Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [30]
And his last words were indeed, as Clyde said, “It’s all right.”
“Well now, listen,” said Clyde. “When you get yourself a bartending job up there in New York, I just know you’re going to wind up owning that bar inside of two years’ time.” This was kindness on his part, and not genuine optimism. Clyde was trying to help me be brave. “And after you’ve got the most popular bar in New York,” he went on, “I just hope you’ll remember Clyde and maybe send for him. I can not only tend bar—I can also fix your air conditioning. By that time I’ll be able to fix your locks, too.”
I knew he had been considering enrolling in The Illinois Institute of Instruction course in locksmithing. Now, apparently, he had taken the plunge. “So you took the plunge,” I said.
“I took the plunge,” he said. “Got my first lesson today.”
The prison was a hollow square of conventional, two-story military barracks. Clyde and I were crossing the vast parade ground at its center. I with my bedding in my arms. This was where young infantrymen, the glory of their nation, had performed at one time, demonstrating their eagerness to do or die. Now I, too, I thought, had served my country in uniform, had at every moment for two years done precisely what my country had asked me to do. It had asked me to suffer. It had not asked me to die.
There were faces at some of the windows—feeble old felons with bad hearts, bad lungs, bad livers, what have you. But there was only one other figure on the parade ground itself. He was dragging a large canvas trash bag after himself as he picked up papers with a spike at the end of a long stick. He was small and old, like me. When he saw us coming, he positioned himself between us and the Administration Building, and he pointed his spike at me, indicating that he had something very important to say to me. He was Dr. Carlo di Sanza, who held a Doctorate in law from the University of Naples. He was a naturalized American citizen and was serving his second term for using the mails to promote a Ponzi scheme. He was ferociously patriotic.
“You are going home?” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Don’t ever forget one thing,” he said. “No matter what this country does to you, it is still the greatest country in the world. Can you remember that?”
“Yes, sir—I think I can,” I said.
“You were a fool to have been a communist,” he said.
“That was a long time ago,” I said.
“There are no opportunities in a communist country,” he said. “Why would you want to live in a country with no opportunities?”
“It was a youthful mistake, sir,” I said.
“In America I have been a millionaire two times,” he said, “and I will be a millionaire again.”
“I’m sure of it,” I said, and I was. He would simply start up his third Ponzi scheme—consisting, as before, of offering fools enormous rates of interest for the use of their money. As before, he would use most of the money to buy himself mansions and Rolls-Royces and speedboats and so on, but returning part of it as the high interest he had promised. More and more people would come to him, having heard of him from gloatingly satisfied recipients of his interest checks, and he would use their money to write more interest checks—and on and on.
I am now convinced that Dr. di Sanza’s greatest strength was his utter stupidity. He was such a successful swindler because he himself could not, even after two convictions, understand what was inevitably castastrophic about a Ponzi scheme.
“I have made many people happy and rich,” he said. “Have you done that?”
“No, sir—not yet,” I said. “But it’s never too late to try.”
I am now moved to suppose, with my primitive understanding of economics, that every successful government is of necessity a Ponzi scheme. It accepts enormous loans that can never be repaid. How else am I to explain to my polyglot grandchildren