We Are What We Pretend to Be

by Kurt Vonnegut

  K: So, you have many women friends.

  B: I have many people friends. In the words of Thomas Jefferson: “We the people.” And next time, either bring Desamol or don’t wear perfume.

  K: I’m not wearing perfume.

  B: Somebody is.

  K: When you were taking Desamol, why weren’t you half-asleep all the time?

  B: You take Ritalin.

  K: Another side effect, I’ve read, is constipation.

  B: You take Phillips’ Milk of Magnesia, the old tried and true.

  K: And headaches.

  B: You take Excedrin or Anacin or Tylenol or Bayer Aspirin or Bufferin.

  K: And occasional dizziness.

  B: You sit down or hold onto a telephone pole or the nearest meter maid. And no lipstick next time.

  K: I’ll wipe it off right now.

  B: You would look so pretty while you were doing it, that would just make things worse.

  K: I think you’re kidding me, Gil Berman.

  B: Wouldn’t you think something had gone terribly wrong if I didn’t fall in love with you? Be honest.

  K: The scrapbook.

  B: What scrapbook is that? Mother made a million of them, to which I, the greatest of all comedians, as you may have noticed, have now fallen heir, along with an eight-bedroom house in Knightsbridge, two Steinway grand pianos, and Boston slum properties almost without number. It’s in my file here that my mother made scrapbooks?

  K: I didn’t know that about your mother. I just found this one scrapbook in your file, and it seemed so odd: It had such an expensive cover, and the clippings were so neat. They were laid out on each page so artistically, almost as though by a professional layout artist.

  B: She could have been a professional layout artist. I could have been a professional layout artist. You could have been a professional layout artist. You married? One of Mother’s scrapbooks wound up out here? The only proof of the existence of God my mother needed was the morning paper, a pair of scissors and Elmer’s Glue, and a piano. Jesus, I must have talked so much about her scrapbooks the first time I was here, somebody must have written her doctor to ask if they could please see one. But that doesn’t seem very likely. K: You didn’t bring it with you? I thought maybe you were the one who made it.

  B: What’s it about? Barbra Streisand’s fight with her hairdresser? The Cuban Missile Crisis? It was all so fucking pathetic. When Mother was a little girl she made scrapbooks about what a great pianist she was, the even greater one she would surely become. About three of ’em, now mine, all mine. She stopped when there was nothing more about her in the morning paper. But after she went bonkers, after the shock treatments, she started making them again, almost as though anything that happened was something for which she was somehow responsible and should be proud. And she was proud! She didn’t even know who Dad was anymore, just that he was this sweet young man who came by from time to time because he loved to look at her scrapbooks. I wasn’t all that clear either about who he was, and what the fuck he was doing there. He was a paragon of manly schmaltz who loved scrapbooks and thought it was great how nice and straight my teeth are. Which they are. Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed how straight and gleaming white they are. Don’t lie. You have delivered yourself into the presence of the world’s most dreaded shit-detector. So God knows how and God knows why: One of my poor mother’s scrapbooks made it all the way to a file cabinet in Salem, Wisconsin. What’s it about? Elizabeth Taylor marries for the thirteenth time? Vietnam?

  K: I thought you surely knew. Now I’m sorry I brought it up. It’s about your nervous breakdown in Boston.

  B: You’re shitting me! She made a fucking scrapbook of that?

  K: You were in the morning paper, not once but several times.

  B: Oh, keeeeerap!

  K: Since you only now found out about it, let’s put off talking about it until the next time.

  B: Keeeeeerap! Burn the motherfucker!

  K: When you go home from here, where exactly is home?

  B: Keeeeeerap!

  K: Where is home?

  B: Where is what?

  K: Where is home?

  B: Home, my dear Docky-wocky, docky-wocky-wicky-woo, is a condominium to die for in Manhattan, across from Gramercy Park South, to which I hold a key, and five doors down from the Players, a club for theater people in which I hold a membership, and where I find more congenial company than at which you can shake a stick. And six blocks west is a saintly physician who will prescribe anything I want, even if he never heard of it before, for he himself is on LSD. K

  : And will there be someone waiting for you in your nice condominium?

