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Authors: Kurt Vonnegut

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BOOK: We Are What We Pretend to Be

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And then he said, “That tree, when a sapling, must have
crossed the Atlantic on a sailing ship. Imagine crossing the North Atlantic, whether on an errand for good or for evil, with only the restless winds of the planet to get you where you next wanted to do your thing. How’s that for science fiction? And now we have automobiles, powered by the most addictive and destructive drug yet discovered, which is gasoline. Yes, and in one eensy-weensy century we have sucked the last drop of petroleum from our planet’s sweet flowing breast. For what? For an orgy of transportation whoopee, friends and neighbors. For shame! You think around-the-clock fucking and sucking is bad? Listen: The farts of our internal combustion engines have wrecked the atmosphere as a protective shield, and as anything a mother would want her child to breathe. You think people farts are bad? The polar ice caps are melting, I shit you not. The last polar bear, the last King of the Arctic, died ten days ago, and a mulberry stump on Cape Cod will soon be under three feet of saltwater.

“And I ask you again, friends and neighbors: ‘How’s that for science fiction?’

“There’s bad news and there’s good news,” he said. “Martians have landed in New York City. The good news is they only eat homeless people, and they pee gasoline. Only kidding, folks. Actually, a team of anthropologists from Mars has been studying the American way of life for the past ten years. They went back home last week on account of global warming. They didn’t want to be roasted or drowned. But their leader said before lift-off that there were two things about Americans no Martian could ever understand. ‘What is it,’ he said, ‘about blowjobs and golf?’”

He cleared his throat and pretended to make sure his voice
was still working. He did this by singing scales as he used to do in singing class at Knightsbridge High: “
Do, re
,
mi, mi, mi
,” and so on. Again: What a voice! Jesus Christ!

And then he said, “I know you ladies from Smith College here tonight are ardent feminists, flat heels and no makeup, preparing to beat men at their own games in the marketplace. But you know what I think?” he asked with apparently profound, baritone concern. “I think this is a national tragedy. Honest to God, and this kidder is not kidding this time: I think educating a woman is like pouring honey into a fine Swiss watch. Everything stops.”

He was rewarded with an incredulous, collective gasp from the audience. It went up in the theater, as he would later declare, “like a great big purple hot-air balloon.” He was on a roll with political incorrectness, and he didn’t stop. “You want to know what I think about the Chinese fire drill about men and women that’s been going on for a million years now? Try this on for size: All women are psychotic and all men are jerks.”

The audience was lobotomized.

He laughed at them. “Boy, did I ever goose you. You’re the goosiest bunch I’ve spoken to since B’nai B’rith. But let me restore your dignity with a therapeutic technique I perfected while lying on my back on a craps table in the Trump Taj Mahal.” What was supposed to happen next, and had happened at the University of Vermont; and then at his alma mater, Columbia; and then at Boston University, where his mom and dad met; and then Ithaca College, where Martha Jones had fallen in love with him, was this: He would coax the audience into standing up and clucking like hens who had just laid eggs.

He was a hypnotist.

Gil Berman said, “And that’s the end of my show, folks. You’re such polite people, you’re probably ready to clap your hands, whether you liked the show or not. Over the past thousand years, at least, nice people like you have been clapping for poor sons-of-bitches or daughters-of-bitches onstage, whether they really liked them or not. Slapping your palms with your palms can mean anything. It’s high time we came up with a new form of applause that is optional, and that can mean only one thing: ‘Really loved your show, no shit, no shit.’ How about clucking like hens who’ve just laid eggs, not that I’ve laid eggs tonight. At least I hope not.”

Silence.

“Applaud, please. I stand before you, having completely drained myself in order to make you happier to be alive than you were before, but you sit there like statues made of apple pan dowdy.”

Silence. Sheepishness.

As he had done four times before, Berman came to the apron of the stage, wiggling his fingers at the audience like a mesmerist, and intoned droningly: “You are hypnotized. You have no will of your own. You have just laid eggs. Now stand up and cluck, cluck, cluck. Show how proud you are.”

