Welcome to the Monkey House: The Special Edition (45 page)

Easy Go
by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Sure—I used to work for Greta Garball.

I worked for him and then for his widow for seven months in Chicago. That was before I went into the aluminum storm window line.

Greta Garball was a nickname he had had as a little kid. His real name was Frederick Gaborian. But I never heard anybody call him anything but Greta or Mr. Garball.

I asked him once if he minded being called Greta Garball, and he said no. “Kurt,” he said to me, “in this business everything should look peculiar, even if it isn’t. It is absolutely fitting that the proprietor of this establishment should be a man named Greta Garball. When customers come in here, the last thing I want to do is put them at their ease, is make them feel at home. When people come in here,” he said, “I want them to get the distinct impression that they have come to a very sick place indeed.”

Mr. Garball never said so, but I am sure he hired me because I was a dwarf. Up to the time I asked him for a job he had been running the whole shooting match by himself. But he could not resist having a dwarf named Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., on the premises.

Mr. Garball himself was six feet four, and 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 herringbone twill coveralls with the words “To be or not to be” embroidered on the back.

There was only one Greta Garball in those days, down on Forty-second and Lake Park. It 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 out front still claimed it was.

It wasn’t even called a Greta Garball. Mr. Garball called it “The South Side Ethical Suicide Parlor.”

We had a cash register, a pad of release forms, Mr. Garball’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! Those entering this booth do so at their own peril! You have been warned!”

And that was it.

In those days it was carbon monoxide or nothing.

If Mr. Garball were alive today, he wouldn’t be proud of the coast-to-coast chain of ethical suicide parlors that bears his nickname.

He wouldn’t like the expensive locations and the purple tile roofs.

He wouldn’t like the choice of cyanide, strychnine, or carbon monoxide.

He wouldn’t like the green lawns and flagstone walks and soft music.

He wouldn’t like the pretty stewardesses and easy chairs.

Frankly, I think they would make him sick.

What would make him sickest about the modern Greta Garballs is their efficiency and the attitude of the people who run them. I know just what Mr. Garball would say if he could see one. “You call that an ethical suicide parlor?” he would say. “I’d call it a heartless, soulless slot machine!”

Back in the old days, even during the Christmas rush, Mr. Garball talked to every customer, sometimes for an hour or more. And he swore he would never expand the business to the point where he could not do that.

Oh, I know modern business methods have kept the cost of ethical suicide down while the cost of everything else has quadrupled and quintupled. I’ve seen the graphs in the Greta Garball ads in Life.

But I don’t think efficiency is everything.

And neither did Mr. Garball. For every customer he accepted, he turned three away. If a modern Greta Garball showed a record like that, the stewardess and the district sales promotion manager would be fired so quick it would curl their hair.

Two months ago I went into a new Greta Garball they had opened up on the Albany-Schenectady road. I pretended I didn’t want to live any longer. I wanted to hear what the stewardess would say so I could compare it with what Mr. Garball would have said.

She started off pretty much the way Mr. Garball used to. She said the company didn’t want my money, didn’t need my money. She said Greta Garball International was a kind of public utility, like the water company. She said Greta Garball International wanted most of all to serve people.

She said it was her sworn duty to make sure I was doing the right thing. She said ethical suicide wasn’t for everybody.

And then she put on a record of a song called “The Bluebird of Happiness.”

The record had a crack in it.

And when the record was over she said, “Well now, doesn’t that change your mind?”

“That was supposed to fill me with the will to live?” I said.

She froze right up. The very first thing they teach them in Stewardess School is how to spot people who aren’t serious, who just want free coffee and a cheap thrill.

“You’d be surprised if you know how many lives that record has saved,” she said.

“I’d be flabbergasted,” I told her, “if the number of people it had saved was as big as one. Is that all you do, just play the record for people?”

“We have a book we give people to read,” she said, “but I don’t think a mere idle curiosity seeker would be very interested.”

I thought she meant a Bible.

And I got very interested, because I thought having a Bible around was at least one improvement over the old days. One time I tried to get Mr. Garball to buy a Bible for the shop, and he said nothing doing. He said he had enough against his soul without practicing religion without a license.

“Could I see the book, please?” I said to the stewardess. I wanted to see what parts of the Bible were thumbed most, what parts the management recommended.

“Read to your heart’s content, Shorty,” she said, and she practically threw the book at me.

So help me God, the book was “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” by Dale Carnegie.

I read the first paragraph, and then I gave her back the book. “Well, thanks very much, Miss,” I said. “I’m so bouyed up now, I couldn’t possibly think of self-destruction.”

“Suit yourself, Peewee,” she said. She did her best to make me feel cheap and small. “Next time you’re down in the dumps,” she said, “why don’t you go cry on your girlfriend’s shoulder?”

She didn’t think a dwarf could possibly have a happy love life.

“For your information, Venus,” I said to her, “I am happily married to the most beautiful midget in the United States of America. Why don’t you take one of your own cyanide pills? It would sweeten up your whole personality.”

On my way out through the lobby I saw that the stewardess had hung her trench coat over some kind of poster. I pulled the coat to one side.

“It’s always darkest just before the dawn,” the poster said. It was signed by the New York State Commissioner of Ethical Suicide, who makes thirty-five thousand dollars a year.

Now let me tell you how a customer was treated when Mr. Garball was alive. Oh, Mr. Garball was rude, too. Actually, he was ruder than the stewardess I just talked about.

But when Mr. Garball was rude, there was kindness behind it.

Mr. Garball loved people.

“Hello, you big fat booby!” he would say to some poor soul who had shuffled into the shop. “What makes you think I want your lousy fifty bucks? What’s
fifty dollars to me? I’ve already got four houses, eight cars, and sixty-four suits.”

And then Mr. Garball would shake his head. “No, you are not the type,” he would say. “I don’t want your business. Death is not for you—not yet.”

The customer would mumble something about how death really was the thing for him.

“You’ve come to a pretty stuffy place here,” Mr. Garball would say. “It may not look like much, but this is actually the most snobbish retail outlet in Chicago. Think of this place as a very exclusive tailor shop. We won’t let just anybody but our merchandise. You have to be the right type for our merchandise, and we won’t let you out of here with it if we don’t think it fits.”

Then it would be up to the customer to prove that he really was the right type to go into the telephone booth for the big sleep. He would have to tell Mr. Garball one hard luck story after another, and the stories would have to be scorchers.

Mr. Garball was a tough man to impress with a hard luck story.

And when he said he didn’t think somebody’s troubles were so bad it really counted for something, because Mr. Garball wasn’t any Pollyanna.

Mr. Garball knew that life could get so snarled up sometimes that there wasn’t anything to do but give it up completely.

That was why he had founded the business. “What we are providing here, Kurt,” he said to me one day, “is a convenient, cheap, and no-nonsense exit from life for those whose luck is incurably diseased. For those to whom nothing good has every happened, for those to whom nothing good will ever happen, the door to our telephone booth is at long last the door to home.”

So when Mr. Garball said to a customer, “Brother, I have heard your tales of woe, and I give you my word of honor that self-destruction is not for you,” it was impressive. Chances are that just about the time he was saying that to a rejected customer an accepted customer would be going out the back door feet first.