KURT VONNEGUT 


SEVEN STORIES PRESS 
York • London 



 © © 
by Kurt Vonnegut 

A Seven Stories First Edition 

Seven Stories Press 
Watts Street 
New York, NY 


Distributed in Canada by

 
Toronto. 
Distributed in the

 
by London. 

All rights reserved. 

Special thanks to Marty ofWNYC, who served as city 
desk editor to our roving reporter on the Afterlife, encouraging 
him to keep digging away at the story, and getting public radio to 
pay him a buck a word, which isn't bad for an out-of-the-way beat 
like Heaven. 

Portions of the introduction to this book were adapted from a 
graduation address delivered by the author at Agnes Scott College, 
Atlanta, Georgia, on May

 
1999. 

ISBN: 

Printed in the 



INTRODUCTION . 

GOD BLESSYOU, DR KEVORKIAN

 21 

INDEX OF PERSONS

 79 


AWORD FROMWNYC'S REPORTER

 
THE AFTERLIFE 
My first near-death experience was an accident, a 
botched anesthesia during a triple bypass. I had listened 
to several people on TV talk shows who had 
gone down the blue tunnel to the Pearly Gates, and 
even beyond the Pearly Gates, or so they said, and then 
come back to life

 
But I certainly wouldn't have 
set out on such a risky expedition on purpose, without 
first having survived one, and then planned another in 
cooperation with Dr. Jack Kevorkian and the staff at 
the state-of-the-art lethal injection execution facility 
at Texas. 

The following reports were recorded for later 
broadcast by radio station WNYC. I hope they convey 


a sense of immediacy. They were taped in the tiled 
Huntsville death chamber only five minutes or so after 
I was unstrapped from the gurney. The tape recorder, 
incidentally, like the gurney, was the property of the 
good people of Texas, and was ordinarily used to 
immortalize the last words of persons about to make a 
one-way, all-expenses-paid trip to Paradise. 

There will be no more round trips for me, barring 
another accident. For the sake of my family, I am trying 
to reinstate my health and life insurance polices, if 
possible. But other journalists, and perhaps even 
tourists, will surely follow the safe two-way path to 
Eternity I pioneered. I beg them to be content, as I 
learned to be, with interviews they are able to conduct 
on the hundred yards or so of vacant lot between the 
far end of the blue tunnel and the Pearly Gates. 

To go through the Pearly

 
no matter how 
tempting the interviewee on the other side, as I myself 
discovered the hard way, is to run the risk that crotch



ety Saint Peter, depending on his

 
may never let 
you out again. Think of how heartbroken your friends 
and relatives would be if, by going through the Pearly 
Gates to talk to Napoleon, say, you in effect committed 


About belief or lack of belief in an Some of 
you may know that I am neither Christian nor Jewish 
nor Buddhist, nor a conventionally religious person of 
any sort. 

I am a which means, in part, that I have 
tried to behave decently without any expectation of 
rewards or punishments after I'm dead. My German-
American ancestors, the earliest of whom settled in 
our Middle West about the time of our Civil War, 
called themselves "Freethinkers," which is the same 
sort of thing. My great grandfather Clemens Vonnegut 


wrote, for example, "If what Jesus said was good, what 
can it matter whether he was God or not?" 

I myself have written, "If it weren't for the message 
of mercy and pity in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, I 
wouldn't want to be a human being. I would just as 
soon be a rattlesnake." 

I am honorary president of the American Humanist 
Association, having succeeded the late, great, spectacularly 
prolific writer and scientist, Dr. Isaac Asimov in 
that essentially functionless capacity. At an 
memorial service for my predecessor I said, "Isaac is 
up in Heaven now." That was the funniest thing I 
could have said to an audience of humanists. It rolled 
them in the aisles. Mirth! Several minutes had to pass 
before something resembling solemnity could be 
restored. 

I made that joke, of course, before my first near-

death 
accidental one. 

So when my own time comes to join the choir 

10 


invisible or whatever, God forbid, I hope someone will 
say,

 
up in Heaven now." Who really knows? I 
could have dreamed all this. 

My epitaph in any case? "Everything was beautiful. 
Nothing hurt." I will have gotten off so light, whatever 
the heck it is that was going on. 

Humanists, having received no credible information 
about any sort of God, are content to serve as well as 
they can, the only abstraction with which they have 
some familiarity: their communities. They don't have 
to join the to be one. 

Yes, and this booklet of my conversations with the 
dead-and-buried was created in the hope that it would 
earn a little bit of for me, but for the 
National Public Radio Station WNYC in downtown 
Manhattan. WNYC enhances the informed wit and 

11 


wisdom of its community and mine. It does what no 
commercial radio or TV station can afford to do any 
more. WNYC satisfies the people's right to 
contrasted with, as abject slaves of high-roller publicists 
and advertisers, keeping the public vacantly 
diverted and entertained. 

Whereas formal religions surely comfort many 
members of the WNYC staff, that staff's collective 
effect on its community is ideal so 
Earthbound and unmajestic that I never capitalize it. 
As I have used it here, "humanist" is nothing more 

' 

supernatural than a handy synonym for "good citizenship 
and common decency." 

I wish one and all long and happy

 
no matter what 
may become of them afterwards. Use sunscreen! 
Don't smoke cigarettes. 

12 


Cigars, however, are good for

 
There is even a 
magazine celebrating their

 
with male role 
models,

 
actors, rich guys with trophy 
on its covers. Why not the surgeon general? Cigars, of 
course, are made of trail mix, of crushed cashews and 
Granola and raisins, soaked in maple syrup and dried 
in the

 
Why not eat one tonight at bedtime? 
Firearms are also good for you. Ask Charlton 
Heston, who once played Moses. Gunpowder has zero 
fat and zero cholesterol. That goes for dumdums, too. 
Ask your senator or senatrix or congressperson if 
guns, like cigars, aren't good for you. 

