PLAYBOY: Kilgore Trout is the fictitious science-fiction writer you've used in some of your novels.
VONNEGUT, JR.: That's true. And he's writing a story now about a time when our Government understands that it isn't taking care of the people because it's too clumsy and slow. It wants to help people, but it can't get anywhere in time. So the President happens to visit Nigeria, where extended families have been the style since the beginning of time. He is impressed, and properly so. Huge families take care of their own sick and old, of any relative in trouble. They do it right away and at no cost to the government. So the President of the United States comes home and he announces that the trouble with the country is that nobody has enough relatives within shouting distance. Nobody can just yell for help. Everybody has to fill out forms. So the President is going to have the computers of the Social Security Administration assign everybody thousands of relatives.

PLAYBOY: At random?
VONNEGUT, JR.: Higgledy-piggledy. You have to throw out whatever middle name you have and substitute whatever name the computers give you -- names of Greek gods, colors, chemical elements, flowers, animals. The story begins with a political refugee coming to America, and he not only has to swear allegiance to the country and all that, he also has to accept a new middle name from the computers. They give him the middle name Daffodil. His name becomes Laszlo Daffodil Blintz. He has 20,000 relatives all over the country with the same Government Issue middle name. He gets a Daffodil family directory, a subscription to the Daffodil family's monthly magazine. There would be lots of ads in there for jobs, things to buy, things to sell.

PLAYBOY: Wouldn't his GI relatives take advantage of him?
VONNEGUT, JR.: If they asked for too much, he could tell them to go screw, just the way he would a blood relative. And there would be ads and articles in the family monthly about crooks or deadbeats in the family. The joy of it would be that nobody would feel alone and anybody who needed seven dollars until next Tuesday or a baby sitter for an hour or a trip to the hospital could get it. Whenever I'm alone in a motel in a big city, I look up Vonneguts and Liebers in the telephone book, and there never are any. Lieber was my mother's maiden name. But if I were a Daffodil or a Chipmunk or a Chromium, there would be plenty of numbers to call.

PLAYBOY: What if they didn't want to hear from you?
VONNEGUT, JR.: That's a fairly standard experience with relatives. It's also fairly standard for relatives to be glad to hear from you, to help if they can.

PLAYBOY: They wouldn't be compelled by law to give you what you wanted?
VONNEGUT, JR.: Hell, no. It would be like regular relatives, only there would be slews of them. If some guy came ringing my doorbell and he said, "Hey, you're a Chipmunk and I'm a Chipmunk; I need a hundred dollars," I would listen to his story, if I felt like it, and give him what I could spare, what I thought he deserved. It could be zero. And it wouldn't turn the country into a sappy, mawkish society, either. There would be more people telling each other to go screw than there are right now. A panhandler could come up to you and say, "Hey, buddy, can you help a fella out?" And you could ask him his middle name, and he might say, "Chromium," and you could say, "Screw you. I'm a Chipmunk. Go ask a Chromium for help."

Eventually, of course, the Chromiums would start thinking they were just a little bit better than the Daffodils and "I don't know what it is about those Chipmunks," and so on, but there would also be people of all backgrounds meeting as relatives. "Are you an Emerald? Shit, I'm an Emerald, too! Where are you from?" I know that as far as Vonneguts go, I've got some claim on those people. I got a postcard on my 50th birthday signed by a lot of people named Vonnegut -- a Catholic branch around Oakland, California. I don't know how they found out it was my birthday, but I got this marvelous card and I'd never met them.

One time a few years ago, I was speaking at the University of Hawaii and somebody came up to me and said, "Who's Fred Vonnegut?" I said I didn't know and he told me that Fred Vonnegut's name was in the newspaper all the time. So I picked up a Honolulu paper and in it there was this big used-car ad with a picture of Fred and a headline like "Come In And Ask Fred Vonnegut For A Good Deal." So I looked him up and we had supper together. Turned out that he grew up in Samoa and his mother was a Finn. But the meeting, the connection, was exciting to both of us.

