Slapstick, Or, Lonesome No More! - Kurt Vonnegut [45]
“And what’s the moral of that story, do you think?” I asked her.
She lay a callused palm on my knee. “Wilbur—don’t ever get married,” she replied.
• • •
We talked some about Indianapolis, which I had seen on the same trip, and where she and her husband had been a waitress and a bartender for a Thirteen Club—before they joined the army of the King of Michigan.
I asked her what the club was like inside.
“Oh, you know—” she said, “they had stuffed black cats and jack-o-lanterns, and aces of spades stuck to the tables with daggers and all. I used wear net stockings and spike heels and a mask and all. All the waitresses and the bartenders and the bouncer wore vampire fangs.”
“Um,” I said.
“We used to call our hamburgers ‘Batburgers,’” she said.
“Uh huh,” I said.
“We used to call tomato juice with a shot of gin a ‘Dracula’s Delight,’” she said.
“Right,” I said.
“It was just like a Thirteen Club anywhere,” she said, “but it never went over. Indianapolis just wasn’t a big Thirteen town, even though there were plenty of Thirteens there. It was a Daffodil town. You weren’t anything if you weren’t a Daffodil.”
45
I TELL YOU—I have been regaled as a multimillionaire, as a pediatrician, as a Senator, and as a President. But nothing can match for sincerity the welcome Indianapolis, Indiana, gave me as a Daffodil!
The people there were poor, and had suffered an awful lot of death, and all the public services had broken down, and they were worried about battles raging not far away. But they put on parades and feasts for me, and for Carlos Daffodil-11 Villavicencio, too, of course, which would have blinded ancient Rome.
• • •
Captain Bernard Eagle-1 O’Hare said to me, “My gosh, Mr. President—if I’d known about this, I would have asked you to make me a Daffodil.”
So I said, “I hereby dub thee a Daffodil.”
• • •
But the most satisfying and educational thing I saw out there was a weekly family meeting of Daffodils.
Yes, and I got to vote at that meeting, and so did my pilot, and so did Carlos, and so did every man, woman, and every child over the age of nine.
With a little luck, I might even have become Chairperson of the meeting, although I had been in town for less than a day. The Chairperson was chosen by lot from all assembled. And the winner of the drawing that night was an eleven-year-old black girl named Dorothy Daffodil-7 Garland.
She was fully prepared to run the meeting, and so, I suppose, was every person there.
• • •
She marched up to the lectern, which was nearly as tall as she was.
That little cousin of mine stood on a chair, without any apologies or self-mockery. She banged the meeting to order with a yellow gavel, and she told her silenced and respectful relatives, “The President of the United States is present, as most of you know. With your permission, I will ask him to say a few words to us at the conclusion of our regular business.
“Will somebody put that in the form of a motion?” she said.
“I move that Cousin Wilbur be asked to address the meeting at the conclusion of regular business,” said an old man sitting next to me.
This was seconded and put to a voice vote.
The motion carried, but with a scattering of seemingly heartfelt, by-no-means joshing, “Nays” and “Noes.”
Hi ho.
• • •
The most pressing business had to do with selecting four replacements for fallen Daffodils in the army of the King of Michigan, who was at war simultaneously with Great Lakes pirates and the Duke of Oklahoma.
There was one strapping young man, I remember, a blacksmith, in fact, who told the meeting, “Send me. There’s nothing I’d rather do than kill me some ‘Sooners,’ long as they ain’t Daffodils.” And so on.
To my surprise, he was scolded by several speakers for his military ardor. He was told that war wasn’t supposed to be fun, and in fact wasn’t fun—that tragedy was being discussed, and that he had better put on a tragic face, or he would be ejected from the meeting.
“Sooners” were people from Oklahoma, and, by extension, anybody in the service of the Duke of Oklahoma,