Silence. What had happened at all four previous shows would surely have happened again. One person would have clucked, and then another. And then, in about three minutes, everyone, with a few exceptions, of course, would have been standing and clucking louder and louder, and laughing like crazy when he or she wasn’t clucking, and flapping his or her folded arms like chicken wings,
and loving himself or herself in a hilarious demonstration of therapeutic mass hysteria.

And Berman would have vanished.

But Martha Jones had seen his act in Ithaca, and to her the slowness of the audience there to respond to commands by this avatar of Jesus was an abomination. She wasn’t going to allow that to happen again. She had shuddered and swayed to her feet. She now faced the audience and belted out these words in the voice of the toughest truck driver on the turnpike from Hell to Pittsburgh, and only capital letters will do:

“DO WHAT HE SAYS! THIS MAN IS NONE OTHER THAN JESUS CHRIST!”

Everybody thought the thug in a muumuu was part of the act!

Berman was rooted to the stage like a mulberry stump in Barnstable.

What were members of the audience to extrapolate from this situation? They were being tested, they thought. The next move was up to them. What were their alternatives? Any sudden and stentorian announcement about Jesus would have left them momentarily thunderstruck. But now they could evaluate the source: an obvious clown, a man dressed like a woman, and part of the show. So far as they knew, Gil Berman was still completely in charge. So if they did not feel at all like laughing, which they didn’t, that was because he did not want them to laugh. Did he really think he was Jesus? Anyone crazy enough to believe that about himself or herself, as the case might be, would still not have been so crazy as to pay a clown, of all symbols, to announce the
fact. Nor had Berman at any point in the evening seemed in the least fire-eyed or messianistic.

Silence.

Berman, who couldn’t really have been catatonic, was up there onstage pretending to be catatonic, or so they thought. He wasn’t about to tell them what to do next. They should be able to figure that out for themselves, if they were such a smart bunch of college kids. Applaud with their hands? He had mocked doing that for its quite possible insincerity. Cluck like chickens? Please!

And then they got it, or thought they did: This enemy of hypocrisy up there on stage wanted no hypocrisy from them, should any part of his show have disappointed them. And he was demonstrating that he was as austere about praise as he was about sex. He didn’t need it, didn’t want it. Let others be obsessed by praise.

In character!

What to do? They did it. They departed the Calvin Theater as quietly as ghosts.

Holy shit! What a sacred moment.

In a few minutes, the silence broken only by the sounds of shuffling footsteps, the opening and closing of doors to the outside, and the clangor of a passing fire engine, there were only four human beings still inside the Calvin. There was Berman onstage. There was Martha Jones, who had subsided back into her seat, as Berman would later say, “like a mountain of apple pan dowdy.” Her Neanderthal features were now a tabula rasa. There was a rosy, roly-poly, uniformed Northampton policeman who had been on duty backstage.

And loping down the aisle from the lobby came Sheldon Hayes, the very tall, very thin, white-haired, sixty-year-old theater manager, who, years ago, had left nearby Florence, Massachusetts, for New York City, in the outsize expectation of becoming a Broadway actor. His long white hair was tied in back with a blue velvet ribbon in a ponytail. He was thrilled and incredulous. Sheldon Hayes believed he had witnessed a theatrical masterpiece.

Sheldon Hayes stopped first before Martha Jones, front row center, and he said, “You were terrific! I damn near excreted a piece of masonry!” And he wheeled so quickly, in order to look up at Berman, who was now teetering on the apron of the stage, that he could not see that Berman’s stooge, supposedly, might actually be a corpse now.

