God Bless You Mr. Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut died last week.  He was one of my favorite writers. 

It was Fall, 1972.  I had just moved into an apartment at 45th and Baltimore in West Philadelphia.  There were four of us sharing a three bedroom apartment.  We were all VISTA Volunteers, making $52.00 a week – after taxes that is. 

Dale Case was one of my roommates. He and I shared a passion for reading.  One day, he asked if I had ever read Cat’s Cradle.  I said, “no, who wrote it?”  He was incredulous.  He said, “you mean you never read Kurt Vonnegut?”  I hadn’t. 

He gave me Cat’ Cradle when he finished it.  Over the next few months, I spent a lot of time at the used book stores near The University of Pennsylvania.  In those days, you cold buy a used paperback for a quarter. 

I bought and every Vonnegut book that I could before Christmas that year.  I read Mother Night; Slaughterhouse Five; Sirens of Titan; Player Piano, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.  I delighted in characters like Billy Pilgrim, Kilgore Trout, and Montana Wildhack.  I learned to love Ilium, New York – that mythical town that made up one fourth of the Albany, Troy, Schenectady, Ilium Quadrangle.

Like many of my generation, I began to say “so it goes” whenever I missed an opportunity, or anything unhappy, unpleasant, bizarre or just plain stupid happened.

Kurt Vonnegut was an American original.  Norman Mailer (The Naked and the Dead), and James Jones (From Here to Eternity) may have written more gritty novels about World War II, but Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five somehow showed not only the horrible side of war, but the absurdity of war itself.

I almost met him one day.  I was walking up Second Avenue in the 30s in New York City.  A man approaching me caught my eye.  It was February.  He was wearing a long overcoat with a large herringbone print – open.  He had a very long purple and white alternating striped scarf looped twice around his neck and hanging down to his knees.  And he was eating an ice cream cone.  I looked at his face, and there was the face of the man who graced the cover of the paperbacks I used to carry in the back pocket of my jeans and read on the subway in Philadelphia.

I had heard he was kind of shy and prized his privacy.  I wanted to say hello and ask him to come and sit with me for a couple of hours and talk about what he wrote, how and why he wrote it.  But I didn’t.  I looked him in the eye and nodded.  He seemed relieved.  He smiled and nodded back. 

As I continued up Second Avenue, I turned around to look at one of my literary heroes.  He continued walking down the avenue.  He never turned around, but he raised his left hand in a salute – as if he knew I would turn around for that one last glance.

And so it goes…