Don’t let anyone tell you any different, Kurt Vonnegut said. We’re all just here to fart around. Yesterday, one of America’s greatest satirists ran out of gas.

The author of such dark comedies as Breakfast of Champions and Slaughterhouse Five was the best at deceiving his readers, leading them to believe they were reading juvenile pap until each novel’s great reveal, when suddenly the tome confronts the great questions: Is there a Creator of the Universe? Do we have free will? And if not, then what do we do with each other? And so on.
About 10 years ago, I took a road trip with a car full of college friends to Southern Miss in Hattiesburg to hear Vonnegut speak. There are other authors I’ve heard in person who write in a voice not their own. Vonnegut wasn’t one of them.

The auditorium was packed, and the president of the university took the better part of half an hour delivering his introduction. The crowd of college students, most whom were there for class credit, grew more impatient with each of the president’s lame jokes. The students, myself included, let our attention wander until it found something else to watch — visible beneath the stage curtain, a pair of plain brown loafers, pacing. The president told another joke and Vonnegut parted the curtain, just enough to reveal his face. His eyes rolled once over the crowd, and then just that quickly, he disappeared again. The students exploded and the college president began to beam. He hadn’t seen Vonnegut. He thought they were laughing at him. Another joke. The curtain parted again. This time Vonnegut stuck out his tongue. The same riot. And this happened about three or four times more, until the speaker finally realized he was being had. And then Vonnegut came on stage for good.

“Have any of you heard me speak before?” he asked. No hands went up. “Liars!” he yelled. “Well if you have and you’re shy, then I’m sorry, because you’re going to hear it again. I’ve been giving the same speech for 20 years, and I’m not going to change it tonight.”

The gist of that speech, you can find in many of Vonnegut’s books. Late in life, he was accused of recycling his material, but I believe he was refining it. His most recent work, A Man Without a Country, might be the closest thing to a stage script.

Vonnegut was a mild schizophrenic, if you can be mildly schizophrenic. Without notice, his narrative on stage would jump the tracks mid-sentence. He would talk about Subject A (perhaps, the importance of extended families) and then switch to Subject Q (his theory of graphing a story arch) without intention or cognizance. Then realizing what he had done, he would connect Subject A to Q, as though he had meant to all along. Nature’s cruelty had given him a lifetime of happy accidents.

In the Q&A session, someone asked Vonnegut to name his favorite living writer and musician. “When you get to be my age, you don’t think in that way — living — so much. I wouldn’t want to say who my favorite living writer is. It would upset too many people. As for musicians. Well, Bob Dylan is a good musician. He’s a lousy poet, but a good musician. And Mozart was pretty good, I think.”

Vonnegut called himself a Christ-worshiping agnostic. The Sermon on the Mount was “the first good idea,” he said. There hasn’t been a second good idea, but he thought there would be, and it would probably come from music.

Then Vonnegut told how he had played the clarinet when he was young. His mother had encouraged him to take lessons before she killed herself. He pantomimed playing the clarinet. The crowd of students, at least those who hadn’t ducked out half-way through, became uncomfortably silent. Vonnegut spoke, but there was some sort of disconnect with his body language. A wire was loose in that frazzled head up there. This poor old man on stage was having some kind of episode. But Vonnegut kept talking. He told everyone about the Big Band Era and how everyone his age had wanted to play in a big band. Without warning, he began singing a song. As he did, he walked backward, taking careful steps toward the curtain. He parted the curtain with his left hand, and he stood there, beneath the proscenium until he reached the very last word of the very last verse: “Toodeloo.”

With that, he dropped the curtain, and then he was gone.

So it goes.

— Kyle Whitmire