God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian Read online

  “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 Torrington. He said there was a Virginian, Thomas Jefferson, who had actually encapsulated God in only six words: “All men are created equal.”

  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 said. “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 a-molderin’ in the grave,” said John Brown, “be my truth which goes marchin’ on.”

  (Choral rendition of one stanza of “Battle Hymn of the Republic”)

  This is Kurt Vonnegut, signing off in the lethal injection facility at Huntsville, Texas. Until the next time, ta ta.

  during yesterday’s controlled

  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 Arly A. Burke, Chief of Naval Operations from 1955 to 1961. 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 1919, 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 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 funeral, 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.”

  dr. jack kevorkian has again

  unstrapped me from what has become my personal gurney, here, in the lethal injection facility at Huntsville, 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 governments—and there is no other sort of government—to 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 me: “I did my best to entertain.”

  Signing off now. Hey, Jack, waddaya say we go downtown for some of that good old Tex-Mex cuisine?

  during what has been almost

  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 hadn’t met before. This great American died in 1926 at the age of seventy-one when I was only four years old.

  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 said.

  “What a shame,” he said. 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.

  this is kurt vonnegut.

  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 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 New 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.

  jack kevorkian and i thought

  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 woman! Her name is Vivian Hallinan.

  What made me want to meet her was one word in the headline on her obituary in the New York 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 “colorful?” Two possible synonyms suggested themselves: “clownish” or “cute.”

  I have now cracked the code. “Colorful” in the NewYork Times means unbelievably good looking and personable and rich, but socialist.

  You want to talk “colorful?” Vivian’s late lawyer husband Vincent Hallinan, loaded with real estate bucks, back in 1952 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 1964.

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

  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. Roose
velt was called by his enemies: “A traitor to her class.”

  dr. kevorkian has just

  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 course, were among those casualties, along with four million other Germans, six million Jews, eighteen million citizens of the Soviet Union, and so on.

  “I paid my dues along with everybody else,” he 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 1889–1945. Underneath should be a two-word sentence in German: “Entschuldigen Sie.”

  Roughly translated into English, this comes out, “I Beg Your Pardon,” or “Excuse Me.”

  during today’s controlled near-death

  experience, I spoke to John 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 1996. 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.

  this is kurt vonnegut,

  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 NewYork 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 she replied with shrugs and in three different romance languages.

  “Así es la vida,” she said.

  “C’é la vita,” she said.

  “C’est la vie,” she said.

  And then: “Go fly a kite!”

  during my controlled near-death

  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, how the blue tunnel works.

  It isn’t enough for Newton that during his eighty-five years on Earth he invented calculus, 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 deaf, 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 unsatisfied.

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

  i have just interviewed

  Peter Pellegrino, who died last March 26, age eighty-two, in his home in Newtown, Pennsylvania. Mr. Pellegrino 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 F.A.A.

  He asked if I’d 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, man—get 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 is 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, ‘Heaven and Its Discontents.’ ” He said to Pellegrino, ironically of course, “If you’d had crack cocaine on Earth, I suppose Heaven would also be a disappointment.”

  “Bingo!” said Pellegrino.

  Even as a child, he said, he knew he belonged up in the sky, not on the ground, and I quote: “… just 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 propellers, 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.

  when i went looking

  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 1998. 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 IQ 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 cell. In a cell, he said, he wouldn’t give a darn how much time was passing by. Actually, he used the “s” 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 being taught that ‘the big n’ was some kind of American hero, like George effing Washington. Because of my little old bullet,” he said, “the shit ‘the big n’ said has been carved into marble monuments and inlaid with effing gold, I hear.”

  This is Kurt Vonnegut in the effing state-of-the-art lethal injection facility in Huntsville, effing, Texas signing off.

  during my most recent controlled

  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 asked if it had a name, and I said, “Indianapolis.”

  I congratulated him on all the Oscars the movie Shakespeare in Love had won, since it had his play Romeo and Juliet as its centerpiece.

  He said of the Oscars, and of the mo
vie 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 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 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.” That 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 thee 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 might have asked the greatest writer who ever lived could be found in Bartlett’s 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 is, 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?”