A Very Kurt Conversation

''Christ knows what it is, but people buy it, so give us more of it.''

(Artwork courtesy of Esoterica Magazine)

“Indianapolis, Indiana is the first place in the United States of America where a white man was hanged for the murder of an Indian. The kind of people who'll hang a white man for murdering an Indian — that's the kind of people for me.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

When I was growing up in Indianapolis, we didn’t have much to be proud of as far as I could tell. Sure, an auto race everybody had heard of, but no national treasures.

We did have David Letterman, but we didn’t know it yet because he was still at Broad Ripple High School. I was in his class - Go Rockets! - and he was just a below-average smartass.

Come to think of it, “below-average smartass” pretty much described me, too.

But then, in my teens, we suddenly had Kurt Vonnegut. And we - my friends and I - discovered him very early on, making him our own pearl of a secret.

He wrote about Indianapolis, about irony, about all things crazy. He made no sense, he made perfect sense. Just when we were sure that nobody on earth understood us, Kurt Vonnegut did.

I vividly recall one late afternoon in the 1960s, standing at the New Arrivals shelf at the library branch over on Guilford, casually scanning the book jacket of a novel called “Mother Night,” by some guy named Vonnegut.

The blurb mentioned Indianapolis, Unitarians and several other trigger words that immediately grabbed my attention. Hey, this Vonnegut guy could just about be my next-door neighbor!

It turned out, hip people were reading Vonnegut. Smart people were reading Vonnegut. People who thought like I did were reading Vonnegut. He wasn’t just Indianapolis, he was Shortridge High School Indianapolis, arch-rival of my own Broad Ripple.

We didn’t know it yet, but the stage was being set for the Battle of the Hoosier Humorists.

Please understand, the high school branch of your family tree is seminal in Indianapolis. When I interviewed Vonnegut for Reuters, in 1983, we had an ice-breaking conversation in his Turtle Bay co-op in New York City, and he asked where I was from.

“Indianapolis,” I replied.

He brightened. “I’m from Indianapolis, too,” he said. As if I didn’t know that.

“Where did you go to school?” he asked.

“Indiana University,” I volunteered.

Vonnegut scoffed. “No, no, I mean where did you go to HIGH School? I don’t care about your college!”

“All my jokes are Indianapolis. All my attitudes are Indianapolis. My adenoids are Indianapolis. If I ever severed myself from Indianapolis, I would be out of business. What people like about me is Indianapolis.”

– Kurt Vonnegut

Looking back, I think Vonnegut and I were in a “false karass.” If you’ve read “Cat’s Cradle,” you know that’s a group of people who affect a shared identity or purpose, but whose mutual association is meaningless. We both grew up in Indianapolis. We both moved to Upstate New York and then on to New York City.

Hugely coincidental, to be sure, but meaningless, nonetheless.

Kurt dedicated one of his books to his brother, Bernard, “who is funnier than I am.” Bernard was an acclaimed scientist in Schenectady, New York, and when I moved to that part of the country, I decided to interview him. He took me into his lab to explain the scientific experiment he was working on.

Bernard was obsessed with finding a way to measure wind speeds of tornadoes accurately. He knew that chickens on farms often lost their feathers during a tornado, so he devised a way to blow high-pressure streams of air at poor chickens, to see how much force was needed to de-feather them.

He thought he was on to something, but then somebody told him that chickens in distress can voluntarily shed their feathers, so his experiment was useless.

Then, because tornado stories often mentioned bits of straw being embedded in the sides of barns by the extreme winds, he came up with a powerful machine to shoot straw at planks, to measure what sort of velocity was required to penetrate a barn.

While he was showing me his Sci-Fi Turbo-Charged Magnum Straw-Shooting Tube Gun, Bernard told me he really didn’t know why Kurt had said that thing about him being so funny.

Gee, Bernard, let’s have a think about this…

"I've wondered where home is, and I realized, it's not Mars or someplace like that, it's Indianapolis when I was nine years old."

 — Kurt Vonnegut

(Vonnegut’s typewriter, courtesy of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library)

But back to Kurt, and our false karass. In the 1980s we were both living in New York City, and he was riding an enormous wave of popularity. College students worshiped him. It seemed like I should interview him. My timing was pretty good. He had recently published “Deadeye Dick,” and would want to promote it.

I called his publicist with a request. Normally, a publicist sets up the interview, calls the journalist with the information, and that’s it. But Kurt had a different system. The publicist gave me his home phone number. I was to call and set it up with Kurt himself, then throw away the number and never use it again.

The author seemed happy to have a fellow Hoosier in his living room, even if we were both really New Yorkers now. I was expecting gruff, but I got amiable. Expecting laconic but got loquacious. Once again I was reminded of how very fortunate I was, chatting with my favorite living author.

I think journalists ought to feel grateful. I certainly did.

Kurt realized, of course, that he had a sweet deal going for him. ''I've never had a rewrite conversation with editors,'' he told me, confiding that he suspected his publishers simply looked at his manuscripts and said, ''Christ knows what it is, but people buy it, so give us more of it.''

The author said that when he went for a walk in Manhattan, he reckoned he got recognized about once every 90 minutes, but ironically, when he returned occasionally to Indianapolis, which figures prominently in several of his books, ''nobody ever recognizes me.''

Of course, Kurt was hardly a stranger to irony. As a character in his book, “Jailbird” put it, ''No American is so old and poor and friendless that he cannot make a collection of some of the most exquisite little ironies in town.''

“I trust my writing most and others seem to trust it most when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

Vonnegut and Indianapolis were good for each other. In 2010, three years after Kurt’s death, a plucky visionary named Julia Whitehead, who never met Vonnegut, had the idea to open a museum dedicated to his work and to causes that were important to him – freedom of speech, social justice, censorship, the environment, etc…

The Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library is the epicenter of cool in Indianapolis. It is much more than a collection of his old typewriters and a very nifty gift shop. It sponsors community outreach programs that would have made Vonnegut proud. Julia raised the money for the Museum and still runs it.

Another small irony: Vonnegut was famously anti-war, and Julia is a former U.S. Marine. And so it goes.

Speaking of delicious ironies, here is one. Some years ago, when it was noted that Kurt Vonnegut and David Letterman, two world class humorists, had both come out of Indianapolis, Kurt famously scoffed that there had been at least 10 people in his class at Shortridge who were funnier than Letterman.

I doubt if he really believed that, by the way.

Don’t take the bait, David! Just let it go! Fast-forward a few years, and the Vonnegut Museum wanted to give Letterman a Kurt Vonnegut Humor Award. Letterman, apparently still holding a grudge, declined to accept it. I guess he took the bait.

“And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.’”
— Kurt Vonnegut