Talking With Kurt Vonnegut

I once had a telephone conversation with Kurt Vonnegut. Maybe. It was my senior year of college, and somehow my roommate, Gerry, and my best friend through high school and college, Gary (all English majors) had somehow got Vonnegut’s son’s phone number in, as I recall, Connecticut. This is all very vague memory. But I think we reached the son, and he said that his father wasn’t there, but that he, the son, would call us a bit later when he, the father, would be there. And he did. And his father, Kurt Vonnegut, was all of a sudden on the phone. We passed the phone around. I have no recollection what we talked about, probably mostly about his works, maybe something about the Vietnam War, both shared subjects of interest. After a half hour or so, we hung up. And then the speculation began. Was that really Kurt Vonnegut we were talking with? If it wasn’t his son we first contacted (or even if it was), why wouldn’t he have just told us to fuck off and hang up? Why would Vonnegut agree to talk for half an hour with three goofball English majors in Kansas? Why would someone who wasn’t Vonnegut chat with us for half an hour pretending he was?

I talked recently with my friend Gary (also on the phone, as it happens), and he mentioned in passing this incident. Which means it’s not a figment of (only) my imagination. Obviously whatever the content of the conversation – if it really happened – is unimportant. All that’s important is that three senior English majors, in the spring of 1973, the year Breakfast of Champions was published, were able to spend some time talking with one of their contemporary literary heroes. So it goes.