Jailbird

by Kurt Vonnegut

  Was she religious? No. She was from a family that was skeptical about all formal forms of worship, which was classified as Jewish by the Nazis. Its members would not have so classified themselves. I asked her once if she had ever sought the consolations of religion in the concentration camp.

  "No," she said. "I knew God would never come near such a place. So did the Nazis. That was what made them so hilarious and unafraid. That was the strength of the Nazis," she said. "They understood God better than anyone. They knew how to make Him stay away."

  I still ponder a toast Ruth gave one Christmas Eve, in Nineteen-hundred and Seventy-four or so. I was the only person to hear it--the only other person in the bungalow. Our son had not sent us so much as a Christmas card. The toast was this, and I suppose she might just as logically have given it on the day I met her in Nuremberg: "Here's to God Almighty, the laziest man in town."

  Strong stuff.

  Yes--and my speckled old hands were like the Albrecht Durer hands atop my folded bedding, as I sat on my prison cot in Georgia, waiting for freedom to begin again.

  I was a pauper.

  I had emptied my savings account and cashed in my life-insurance policies and sold my Volkswagen and my brick bungalow in Chevy Chase, Maryland, in order to pay for my futile defense.

  My lawyers said that I still owed them one hundred and twenty-six thousand dollars. Maybe so. Anything was possible.

  Nor did I have glamor to sell. I was the oldest and least celebrated of all the Watergate coconspirators. What made me so uninteresting, I suppose, was that I had so little power and wealth to lose. Other coconspirators had taken belly-whoppers from the tops of church steeples, so to speak. When I was arrested, I was a man sitting on a three-legged stool in the bottom of a well. All they could do to me was to saw off the legs of my little stool.

  Not even I cared. My wife had died two weeks before they took me away, and my son no longer spoke to me. Still--they had to put handcuffs on me. It was the custom.

  "Your name?" the police sergeant who booked me had asked.

  I was impudent with him. Why not? "Harry Houdini," I replied.

  A fighter plane leaped up from the tip of a nearby runway, tore the sky to shreds. It happened all the time.

  "At least I don't smoke anymore," I thought.

  President Nixon himself commented one time on how much I smoked. It was soon after I came to work for him--in the spring of Nineteen-hundred and Seventy. I was summoned to an emergency meeting about the shooting to death of four antiwar protesters at Kent State University by members of the Ohio National Guard. There were about forty other people at the meeting. President Nixon was at the head of the huge oval table, and I was at the foot. This was the first time I had seen him in person since he was a mere congressman--twenty years before. Until now he had no wish to see his special advisor on youth affairs. As things turned out, he would never want to see me again.

  Virgil Greathouse, the secretary of health, education, and welfare, and reputedly one of the President's closest friends, was there. He would begin serving his prison term on the same day I completed mine. Vice-President Spiro T. Agnew was there. He would eventually plead nolo contendere to charges of accepting bribes and evading income taxes. Emil Larkin, the President's most vindictive advisor and dreaded hatchet man, was there. He would eventually discover Jesus Christ as his personal Savior as the prosecutors were about to get him for obstruction of justice and perjury. Henry Kissinger was there. He had yet to recommend the carpet-bombing of Hanoi on Christmas Day. Richard M. Helms, head of the C.I.A., was there. He would later be reprimanded for lying under oath of Congress. H.R. Haldeman and John D. Ehrlichman and Charles W. Colson and John N. Mitchell, the attorney general, were there. They, too, would be jailbirds by and by.

  I had been up all the previous night, drafting and redrafting my suggestions as to what the President might say about the Kent State tragedy. The guardsmen, I thought, should be pardoned at once, and then reprimanded, and then discharged for the good of the service. The President should then order an investigation of National Guard units everywhere, to discover if such civilians in soldiers' costumes were in fact to be trusted with live ammunition when controlling unarmed crowds. The President should call the tragedy a tragedy, should reveal himself as having had his heart broken. He should declare a day or perhaps a week of national mourning, with flags flown at half-mast everywhere. And the mourning should not be just for those who died at Kent State, but for all Americans who had been killed or crippled in any way, directly or indirectly, by the Vietnam War. He would be more deeply resolved than ever, of course, to press the war to an honorable conclusion.

