Welcome to the Monkey House: The Special Edition (44 page)
Read Welcome to the Monkey House: The Special Edition Online
Authors: Kurt Vonnegut,Gregory D. Sumner
· · ·
In the next version Vonnegut fleshes out more of the details of “Greta
Garbo
’s” first parlor. “Kurt” tells us that the boss’s name, like the assistant’s stature and costume, are part of a conscious effort to disorient customers, to remind them that once they entered the building they left the “normal” world and should use vigilance accordingly. “In our business,” Garbo used to say, “everything should be slightly out of focus.”
Now the parlors have metastasized into a vast impersonal chain, and Mr. Garbo, if he were still around, would not approve of its methods. He insisted on interviewing clients in depth and “swore he would never expand the business to where he couldn’t do that.” In his mind he was running a kind of exclusive tailor shop, “with nothing but shrouds on the plain pipe racks.” “In my own particular way, I’m proud of the merchandise,” he would boast. “Nobody goes out of here wearing death unless it’s his style and unless it fits.” He turned away a third of his customers, a record that would get a hostess fired in a heartbeat today. Sadly, only the numbers count any more, the parlors are coin-operated, and there is no place for this kind of care and attention—one could even call it craftsmanship.
A sign over the door of each franchised parlor reads: “It’s always darkest before dawn. Are you sure you want to do this?” But the message serves an ironic function here and is not really meant to deter those who walk in. Vonnegut seems to be evoking the trappings of the Nazi death camps of World War II
(
Arbeit Macht Frei
) that were so often on his mind. The American version has smiling faces, its slogans are sunnier and superficially more encouraging—but the end result is about the same in this near-future scenario.
This draft ends abruptly, after the introduction of a love interest for Mr. Garbo. Vonnegut is not sure where he wants to take this wrinkle and saves it for another day’s work.
I Used to Work in Chicago
by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Sure—I used to work for Greta Garbo. I worked for him for two years in Chicago, before I went into the aluminum storm window business. Greta Garbo wasn’t his real name. His real name was Frederick Claremont Gaborian, and that’s how he signed my pay-checks.
But I never heard anyone call him anything but Greta Garbo.
I asked him once if he minded being called Greta Garbo, and he said no. “Kurt,” he said to me, “in our business, everything should be slightly out of focus.
It’s
It
is absolutely fitting that the proprietor of this establishment should be named Greta Garbo.”
And he did what he could to put me out of focus, too. He liked my name, just the way it was, and he never left off the Junior when he introduced me to a client. But that wasn’t enough. He had me wear the trousers of an old Santa Claus suit, and gym shoes, and a sweatshirt that said Delta Kappa Epsilon on the back.
I
worked
wore that outfit
in the original Greta Garbo in Chicago. There was only one in those days, down on Forty-second and Lake Park, and it didn’t have any purple tile roof. It was in a plain old cement
block building that
with a flat tar roof. It
used to be a Gulf lubritorium. It wasn’t even called a Greta Garbo. Mr. Garbo called it the South Side Ethical Suicide Parlor.
Just the two of us, Mr. Garbo and I, used to run the whole shooting match.
We had a cash register, a pad of release forms, a phonograph, a record of
Mario Lanza singing
The Bluebird of Happiness
, an old 1959 Edsel Corsair over a greasepit, a length of garden hose running from the exhaust pipe of the Edsel to a hole in the telephone booth and. That was it. In those days it was carbon monoxide or nothing.
If Mr. Garbo was alive today,
I don’t think he would
he wouldn’t
be
very
proud of the coast-to-coast chain of suicide parlors that bears his nickname. He wouldn’t like the stainless steel booths. He wouldn’t like the purple tile roofs. He wouldn’t like the expensive, easy-to-find locations.
and
He wouldn’t like
the choice of six different ways to die quick Frankly,
or the canned farewell notes
.
Frankly, I think they would make him sick.
And what would make him sickest would be supposedly ethical suicide parlors that were coin operated, without anybody around for the customer to talk to. Back in the old days, even during the Christmas rush, Mr. Garbo talked to every customer sometimes for an hour or more. And he swore
he’d
he would
never expand the business to where he couldn’t do that. Oh, I know automation has kept the cost of
ethical
suicide down, where the cost of everything else has doubled and tripled and quintupled. I’ve seen the graphs in the
Greta Garbo
ads. But I don’t think money is everything.
And neither did Mr. Garbo. A third of the people who came to him to have an accident arranged got
turned away, got talked out of it. I just wonder how many people get turned away by the sign
they have
over the
doors of Greta Garbos
nowadays, the one that says, “It’s always darkest before the dawn. Are you sure you want to do this?” That’s a pretty feeble substitute for the talks Mr. Garbo would give a customer before he’d
he would
let him in the phone booth and start up the Edsel.
