Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [60]
The greatest movie ever, as anybody with half a brain knows, is My Life as a Dog. The second-greatest movie ever is All About Eve.
There is a chance, moreover, that I will see Katharine Hepburn, a real movie star! She lives only one block from us! When I speak to her, and tell her my name, she always says, “Oh yes, you’re that friend of my brother’s.” I do not know her brother.
No such luck today, though, but what the heck. I am a philosopher. I have to be.
Into the news store I go. Relatively poor people, with lives not strikingly worth living, are lined up to buy lottery tickets or other crap. All keep their cool. They pretend they don’t know I’m a celebrity.
The store is a Ma-and-Pa joint owned by Hindus, honest-to-God Hindus! The woman has a teeny-weeny ruby between her eyes. That’s worth a trip. Who needs an envelope?
You must remember this, a kiss is still a kiss, a sigh is still a sigh.
I know the Hindus’ stock of stationery as well as they do. I didn’t study anthropology for nothing. I find one nine-by-twelve manila envelope without assistance, remembering simultaneously a joke about the Chicago Cubs baseball team. The Cubs were supposedly moving to the Philippine Islands, where they would be renamed the Manila Folders. That would have been a good joke about the Boston Red Sox, too.
I take my place at the end of the line, chatting with fellow customers who are buying something other than lottery tickets. The lottery ticket suckers, decorticated by hope and numerology, may as well be victims of Post-Timequake Apathy. You could run them over with an eighteen-wheeler. They wouldn’t care.
57
From the news store I go one block south to the Postal Convenience Station, where I am secretly in love with a woman behind the counter. I have already put my pages in the manila envelope. I address it, and then I take my place at the end of another long line. What I need now is postage! Yum, yum, yum!
The woman I love there does not know I love her. You want to talk about poker faces? When her eyes meet mine, she might as well be looking at a cantaloupe!
Because she works sitting down, and because of the counter and the smock she wears, all I have ever seen of her is from the neck up. That’s enough! From the neck up she is like a Thanksgiving dinner! I don’t mean she looks like a plateful of turkey and sweet potatoes and cranberry sauce. I mean she makes me feel like that is what has just been set before me. Dig in! Dig in!
Unadorned, I believe, her neck and face and ears and hair would still be Thanksgiving dinner. Every day, though, she hangs new dingle-dangles from her ears and around her neck. Sometimes her hair is up, sometimes it’s down. Sometimes it’s frizzy, sometimes it’s straight. What she can’t do with just her eyes and lips! One day I’m buying a stamp from Count Dracula’s daughter! The next day she’s the Virgin Mary.
This time she’s Ingrid Bergman in Stromboli. But she is a long way off still. There are many addled old poops, no good at counting money anymore, and immigrants talking gibberish, maddeningly imagining it to be English, in line ahead of me.
One time I had my pocket picked in that Postal Convenience Center. Convenient for whom?
I put the waiting time to good use. I learn about stupid bosses and jobs I will never have, and about parts of the world I will never see, and about diseases I hope I will never have, and about different kinds of dogs people have owned, and so on. By means of a computer? No. I do it by means of the lost art of conversation.
I at last have my envelope weighed and stamped by the only woman in the whole wide world who could make me sincerely happy. With her I wouldn’t have to fake it.
I go home. I have had one heck of a good time. Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different!
58
I have taught creative writing during my seventy-three years on automatic pilot,