Crawdaddy, April 1, 1974, pp. 42-51.

Meeting My Maker: A Visit with Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., by Kilgore Trout

by Greg Mitchell/1974

Chris' note: Below are excerpts from a wonderful text by Greg Mitchell. The full interview can be savored in William Rodney Allen's ''must-have'' collection Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1988), 133-155..

Allen's introduction to this piece: ''In this unusual article, Greg Mitchell took on the persona of Vonnegut's famous character Kilgore Trout, the down-andout science fiction writer. Although he used a fictional framework in this piece, Mitchell actually interviewed Vonnegut, so the responses attributed to the author are authentic.''

There I was at high noon, crossing Times Square with a purple hard-on courtesy of the withering winter chill and a visit to pornographic book stores on 42nd Street where I had gone to buy copies of my novels. Although my Creator had promised that he would line up a reputable publisher for me ''no more beaver books for you'' he had declared at our last meeting-that hadn't been arranged yet, and, anyway, that still wouldn't have accounted for copies of my books I've been trying to track down for years.

The titles I give to my books are often changed, incidentally. The book I had succeeded in finding that day, Pan-Galactic Straw Boss, was being sold as Mouth Crazy. It was illustrated with pictures of several white women coupling with the same black man, who, for some reason, wore a Mexican sombrero.

What do my science fiction stories have in common with pornography? Fantasies of an impossibly hospitable world, I'm told.

The city sky was clean and hard and bright, looming like an enchanted dome that would shatter at a tap or ring like a great glass bell, as I made my way to East 38th Street and a reunion with my Creator on the first anniversary of my freedom from bondage.

''I am approaching my fiftieth birthday, Mr. Trout,'' he had informed me on that murky midnight in Midland, City, Indiana one year before. ''I am cleansing and renewing myself for the very different sorts of years to come.'' Although he had been creating me for some 20 years, this was our first meeting face to face. ''Under similar conditions, Count Tolstoi freed his serfs. Thomas Jefferson freed his slaves. I am going to set at liberty all the literary characters who have served me so loyally during my writing career.

''You're the only one I'm telling,'' he whispered between drags on a foul-smelling stub of a cigarette. The reason, he explained, was that I was the only character he had ever created who had enough imagination to suspect that he might be the creation of another human being. What I had suspected, actually, was that I was a character in a book by somebody who wanted to write about somebody who suffered all the time.…

I had spent the previous night in a movie theater on 42nd Street. It was much cheaper than a night in a hotel. I had never done it before, but I knew sleeping in movie houses was the sort of thing really dirty old men did. I was in town to take part in a symposium entitled ''The Future of the American Novel in the Age of McLuhan.''

As I walked east on 38th Street I decided that what I wished to say at that symposium was this: ''I don't know who McLuhan is, but I know what it's like to spend the night with a lot of other dirty old men in a movie theater in New York City.'' And: ''Does this McLuhan, whoever he is, have anything to say about the relationship between wide-open beavers and the sales of books?'' …

So there I was, sleeping in dirty movie houses and walking down East 38th Street, pursuing my own destiny. I was carrying a brown paper parcel containing six new pairs of jockey shorts, six new pairs of socks, a razor and a new toothbrush. I was wearing the tuxedo I had worn to a senior dance at Thomas Jefferson High School in Dayton, Ohio, in 1924, and a sparkling new evening shirt.

Since Vonnegut no longer needed me, I was free to write for anyone: reputable publishers, publishers of beaver books-anyone. At that moment, in fact, I was considering ways I could turn that aftemoon's gathering into a big-deal magazine article.

I was only a half block from my Creator, and slowing down. I wondered if he would recognize me. Since our previous meeting, my hair had gotten thinner on top and greyer on the sides, and I had shaved my scraggly white beard. Still, there were these distinguishing features: I am snaggle-toothed and missing the top joint of my right ring finger.

Vonnegut did that to me, incidentally. He had me born snaggle-toothed, and had Dwayne Hoover bite off the top of my finger at the end of Breakfast of Champions. Hoover had done that because of something he had read in a book, Now It Can Be Told. I wrote that book.

Vonnegut had also given me a tremendous wang. You never know who'll get one.

There I was in front of his four-floor Victorian brownstone, where he had moved within the past month from another location ten blocks away, with his lady-friend, whom I shall call Ellen.

West Barnstable, Cape Cod, where he had constructed me and most of his other puppets, was now four years in his distant past.

There seemed to be a photography studio in the basement and a Dr. Abraham Epstein living on the top floor.

I rang the bell and within seconds, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was at the door.

''Here I am,'' I offered.

''So glad you are,'' he said, taking my bag.

He spoke twangily and his smile went on and on. He's a sweet old poop, a big man, six-feet-three, broad shoulders, no hips, no belly, less of the bear of a man I had remembered from our previous, brief meeting on a dark night. His hair had been trimmed, also.

