Welcome to the Monkey House - Kurt Vonnegut [1]
My sister smoked too much. My father smoked too much. My mother smoked too much. I smoke too much. My brother used to smoke too much, and then he gave it up, which was a miracle on the order of the loaves and fishes.
And one time a pretty girl came up to me at a cocktail party, and she asked me, "What are you doing these days?"
"I am committing suicide by cigarette," I replied.
She thought that was reasonably funny. I didn’t. I thought it was hideous that I should scorn life that much, sucking away on cancer sticks. My brand is Pall Mall. The authentic suicides ask for Pall Malls. The dilettantes ask for Pell Mells.
I have a relative who is secretly writing a history of parts of my family. He has showed me some of it, and he told me this about my grandfather, the architect: "He died in his forties— and I think he was just as glad to be out of it." By "it," of course, he meant life in Indianapolis—and there is that yellow streak about life in me, too.
The public health authorities never mention the main reason many Americans have for smoking heavily, which is that smoking is a fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide.
It is disgraceful that I should ever have wanted out of "it," and I don’t want out any more. I have six children, three of my own and three of my sister’s. They’ve turned out gloriously. My first marriage worked, and continues to work. My wife is still beautiful.
I never knew a writer’s wife who wasn’t beautiful.
In honor of the marriage that worked, I include in this collection a sickeningly slick love story from The Ladies’ Home Journal, God help us, entitled by them "The Long Walk to Forever." The title I gave it, I think, was "Hell to Get Along With."
It describes an afternoon I spent with my wife-to-be. Shame, shame, to have lived scenes from a woman’s magazine.
The New Yorker once said that a book of mine, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, was"... a series of narcissistic giggles." This may be another. Perhaps it would be helpful to the reader to imagine me as the White Rock girl, kneeling on a boulder in a nightgown, either looking for minnows or adoring her own reflection.
WHERE I LIVE
NOT VERY LONG AGO, an encyclopedia salesman stopped by America’s oldest library building, which is the lovely Sturgis Library in Barnstable Village, on Cape Cod’s north shore. And he pointed out to the easily alarmed librarian that the library’s most recent general reference work was a 1938 Britannica, back-stopped by a 1910 Americana. He said many important things had happened since 1938, naming, among others, penicillin and Hitler’s invasion of Poland.
He was advised to take his astonishment to some of the library’s directors. He was given their names and addresses. There was a Cabot on the list—and a Lowell and a Kittredge, and some others. The librarian told him that he had a chance of catching several directors all at once, if he would go to the Barnstable Yacht Club. So he went down the narrow yacht club road, nearly broke his neck as he hit a series of terrific bumps put in the road to discourage speeders, to kill them, if possible.
He wanted a martini, wondered if a nonmember could get service at the bar. He was appalled to discover that the club was nothing but a shack fourteen feet wide and thirty feet long, a touch of the Ozarks in Massachusetts. It contained an hilariously warped ping-pong table, a wire lost-and-found basket with sandy, fragrant contents, and an upright piano that had been under a leak in the roof for years.
There wasn’t any bar, any telephone, any electricity. There weren’t any members there, either. To cap it all, there wasn’t a drop of water in the harbor. The tide, which can be as great as fourteen feet, was utterly out. And the so-called yachts, antique wooden Rhodes 18’s, Beetlecats, and a couple of Boston Whalers, were resting on the bluish-brown glurp of the emptied harbor’s floor.