  B: Of course! You think I would yearn to be back there if there weren’t a significant other waiting?

  K: Another neuter?

  B: You got it!

  K: Can I ask who it is?

  B: If you promise not to breathe his name to anyone.

  K: Goes without saying.

  B: Gilbert Lanz Berman. You would fall head-over-heels in love with him, if you could see his smile. You’d want to marry him.

  K: And be labeled a home-wrecker? And I must be going now. And I am so happy you have plenty of Phillips’ Milk of Magnesia.

  B: Touché, dearest of all possible Helens. Touché, touché.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Calvin Theater there in Northampton is named in honor of Calvin Coolidge, the thirtieth president of the United States. He was born and raised nearby. When the American humorist Dorothy Parker was told in 1933 that Coolidge was dead, she said, “How can they tell?”

  Yes, and catty-corner and across the street from the Calvin is the Hotel Northampton, where Gil Berman had hired a room for one night only. A car and driver from a limo service had brought him from Manhattan, and the driver had a room in the same hotel. The plan was that they would go to Knightsbridge the next morning, where Berman would try yet again to strike some sort of bargain with his childhood home. At least it was empty now, and it was his, all his. He could fucking well, in his own words, “put out a contract on it, call in the wreckers, if it still won’t stop putting crazy messages in my head like the CIA.”

  Berman could easily afford such expensive transportation. And he no more needed the fees he got for public appearances than his father had needed what he was paid for orthodontics. He and the driver, Don, had not become friends on the trip. Berman had not wanted to talk, but preferred to daydream, snooze, or simply take in the scenery. He was not one to befriend those who drove him. He said to one driver who tried to strike up a lively conversation, “Look, I’m trying to think back here. If I need a Sancho Panza, I’ll let you know.”

  At the end of the trip that driver said, “Just one question, Mr. Berman, if it won’t interrupt your chain of thought too much. Who the heck was Sancho Panza? A baseball star?”

  After Martha Jones’s niece got her aunt out of front row center in the Calvin and into the family Honda out front and headed for Ithaca, Berman returned to his hotel room on the third floor. He found himself phoning Dr. Walter Streit, the psychiatrist who had replaced Dr. Klein back in Wisconsin, back at Caldwell. During his drug years, he regularly called up this acquaintance or that one, twice his congressperson, without knowing why, and then waited to see what would come pouring out of him. In a Rolling Stone interview back then, he said: “To me a telephone is like a bung in a barrel, only I’m the barrel. When the person answers I just turn on the bung, and what comes out is almost always new material, wonderful stuff I’ve never heard before. I laugh like hell, and so does the guy on the other end.”

  Drug-free Berman hoped sobriety would still let him do this. He would soon find out.

  Dr. Streit had given Berman his home phone number, saying, “In case something has bothered you so much you don’t know what to do next.” Dr. Streit was already in bed, although it was only 8:30 in Wisconsin, which is on Central Standard Time. Dr. Streit was drunk as a hoot-owl, lying on his back with an open copy of “The Myth
of Sisyphus” by Albert Camus for a roof over his face, when the phone on his bedside table rang and rang. He picked it up, and here’s what he heard: “Doc, this is Gil Berman. I’m fine. Don’t worry about me. But you can’t believe what happened at my show tonight. What a fucking zoo! The theater manager looked like an albino giraffe. The cop on duty looked like a sentimental hippopotamus! And there was this deranged woman who looked like a gorilla in a haystack. And then this circus midget came in with another cop, who looked like a transsexual iguana! Honest to God! And the midget, a girl, said to the gorilla in a haystack, ‘Aunt Martha, you’ve stopped taking your pills again. Now look at the trouble you’ve caused for these nice strangers.’ And the gorilla in a haystack said, ‘I just wanted to make sure this man knew that he, like the holy clowns Abbie Hoffman and Lenny Bruce, was a reincarnation of Jesus Christ.’ All I need to know from you, Doc, is where do I go to get detoxed from sobriety?”

