Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [96]
Am I broke again? Yes. My defense has been expensive. Also: My Watergate lawyers have caught up with me. I still owe them a lot for all they did for me.
Clyde Carter, my former guard in Georgia and now a vice-president of the Chrysler Air Temp Division of RAMJAC, was there with his lovely wife, Claudia. He did a side-splitting imitation of his cousin the President, saying, “I will never lie to you,” and promising to rebuild the South Bronx and so on.
Frank Ubriaco was there with his lovely new wife, Marilyn, who is only seventeen. Frank is fifty-three. They met at a discotheque. They seem very happy. She said that what attracted her to him at first was that he wore a white glove on only one hand. She had to find out why. He told her at first that the hand had been burned by a Chinese communist flame thrower during the Korean War, but later admitted that he had done it to himself with a Fry-o-lator. They have started a collection of tropical fish. They have a coffee table that contains tropical fish.
Frank invented a new sort of cash register for the McDonald’s Hamburgers Division. It was getting harder all the time to find employees who understood numbers well, so Frank took the numbers off the keys of the cash register and substituted pictures of hamburgers and milkshakes and French fries and Coca-Colas and so on. The person toting up a bill would simply punch the pictures of the various things a customer had ordered, and the cash register would add it up for him.
Frank got a big bonus for that.
My guess is that the Saudis will keep him on.
There was a telegram to me from Dr. Robert Fender, still in prison in Georgia. Mary Kathleen had wanted RAMJAC to make him a vice-president, too, but there was no way to get him out of prison. Treason was just too serious a crime. Clyde Carter had written to him that I was going back to prison myself, and that there was going to be a party for me, and that he should send a telegram.
This was all it said: “Ting-a-ling.”
That was from his science-fiction story about the judge from the planet Vicuna, of course, who had to find a new body to occupy, and who flew into my ear down there in Georgia, and found himself stuck to my feelings and destiny until I died.
According to the judge in the story, that was how they said both hello and good-bye on Vicuna: “Ting-a-ling.”
“Ting-a-ling” was like the Hawaiian “aloha,” which also means both hello and good-bye.
“Hello and good-bye.” What else is there to say? Our language is much larger than it needs to be.
I asked Clyde if he knew what Fender was working on now.
“A science-fiction novel about economics,” said Clyde.
“Did he say what pseudonym he’s going to use?” I said.
“‘Kilgore Trout,’” said Clyde.
• • •
My devoted secretary, Leora Borders, and her husband, Lance, were there. Lance was just getting over a radical mastectomy. He told me that one mastectomy in two hundred was performed on a man. Live and learn!
There were several other RAMJAC friends who should have been there, but dared not come. They feared that their reputations, and hence their futures as executives, might be tainted if it were known that they were friendly with me.
There were telegrams from other people I had had to my famous little parties—John Kenneth Galbraith and Salvador Dali and Erica Jong and Liv Ullmann and the Flying Farfans and on and on.
Robert Redford’s telegram, I remember, said this: “Hang tough.”
The telegrams were something less than spontaneous. As Sarah Clewes would admit under questioning, she had been soliciting them all week long.
Arpad Leen sent a spoken message through Sarah, which was meant for my ears alone: “Good show.” That could be taken a million different ways.
He was no longer presiding over the dismemberment of RAMJAC, incidentally. He had been hired away by American