Like, And Actually, A Blow To The Head
By: Sean-Patrick Burke
I was introduced to the writings of Kurt Vonnegut in what can only be described as a very painful way. While other people might be able to say they were assigned Slaughterhouse Five in school or picked up a copy of Breakfast Of Champions expecting it to be a sports book, I received my first dose of his humor and insight in the form of a copy of Welcome To The Monkey House, thrown by an irate English teacher to the side of my head. It was a paperback, light and flexible, but it had a stiff spine, and a corner found its way into my eye.
Not a very nice way to begin a lifelong appreciation of a writer, but that’s how it started for me.
—
At the beginning of tenth grade, I did nothing in school. No homework, projects, nothing. I wasn’t on drugs, I just didn’t care. Now I have a wife, kids, a job, and a mortgage. I’m happy and I care about what I do today and tomorrow, but at that point in my life I was content staring out the window and lazily taking heat for it. After one quarter, my grade average was a twenty-five out of one-hundred. Failed everything. So my parents shipped me south to a Catholic boys boarding school whose advertisements showed strapping young men in khakis and blazers under a heading that proclaimed that the school made underachievers achieve.
I achieved there, for a time.
—
My name is Sean-Patrick Burke, but no one calls me Sean-Patrick. Just Sean. While I was at Catholic school, another Sean Burke was a goalie for the Hartford Whalers hockey team. That year, Sean Burke won as many games as he lost. My English teacher was the school’s hockey coach and a Whalers fan. He was very unsatisfied in Sean Burke’s performance. And on that particular day he was very unsatisfied with my performance as well.
—
It was one of my first few days at the new school, and I was bored. The class was finishing up the novel Deliverance by James Dickey.
(Note: I had just gone from a coed school to an all-male one. They could have picked a better literary introduction for me. A Separate Peace, perhaps? If memory serves me right, I believe that particular novel has significantly fewer brutal rapes. Perhaps. But I digress.)
Since I hadn’t read the book in my other school, I was supposed to be attentive but mostly just wait for the class to start the next book. So I did what I did at public school: Ituned out the teacher and stared out the window, and “Harrison Bergeron”, “Who Am I This Time?”, “Epicac”, and all the rest of those wonderful stories slammed against my head.
“Asleep in the goal again!” the teacher yelled, and picked up a copy of All Quiet On The Western Front. I cowered, he held back, the students laughed, I paid attention, and after the last proverbial twang of the banjo that class period, we all received copies of Monkey House, except for me.
I already had my copy.
—
My brief boarding school experience was like a discount version of Dead Poets Society. Instead of going into a cave and reciting poetry, this group of boys converged in a converted room dominated by a large sectional couch that stank of feet and cheese and spilled soda and watched professional wrestling and basketball and Jerry Springer and recited insults amongst themselves.
I spent a lot of time in my room, reading.
That first time I read Monkey House, I read according to the syllabus (we didn’t have to read them all, and those we did weren’t in the original ordering). The stories had energy and wit that I felt had been drained from my life, and they also had a skeptical view of life that I felt growing every day inside my mind. I plowed through it again, front to back, and then got a copy of Slaughterhouse from the library.
So it went, late fall through late spring.
—
I left that school and returned to my old public school the following year. I adjusted to the freedom from having my entire day scheduled from waking up to lights out, but I kept reading Vonnegut. I have yet to kick the habit.
For Christmas this past year my wife bought me a copy of Look At The Birdie, and I’ve been taking it slowly, reading (on average) one story a month. I feel strange looking at the bookshelf knowing I’ll be coming to the end of new-to-me stories soon, after fourteen-or-so years of reading. His stories hold up to repeated readings, but like many things in life, you never forget your first time. Especially if you get hit in the head right before it happens.
{ 4 comments }