My late Uncle Alex

 
my father's kid brother, 
a Harvard-educated life insurance agent in Indianapolis 
who was well read and wise, was a humanist like all the 
rest of the family. What Uncle Alex found particularly 

13 


objectionable about human beings in general was that 
they so seldom noticed it when they were happy. 
He himself did his best to acknowledge it when 
times were sweet. We could be lemonade in 
the shade of an apple tree in the summertime, and 
Uncle Alex would interrupt the conversation to say, "If 
this isn't nice, what is?" 
I myself say that out loud at times of easy, natural 
bliss: "If this isn't nice, what is?" Perhaps others can 
also make use of that heirloom from Uncle I find 
it really cheers me up to keep score out loud that way. 
OK, now let's have some fun. Let's talk about sex. Let's 
talk about women. Freud said he didn't know what 
women wanted. I know what women want. They want 
a whole lot of people to talk to. What do they want to 
talk about? They want to talk about everything. 
14 
objectionable about human beings in general was that 
they so seldom noticed it when they were happy. 
He himself did his best to acknowledge it when 
times were sweet. We could be lemonade in 
the shade of an apple tree in the summertime, and 
Uncle Alex would interrupt the conversation to say, "If 
this isn't nice, what is?" 
I myself say that out loud at times of easy, natural 
bliss: "If this isn't nice, what is?" Perhaps others can 
also make use of that heirloom from Uncle I find 
it really cheers me up to keep score out loud that way. 
OK, now let's have some fun. Let's talk about sex. Let's 
talk about women. Freud said he didn't know what 
women wanted. I know what women want. They want 
a whole lot of people to talk to. What do they want to 
talk about? They want to talk about everything. 
14 

What do men want? They want a lot of

 
and 

they wish people wouldn't get so mad at them. 
Why are so many people getting divorced today? 
It's because most of us don't have extended families

 It used to be that when a man and a woman 
got married, the bride got a lot more people to talk to 
about everything. The groom got a lot more pals to tell 
dumb jokes to. 

A few Americans, but very few, still have extended 
families. The Kennedys. 
But most of

 
if we get married nowadays, are just 
one more person for the 
The groom gets 

one more

 
but it's a The woman gets one 
more person to talk to about everything, but it's a 

When a couple has an argument, they may think it's 
about money or power or sex, or how to raise the 
kids, or whatever. What they're really saying to each 
other, though, without realizing it, is this: 

"You are not enough 



I met a man in Nigeria one time, an who had six 
hundred relatives he knew quite His wife had just 
had a baby, the best possible news in any extended 
family. 
They were going to take it to meet all its relatives, 
of all ages and sizes and shapes. It would even 
meet other babies, cousins not much older than it was. 
Everybody who was big enough and steady enough 
was to get to hold it, cuddle it, gurgle to it, and' 
say how pretty it was, or handsome. 
Wouldn't you have loved to be that baby? 
This rambling introduction is four times as long as 
the most efficient, effective piece of writing in the 
history of the English-speaking world, which was 
Abraham Lincoln's address on the battlefield at 
Gettysburg. 
16 
I met a man in Nigeria one time, an who had six 
hundred relatives he knew quite His wife had just 
had a baby, the best possible news in any extended 
family. 
They were going to take it to meet all its relatives, 
of all ages and sizes and shapes. It would even 
meet other babies, cousins not much older than it was. 
Everybody who was big enough and steady enough 
was to get to hold it, cuddle it, gurgle to it, and' 
say how pretty it was, or handsome. 
Wouldn't you have loved to be that baby? 
This rambling introduction is four times as long as 
the most efficient, effective piece of writing in the 
history of the English-speaking world, which was 
Abraham Lincoln's address on the battlefield at 
Gettysburg. 
16 

Lincoln was shot by a two-bit actor who was exercising 
his right to bear arms. Like Isaac and Uncle 
Lincoln is up in Heaven now. 


So this is Kurt Vonnegut, WNYC's now emeritus 
reporter on the afterlife, signing off on paper this 
time. 

Ta ta and adios. Or, as Saint Peter said to me, with 
a sly wink, when I told him I was on my last round-trip 
to Paradise: "See you later, Alligator." 

K.V. 
November 8, 1998 and May 
1999 

17 


on my 
experience 
this morning, I found out what becomes of people 
who die while they're still babies. Finding that out was 
accidental, since I'd gone down the blue tunnel to o 
interview Dr. Mary D. Ainsworth, who died last 
March age eighty-five, in Charlottesville, Virginia. 
She was a retired but developmental 
psychologist. 
Dr. extravagantly favorable obituary in 
the NewYork Times said she had done more research than 
anyone on the long-term effects of bonding between a 
mother and an infant during the first year ofo 
alternatively, the absentminded lack of bonding. She 
21 
on my 
experience 
this morning, I found out what becomes of people 
who die while they're still babies. Finding that out was 
accidental, since I'd gone down the blue tunnel to o 
interview Dr. Mary D. Ainsworth, who died last 
March age eighty-five, in Charlottesville, Virginia. 
She was a retired but developmental 
psychologist. 
Dr. extravagantly favorable obituary in 
the NewYork Times said she had done more research than 
anyone on the long-term effects of bonding between a 
mother and an infant during the first year ofo 
alternatively, the absentminded lack of bonding. She 
21 

