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

ecstasy.

Father should never have made me go to West Point. Never mind what he did to the environment with
his nonbiodegradable plastics. Look what he did to me! What a boob he was! And my mother agreed with
every decision he ever made, which makes her another blithering nincompoop.
They were both killed 20 years ago in a freak accident in a gift shop on the Canadian side of Niagara
Falls, which the Indians in this valley used to call тАЬThunder Beaver,тАЭ when the roof fell in.

There are no dirty words in this book, except for тАЬhellтАЭ and тАЬGod,тАЭ in case someone is fearing that an
innocent child might see 1. The expression I will use here and there for the end of the Vietnam War, for
example, will be: тАЬwhen the excrement hit the air-conditioning.тАЭ
Perhaps the only precept taught me by Grandfather Wills that I have honored all my adult life is that
profanity and obscenity entitle people who donтАЩt want unpleasant information to close their ears and eyes
to you.

The more alert soldiers who served under me in Vietnam would comment in some amazement that I
never used profanity, which made me unlike anybody else they had ever met in the Army. They might ask
if this was because 1 was religious.
I would reply that religion had nothing to do with it. I am in fact pretty much an Atheist like my
motherтАЩs father, although I kept that to myself. Why argue some-
body else out of the expectation of some sort of an Afterlife?
тАЬI donтАЩt use profanity,тАЭ I would say, тАЬbecause your life and the lives of those around you may depend
on your understanding what I tell you. OK? OK?тАЭ

I resigned my commission in 1975, after the excrement hit the air-conditioning, not failing, however, to
father a son on my way home, unknowingly, during a brief stopover in the Philippines. I thought surely
that the subsequent mother, a young female war correspondent for The Des Moines Register, was using
foolproof birth control.
Wrong again!
Booby traps everywhere.

The biggest booby trap Fate set for me, though, was a pretty and personable young woman named
Margaret Patton, who allowed me to woo and marry her soon after my graduation from West Point, and
then had 2 children by me without telling me that there was a powerful strain of insanity on her
motherтАЩs side of her famSo then her mother, who was living with us, went
insane, and then she herself went insane. Our children, moreover, had every reason to suspect that they,
too, might go crazy in middle age.
 Our children, full-grown now, can never forgive us for reproducing. What a mess.

I realize that my speaking of my first and only wife as something as inhuman as a booby trap risks my
seeming to be yet another infernal device. But many other women have had no trouble relating to me as a
person,
and ardently, too, and my interest in them has gone well beyond the merely mechanical. Almost
invariably, I have been as enchanted by their souls, their intellects, and the stories of their lives as by their
amorous propensities.
But after I came home from the Vietnam War, and before either Margaret or her mother had shown me
and the children and the neighbors great big symptoms of their inherited craziness, that mother-daughter
team treated me like some sort of boring but necessary electrical appliance like a vacuum cleaner.

Good things have also happened unexpectedly, тАЬmanna from HeavenтАЭ you might want to call them, but