And Sheldon Hayes called Martha Jones a “he.” He said to Gil Berman. “Where the heck did you find him? He was marvelous! He told me he was part of the show, and had to be front row center, but I couldn’t imagine how you were going to use him. You are a genius. That’s all I can say. How in heck did you know it was going to work that well? And you know what people whispered to me as they were leaving? They were saying things like, ‘Cool, cool,’ and ‘Super cool.’ One kid said, ‘I’m just going to have to go back to the dorm and think about this. No TV tonight.’ They were all so reverent. The Jesus Christ business shocked them, made them so reverent, made them think about all
kinds of
stuff all at once, which is what the greatest teachers do. But what a crazy risk you took with the Jesus thing. Talk about a chance for a big-time backfire. But you son of a bitch, you got away with it.
It worked, it worked. Crazy like a fox. They’re all going to go home and think now.”

Sheldon Hayes wasn’t gay. Like Berman, he was a neuter. Later that evening, Berman would describe him as “an albino giraffe.”

Gil Berman for the moment accepted what had happened. What else could he do? What else should he have done? But then he took a good look at Martha Jones, although he did not know that was her name, or even whether she was a man or a woman. And then he said to the albino giraffe, “I think maybe you’d better call an ambulance.” And the roly-poly, rosy policeman, whom Berman would later call “a sentimental hippopotamus,” and who was standing next to him now, was already talking to police headquarters, two blocks away, on his cellphone, on his own having decided that Berman’s “stooge” really might be dead.

He thought he had big news, but headquarters had even bigger news for him, which Berman and Sheldon Hayes could hear in the shushing overflow from the instrument’s earpiece. This person was a woman. Her name was Martha Jones. She was a deinstitutionalized mental patient who had stopped taking her pills and run away from her brother-in-law’s house in Ithaca, where she was living; that she often looked dead but really wasn’t; and that her niece Lily Matthews was there at the station right now, ready to drive her aunt back to Ithaca. The cops in Ithaca, as soon as Martha Jones was reported missing but not dangerous, had learned at the bus station there that the unmistakable Martha Jones had bought a bus ticket from Ithaca to Northampton,
which would require her to change buses at Syracuse, and then at Springfield. But damn if she hadn’t made it!

The sentimental hippopotamus clicked off his cellphone, and he said to Sheldon Hayes and Gil Berman, as though they hadn’t heard any of it, and with all possible clinical gravitas: “It’s a she. She only looks dead. We don’t have to do anything. She hasn’t been taking her pills. Her niece will be here in a minute to pick her up.”

Here is additional clinical information about Martha Jones that might have been interesting, but surely not useful at that point in time, as the three men stood around in the Calvin with their thumbs up their asses, so to speak, waiting for the niece to arrive: Martha Jones had been born with ambiguous sexual organs and glands and musculature. These things happen. Several such persons had elected to compete as female athletes with great success. Martha Jones had elected to overeat and go nuts in muumuus instead.

Chapter 4

CHAPTER 4

The following is a transcript of a recording of what Gilbert Lanz Berman said to a psychiatrist five years his junior, post–Taj Mahal, during his second stay at Caldwell, after he had been there a week. This was the first of two sessions. He would fire her after the second one. She was Dr. Helen Newman Klein, whose office was in nearby Milwaukee. She would come to Caldwell, which had no resident psychiatrist, but only internists and dieticians and psy-chopharmacologists and aerobics instructors and psychiatric social workers and the like, at the request of patients, like Berman, who wanted and could afford to pay for seriously probing talk therapy that might deal with life problems beyond mere substance abuse. Dr. Klein was an absolute knockout—great body, great smile.

After Berman fired her, she would opine that Berman, rich as Croesus, had summoned a psychiatrist so he could tease her for his own amusement and cajole her into prescribing a sleeping pill, Desamol, that they wouldn’t give him at Caldwell.

She said to a Milwaukee colleague, Dr. Walter Streit, who was on his way out to Caldwell to take over Berman’s case, “I hope your pockets are full of Desamol, and you know what the fundamental illness of stand-up comedians is.” Dr. Streit said he didn’t know but that he hoped to find out, and she said, “Ingratitude.”

So here we go, with “B” for Berman and “K” for Klein:

K: How do you do, Mr. Berman? I’m Dr. Klein.

B: Do have a seat, Doc. Take a load off your feet. I keep thinking today is Tuesday.

K: Today is Tuesday.

