Kilgore Trout Lives
“Did you hear about Kurt Vonnegut?” Dan asked me. “What about Kurt Vonnegut? I asked, brining my electric razor in from his balcony, where I had just finished performing restorative efforts upon Chris’ head. “How he’s dead,” Dan said. I dropped the razor, dislodging the metal plate over the blade. I picked it up, slamming the protuberance back into place. “What?” I said. “He died of head trauma,” Dan said, still pecking away at his computer. I looked at my cell phone. Corey had called me, at some point and left a message. I listened.
In a somewhat pathetic voice, Corey miserably reported to me, “Tom, Kurt Vonnegut’s dead. Call me back.” And click. I chuckles a little at Corey’s blunt message, clearly laced in varying degrees of sadness.
What defines a hero? What made Kurt Vonnegut a hero for me? My heroes are people whom I have come across that I’d like to emulate in art, or in life. Frank Zappa, Stevie Wonder, Woody Allen, Jim Henson, Barry K. Marshall, and Kurt Vonnegut are some of my heroes. Zappa and Henson died when I was five and three, respectively, before I even cared about who they were. I was given the opportunity to share 20 years on this wretched, dying planet with Kurt Vonnegut before his death on Wednesday. I didn’t think much of it, but it’ll never be the same now that he’s gone.
I read Slaughterhouse-Five at the perfect time in my life. I was a stubbornly self-righteous fifteen year old living in a world on the verge of yet another ridiculous war. I had never heard of Kurt Vonnegut before Christian Calderone assigned him to us in his terribly orchestrated English class that typically reeked of dope. Calderone would occasionally be sitting on the desk when we entered class. “You know what,” he’d start, bobbing gently from side to side, “I don’t feel like doing shit. Let’s watch The Simpsons.” And so we did. He gave us until Monday to get our copies of Slaughtehouse-five, which I picked up at the mall on Friday night. I leafed through it briefly while sitting in the Border’s café with Nick and Emile before shoving it in my backpack. “Wanna play elevator tag?” Emile asked. “No,” Nick and I said simultaneously. Eventually my father picked us up and I retreated to my room, tearing my new novel out of my bag. The texture of this particular printing of Vonnegut was noticeably waxy, and I ran my fingers over it. I opened in and began reading.
On Monday, I had my copy slung under my arm, between my binder and my textbook. “Did you start reading it?” I asked Corey in the library that morning. “Yeah,” he said, “I like it a lot.”
In Mr. Sirois’ religion class, Dan Cattucci informed us that he had already finished it. “It’s good,” he said, “Not great, but pretty good.” “Does it Follow Billy Pilgrim the whole time?” I asked. “More or less,” he said, tilting his head to the side, apparently taken aback by my sharp line of questioning. In retrospect, I’m confident that Dan hadn’t actually read the book by that point, and also that a lot of what Dan said was bullshit. Corey believed him when he said that he had written articles for Rolling Stone, but Corey also believed that in middle school, he had met Mandy Moore on AIM. “She’s really Mandy Moore,” he insisted, “She has the password to Mandy Moore’s personal website.” He then plugged in the password provided by Ms. Moore, whom at the time was only seventeen(Which was an acceptable enough age difference that Corey felt that he could still conceivably date her). Her website was beautifully adorned with a pink background and a large picture of Mandy Moore. “See!” he said. I was sufficiently convinced.
Corey and I both finished the book about two weeks before we were assigned to, and informed Calderone of this. He told us to read it again, which we both did in a little under a week. That following Friday, on one of our many mallrat adventures, I randomly waved my hand over God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, simply because Rosewater was a character in Slaughterhouse-Five, and I wanted to discover more about him. I read the entire book on Saturday. That Saturday also happened to be my great uncle’s funeral, so after praying by his side in the same room where I would, years later, pray by my grandmother, I sat down and unrolled the book from my back pocket. As disrespectful as that might seem, in my dense, Uncle Joe and I didn’t get along very well. He though my name was Jeff and once threw a very large rock at my head. My grandmother, at whose wake I did not read as much as I cried, came over to see what I was reading. She would buy pulp novels at the supermarket by the bagful and was interested in seeing what a far less aged and sophisticated reader was attempting. “Vonnegut? Never heard of him,” she said, walking away. I was pleased that she had no interest in attempting me to put away the book at her brother’s funeral, and I wonder if somewhere in the back of her mind, she realized that her decaying husk would be laying there a brief four years later. I finished it before about an hour before my 8:30 bedtime(I had to wake up at 3:38 the following morning for the paper route) and on Sunday, I clamored for my mother to allow me to procure another. It became my goal to read them all. At fifteen, with the help of Vonnegut and Kevin Smith, I was figuring myself out. I never successfully finished reading all of his books.
I walked from Kenmore Square’s T station, which was already filling up with Red Sox fans. The rain and snow pelted my bald, hatless head. I stood and watched it fall in the road. Corey called me again. “Hey,” I said, “I got your message.”
“I don’t know what to do,” he said, “I feel like my dad’s dead.”
Corey and I had great ambitions to meet Vonnegut before he died, which we can never do, now.
“All I want to do is read slaughterhouse, and I can’t find it,” he said.
“I feel like we should do something,” I told him.
“I know, man,” he said. Corey and I haven’t been in close contact with one another in a while now, even though this year, we live a few blocks from one another. We’re both very busy. We briefly reconnected through the death of our collective hero.
“I’m gonna go watch sponge bob now,” Corey said, “I’ll talk to you soon, buddy.”
I chuckled, “Have a good day,” I told him.
I hung up and walked into Commonwealth books, a used bookstore brilliantly located on Commonwealth Ave. In my warped little brain, I mused that I’d find some great treasure of his, an autographed copy of Cat’s Cadle, a first edition of Slaughterhouse, and so on. I thought about all the stuff that I had stolen from him in my own writing “and so on”, for instance, The Cowboy is loosely based on Kilgore Trout, also). None of his books were there. Nothing. I stepped outside. Falling ice hit me like so many little throwing stars thrust by a race of microscopic ice ninjas. I looked out at a world that my hero, Kurt Vonnegut, would never see. I thought about how in Slaughterhouse-Five, nobody ever dies, because life operates free of the shackles of time. Vonnegut is trapped forever in a day before today. So it goes.