When I was fourteen years old, my art teacher handed me his battered copy of BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS. “I hope you like it,” he said. This was the art teacher that got me into The Clash and The Ramones, and helped get me into the North Carolina School of the Arts-- a good egg, surely. Anyway-- when the guy that got you into The Clash gives you a book and says “I hope you like it,” you take it and read it and KNOW you’ll like it.

Then he waited a second before letting go of the book-- “You might want to hide it,” he says. “Or at least don’t tell anyone that I gave it to you.” We were in ruralish North Carolina. I didn’t blame him then and I don’t blame him now, and I hope he's given it to a kid every year since.

(For a while, I even smoked Pall Malls, the cigarettes of the true suicides, because Kurt Vonnegut smoked Pall Malls, and called them the cigarettes of the true suicides.

What do you want? I was fifteen, and Michael Watts' parents smoked them, so they were easy to get and, I WAS FIFTEEN.)

BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS was the book that changed my life, Saved my life, was my everything. And Vonnegut, surely the closest thing to Twain since Twain, became as crucial in my juvenile pantheon as were Joe Strummer and Bill Sienkiewicz.

(After Maiko, Mateus, and I were bleary eyed and blasted in Tokyo, and caught each other all swaying in time to OK COMPUTER, Maiko and I swapped Favorite Books. I got NORWEGIAN WOOD. She got BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS.)

(I have never been able to pick up SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE without reading half the goddamn thing on one uninterrupted swoop.)

(Vonnegut would, eventually, grade his own work, giving SLAUGHTERHOUSE an A-plus and BREAKFAST but a C.)

(So it goes.)

(And I swear to god, this next part is true:)

Last night, I had a very long, very detailed dream that was unremarkable in every single way, save for its actual content: Kurt Vonnegut and I were sitting in a room together, talking. We were talking about what it meant to lose your father. In the dream, my dad had just died, and Vonnegut was talking me through it.

There were no venii of the half-shell or time-strewn caterpillars in this dream, no curious transvestites playing piano. The fine china of Dresden remained intact and Diana Moon Glampers shot no one. The dream was simple, elegant; a one-act play in which an older man tried to ease a younger man through one of life’s grim outposts. We talked. I was sad; he was wise. Scene.

Good night, Mr. Vonnegut.

God bless you, Mr. Vonnegut.