B: That’s what I keep thinking. You know why cream is so much more expensive than milk?

K: So much more butterfat?

B: It’s because the cows hate to squat on those little cartons. You bring me my Desamol like a good girl? I have a lot of trouble sleeping.

K: You have to ask your doctor out here. You’ve been here once before?

B: Who squealed? O.K., you got me. And the last time I was here, they sent me home to Mother with a bushel of Desamol, so I could sleep.

K: Times change. Side effects and lawsuits announce themselves. Prescriptions change. Desamol isn’t recommended for men anymore, except for sex offenders.

B: Actually, there’s nothing wrong with me this time, thank goodness. I’m back at dear old Caldwell University for my class reunion.

K: Which class is that?

B: Upper. What other class can afford to stay here? But as long as you’ve come all the way from Milwaukee, maybe you can give me some advice about my brother Heathcliffe.

K: A brother? I looked at your files here this morning.

B: Oy! The Gestapo!

K: No mention of a brother.

B: Black sheep! Heathie can’t hold a job. Had a swell job in a panty-girdle factory. He was pulling down ten thousand a year! Got canned. So I bought him a one-way ticket to Switzerland.

K: Where Heathie punched holes in cheese.

B: Much too obvious, Doc.

K: Shot in the dark.

B: They had him clean birdshit out of cuckoo clocks. Too much responsibility for brother Heathcliffe. So I pulled some wires, Doc, called in some markers, used my connections with certain unnamed persons in the White House, and got him a position hammering corks into bottles in a winery. Lasted three lousy weeks, Dr. Strangelove. His co-bottlers at Manischewitz said my brother was nothing but a mean and stupid corksocker.

K: Tell me about his love life.

B: None of your beeswax, Ms. Nancy Drew. Want to talk about mine?

K: What is there to say? Throughout history, celibacy has been a respected, even revered predicament, if we can call it that, in which some of our greatest thinkers have found themselves, long before you started taking Desamol.

B: For sleep.

K: And the exact opposite of Viagra.

B: Oysters aren’t the great aphrodisiacs they’re cracked up to be.

K: Heck!

B: Ate twelve of ’em one time.

K: Oh?

B: Only three of ’em worked.

K: Must have been before you came here the first time. And that must have been after your father died.

B: Too obvious, Doc. My dad committed suicide in an old girlfriend’s garage, so that explains everything? Listen, in one of Plato’s dialogues, a formerly great cocksman is asked what it’s like not to be a great cocksman anymore, and he says it’s like being allowed to dismount from a wild horse. K: Not all horses buck.

B: Are you making a pass at me?

K: I was thinking of horses. Now that you mention it, though, women must be making passes at you all the time.

B: Shows how little you know about women. They don’t make passes at gay men, do they? And I’ve taught them that a neuter is another sort of man they don’t have to attract with a lot of silly horseshit like butts and boobs, and that’s such a relief to them. They can think for a change. They can wear shoes that feel good. They can be genuinely friendly with other women instead of being on their guard against them. Ever notice how free women are to really like each other a lot when they’re shopping or having lunch or going to the theater with a gay guy? Same thing with a neuter, and we’ll soon be coming out of the closet by the millions, thanks to
me. No AIDS, no babies, no marriage, no breech births, no postpartum depression, no orders of protection and broken jaws, no divorce. Women, make passes at the flaming neuter Gil Berman? Why spoil a good thing?

K: So, you have many women friends.

B: I have many people friends. In the words of Thomas Jefferson: “We the people.” And next time, either bring Desamol or don’t wear perfume.

K: I’m not wearing perfume.

B: Somebody is.

K: When you were taking Desamol, why weren’t you half-asleep all the time?

B: You take Ritalin.

K: Another side effect, I’ve read, is constipation.

B: You take Phillips’ Milk of Magnesia, the old tried and true.

K: And headaches.

B: You take Excedrin or Anacin or Tylenol or Bayer Aspirin or Bufferin.

K: And occasional dizziness.