studied motherless babies in London, all kinds of 
mothering or lack of it in and then here in the o o ' 
U.S. of A. 
She concluded, with impressive scientific proofs, 
that infants need a secure attachment to a mother figure 
at the beginning of life, if they are to thrive. 
Otherwise, they will be forever anxious. 
I wanted her to talk some about nature versus nurture, 
and also about the mothering I myself had 
received when a that might not go 
a long way toward explaining me. 
But Dr. was bubbling over with excitement 
over how her theories were confirmed in 
Heaven. Never mind all the honors she'd received from 
fellow psychologists on Earth. It turns out that there 
are nurseries and nursery schools and kindergartens in 
Heaven for people who died when they were babies. 
Volunteer surrogate mothers, or sometimes the babies' 
actual mothers, if they're dead, bond like crazy with 
22 
studied motherless babies in London, all kinds of 
mothering or lack of it in and then here in the o o ' 
U.S. of A. 
She concluded, with impressive scientific proofs, 
that infants need a secure attachment to a mother figure 
at the beginning of life, if they are to thrive. 
Otherwise, they will be forever anxious. 
I wanted her to talk some about nature versus nurture, 
and also about the mothering I myself had 
received when a that might not go 
a long way toward explaining me. 
But Dr. was bubbling over with excitement 
over how her theories were confirmed in 
Heaven. Never mind all the honors she'd received from 
fellow psychologists on Earth. It turns out that there 
are nurseries and nursery schools and kindergartens in 
Heaven for people who died when they were babies. 
Volunteer surrogate mothers, or sometimes the babies' 
actual mothers, if they're dead, bond like crazy with 
22 

the little souls. Cuddle, cuddle, cuddle. Kiss, kiss, kiss. 
Don't cry, little baby. Your mommy loves you. Bet you 
have to burp. I'll bet that's the Feel better? 
Time to go sleepy-bye. Goo, goo, goo. 
And the babies grow up to be angels. That's where 
angels come 
This is Kurt signing off in the lethal o o o 
injection facility in Huntsville, Texas. Until the next 
time, goo goo goo and ta ta. 
23 
the little souls. Cuddle, cuddle, cuddle. Kiss, kiss, kiss. 
Don't cry, little baby. Your mommy loves you. Bet you 
have to burp. I'll bet that's the Feel better? 
Time to go sleepy-bye. Goo, goo, goo. 
And the babies grow up to be angels. That's where 
angels come 
This is Kurt signing off in the lethal o o o 
injection facility in Huntsville, Texas. Until the next 
time, goo goo goo and ta ta. 
23 

us morning, 
near-death experience, I was lucky enough to meet, 
at the far end of the blue tunnel, a man named 
Salvatore Biagini. Last July 8th, Mr. Biagini, a retired 
construction worker, age seventy, suffered a fatal 
heart attack while rescuing his beloved schnauzer, 
Teddy, from an assault by an unrestrained bull 
named in Queens. 
The pit bull, with no previous record of violence 
against man or beast, jumped a four-foot fence in 
order to have at Teddy. Mr. Biagini, an unarmed man 
with a of heart trouble, him, allowing J 
the schnauzer to run away. So the pit bull bit Mr. 
25 
us morning, 
near-death experience, I was lucky enough to meet, 
at the far end of the blue tunnel, a man named 
Salvatore Biagini. Last July 8th, Mr. Biagini, a retired 
construction worker, age seventy, suffered a fatal 
heart attack while rescuing his beloved schnauzer, 
Teddy, from an assault by an unrestrained bull 
named in Queens. 
The pit bull, with no previous record of violence 
against man or beast, jumped a four-foot fence in 
order to have at Teddy. Mr. Biagini, an unarmed man 
with a of heart trouble, him, allowing J 
the schnauzer to run away. So the pit bull bit Mr. 
25 

 in several places and then Mr. heart 
quit never to beat again. 1 O 
I asked this heroic pet lover how it felt to have died 
for a named Teddy. Salvador Biagini was 
philosophical. He said it sure as heck beat dying for 
absolutely nothing in the Viet Nam War. 
26 
in several places and then Mr. heart 
quit never to beat again. 1 O 
I asked this heroic pet lover how it felt to have died 
for a named Teddy. Salvador Biagini was 
philosophical. He said it sure as heck beat dying for 
absolutely nothing in the Viet Nam War. 
26 

after this 
morning s 


near-death experience I am almost literally heartbroken 
that there was no way for me to take a tape recorder 
down the blue tunnel to Heaven and back again. Never 
before had there been a New

 
brass band, 
led by the late Louis Armstrong, to greet a new arrival 
with a rousing rendition of "When the Saints Come 
Marching recipient of this very rare and merry 
honor, accorded to only one in ten million newly dead 
people,

 
told, was an Australian Aborigine, with 
some white blood, named Birnum Birnum. 
When white settlers came in the nineteenth century, 
the natives of Australia and nearby Tasmania had the 

27 


simplest and most primitive cultures of any people 

then on

 
were regarded as vermin, with no 

more minds and souls than

 
say. They were shot; 
they were poisoned. Only in

 
practically the day 

before

 
were the surviving Australian 

Aborigines granted citizenship, thanks to demonstrations 
led by Birnum He was the first of his 
people to attend law school. 

There were no survivors on Tasmania. I asked him 
for a sound bite about the to take back to 
WNYC. He said they were victims of the only completely 
successful genocide of which we know. Louis 
Armstrong broke into our conversation to say the 
Tasmanians were as gifted and intelligent as anybody, 
given good Two members of his current band, 
he said, were Tasmanians. One played clarinet; the 
other one played a mean gutbucket, or slide trombone. 

This is Kurt Vonnegut, reporter on the 
Afterlife, signing off. 

28 


experience was a real honey! I interviewed John 
body lies in the grave, 
but whose truth goes marchin'

 
One hundred forty 
years ago, come October 
he was hanged for treason 
against the United States of America. At the head of a 
force of only eighteen other anti-slavery fanatics, he 
captured the virtually unguarded Federal Armory at 
Harper's Ferry, Virginia. His plan?To pass out weapons 
to slaves, so they could overthrow their masters. 
Suicide. 
Law-abiding citizens opened fire from all sides, 
killing eight of his men, two of them his sons. He 


29 


self was taken prisoner by a force of United States 
Marines, sworn to uphold the Constitution. Their 
commander was Colonel Robert

 
Lee. 
John Brown wears a hangman's noose for a necktie 
up in Heaven. I asked him about it, and he said, 
"Where's yours? Where's yours?" 

