There is something kinetic and alive in the keystrokes of the work in progress, even with its repetitions and false starts. Watching how Vonnegut built the Monkey House helps us answer the question he must have asked himself often as he stood back to survey his various handiworks:
“How the hell did I ever do that?”
2. “GRETA GARBALL LOVED PEOPLE”
As Vonnegut began each new effort on the story that would become “Welcome to the Monkey House,” he first typed the mailing address of his literary agents, who would eventually be submitting the material:
LITTAUER & WILKINSON, Inc.
424 Madison Avenue
New York 17, N.Y.
Plaza 5-3382
These headings carry an almost incantatory quality as one views the drafts, as if the author was willing this version of the story to be the final one. The prime ingredient he was seeking—something he found elusive here—was a dynamic tension between the main characters. “It’s the writer’s job to stage confrontations,” he once observed, ever mindful of the practical, mechanical challenges presented by the construction process. “If he can’t do that he should withdraw from the trade.” In time, matters would center on a showdown between the mercurial, chameleon-like trickster Billy the Poet and Nancy, the bored Ethical Suicide hostess. But a lot of fitful, tenacious hashing had to take place before their paths would cross.
Vonnegut seems to have begun his journey with a story template very different in tone and scale from the one ultimately published. We see from the start in these discarded versions the germ of the idea of the Ethical Suicide Parlor, but there is no Big Brother scaffolding to explain it, no World Government mandating birth control measures, no Billy or Nancy.
Instead we have a series of sketches of Greta Garball, an entrepreneur of the old school who stumbled upon the idea of painless, voluntary death as a way to make a buck. There were limits to how far he would go, however—a right and a wrong way to conduct business. Garball encouraged people to avoid using his services if their broken lives could be salvaged. Despite his discriminating approach, however, terminally discontented people were so plentiful that his parlor flourished, beyond his wildest expectations.
In this draft, titled “Easy Go,” Vonnegut uses a first-person perspective—the narrator could be confiding to us from the next bar stool. He is a rags-to-riches figure full of success and prosperity bromides, unapologetic about his vast accumulated wealth. “Everything I’ve got, I worked for.”
Garball recalls romantic misadventures from his youth with rapid-fire, throwaway gags of the kind in which Vonnegut specialized. Women reject his advances, with a disgust we would eventually see in the hostess Nancy. The farce extends even to a mail-order sex doll, which he had to wrest away from his brother, only to find more humiliation.
Garball took from these experiences a cold, hard lesson: love is a bargain, and to enter into it a guy needed money. He wandered the streets pondering ways to get it until the suicide parlor idea came to him. (Note how Vonnegut is already playing with the equation between sex and death that would be a major theme of the finished story.) He was not too proud to go door to door, like a Fuller Brush salesman, promoting the “Easy Go Story.” Greta Garball is the self-made man of the Great Depression, and his was a business, like the author’s, built with hard labor from the ground up.
Rough and preliminary as it is, this draft already has some of the elements of the published version. Most striking is the very concrete detail of the “purple-tiled roofs” that must have been part of Vonnegut’s original inspiration for a chain of inviting, brightly colored, fast-food-style suicide parlors. However, this protagonist is too limited by his pinched world-view—“I realized I would never have love without wealth”—for the author to develop him further as a sympathetic character, and the effort is abandoned after three and a half pages.
Easy Go
by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
They tell me I am probably the richest man in the world. I may be, and then again I may not be. I don’t much care. The important thing about me is that I haven’t always been rich and happy. Everything I’ve got I worked for.
I can laugh now about the way things used to be for me, but they sure weren’t funny then. That is why I tell young people who come to me for advice, who want to be rich and happy, too, “Keep your eyes open for opportunities, and remember it is always darkest before the dawn.”
I remember one time when I was young and poor, I took this nurse I used to go to grade school with out. I started to make love to her, and she didn’t like it.
“What’s the matter with it?” I said.
And she said, “How would you like it if somebody did this to you?” And she tickled me all over, and she took off one of my shoes and threw it out of the car, and she tore the buttons off my shirt, and she emptied the car ashtray all over me. “Now you know how a girl feels,” she said, “after she’s been out with somebody who can’t keep his hands to himself.”
Another time I took this telephone operator I used to go to high school with out, and I asked her to sleep with me.
“All right,” she said, “just as long as you reverse the charges.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“You have the baby, and I’ll leave town,” she said.
“That’s very funny,” I said.
“I’ll tell Alexander Graham Bell you think so,” she said. “He’s the one who made it up.”
“I don’t know whether to feel encouraged or discouraged,” I said.
“What about?” she said.
“The way you’re joking,” I said, “I can’t tell if you like me or not.”
“Ask me some specific questions,” she said.
“All right,” I said. “What would you do if I kissed you now?”
“I would throw up,” she said.
I laughed. I caught her in my arms and I kissed her.
She threw up.
So I wrote away to Paris for a complete rubber woman in a plain wrapper. She had a tape recorder in her, so I could always have her say the right thing at the right time.
But my brother opened her before I got home, even though she was addressed to me.
“She’s mine!” I told him.
“Suppose you ask her about that,” he said.
So I pushed the button of her tape recorder, and she said to me, “Lay one more finger on me, you miserable shrimp, and I’ll scream for an hour.”
This was a turning point, because I realized that I would never have love without wealth. So I walked the streets of the city, wondering what I could sell that people really needed.
And the answer came to me: Suicide.
The next day I rented a vacant filing station and hired a lawyer.
One week later I opened the first Easy Go, the first ethical suicide parlor in the world. There wasn’t any pretty hostess, wasn’t any soft music, wasn’t any purple tile roof, wasn’t anything people have come to associate with an Easy Go. There was just me, a cash register, an old De Soto with a length of green garden hose running from its exhaust pipe into the telephone booth, and that was it.
