Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [12]
The multimillionaire wanted someone who would play chess with him many hours a day. So he seduced the boy, so to speak, with simpler games first—hearts and old maid, checkers and dominoes. But he also taught him chess. Soon they were playing only chess. Their conversations were limited to conventional chess taunts and teasings, which had not changed in a thousand years.
Samples: “Have you played this game before?” “Really?” “Spot me a queen.” “Is this a trap?”
The boy was Walter F. Starbuck. He was willing to spend his childhood and youth so unnaturally for this reason: Alexander Hamilton McCone promised to send him to Harvard someday.
—K.V.
Help the weak ones that cry for me, help the prosecuted and the victim, because they are your better friends; they are the comrades that fight and fall as your father and Bartolo fought and fell yesterday for the conquest of the joy of freedom for all the poor workers. In this struggle of life you will find more love and you will be loved.
—NICOLA SACCO (1891-1927)
in his last letter to his thirteen-year-old-son, Dante, August 18, 1927, three days before his execution in Charlestown Prison, Boston, Massachusetts. “Bartolo” was Bartolomeo Vanzetti (1888—1927), who died the same night in the same electric chair, the invention of a dentist. So did an even more forgotten man, Celestino Madeiros (1894—1927), who confessed to the crime of which Sacco and Vanzetti had been convicted, even while his own conviction for another murder was being appealed. Madeiros was a notorious criminal, who behaved unselfishly at the end.
1
LIFE GOES ON, yes—and a fool and his self-respect are soon parted, perhaps never to be reunited even on Judgment Day.
Pay attention, please, for years as well as people are characters in this book, which is the story of my life so far. Nineteen-hundred and Twenty-nine wrecked the American economy. Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-one sent me to Harvard. Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-eight got me my first job in the federal government. Nineteen-hundred and Forty-six gave me a wife. Nineteen-hundred and Forty-six gave me an ungrateful son. Nineteen-hundred and Fifty-three fired me from the federal government.
Thus do I capitalize years as though they were proper names.
Nineteen-hundred and Seventy gave me a job in the Nixon White House. Nineteen-hundred and Seventy-five sent me to prison for my own preposterous contributions to the American political scandals known collectively as “Watergate.”
Three years ago, as I write, Nineteen-hundred and Seventy-seven was about to turn me loose again. I felt like a piece of garbage. I was wearing olive-drab coveralls, the prison uniform. I sat alone in a dormitory—on a cot that I had stripped of its bedding. A blanket, two sheets, and a pillowcase, which were to be returned to my government along with my uniform, were folded neatly on my lap. My speckled old hands were clasped atop these. I stared straight ahead at a wall on the second floor of a barracks at the Federal Minimum Security Adult Correctional Facility on the edge of Finletter Air Force Base—thirty-five miles from Atlanta, Georgia. I was waiting for a guard to conduct me to the Administration Building, where I would be given my release papers and my civilian clothes. There would be no one to greet me at the gate. Nowhere in the world was there anyone who had a forgiving hug for me—or a free meal or a bed for a night or two.
If anyone had been watching me, he would have seen me do something quite mysterious every five minutes or so. Without changing my blank expression, I would lift my hands from the bedding and I would clap three times. I will explain why by and by.
It was nine in the morning on April twenty-first. The guard was one hour late. A fighter plane leaped up from the top of a nearby runway, destroyed enough energy to heat one hundred homes for a