  Berman paused for breath. He had been guffawing in agony, in the style of the opening lines of Who’s Sorry Now? When he got set to spout some more, though, he realized that the phone was dead. Dr. Streit had apparently hung up on him, which was indeed the case. Some doctor!

  “Sobriety,” incidentally, is generally understood to mean a life without one specific mind-bender, which is alcohol. But get a load of this: Gil Berman had been entitled to credit himself with sobriety, when defined that narrowly, for eighteen years! He hadn’t had an alcoholic beverage since his first stay at Junkie Junction, at the Caldwell Institute. When he spoke of sobriety there in Northampton, he meant he was at last free of the drugs that had, not only in his own opinion, but in the opinions of several colleagues and critics, as well, made him deeper and quicker as a comedian than he would have otherwise been.

  On the subject of alcohol abuse, in fact, he had become quite the prude. When he was in the company of people who were drinking booze, he would order “a double Shirley Temple, please, and don’t hold back on the grenadine.” Grenadine is a cloyingly sweet, nonalcoholic, red-orange syrup flavored with pomegranates and is the most exciting ingredient in a Shirley Temple cocktail. A Shirley Temple cocktail, in turn, is what grownups who are drinking hard liquor, tossing down what the late W. C. Fields called “Nose Paint,” order for any children they happen to have somehow brought with them into a drinking establishment.

  In the beginning, immediately after Gil Berman got out of Crawford for the first time, persons serving him thought he was kidding, since no adult in history had ever ordered a Shirley Temple. So there was bargle-bargle before it was clear he was dead serious: “Where’s the manager? I want to see the manager. I want a Shirley fucking Temple cocktail, and you, for reasons impossible for this sane citizen of the United fucking States of America to fathom, will not let me have one,” and so on. That sort of thing.

  In more recent times, though, his lusty consumption of Shirley Temples had become as widely known as his chastity and wealth, to the point that he was often served a Shirley Temple without having ordered one. The sobriquet he had given Shirley Temples in performances and interviews, moreover, had become patois for many gin-mill professionals. The nickname was “Footin-the-door.” A waitress might say to a bartender, “Two feet in the door,” and the bartender might reply, “Two Shirley Temples coming up.” Someone at the Hotel Northampton had been so hip as to have a pitcher of Shirley Temples and a bucket of ice waiting for Berman in his room.

  In his Rolling Stone interview he declared: “Drugs are science. Alcohol is superstition.”

  A Gil Berman joke about Caldwell, which he gave gratis to a comedy team, since it took two people to make it work:

  Al: You’re looking so happy and healthy, Joe. Just get out of Junkie Junction?

  Joe: Better than that, Al, I just shipped the wife and mother-in-law up to sunny Wisconsin for new pills, old religion, and detox.

  Al: Found their stashes yet?

  Joe: Nothing to it, Al. Hired a dog and handler from Rent-a-Narc.

  Oh, sure, and Gil Berman, there in his room at the Hotel Northampton after being hung up on by a psychiatrist, felt like something the cat drug in. He wasn’t funny anymore? He’d been funny enough at the Calvin. And the demented poor soul in the front row hadn’t wrecked the show, but had accidentally created a theatrically effective, if confusing, coda.

  So?

  And then it came to him: He himself loathed what he had said to the doctor. Why? Because what had happened at the theater after the niece arrived had in fact been so noble, so spiritually dignified, so moving that Berman had almost wept. Why couldn’t he have said so?

  “Circus midget”? The niece, only eighteen, was indeed short, but not freakishly so: maybe five feet. Why not “teenage Virgin Mary”? Berman was so impressed with her that he called police headquarters afterward from his room to find out her full name and, if possible, her address. Her name was Lily Tracy Matthews.

  The theater manager, Sheldon Hayes, was an “albino giraffe”? Really? And what about “the transsexual iguana” and “the sentimental hippopotamus”? Why not “three angels” instead?

  And “the gorilla in a haystack”? Why not “a sacred mountain of faith and humility”? That is what she really was.

  Primitive, patriotic, self-anointed critics had sent him hate letters in the past, saying, in effect, in one way or another: “You don’t even need the money or women. What do you think you’re doing, shitting on everything we hold dear?” Were they right that much of what he shat upon deserved to be honored as sacred? Here was what he had just shat upon on the telephone:

  Into the Calvin came the short but shapely niece with a cop whose features were indeed, albeit through no fault of his own, sexually ambiguous and objectively reptilian. She had parked her dad’s Honda Accord right outside. The iguana looked at the seeming corpse front row center and said, “Oh my God. Holy shit.” But then he said to her: “Excuse me, Miss Matthews. I just didn’t know what we were up against.”

  And she said: “I told you how important this person is to me, how much I love her.”

  He said: “No disrespect.” He had been indoctrinated by her on the way over to this effect: that her aunt, no matter what she looked like, was actually majestic. And the rosy, roly-poly cop took his cue from him, and, like the iguana, positioned himself at an unthreatening distance from Martha Jones, but with arms outstretched, signaling muscular but gentle potential helpfulness.

  Berman: “If CPR were required, they knew how to give it. Inside even the meanest uniformed policeperson there is a Florence Nightingale screaming to be let out.”

  Gil Berman and the tall, pony-tailed, white-haired theater manager, the failed actor Sheldon Hayes, clambered up onto the stage, lest there be violence. And Lily Tracy Matthews, the niece, said to the muumuued corpse: “Aunt Martha, you haven’t been taking your pills again. Now look how much trouble you’ve caused these nice strangers.”

  Only the lips and tongue of the corpse moved. This time their words were high and teeny-weeny, like Minnie Mouse. They said: “I just wanted to make sure this man knew he was a reincarnation of Jesus, like Lenny Bruce and Abbie Hoffman.” The mouth closed was lifeless as the rest of the body again. Martha Jones wasn’t going anywhere, and there has to be the suspicion, as must be suspected of every mentally disadvantaged person, that inside lurks a master or mistress illusionist. Sane or not, Martha Jones had contrived to make an awfully nice young woman take complex and loving care of her.

  Lily Matthews, who hadn’t seen Berman’s show in Ithaca, who never watched TV, and so had never seen him on a talk show, looked up at Berman and Sheldon and said, “Which one of you is the great comedian?”

  “Guilty as charged,” said Berman.

  She said, “Please tell her you know you’re Jesus Christ.”

  “I know,” said Berman.

  “It has to be the whole thing,” she said. “You have to say the whole thing, or we’ll spend the rest of our lives in here.”

  Before he could stop hims
elf, Berman said, “It’s time to call a forklift.” The instant that slipped out he could have killed himself. Of all the heartless things to say! Who the hell did he think he was: Count Dracula?

  Sheldon Hayes hissed at Berman with undiluted hatred. “Jesus Christ, man.” It wasn’t a cue. It was an expletive.

  The two cops were now leaning backward, their arms dangling helplessly behind them, their faces aghast. How could they play this serious game with such a smart-ass making wisecracks? Lily Matthews had bared her clenched teeth and was sucking in air through the cracks in between them.

  Gil Berman made a gesture that may have been instinctive for all comedians throughout history, comedians who have really stunk up a joint with abysmal tastelessness. He held up his hands palms outward, petting the hostile air as though it were an enormous sheepdog, meaning: “Hey, gimme a break. Gimme a chance, you guys. You guys know me,” and so on.

  And then he said directly to Martha Jones, squatting so his eyes were almost level with hers: “I admit it, Aunt Martha: I am Jesus Christ, I am Jesus Christ.”

  From Martha Jones’s lips and tongue, still Minnie Mouse, came these six words: “You bet your ass you are.” But she was still a corpse, not about to leave there. And the iguana said to Lily, “What do we do now?”

  Before answering she sent darts of contempt from her eyes into those of the great comedian. Then she said, “First I have to sing to her. And then we all have to sing so we can march her out of here.” Can you beat it? Martha Jones had made it all the way from Ithaca to Syracuse to Springfield to Northampton, and to the public library and then the Calvin Theater, in a town strange to her, without any songs or marching. Lily felt the need to explain: “After she completes a mission, she tries to die, hopes to die.” Sheldon Hayes and the two cops nodded in perfect understanding.