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basement. When, at the very beginning, Father said that we should go down in the basement and get to work, we had actually gone down in the basement. But we stayed down there for only about 10 minutes while he thought and thought, growing ever more excited. I didn’t say anything.
    Actually, I did say one thing. “Mind if I smoke?” I said.
    “Go right ahead,” he said.
    That was a breakthrough for me. It meant I could smoke in the house whenever I pleased, and he wouldn’t say anything.
    Then he led the way back up to the living room. He sat down at Mother’s desk and made a list of things that should go into the exhibit.
    “What are you doing, Dad?” I said.
    “Shh,” he said. “I’m busy. Don’t bother me.”
     
    SO I DIDN’T bother him. I had more than enough to think about as it was. I was pretty sure I had gonorrhea. It was some sort of urethral infection, which was making me very uncomfortable. But I hadn’t seen a doctor about it, because the doctor, by law, would have had to report me to the Department of Health, and my parents would have been told about it, as though they hadn’t had enough heartaches already.
    Whatever the infection was, it cleared itself up without my doing anything about it. It couldn’t have been gonorrhea, which never stops eating you up of its own accord. Why should it ever stop of its own accord? It’s having such a nice time. Why call off the party? Look how healthy and happy the kids are.
     
     
    TWICE IN LATER life I would contract what was unambiguously gonorrhea, once in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and then again in Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City, in Vietnam. In both instances I told the doctors about the self-healing infection I had had in high school.
    It might have been yeast, they said. I should have opened a bakery.
     
     
    SO FATHER STARTED coming home from work with pieces of the exhibit, which had been made to his order at Barrytron: pedestals and display cases, and explanatory signs and labels made by the print shop that did a lot of work for Barrytron. The crystals themselves came from a Pittsburgh chemical supply house that did a lot of business with Barrytron. One crystal, I remember, came all the way from Burma.
    The chemical supply house must have gone to some trouble to get together a remarkable collection of crystals for us, since what they sent us couldn’t have come from their regular stock. In order to please a big customer like Barrytron, they may have gone to somebody who collected and sold crystals for their beauty and rarity, not as chemicals but as jewelry.
    At any rate, the crystals, which were of museum quality, caused Father to utter these famous last words after he spread them out on the coffee table in our living room, gloatingly: “Son, there is no way we can lose.”
     
     
    WELL, AS JEAN-PAUL Sartre says in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, “Hell is other people.” Other people made short work of Father’s and my invincible contest entry in Cleveland 43 years ago.
    Generals George Armstrong Custer at the Little Bighorn, and Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg, and William Westmoreland in Vietnam all come to mind.
     
     
    SOMEBODY SAID 1 time, I remember, that General Custer’s famous last words were, “Where are all these blankety-blank Injuns comin’ from?”
     
     
    FATHER AND I, and not our pretty crystals, were for a little while the most fascinating exhibit in Moellenkamp Auditorium. We were a demonstration of abnormal psychology. Other contestants and their mentors gathered around us and put us through our paces. They certainly knew which buttons to push, so to speak, to make us change color or twist and turn or grin horribly or whatever.
    One contestant asked Father how old he was and what high school he was attending.
    That was when we should have packed up our things and gotten out of there. The judges hadn’t had a look at us yet, and neither had any reporters. We hadn’t yet put up the sign that said what my name was and what