PLAYBOY: Aren't links by name, though, what you call a false karass in Cat's Cradle -- a group that finds its identity in an irrelevant or artificial shared experience?
VONNEGUT, JR.: I don't know, but if it works, it doesn't matter. It's like the drug thing among young people. The fact that they use drugs gives them a community. If you become a user of any drug, you can pick up a set of friends you'll see day after day, because of the urgency of getting drugs all the time. And you'll get a community where you might not ordinarily have one. Built around the marijuana thing was a community, and the same is true about the long-hair thing: You're able to greet and trust strangers because they look like you, because they use marijuana, and so forth. These are all magical amulets by which they recognize one another -- and so you've got a community. The drug thing is interesting, too, because it shows that, damn it, people are wonderfully resourceful.

PLAYBOY:How so?
VONNEGUT, JR.: Well, thousands of people in our society found out they were too stupid or too unattractive or too ignorant to rise. They realized they couldn't get a nice car or a nice house or a good job. Not everybody can do that, you know. You must be very pleasant. You must be good-looking. You must be well connected. And they realized that if you lose, if you don't rise in our society, you're going to live in the midst of great ugliness, that the police are going to try to drive you back there every time you try to leave. And so people trapped like that have really considered all the possibilities. Should I paint my room? If I get a lot of rat poison, will the rats go away? Well, no. The rats will still be there, and even if you paint it, the room will still be ugly. You still won't have enough money to go to a movie theater; you still won't be able to make friends you like or can trust.

So what can you do? You can change your mind. You can change your insides. The drug thing was a perfectly marvelous, resourceful, brave experiment. No government would have dared perform this experiment. It's the sort of thing a Nazi doctor might have tried in a concentration camp. Loading everybody in block C up with amphetamines. In block D, giving them all heroin. Keeping everyone in block E high on marijuana -- and just seeing what happened to them. But this experiment was and continues to be performed by volunteers, and so we know an awful lot now about how we can be changed internally. It may be that the population will become so dense that everybody's going to live in ugliness, and that the intelligent human solution -- the only possible solution -- will be to change our insides.

PLAYBOY: Have drugs been a solution for you?
VONNEGUT, JR.: No -- although I did get into the prescribed-amphetamines thing because I was sleeping a lot. I've always been able to sleep well, but after eight hours of sleep, I'd find myself taking a nap in the afternoon. I found I could sleep from one to five if I wanted to, spend the afternoon seeing wonderful color movies. It's a common response to depression. I was taking these enormous naps and I decided it was a waste of time. So I talked to a doctor about it and she prescribed Ritalin. It worked. It really impressed me. I wasn't taking a whole lot of it, but it puzzled me so much that I could be depressed and just by taking this damn little thing about the size of a pinhead, I would feel much better. I used to think that I was responding to Attica or to the mining of the harbor of Haiphong. But I wasn't. I was obviously responding to internal chemistry. All I had to do was take one of those little pills. I've stopped, but I was so interested that my mood could be changed by a pill.

PLAYBOY: Do you experience manic periods as well as depressive ones?
VONNEGUT, JR.: Until recently, about every 20 days, I blew my cork. I thought for a long time that I had perfectly good reasons for these periodic blowups; I thought people around me had it coming to them. But only recently have I realized that this has been happening regularly since I've been six years old. There wasn't much the people around me could do about it. They could probably throw me off a day or so, but it was really a pretty steady schedule.

PLAYBOY: You say was.
VONNEGUT, JR.: Well, I've been taking lessons in how to deal with it. I've been going to a doctor once a week. It isn't psychoanalysis: It's a more superficial sort of thing. I'm talking to her about depression, trying to understand its nature. And an awful lot of it is physiological. In this book I've just finished, Breakfast of Champions, the motives of all the characters are explained in terms of body chemistry. You know, we don't give a shit about the characters' childhoods or about what happened yesterday -- we just want to know what the state of their blood streams is. They're up when their blood streams are up and they're down when their blood streams are down. But for me, this year is a much better one than last year was. Depressions really had me, and they don't this year. I'm managing much better. I was really very down the last couple of years, and by working at it, I've gotten myself up again. I'm getting help from intelligent people who aren't Freudians.

PLAYBOY: Early on in Slaughterhouse-Five, you mention getting a little drunk at night and calling old friends long distance. Do you still do that?
VONNEGUT, JR.: Not anymore. But it's wonderful. You can find anybody you want in the whole country. I love to muck around in the past, as long as there are real people and not ghosts to muck around with. I knew an obstetrician who was very poor when he was young. He went to California and he became rich and famous. He was an obstetrician for movie stars. When he retired, he went back to the Midwest and looked up all the women he'd taken out when he was nobody. He wanted them to see he was somebody now. "Good for you," I said. I thought it was a charming thing to do. I like people who never forget.

