Dear Kurt,
April 12th, 2007 by Adam
filtered water, and pictures of you
and I’m not coming out until this is all over.”
–Ben Gibbard, We Will Become Silhouettes
Dear Kurt, before I say anything about your brilliance or legacy, I must say one thing: you fell? Fucking clutz!! I read the words on CNN “Novelist Kurt Vonnegut dies at 84” and tears welled in my eyes. Then I read how you died and I had to laugh at your old, clumsy ass. If Salinger had gone that way today instead, you would be laughing too– harder than anyone else. You were a man who understood that humor has a place in every facet of our lives, and for that alone I’ll respect and cherish your memory forever.
Dear Kurt, I have a confession to make. I have never read one of your books—not even Slaughterhouse Five. The text was assigned in a high school English course my sophomore year, and recommended to me personally by a man I very much admired two years later, but I just never bothered to read it (nor Breakfast of Champions, nor Bluebeard, though copies of both are sitting in my library at home, all those thousands of miles of ocean and stories away). Instead, I read some crappy science-fiction-fantasy pablum by Raymond E. Feist; I discovered Eliot, eschewed Wordsworth. Instead I listened to Collective Soul and watched “Saved By The Bell” reruns. Instead I went to high school dances and finger-banged platinum blondes who could barely recite the alphabet, let alone appreciate the written word. I saw that same girl three years ago at a used bookstore where she was buying trashy romance novels and talking about her new truck. Her mouth spewed words which were horrendously vapid and utterly meaningless; moral: I should have spent my time in high school wiser.
Dear Kurt, at least I can say that I’ve read your essays: your criticisms and satire of the current administration and our President who spouts words just barely less meaningless than the platinum blonde ex were remarkably concise, poignant, biting. Your sense of justice was never dulled by the firebombing of Dresden, nor by the quiet, depressive, alcohol-and-Pall-Mall-fueled life which you led on Cape Cod afterward. Your more brilliant quotes alone could consume several pages, and I must admit that I use several of them liberally. My favorite, which I included in an email just last week, is: “When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.” I think anyone who has ever made the conscious decision to be a professional writer knows exactly that brand of crippling impotence. Somehow, in 16 words, you managed to say what most of us could not in 16,000.
Dear Kurt, I live on the dry, isolated fringe of a massive continent and I’ve yet to find one native here who knows or appreciates your work, let alone who can commiserate with me. Even the more literate of the Australians say “Kurt who?” and assume Slaughterhouse Five is a gruesome thriller. My neighbors are gone; the writing class is disbanded for Easter, so instead I’ll console myself, spending the next two days drunk and the days beyond that moody and resentful. I told someone you were, until today, the most famous living American writer and he asked innocently “Why not Salinger?” I wanted to stab him with a broken bottle.
Dear Kurt, tonight I drink to your memory, and to all the novels, essays, newspaper columns, quotes, photographs, crude drawings, jokes, and generally wonderful psychic energy that the rest of us huddled masses now must live without. In many ways it will be exactly like we lived yesterday, just without your class and style, without your invisible presence breathing down our necks, smiling at us from just behind our right ear in those gigantic glasses and even larger nose with curly, short, graying locks— a heady mix of Walter Matthau and Woody Allen—telling us that line was good, but the next should be even better.
Dear Kurt, I’m sorry I never read your books. I suppose I’ll read them all now, tossing aside Faulkner, Malouf, O’Henry, and Anne Lamott (she’s still got a little life left in her) in a crazed attempt to understand the mind that I took, which many of us took, for granted until this very afternoon. I fantasize that tomorrow I will wake with a splitting headache and crawl to the University library, where I will be greeted by weepy-eyed librarians who inform me, sobbing, that I’m too late—all the Vonnegut books have been checked out in a mad rush of sadness and half the Fitzgerald too, because those poor, starving wrecks needed something to read, and for once Dan Brown and J.K. Rowling just wouldn’t fucking cut it.
Dear Kurt, that scenario won’t come to pass, and we both know this. If I went down tomorrow, the girl behind the desk would wrinkle her pug nose and point me to the ‘Contemporary American Fiction’ section (as if you were incapable of transcending boundaries of nationality or genre) and I would find your entire library, waiting, untouched and barely remembered. No, I think I’ll head down right now, Kurt, and get them before their very presence tomorrow depresses me– and I’ll read them all, Kurt, I promise, just as I promised Mr. Wymbs that I would one apathetic afternoon seven years ago.
Dear Kurt, in essence this is less of a tribute and more of an apology for loving but not understanding you fully— for appreciating your life and mind, but not to the extent that I would deign to read the gifts you so openly gave. Today I face the truth, Kurt: I’m a barely literate amateur writer, while you are an outstandingly brilliant, hyper-literate artist who is now dead. So I’m going to make it up to you. Right now. This very instant. I’ve just returned from a stumble to the library where I piled seven of your books under my arm: Slaughterhouse Five, The Sirens Of Titan, Cats Cradle, Breakfast Of Champions, Fates Worse Than Death, A Man Without A Country, and Hocus Pocus. I’ve got eight liters of wine, Kurt, four red and four white. I’ve got a pack of 25 Winfields, the kind in the white box. I’ve got one and a half pizzas, a kilo of rice, some pasta, two chicken schnitzels and a box of generic cornflakes (no milk). I’m going into mourning, and I’m not coming out until those books are read.
Dear Kurt, while I’m devouring your words like warm pastries, you go to Heaven. Pull on Jesus’ beard. Tell him the M&M’s joke of which I am so fond. Say “wocka wocka” and waddle away like Groucho Marx, cigar in tow. Ask God where he keeps the mini-weenies, then ride the cosmic firepole down to hell and play beach volleyball with Satan, Milton, Mitch Hedburg, Ghandi, and all the others who were smart enough to deny the bullshit that floats just above their heads. Take a whack at Anna Nicole Smith while you’re at it—she’s probably having more trouble adjusting to the heat than you will.
Forever Yours, Apologetically, Dear Kurt,
Adam
Stunning. RIP Kurt, my sardonic love.
Dear Supercrap, your writing is truly insufferable. thanks for namedropping all those authors though, in case I assumed you weren’t a Serious Writer just because you’d rather buddy up to your pal Kurt than actually read his books.
I know I’m a year and a few months late for the party , but I feel like kurt would have enjoyed this. insufferable namedropping is not a crime. You moved me. I miss him, too.