employers, and to the students themselves, that our graduates’ intellectual achievements, while respectable, were unconventional.
LOWELL CHUNG GOT me on a horse for the first time in my life when I was 43 years old. He dared me. I told him I certainly wasn’t going to commit suicide on the back of one of his fire-cracker polo ponies, since I had a wife and a mother-in-law and 2 children to support. So he borrowed a gentle, patient old mare from his girlfriend at the time, who was Claudia Roosevelt.
Comically enough, Lowell’s then girlfriend was a whiz at arithmetic, but otherwise a nitwit. You could ask her, “What is 5,111 times 10,022, divided by 97?” Claudia would reply, “That’s 528,066.4. So what? So what?”
So what indeed! The lesson I myself learned over and over again when teaching at the college and then the prison was the uselessness of information to most people, except as entertainment. If facts weren’t funny or scary, or couldn’t make you rich, the heck with them.
WHEN I LATER went to work at the prison, I encountered a mass murderer named Alton Darwin who also could do arithmetic in his head. He was Black. Unlike Claudia Roosevelt, he was highly intelligent in the verbal area. The people he had murdered were rivals or deadbeats or police informers or cases of mistaken identity or innocent bystanders in the illegal drug industry. His manner of speaking was elegant and thought-provoking.
He hadn’t killed nearly as many people as I had. But then again, he hadn’t had my advantage, which was the full cooperation of our Government.
Also, he had done all his killing for reasons of money. I had never stooped to that.
When I found out that he could do arithmetic in his head, I said to him, “That’s a remarkable gift you have.”
“Doesn’t seem fair, does it,” he said, “that somebody should come into the world with such a great advantage over the common folk? When I get out of here, I’m going to buy me a pretty striped tent and put up a sign saying ‘One dollar. Come on in and see the Nigger do arithmetic.’ ” He wasn’t ever going to get out of there. He was serving a life sentence without hope of parole.
DARWIN’S FANTASY ABOUT starring in a mental-arithmetic show when he got out, incidentally, was inspired by something 1 of his great-grandfathers did in South Carolina after World War I. All the airplane pilots back then were white, and some of them did stunt flying at country fairs. They were called “barnstormers.”
And 1 of these barnstormers with a 2-cockpit plane strapped Darwin’s great-grandfather in the front cockpit, even though the great-grandfather couldn’t even drive an automobile. The barnstormer crouched down in the rear cockpit, so people couldn’t see him but he could still work the controls. And people came from far and wide, according to Darwin, “to see the Nigger fly the airplane.”
He was only 25 years old when we first met, the same age as Lowell Chung when Lowell won the Bronze Medal for horseback riding in Seoul, South Korea. When I was 25, I hadn’t killed anybody yet, and hadn’t had nearly as many women as Darwin had. When he was only 20, he told me, he paid cash for a Ferrari. I didn’t have a car of my own, which was a good car, all right, a Chevrolet Corvette, but nowhere near as good as a Ferrari, until I was 21.
At least I, too, had paid cash.
WHEN WE TALKED at the prison, he had a running joke that was the assumption that we came from different planets. The prison was all there was to his planet, and I had come in a flying saucer from one that was much bigger and wiser.
This enabled him to comment ironically on the only sexual activities possible inside the walls. “You have little babies on your planet?” he asked.
“Yes, we have little babies,” I said.
“We got people here trying to have babies every which way,” he said, “but they never get babies. What do you think they’re doing
LOWELL CHUNG GOT me on a horse for the first time in my life when I was 43 years old. He dared me. I told him I certainly wasn’t going to commit suicide on the back of one of his fire-cracker polo ponies, since I had a wife and a mother-in-law and 2 children to support. So he borrowed a gentle, patient old mare from his girlfriend at the time, who was Claudia Roosevelt.
Comically enough, Lowell’s then girlfriend was a whiz at arithmetic, but otherwise a nitwit. You could ask her, “What is 5,111 times 10,022, divided by 97?” Claudia would reply, “That’s 528,066.4. So what? So what?”
So what indeed! The lesson I myself learned over and over again when teaching at the college and then the prison was the uselessness of information to most people, except as entertainment. If facts weren’t funny or scary, or couldn’t make you rich, the heck with them.
WHEN I LATER went to work at the prison, I encountered a mass murderer named Alton Darwin who also could do arithmetic in his head. He was Black. Unlike Claudia Roosevelt, he was highly intelligent in the verbal area. The people he had murdered were rivals or deadbeats or police informers or cases of mistaken identity or innocent bystanders in the illegal drug industry. His manner of speaking was elegant and thought-provoking.
He hadn’t killed nearly as many people as I had. But then again, he hadn’t had my advantage, which was the full cooperation of our Government.
Also, he had done all his killing for reasons of money. I had never stooped to that.
When I found out that he could do arithmetic in his head, I said to him, “That’s a remarkable gift you have.”
“Doesn’t seem fair, does it,” he said, “that somebody should come into the world with such a great advantage over the common folk? When I get out of here, I’m going to buy me a pretty striped tent and put up a sign saying ‘One dollar. Come on in and see the Nigger do arithmetic.’ ” He wasn’t ever going to get out of there. He was serving a life sentence without hope of parole.
DARWIN’S FANTASY ABOUT starring in a mental-arithmetic show when he got out, incidentally, was inspired by something 1 of his great-grandfathers did in South Carolina after World War I. All the airplane pilots back then were white, and some of them did stunt flying at country fairs. They were called “barnstormers.”
And 1 of these barnstormers with a 2-cockpit plane strapped Darwin’s great-grandfather in the front cockpit, even though the great-grandfather couldn’t even drive an automobile. The barnstormer crouched down in the rear cockpit, so people couldn’t see him but he could still work the controls. And people came from far and wide, according to Darwin, “to see the Nigger fly the airplane.”
He was only 25 years old when we first met, the same age as Lowell Chung when Lowell won the Bronze Medal for horseback riding in Seoul, South Korea. When I was 25, I hadn’t killed anybody yet, and hadn’t had nearly as many women as Darwin had. When he was only 20, he told me, he paid cash for a Ferrari. I didn’t have a car of my own, which was a good car, all right, a Chevrolet Corvette, but nowhere near as good as a Ferrari, until I was 21.
At least I, too, had paid cash.
WHEN WE TALKED at the prison, he had a running joke that was the assumption that we came from different planets. The prison was all there was to his planet, and I had come in a flying saucer from one that was much bigger and wiser.
This enabled him to comment ironically on the only sexual activities possible inside the walls. “You have little babies on your planet?” he asked.
“Yes, we have little babies,” I said.
“We got people here trying to have babies every which way,” he said, “but they never get babies. What do you think they’re doing
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