His eyes were like glowing coins. "Without shedding 
of

 
he said, "there is no remission of sin." It 
turns out that's in the New Testament, Hebrews 
I congratulated him on what

 
said on his way to 
be hanged before a gleeful, jeering throng of white 
folks. I quote: "This is a beautiful country." In only five 
words, he had somehow encapsulated the full horror 
of the most hideous legal atrocities committed by a 
civilized nation until the Holocaust. 
"Slavery was legal under American law," he said. 
"The Holocaust was legal under German law," he said. 
John Brown is a Connecticut Yankee, born in

 
He said there was a Virginian, Thomas 

30 


Jefferson, who had actually encapsulated God in only 
six words: "All men are created 
Brown was twenty when Jefferson died. "This perfect 
gentleman, sophisticated, scientific, wise," John 
Brown went on, "was able to write those incomparable 
sacred words while owning slaves. Tell me: Am I really 
the only person to realize that he, by his example, made 
our beautiful country an evil society from the very first, 
where subservience of persons of color to white people 
was deemed in perfect harmony with natural law?" 
"I want to get this straight," I "Are you saying 
that Thomas Jefferson, possibly our country's most 
beloved founding father, after George Washington, was 
an evil man?" 
"Let that, while my body lies in the 
grave," said John Brown, "be my truth which goes 
marchin' on." 
(Choral of one stanza "Battle Hymn 
31 
Jefferson, who had actually encapsulated God in only 
six words: "All men are created 
Brown was twenty when Jefferson died. "This perfect 
gentleman, sophisticated, scientific, wise," John 
Brown went on, "was able to write those incomparable 
sacred words while owning slaves. Tell me: Am I really 
the only person to realize that he, by his example, made 
our beautiful country an evil society from the very first, 
where subservience of persons of color to white people 
was deemed in perfect harmony with natural law?" 
"I want to get this straight," I "Are you saying 
that Thomas Jefferson, possibly our country's most 
beloved founding father, after George Washington, was 
an evil man?" 
"Let that, while my body lies in the 
grave," said John Brown, "be my truth which goes 
marchin' on." 
(Choral of one stanza "Battle Hymn 
31 

This is Kurt

 
signing off in the lethal 

injection facility at Huntsville, Texas. Until the next

 
ta 


32 


yesterday s 


near-death experience, I chatted just inside the 
Pearly Gates with Roberta Gorsuch Burke, married 
for seventy-two years back here on Earth to Admiral

 
A. Burke, Chief of Naval Operations from 
to 
He led the navy into the Nuclear Age. 

She died last July at the age of ninety-eight. 
Admiral Burke, by then retired of course, died a year 
before that at the age of ninety-nine. They met on a 
blind date in

 
when he was in his first year at 
the Naval Academy. On that date, she was a last 
minute substitute for her older sister. Fate. 

They married four years later. If past performance 

33 


is any indication, they will surely stay married there at 
the far end of the blue tunnel throughout all eternity. 
She said to me, "Why fool around?" President Clinton 

told her at her husband's

 
when she still had a 

year to live, "You have blessed America with your service 
and set an example not only for navy wives today, 
and to come, but for all Americans." 

The simple epitaph Roberta Gorsuch Burke chose 
for her tombstone here on Earth: "A Sailor's Wife." 

34 


Jr. jack 

Kevorkian 

has again 
unstrapped me from what has become my personal 
gurney, here, in the lethal injection facility at

 Texas. Jack has now supervised fifteen controlled 
near-death experiences for me. Hey, Jack, way 
to go! On this morning's trip down the blue tunnel to 
the pearly gates, Clarence Darrow, the great American 
defense attorney, dead for sixty years now, came looking 
for me. He wanted WNYC's listeners to hear his 
opinions of television cameras in courtrooms. "I welcome 
them," he said, if you can believe it. This man 
with the reputation of a giant, comes from a rinky dink 
little farm town in Ohio. 


"The presence of those cameras finally acknowledges," 
he said to me, "that justice systems anywhere, 
anytime, have never cared whether justice was 
achieved or not. Like Roman games, justice systems 

are ways for unjust

 
there is no 

other sort of be enormously entertaining 
with real lives at stake." 

I thanked Mr. Darrow for having made American 
history much more humane than it would have been 
otherwise, with his eloquent defenses in court of early 
organizers of labor unions, of teachers of unpopular 
scientific truths, and for his vociferous contempt for 
racism, and for his loathing of the death penalty. And 
the late, great lawyer Clarence Darrow said only this 
to

 
"I did my best to 
Signing off now. Hey, Jack, waddaya say we go 
downtown for some of that good cuisine? 

36 


during 


[keen 


a year of interviewing completely dead people, while 
only half dead myself, I asked Saint Peter again and 
again if I could meet a particular hero of mine. He is 
my fellow Hoosier, the late Eugene Victor Debs of 
Terre Haute, Indiana. He was five times the Socialist 
Party's candidate for president back when this country 
still had a strong Socialist Party. 

And then, guess what, yesterday afternoon none 
other than Eugene Victor Debs, organizer and leader 
of the first successful strike against a major American 
industry, the railroads, was waiting for me at the far 
end of the blue tunnel. We

 
met before. This 

37 


great American died in 1926 at the age of seventy-one 
when I was only four years 


I thanked him for words of his, which I quote again 
and again in lectures: "As long as there is a lower class, 
I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I am 
of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free." 

He asked me how those words were received here 
on Earth in America nowadays. I said they were 
ridiculed. "People snicker and snort," I said. He asked 
what our fastest growing industry was. "The building 
of prisons," I 


"What a shame," he

 
And then he asked me how 
the Sermon on the Mount was going over these days. 
And then he spread his wings and flew away. 