  But I was never asked to speak, nor afterward could I interest anyone in the papers in my hand.

  My presence was acknowledged only once, and then only as the butt of a joke by the President. I was so nervous as the meeting wore on that I soon had three cigarettes going all at once, and was in the process of lighting the fourth.

  The President himself at last noticed the column of smoke rising from my place, and he stopped all business to stare at me. He had to ask Emil Larkin who I was.

  He then gave that unhappy little smile that invariably signaled that he was about to engage in levity. That smile has always looked to me like a rosebud that had just been smashed by a hammer. The joke he made was the only genuinely witty comment I ever heard attributed to him. Perhaps that is my proper place in history--as the butt of the one good joke by Nixon.

  "We will pause in our business," he said, "while our special advisor on youth affairs gives us a demonstration of how to put out a campfire."

  There was laughter all around.

  4

  A DOOR in the prison dormitory below me opened and banged shut, and I supposed that Clyde Carter had come for me at last. But then the person began to sing "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" as he clumped up the stairway, and I knew he was Emil Larkin, once President Nixon's hatchet man. This was a big man, goggle-eyed and liver-lipped, who had been a middle linebacker for Michigan State at one time. He was a disbarred lawyer now, and he prayed all day long to what he believed to be Jesus Christ. Larkin had not been sent out on a work detail or assigned any housekeeping task, incidentally, because of what all his praying on hard prison floors had done to him. He was crippled in both legs with housemaid's knee.

  He paused at the top of the stairs, and there were tears in his eyes. "Oh, Brother Starbuck," he said, "it hurt so bad and it hurt so good to climb those stairs."

  "I'm not surprised," I said.

  "Jesus said to me," he went on, "'You have one last chance to ask Brother Starbuck to pray with you, and you've got to forget the pain it will cost you to climb those stairs, because you know what? This time Brother Starbuck is going to bend those proud Harvard knees, and he's going to pray with you.'"

  "I'd hate to disappoint Him," I said.

  "Have you ever done anything else?" he said. "That's all I used to do: disappoint Jesus every day."

  I do not mean to sketch this blubbering leviathan as a religious hypocrite, nor am I entitled to. He had so opened himself to the consolations of religion that he had become an imbecile. In my time at the White House I had feared him as much as my ancestors must have feared Ivan the Terrible, but now I could be as impudent as I liked with him. He was no more sensitive to slights and jokes at his expense than a village idiot.

  May I say, further, that on this very day Emil Larkin puts his money where his mouth is. A wholly owned subsidiary of my division here at RAMJAC, Heartland House, a publisher of religious books in Cincinnati, Ohio, published Larkin's autobiography, Brother, Won't You Pray with Me?, six weeks ago. All of Larkin's royalties, which could well come to half a million dollars or more, excluding motion-picture and paperback rights, are to go to the Salvation Army.

  "Who told you where I was?" I asked him. I was sorry he had found me. I had hoped to get out of prison without his asking me to pray with him one last time.

  "Clyde Carter
," he said.

  This was the guard I had been waiting for, the third cousin to the President of the United States. "Where the heck is he?" I said.

  Larkin said that the whole administration of the prison was in an uproar, because Virgil Greathouse, the former secretary of health, education, and welfare and one of the richest men in the country, had suddenly decided to begin serving his sentence immediately, without any further appeals, without any further delay. He was very probably the highest-ranking person any federal prison had ever been asked to contain.

  I knew Greathouse mainly by sight--and of course by reputation. He was a famous tough guy, the founder and still majority stockholder in the public relations firm of Greathouse and Smiley, which specialized in putting the most favorable interpretations on the activities of Caribbean and Latin American dictatorships, of Bahamian gambling casinos, of Liberian and Panamanian tanker fleets, of several Central Intelligence Agency fronts around the world, of gangster-dominated unions such as the International Brotherhood of Abrasives and Adhesives Workers and the Amalgamated Fuel Handlers, of international conglomerates such as RAMJAC and Texas Fruit, and on and on.

