Frankly, I think they would make him sick.
And what would make him sickest would be supposedly ethical suicide parlors that were coin operated, without anybody around for the customer to talk to. Back in the old days, even during the Christmas rush, Mr. Garbo talked to every customer sometimes for an hour or more. And he swore he’d he would never expand the business to where he couldn’t do that. Oh, I know automation has kept the cost of ethical suicide down, where the cost of everything else has doubled and tripled and quintupled. I’ve seen the graphs in the Greta Garbo ads. But I don’t think money is everything.
And neither did Mr. Garbo. A third of the people who came to him to have an accident arranged got turned away, got talked out of it. I just wonder how many people get turned away by the sign they have over the doors of Greta Garbos nowadays, the one that says, “It’s always darkest before the dawn. Are you sure you want to do this?” That’s a pretty feeble substitute for the talks Mr. Garbo would give a customer before he’d he would let him in the phone booth and start up the Edsel.
“Look—” he’d Mr Garbo would say to a customer, “I don’t even advertise, and I’ve got a line of people a block long waiting to get in every morning, and each person has fifty dollars in his or her hot little fist, just dying to give it to me. “I net five-hundred dollars a day without any effort at all, and, without fatiguing myself, I could make a hundred times that amount,” he would say. But I already have everything that money can buy. I don’t want your money, I don’t need your money. What I want from you is iron-clad proof that I will be benefiting not only you but all mankind by helping you to cease to exist. I want to make absolutely sure that our product, death, is the right thing for you. Think of this as a clothing store, with nothing but shrouds on the plain pipe racks. I’m the tailor of those shrouds, see—and, in my own peculiar way, I’m proud of the merchandise. I won’t won’t let just anybody come in here and put on one of my shrouds.” Then he would smile. “Nobody goes out of here wearing death,” he would say, “unless it’s his style and unless it fits. Now you tell me exactly why you think death is the only thing for you. If you can’t make me agree with you, I won’t gas you for ten million dollars. Let’s hear your story, and it better be good.”
One of the people he saved with that kind of talk was Marie Coulter Dupont, who later became his wife, and then his widow and then Chairman of the Board of Easy Go. She came in one morning during the May slack period. I was all alone in the shop. Mr. Garbo was across the street, playing checkers with the manager of the Arthur Murray Dance Studio.
Mrs. Dupont came in wearing a very tight silk dress. She It was black
· · ·
The next version of “Easy Go” focuses less on the details of Garball’s humble shop than on the kind of society that could foster a chain of mechanized death parlors. Vonnegut for the first time has found the “axe” he wants to grind in writing this tale. Again, the old-fashioned Mr. Garball wouldn’t like the fancy locations and the prefab farewell notes, “the pretty stewardesses and the easy chairs.” These are all part of what has become “a heartless, soulless slot machine.” “Kurt” makes it his business to visit parlors around the country, and his stop at a new one in Massachusetts is particularly demoralizing. On display are baskets of flowers from “the poison supply house” and a host of other contractors, and it turns out the mayor who solemnly cut the tape at its opening was the first in line for its services!
But why has voluntary death become so accepted? Who is running the network of parlors, and for what purpose? Vonnegut is still vague about it, and he starts over and over again, feeling for a compelling answer to those questions. He has not yet come up with the overpopulation theme that would figure in the final version of the story.
Easy Go
by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Sure—I used to work for Greta Garball.
I worked for him for eight months way back in 1974. I’ll tell you something else, too. He was one of the ninety-two people I killed.
Back in those days there was only one Greta Garball in the whole world, and Chicago had it—down on Forty-second and Lake Park. It didn’t have any purple tile roof. It didn’t have any meditation room. It was a plain cement block building with a flat tar roof. It used to be a filling station, and the signs out front still claimed it was.
It wasn’t even called a Greta Garball. Its official name was The South Side Ethical Suicide Parlor—but people didn’t call it that, either. Everybody called it The Easy Go.
We had a cash register, a pad of release forms, Mr. Garball’s Thunderbird parked over the grease pit, twelve feet of garden hose running from the exhaust pipe to a hole in the telephone booth, and that was it.
In those days it was carbon monoxide or nothing. The closest we ever came to fancy trimmings was the time we got yellow toilet paper for the rest rooms by accident.
If Mr. Garball were alive today, he wouldn’t be proud of the coast-to-coast chain of ethical suicide parlors that bears his name. He wouldn’t like the expensive locations and the purple tile roofs. He wouldn’t like the form farewell notes and the choice of fourteen different ways to die.
He wouldn’t like the pretty stewardesses and the easy chairs and the music.
Frankly, I think they would make him sick.
If you ask me, the modern Greta Garball is a heartless, soulless slot machine. It’s a hobby of mine to drop into Greta Garballs in different parts of the country, pretend I don’t want to live any more, and then watch how the stewardesses go to work. There isn’t one iota of difference between the one-stewardess operation on the corner of Main and Elm in Argus, Indiana, and the fourteen-stewardess operation on Times Square.
There’s just one thing a Greta Garball stewardess wants, and that’s the cash.
