God Bless You Dr. Kevorkian - Kurt Vonnegut [7]
It isn’t enough for Newton that during his eighty-five years on Earth he invented calculus, codified and quantified the laws of gravity, motion, and optics, and designed the first reflecting telescope. He can’t forgive himself for having left it to Darwin to come up with the theory of evolution, to Pasteur to come up with the germ theory, and to Albert Einstein to come up with relativity.
“I must have been deaf, dumb, and blind not to have come up with those myself,” he said to me. “What could have been more obvious?”
My job is to interview dead people for WNYC, but the late Sir Isaac Newton interviewed me instead. He got to make only a single one-way trip down the tunnel. He wants to know what it seems to be made of, fabric or metal or wood or what. I tell him that it’s made of whatever dreams are made of, which leaves him monumentally unsatisfied.
Saint Peter quoted Shakespeare to him: There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
i have just interviewed
Peter Pellegrino, who died last March 26, age eighty-two, in his home in Newtown, Pennsylvania. Mr. Pellegrino was a founder of the Balloon Federation of America, and the first American to cross the Alps in a hot air balloon, and a validator of ballooning records for the National Aeronautic Association, and a balloon pilot examiner for the F.A.A.
He asked if I’d been a balloonist, and I said no. This was outside the Pearly Gates. I’m not allowed inside anymore. If I go inside again, Saint Peter says I’ll be a keeper.
Saint Peter explained to Pellegrino that I wasn’t dead, that I was simply having a near-death experience, and would soon be back among the living.
When Pellegrino heard that, he said, “For God’s sake, man—get a tank of propane and a balloon while you’ve still got time, or you’ll never know what Heaven is!”
Saint Peter protested. “Mr. Pellegrino,” he said, “this is Heaven!”
“The only reason you can say that,” said Pellegrino, “is because you’ve never crossed the Alps in a hot air balloon!”
Saint Peter said to me, “Not only do you still have time to go ballooning. You might also write a book with the title, ‘Heaven and Its Discontents.’ ” He said to Pellegrino, ironically of course, “If you’d had crack cocaine on Earth, I suppose Heaven would also be a disappointment.”
“Bingo!” said Pellegrino.
Even as a child, he said, he knew he belonged up in the sky, not on the ground, and I quote: “… just as a fish flopping on a riverbank knows it belongs in the water.” As soon as he was old enough, he went up in the sky at the controls of all sorts of airplanes, from World War I Jennies to commercial transports.
“But I felt like an invader, an alien up there, tearing up the sky with my propellers, dirtying it up with my noise and exhaust,” he went on. “I didn’t go up in a balloon until I was thirty-five. That was a dream come true. That was Heaven, and I was still alive.
“I became the sky.”
This is Kurt Vonnegut, signing off with Jack Kevorkian in Hunstville State Prison. Until the next time, ta ta.
when i went looking
for James Earl Ray, confessed assassin of Martin Luther King, on today’s controlled near-death experience, I didn’t have to wander far and wide into Paradise. James Earl Ray died of liver failure on April 23 of 1998. According to Saint Peter, though, he has so far been unwilling to take a single step into the Life Everlasting awaiting him beyond the Pearly Gates.
He’s no moron: he has an IQ of 108, well above average when measured against the intelligence of the general American population. He said to me that he wasn’t going to set foot into eternity until a prison cell was built for him. He said the only way he could feel cozy forever was in a prison cell. In a cell, he said, he wouldn’t give a darn how much time was passing by. Actually, he used the “s” word, wouldn’t give a good “shit” how much time was passing by.
His conversation is still liberally spinkled with the “n” word for African Americans, despite Saint