38 


IS 


During my controlled near-death experience this 
morning, I had a continental breakfast with Harold 
Epstein, who died recently on his one-and-a-half-acre 
estate in Larchmont. He died of what can only be 
called natural causes, since he was ninety-four. This 
sweet man was a certified public accountant who, after 
a heart attack thirty-four years ago, surrendered in the 
company of his sweet wife Esta to what he himself 
called "Garden Insanity." 

Esta is still among us, and I hope she's listening. 
These two love birds, Harold and Esta Epstein, traveled 
around the world four times, seeking, and often 

39 


finding, wonderful new plants for American gardens, 
although neither one of them had any formal training 
as a horticulturist. At the time Harold's soul traded his 
old flesh for new flesh in Heaven, he was president 
emeritus of the American Rock Garden Society, the 
Greater

 
York Orchid Society, and the Northeast 
Region of the American Rhododendron Society. 

I asked him for a WNYC sound bite I could use in 
summing up his life after his heart attack so long ago. 
He said, "My only regret is that everybody couldn't be 
as happy as we were." The late Harold Epstein said that 
the first thing he did after he got to Heaven, after picking 
a flower he'd never seen before, was to thank God 
for the priceless gift of garden insanity. 

40 


1 1 • 
ana i 
we knew all the risks I was taking during the controlled 
near-death experiences he has been giving me. 
But today I fell in love with a dead Her name 
is Vivian Hallinan. 


What made me want to meet her was one word in 

the headline on her obituary in the New

 
Times: 

"Vivian Hallinan, 88, Doyenne of Colorful West Coast 
Family." What made someone or even a whole family 
"colorful"? I had interviewed people in the Afterlife 
who had been brilliant or influential or courageous or 
charismatic or whatever. But what the heck was 


41 


 possible synonyms suggested themselves: 
"clownish" or "cute." 

I have now cracked the code. "Colorful" in the New 
York Times means unbelievably good looking and personable 
and rich, but socialist. 

You want to talk late lawyer husband 
Vincent Hallinan, loaded with real estate bucks, 
back in

 
ran for president of the whole United 
States on the Progressive ticket! How clownish and 
cute can you get, even in California? 

Here's how clowning and cute. Vincent did six 
months in jail for his obstreperous defense of the labor 
leader Harry Bridges, who was accused of being a 
Communist during the McCarthy era. Vivian spent 
thirty days in the slammer for unladylike behavior during 
a civil rights demonstration in 


And get a load of this: Her five sons were all in the 
demonstration with her, and one of them, is 
now district attorney of San Francisco! 

42 


In Heaven, you can be any age you like. My own 
father is only nine. Vivian Hallinan has chosen to be 
eternally twenty-four, an utter knockout! I asked her 
how she felt about being called "colorful." 

She said she would rather have been called what 
Franklin D. Roosevelt was called by his enemies: "A 
traitor to her class." 

43 


Jr. 


unstrapped me from the gurney after yet another controlled 
near-death experience. I was lucky enough on 
this trip to interview none other than the late Adolf 
Hitler. 

I was gratified to learn that he now feels remorse for 
any actions of his, however indirectly, which might have 
had anything to do with the violent deaths suffered by 
thirty-five million people during World War II. He and 
his mistress Eva Braun, of were among 
casualties, along with four million

 
Germans, six 
million Jews, eighteen million citizens of the Soviet 
Union, and so on. 


"I paid my dues along with everybody

 
said. 

It is his hope that a modest monument, possibly a 
stone cross, since he was a Christian, will be erected 
somewhere in his memory, possibly on the grounds of 
the United Nations headquarters in New York. It 
should be incised, he said, with his name and dates

 Underneath should be a two-word sen


tence in German: 


Roughly translated into English, this comes out, "I

 
Your Pardon," or "Excuse Me." 

46 


 s s
luring

experience, I spoke to

 
Wesley Joyce, dead at sixty-
five, former cop and minor league ball player, owner of 
the Lion's Head Bar in Greenwich Village from 1966 
until it went bust in 
His was the country's most 
famous hangout for heavy-drinking, non-stop-talking 
writers in America. One wag described the clientele as 
"drinkers with writing problems." 

The late Mr. Joyce said it was the writers who made 
it their club of their own accord, which hadn't pleased 
him all that much. He said he installed a juke box in the 
hopes it would interfere with their talking. But they 
kept coming. "They just had to talk a lot louder," he said. 

47 


WNYC's reporter on the Afterlife. During yesterday's 
controlled near-death experience, I had the pleasure 
of speaking with Frances Keane, a romance languages 
expert and writer of children's books, who died of 
cancer of the pancreas this past June 26 at the age of 
eighty-five. It seemed to me that her generally laudatory 
obit in the Times cut her off at the knees 
at the very end with this stark sentence: "Her three 
marriages ended in divorce." I asked her about this and

o 

she replied with shrugs and in three different romance 
languages.

o o 

49 


"Asi es la vida," she said. 
la vita," she said. 


And then: "Go fly a kite!" 

SO 


during 

my 


experiences, I've met Sir Isaac Newton, who died back 
in 1727, as often as I've met Saint Peter. They both 
hang out at the Heaven end of the blue tunnel of the 
Afterlife. Saint Peter is there because that's his job. Sir 
Isaac is there because of his insatiable curiosity about 
what the blue tunnel is, Low the blue tunnel works. 

It isn't enough for Newton that during his eighty-
five years on Earth he invented

 
codified and 
quantified the laws of gravity, motion, and optics, 
and designed the first reflecting telescope. He can't 
forgive himself for having left it to Darwin to come 
up with the theory of evolution, to Pasteur to come 


up with the germ theory, and to Albert Einstein to 
come up with relativity. 

"I must have been

 
dumb, and blind not to have 

come up with those myself," he said to me. "What 
could have been more obvious?" 

My job is to interview dead people for WNYC, but 
the late Sir Isaac Newton interviewed me instead. He 
got to make only a single one-way trip down the tunnel. 
He wants to know what it seems to be made of, 
fabric or metal or wood or what. I tell him that it's 
made of whatever dreams are made of, which leaves 
him monumentally 

Saint Peter quoted Shakespeare to him: There are 
more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are 
dreamt of in your philosophy. 

52 


i nave 
Peter Pellegrino, who died last March 26, age eighty-
two, in his home in Newtown, Pennsylvania. Mr. 
was a founder of the Balloon Federation of 
America, and the first American to cross the Alps in a 
hot air balloon, and a validator of ballooning records 
for the National Aeronautic Association, and a balloon 
pilot examiner for the 
He asked if been a balloonist, and I said no. This 
was outside the Pearly Gates. I'm not allowed inside 
anymore. If I go inside again, Saint Peter says I'll be a 
keeper. 
Saint Peter explained to Pellegrino that I wasn't 
i nave 
Peter Pellegrino, who died last March 26, age eighty-
two, in his home in Newtown, Pennsylvania. Mr. 
was a founder of the Balloon Federation of 
America, and the first American to cross the Alps in a 
hot air balloon, and a validator of ballooning records 
for the National Aeronautic Association, and a balloon 
pilot examiner for the 
He asked if been a balloonist, and I said no. This 
was outside the Pearly Gates. I'm not allowed inside 
anymore. If I go inside again, Saint Peter says I'll be a 
keeper. 
Saint Peter explained to Pellegrino that I wasn't 

dead, that I was simply having a near-death experience, 
and would soon be back among the living. 

When Pellegrino heard that, he said, "For God's 
sake, a tank of propane and a balloon while 
you've still got time, or you'll never know what 
Heaven is!" 

Saint Peter protested. "Mr. Pellegrino," he said, 
"this

 
Heaven!" 
"The only reason you can say that," said Pellegrino, 
"is because you've never crossed the Alps in a hot air 
balloon!" 

Saint Peter said to me, "Not only do you still have 
time to go ballooning. You might also write a book 
with the title, and Its He said to 
Pellegrino, ironically of course, "If you'd had crack 
cocaine on Earth, I suppose Heaven would also be a 


"Bingo!" said Pellegrino.

o o 

Even as a child, he said, he knew he belonged up in 



the sky, not on the ground, and I quote:

 
as a 
fish flopping on a riverbank knows it belongs in the 
water." As soon as he was old enough, he went up in 
the sky at the controls of all sorts of airplanes, from 
World War I Jennies to commercial transports. 

"But I felt like an invader, an alien up there, tearing 

up the sky with my

 
dirtying it up with my 

noise and exhaust," he went on. "I didn't go up in a balloon 
until I was thirty-five. That was a dream come 
true. That was Heaven, and I was still alive. 

"I became the sky." 

This is Kurt Vonnegut, signing off with Jack 
Kevorkian in Hunstville State Prison. Until the next 
time, ta ta. 



for James Earl Ray, confessed assassin of Martin Luther 
King, on today's controlled near-death experience, I 
didn't have to wander far and wide into Paradise. 
James Earl Ray died of liver failure on April 23 of

 
According to Saint Peter, though, he has so far 
been unwilling to take a single step into the Life 
Everlasting awaiting him beyond the Pearly Gates. 

He's no moron: he has an

 
of 108, well above 
average when measured against the intelligence of the 
general American population. He said to me that he 
wasn't going to set foot into eternity until a prison cell 
was built for him. He said the only way he could feel 

cozy forever was in a prison In a cell, he said, he 
wouldn't give a darn how much time was passing by. 
Actually, he used the word, wouldn't give a good 
"shit" how much time was passing by. 
His conversation is still liberally spinkled with the 
"n" word for African-Americans, despite Saint Peter's 
pleas that he, for the love God, pipe the hell down. He 
said he never would have shot "the big n," meaning Dr. 
King, if he'd known the bullet would make what "the 
big n" said and fought for so effing famous all over the 
effing world. "Because of me," he said, "little white 
children are taught that big was some o o o 
kind of American hero, like George effing 
Because of my little old bullet," he said, "the shit 
big said has been carved into marble monuments 
and inlaid with effing gold, I hear." 
This is in the effing state-of-the-art o O 
lethal injection facility in Huntsville, signing 
off. o 
58 
cozy forever was in a prison In a cell, he said, he 
wouldn't give a darn how much time was passing by. 
Actually, he used the word, wouldn't give a good 
"shit" how much time was passing by. 
His conversation is still liberally spinkled with the 
"n" word for African-Americans, despite Saint Peter's 
pleas that he, for the love God, pipe the hell down. He 
said he never would have shot "the big n," meaning Dr. 
King, if he'd known the bullet would make what "the 
big n" said and fought for so effing famous all over the 
effing world. "Because of me," he said, "little white 
children are taught that big was some o o o 
kind of American hero, like George effing 
Because of my little old bullet," he said, "the shit 
big said has been carved into marble monuments 
and inlaid with effing gold, I hear." 
This is in the effing state-of-the-art o O 
lethal injection facility in Huntsville, signing 
off. o 
58 

during my 

\ 


near-death experience, I got to interview William 
Shakespeare. We did not hit it off. He said the dialect I 
spoke was the ugliest English he had ever heard, "fit to 
split the ears of groundlings." He askedname, and I said, "Indianapolis." 

 
it had a 
I congratulated him on all the Oscars the movie 
Shakespeare

 
Love had won, since it had his play Romeo 
and Juliet as its 
He said of the Oscars, and of the movie itself, "A 
tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying 
nothing." 

I asked him point-blank if he had written all the 

59 


plays and poems for which he'd been given credit. 
"That which we call a rose by any other name would 
smell as sweet," he said. "Ask Saint Peter!" Which I 
would do. 