''Mr Trout -- Kilgore,'' he began to say, ushering me into the apartment, when suddenly somewhere a big dog barked.

Vonnegut's diffident bloodhound Lope appeared at the entrance to the living room. I recoiled. I'm scared to death of dogs. Vonnegut shooed him away.

''I got him from my brother,'' he said, confidentially. ''He has to fight all the time because he can't wag his tail.''

He introduced me to Ellen, a pale, dark-haired woman in her early 30s who was busy unpacking boxes. They had just moved in.

''It's a nice cozy house you have here,'' I said, and it really was.

''It takes a heap of living,'' Vonnegut said, ''to make a house a home.''

He had oodles of charm.

''It's a bugger of a day out there,'' Vonnegut said, taking my coat. ''You okay now?''

''Yes. Fine.'' I answered. ''Warm as toast.''

The room was bare but for the black leather couch we sat on, a glass coffee table alongside and shelves of books against two walls.

Vonnegut was dressed in terribly baggy but good tweed pants, a green V-neck sweater and brown hush puppies.

''What are you doing now, my old friend?'' he asked, his dark eyebrows shooting up and his lips breaking into a really fine grin. He had left me in Cohoes, New York, installing aluminum storm windows and screens' Before that he had made me circulation man for the Ilium Gazette -made me bully, and flatter and cheat little delivery boys.

I told him I was back at the job he'd made me leave a decade before at a stamp redemption center in Hyannis, Massachusetts. ''Think of the sacrilege of a Jesus figure redeeming stamps,'' I said, softly.…

I asked him if he had been able to figure out yet why he's the best-selling author on campus. If I was going to write an article based on our conversation, I had to get some good quotes.

''Well, I'm screamingly funny,'' he obliged. ''I really am in the books. And I talk about stuff Billy Graham won't talk about, for instance, you know, is it wrong to kill?

''I see nothing wrong with being sophomoric. I mean, my books deal with subjects that interest sophomores. Again, I fault my fraternity brothers from Cornell. Not only do they not read anymore but they're not interested in the Big Questions, and I don't regard that as mature -- I regard it as a long step toward the grave.''

''How nice,'' I said of his fellow Cornellians. ''To feel nothing and still get full credit for being alive.''

Still, I wondered whether yesterday's sophomores now look back at his work as ''kid's stuff''

''People usually don't go back and re-read my books,'' Vonnegut observed. ''I seldom do it myself. If someone has read me when he was 19, which is quite likely, when he ceases to be 19 he's going to leave me behind too. If it's comforting to the person to feel he's outgrown certain things and is into deeper stuff, well I'm really all for him. That's a nice way to feel.…

''And one day,'' he continued, ''they'll stop and think and ask themselves: 'How did I get so old?' And 'Where have all the years gone?''' …

This last remark had touched him deeply, I could tell; Vonnegut at times gets the most genuinely sympathetic look across his face I've ever seen in a human being. So I chose that moment to tell him how much I appreciated his giving me my freedom. I said that although this meant that.1 wasn't necessarily going to win the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1979, as Vonnegut had originally arranged for me to do, it also meant that I wasn't necessarily going to die in 1981 (at the age of 74) as he had also planned.

That's what I told him. What I really was feeling was that I was a frightened, aging Jesus, whose sentence to crucifixion had been commuted to imprisonment for life.

Vonnegut had given me a life not worth living, but he had also given me an iron will to live. This was a common combination on the planet Earth.

I didn't really want to get into it then, so I excused myself I had to take a wizz. . . .

Returning to the living room I found Vonnegut on the phone... chatting amiably with someone who seemed to be a stranger. I took this opportunity to find a more comfortable spot on the couch.…

By and by Vonnegut hung up, dipped into the kitchen for a minute, came back out and offered me an apple.

''They treat me as an extremely prosperous man now,'' he said suddenly. Apparently that had been one of his students on the phone. ''Which makes a difference. I don't know what sort of difference.

''A student whispered these exact words one morning when I walked by,'' Vonnegut said, almost choking on his apple. ''Fabulously well-to-do.''

Breakfast of Champions has sold over a quarter of a million copies in hardback, ''which is extraordinary,'' Vonnegut said, adding that the $2.45 paperback will be published in April. ''I get a lot of mail from people who think the expensive paperbacks are a rip-off'' he exclaimed, ''but they're not-they're much better books, they can take more readings because of better binding.''

''You get what you pay for,'' I said. I meant it ironically. I had never been paid for a single word I'd ever written. My Creator contends that my unpopularity is deserved. ''Trout's prose is frightful'' he once wrote. ''Only his ideas are good.''

This is how much of the planet I own: doodley-squat.

Vonnegut, on the other hand, said he saw his writing career as ''a perfectly straightforward business story.'' He wasn't being perfectly serious, but then he could afford not to be. ''My wealth is mainly in the form of copyrights,'' he explained, ''which are very valuable as long as the computers and the printing presses think I'm their man.''

