Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [14]
Frank had made up the craziest assignment he could think of, confident that Palladio would tell him to take his custom elsewhere. But it didn’t! It presented him with menu after menu, asking how many cars, and in what city, because of various local building codes, and whether trucks would be allowed to use it, too, and on and on. It even asked about surrounding buildings, and whether Jeffersonian architecture would be in harmony with them. It offered to give him alternative plans in the manner of Michael Graves or I. M. Pei.
It gave him plans for the wiring and plumbing, and ballpark estimates of what it would cost to build in any part of the world he cared to name.
So Frank went home and killed himself the first time.
Laughing and crying there in his wife’s office at the Academy on the first of two Christmas Eves, 2000, Zoltan Pepper said this to his pretty but gawky wife: “It used to be said of a man who had suffered a catastrophic setback in his line of work that he had been handed his head on a platter. We are being handed our heads with tweeters now.”
He was speaking, of course, of microchips.
10
Allie died in New Jersey. She and her husband, Jim, also a native Hoosier, are buried whole in Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis. So is James Whitcomb Riley, the Hoosier Poet, a never-married lush. So is John Dillinger, the beloved bank robber of the 1930s. So are our parents, Kurt and Edith, and Father’s kid brother Alex Vonnegut, the Harvard-educated life insurance salesman who said, whenever life was good, “If this isn’t nice, what is?” So are two previous generations of our parents’ forebears : a brewer, an architect, merchants and musicians, and their wives, of course.
Full house!
John Dillinger, a farm boy, escaped from jail once brandishing a wooden pistol he had whittled from a broken washtub slat. He blackened it with shoe polish! He was so entertaining. While on the run, robbing banks and vanishing into the boondocks, Dillinger wrote Henry Ford a fan letter. He thanked the old anti-Semite for making such fast and agile getaway cars!
It was possible to get away from the police back then if you were a better driver with a better car. Talk about fair play! Talk about what we say we want for everyone in America: a level playing field! And Dillinger robbed only the rich and strong, banks with armed guards, and in person.
Dillinger wasn’t a simpering, sly swindler. He was an athlete.
In the slavering search for subversive literature on the shelves of our public schools, which will never stop, the two most subversive tales of all remain untouched, wholly unsuspected. One is the story of Robin Hood. As ill educated as John Dillinger was, that was surely his inspiration: a reputable blueprint for what a real man might do with life.
The minds of children in intellectually humble American homes back then weren’t swamped with countless stories from TV sets. They heard or read only a few stories, and so could remember them, and maybe learn something from them. Everywhere in the English-speaking world, one of those was “Cinderella.” Another was “The Ugly Duckling.” Another was the story of Robin Hood.
And another, as disrespectful of established authority as the story of Robin Hood, which “Cinderella” and “The Ugly Duckling” are not, is the life of Jesus Christ as described in the New Testament.
G-men, under orders from J. Edgar Hoover, the unmarried homosexual director of the FBI, shot Dillinger dead, simply executed him as he came out of a movie theater with a date. He hadn’t pulled a gun, or lunged or dived, or tried to run away. He was like anybody else coming out into the real world after a movie, awakening from enchantment. He was killed because he had for too long made G-men, all of whom then wore fedoras, look non compos mentis, like nincompoops.
That was in 1934. I was eleven. Allie was sixteen. Allie wept and raged, and we both reviled Dillinger’s date at the movie. This bitch, and there was nothing else