Chapter 9

“You know what you can do with free will?” said Prince.
“No,” said Trout.
“You can stuff it up your ass,” said Prince.

--Kurt Vonnegut

 

As I write it’s February 28, 2006. Carnival time on this little island, as it was two years ago when I had my rough night watching Sean Penn win an Oscar and I saw a woman in the audience who’d won an Oscar and with whom I’d had sex and then I imagined Lisa accepting an Oscar for faking so well her love for me. There’s a double overhead north swell wrapping around the point just down the coast from where I write, perfect waves, what I live for, and I’m too dizzy and weak and shaky for a surf go-out.

One of my dogs back in Costa Rica, Tigre (a good boy), died, and I’m having a tough time with it. Marcos, my caretaker, told me this by phone. That Tigre may have been poisoned is not helping in my dealing with his death.

No, this time don’t laugh, please, at the relentlessness.

So this morning instead of surfing I stayed here at home… not home, since I don’t have one, but here where I’m living right now, the same house I was living in two years ago on Oscar night – the same TV set I watched on the table by my laptop – curled up like a poisoned slug on my bed and reading more from Timequake. I like to read, reread, K.V. when I’m stressed and depressed; it makes me feel more normal. In a sense reading K.V. is similar to unmotivated kindness, witnessing it, which I’ve said kills some of the hopelessness.

Here’s some stuff from Timequake I underlined when I first read it and I hope you’ll find it of more significance than female baboons copulating with all the males in their troop.

The premise of Timequake One was that a timequake, a sudden glitch in the space-time continuum, made everybody and everything do exactly what they’d done during the past decade, for good or ill, a second time. It was déjà vu that wouldn’t quit for ten long years.

K.V. goes on to say that in “the rerun” you’d be:

…betting on the wrong horse again, marrying the wrong person again, getting the clap again. You name it!

Only when people got back to when the timequake hit did they stop being robots of their pasts. As the old science fiction writer Kilgore Trout said: “Only when free will kicked back in could they stop running obstacle courses of their own construction.”

Amen on “obstacle courses of their own construction”! (The Terminator meets Franz Kafka!)

Trout didn’t mind writing it [a certain short story] again. Rerun or not, he could tune out the crock of shit being alive was as long as he was scribbling, head down, with a ballpoint pen on a legal pad.

A-fucking-men!

The moral at the end of the only love story Kilgore Trout ever wrote is this: “Men are jerks. Women are psychotic.”

That one sounds familiar!

Trout: “Listen, if it isn’t a timequake dragging us through knothole after knothole, it’s something else just as mean and powerful.”

Ditto!

But the point being, I suppose: Here I am again on the run (a rerun) and fearful on this little island in the same house and it’s again carnival time and the Oscars will soon roll around again (this Sunday) and I’m a mess again, so the premise of K.V.’s tale sort of strikes where I live. Plus, in writing this book, this nonfiction book, this memoir, I am of course creating my own timequake, in reliving the same shit again.

So there’s a double whammy effect.

Trout: “Wake up! For God’s sake, wake up, wake up! Free will! Free will!”

When I’m finished writing this, will free will kick back in? (See this chapter’s epigraph for my view on that.)

Speaking of free will, I may be losing control of this narrative, as if I ever did have control, as if I was ever more than just peripherally involved. This chapter was supposed to be about something else completely. It was supposed to be about the three weeks during which I believed I would soon be dead. I was going to talk about my fear, not of death but of dying. I was going to talk about Mom’s death, and how I tried to help, and how I wondered if she knew I was there, right at the end, and if that was at all a comfort. And I was going to talk about some of the thoughts I had the night Mom died, and of which I am ashamed.

I was going to explain why the fear of dying alone resulted in my not blowing holes with my Browning 12 and S & W .38 in my next door neighbor Barry’s house and of my not expelling Lisa from my life by her hair. How I preferred to have someone, even her, by my bedside when I was near death, even knowing she had faked everything and would be faking everything while I was dying. How I preferred having the devil there with me rather than being alone and wretched, like my father was when he died, sprawled in the filth of his living room with the Christmas card I’d sent him unopened on the floor, and his body desecrated by his goddamn cats.

I was going to talk more about all my dis-eases and terminal loneliness and my dark shit, whatever it is, and repeat something I said earlier about the fragility of body and soul, and how closely the two are connected.

I also had a note to somehow work in how there are only two worthwhile pursuits in life, pursuits that keep you hanging in, body and soul, these pursuits being art and science – relationships with other human beings don’t seem to cut it – and somehow as a Meanwhile I wanted to lay in a warning about science.

Trout: “Science never cheered up anyone. The truth about the human situation is just too awful.”

The point I wanted to make is that you should be careful with science, since even pure science and profound rushes of insight like E=MC2 (a secret of the universe) can have awful repercussions for humankind, while nothing in art can be harmful. The reason for this is that science is lacking in something on some level, although I’m not sure what I mean by that. (That K.V. says these same things in his writings is one of the reasons I like reading him when I’m stressed and depressed. I guess it’s comforting to know that although I may be stressed and depressed, nuts, maybe, I’m not alone.)

There’s a joke I’m fond of that makes the point about science being lacking in something. It goes like this:

 

A scientist invents a way of creating life, of breathing life into dirt with a cosmic ray he’s developed. He says to God, “Hey, God, I can breath life into dirt! We scientists don’t need you anymore!”

God says, “Let me see.”

The scientist sets up his equipment, a complex array of tubes and gauges and dials and a chamber where his cosmic ray gets focused just right. He picks up a handful of dirt and goes to put it in the chamber, where life will be breathed into it.

“No, no,” God says. “Get your own dirt.”

 

One person I’ve told that joke to is Stephon Alexander, the physicist who seeks to understand God through looking into first causes and playing jazz music on the saxophone. Stephon laughed his ass off.

Kilgore’s Creed: “You were sick, but now you’re well again, and there’s work to do.”

“Kilgore” is Kilgore Trout, of course, the fictional character K.V. uses in many of his books as an alter-ego. K.V. treats Trout very badly, puts him through all sorts of hell, in order to see how Trout handles it. If you’re going to write a book (not someday): Put your characters through all sorts of hell to see how they handle it. (I think K.V. gives this advice somewhere as well. So be it. None of my advice is at all original.)

The above, Kilgore’s Creed, is what Trout tells everyone when the timequake, the rerun, runs it’s course and we all have free will again. Trout, in spite of everything K.V. puts him through, in spite of the hopelessness he feels down in his bones, is giving it a shot.

We have to love him for that, as K.V. loves him.

From Can’t You Get Along With Anyone? A Writer’s Memoir, and a Tale of a Lost Surfer’s Paradise by Allan C. Weisbecker

Note: I wrote the above chapter before KV passed away. I’ve left the last line in the present tense because I believe that as long as he’s being read, KV still lives.

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