I'd read somewhere that he'd just bought a brand-new white Mercedes.

''Yeah, it has about 14 miles on it,'' he said. ''It was the first expensive thing I've done. I realized I was number one on the best-seller list, so I just went down to Hoover Imports on Park Avenue. bought it off the floor, and drove out.

''But if you want my expert opinion,'' he said, and knew that I did, money doesn't necessarily make people happy.''

''Thanks for the information,'' I replied. ''You just saved me a lot of trouble.'' …

He asked me what I'd been writing and I said I hadn't written more than 20 pages of fiction all year. I had lost my inspiration.

''You've got to write again,'' he said good-naturedly. He really did look concerned.

''Dead men don't usually write very well,'' I said.

''You're not dead!'' he argued, interrupting another cough with his fist. ''You're full of ideas.''

I couldn't think of a single one. ''Blather,'' I said. Somewhere a siren, a tax-supported mourner, wailed.…

It was encouraging to know that Vonnegut had become interested in writing novels again, even though I wouldn't be in any of them. Just three years ago, after the reasonably successful (I'm told) Broadway production of Happy Birthday, Wanda June, he had said: ''It's plays from now on.''

Now he says he'll write another play, sometime. ''I enjoy the writing,'' he told me. ''I don't enjoy the production of it.''

Wanda June, meanwhile, has been made into a movie. Slaughterhouse-Five too. Vonnegut called Wanda June ''one of the most embarrassing movies ever made'' but said admiringly that George Roy Hill had made a ''flawless translation'' of Slaughterhouse-Five. ''I drool and cackle every time I watch that film,'' he said, but promised: ''I am not going to have anything more to do with film, for this reason-I don't like film.

''Film is too clankingly real,'' he explained, ''too permanent, too industrial for me. As a stingy child of the Great Depression, I am bound to complain that it is also too fucking expensive to be much fun. On that television show Between Time and Timbuktu [a melding of Vonnegut's works initiated by National Education Television and shown in March, 19721 when our $100, 000 was gone, we couldn't go back and edit-there were lots of things that just didn't work because it would have cost another $50,000.

''So after that experience of how expensive it was to patch a film I got interested in books again and I decided that they're much more agreeable and more easily patched.

''The big trouble with print, of course, is that it is an elitist art form,'' he asserted. ''Most people can't read very well.'' .…

''As I get older,'' he said, interrupted by another enormous cough that wracked his body, ''I get more didactic. I say what I really think. If I have an idea I don't imbed it in a novel, I simply write it in an essay as clearly as I can. I've always tried for clarity because I myself was interested in what the hell I thought I was saying. It seems to me that a lot of writing has been done in the past by gentlemen who have used as symbols cultural artifacts I have never seen. You know, I have never made a Grande Tour of Europe. And so I don't know what the sunset over some damn church looks like-I've never seen the church. And so I'm sensitive to those sort of snubs in literature and avoid them myself I like to explain what the hell I'm talking about''.…

''Do you think you had as much influence on your own children's attitudes about life as you had on thousands of strangers' kids across the country?'' I asked.

''I don't know,'' he answered. ''I couldn't really say.'' It really did look like he couldn't really say. ''They're not Social Darwinists. And they're not racists. They are all pacifists. They avoided military service with my encouragement. . . .''

Vonnegut said he was disappointed in his children only because ''they aren't more urban people. I'd hoped they would get interested in the problems of the cities. But I'd made sort of a naive mistake. I'd raised them in the country so they didn't know anything about the city.

''A couple of them are starting to get the idea and become urban. But one is a goat farmer in Jamaica, and is probably the happiest of the bunch, and I admire his doing this.''

Vonnegut said he had managed to teach his children-three of his own and three adopted when his sister died--''the only rule I know of''--This is it: God damn it, you've got to be kind.

''What about the other messages you've passed on in your books?'' I asked accusingly.

He cocked his head quizzically. ''I know nothing about any message,'' he said, deadpan. ''Somebody said something about a message?''...

The doorbell rang. . . .

I headed for the bathroom. Passing the back window, I looked... down into the little private park below, the little Eden formed of joined back yards. No one was playing in it now. There was no one in it to cry, as I should have liked someone to cry, in a signal that indicates that a game of hide-and-seek is over, that it is time for children in hiding to go home:

Olly-olly-ox-in-free.

I stepped into the bedroom, retrieved my coat from atop the chenille bedspread... and realized that somebody had put a note in my pocket, did it with intentional clumsiness, so that I would know the note was there.

I went into the bathroom to read the note. The pink flamingo winked at me.

The note was printed on lined paper torn from a small spiral notebook. This is what it said:

Leave at once. I am waitingfor you in vacant store directly across the street. Urgent. Your life in danger Eat this.

This was my reaction:

''What next?''. . .

ETC ...