Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut Read Free Book Online

drinking wine, I thought, although I had never liked alcohol.
    The worst thing, I thought, was that I would be asleep in an alley in the Bowery, say, and juvenile delinquents who loathed dirty old men would come along with a can of gasoline. They would soak me in it, and they would touch me off. And the worst thing about that, I thought, would be having my eyeballs lapped by flames.
    No wonder I craved an empty mind!
    But I could achieve mental vacancy only intermittently. Most of the time, as I sat there on the cot, I settled for an only slightly less perfect peace, which was filled with thoughts that need not scare me—about Sacco and Vanzetti, as I say, and about the Cuyahoga Massacre, about playing chess with old Alexander Hamilton McCone, and on and on.
    Perfect blankness, when I achieved it, lasted only ten seconds or so—and then it would be wrecked by the song, sung loudly and clearly in my head by an alien voice, which required for its completion that I clap three times. The words were highly offensive to me when I first heard them, which was at a drunken stag party at Harvard during my freshman year. It was a song to be kept secret from women.It may be that no woman has ever heard it, even at this late date. The intent of the lyricist, obviously, was to so coarsen the feelings of males who sang the song that the singers could never believe again what most of us believed with all our hearts back then: that women were more spiritual, more sacred than men.
    I still believe that about women. Is that, too, comical? I have loved only four women in my life—my mother, my late wife, a woman to whom I was once affianced, and one other. I will describe them all by and by. Let it be said now, though, that all four seemed more virtuous, braver about life, and closer to the secrets of the universe than I could ever be.
    Be that as it may, I will now set down the words to the frightful song. And even though I have been technically responsible, because of my high position in a corporate structure in recent years, for the publication of some of the most scurrilous books about women ever written, I still find myself shrinking from setting on paper, where they have perhaps never been before, the words to the song. The tune to which they were sung, incidentally, was an old one, a tune that I call “Ruben, Ruben.” It no doubt has many other names.
    Readers of the words should realize, too, that I heard them sung not by middle-aged roughnecks, but by college boys, by children, really, who, with a Great Depression going on and with a Second World War coming, and with most of them mocked by their own virginity, had reason tobe petrified of all the things that women of that time would expect of them. Women would expect them to earn good money after they graduated, and they did not see how they could do that, with all the businesses shutting down. Women would expect them to be brave soldiers, and there seemed every chance that they would go to pieces when the shrapnel and bullets flew. Who could be absolutely responsible for his own reactions when the shrapnel and bullets flew? There would be flame throwers and poison gas. There would be terrific bangs. The man standing beside you could have his head blown off—and his throat would be a fountain.
    And women, when they became their wives, would expect them to be perfect lovers even on the wedding night—subtle, tender, raffish, respectful, titillatingly debauched, and knowing as much about the reproductive organs of both sexes as Harvard Medical School.
    I recall a discussion of a daring magazine article that appeared at that time. It told of the frequency of sexual intercourse by American males in various professions and trades. Firemen were the most ardent, making love ten times a week. College professors were the least ardent, making love once a month. And a classmate of mine, who, as it happened, would actually be killed in the Second World War, shook his head mournfully and said,