In those days, it was carbon monoxide or nothing.
It is hard to believe nowadays, with an Easy Go next door to practically every Howard Johnson’s in this great land of ours, that the whole idea of a suicide parlor once had to be explained and sold. When I say I had to ring doorbells, I mean I had to do exactly that. I wasn’t afraid of having doors slammed in my face, and I told the Easy Go story to anybody who would listen.
· · ·
In this next draft, titled “I Used to Work in Chicago,” the place is more specific and the point of view shifts to Garball’s diminutive assistant, “Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.” Beyond the autobiographical dimensions—the author did work for two years in Chicago after the war, as a police reporter—“Kurt” is offered as a gesture of wry self-deprecation. It is interesting to note that Vonnegut wanted to put the family name on a tombst
one in Cat’s Cradle, but his editor at the time vetoed the idea as too jarring, unduly confusing to the reader. Five years later a new freedom of experimentation is in the air, and the frontiers between fiction and life have blurred considerably. Vonnegut is itching to take the plunge again, to get more personal, a hall-mark of the mature phase of his writing career.
“Kurt” describes his rather minimal duties, and his role in adding a bit of carnivalesque “atmosphere” to the bare-bones parlor. His Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs outfit anticipates Billy Pilgrim’s Cinderella toga and gold airmen’s boots in Slaughterhouse-Five. He explains the seasonal ups and downs of the business, and the origin of the boss’s name, derived from his Armenian ethnicity. (We think here of Vonnegut’s irascible Rabo Karabekian from Breakfast of Champions and Bluebeard.) A handwritten detail at the end, about his charity to the local church, conveys a tenderness one might not have suspected beneath Mr. Garball’s bluster.
“Kurt’s” tone is intimate, even though it is framed by the klieg lights of a Senate investigating committee. By having the narrator discuss his line of work in its chillingly matter-of-fact particulars (“I was always the one who turned on the switch”), by broaching ethical suicide as a commonplace feature of American life, Vonnegut willfully undermines from the top its shock value. He is following one of his own rules for writing: “Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense.” But this approach demands an array of twists and plot devices to sustain the reader’s interest. The small world of Garball’s converted garage operation does not offer enough possibilities to meet that need, and again things stall out after three and a half pages.
I Used to Work in Chicago
by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
The following is excerpted from the testimony of Kurt Vonnegut. Jr., before the Senate Commerce Committee in a hearing relative to possible Federal regulation of eithical suicide parlors.
Sure—I used to work for Greta Garball. I worked for him for two years in the very first ethical suicide parlor in the history of this country. That was eighteen years ago—on Fifty-fifth Street in Chicago. I was on piece work. Mr. Garball paid me ten dollars for every customer we did in. I was always the one who turned on the switch and started up the car.* Both years I paid income tax on about twenty-thousand
*Editor’s Note: In transcribing the typewritten manuscript drafts, I’ve struck through lines that Vonnegut himself crossed out and italicized additions he made later.
dollars, so you can figure out for yourself how many folks I must have killed helped to kill.
Our biggest season was between Thanksgiving and Christmas. When the stores started decorating their windows for Christmas and all you could get on the radio was Christmas carols, it seemed like half of Chicago wished it was dead. I am talking just about grownups, of course. Our worst season started in May, and things generally didn’t start picking up again until Labor day.
Don’t get me wrong—a suicide parlor can still make money in the summertime. You would be surprised how many people want to die because their baseball team isn’t doing well.
Mr. Garball’s real name was Frederick T. Gaborian, but I never heard anybody call him anything but Greta or Mr. Garball. I think he made up that name for atmospheres. Somehow, That name really hit the customers right. They would come in, asking to be killed, and the man they had to talk it over with was a man named Greta Garball. It was special.
Mr. Garball hired me on account of I was a midget. He didn’t need any help when I came around looking for work. He was running the whole shooting match himself without any trouble, but he couldn’t resist having a midget named Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., on the premises. He gave me the official title of Director of Public Relations and Head Troll, and he introduced me to every customer that way. I was like a toy to him. He had a little frock coat made up for me, and a little Snow-White-and-Seven-Dwarfs outfit, and a little suit of herringbon twill coveralls with the words “To be or not to be?” embroidered on the back.
The first Greta Garball didn’t have any music, didn’t have any easy chairs, didn’t have any meditation room, didn’t have any purple tile roof. It was a plain cement block building with a flat asphalt roof. It used to be a Gulf Lubritorium, and the signs outside still claimed it was. It wasn’t even called a Greta Garball. Mr. Garball called it The South Side Ethical Suicide Parlor, but their weren’t even any signs that said it was that.
We had a cash register, a pad of release forms, Mr. Barball’s Chrysler Imperial parked over a grease pit, a length of green plastic garden hose running from the exhaust pipe of the Chrysler to a hole in the telephone booth, and a big sign over the telephone booth that said, “Danger! Carbon monoxide. Enter this booth at your own risk! You have been warned!”
We charged everybody, regardless of their circumstances, a flat hundred dollars, plus fifty cents for notarizing their signature on the release form. Mr. Garbell was a notary public,
We were very democratic. We never turned anybody down on account of race, color, or creed.
We charged a flat hundred dollars. That was a package deal that included notifying the next of kin and transportation to any mortuary inside the city limits. The only extra charge was whatever the customer wanted to pay Mr. Garball for notarizing the release form. Mr. Garball was a notary public, and the customers generally give him somewhere between ten cents and a dollar. Mr. Garball put whatever they gave him in a cigar box. and he passed On Sunday he would give whatever he would give the money in the cigar box to the Church his Church.
· · ·
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 absolute
ly 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.
Welcome to the Monkey House: The Special Edition Page 34