I did a crazy thing like that myself. At Shortridge High School, when I went there, we had a senior dance at which comical prizes were given to different people in the class. And the football coach -- he was a hell of a good coach, we had a dynamite football team -- was giving out the presents. Other people had rigged them, but he was passing them out, announcing what the present was for each person. At that time, I was a real skinny, narrow-shouldered boy.

PLAYBOY: Like Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse?
VONNEGUT, JR.: Right. I was a preposterous kind of flamingo. And the present the coach gave me was a Charles Atlas course. And it made me sick. I considered going out and slashing the coach's tires, I thought it was such an irresponsible thing for an adult to do to a kid. But I just walked out of the dance and went home. The humiliation was something I never forgot. And one night last year, I got on the phone and called Indianapolis information and asked for the number of the coach. I got him on the phone and told him who I was. And then I reminded him about the present and said, "I want you know that my body turned out all right." It was a neat unburdening. It certainly beats psychiatry.

PLAYBOY: In your books, a real sadness darkens all the fun. Despite your apparently successful self-therapy, do you consider yourself basically sad?
VONNEGUT, JR.: Well, there are sad things from my childhood, which I assume have something to do with my sadness. But any sadness I feel now grows out of frustration, because I think there is so much we can do -- things that are cheap -- that we're not doing. It has to do with ideas. I'm an atheist, as I said, and not into funerals -- I don't like the idea of them very much -- but I finally decided to go visit the graves of my parents. And so I did. There are two stones out there in Indianapolis, and I looked at those two stones side by side and I just wished -- I could hear it in my head, I knew so much what I wished -- that they had been happier than they were. It would have been so goddamned easy for them to be happier than they were. So that makes me sad. I'm grateful that I learned from them that organized religion is anti-Christian and that racial prejudices are stupid and cruel. I'm grateful, too, that they were good at making jokes. But I also learned a bone-deep sadness from them. Kids will learn anything, you know. Their heads are empty when they're born. Grownups can put anything in there.

PLAYBOY: Why were your parents so sad?
VONNEGUT, JR.: I can guess. I can guess that the planet they loved and thought they understood was destroyed in the First World War. Something I said earlier, that human beings were too good for this planet; that was probably the sadness in their bones. That's hogwash, of course. They wrecked their lives thinking the wrong things. And, damn it, it wouldn't have taken much effort to get them to think about the right things.

PLAYBOY: Are you like your character Eliot Rosewater in the sense of feeling very tender about all the sadness in the world?
VONNEGUT, JR.: It's sort of self-congratulatory to be the person who walks around pitying other people. I don't do that very much. I just know that there are plenty of people who are in terrible trouble and can't get out. And so I'm impatient with those who think that it's easy for people to get out of trouble. I think there are some people who really need a lot of help. I worry about stupid people, dumb people. Somebody has to take care of them, because they can't hack it. One thing I tried to get going at one time was a nonprofit organization called Life Engineering. If you didn't know what to do next and you came to us, we'd tell you. Our only requirement would be that you had to do what we told you. You'd have to absolutely promise to do whatever we'd say, and then we'd give you the best possible answer we could. But it turned out that nobody ever kept his promise and we had no way of enforcing it. We couldn't bring in a couple of hit men from Detroit.