I asked him if he had love affairs with men as well 
as women, knowing how eager my WNYC audience

O O 

was to have this matter settled. His answer, however, 
celebrated affection between animals of any sort: 

"We were as twinn'd lambs that did frisk in the sun, 
and bleat the one at the other: what we chang'd was 
innocence for innocence." By changed he meant 
exchanged: "What we exchanged was innocence for 
innocence

 
has to be the softest core pornography 
I ever heard. 
And he was through with me. In effect, he told your 
reporter to go screw himself. "Get

 
to a nunnery!" 
he said, and off he went. 
I felt like such a fool as I made my way back to the 
blue tunnel. An enchanting answer to any question I 

60 


might have asked the greatest writer who ever lived 
could be found in Familiar Quotations. The 
beaut about exchanging innocence for innocence was 
from The Winter's Tale. 

I at least remembered to ask Saint Peter if 
Shakespeare had written Shakespeare. He told me that 
nobody arriving in Heaven, and there was no Hell, had 
claimed authorship for any of it. Saint Peter added, 
"Nobody, that

 
who was willing to submit to my lie-
detector test." 
This is your tongue-tied, humiliated, self-loathing, 
semi-literate Hoosier hack Kurt Vonnegut, signing off 
with this question for today: "To be or not to be?" 

61 


never 
lave

 
been 
a 
about a dead person I've interviewed, but now is the 
time. Let's see how smart you are about the history of 
big ideas. 
For starters: This former Earthling, although not 
quite twenty, published an idea as persistent in the 
minds of thinking people today as Pasteur's germ 
theory, say, or Darwin's theory of evolution, or 
Malthus's dread of overpopulation. 
Hint number two: Breeding will tell. This incrediprecocious 
writer's mother was a famous writer, 
too. Some of her books were illustrated by none other 
than William Blake! Imagine having one's book 


63 


trated by William Blake! Her most passionate subject: 
the right of women to be treated as the equals of 

My mystery dead person's father was a writer, too, 
an preacher who wrote, most memorably, 
"God himself has no right to be a tyrant." 

Who were the friends of such distinguished parents? 
William Blake and Thomas Paine, and William 
Wordsworth to name a few. 

Hint number

 
This person was married to a 
celebrity, as famous for the romantic disorder of his 
life as for his poetry. He inspired the suicide of his first 
wife, for example. As Romantically as you please, he 
drowned when he was only thirty. 

Give up? I spoke in Heaven today to Mary 
Wollstonecraft Shelley, author, again before she was 
twenty, of the most prescient and influential science 
fiction novel of all times: Frankenstein: Or the Modern 
Prometheus.

 
was in

 
a full century before the 
end of the First World its Frankensteinian 

64 


inventions of posion gas, tanks and airplanes, flame 
throwers and land mines, and barbed-wire entanglements 
everywhere. 

I hoped to get Mary Shelley's opinions of the atomic 
bombs we dropped on the unarmed men, women, 

and children of Hiroshima and

 promise 
to try again. This time, though, she would only 
rhapsodize about her parents, who were, of course, 
William and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and about 

her husband, Percy Shelley, and his friends and 
hers, John Keats and Lord 
I said many people nowadays thought 
"Frankenstein" was the name of the monster, and not 
of the scientist who created him. 

She said, "That's not so ignorant after

 
There are 
two monsters in my story, not one. And one of them, 
the scientist, is indeed named Frankenstein." 
This is

 
in Huntsville, Texas, signing 
off. 

65 


i nave 

from 
having interviewed the poet Dr. Philip Strax, S-T-R-A



X. He died at the age of ninety on the same day as the 
baseball player Joe Dimaggio, and was the author of 
this charming couplet: 
better to have love and lust 
Than let our apparatus rust. 
Author of three volumes of poetry, Philip Strax was 
also a radiologist. He refined the use of x-rays, previously 
useful mainly for looking at bones, so they could 
detect malignancies in the soft tissue of breasts. The 
number of women's lives extended by early detection 
of cancers, thanks to mammograms, in baseball terms 
might be called thousands upon thousands of 
or runs batted in. 


67 


The turning point in his career as a physician, if not 
as a poet, was the death of his beloved wife Gertrude 
at the age of only thirty-nine. She was killed by breast 
cancer detected too late. Every moment of his professional 
life thereafter was devoted to fighting that disease: 
What a success! 
I found him at the edge of a crowd of frenzied angels 
who wanted their feathers autographed by Dimaggio. I 
said that his glowing obituary in the Times indicated 
that he was extraordinarily fond of women, and 
they of him. He recited these unabashedly feminist 
lines of his own composition: 
Let us remind our poor in deed and song: 
There are two men in this womanly world: 
Those who know they are weak, 
Those who think they are strong. 
This is in the indispensable company 
of Jack Kevorkian, who has saved my life a hundred 
times now, signing off until the next time. Ta ta. 
68 
The turning point in his career as a physician, if not 
as a poet, was the death of his beloved wife Gertrude 
at the age of only thirty-nine. She was killed by breast 
cancer detected too late. Every moment of his professional 
life thereafter was devoted to fighting that disease: 
What a success! 
I found him at the edge of a crowd of frenzied angels 
who wanted their feathers autographed by Dimaggio. I 
said that his glowing obituary in the Times indicated 
that he was extraordinarily fond of women, and 
they of him. He recited these unabashedly feminist 
lines of his own composition: 
Let us remind our poor in deed and song: 
There are two men in this womanly world: 
Those who know they are weak, 
Those who think they are strong. 
This is in the indispensable company 
of Jack Kevorkian, who has saved my life a hundred 
times now, signing off until the next time. Ta ta. 
68 

if is 
in 
afternoon 


of February

 
I have just been unstrapped from 
a gurney following another controlled near-death 
experience in this busy execution chamber in 
Huntsville, Texas. 

For the first time in my career, I was actually on the 
heels of a celebrity as I made my way down the blue 
tunnel to Paradise. She was Carla Faye Tucker, the 
born again murderer of two strangers with a pick-axe. 
Carla Faye was completely killed here, by the State of 
Texas, shortly after lunch time. 