“Look—”
he’d
Mr Garbo would
say to a customer, “I don’t even advertise, and I’ve got a line of people a block long waiting to get in every morning, and each person has fifty dollars in his or her hot little fist, just dying to give it to me. “I net five-hundred dollars a day without any effort at all, and, without fatiguing myself, I could make a hundred times that amount,”
he would say
. But I already have everything that money can buy. I don’t want your money, I don’t need your money. What I want from you is iron-clad proof that I will be benefiting not only you but all mankind by helping you to cease to exist. I want to make absolutely sure that our product, death, is the right thing for you. Think of this as a clothing store, with nothing but shrouds on the plain pipe racks. I’m the tailor of those shrouds, see—and, in my own peculiar way, I’m proud of the merchandise. I won’t won’t let just anybody come in here and put on one of my shrouds.” Then he would smile. “Nobody goes out of here wearing death,” he would say, “unless it’s his style and unless it fits. Now you tell me exactly why you think death is the only thing for you. If you can’t make me agree with you, I won’t gas you for ten million dollars. Let’s hear your story, and it better be good.”
One of the people he saved with that kind of talk was Marie Coulter Dupont, who
later
became his wife,
and then his widow and then Chairman of the
Board of Easy Go
. She came in one morning during the May slack period. I was all alone in the shop. Mr. Garbo was across the street, playing checkers with the manager of the Arthur Murray Dance Studio.
Mrs. Dupont came in wearing a very tight silk dress.
She
It was black
· · ·
The next version of “Easy Go” focuses less on the details of Garball’s humble shop than on the kind of society that could foster a chain of mechanized death parlors. Vonnegut for the first time has found the “axe” he wants to grind in writing this tale. Again, the old-fashioned Mr. Garball wouldn’t like the fancy locations and the prefab farewell notes, “the pretty stewardesses and the easy chairs.” These are all part of what has become “a heartless, soulless slot machine.” “Kurt” makes it his business to visit parlors around the country, and his stop at a new one in Massachusetts is particularly demoralizing. On display are baskets of flowers from “the poison supply house” and a host of other contractors, and it turns out the mayor who solemnly cut the tape at its opening was the first in line for its services!
But why has voluntary death become so accepted? Who is running the network of parlors, and for what purpose? Vonnegut is still vague about it, and he starts over and over again, feeling for a compelling answer to those questions. He has not yet come up with the overpopulation theme that would figure in the final version of the story.
Easy Go
by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Sure—I used to work for Greta Garball.
I worked for him for eight months way back in 1974. I’ll tell you something else, too. He was one of the ninety-two people I killed.
Back in those days there was only one Greta Garball in the whole world, and Chicago had it—down on Forty-second and Lake Park. It didn’t have any purple tile roof. It didn’t have any meditation room. It was a plain cement block building with a flat tar roof. It used to be a filling station, and the signs out front still claimed it was.
It wasn’t even called a
Greta Garball
. Its official name was
The South Side Ethical Suicide Parlor
—but people didn’t call it that, either. Everybody called it
The Easy Go
.
We had a cash register, a pad of release forms, Mr. Garball’s Thunderbird parked over the grease pit, twelve feet of garden hose running from the exhaust pipe to a hole in the telephone booth, and that was it.
In those days it was carbon monoxide or nothing. The closest we ever came to fancy trimmings was the time we got yellow toilet paper for the rest rooms by accident.
If Mr. Garball were alive today, he wouldn’t be proud of the coast-to-coast chain of ethical suicide parlors that bears his name. He wouldn’t like the expensive locations and the purple tile roofs. He wouldn’t like the form farewell notes and the choice of fourteen different ways to die.
He wouldn’t like the pretty stewardesses and the easy chairs and the music.
Frankly, I think they would make him sick.
If you ask me, the modern Greta Garball is a heartless, soulless slot machine. It’s a hobby of mine to drop into Greta Garballs in different parts of the country, pretend I don’t want to live any more, and then watch how the stewardesses go to
work. There isn’t one iota of difference between the one-stewardess operation on the corner of Main and Elm in Argus, Indiana, and the fourteen-stewardess operation on Times Square.
There’s just one thing a Greta Garball stewardess wants, and that’s the cash.
Two months ago I was driving down the Fall River Expressway, and I saw a new Greta Garball they’d put up next to a Howard Johnson’s. There was the purple roof next to an orange one. It was so new that the Mayor of Brockton had cut the tape across the door only that morning. The cut tape was still there, and there were baskets of flowers all around from the builder and the plumbing contractor and the poison supply house and the National Association of Quality Morticians and so on.
I hung my head and I shuffled in. The stewardess was beautiful, the way they all are, the way they all have to be. And she’d had four years of abnormal psychology at the college level and two years at the Greta Garball Institute, the way they all have to.
“Haven’t been open long, I see,” I said.
“Four hours and fifteen minutes,” she said.
“Am I your first customer?” I said.
“Heavens no,” she said. “You’re the fifth.”
“Who was the first?” I said.
“The Mayor of Brockton,” she said.
Now you think about that a minute. That young woman was doing people in at a rate of one an hour. According to a stockholders’ report I got the other day, that’s the national average for Greta Garball hostesses. Your average hostess today, taking vacations and holidays and sick leave into account, kills 1673.43 people a year. And how many people did
I say I’d killed in eight months, working with Mr. Garball himself back in 1974?
Ninety-two.
Ninety-two!
Mr. Garball used to turn away twenty customers for every one he’d accept! Any modern Greta Garball stewardess with a record like that would be canned and blacklisted for life.
This girl out there on the Fall River Expressway, she wasn’t about to get fired for turning people away. I mean to say that girl was an expert.