Welcome to the Monkey House: The Special Edition (41 page)

“No!” cried Willy. “Not another one!”

“ ‘I do stipulate,’ ” read Lou, “ ‘that all of my property, of whatsoever kind and nature, not be divided, but do devise and bequeath it to be held in common by my issue, without regard for generation, equally, share and share alike.’ ”

“Issue?” said Emerald.

Lou included the multitude in a sweep of his hand. “It means we all own the whole damn shootin’ match.”

All eyes turned instantly to the bed.

“Share and share alike?” said Morty.

“Actually,” said Willy, who was the oldest person present, “it’s just like the old system, where the oldest people head up things with their headquarters in here, and—”

“I like
that
!” said Em. “Lou owns as much of it as you do, and I say it ought to be for the oldest one who’s still working. You can snooze around here all day, waiting for your pension check, and poor Lou stumbles in here after work, all tuckered out, and—”

“How about letting somebody who’s never had any privacy get a little crack at it?” said Eddie hotly. “Hell, you old people had plenty of privacy back when you were kids. I was born and raised in the middle of the goddam barracks in the hall! How about—”

“Yeah?” said Morty. “Sure, you’ve all had it pretty tough, and my heart bleeds for you. But try honeymooning in the hall for a real kick.”

“Silence!” shouted Willy imperiously. “The next person who opens his mouth spends the next six months by the bathroom. Now clear out of my room. I want to think.”

A vase shattered against the wall, inches above his head. In the next moment, a free-for-all was underway, with each couple battling to eject every other couple from the room. Fighting coalitions formed and dissolved with the lightning changes of the tactical situation. Em and Lou were thrown into the hall,
where they organized others in the same situation, and stormed back into the room.

After two hours of struggle, with nothing like a decision in sight, the cops broke in.

For the next half-hour, patrol wagons and ambulances hauled away Schwartzes, and then the apartment was still and spacious.

·    ·    ·

An hour later, films of the last stages of the riot were being televised to 500,000,000 delighted viewers on the Eastern Seaboard.

In the stillness of the three-room Schwartz apartment on the 76th floor of Building 257, the television set had been left on. Once more the air was filled with the cries and grunts and crashes of the fray, coming harmlessly now from the loudspeaker.

The battle also appeared on the screen of the television set in the police station, where the Schwartzes and their captors watched with professional interest.

Em and Lou were in adjacent four-by-eight cells, and were stretched out peacefully on their cots.

“Em—” called Lou through the partition, “you got a washbasin all your own too?”

“Sure. Washbasin, bed, light—the works. Ha! And we thought Gramps’ room was something. How long’s this been going on?” She held out her hand. “For the first time in forty years, hon, I haven’t got the shakes.”

“Cross your fingers,” said Lou, “the lawyer’s going to try to get us a year.”

“Gee,” said Em dreamily, “I wonder what kind of wires you’d have to pull to get solitary?”

“All right, pipe down,” said the turnkey, “or I’ll toss the whole kit and caboodle of you right out. And first one who lets on to anybody outside how good jail is ain’t never getting back in!”

The prisoners instantly fell silent.

The living room of the Schwartz apartment darkened for a moment, as the riot scenes faded, and then the face of the announcer appeared, like the sun coming from behind a cloud.
“And now, friends,”
he said,
“I have a special message from the makers of anti-gerasone, a message for all you folks over one hundred and fifty. Are you hampered socially by wrinkles, by stiffness of joints and discoloration or loss of hair, all because these things came upon you before anti-gerasone was developed? Well, if you are, you need no longer suffer, need no longer feel different and out of things
.

“After years of research, medical science has now developed super-anti-gerosone! In weeks, yes weeks, you can look, feel, and act as young as your great-great-grandchildren! Wouldn’t you pay $5,000 to be indistinguishable from everybody else? Well, you don’t have to. Safe, tested super-anti-gerasone costs you only dollars a day. The average cost of regaining all the sparkle and attractiveness of youth is less than fifty dollars
.

“Write now for your free trial carton. Just put your name and address on a dollar postcard, and mail it to ‘Super,’ Box 500,000, Schenectady, N.Y. Have you got that? I’ll repeat it
. ‘Super.’
Box …”
Underlining the announcer’s words was the scratching of Gramps’ fountain-pen, the one Willy had given him the night before. He had come in a few minutes previous from the Idle Hour Tavern, which commanded a view of Building 257 across the square of asphalt known as the Alden Village Green. He had called a cleaning woman to come straighten the place up, and had hired the best lawyer in town to get his descendants a conviction. Gramps had then moved the daybed before the television screen so that he could watch from a reclining position. It was something he’d dreamed of doing for years.

“Schen-ec-ta-dy,” mouthed Gramps. “Got it.” His face had changed remarkably. His facial muscles seemed to have relaxed, revealing kindness and equanimity under what had been taut, bad-tempered lines. It was almost as though his trial package of Super-anti-gerasone had already arrived. When
something amused him on television, he smiled easily, rather than barely managing to lengthen the thin line of his mouth a millimeter. Life was good. He could hardly wait to see what was going to happen next.

(1953)

Kurt Vonnegut liked to tell the story of the handyman he hired to build an addition to his old farmhouse in West Barnstable, on Cape Cod. This was the home where Vonnegut lived for twenty years, struggling to support his family as an author. The addition was to be a study, a place where he could work in relative peace and quiet, away from the bustle of his six children. The son of an architect, and a tinkerer and draftsman and woodworker himself, Vonnegut was naturally curious about the project, and he took regular breaks from his writing table to watch as it unfolded. Over several days the contractor went about his tasks, focusing on one part of the job at a time, one board and nail and section of sheetrock in turn, from foundation to sidewalls to roof, making adjustments as he moved toward the goal for which he had been hired. When it was done, the contractor stood back to admire the finished product.
“How the hell did I ever do that?”
he exclaimed in astonishment.

