Slapstick, Or, Lonesome No More! - Kurt Vonnegut [39]
There were editorials calling for family health insurance programs and sports teams and so on. There was one interesting essay, I remember, either in The Daffy-nition or The Goober Gossip, which said that families with high moral standards were the best maintainers of law and order, and that police departments could be expected to fade away.
“If you know of a relative who is engaged in criminal acts,” it concluded, “don’t call the police. Call ten more relatives.”
And so on.
• • •
Vera told me that the motto of The Woodpile used to be this: “A Good Citizen is a Good Family Woman or a Good Family Man.”
• • •
As the new families began to investigate themselves, some statistical freaks were found. Almost all Pachysandras, for example, could play a musical instrument, or at least sing in tune. Three of them were conductors of major symphony orchestras. The widow in Urbana who had been visited by Chinese was a Pachysandra. She supported herselfand her son by giving piano lessons out there.
Watermelons, on the average, were a kilogram heavier than members of any other family.
Three-quarters of all Sulfurs were female.
And on and on.
As for my own family: There was an extraordinary concentration of Daffodils in and around Indianapolis. My family paper was published out there, and its masthead boasted, “Printed in Daffodil City, U.S.A.”
Hi ho.
• • •
Family clubhouses appeared. I personally cut the ribbon at the opening of the Daffodil Club here in Manhattan—on Forty-third Street, right off Fifth Avenue.
This was a thought-provoking experience for me, even though I was sedated by tri-benzo-Deportamil. I had once belonged to another club, and to another sort of artificial extended family, too, on the very same premises. So had my father, and both my grandfathers, and all four of my great grandfathers.
Once the building had been a haven for men of power and wealth, and well-advanced into middle age.
Now it teemed with mothers and children, with old people playing checkers or chess or dreaming, with younger adults taking dancing lessons or bowling on the duckpin alleys, or playing the pinball machines.
I had to laugh.
38
IT WAS ON THAT particular visit to Manhattan that I saw my first “Thirteen Club.” There were dozens of such raffish establishments in Chicago, I had heard. Now Manhattan had one of its own.
Eliza and I had not anticipated that all the people with “13” in their middle names would naturally band together almost immediately, to form the largest family of all.
And I certainly got a taste of my own medicine when I asked a guard on the door of the Manhattan Thirteen Club if I could come in and have a look around. It was very dark in there.
“All due respect, Mr. President,” he said to me, “but are you a Thirteen, sir?”
“No,” I said. “You know I’m not.”
“Then I must say to you, sir,” he said, “what I have to say to you.
“With all possible respect, sir:” he said, “Why don’t you take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut? Why don’t you take a flying fuck at the mooooooooooooon?”
I was in ecstasy.
• • •
Yes, and it was during that visit here that I first learned of The Church of Jesus Christ the Kidnapped—then a tiny cult in Chicago, but destined to become the most popular American religion of all time.
It was brought to my attention by a leaflet handed to me by a clean and radiant youth, as I crossed the lobby to the staircase of my hotel.
He was jerking his head around in what then seemed an eccentric manner, as though hoping to catch someone peering out at him from behind a potted palm tree or an easy chair, or even from directly overhead, from the crystal chandelier.
He was so absorbed in firing ardent glances this way and that, that it was wholly uninteresting to him that he had just handed a leaflet