Vonnegut is dead

An image of Bruce Lee with his ass-kicking face on is the last thing I see as the computer screen flickers off. Kurt Vonnegut just died. God I could use a beer, I think to myself. But it is too late to buy beer. Damn Ohio decency laws. What the hell are they good for anyway? What jackass decided that being unable to buy beer at one in the morning would indicate how decent we all were? City leaders with self-conscious, half-assed desires to keep up appearances of morality? Some rich republican housewife, greasy and painted like that bitch Tammy Fay Baker, with mascara streaming down her fat face:

“Won’t somebody, please, think about the children?” She whines in a timorous contralto. Show her a photo of a starving third world child and she tells you to be proud that you can live in America. Yeah lady, I am really proud. In fact I was just thinking that the other day as I sat down in front of the T.V. to drink a fancy Vanilla Chai drink with soy protein that cost me five bucks. Four eight ounce servings per bottle, you do the math. I cannot deny my privilege. I flipped through the channels for a minute or two, then turned the damn thing off in disgust and went to study my Chinese. Pop-tarts commercials are even propagating the beauty myth now.

I remember watching an old man hobble onto the stage at the Ohio State University Student Union with a cane. The air was throbbing with anticipation. I sat among thousands of others and listened to Kurt Vonnegut Jr. as he gave what he said was his final public talk. What I saw both inspired me to keep writing and depressed me terribly. He knew his days were numbered and he used his last big college audience to let us know that, maybe, we should just give up?

“Don’t worry about money,” he said (in so many words). “Just follow a career in the arts. Paint a picture, write a poem, sing a song. I’ll sing a song right now.” His off key and gravelly but nonetheless soulful voice rose above the failing sound system. They were having trouble with the speakers all night, so I missed some of his words, but I could hear his song clearly. It doesn’t matter what it was, the point was that he was singing. He was near the end, as far as he was concerned, and he was singing his heart out to a bunch of kids. People complained that he was too bitchy:

“I expected him to be funnier, but he was all doom and gloom. Now I am depressed,” I heard someone say. Well that’s why there is Prozac, I wanted to say, and Beer. If the message is too hard to take, we can always just grab a beer, park our kiesters on the couch and watch T.V. until every brain cell that still carries the memory of when we saw a great writer speak his mind freely is hooked up to a suicide machine.

“He basically just quoted his last book,” was a frequent complaint. Maybe it was because I hadn’t read his last book, but it hardly mattered to me. When someone like Kurt Vonnegut talks, I don’t care what he says, I’ll take it into consideration. I don’t care if he’s an old man, crippled and disenchanted, bitching about his knees or the fact that his voice isn’t as loud and clear as it used to be. Christ himself would have given him the benefit of the doubt, if he didn’t pat him on the back for hitting the nail on the head.

All he was asking us to do was create something beautiful. To look inside ourselves and find whatever it was we wanted to say and say it however we wanted, just as long as we were saying it. Now that he is gone, are we so far removed from the wisdom of our elders that we cannot even consider the last wishes of a dead man, one of the strongest voices for humanity that this country has heard in the last century? Was he right? Are we all just too high, metaphorically or otherwise, or too lost to care? Has the focus of this country shifted so that the only things that matter to us now have nothing to do with the things that make us human?

The day after he died I imagined him sitting on a cloud and laughing at the headlines on CNN: Anna Nicole Smith’s Bastard child – oh wait, she has a daddy now, yay – and some old bigot who forgot his manners. I was angry. One of the greatest writers and humanitarians of the last century dies and some Bimbo’s illegitimate child takes precedence over his obituary. I was angry, but Mr. Vonnegut would be laughing. Why shouldn’t he be? He finally got out. He told us he was looking forward to it. He sat on a humble chair, with both hands clutching his cane, his eyes searching the faces of the swarms of disenchanted college students who seem to have come to hear him mock G.W.:

“I’m just an old whiny man with nothing else to say,” he said. But that’s not true. When he died, he made one of the most important statements he could have made by letting us know we are on our own now. He said what he needed to say, now we have to start raving about impending comets and the fifty-first state of denial. We can only hope that others rise to pick up his fallen torch. I will do what I can, however small of a promise that is. I only hope I am strong enough to hoist it high enough to do it justice.

The night that Kurt Vonnegut died all I wanted was a beer. Realizing I could not have one, I killed the messenger and closed the browser window. My wallpaper was a black and white shot of Bruce Lee, looking intense. He is another hero of mine, now dead, who fought the world to make a point about humanity. I laughed and turned the computer off.