Slapstick, Or, Lonesome No More! - Kurt Vonnegut [35]
And I told him how Budweiser had died.
• • •
During this conversation, I would bring my hand to my mouth again and again, seeming to stifle exclamations and so on. I was actually popping tiny green pills into my mouth. They were outlawed by then, and no longer manufactured. I had perhaps a bushel of them back in the Senate Office Building.
They accounted for my unflagging courtesy and optimism, and perhaps for my failure to age as quickly as other men. I was seventy years old, but I had the vigor of a man half that age.
I had even picked up a pretty new wife, Sophie Rothschild Swain, who was only twenty-three.
• • •
“If you get elected, and I get issued all these new artificial relatives—” said the man. He paused. “How many did you say?”
“Ten thousand brothers and sisters,” I told him. “One-hundred and ninety-thousand cousins.”
“Isn’t that an awful lot?” he said.
“Didn’t we just agree we need all the relatives we can get in a country as big and clumsy as ours?” I said. “If you ever go to Wyoming, say, won’t it be a comfort to you to know you have many relatives there?”
He thought that over. “Well, yes—I expect,” he said at last.
“As I said in my speech:” I told him, “your new middle name would consists of a noun, the name of a flower or fruit or nut or vegetable or legume, or a bird or a reptile or a fish, or a mollusk, or a gem or a mineral or a chemical element—connected by a hypen to a number between one and twenty.” I asked him what his name was at the present time.
“Elmer Glenville Grasso,” he said.
“Well,” I said, “you might become Elmer Uranium-3 Grasso, say. Everybody with Uranium as a part of their middle name would be your cousin.”
“That brings me back to my first question,” he said. “What if I get some artificial relative I absolutely can’t stand?”
• • •
“What is so novel about a person’s having a relative he can’t stand?” I asked him. “Wouldn’t you say that sort of thing has been going on now for perhaps a million years, Mr. Grasso?”
And then I said a very obscene thing to him. I am not inclined toward obscenities, as this book itself demonstrates. In all my years of public life, I had never said an off-color thing to the American people.
So it was terrifically effective when I at last spoke coarsely. I did so in order to make memorable how nicely scaled to average human beings my new social scheme would be.
Mr. Grasso was not the first to hear the startling rowdy-isms. I had even used them on radio. There was no such thing as television any more.
“Mr. Grasso,” I said, “I personally will be very disappointed, if you do not say to artificial relatives you hate, after I am elected, ‘Brother or Sister or Cousin,’ as the case may be, ‘why don’t you take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut? Why don’t you take a flying fuck at the mooooooooooooon?’”
• • •
“You know what relatives you say that to are going to do, Mr. Grasso?” I went on. “They’re going to go home and try to figure out how to be better relatives!”
• • •
“And consider how much better off you will be, if the reforms go into effect, when a beggar comes up to you and asks for money,” I went on.
“I don’t understand,” said the man.
“Why,” I said, “you say to that beggar, ‘What’s your middle name?’ And he will say ‘Oyster-19’ or ‘Chickadee-1,’ or ‘Hollyhock-13,’ or some such thing.
“And you can say to him, ‘Buster—I happen to be a Uranium-3. You have one hundred and ninety thousand cousins and ten thousand brothers and sisters. You’re not exactly alone in this world. I have relatives of my own to look after. So why don’t you take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut? Why don’t you take a flying fuck at the moooooooooooon?’”
34
THE FUEL SHORTAGE was so severe when I was elected, that the first stiff problem I faced after my inauguration was where to get enough electricity to power the computers which would issue the new middle names.
I ordered horses and soldiers and wagons