Schlachthof-fünf

1972. She-it. I was fifteen years old in 1972. A sophomore in high school. Wrestling for the Lansdowne Vikings, 119 pound weight class. A virgin. And I was reading a lot of Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury and all the Harlan Ellison I could get my hands on. But I hadn't discovered Kurt Vonnegut yet. 

That didn't happen until two years later. I was wandering through a bookstore in Baltimore, Maryland, and I saw a book with an orange, yellow, and white (and a little bit of blue) cover entitled Breakfast of Champions. Like Wheaties. Which was enough to make me pick it up. I don't remember what or how much I read then, but I do remember seeing a crude drawing of a cow on one page and a crude drawing of a hamburger on another page. And that was enough for me. I bought it and began to read.

My girlfriend (I was now a high school senior, wrestling 140 pound weight class, no longer a virgin, started smoking) had this funny habit of saying, "Listen" before she said anything. And that was something Vonnegut did repeatedly in Breakfast of Champions. So of course I showed it to June. I opened the book at random, saw "Listen:", and showed it to her. Unfortunately it was a section in which Kurt Vonnegut defined buggery. June was not pleased. She tried to take my book and rip it in half. And I learned an important lesson about women. (And I've known a lot of women since then, but that lesson has never been contravened.) 

I'm pretty sure that when I finished Breakfast that I picked up Slaughterhouse-Five next. And I proceeded to read every Vonnegut book I could get my hands on. Eventually I found Between Time and Timbuktu, which was not really a Vonnegut book, but the script for a tv movie (1972) based on a pastiche of Vonnegut's novels and stories. It had an introduction written by Vonnegut, and in it he alluded to a Slaughterhouse-Five movie. Of course in those days--not only pre-internet, but pre-vhs--there wasn't any way to see a movie unless it was in the theater or on tv. And I wasn't really burning to see it, anyway, since Vonnegut's praise for it was a bit stinted.

44 years later . . .

I happened upon Glenn Gould. Saw an ad for a graphic novel (Glenn Gould: A Life Off Tempo by Sandrine Revel) which looked interesting, but at $14.99 for 134 pages was too expensive for me. But it was enough to get me interested in Mr. Gould, and that eventually led to me finding out that his music was used as the soundtrack for the Slaughterhouse-Five movie.

So I checked the DVD out from the library. As usual, I had to renew it a few times before I actually managed to put it into the DVD player. (Thank God for due dates and limited renewals; without them I'd never get to a lot of good things.) And it wasn't bad. Not great, either, but not bad. Good music. And it made me want to read Kurt Vonnegut again. But not just Slaughterhouse-Five. It made me want to go back to Player Piano and read ALL of Vonnegut. Again, as I've read all of his books. And I re-read everything from Player Piano to Galapagos the last time I got the urge to have a go at the (then) complete Vonnegut oeuvre. And I have read Breakfast of Champions and Slaughterhouse-Five at least a couple more times each. Oh, Cat's Cradle, too.

I saw the cover to a German edition of Slaughterhouse-Five that had an awesome cover . . . it showed a high up view of the city of Dresden after the bombing. There was a statue . . . maybe an angel  . . . on the left hand side of the picture. It kind of made me want to read the book in German. But my German is definitely not up to the task. And besides, that would be kind of stupid, wouldn't it?

But I didn't realize how much I missed Kurt Vonnegut until I saw that movie. 

Maybe I'll get around to watching the Breakfast of Champions movie now. I've had it for about five years now.