Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [57]
Little did I dream that I would soon be scuttling through the catacombs beneath the station, and that I would learn the secret purpose of The RAMJAC Corporation down there.
The baby and I headed back west again. If we had kept going east, we would have soon delivered ourselves to Tudor City, where my son lived. We did not want to see him. Yes, and we paused before the window of a store that offered wicker picnic hampers—fitted out with Thermos bottles and tin boxes for sandwiches and so on. There was also a bicycle. I assumed that I could still ride a bicycle. I told the baby in my mind that we might buy a hamper and a bicycle and ride out on an abandoned dock some nice day and eat chicken sandwiches and wash them down with lemonade, while seagulls soared and keened overhead. I was beginning to feel hungry. Back in prison I would have been full of coffee and oatmeal by then.
I passed the Century Association on West Forty-third Street, a gentleman’s club where, shortly after the Second World War, I had once been the luncheon guest of Peter Gibney, the composer, a Harvard classmate of mine. I was never invited back. I would have given anything now to be a bartender in there, but Gibney was still alive and probably still a member. We had had a falling out, you might say, after I testified against Leland Clewes. Gibney sent me a picture postcard, so that my wife and the postman could read the message, too.
“Dear shithead,” it said, “why don’t you crawl back under a damp rock somewhere?” The picture was of the Mona Lisa, with that strange smile of hers.
Down the block was the Coffee Shop of the Hotel Royalton, and I made for that. The Royalton, incidentally, like the Arapahoe, was a Hospitality Associates, Ltd., hotel; which is to say, a RAMJAC hotel. By the time I reached the coffee-shop door, however, my self-confidence had collapsed. Panic had taken its place. I believed that I was the ugliest, dirtiest little old bum in Manhattan. If I went into the coffee shop, everybody would be nauseated. They would throw me out and tell me to go to the Bowery, where I belonged.
But I somehow found the courage to go in anyway—and imagine my surprise! It was as though I had died and gone to heaven! A waitress said to me, “Honeybunch, you sit right down, and I’ll bring you your coffee right away.” I hadn’t said anything to her.
So I did sit down, and everywhere I looked I saw customers of every description being received with love. To the waitress everybody was “honeybunch” and “darling” and “dear.” It was like an emergency ward after a great catastrophe. It did not matter what race or class the victims belonged to. They were all given the same miracle drug, which was coffee. The catastrophe in this case, of course, was that the sun had come up again.
I thought to myself, “My goodness—these waitresses and cooks are as unjudgmental as the birds and lizards on the Galápagos Islands, off Ecuador.” I was able to make the comparison because I had read about those peaceful islands in prison, in a National Geographic loaned to me by the former lieutenant governor of Wyoming. The creatures there had had no enemies, natural or unnatural, for thousands of years. The idea of anybody’s wanting to hurt them was inconceivable to them.
So a person coming ashore there could walk right up to an animal and unscrew its head, if he wanted to. The animal would have no plan for such an occasion. And all the other animals would simply stand around and watch, unable to draw any lessons for themselves from what was going on. A person could unscrew the head of every animal on an island, if that was his idea of business or fun.
I had the