“You guys go on ahead without me.”

—Billy Pilgrim, “Slaughterhouse Five”

Sixty-some-odd years after surviving the razing of Dresden, Germany as a young G.I. in the waning days of WWII by taking shelter in the basement of the slaughterhouse where he was being held prisoner, time and tide have accomplished what her majesty’s RAF and Nazi Germany’s finest couldn’t, and unstuck Kurt Vonnegut in time.

Kurt Vonnegut 1922—2007

When I was in high school in the late ’70s, That Special Teacher that some of us were fortunate enough to have, dismissed me from the rigors of her English class’ regular curriculum and introduced me to, among other dangerous thinkers, the late Mr. Vonnegut’s work. (This is the same teacher, Mrs. Lockhart, who also about stroked-out when I told her I was working my way through the writings of Ayn Rand. The funny thing is, Rand and Vonnegut were both saying the same thing, only coming at it from different directions: the individual is more important than the collective.)

Kurt Vonnegut’s writing taught me that you could hold a funhouse mirror up to the worst depravities the human condition had to offer, still make your reader laugh and even leave them with at least an olive branch of hope when the telling was done (if that was in any event one’s purpose). Even after witnessing his mother drink Drano and “turn into a human volcano,” as he famously described his mother’s suicide in book after book; somebody’s mother was always committing suicide in Vonnegut’s books, usually by kitchen product.

For a couple of years thereafter most of my ‘creative writing’ bore the marks of my sincerest form of flattery as I tried my best to ape Vonnegut’s easy, eclectic yet conversational style. It’s pure shit, looking back on it, but it’s some of the purest shit of which I am least ashamed.

And now, the Great Man has passed. I’ll leave it to other, more able writers to eulogize him. I don’t feel worthy of the task for one thing; for another I’m sure he would find it all so much sentimental nonsense.

Discovering his work at the same time as being exposed to Hunter S. Thompson’s writing changed not just the way I looked at the world, but where I saw my place in it. Kurt Vonnegut was, more than almost any other writer, the voice of my generation. He was not just unafraid to cry “Bullshit!” in a crowded slaughterhouse; he considered it his responsibility. And he bequeathed that sense of responsibility, of moral outrage in a world gone mad, to me and every other aspiring writer who followed him.

That’s the legacy he left, and the one that I, within the constraints of my ability, try to honor in my humble Forum here whenever I sit down to bang out one of my humble left-wing rants.

In the unlikely event you’re reading this, but haven’t read any of Vonnegut’s books, I cannot encourage you strongly enough to check out his wares. If you’re just starting, “Breakfast of Champions” has always been my personal favorite. I also fondly recall “Sirens of Titan” and “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,” among his many other great works. In my mind, they all blend together in one seamless epic. That’s probably at least partly because many of Vonnegut’s books contain certain characters that keep popping up in story after story, like Kilgore Trout, failed hack science-fiction writer; and mothers who kill themselves by drinking the fine products of the Drano family of clog-cleaners. His books, like his characters, inhabited their own discrete alternate universe. A crazy, back-to-front world that looked scarily like our own.

In order to impress upon the unititiated a snapshot of the insoucience I loved and will miss so much about Vonnegut, I close with this drawing from the hand of the man himself, from “Breakfast of Champions” (which he also illustrated), of an asshole. So it goes: