Palm Sunday, Welcome to the Monkey House

by Kurt Jr. Vonnegut

The Great Depression was going on. The year would have been 1932. I had been taken out of private school a couple of years before, so that my classmates were no longer the children of the rich and the powerful. They were the children of mechanics and clerks and mailmen and so on. I thought it was wonderful that their mothers could cook. That was more than my own mother could do. Also, their fathers could fart around with motors and so on. Peer pressure, which is the most powerful force in the universe, had actually made me a scorner of my parents' class.

  But I was polite enough when these two silly upper-class shitheads came over to our house one night. They were husband and wife. I remember their names well enough, but I will call them "Bud and Mary Swan." This was at a time when securities had become nearly worthless, when many banks had closed forever. Factories and stores were dead. But the Swans had arrived in a new Marrnon, and Mrs. Swan had a new fur coat and a new star sapphire ring.

  We all had to look out through the front door at the car, and then at the coat and the ring. So Mother and Father, with their nice manners, said they were glad that things were going so well for the Swans. The whole thing looked fishy to me. Everybody else was broke. Where would the Swans get all that money? It was as though this one couple had been allowed to defy the law of gravity.

  Mother and Father told me to take another look at the sapphire, so I could see the beautiful star in there. So I did. But then, to get a better understanding of what was going on, I asked Mr. Swan how much the ring had cost him. That was when Father hit me. He hit me with an underhand blow to the seat of my pants. It lofted me in the direction of the staircase, and I just kept on going upstairs to my bedroom. I was mad.

  Now then: As my parents would eventually discover, to their grief, the Swans were cat's-paws for confidence men. They had been bankrolled by crooks to put on a show for friends of theirs who might still have a little money squirreled away somewhere. My parents would want to know where the Swans got all their easy money. My parents needed some easy money, too. If they didn't find it somewhere, they would be bounced forever from the upper class. As I say, I myself had already sunk into the lower orders.

  The Swans said that they had invested what little they had left after the crash of the securities market in a wonderful company which wanted to keep itself a secret. It was quietly putting together a coal monopoly which would be as rich and powerful as Standard Oil. It was buying mines and barge lines and controlling interest in coal-hauling railroads, was getting them for a minor fraction of their true value since it was paying cash. Almost nobody else had cash. The cash was coming from individuals like the Swans and my parents, who could keep a secret, and who could scrape up a little something from the bottoms of their barrels, if they really tried.

  The value of the company would increase at least a hundred times, the instant prosperity returned to the world. Meanwhile, the company was already paying dividends because it was so efficient. It was the dividends which had bought the Marmon and the coat and the star sapphire ring.

  My parents of course invested. They found buyers somewhere, I suppose, for some of their oil paintings or oriental rugs, or for some of Father's fine guns. During the boom years, Father had been a collector of guns.

  My parents had been taught such nice manners in childhood that it was actually impossible for them to suspect that these old friends of theirs were in league with crooks. They had no simple and practical vocabularies for the parts and functions of their excretory and reproductive systems, and no such vocabularies for treachery and hypocrisy, either. Good manners had made them defenseless against predatory members of their own class. There we have our old friend peer pressure again, of course.

  And there was no coal monopoly, of course. Whoever got my parents' money spent most of it on racehorses and chorus girls, probably, except for maybe a quarter of it, which they sent to the Swans as dividends.

  I had a telephone conversation recently with a young Indianapolis cousin, a married woman, during which I said that I dreaded coming out there, since I did not consider it possible that my older relatives could love me but hate my books so. She replied that I had to understand that they were all Victorians and too old to change. They could not help themselves when it came to loathing dirty books.

  So I thought about Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and the Empress of India, who lived from 1819, long before my first ancestor arrived in this country, until 1901, when my father was a junior in Shoftridge High School. And I asked myself why any mention of bodily functions should have pained this queen so.

  I cannot believe that Victoria herself would have suffered a moment's genuine dismay if I had shown her the picture of my asshole which I drew for my book Breakfast of Champions. My asshole looks like this:

  I also feature my asshole in my signature, which looks like this:

  WHAT would Queen Victoria really feel in the presence of what she had declared to be obscenities? That her power to intimidate was being attacked ever so slightly, far, far from its center, was being attacked where it could not matter much as yet—was being attacked way out on the edge. She created arbitrary rules for that outermost edge to warn her of the approach of anyone so crude, so rash as to bring to her attention the suffering of the Irish, or the cruelties of the factory system, or the privileges of the nobility, or the approach of a world war, and on and on? If she would not even acknowledge that human beings sometimes farted, how could she be expected to hear without swooning of these other things?

  WHAT a subtle scheme Queen Victoria evolved to make people hesitant about discussing their entitlement to more control over their lives. She persuaded them that they would deserve to be self-governing only after they had stopped thinking about all the things that human beings can't help thinking about all the time.

  Genteel mothers, of the era could do no less than to similarly discipline their children and their servants—and their husbands, if they could get away with it, and on and on.

  WHAT was the dirtiest story I ever wrote? Surely "The Big Space Fuck," the first story in the history of literature to have "fuck" in its title. It was probably the last short story I will ever write. I did it for my friend Harlan Ellison, who printed it in his anthology Again, Dangerous Visions. It was copyrighted by him in 1972, and appears here with his kind permission. It goes like this:

  THE BIG SPACE FUCK

  In 1987 it became possible in the United States of America for a young person to sue his parents for the way he had been raised. He could take them to court and make them pay money and even serve jail terms for serious mistakes they made when he was just a helpless little kid. This was not only an effort to achieve justice but to discourage reproduction, since there wasn't anything much to eat any more. Abortions were free. In fact, any woman who volunteered for one got her choice of a bathroom scale or a table lamp.

  In 1989, America staged the Big Space Fuck, which was a serious effort to make sure that human life would continue to exist somewhere in the Universe, since it certainly couldn't continue much longer on Earth. Everything had turned to shit and beer cans and old automobiles and Clorox bottles. An interesting thing happened in the Hawaiian Islands, where they had been throwing trash down extinct volcanoes for years: a couple of the volcanoes all of a sudden spit it all back up. And so on.

  This was a period of great permissiveness in matters of language, so even the President was saying shit and fuck and so on, without anybody's feeling threatened or taking offense. It was perfectly OK. He called the Space Fuck a Space Fuck and so did everybody else. It was a rocket ship with eight hundred pounds of freeze-dried jizzum in its nose. It was going to be fired at the Andromeda Galaxy, two-million light years away. The ship was named the Arthur C. Clarke, in honor of a famous space pioneer.

  It was to be fired at midnight on the Fourth of July. At ten o'clock that night, Dwayne Hoobler and his wife Grace were watching the countdown on television in the living room of their modest home in Elk Harbor, Ohio, on t
he shore of what used to be Lake Erie. Lake Erie was almost solid sewage now. There were man-eating lampreys in there thirty-eight feet long. Dwayne was a guard in the Ohio Adult Correctional Institution, which was two miles away. His hobby was making birdhouses out of Clorox bottles. He went on making them and hanging them around his yard, even though there weren't any birds any more.

  Dwayne and Grace marveled at a film demonstration of how jizzum had been freeze-dried for the trip. A small beaker of the stuff, which had been contributed by the head of the Mathematics Department at the University of Chicago, was flash-frozen. Then it was placed under a bell jar, and the air was exhausted from the jar. The air evanesced, leaving a fine white powder. The powder certainly didn't look like much, and Dwayne Hoobler said so—but there were several hundred million sperm cells in there, in suspended animation. The original contribution, an average contribution, had been two cubic centimeters. There was enough powder, Dwayne estimated out loud, to clog the eye of a needle. And eight-hundred pounds of the stuff would soon be on its way to Andromeda.

  "Fuck you, Andromeda," said Dwayne, and he wasn't being coarse. He was echoing billboards and stickers all over town. Other signs said, "Andromeda, We Love You," and "Earth Has the Hots for Andromeda," and so on.

  There was a knock on the door, and an old friend of the family, the County Sheriff, simultaneously let himself in. "How are you, you old motherfucker?" said Dwayne.

  "Can't complain, shitface," said the sheriff, and they joshed back and forth like that for a while. Grace chuckled, enjoying their wit. She wouldn't have chuckled so richly, however, if she had been a little more observant. She might have noticed that the sheriffs jocularity was very much on the surface. Underneath, he had something troubling on his mind. She might have noticed, too, that he had legal papers in his hand.

  "Sit down, you silly old fart," said Dwayne, "and watch Andromeda get the surprise of her life."

  "The way I understand it," the sheriff replied, "I'd have to sit there for more than two million years. My old lady might wonder what's become of me." He was a lot smarter than Dwayne. He had jizzum on the Arthur C. Clarke, and Dwayne didn't. You had to have an I.Q. of over 115 to have your jizzum accepted. There were certain exceptions to this: if you were a good athlete or could play a musical instrument or paint pictures, but Dwayne didn't qualify in any of those departments, either. He had hoped that birdhouse-makers might be entitled to special consideration, but this turned out not to be the case. The Director of the New York Philharmonic, on the other hand, was entitled to contribute a whole quart, if he wanted to. He was sixty-eight years old. Dwayne was forty-two.

  There was an old astronaut on the television now. He was saying that he sure wished he could go where his jizzum was going. But he would sit at home instead, with his memories and a glass of Tang. Tang used to be the official drink of the astronauts. It was a freeze-dried orangeade.

  "Maybe you haven't got two million years," said Dwayne, "but you've got at least five minutes. Sit thee doon."

  "What I'm here for—" said the sheriff, and he let his unhappiness show, "is something I customarily do standing up."

  Dwayne and Grace were sincerely puzzled. They didn't have the least idea what was coming next. Here is what it was: the sheriff handed each one of them a subpoena, and he said, "It's my sad duty to inform you that your daughter, Wanda June, has accused you of ruining her when she was a child."

  Dwayne and Grace were thunderstruck. They knew that Wanda June was twenty-one now, and entitled to sue, but they certainly hadn't expected her to do so. She was in New York City, and when they congratulated her about her birthday on the telephone, in fact, one of the things Grace said was, "Well, you can sue us now, honeybunch, if you want to." Grace was so sure she and Dwayne had been good parents that she could laugh when she went on, "If you want to, you can send your rotten old parents off to jail."

  Wanda June was an only child, incidentally. She had come close to having some siblings, but Grace had aborted them. Grace had taken three table lamps and a bathroom scale instead.

  "What does she say we did wrong?" Grace asked the sheriff.

  "There's a separate list of charges inside each of your subpoenas," he said. And he couldn't look his wretched old friends in the eye, so he looked at the television instead. A scientist there was explaining why Andromeda had been selected as a target. There were at least eighty-seven chrono-synclastic infundibulae, time warps, between Earth and the Andromeda Galaxy. If the Arthur C. Clarke passed through any one of them, the ship and its load would be multiplied a trillion times, and would appear everywhere throughout space and time.

  "If there's any fecundity anywhere in the Universe," the scientist promised, "our seed will find it and bloom."

  One of the most depressing things about the space program so far, of course, was that it had demonstrated that fecundity was one hell of a long way off, if anywhere. Dumb people like Dwayne and Grace, and even fairly smart people like the sheriff, had been encouraged to believe that there was hospitality out there, and that Earth was just a piece of shit to use as a launching platform.

  Now Earth really was a piece of shit, and it was beginning to dawn on even dumb people that it might be the only inhabitable planet human beings would ever find.

  Grace was in tears over being sued by her daughter, and the list of charges she was reading was broken into multiple images by the tears. "Oh God, oh God, oh God—" she said, "she's talking about things I forgot all about, but she never forgot a thing. She's talking about something that happened when she was only four years old."

  Dwayne was reading charges against himself, so he didn't ask Grace what awful thing she was supposed to have done when Wanda June was only four, but here it was: Poor little Wanda June drew pretty pictures with a crayon all over the new living-room wallpaper to make her mother happy. Her mother blew up and spanked her instead. Since that day, Wanda June claimed, she had not been able to look at any sort of art materials without trembling like a leaf and breaking out into cold sweats. "Thus was I deprived," Wanda June's lawyer had her say, "of a brilliant and lucrative career in the arts."

  Dwayne meanwhile was learning that he had ruined his daughter's opportunities for what her lawyer called an "advantageous marriage and the comfort and love therefrom." Dwayne had done this, supposedly, by being half in the bag whenever a suitor came to call. Also, he was often stripped to the waist when he answered the door, but still had on his cartridge belt and his revolver. She was even able to name a lover her father had lost for her: John L. Newcomb, who had finally married somebody else. He had a very good job now. He was in command of the security force at an arsenal out in South Dakota, where they stockpiled cholera and bubonic plague.

  The sheriff had still more bad news to deliver, and he knew he would have an opportunity to deliver it soon enough. Poor Dwayne and Grace were bound to ask him, "What made her do this to us?" The answer to that question would be more bad news, which was that Wanda June was in jail, charged with being the head of a shoplifting ring. The only way she could avoid prison was to prove that everything she was and did was her parents' fault.

  Meanwhile, Senator Flem Snopes of Mississippi, Chairman of the Senate Space Committee, had appeared on the television screen. He was very happy about the Big Space Fuck, and he said it had been what the American space program had been aiming toward all along. He was proud, he said, that the United States had seen fit to locate the biggest jizzum-freezing plant in his “I’il ol’ home town," which was Mayhew.

  The word "jizzum" had an interesting history, by the way. It was as old as "fuck" and "shit" and so on, but it continued to be excluded from dictionaries, long after the others were let in. This was because so many people wanted it to remain a truly magic word—the only one left.

  And when the United States announced that it was going to do a truly magical thing, was going to fire sperm at the Andromeda Galaxy, the populace corrected its government. Their collective unconscious announced that it w
as time for the last magic word to come into the open. They insisted that sperm was nothing to fire at another galaxy. Only jizzum would do. So the Government began using that word, and it did something that had never been done before, either: it standardized the way the word was spelled.

  The man who was interviewing Senator Snopes asked him to stand up so everybody could get a good look at his codpiece, which the Senator did. Codpieces were very much in fashion, and many men were wearing codpieces in the shape of rocket ships, in honor of the Big Space Fuck. These customarily had the letters "U.S.A." embroidered on the shaft. Senator Snopes' shaft, however, bore the Stars and Bars of the Confederacy.

  This led the conversation into the area of heraldry in general, and the interviewer reminded the Senator of his campaign to eliminate the bald eagle as the national bird. The Senator explained that he didn't like to have his country represented by a creature that obviously hadn't been able to cut the mustard in modern times.

  Asked to name a creature that had been able to cut the mustard, the Senator did better than that: he named two— the lamprey and the bloodworm. And, unbeknownst to him or to anybody, lampreys were finding the Great Lakes too vile and noxious even for them. While all the human beings were in their houses, watching the Big Space Fuck, lampreys were squirming out of the ooze and onto land. Some of them were nearly as long and thick as the Arthur C. Clarke.

  And Grace Hoobler tore her wet eyes from what she had been reading, and she asked the sheriff the question he had been dreading to hear: "What made her do this to us?"

  The sheriff told her, and then he cried out against cruel Fate, too. "This is the most horrible duty I ever had to carry out—" he said brokenly, "to deliver news this heartbreaking to friends as close as you two are—on a night that's supposed to be the most joyful night in the history of mankind."