B: You sit down or hold onto a telephone pole or the nearest meter maid. And no lipstick next time.

K: I’ll wipe it off right now.

B: You would look so pretty while you were doing it, that would just make things worse.

K: I think you’re kidding me, Gil Berman.

B: Wouldn’t you think something had gone terribly wrong if I didn’t fall in love with you? Be honest.

K: The scrapbook.

B: What scrapbook is that? Mother made a million of them, to which I, the greatest of all comedians, as you may have noticed, have now fallen heir, along with an eight-bedroom house in Knightsbridge, two Steinway grand pianos, and Boston slum properties almost without number. It’s in my file here that my mother made scrapbooks?

K: I didn’t know that about your mother. I just found this one scrapbook in your file, and it seemed so odd: It had such an expensive cover, and the clippings were so neat. They were laid out on each page so artistically, almost as though by a professional layout artist.

B: She could have been a professional layout artist. I could have been a professional layout artist. You could have been a professional layout artist. You married? One of Mother’s scrapbooks wound up out here? The only proof of the existence of God my mother needed was the morning paper, a pair of scissors and Elmer’s Glue, and a piano. Jesus, I must have talked so much about her scrapbooks the first time I was here, somebody must have written her doctor to ask if they could please see one. But that doesn’t seem very likely. K: You didn’t bring it with you? I thought maybe you were the one who made it.

B: What’s it about? Barbra Streisand’s fight with her hairdresser? The Cuban Missile Crisis? It was all so fucking pathetic. When Mother was a little girl she made scrapbooks about what a great pianist she was, the even greater one she would surely become. About three of ’em, now mine, all mine. She stopped when there was nothing more
about her in the morning paper. But after she went bonkers, after the shock treatments, she started making them again, almost as though anything that happened was something for which she was somehow responsible and should be proud. And she was proud! She didn’t even know who Dad was anymore, just that he was this sweet young man who came by from time to time because he loved to look at her scrapbooks. I wasn’t all that clear either about who he was, and what the fuck he was doing there. He was a paragon of manly schmaltz who loved scrapbooks and thought it was great how nice and straight my teeth are. Which they are. Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed how straight and gleaming white they are. Don’t lie. You have delivered yourself into the presence of the world’s most dreaded shit-detector. So God knows how and God knows why: One of my poor mother’s scrapbooks made it all the way to a file cabinet in Salem, Wisconsin. What’s it about? Elizabeth Taylor marries for the thirteenth time? Vietnam?

K: I thought you surely knew. Now I’m sorry I brought it up. It’s about your nervous breakdown in Boston.

B: You’re shitting me! She made a fucking scrapbook of that?

K: You were in the morning paper, not once but several times.

B: Oh, keeeeerap!

K: Since you only now found out about it, let’s put off talking about it until the next time.

B: Keeeeeerap! Burn the motherfucker!

K: When you go home from here, where exactly is home?

B: Keeeeeerap!

K: Where is home?

B: Where is what?

K: Where is home?

B: Home, my dear Docky-wocky, docky-wocky-wicky-woo, is a condominium to die for in Manhattan, across from Gramercy Park South, to which I hold a key, and five doors down from the Players, a club for theater people in which I hold a membership, and where I find more congenial company than at which you can shake a stick. And six blocks west is a saintly physician who will prescribe anything I want, even if he never heard of it before, for he himself is on LSD. K

: And will there be someone waiting for you in your nice condominium?

B: Of course! You think I would yearn to be back there if there weren’t a significant other waiting?

K: Another neuter?

B: You got it!

K: Can I ask who it is?

B: If you promise not to breathe his name to anyone.

K: Goes without saying.

B: Gilbert Lanz Berman. You would fall head-over-heels in love with him, if you could see his smile. You’d want to marry him.

K: And be labeled a home-wrecker? And I must be going now. And I am so happy you have plenty of Phillips’ Milk of Magnesia.

B: Touché, dearest of all possible Helens. Touché, touché.

BOOK: We Are What We Pretend to Be

9.68Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub