Kurt Vonnegut - Jailbird

How well did I do at RAMJAC? During my incumbency, my division, including subsidiaries under its control, both covert and overt, won eleven platinum records, forty-two gold records, twenty-two Oscars, eleven National Book Awards, two American League pennants, two National League pennants, two World Series, and fifty-three Grammies — and we never failed to show a return on capital of less than 23 percent. I even engaged in corporate in-fighting, preventing the transfer of the catfood company from my division to General Foods. It was exciting. I got really mad.

We just missed getting another Nobel prize in literature several times. But then we already had two: Saul Bellow and Mr. Singer.

I myself have made Who's Who for the first time in my life. This is a slightly tarnished triumph, admittedly, since my own division controls Gulf & Western, which controls Who's Who. I put it all in there, except for the prison term and the name of my son: where I was born, where I went to college, various jobs I've held, my wife's maiden name.

Did I invite my own son to my parties — to chat with so many heroes and heroines of his? No. Did he quit the Times when I became his superior there? No. Did he write or telephone greetings of any sort? No. Did I try to get in touch with him? Only once. I was in the basement apartment of Leland and Sarah Clewes. I had been drinking, something I don't enjoy and rarely do. And I was physically so close to my son. His apartment was only thirty feet above my head.

It was Sarah who had made me telephone him.

So I dialed my son's number. It was about eight o'clock at night. One of my little grandchildren answered, and I asked 'him his name.

"Juan," he said.

"And your last name?" I said.

"Stankiewicz," he said. In accordance with my wife's will, incidentally, Juan and his brother, Geraldo, were receiving reparations from West Germany for the confiscation of my wife's father's bookstore in Vienna by the Nazis after the Anschluss, Germany's annexation of Austria in Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-eight. My wife's will was an old one, written when Walter was a little boy. The lawyer had advised her to leave the money to her grandchildren so as to avoid one generation of taxes. She was trying to be smart about money. I was out of work at the time.

"Is your daddy home?" I said.

"He's at the movies," he said.

I was so relieved. I did not leave my name. I said I would call back later.

As for what Arpad Leen suspected about me: Like anyone else, he was free to suspect as much or as little as he pleased. There were no more fingerprinted messages from Mrs. Graham. The last one confirmed in writing that Clewes and I and Ubriaco and Edel and Lawes and Carter and Fender were to be made vice-presidents.

There was a deathly silence after that — but there had been deathly silences before. One lasted two years. Leen meanwhile operated under the mandate of a letter Mary Kathleen had sent him in Nineteen-hundred and Seventy-one, which said only this: "acquire, acquire, acquire."

She had certainly picked the right man for the job. Arpad Leen was born to acquire and acquire and acquire.

What was the biggest lie I told him? That I saw Mrs. Graham once a week, and that she was happy and well and quite satisfied with the way things were going.

As I testified before a grand jury: He gave every evidence of believing me, no matter what I said about Mrs. Graham.

I was in an extraordinary position theologically with respect to that man. I knew the answers to so many of the ultimate questions he might want to ask about that life of his.

Why did he have to go on acquiring and acquiring and acquiring? Because his deity wanted to give the wealth of the United States to the people of the United States. Where was his deity? In Morristown, New Jersey. Was she pleased with how he was doing his job? She was neither pleased nor displeased, since she was as dead as a doornail. What should he do next? Find another deity to serve.

I was in an extraordinary position theologically with respect to his millions of employees, too, of course, since he was a deity to them, and supposedly knew exactly what he wanted and why.

Well — it is all being sold off now by the federal government, which has hired twenty thousand new bureaucrats, half of them lawyers, to oversee the job. Many people assumed that RAMJAC owned everything in the country. It was something of an anticlimax, then, to discover that it owned only 19 percent of it — not even one-fifth. Still — RAMJAC was enormous when compared with other conglomerates. The second largest conglomerate in the Free World was only half its size. The next five after that, if combined, would have been only about two-thirds the size of RAMJAC.

There are plenty of dollars, it turns out, to buy all the goodies the federal government has to sell. The President of the United States himself was astonished by how many dollars had been scattered over the world through the years. It was as though he had told everybody on the planet, "Please rake your yard and send the leaves to me."

There was a photograph on an inside page of the Daily News yesterday of a dock in Brooklyn. There was about an acre of bales that looked like cotton on the dock. These were actually bales of American currency from Saudi Arabia, cash on the barrelhead, so to speak, for the McDonald's Hamburgers Division of RAMJAC.

The headline said this: "HOME AT LAST!"

Who is the lucky owner of all those bales? The people of the United States, according to the will of Mary Kathleen O'-Looney.

What, in my opinion, was wrong with Mary Kathleen's scheme for a peaceful economic revolution? For one thing, the federal government was wholly unprepared to operate all the businesses of RAMJAC on behalf of the people. For another thing: Most of those businesses, rigged only to make profits, were as indifferent to the needs of the people as, say, thunderstorms. Mary Kathleen might as well have left one-fifth of the weather to the people. The businesses of RAMJAC, by their very nature, were as unaffected by the joys and tragedies of human beings as the rain that fell on the night that Madeiros and Sacco and Vanzetti died in an electric chair. It would have rained anyway.

The economy is a thoughtless weather system — and nothing more.

Some joke on the people, to give them such a thing.

There was a supper party given in my honor last week — a "going away party," you might say. It celebrated the completion of my last full day at the office. The host and hostess were Leland Clewes and his lovely wife Sarah. They have not moved out of their basement apartment in Tudor City, nor has Sarah given up private nursing, although Leland is now pulling down about one hundred thousand dollars a year at RAMJAC. Much of their money goes to the Foster Parents Program, a scheme that allows them to support individual children in unfortunate circumstances in many parts of the world. They are supporting fifty children, I think they said. They have letters and photographs from several of them, which they passed around.

I am something of a hero to certain people, which is a novelty. I single-handedly extended the life of RAMJAC by two years and a little more. If I had not concealed the will of Mary Kathleen, those at the party would never have become vice-presidents of RAMJAC. I myself would have been thrown out on my ear — to become what I expect to be anyway, if I survive my new prison term, which is a shopping-bag man.

Am I broke again? Yes. My defense has been expensive. Also: My Watergate lawyers have caught up with me. I still owe them a lot for all they did for me.

Clyde Carter, my former guard in Georgia and now a vice-president of the Chrysler Air Temp Division of RAMJAC, was there with his lovely wife Claudia. He did a side-splitting imitation of his cousin the President, saying, "I will never lie to you," and promising to rebuild the South Bronx and so on.