Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [48]
I can’t thank Joe enough for having me make negatives for his positives after the little radio in my head stopped receiving messages from wherever it is the bright ideas come from. Art is so absorbing.
It is a sopper-upper.
Listen: Only three weeks ago at this writing, on September 6th, 1996, Joe and I opened a show of twenty-six of our prints in the 1/1 Gallery in Denver, Colorado. A local microbrewery, Wynkoop, bottled a special beer for the occasion. The label was one of my self-portraits. The name of the beer was Kurt’s Mile-High Malt.
You think that wasn’t fun? Try this: The beer, at my suggestion, was lightly flavored with coffee. What was so great about that? It tasted really good, for one thing, but it was also an homage to my maternal grandfather Albert Lieber, who was a brewer until he was put out of business by Prohibition in 1920. The secret ingredient in the beer that won a Gold Medal for the Indianapolis Brewery at the Paris Exposition of 1889 was coffee!
Ting-a-ling!
That still wasn’t enough fun out there in Denver? OK, how about the fact that the name of the owner of the Wynkoop Brewing Company, a guy about Joe’s age, was John Hickenlooper? So what? Only this: When I went to Cornell University to become a chemist fifty-six years ago, I was made a fraternity brother of a man named John Hickenlooper.
Ting-a-ling?
This was his son! My fraternity brother had died when this son was only seven. I knew more about him than his own son did! I was able to tell this young Denver brewer that his dad, in partnership with another Delta Upsilon brother, John Locke, sold candy and soft drinks and cigarettes out of a big closet at the top of the stairs on the second floor of the fraternity house.
They christened it Hickenlooper’s Lockenbar. We called it Lockenlooper’s Hickenbar, and Barkenhicker’s Loopenlock, and Lockenbarker’s Loopenhick, and so on.
Happy days! We thought we’d live forever.
Old beer in new bottles. Old jokes in new people.
I told young John Hickenlooper a joke his dad taught me. It worked like this: His dad would say to me, no matter where we were, “Are you a member of the Turtle Club?” I had no choice but to bellow at the top of my lungs, “YOU BET YOUR ASS I AM!”
I could do the same thing to his dad. On some particularly solemn and sacred occasion, such as the swearing in of new fraternity brothers, I might whisper to him, “Are you a member of the Turtle Club?” He would have no choice but to bellow at the top of his lungs, “YOU BET YOUR ASS I AM!”
45
Another old joke: “Hello, my name is Spalding. No doubt you’ve played with my balls.” It doesn’t work anymore because Spalding is no longer a major manufacturer of athletic equipment, just as Lieber Gold Medal Beer is no longer a popular recreational drug in the Middle West, and just as the Vonnegut Hardware Company is no longer a manufacturer and retailer of durable and eminently practical goods out that way.
The hardware company was put out of business fair and square by livelier competitors. The Indianapolis Brewery was shut down by Article XVIII of the United States Constitution, which declared in 1919 that the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors was against the law.
The Indianapolis humorist Kin Hubbard said about Prohibition that it was “better than no liquor at all.” Intoxicating liquors did not become lawful again until 1933. By then, the bootlegger Al Capone owned Chicago, and Joseph P. Kennedy, father of a murdered-President-to-be, was a multimillionaire.
At the daybreak that followed the opening of Joe Petro III’s and my show in Denver, a Sunday, I awoke alone in a room in the oldest hotel there, the Oxford. I knew where I was and how I had gotten there. It wasn’t as though I had been drunk as a hooty-owl on Grandfather’s beer the night before.
I dressed and stepped outside. Nobody else I could see was up yet. There were no moving vehicles. If free will had