  He was bald. He was jowly. His forehead was wrinkled like a washboard. He had a cold pipe clamped in his teeth, even when he sat on a witness stand. I got close enough to him one time to discover that he made music on that pipe. It was like the twittering of birds. He entered Harvard six years after I graduated, so we never met there. We made eye-contact only once at the White House--at the meeting where I made a fool of myself by lighting so many cigarettes. I was just a little mouse from the White House pantry, as far as he was concerned. He spoke to me only once, and that was after we were both arrested. We came together accidentally in a courthouse corridor, where we were facing separate arraignments. He found out who I was and evidently thought I might have something on him, which I did not. So he put his face close to mine, his eyes twinkling, his pipe in his teeth, and he made me this unforgettable promise: "You say anything about me, Buster, and when you get out of jail you'll be lucky to get a job cleaning toilets in a whorehouse in Port Said."

  It was after he said that, that I heard the birdcalls from his pipe.

  Greathouse was a Quaker, by the way--and so was Richard M. Nixon, of course. This was surely a special bond between them, one of the things that made them best of friends for a while.

  Emil Larkin was a Presbyterian.

  I myself was nothing. My father had been secretly baptized a Roman Catholic in Poland, a religion that was suppressed at the time. He grew up to be an agnostic. My mother was baptized a Greek Orthodox in Lithuania, but became a Roman Catholic in Cleveland. Father would never go to church with her. I myself was baptized a Roman Catholic, but aspired to my father's indifference, and quit going to church when I was twelve. When I applied for admission to Harvard, old Mr. McCone, a Baptist, told me to classify myself as a Congregationalist, which I did.

  My son is an active Unitarian, I hear. His wife told me that she was a Methodist, but that she sang in an Episcopal Church every Sunday for pay. Why not?

  And on and on.

  Emil Larkin, the Presbyterian, and Virgil Greathouse, the Quaker, had been thick as thieves back in the good old days. They had not only dominated the burglaries and the illegal wiretaps and the harassment of enemies by the Internal Revenue Service and so on, but the prayer breakfasts, as well. So I asked Larkin now how he felt about the reunion in prospect.

  "Virgil Greathouse is no more and no less my brother than you or any other man," he said. "I will try to save him from hell, just as I am now trying to save you from hell." He then quoted the harrowing thing that Jesus, according to Saint Matthew, had promised to say in the Person of God to sinners on Judgment Day.

  This is it: "Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels."

  These words appalled me then, and they appall me now. They are surely the inspiration for the notorious cruelty of Christians.

  "Jesus may have said that," I told Larkin, "but it is so unlike most of what else He said that I have to conclude that He was slightly crazy that day."

  Larkin stepped back and he cocked his head in mock admiration. "I have seen some rough-tough babies in my time," he said, "but you really take the prize. You've turned every friend you ever had against you, with all your flip-flops through the years, and now you insult that last Person who still might be willing to help you, who is Jesus Christ."

  I said nothing. I wished he would go away.

  "Name me one friend you've got left," he said.

  I thought to myself that Dr. Ben Shapiro, my best man, would have remained my friend, no matter what--might have come for me there at prison in his car and taken me to his home. But that was sentimental speculation on my part. He had gone to Israel long ago and gotten himself killed in the Six Day War. I had heard that there was a primary school named in his honor in Tel Aviv.

  "Name One," Emil Larkin persisted.

  "Bob Fender," I said. This was the only lifer in the prison, the only American to have been convicted of treason during the Korean War. He was Doctor Fender, since he held a degree in veterinary science. He was the chief clerk in the supply room where I would soon be given my civilian clothes. There was always music in the supply room, for Fender was allowed to play records of the French chanteuse, Edith Piaf, all day long. He was a science-fiction writer of some note, publishing many stories a year under various pseudonyms, including "Frank X. Barlow" and "Kilgore Trout."

