Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [22]
So I went to New York City to be born again.
It was and remains easy for most Americans to go somewhere else to start anew. I wasn’t like my parents. I didn’t have any supposedly sacred piece of land or shoals of friends and relatives to leave behind. Nowhere has the number zero been more of philosophical value than in the United States.
“Here goes nothing,” says the American as he goes off the high diving board.
Yes, and my mind really was as blank as an embryo’s as I crossed this great continent on womblike Pullman cars. It was as though there had never been a San Ignacio. Yes, and when the Twentieth Century Limited from Chicago plunged into a tunnel under New York City, with its lining of pipes and wires, I was out of the womb and into the birth canal.
Ten minutes later I was born in Grand Central Station, wearing the first suit I had ever owned, and carrying a cardboard valise and a portfolio of my very best drawings.
Who was there to welcome this beguiling Armenian infant?
Not a soul, not a soul.
I would have made a great Dan Gregory illustration for a story about a yokel finding himself all alone in a big city he has never seen before. I had got my suit through the mail from Sears, Roebuck, and nobody could draw cheap, mail-order clothes like Dan Gregory. My shoes were old and cracked, but I had shined them and put new rubber heels on them myself. I had also threaded in new laces, but one of those had broken somewhere around Kansas City. A truly observant person would have noticed the clumsy splice in the broken shoelaces. Nobody could describe the economic and spiritual condition of a character in terms of his shoes like Dan Gregory.
My face, however, was wrong for a yokel in a magazine story back then. Gregory would have had to make me an Anglo-Saxon.
He could have used my head in a story about Indians. I would have made a passable Hiawatha. He illustrated an expensive edition of Hiawatha one time, and the model he used for the title character was the son of a Greek fry cook.
In the movies back then, just about any big-nosed person whose ancestors came from the shores of the Mediterranean or the Near East, if he could act a little, could play a rampaging Sioux or whatever. The audiences were more than satisfied.
Now I yearned to get back on the railroad train! I had been so happy there! How I adored that train! God Almighty Himself must have been hilarious when human beings so mingled iron and water and fire as to make a railroad train!
Nowadays, of course, everything must be done with plutonium and laser beams.
And could Dan Gregory ever paint pictures of railroad trains! He used to work from blueprints he got from the manufacturers, so that a misplaced rivet or whatever wouldn’t spoil his picture for a railroad man. And if he had done a picture of the Twentieth Century Limited the day I arrived, the stains and dirt on the outside would be native to the run between Chicago and New York. Nobody could paint grime like Dan Gregory.
And where was he now? Where was Marilee? Why hadn’t they sent someone to meet me with his great Marmon touring car?
He knew exactly when I was coming. He was the one who had picked the date, an easy one to remember. It was Saint Valentine’s Day. And he had done me so many kindnesses through the mail, and not through Marilee or any flunky. All the messages were in his own handwriting. They were brief, but they were incredibly generous, too. I was not only to buy a warm suit for myself at his expense, but one for Father, too.
His notes were so compassionate! He didn’t want me to get scared or make a fool of myself on the trains, so he told me how to act in a Pullman berth and on the dining car, and how much and when to tip the waiters and porters, and how to change trains in Chicago. He couldn’t have been