Welcome to the Monkey House - Kurt Vonnegut [16]
"He didn’t have the slightest idea his pills would be taken by human beings someday," said the Foxy Grandpa. "His dream was to introduce morality into the monkey house at the Grand Rapids Zoo. Did you realize that?" he inquired severely.
"No. No, I didn’t. That’s very interesting."
"He and his eleven kids went to church one Easter. And the day was so nice and the Easter service had been so beautiful and pure that they decided to take a walk through the zoo, and they were just walking on clouds."
"Um." The scene described was lifted from a play that was performed on television every Easter.
The Foxy Grandpa shoehorned himself into the scene, had himself chat with the Nations just before they got to the monkey house. " ’Good morning, Mr. Nation,’ I said to him. ’It certainly is a nice morning.’ ’And a good morning to you, Mr. Howard,’ he said to me. ’There is nothing like an Easter morning to make a man feel clean and reborn and at one with God’s intentions.’ "
"Um." Nancy could hear the telephone ringing faintly, naggingly, through the nearly soundproof door.
"So we went on to the monkey house together, and what do you think we saw?"
"I can’t imagine." Somebody had answered the phone.
"We saw a monkey playing with his private parts!"
"No!"
"Yes! and J. Edgar Nation was so upset he Went straight home and he started developing a pill that would make monkeys in the springtime fit things for a Christian family to see."
There was a knock on the door.
"Yes—?" said Nancy.
"Nancy," said Mary, "telephone for you."
When Nancy came out of the booth, she found the sheriff choking on little squeals of law-enforcement delight. The telephone was tapped by agents hidden in the Howard Johnson’s. Billy the Poet was believed to be on the line. His call had been traced. Police were already on their way to grab him.
"Keep him on, keep him on," the sheriff whispered to Nancy, and he gave her the telephone as though it were solid gold.
"Yes—?" said Nancy.
"Nancy McLuhan?" said a man. His voice was disguised. He might have been speaking through a kazoo. "I’m calling for a mutual friend."
"Oh?"
"He asked me to deliver a message."
"I see."
"It’s a poem."
"All right."
"Ready?"
"Ready." Nancy could hear sirens screaming in the background of the call.
The caller must have heard the sirens, too, but he recited the poem without any emotion. It went like this:
"Soak yourself in Jergen’s Lotion.
Here comes the one-man population explosion."
They got him. Nancy heard it all—the thumping and clumping, the argle-bargle and cries.
The depression she felt as she hung up was glandular. Her brave body had prepared for a fight that was not to be.
The sheriff bounded out of the Suicide Parlor, in such a hurry to see the famous criminal he’d helped catch that a sheaf of papers fell from the pocket of his trench coat.
Mary picked them up, called after the sheriff. He halted for a moment, said the papers didn’t matter any more, asked her if maybe she wouldn’t like to come along. There was a flurry between the two girls, with Nancy persuading Mary to go, declaring that she had no curiosity about Billy. So Mary left, irrelevantly handing the sheaf to Nancy.
The sheaf proved to be photocopies of poems Billy had sent to Hostesses in other places. Nancy read the top one. It made much of a peculiar side effect of ethical birth-control pills: They not only made people numb—they also made people piss blue. The poem was called What the Somethinghead Said to the Suicide Hostess, and it went like this:
I did not sow, I did not spin,
And thanks to pills I did not sin.
I loved the crowds, the stink, the noise.
And when I peed, I peed turquoise.
I ate beneath a roof of orange;
Swung with progress like a door hinge.
’Neath purple roof I’ve come today
To piss my azure life away.
Virgin hostess, death’s recruiter,
Life is cute, but you are cuter.
Mourn my pecker, purple