God Bless You Dr. Kevorkian - Kurt Vonnegut [6]
I have now cracked the code. “Colorful” in the NewYork Times means unbelievably good looking and personable and rich, but socialist.
You want to talk “colorful?” Vivian’s late lawyer husband Vincent Hallinan, loaded with real estate bucks, back in 1952 ran for president of the whole United States on the Progressive ticket! How clownish and cute can you get, even in California?
Here’s how clowning and cute. Vincent did six months in jail for his obstreperous defense of the labor leader Harry Bridges, who was accused of being a Communist during the McCarthy era. Vivian spent thirty days in the slammer for unladylike behavior during a civil rights demonstration in 1964.
And get a load of this: Her five sons were all in the demonstration with her, and one of them, Terrence, is now district attorney of San Francisco!
In Heaven, you can be any age you like. My own father is only nine. Vivian Hallinan has chosen to be eternally twenty-four, an utter knockout! I asked her how she felt about being called “colorful.”
She said she would rather have been called what Franklin D. Roosevelt was called by his enemies: “A traitor to her class.”
dr. kevorkian has just
unstrapped me from the gurney after yet another controlled near-death experience. I was lucky enough on this trip to interview none other than the late Adolf Hitler.
I was gratified to learn that he now feels remorse for any actions of his, however indirectly, which might have had anything to do with the violent deaths suffered by thirty-five million people during World War II. He and his mistress Eva Braun, of course, were among those casualties, along with four million other Germans, six million Jews, eighteen million citizens of the Soviet Union, and so on.
“I paid my dues along with everybody else,” he said.
It is his hope that a modest monument, possibly a stone cross, since he was a Christian, will be erected somewhere in his memory, possibly on the grounds of the United Nations headquarters in New York. It should be incised, he said, with his name and dates 1889–1945. Underneath should be a two-word sentence in German: “Entschuldigen Sie.”
Roughly translated into English, this comes out, “I Beg Your Pardon,” or “Excuse Me.”
during today’s controlled near-death
experience, I spoke to John Wesley Joyce, dead at sixty-five, former cop and minor league ball player, owner of the Lion’s Head Bar in Greenwich Village from 1966 until it went bust in 1996. His was the country’s most famous hangout for heavy-drinking, non-stop-talking writers in America. One wag described the clientele as “drinkers with writing problems.”
The late Mr. Joyce said it was the writers who made it their club of their own accord, which hadn’t pleased him all that much. He said he installed a juke box in the hopes it would interfere with their talking. But they kept coming. “They just had to talk a lot louder,” he said.
this is kurt vonnegut,
WNYC’s reporter on the Afterlife. During yesterday’s controlled near-death experience, I had the pleasure of speaking with Frances Keane, a romance languages expert and writer of children’s books, who died of cancer of the pancreas this past June 26 at the age of eighty-five. It seemed to me that her generally laudatory obit in the NewYork Times cut her off at the knees at the very end with this stark sentence: “Her three marriages ended in divorce.” I asked her about this and she replied with shrugs and in three different romance languages.
“Así es la vida,” she said.
“C’é la vita,” she said.
“C’est la vie,” she said.
And then: “Go fly a kite!”
during my controlled near-death
experiences, I’ve met Sir Isaac Newton, who died back in 1727, as often as I’ve met Saint Peter. They both hang out at the Heaven end of the blue tunnel of the Afterlife. Saint Peter is there because that’s his job. Sir Isaac is there because of his insatiable