Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [27]
Strong stuff.
My prison daydream of New York City did suppose, however, that there were still old acquaintances, although I could not name them, who might help me to get a job. It is a hard daydream to let go of—that one has friends. Those who would have remained my friends, if life had gone a little bit better for me, would have been mainly in New York. I imagined that, if I were to prowl midtown Manhattan day after day, from the theater district on the west to the United Nations on the east, and from the Public Library on the south to the Plaza Hotel on the north, and past all the foundations and publishing houses and bookstores and clothiers for gentlemen and clubs for gentlemen and expensive hotels and restaurants in between, I would surely meet somebody who knew me, who remembered what a good man I used to be, who did not especially despise me—who would use his influence to get me a job tending bar somewhere.
I would plead with him shamelessly, and rub his nose in my Doctor of Mixology degree.
If I saw my son coming, so went the daydream, I would show him my back until he was safely by.
“Well,” said Larkin, “Jesus tells me not to give up on anybody, but I’m close to giving up on you. You’re just going to sit there, staring straight ahead, no matter what I say.
“Afraid so,” I said.
“I never saw anybody more determined to be a geek than you are,” he said.
A geek, of course, is a man who lies in a cage on a bed of filthy straw in a carnival freak-show and bites the heads off live chickens and makes subhuman noises, and is billed as having been raised by wild animals in the jungles of Borneo. He has sunk as low as a human being can sink in the American social order, except for his final resting place in a potter’s field.
Now Larkin, frustrated, let some of his old maliciousness show. “That’s what Chuck Colson called you in the White House: ‘The Geek,’” he said.
“I’m sure,” I said.
“Nixon never respected you,” he said. “He just felt sorry for you. That’s why he gave you the job.”
“I know,” I said.
“You didn’t even have to come to work,” he said. “I know,” I said.
“That’s why we gave you the office without any windows and without anybody else around—so you’d catch on that you didn’t even have to come to work.”
“I tried to be of use anyway,” I said. “I hope your Jesus can forgive me for that.”
“If you’re just going to make fun of Jesus, maybe you better not talk about Him at all,” he said.
“Fine,” I said. “You brought Him up.”
“Do you know when you started to be a geek?” he said.
I knew exactly when the downward dive of my life began, when my wings were broken forever, when I realized that I would never soar again. That event was the most painful subject imaginable to me. I could not bear to think about it yet again, so I said to Larkin, looking him in the eye at last, “In the name of mercy, please leave this poor old man alone.”
He was elated. “By golly—I finally got through the thick Harvard hide of Walter F. Starbuck,” he said. “I touched a nerve, didn’t I?”
“You touched a nerve,” I said.
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” he said.
“I hope not,” I said, and I stared at the wall again.
“I was just a little boy in kneepants in Petoskey, Michigan, when I first heard your voice,” he said.
“I’m sure,” I said.
“It was on the radio. My father made me and my little sister sit by the radio and listen hard. ‘You listen hard,’ he said. ‘You’re hearing history made.’”
The year would have been Nineteen-hundred and Forty-nine. I had just returned to Washington with my little human family. We had just moved into our brick bungalow in Chevy Chase, Maryland, with its flowering crab apple tree. It was autumn. There were tart little apples on the tree. My wife Ruth was about to make jelly out of them, as she would do every year. Where was my voice coming from,