Vonnegut used this homily to convey the irreducible mystery of all creative acts, whether they involved framing wooden structures, laying paint on canvas, or pecking out sentences and paragraphs on a typewriter. Before he broke through to success and celebrity in 1969 with
Slaughterhouse-Five
, he was happy to consider himself one more neighborhood artisan, taking pride in standards and attention to craft despite the meager pay. Vonnegut was not a member of the Cape’s moneyed elite, and he preferred to compare himself to the plumbers and mechanics and electricians he knew.

“Mechanics fix automobiles,” he once observed. “Carpenters build houses. Storytellers use a reader’s leisure time in such a way that the reader will not feel that his time has been wasted.”

What those endeavors demanded in common was long hours of preparation and painstaking diligence, combined with an iron determination in the face of setbacks and detours and false starts—none of which should be visible when the piece was ready for public view. In his own case, if one was lucky, the unglamorous “showing up” at the workstation every day might result in a few intuitive leaps, the occasional wrinkle or departure that invited notice as original, special, maybe even something worthy of being called art.

·    ·    ·

The short story “Welcome to the Monkey House” was the fruit of such labors. It is a fascinating example of Vonnegut’s craft. Much of this is due to its timing, both within the arc of his career and against the backdrop of the seismic cultural and social changes, the assault on sacred cows and polite decorum, in which it emerged. First appearing in
Playboy
in January 1968, with its provocative language and its parody of drug laws, the “sexual revolution,” and the American Way of Death, it was custom-built to appeal to that magazine’s hip young male audience. This was a demographic worlds removed from both the underground sci-fi crowd who had stumbled upon Vonnegut’s early novels and the middlebrow consumers of
The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s
, and
Ladies’ Home Journal
who had long been his bread-and-butter constituency. It created such a sensation that later in 1968 he used it as the title selection for a paperback anthology of short stories, just as he was on the cusp of hitting it big. Vonnegut was emerging from cult “underground” status with pieces for
The New York Times
and
Esquire
, and, after a residency teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he had finally figured out how to tell his war story. The result would be a bestseller phenomenon the next year,
Slaughterhouse-Five
.

In the excerpts of the multiple drafts presented here, we can observe this famous story taking shape and, at an intimate level, discover something about Vonnegut’s method. Especially with a subject as open about his process as he was, the opportunity to observe an author working in “real time” is rare and illuminating indeed.

·    ·    ·

In the near future of “Monkey House,” a police state has instituted measures to curb the explosion of the global population—which, extrapolating from the contemporary trends that produced alarmist books like
The Population Bomb
, Kurt Vonnegut imagines reaching seventeen billion. Sixty-three million people live in New York City alone, seven million despoil the villages and byways of Vonnegut’s beloved Cape. Something drastic had to be done. People find themselves “jammed together like drupelets,” the pulpy knobs on raspberries—a word only Vonnegut at his most whimsical would employ, and a thought perhaps inspired by close observation of the bumper-to-bumper summer traffic near his home.

“Ethical Birth Control” laws require citizens to take pills to numb the lower body, removing the temptation of sex for pleasure. When medicated, women felt like “balsa wood,” and you could “kick a man in the balls while reciting the Gettysburg Address and he wouldn’t miss a syllable.” The pill is the invention of “J. Edgar Nation,” a prudish pharmacist from Grand Rapids offended by the quite natural carnal behavior his (large) family witnessed while walking past the monkey house of the local zoo one morning after Easter services. Vonnegut often commented on how small ideas can have big, unexpected consequences once they are in circulation. The classic example is in
Cat’s Cradle
, where Felix Hoenikker’s “last batch of brownies,” ice-nine, ends up destroying the world. In this story, the obscure pharmacist’s invention has been made mandatory for people everywhere. Those in the renegade underground who refuse to take them, who insist on keeping their
full range of human feelings and appetites, are hunted down and prosecuted as a threat to public decency.

A side effect of the pills is that they cause one to “piss blue”—a boon to those charged with separating criminals from the rest of the population. It also provides the author with the opportunity to play with some irreverent, earthy doggerel. Here is an example from one draft:

Throughout his career Vonnegut leavened his fiction with such digressions, graffiti and soldier’s limericks, intermixed with snippets of lyric poetry, biblical passages, and sonnets from Shakespeare. The vulgarities drove more genteel readers away, including, to his chagrin, some of his relatives back in Indiana, but they serve to keep things grounded, and they enhance the weight of the nobler sentiments.

·    ·    ·

The second population-control measure is a ubiquitous chain of roadside “Ethical Suicide Parlors.” They are recognizable by their festive purple roofs, twinned always with orange-roofed Howard Johnson’s restaurants. (Again, this may be an image drawn from the sprawl the author saw overtaking the picturesque towns near his home.) The horror of the juxtaposition is the black joke: customers have a choice of “28 flavors of ice cream, 8 flavors of death,” the two most popular being “butter-crunch and carbon monoxide.” At every parlor, also known as
an Easy Go or a Sleep Shop, one is greeted by a member of a team of “hostesses” trained to be irresistible in their sexy pop-art costumes. (In some drafts, as we’ll see, it is a male “expediter” who works with the client.)