Welcome to the Monkey House: The Special Edition (48 page)

Desire Under a Hot Tin Streetcar
by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

When Tony Comstock came home from his job at the Ethical Suicide Parlor, his wife Candy told him that narcotics agents had
caught a high school history teacher with
two-hundred and fifty gallons of distilled water behind a secret panel in his rumpus room, in West Milton, only eight miles away. “Only
eight
miles away,” she said again.

“That’s
close
,”
Tony agreed. They shook hands limply
. Candy was very fat, and not very clean. Tony wasn’t very clean either,
had a two-day beard
. Nobody cared. This was 1971.

“I wish there was some way they could give him more than ten years,” Candy went on. She was complaining about the law that set the maximum sentence for illegal possession of distilled water at ten years. That was the minimum, too, with no chance for parole. “When a man is entrusted with young
people, and he betrays that trust and lures them down in his basement for orgies, I think the death penalty should be automatic.”

“Orgies?”

“What else would you call it, where a man sits around with students of both sexes, and they all drink distilled water?

Desire Under a Hot Tin Streetcar
by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Tony Comstock was an expediter in an Ethical Suicide Parlor next door to a Howard Johnson’s in Hyannis, Massachusetts. There was a Howard Johnson’s for every square mile of land on the face of the earth,
and they were all socialized
, and next door to every Howard Johnson’s was an Ethical Suicide Parlor. The Howard Johnson’s had an orange roof, and the Ethical Suicide Parlor had a purple roof,
but they were both the Government. Everything was the Government
. The population of the earth was seventeen billion souls.

Tony’s job was to make sure that people who had volunteered to die didn’t change their minds at the last minute.
He
Tony
was lucky
or unlucky
to have a job,
depending on how you feel about work
. Most people didn’t have jobs because the machines did everything so well. Most people just consumed. And most people didn’t take much pride in their appearance any more, but Tony did. It was important for him to look nice, because his job had such deep religious and public relations implications.

This was way
far
in the future—
twenty
fourteen
years from now.

A nice appearance was so important in Tony’s profession that he declined to wear shinguards and safety shoes. Most other people
wore them
when they went out, since they couldn’t feel anything from the waist down.
and
They
could sustain serious leg of foot injuries without even realizing it. They were numb from the waist down because of chemicals in the drinking water. It was world law that everybody had to have those chemicals in his or her drinking water, as the case might be. So everybody felt like balsa wood from the waist on down. You could bark your shins and bleed to death, if you didn’t wear shinguards, and never even know you were dying.

Actually, there were four separate chemicals in everybody’s drinking water, each one with a distinct purpose. One prevented tooth decay, and another one prevented cancer, and the third one prevented cario-vascular diseases, and the fourth one was the only form of birth control that religious leaders around the world could accept. It was the fourth chemical that made everybody feel like balsa wood from the waist down.

And it was the third chemical that made it easy for the police to make sure a suspect was drinking from the public water supply, was getting all the chemicals the law required. The third chemical made everybody piss blue.

Tony was married, as required by law. Everybody over twenty-one was married, as required by law. One spring afternoon, when Tony came home from the Ethical Suicide Parlor, his fat, dirty wife, whose name was Candy, reminded him that he couldn’t
play
fart around
with his model railroad layout in the basement that night.
She had on all
sorts of equipment
. After supper,
she said
, they were going to be host and hostess to people who wanted to try out for parts in a play the Barnstable Comedy Club, and amateur acting organization, was going to put on.

Tony was president of the club. He was also the best actor in it. It was his acting ability that had gotten him the job in the Ethical Suicide Parlor. Every day he had to tell people how wonderful Heaven was. And, of course, he didn’t know the first thing about life after death. Nobody did. And the people who were about to die
knew
he couldn’t possibly know
what
anything about it, but he was such a good actor he made them listen. To hear him tell it, Heaven was all gold and diamonds
and
music Andre
Lawrence Welk and Billy Graham
, and the atmosphere was like the air coming out of the back door of a bakery.

He was really something.

During supper, which was fish flour fritters and seaweed, Tony’s wife talked about what she always talked about, which was distilled water and the crazy things it made people do. The penalty for drinking distilled water instead of water with all the chemicals in it was ten thousand dollars and ten years in jail. That was the maximum, and the minimum, too. A person convicted of drinking distilled water had no chace of parole.

But lots of people drank it anyway, and enough of them were arrested or went berserk to give Candy at least a thrill a day. She was twittering and twanging at supper now about a distilled water orgy of high school students
down
in New Jersey. Twenty-six boys and girls from excellent families had been
caught in a basement with twenty-four quarts of distilled water in bottles labeled innocently gin and vodka. One of the main effects of distilled water, of course, was that, if you drank enough of it, you stopped being numb from the waist down.

“They have an A.P.B. out for the man who sold it to ’em,” said Candy. “They know who it was.” The “A.P.B.”, of course, was an all points bulletin. Candy had a complete and expert police vacabulary. Everybody did. Law enforcement was the principal entertainment of the time. “If it wasn’t for crime and punishment,” Candy said one time, “I’d be bored to tears.” She was anything but bored now, said that the police didn’t simply want to catch one more small-time distilled water peddlar. They were going to catch the peddlar, all right, but they were going to make him tell them the identity of “Mr. Big.” Mr. Big was always in the news. He was supposed to be the king of the distilled water racket, making millions out of degrading the innocent.

They never caught him, by the way. The hunt goes on.

The play the Barnstable Comedy Club was going to put on was named as straight-forwardly as a spotted dog named Spot. It was called “J. Edgar Nation,” and was based on the true facts about the life of that man. J. Edgar Nation, of course, was the humble Michigan druggist who developed the anti-erotic drug that everybody had to take now, the one that made everybody numb from the waist down.

As was brought out in the play, J. Edgar Nation had no idea his discovery was going to become the chief civilizing agent of the world. He simply wished to bring morality to the monkey house of the Grand Rapids zoo. The idea came to him when he and
his wife and his fourteen children went strolling through the zoo after Easter services, saw a monkey put his hands on his private parts.

In the play, the monkeyhouse scene was only referred to. It would have been a difficult thing to actually stage, would have called for midgets or children in monkey suits and so on. So the play opened with the family back home for a traditional feast of ham, with nobody able to eat it.

The next scene was supposedly in the Contemplation Room of the United Nations Building in New York City, which has as its central feature a philodendron with a spotlight on it. No such scene actually took place in that room, but the arguments in the play are taken word for word from newspaper reports of the time.

In the play, six famous scientists from all over the world come into the Contemplation Room, arguing about various forms of birth control to keep the world from being overpopulated, and they find six famous religious leaders from all over the world who are all praying around the philodendron, each in his own way, that the world will not enter a period of even greater sexual license. The religious people are afraid, with very good reason, of course, that, if birth control becomes universal, people will copulate for pleasure all the time, which was the last thing God had in mind. What God had in mind, obviously, was reproduction
or nothing
.

In the play, the argle-bargle between the two factions goes back and forth, posing the eternal riddle. “Which is worse, famine
and pestilence
or libertinism?” And then the Secretary General of the United Nations comes in with a newspaper. He reads
out loud a story of how morality has been brought to the monkey house in Grand Rapids. Thanks to chemicals in their drinking water, the monkeys are fully capable of reproducing. But they
don’t do
verh mcuh because there’s absolutely no pleasure in it any more.”

There is a stunned silence. And then the religious people have to admit, if these chemicals work on human beings, they could very well be moral.