Palm Sunday (32 page)

He chokes Utterson to death. There are Grand Guignol effects, with Utterson spitting out catsup, sticking out an impossibly long tongue, and so on
.

Still clinging to Utterson’s throat, Hyde, played by JERRY, sings a tragic song about how the most idealistic experiments can sometimes go wrong
.

KIMBERLY, POPS, and a few others come out of the pub, all half in the bag. KIMBERLY is still holding the handle of the perambulator. They see Hyde choking the dead Utterson. KIMBERLY identifies him as the man who probably blew up the baby, tells POPS to shoot him like a mad dog
.

POPS draws his real pistol, which is loaded, and is so carried away by the drama that he actually takes a shot at JERRY, shattering a streetlamp
.

Everything stops.]

JERRY:
[As JERRY, dropping Utterson]
That was a real bullet.

POPS:
I told you I had real bullets in my gun. Nobody kills babies while I’m around.

JERRY:
Imbecile!

LEGHORN:
[Striding onstage to disarm Pops]
I’ll take that thing.
[He sticks the pistol under his belt.]

POPS:
I lost my head.

JERRY:
I almost lost my life. Get out of here!

POPS:
What can I say after I’ve said I’m sorry?

JERRY:
Try “Good-bye.”

POPS:
This thing is never going to make it to Broadway anyway.
[He exits.]

LEGHORN:
Well—if this show has accomplished nothing else, at least it’s disarmed a campus cop.

JERRY:
The whole thing stunk. I really let you down this time, gang. I resign as head of the student body.

[SALLY enters, still a mess, deeply concerned about Jerry.]

SALLY:
Jerry—

JERRY:
You don’t have to tell me: You don’t love me anymore. I don’t even love myself anymore.

SALLY:
It wasn’t your fault, Jerry. I mean—it was a story we found in the public domain. Everybody knows there’s nothing but picked-over garbage in the public domain.

LEGHORN:
A little chicken would cheer us all up about now—but I don’t know where we could find a chicken this time of night.

[POPS screams in terror outside the theater. The screams go on and on. Nobody is much concerned.]

SALLY:
What’s that?

JERRY:
It sounds like Pops got himself caught in his zipper again.

SAM:
Happens all the time. KIMBERLY: I don’t know—that doesn’t quite sound like his zipper scream.

[POPS enters, mad with terror, breathless.]

POPS:
[Pointing, gasping]
I just saw—I just saw—I just saw—

LEGHORN:
You’re not making any sense.

POPS:
I just saw the biggest chicken in history.

LEGHORN:
Uh huh. The biggest chicken in history weighed fifty-six pounds and four ounces, and was found on Bikini Atoll after a hydrogen bomb test there.

POPS:
Bigger than that.

LEGHORN:
And what was this chicken doing?

POPS:
As God is my witness—it was eating a Doberman pinscher alive.

JERRY:
He just wants his gun back.

LEGHORN:
I don’t know. Strange things happen in the chicken world. [Aside] Often profitable. [
To Pops]
How much would you say this chicken weighed?

POPS:
With or without the Doberman inside?

LEGHORN:
Without the dog.

POPS:
A hundred and eighty pounds, medium build, white—
yellow feet, yellow beak—believed to be dangerous. Somebody better get out an APB.

LEGHORN:
A hundred-and-eighty-pound chicken would feed about two hundred people. A few birds like that would go a long way toward ending the protein shortages in India, in Africa, in Moscow—in Bangladesh.
[He considers going out to have a look.]

POPS:
Oh, sir—I hate your guts, but I beg of you, please don’t go out there alone.

LEGHORN:
I never met the chicken I could not dominate. Besides, gumshoe, I have a gun with five shots left in it. Remember?

[LEGHORN draws the pistol, blows down the barrel, and exits.]

JERRY:
Well—that’s all very interesting, but it doesn’t have a heck of a lot to do with saving the college, does it?

POPS:
You’d think it had to do with everything there ever was, if you saw a chicken that size.

SALLY:
Maybe somebody should call the Humane Society.

POPS:
The National Guard!

JERRY:
Maybe we
should
put on a cake sale.

[A pistol is fired outside.]

POPS:
Four shots left.

SALLY:
Is it legal to shoot a chicken that size? POPS: A chicken, no matter how big, has no rights in the state of Pennsylvania.

[Two more pistol shots]

POPS:
Two shots left.

[LEGHORN rushes back in, holding the smoking gun.]

LEGHORN:
Everybody out! Grab a hammer, a broom—anything! I’m gonna need help with this one. This one
must have been fed pure plutonium on Mars. I think I winged it, but I can’t be sure.

[All but KIMBERLY grab makeshift weapons and rush out. SAM is the last one out.]

SAM:
You coming, Kimberly?

KIMBERLY:
No. I am a follower of Albert Schweitzer. I have reverence for life. Besides, I’m very sleepy.

SAM:
Okay, you take a nap.

[SAM exits. Sounds of a chase come from outside, fading off into the distance, as KIMBERLY makes a pillow of a discarded garment and goes to sleep on Dr. Jekyll’s doorstep. She snores softly, sweetly
.

There are clumsy, subhuman sounds in the wings. The great chicken which the head of the chemistry department has turned himself into enters, desperately hoping to elude its hunters. It is wounded and enraged. It does not see Kimberly at first, and KIMBERLY goes on sleeping. It tears off the door of the pub, uproots a lamppost and bends it double, and so on
.