PLAYBOY: Another way of dealing with sadness, of coming to terms with problems you can't solve, is through humor. Is that your way?
VONNEGUT, JR.: Well, I try. But laughter is a response to frustration, just as tears are, and it solves nothing, just as tears solve nothing. Laughing or crying is what a human being does when there's nothing else he can do. Freud has written very soundly on humor -- which is interesting, because he was essentially such a humorless man. The example he gives is of the dog who can't get through a gate to bite a person or fight another dog. So he digs dirt. It doesn't solve anything, but he has to do something. Crying or laughing is what a human being does instead. I used to make speeches a lot, because I needed the money. Sometimes I was funny. And my peak funniness came when I was at Notre Dame, at a literary festival there. It was in a huge auditorium and the audience was so tightly tuned that everything I said was funny. All I had to do was cough or clear my throat and the whole place would break up. This is a really horrible story I'm telling. People were laughing because they were in agony, full of pain they couldn't do anything about. They were sick and helpless because Martin Luther King had been shot two days before. The festival had been called off on the Thursday he was shot, and then it was resumed the next day. But it was a day of grieving, of people trying to pull themselves together. And then, on Saturday, it was my turn to speak. I've got mildly comical stuff I do, but it was in the presence of grief that the laughter was the greatest. There was an enormous need to either laugh or cry as the only possible adjustment. There was nothing you could do to bring King back. So the biggest laughs are based on the biggest disappointments and the biggest fears.

PLAYBOY: Is that what's called black humor? Or is all humor black?
VONNEGUT, JR.: In a sense, it probably is. Certainly, the people Bruce Jay Friedman named as black humorists weren't really very much like one another. I'm not a whole lot like J.P. Donleavy, say, but Friedman saw some similarity there and said we were both black humorists. So critics picked up the term because it was handy. All they had to do was say black humorists and they'd be naming 20 writers. It was a form of shorthand. But Freud had already written about gallows humor, which is middle-European humor. It's people laughing in the middle of political helplessness. Gallows humor had to do with people in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. There were Jews, Serbs, Croats -- all these small groups jammed together into a very unlikely sort of empire. And dreadful things happened to them. They were powerless, helpless people, and so they made jokes. It was all they could do in the face of frustration. The gallows humor that Freud identifies is what we regard as Jewish humor here: It's humor about weak, intelligent people in hopeless situations. And I have customarily written about powerless people who felt there wasn't much they could do about their situations.

One of my favorite cartoons -- I think it was by Shel Silverstein -- shows a couple of guys chained to an 18-foot cell wall, hung by their wrists, and their ankles are chained, too. Above them is a tiny barred window that a mouse couldn't crawl through. And one of the guys is saying to the other, "Now here's my plan. . . ." It goes against the American storytelling grain to have someone in a situation he can't get out of, but I think this is very usual in life. There are people, particularly dumb people, who are in terrible trouble and never get out of it, because they're not intelligent enough. And it strikes me as gruesome and comical that in our culture we have an expectation that a man can always solve his problems. There is that implication that if you just have a little more energy, a little more fight, the problem can always be solved. This is so untrue that it makes me want to cry -- or laugh. Culturally, American men aren't supposed to cry. So I don't cry much -- but I do laugh a lot. When I think about a stupid, uneducated black junkie in this city, and then I run into some optimist who feels that any man can lift himself above his origins if he's any good -- that's something to cry about or laugh about. A sort of braying, donkey-like laugh. But every laugh counts, because every laugh feels like a laugh.

PLAYBOY: What sort of things strike you as genuinely funny?
VONNEGUT, JR.: Nothing really breaks me up. I'm in the business of making jokes; it's a minor art form. I've had some natural talent for it. It's like building a mousetrap. You build the trap, you cock it, you trip it, and then bang! My books are essentially mosaics made up of a whole bunch of tiny little chips; and each chip is a joke. They may be five lines long or eleven lines long. If I were writing tragically, I could have great sea changes there, a great serious steady flow. Instead, I've gotten into the joke business. One reason I write so slowly is that I try to make each joke work. You really have to or the books are lost. But joking is so much a part of my life adjustment that I would begin to work on a story on any subject and I'd find funny things in it or I would stop.

PLAYBOY: How did you happen to begin writing?
VONNEGUT, JR.: The high school I went to had a daily paper, and has had since about 1900. They had a printing course for the people who weren't going on to college, and they realized, "My goodness, we've got the linotypes -- we could easily get out a paper." So they started getting out a paper every day, called the Shortridge Echo. It was so old my parents had worked on it. And so, rather than writing for a teacher, which is what most people do, writing for an audience of one -- for Miss Green or Mr. Watson -- I started out writing for a large audience. And if I did a lousy job, I caught a lot of shit in 24 hours. It just turned out that I could write better than a lot of other people. Each person has something he can do easily and can't imagine why everybody else is having so much trouble doing it. In my case, it was writing. In my brother's case, it was mathematics and physics. In my sister's case, it was drawing and sculpting.