Two months ago I was driving down the Fall River Expressway, and I saw a new Greta Garball they’d put up next to a Howard Johnson’s. There was the purple roof next to an orange one. It was so new that the Mayor of Brockton had cut the tape across the door only that morning. The cut tape was still there, and there were baskets of flowers all around from the builder and the plumbing contractor and the poison supply house and the National Association of Quality Morticians and so on.
I hung my head and I shuffled in. The stewardess was beautiful, the way they all are, the way they all have to be. And she’d had four years of abnormal psychology at the college level and two years at the Greta Garball Institute, the way they all have to.
“Haven’t been open long, I see,” I said.
“Four hours and fifteen minutes,” she said.
“Am I your first customer?” I said.
“Heavens no,” she said. “You’re the fifth.”
“Who was the first?” I said.
“The Mayor of Brockton,” she said.
Now you think about that a minute. That young woman was doing people in at a rate of one an hour. According to a stockholders’ report I got the other day, that’s the national average for Greta Garball hostesses. Your average hostess today, taking vacations and holidays and sick leave into account, kills 1673.43 people a year. And how many people did I say I’d killed in eight months, working with Mr. Garball himself back in 1974?
Ninety-two.
Ninety-two! Mr. Garball used to turn away twenty customers for every one he’d accept! Any modern Greta Garball stewardess with a record like that would be canned and blacklisted for life.
This girl out there on the Fall River Expressway, she wasn’t about to get fired for turning people away. I mean to say that girl was an expert.
· · ·
This next “Easy Go” is the most developed and satisfying version of the Garball series. The flow is smooth as we find more and more reason to admire Greta Garball and his quaint humanism.
“Kurt” reports on a visit to a parlor in upstate New York. After lip service about Greta Garball International being in the spirit of a “public utility,” and more perfunctory clichés about
the joys of living, the hostess’s decorum breaks down at the first sign of resistance. Insults worthy of those between Billy and Nancy in the published story begin to fly.
“Oh, Mr. Garball was rude too. Actually, he was ruder than the stewardess I just talked about,” “Kurt” admits, upon reflection. “But when Mr. Garball was rude, there was a kindness beneath it. Mr. Garball loved people.” Death is a serious business, and he was not sympathetic to frivolous cases, or to those who wished to make a gratuitously angry statement by their demise. During the Christmas rush he refused to gas a department store employee in his Santa suit. “We are not in the business,” he told the man in no uncertain terms before showing him the door, “to help the dead mock the living.”
Garball is revealed as a romantic at heart, subject to bouts of spring fever and prone to flirting with the girls at the Arthur Murray dance studio across the street. Vonnegut takes another stab at a love interest for his character, with a young woman who would become his widow—sex and death are converging again. But perhaps the tack is too distracting from the larger moral and political issues he wants to address for him to carry it further. For those subjects he will need a larger canvas.
Easy Go
by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Sure—I used to work for Greta Garball.
I worked for him and then for his widow for seven months in Chicago. That was before I went into the aluminum storm window line.
Greta Garball was a nickname he had had as a little kid. His real name was Frederick Gaborian. But I never heard anybody call him anything but Greta or Mr. Garball.
I asked him once if he minded being called Greta Garball, and he said no. “Kurt,” he said to me, “in this business everything should look peculiar, even if it isn’t. It is absolutely fitting that the proprietor of this establishment should be a man named Greta Garball. When customers come in here, the last thing I want to do is put them at their ease, is make them feel at home. When people come in here,” he said, “I want them to get the distinct impression that they have come to a very sick place indeed.”
Mr. Garball never said so, but I am sure he hired me because I was a dwarf. Up to the time I asked him for a job he had been running the whole shooting match by himself. But he could not resist having a dwarf named Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., on the premises.
Mr. Garball himself was six feet four, and I was like a toy to him. He had a little frock coat made up for me, and a little Snow-White-and-Seven-Dwarfs outfit, and a little suit of herringbone twill coveralls with the words “To be or not to be” embroidered on the back.
There was only one Greta Garball in those days, down on Forty-second and Lake Park. It didn’t have any purple tile roof. It was a plain cement block building with a flat asphalt roof. It used to be a Gulf Lubritorium, and the signs out front still claimed it was.
It wasn’t even called a Greta Garball. Mr. Garball called it “The South Side Ethical Suicide Parlor.”
We had a cash register, a pad of release forms, Mr. Garball’s Chrysler Imperial parked over a grease pit, a length of green plastic garden hose running from the exhaust pipe of the Chrysler to a hole in the telephone booth, and a big sign over the telephone booth that said, “Danger! Carbon monoxide! Those entering this booth do so at their own peril! You have been warned!”
And that was it.
In those days it was carbon monoxide or nothing.
If Mr. Garball were alive today, he wouldn’t be proud of the coast-to-coast chain of ethical suicide parlors that bears his nickname.
He wouldn’t like the expensive locations and the purple tile roofs.
He wouldn’t like the choice of cyanide, strychnine, or carbon monoxide.
He wouldn’t like the green lawns and flagstone walks and soft music.
He wouldn’t like the pretty stewardesses and easy chairs.
Frankly, I think they would make him sick.
