushes with the wife of the coach of the Tennis Team.
So I cut him down with my Swiss Army knife. That was how I got the Mercedes.
Pierre would have better luck 2 years later, jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, and a campus joke was that now I had to give the Mercedes back.

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.