Rhymes with orange

When I was in junior high school, the hippie girl who lived next door (the one with the boyfriend who saw a lot of bad shit in 'Nam) gave my mother a copy of a very popular new book called Breakfast of Champions. Mom didn't care for it, but I was all over that shit since I had heard the hippie girl reading it and laughing out loud.

For me, the book was one of those artworks you encounter that seem to speak directly to you and tell you that you are not alone in whatever godforsaken shithole you are currently stuck in. (Marion, Indiana being one of the worst, of course.)

As remains my M.O., I slowly bought up every book he had published previously. They were all in paperback, so I could just afford to buy them by saving up my allowance.

I became obsessed, not only because the author was a cynical son of a bitch, but also because he was from Indiana. Indiana. Someone from Indiana who wrote about shit that wasn't farming, and corn crops, and bolts of gingham, and taking Bobby Sue to the dance.

A couple of years later, in my first year in high school, I had a great English Lit class. The teacher was actually sorta young, and well-spoken, and she knew a lot of the same authors I did, she wasn't just always going on about Beowulf. She made a bulletin board covered in paper, a sort of literary graffiti board, and told us to write bits from our favorite poems and books on it, so that other students could read them.

Well, it was an elective class, and thus full of geeks eager to impress each other, and of course the teacher, with their amazingly mature and hip literary taste. Vonnegut was very popular, and I knew it wouldn't be too long before a quote from one of his works appeared on the board, and then of course every subsequent quote of his would just seem unoriginal and old hat. With my encyclopedic knowledge of the works of Vonnegut, I was determined to write not only the first quote, but the definitive quote, the slightly obscure but still accessible quote, the coolest fucking quote ever.

Only the teacher didn't feel the same way about my contribution. She began the next class by announcing to everyone that she didn't know "who wrote that garbage on the board," but it was "not acceptable." Also that while she would not report the person who wrote it, or even ask to know who it was, that person should know that "he or she should never, ever, write anything that nasty and despicable on the classroom board ever again."

Some of the girls in the class sniggered, and a couple of my friends, suspecting me, watched me from the corners of their eyes. But I just sat there, without protest. I was crushed. Absolutely crushed to my soul. How could she not know, I thought. How could she not recognize the brilliance? We're all almost adults here, I thought. How could great literature be naughty?

What I chose was from one of my favorite short stories, Welcome to the Monkey House, from the collection of the same name. It's a science fiction story about a future society where the government has decided to tackle the planet's devastating overpopulation problem in two ways. The first is to require that all citizens take pills to numb them from the waist down, thus robbing them of sexual pleasure and the desire to procreate. The pills also have the side effect of turning the urine bright blue. The second way is to encourage citizens to visit purple-roofed Federal Ethical Suicide Parlors, conveniently situated next to Howard Johnson restaurants, and to allow one of the virgin parlor hostesses to put an end to their suffering.

Enter the rebel, who tries to take the whole system down by tossing his pills, and seducing all the virgin hostesses away from their parlors of nice, quiet death. He does this partly by writing poems to them, and thus, I give you my awesome English Lit graffiti board Vonnegut quote:

I did not sow, I did not spin,
And thanks to pills I did not sin.
I loved the crowds, the stink, the noise.
And when I peed, I peed turquoise.

I ate beneath a roof of orange;
Swung with progress like a door hinge.
'Neath purple roof I've come today
To piss my azure life away.

Virgin hostess, death's recruiter,
Life is cute, but you are cuter.



- Kurt Vonnegut, Hoosier, November 11, 1922 - April 11, 2007