God Bless You Dr. Kevorkian - Kurt Vonnegut [9]
I hoped to get Mary Shelley’s opinions of the atomic bombs we dropped on the unarmed men, women, and children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—and promise to try again. This time, though, she would only rhapsodize about her parents, who were, of course, William and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and about her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and his friends and hers, John Keats and Lord Byron.
I said many ignorant people nowadays thought “Frankenstein” was the name of the monster, and not of the scientist who created him.
She said, “That’s not so ignorant after all. There are two monsters in my story, not one. And one of them, the scientist, is indeed named Frankenstein.”
This is Kurt Vonnegut in Huntsville, Texas, signing off.
i have returned from heaven,
having interviewed the poet Dr. Philip Strax, S-T-R-A-X. He died at the age of ninety on the same day as the baseball player Joe Dimaggio, and was the author of this charming couplet:
Tis better to have love and lust
Than let our apparatus rust.
Author of three volumes of poetry, Philip Strax was also a radiologist. He refined the use of x-rays, previously useful mainly for looking at bones, so they could detect malignancies in the soft tissue of breasts. The number of women’s lives extended by early detection of cancers, thanks to mammograms, in baseball terms might be called thousands upon thousands of R.B.I., or runs batted in.
The turning point in his career as a physician, if not as a poet, was the death of his beloved wife Gertrude at the age of only thirty-nine. She was killed by breast cancer detected too late. Every moment of his professional life thereafter was devoted to fighting that disease: what a success!
I found him at the edge of a crowd of frenzied angels who wanted their feathers autographed by Dimaggio. I said that his glowing obituary in the NewYork Times indicated that he was extraordinarily fond of women, and they of him. He recited these unabashedly feminist lines of his own composition:
Let us remind our poor men folk in deed and song:
There are two types of men in this womanly world:
Those who know they are weak,
Those who think they are strong.
This is Kurt Vonnegut, in the indispensable company of Jack Kevorkian, who has saved my life a hundred times now, signing off until the next time. Ta ta.
it is late in the afternoon
of February 3, 1998. I have just been unstrapped from a gurney following another controlled near-death experience in this busy execution chamber in Huntsville, Texas.
For the first time in my career, I was actually on the heels of a celebrity as I made my way down the blue tunnel to Paradise. She was Carla Faye Tucker, the born-again murderer of two strangers with a pick-axe. Carla Faye was completely killed here, by the State of Texas, shortly after lunch time.
Two hours later, on another gurney, I myself was made only three-quarters dead. I caught up with Carla Faye in the tunnel, about a hundred fifty yards from the far end, near the Pearly Gates. Since she was dragging her feet, I hastened to assure her that there was no Hell waiting for her, no Hell waiting for anyone. She said that was too bad because she would be glad to go to Hell if only she could take the governor of Texas with her. “He’s a murderer, too,” said Carla Faye. “He murdered me.”
Dr. Jack Kevorkian supervises my trip to near death and back. Your reporter from the Afterlife has to sign off now. Jack and I have been asked to vacate the lethal injection facility, which must be prepared for yet another total execution. Speaking for both of us, I now say, ta-ta.
unfortunately, the recent
legal difficulties of Jack Kevorkian in Michigan, which is to say his conviction for murder one, have brought what I hope is a temporary halt to the