It sees Kimberly at last, approaches her sleeping form with a mixture of dim-witted awe and lust, after the fashion of King Kong. It decides to do something with her
—
whether to rape her or abduct her or consume her, it is not clear
.

We never find out, for just in the nick of time, LEGHORN enters with his pistol cocked and aimed. He is followed by SAM, SALLY, and JERRY.]

LEGHORN:
Reach for the sky.

[The chicken raises its wings, turns around slowly.]

LEGHORN:
Don’t try anything fancy. One false move, and you’re fricassee.

JERRY:
Some bird!

LEGHORN:
I had a hunch this one would double back to the Mildred Peasely Bangtree Memorial Theater and try
to hide in here. Do I know chickens, or do I know chickens?

SALLY:
Who was Mildred Peasely Bangtree?

JERRY:
NO time to wonder that now.

LEGHORN:
Quiet now. I’m going to interrogate this roaster.

SALLY:
Rooster?

LEGHORN:
Roaster.

[LEGHORN now conducts a conversation in chicken language with the chicken. It takes quite a while. It is expressive, with moments of excitement and sadness and so on.]

JERRY:
What did it say?

LEGHORN:
I thought I had heard every chicken story possible, but this is a new one on me. This is the head of your chemistry department here. He drank a mixture of LSD and chicken tonic and Drano and God only knows what else, in the hopes of winning a Nobel prize. There’s more of the stuff back in his laboratory.

SALLY, JERRY, AND SAM:
Dr. Jekyll.

[LEGHORN says something rueful in chicken language, and the chicken agrees.]

SAM:
What did you just say to him?

LEGHORN:
Said he couldn’t go to Stockholm looking like that.

[Chicken says more, resignedly.]

LEGHORN:
Says he’s got three bullets in him, and is dying anyway.

[The chicken begins a tragic dying scene, which takes a minute or two
.

WHITEFEET and MRS. JEKYLL enter while it is going on. MRS. JEKYLL is carrying the beaker. Everybody is profoundly moved but WHITEFEET, who is overwhelmed with mirth.]

WHITEFEET:
That’s the funniest costume I ever saw!

MRS. JEKYLL:
Shut up you lightweight—you intolerable sparrowfart! That is my husband there. I watched it all through the laboratory window. I have the fatal mixture here.
[She shows the beaker.]

[The chicken struggles upright one last time, and sings a farewell aria in chicken language, with orchestral accompaniment. It dies, its feet straight up in the air.]

SAM:
Kimberly, are you all right?

KIMBERLY:
I think so. But I’ll never be the same. I don’t think I can be a follower of Albert Schweitzer anymore.

[The remainder of the cast enters quietly to gawk.]

MRS. JEKYLL:
What was its last song about?

LEGHORN:
I’m liable to bust out crying when I tell you. I never thought a chicken could get to me like that. There’s precious little sentimentality in the modern chicken business, believe you me. It sang about the disposal of its remains. It asked to be roasted and wrapped in Reynolds Wrap and given to an orphanage.

MRS. JEKYLL:
The first unselfish act of his life.

LEGHORN:
Well, we’re all in this together now—and the reputation of the college, not that it ever amounted to a hill of beans, depends on what we decide to do. All in favor of roasting it?

ALL:
Aye.

LEGHORN:
All in favor of wrapping it in Reynolds Wrap?

ALL:
Aye.

LEGHORN:
All in favor of giving it to an orphanage?

ALL BUT MRS. JEKYLL:
No.

MRS. JEKYLL:
Abstain.

LEGHORN:
Abstention noted. I think you have voted wisely. Allowing even orphans to eat a chicken produced by this method is morally repugnant in a Christian society
at this time. Future generations may feel differently. It is the sense of the meeting, then, that the roasted chicken be buried in an unmarked grave as soon as possible, and that nothing more be said about it, since the story, if it ever got out, would interfere with recruiting and fund raising activities of the college, and only confuse the county prosecutor. CHORUS:
[Singing, directed by JERRY]
Aaaaaaaaaaaaa-men! Aaaaaaaaaaaa-men! Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-men!

[Sobbing, MRS. JEKYLL throws herself on the remains.]-

CURTAIN

I
HAVE SPOKEN IN ANOTHER
chapter of the thunderstorms in the head of Jack Kerouac when I knew him, or to be more truthful, when he was unknowable—near the end of his life. He was to be pitied and forgiven, of course, for all he said while the thunder and lightning was going on.

We arrive now, though, at the case of a writer who not only thought loathsomely on occasion, but who sometimes acted on those loathsome thoughts, and who, as many people have told me very pointedly, can never be forgiven. It is common for people to find his work impossible to read, not because of what he happens to be saying on a given page but because of unforgivable things he has said or written elsewhere.

He said often enough himself, one way or another and as a universally despised old man and war criminal, that he had nothing to apologize for, and that forgiveness would be yet another insult from nincompoops.

He would not like me. The evidence is that he was not strikingly fond of any human beings. He loved his cat, which he was forever carrying from here to there like a baby.

He considered himself at least the equal of any living
writer. I am told that he once said of the Nobel prize: “Every Vaseline-ass in Europe has one. Where’s mine?”

And yet, compulsively, with no financial gain in prospect, and understanding that many people will believe that I share many of his authentically vile opinions, I continue to say that there were good things about this man. And my name is most snugly tied to his in the Penguin paperback editions of his last three books,
Castle to Castle, North
, and
Rigadoon
. My name is on each cover: “With a new introduction,” it says, “by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.”

That introduction to all three paperbacks goes like this: