Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [58]
The profit motive was not operating. The transactions were on the order of sixty-eight cents, a dollar ten, two dollars and sixty-three … I would find out later that the man who ran the cash register was the owner, but he would not stay at his post to rake the money in. He wanted to cook and wait on people, too, so that the waitresses and cooks kept having to say to him, “That’s my customer, Frank. Get back to the cash register,” or “I’m the cook here, Frank. What’s this mess you’ve started here? Get back to the cash register,” and so on.
His full name was Frank Ubriaco. He is now executive vice-president of the McDonald’s Hamburgers Division of The RAMJAC Corporation.
I could not help noticing that he had a withered right hand. It looked as though it had been mummified, although he could still use his fingers some. I asked my waitress about it. She said he had literally French-fried that hand about a year ago. He accidentally dropped his wristwatch into a vat of boiling cooking oil. Before he realized what he was doing, he had plunged his hand into the oil, trying to rescue the watch, which was a very expensive Bulova Accutron.
So out into the city I went again, feeling much improved.
I sat down to read my newspaper in Bryant Park, behind the Public Library at Forty-second Street. My belly was full and as warm as a stove. It was no novelty for me to read The New York Times. About half the inmates back at the prison had mail subscriptions to the Times, and to The Wall Street Journal, too, and Time and Newsweek and Sports Illustrated, too, and on and on. And People. I subscribed to nothing, since the prison trash baskets were forever stuffed with periodicals of every kind.
There was a sign over every trash basket in prison, incidentally, which said, “Please!” Underneath that word was an arrow that pointed straight down.
In leafing through the Times, I saw that my son, Walter Stankiewicz, né Starbuck, was reviewing the autobiography of a Swedish motion-picture star. Walter seemed to like it a lot. I gathered that she had had her ups and downs.
What I particularly wanted to read, though, was the Times’s account of its having been taken over by The RAMJAC Corporation. The event might as well have been an epidemic of cholera in Bangladesh. It was given three inches of space on the bottom corner of an inside page. The chairman of the board of RAMJAC, Arpad Leen, said in the story that RAMJAC contemplated no changes in personnel or editorial policy. He pointed out that all publications taken over by RAMJAC in the past, including those of Time Inc., and been allowed to go on as they wished, without any interference from RAMJAC.
“Nothing has changed but the ownership,” he said. And I must say, as a former RAMJAC executive myself, that we didn’t change companies we take over very much. If one of them started to die, of course—then our curiosity was aroused.
The story said that the publisher of the Times had received a handwritten note from Mrs. Jack Graham “… welcoming him to the RAMJAC family.” It said she hoped he would stay on in his present capacity. Beneath the signature were the prints of all her fingers and thumbs. There could be no question about the letter’s being genuine.
I looked about myself in Bryant Park. Lilies of the valley had raised their little bells above the winter-killed ivy and glassine envelopes that bordered the walks. My wife Ruth and I had had lilies of the valley and ivy growing under the flowering crab apple tree in the front yard of our little brick bungalow in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
I spoke to the lilies of the valley. “Good morning,” I said.
Yes, and I must have gone into a defensive trance again. Three hours passed without my budging from the bench.
I was aroused at last by a portable radio that was turned up loud. The young man carrying it sat down on a bench facing mine. He appeared to be