Two hours later, on another

 
I myself was 
made only three-quarters dead. I caught up with Carla 

69 


Faye in the tunnel, about a hundred fifty yards from 
the far end, near the Pearly Gates. Since she was dragging 
her

 
I hastened to assure her that there was 
no Hell waiting for her, no Hell waiting for anyone. 
She said that was too bad because she would be glad to 
go to Hell if only she could take the governor of Texas 
with her. "He's a murderer, too," said

 
Faye. "He 

murdered 


Dr. Jack Kevorkian supervises my trip to near death 
and back. Your reporter from the Afterlife has to sign 
off now. Jack and I have been asked to vacate the lethal 
injection facility, which must be prepared for yet 
another total Speaking for both of us, I now 
say, ta-ta. 

70 


legal 


of Jack Kevorkian in Michigan, which is to say his conviction 
for murder one, have brought what I hope is a 
temporary halt to the near-death experiences he has 
been giving me. In order to provide some filler 
between WNYC's appeals for money, I have interviewed 
a person who is still alive. 

He is writer

 
Trout. I asked 
him how he felt about what happened in Kosovo, 
Serbia. I tape-recorded his reply, but his upper plate 
came unstuck again and again. For the sake of clarity, I 
repeat in my own voice what he said. 

71 


And I 
NATO should have resisted the nearly temptation 
to be entertainers on television, to compete movies 
by blowing up bridges and police stations and so 
on. The of the Serb tyranny should have been 
left unharmed order to support and should 
they return AH cities and even little towns are world assets. 
For NATO to make one to cut off nose to spite 
so to speak. 
Show 
The homicidal paranoia and schizophrenia of ethnic 
cleansing does worst quickly now, almost instantly, a 
tidal wave or volcano or Rwanda and now 
Kosovo, and who knows where else? The disease to take 
years. One thinks of the Europeans killing off the Aborigines 
the Western Hemisphere, and Australia and Tasmania, 
and the Turks' elimination their 
the Holocaust, which ground on and on Jrom 1 933 
to 1945. The genocide, the only 
72 
And I 
NATO should have resisted the nearly temptation 
to be entertainers on television, to compete movies 
by blowing up bridges and police stations and so 
on. The of the Serb tyranny should have been 
left unharmed order to support and should 
they return AH cities and even little towns are world assets. 
For NATO to make one to cut off nose to spite 
so to speak. 
Show 
The homicidal paranoia and schizophrenia of ethnic 
cleansing does worst quickly now, almost instantly, a 
tidal wave or volcano or Rwanda and now 
Kosovo, and who knows where else? The disease to take 
years. One thinks of the Europeans killing off the Aborigines 
the Western Hemisphere, and Australia and Tasmania, 
and the Turks' elimination their 
the Holocaust, which ground on and on Jrom 1 933 
to 1945. The genocide, the only 
72 

one of whichcessful. Nobody on the face of the Earth has a native

 
heard which was one-hundred-percent sucas 
a forebear! 

As is now the case

 
tuberculosis, 


is a new strain of the ethnic-cleansing bacterium that makes 
conceivable remedies of the past seem pathetic or even absurd. 
every case nowadays:

 
late! The victims are practically 
all dead or homeless by the

 
they 
mentioned on 

the six o'clock news. 

AH that good people can do about the disease

 
ethnic 

cleansing, now always a accompli,

 
to rescue the survivors. 
And watch

 
for Christians! 
signing off. 

This is
73 


my career 

in 

journalism, 

dear listeners, almost certainly ends today. No sooner 
had Jack Kervorkian unstrapped me from my gurney, 
and I sat up and prepared to tell of my interview 
in Heaven with the late Isaac Asimov, than Jack was 
hustled out of here in answer a murder 
charge in Michigan. Irony of ironies! This purported 
murderer has saved my life more than a dozen 
times! With Jack gone, this lethal-injection facility no 
longer feels like a home away from home to me. 

Forgive my mixed emotions, then, as I mourn the 
misery of one friend, Jack, who is still alive, while 
rejoicing in the relative well-being of 

75 


Asimov, who died of kidney and heart failure, age seventy-
two, eight years ago. 

When on Earth, Isaac, my predecessor as honorary 
president of the American Humanist Association, was 
the most prolific American writer of books who ever 

lived. He nearly five hundred of the 


my measly twenty so far, or to

 
de Balzac's 
eighty-five. Sometimes Isaac wrote ten published volumes 
in a single year! These weren't only 
science-fiction. Many were scholarly popularizations of 
Shakespeare and biochemistry and ancient Greek histoand 
the Bible and relativity, and on and on. 
Isaac has a Ph.D. in chemistry from Columbia, and 
was born in Smolensk, in the former Soviet Union, 
but was raised in Brooklyn. He hated flying, and never 
read Hemingway or Fitzgerald or Joyce or Kafka, 
according to his obituary in the Times. "I am a 
stranger," he once wrote, "to twentieth-century fiction 
and poetry." 

76 


"Isaac," I said, "you should be in the Guinness Book of 
Records." 

And he said, "To be immortalized along with a 
rooster named who weighed twenty-two 
pounds and killed two cats?" 

I asked him if he was still writing, and he said, "All 
the time! If I couldn't write all the time, this would be 
hell for me. Earth would have been a hell for me if I 
couldn't write all the time. Hell itself would be bearable 
for me, as long as I could write all the time." 

"Thank goodness there is no Hell," I


' 

"Enjoyed talking to you," he said, "but I have to get 
back to work a six-volume set about cockamamie 
beliefs in an Afterlife." 


"I myself would cheerfully settle for sleep," I said. 
"Spoken as a true humanist," he said, becoming 
more antsy by the second. 
"One last question," I begged. "To what do you 
attribute your incredible productivity?" 

77 


Isaac Asimov replied with but a single word: 
"Escape." And then he appended a famous statement by 
the similarly prolific French writer Jean-Paul Sartre: 

"Hell is other people." 

THE END 

78