Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [58]
Trout, the former hobo, had expensive clothing, including shoes and socks and underwear and cuff links, and matched Louis Vuitton luggage which had belonged to Zoltan Pepper. Everybody agreed that Monica’s husband was better off dead. What would he have had to look forward to?
When Trout found Zoltan’s flattened and elongated wheelchair in the middle of West 155th Street, he leaned it against a tree and said it was modern art. The two wheels had been squashed together so they looked like one. Trout said it was a six-foot aluminum-and-leather praying mantis, trying to ride a unicycle.
He called it The Spirit of the Twenty-first Century.
55
I met the author Dick Francis at the Kentucky Derby years ago. I knew he had been a champion rider in steeplechases. I said he was a bigger man than I had expected. He replied that it took a big man to “hold a horse together” in a steeplechase. This image of his remained in the forefront of my memory so long, I think, because life itself can seem a lot like that: a matter of holding one’s self-respect together, instead of a horse, as one’s self-respect is expected to hurdle fences and hedges and water.
My dear thirteen-year-old daughter Lily, having become a pretty adolescent, appears to me, as do most American adolescents, to be holding her self-respect together the best she can in a really scary steeplechase.
I said to the new graduates at Butler University, not much older than Lily, that they were being called Generation X, two clicks from the end, but that they were as much Generation A as Adam and Eve had been. What malarkey!
Esprit de l’escalier! Better late than never! Only at this very moment in 1996, as I am about to write the next sentence, have I realized how meaningless the image of a Garden of Eden must have been to my young audience, since the world was so densely populated with other secretly frightened people, and so overplanted and rigged with both natural and manmade booby traps.
The next sentence: I should have told them they were like Dick Francis when Dick Francis was young, and astride an animal full of pride and panic, in the starting gate for a steeplechase.
More: If a steed balks again and again at hazards, it is put out to pasture. The self-respects of most middle-class American people my age or older, and still alive, are out to pasture now, not a bad place to be. They munch. They ruminate.
If self-respect breaks a leg, the leg can never heal. Its owner has to shoot it. My mother and Ernest Hemingway and my former literary agent and Jerzy Kosinski and my reluctant thesis advisor at the University of Chicago and Eva Braun all come to mind.
But not Kilgore Trout. His indestructible self-respect is what I loved most about Kilgore Trout. Men loving men can happen, in peacetime as well as war. I also loved my war buddy Bernard V. O’Hare.
Many people fail because their brains, their three-and-a-half-pound blood-soaked sponges, their dogs’ breakfasts, don’t work well enough. The cause of a failure can be as simple as that. Some people, try as they may, can’t cut the mustard! That’s that!
I have a male cousin my age who was doing miserably back in Shortridge High School. He was a hulking interior lineman, and very sweet. He brought home an awful report card. His father asked him, “What is the meaning of this?” My cousin responded as follows: “Don’t you know, Father? I’m dumb, I’m dumb.”
Put this in your pipe and smoke it: My maternal great-uncle Carl Barus was a founder and president of the American Physical Society. A building at Brown University is named in his honor. Uncle Carl Barus was a professor there for many years. I never met him. My big brother did. Until this summer of 1996, Bernie and I had thought of him as a serene contributor to modest but tidy increases in human understanding of the laws of Nature.
Last June, though, I asked Bernie to tell me some specific discoveries, however small, made by our distinguished great-uncle,