What would make him sickest about the modern Greta Garballs is their efficiency and the attitude of the people who run them. I know just what Mr. Garball would say if he could see one. “You call that an ethical suicide parlor?” he would say. “I’d call it a heartless, soulless slot machine!”
Back in the old days, even during the Christmas rush, Mr. Garball talked to every customer, sometimes for an hour or more. And he swore he would never expand the business to the point where he could not do that.
Oh, I know modern business methods have kept the cost of ethical suicide down while the cost of everything else has quadrupled and quintupled. I’ve seen the graphs in the Greta Garball ads in Life.
But I don’t think efficiency is everything.
And neither did Mr. Garball. For every customer he accepted, he turned three away. If a modern Greta Garball showed a record like that, the stewardess and the district sales promotion manager would be fired so quick it would curl their hair.
Two months ago I went into a new Greta Garball they had opened up on the Albany-Schenectady road. I pretended I didn’t want to live any longer. I wanted to hear what the stewardess would say so I could compare it with what Mr. Garball would have said.
She started off pretty much the way Mr. Garball used to. She said the company didn’t want my money, didn’t need my money. She said Greta Garball International was a kind of public utility, like the water company. She said Greta Garball International wanted most of all to serve people.
She said it was her sworn duty to make sure I was doing the right thing. She said ethical suicide wasn’t for everybody.
And then she put on a record of a song called “The Bluebird of Happiness.”
The record had a crack in it.
And when the record was over she said, “Well now, doesn’t that change your mind?”
“That was supposed to fill me with the will to live?” I said.
She froze right up. The very first thing they teach them in Stewardess School is how to spot people who aren’t serious, who just want free coffee and a cheap thrill.
“You’d be surprised if you know how many lives that record has saved,” she said.
“I’d be flabbergasted,” I told her, “if the number of people it had saved was as big as one. Is that all you do, just play the record for people?”
“We have a book we give people to read,” she said, “but I don’t think a mere idle curiosity seeker would be very interested.”
I thought she meant a Bible.
And I got very interested, because I thought having a Bible around was at least one improvement over the old days. One time I tried to get Mr. Garball to buy a Bible for the shop, and he said nothing doing. He said he had enough against his soul without practicing religion without a license.
“Could I see the book, please?” I said to the stewardess. I wanted to see what parts of the Bible were thumbed most, what parts the management recommended.
“Read to your heart’s content, Shorty,” she said, and she practically threw the book at me.
So help me God, the book was “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” by Dale Carnegie.
I read the first paragraph, and then I gave her back the book. “Well, thanks very much, Miss,” I said. “I’m so bouyed up now, I couldn’t possibly think of self-destruction.”
“Suit yourself, Peewee,” she said. She did her best to make me feel cheap and small. “Next time you’re down in the dumps,” she said, “why don’t you go cry on your girlfriend’s shoulder?”
She didn’t think a dwarf could possibly have a happy love life.
“For your information, Venus,” I said to her, “I am happily married to the most beautiful midget in the United States of America. Why don’t you take one of your own cyanide pills? It would sweeten up your whole personality.”
On my way out through the lobby I saw that the stewardess had hung her trench coat over some kind of poster. I pulled the coat to one side.
“It’s always darkest just before the dawn,” the poster said. It was signed by the New York State Commissioner of E
thical Suicide, who makes thirty-five thousand dollars a year.
Now let me tell you how a customer was treated when Mr. Garball was alive. Oh, Mr. Garball was rude, too. Actually, he was ruder than the stewardess I just talked about.
But when Mr. Garball was rude, there was kindness behind it.
Mr. Garball loved people.
“Hello, you big fat booby!” he would say to some poor soul who had shuffled into the shop. “What makes you think I want your lousy fifty bucks? What’s fifty dollars to me? I’ve already got four houses, eight cars, and sixty-four suits.”
And then Mr. Garball would shake his head. “No, you are not the type,” he would say. “I don’t want your business. Death is not for you—not yet.”
The customer would mumble something about how death really was the thing for him.
“You’ve come to a pretty stuffy place here,” Mr. Garball would say. “It may not look like much, but this is actually the most snobbish retail outlet in Chicago. Think of this place as a very exclusive tailor shop. We won’t let just anybody but our merchandise. You have to be the right type for our merchandise, and we won’t let you out of here with it if we don’t think it fits.”
Then it would be up to the customer to prove that he really was the right type to go into the telephone booth for the big sleep. He would have to tell Mr. Garball one hard luck story after another, and the stories would have to be scorchers.
Mr. Garball was a tough man to impress with a hard luck story.
And when he said he didn’t think somebody’s troubles were so bad it really counted for something, because Mr. Garball wasn’t any Pollyanna.
Mr. Garball knew that life could get so snarled up sometimes that there wasn’t anything to do but give it up completely.
That was why he had founded the business. “What we are providing here, Kurt,” he said to me one day, “is a convenient, cheap, and no-nonsense exit from life for those whose luck is incurably diseased. For those to whom nothing good has every happened, for those to whom nothing good will ever happen, the door to our telephone booth is at long last the door to home.”
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