Meeting Kurt Vonnegut

 

I was a child who loved to read. Everyone in my family loved to read. We were book people. My father
brought a shopping bag to the library and loaded it up at the new book section. My mother who worked so hard everyday would come home from work, slip into the rattiest nightgown you've ever seen and sit on the couch with a thick book while the rest of us sat and watched tv.  She never watched tv. She thought it was stupid. Which it is, but I love it. 

My brother and sister were both voracious readers and could read really fast. Terrifyingly fast.  I was three years younger than my brother and he a year younger than my sister. So as a child I remember them tearing through thick books while I was still reading relatively slim ones. Books were not so long then.  I think that when writers were typing them out by hand they were a little more careful.  It wasn't until the advent of word processors that these 4-500 page books became the norm. 

When I was about 14 years old  I was buying my brother a Chanukah present and I bought him an illustrated history of science fiction.  I was flipping through it admiring the pictures and I recognized a lot of the names. Isaac Asimov, Ben Bova, Arthur C. Clarke were all authors that I knew. One of the names I didn't recognize was Kurt Vonnegut.  The titles of his books were strange: Player Piano and Sirens of Titan. I didn't think much of it at the time but just made a mental note that maybe I would pick them up at our weekly trip to the public library.  

Now,  I liked to read but I had a short attention span. If a book grabbed me, sure I could get sucked in for hours. But when I was around 12 or13 my friend Rob introduced me to Marvel Comics at a time when some of the best comics of all time were being written.  Chris Claremont was writing The X-Men and would write it for 20 years (citation needed). John Byrne was writing Fantastic Four. Mark Gruenwald was writing Captain America. There was action and the characters were smart and funny!  I also want to say that my mom was working full time and I was part of a generation of what was called, "latchkey kids" which meant we came home to an empty house for a couple of hours while my mom was at work. For me this meant sitting down and watching tv, which was limited when my mom was home.  so I would sit down and watch Bugs Bunny, The Munsters (never the Addams Family, never got it) and Star Trek five days a week. 

In my high school English class that year Mrs. Siegel gave us a pretty daunting assignment.  We would read four (four!) books by the same author and write a paper comparing and contrasting them. She passed out a list of authors and they were all your typical authors assigned to high school students of that time. That is to say, long dead white men. F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Orwell, John Updike. I remember my friend Tommy chose John Updike and read a lot of books about rabbits.  

But at the bottom of this list, alphabetical as it was, was Kurt Vonnegut the science fiction author! This must be a mistake I thought. A science fiction author on this list. Because it's one thing to read for pleasure and another thing to read. "the classics" in high school. Because a lot of the books we read were terrible. Like The Scarlet Letter? Woof. Maybe because I grew up in New England but I seem to remember reading a lot of Nathaniel Hawthorne who could easily be the poster child for long dead white men writing about things (gables?) that no child was interested in.  This was the future! I had an Atari at home with 112 versions of Space Invaders! Sure they were all incredibly similar, but there were 112 versions, damn it! It said so right on the box!

I went to our school library and found the Vonnegut section.  There was a book of short stories, perfect for a kid with a short attention span, called Welcome to the Monkey House.  I went home and read it cover to cover. This was not science fiction. Or at least not Isaac Asimov's science fiction.  There were suicide parlors and a story about retroactive abortion.  In this story, as I recall, parents were allowed to retroactively abort their children up to the age of 9 or 10.  And there was an abortion wagon kind of like an ice cream truck that roamed the neighborhoods. Vonnegut was filthy.  He was irreverent.  He was really funny. There were curse words. There was sex (at least it was alluded to which was good enough).  Did Mrs. Seigel know about this? Did the librarians know this book was in the library? 

My mind was blown and I was hooked.