  "Bob Fender is everybody's friend and nobody's friend," said Larkin.

  "Clyde Carter is my friend," I said.

  "I am talking about people on the outside," said Larkin. "Who's waiting outside to help you? Nobody. Not even your own son."

  "We'll see," I said.

  "You're going to New York?" he said.

  "Yes," I said.

  "Why New York?" he said.

  "It's famous for its hospitality to friendless, penniless immigrants who wish to become millionaires," I said.

  "You're going to ask your son for help, even though he's never even written you the whole time you've been here?" he said. He was the mail clerk for my building, so he knew all about my mail.

  "If he ever finds out I'm in the same city with him, it will be purely by accident," I said. The last words Walter had ever said to me were at his mother's burial in a small Jewish cemetery in Chevy Chase. That she should be buried in such a place and in such company was entirely my idea--the idea of an old man suddenly all alone. Ruth would have said, correctly, that it was a crazy thing to do.

  She was buried in a plain pine box that cost one hundred and fifty-six dollars. Atop that box I placed a bough, broken not cut, from our flowering crab apple tree.

  A rabbi prayed over her in Hebrew, a language she had never heard, although she must have had endless opportunities to learn it in the concentration camp.

  Our son said this to me, before showing his back to me and the open pit and hastening to a waiting taxicab: "I pity you, but I can never love you. As far as I am concerned, you killed this poor woman. I can't think of you anymore as a father or as any sort of relative. I never want to see or hear of you again."

  Strong stuff.

  My prison daydream of New York City did suppose, however, that there were still old acquaintances, although I could not name them, who might help me to get a job. It is a hard daydream to let go of--that one has friends. Those who would have remained my friends, if life had gone a little bit better for me, would have been mainly in New York. I imagined that, if I were to prowl midtown Manhattan day after day, from the theater district on the west to the United Nations on the east, and from the Public Library on the south to the Plaza Hotel on the north, and past all the foundations and publishing houses and bookstores and clothiers for gentlemen and clubs for gentlemen and expensive hotels and restaurants in between, I would surely meet somebody who knew me, who remembered what a good man I used to be, who did not especiall
y despise me--who would use his influence to get me a job tending bar somewhere.

  I would plead with him shamelessly, and rub his nose in my Doctor of Mixology degree.

  If I saw my son coming, so went the daydream, I would show him my back until he was safely by.

  "Well," said Larkin, "Jesus tells me not to give up on anybody, but I'm close to giving up on you. You're just going to sit there, staring straight ahead, no matter what I say.

  "Afraid so," I said.

  "I never saw anybody more determined to be a geek than you are," he said.

  A geek, of course, is a man who lies in a cage on a bed of filthy straw in a carnival freak-show and bites the heads off live chickens and makes subhuman noises, and is billed as having been raised by wild animals in the jungles of Borneo. He has sunk as low as a human being can sink in the American social order, except for his final resting place in a potter's field.

  Now Larkin, frustrated, let some of his old maliciousness show. "That's what Chuck Colson called you in the White House: 'The Geek,'" he said.

  "I'm sure," I said.

  "Nixon never respected you," he said. "He just felt sorry for you. That's why he gave you the job."

  "I know," I said.

  "You didn't even have to come to work," he said. "I know," I said.

  "That's why we gave you the office without any windows and without anybody else around--so you'd catch on that you didn't even have to come to work."

  "I tried to be of use anyway," I said. "I hope your Jesus can forgive me for that."

  "If you're just going to make fun of Jesus, maybe you better not talk about Him at all," he said.

  "Fine," I said. "You brought Him up."

  "Do you know when you started to be a geek?" he said.

  I knew exactly when the downward dive of my life began, when my wings were broken forever, when I realized that I would never soar again. That event was the most painful subject imaginable to me. I could not bear to think about it yet again, so I said to Larkin, looking him in the eye at last, "In the name of mercy, please leave this poor old man alone."