PLAYBOY: Were you already into science fiction by then?
VONNEGUT, JR.: Most of it was in the pulps, you know. I would read science-fiction pulps now and then, the same way I'd read sex pulps or airplane pulps or murder pulps. The majority of my contemporaries who are science-fiction writers now went absolutely bananas over science-fiction pulps when they were kids, spending all their money on them, collecting them, trading them, gloating over them, cheering on authors the straight world thought were hacks. I never did that, and I'm sorry. I'm shy around other science-fiction writers, because they want to talk about thousands of stories I never read. I didn't think the pulps were beneath me; I was just pissing away my life in other ways.

PLAYBOY: Such as?
VONNEGUT, JR.: I dunno. I used to say I wasted eight years building model airplanes and jerking off, but it was a little more complicated than that. I read science fiction, but it was conservative stuff -- H.G. Wells and Robert Louis Stevenson, who's easily forgotten, but he wrote Jekyll and Hyde. And I read George Bernard Shaw, who does an awful lot of extrapolating, particularly in his introductions. Back to Methuselah was science fiction enough for me.

PLAYBOY: What do you think of it as a form? The standard critical appraisal is that it's low rent.
VONNEGUT, JR.: Well, the rate of payment has always been very low compared with that for other forms of writing. And the people who set the tone for it were the pulp writers. There's an interesting thing: When IBM brought out an electric typewriter, they didn't know if they had a product or not. They really couldn't imagine that anybody was that discontented with the typewriter already. You know, the mechanical typewriter was a wonderful thing; I never heard of anybody's hands getting tired using one. So IBM was worried when they brought out electric typewriters, because they didn't know whether anybody would have any use for them. But the first sales were made to pulp writers, writers who wanted to go faster because they got paid so much a word. But they were going so fast that characterization didn't matter and dialog was wooden and all that -- because it was always first draft. That's what you sold, because you couldn't afford to take the time to sharpen up the scenes. And so that persisted, and young people deciding to become science-fiction writers would use as models what was already being written. The quality was usually terrible, but in a way it was liberating, because you were able to put an awful lot of keen ideas into circulation fast.

PLAYBOY: What attracted you to using the form yourself?
VONNEGUT, JR.: I was working for General Electric at the time, right after World War Two, and I saw a milling machine for cutting the rotors on jet engines, gas turbines. This was a very expensive thing for a machinist to do, to cut what is essentially one of those Brancusi forms. So they had a computer-operated milling machine built to cut the blades, and I was fascinated by that. This was in 1949 and the guys who were working on it were foreseeing all sorts of machines being run by little boxes and punched cards. Player Piano was my response to the implications of having everything run by little boxes. The idea of doing that, you know, made sense, perfect sense. To have a little clicking box make all the decisions wasn't a vicious thing to do. But it was too bad for the human beings who got their dignity from their jobs.

PLAYBOY: So science fiction seemed like the best way to write about your thoughts on the subject?
VONNEGUT, JR.: There was no avoiding it, since the General Electric Company was science fiction. I cheerfully ripped off the plot of Brave New World, whose plot had been cheerfully ripped off from Eugene Zamiatin's We.

PLAYBOY: Slaughterhouse-Five is mainly about the Dresden fire bombing, which you went through during World War Two. What made you decide to write it in a science-fiction mode?
VONNEGUT, JR.: These things are intuitive. There's never any strategy meeting about what you're going to do; you just come to work every day. And the science-fiction passages in Slaughterhouse-Five are just like the clowns in Shakespeare. When Shakespeare figured the audience had had enough of the heavy stuff, he'd let up a little, bring on a clown or a foolish inn-keeper or something like that, before he'd become serious again. And trips to other planets, science fiction of an obviously kidding sort, is equivalent to bringing on the clowns every so often to lighten things up.

PLAYBOY: While you were writing Slaughterhouse-Five, did you try at all to deal with the subject on a purely realistic level?
VONNEGUT, JR.: I couldn't, because the book was largely a found object. It was what was in my head, and I was able to get it out, but one of the characteristics about this object was that there was a complete blank where the bombing of Dresden took place, because I don't remember. And I looked up several of my war buddies and they didn't remember, either. They didn't want to talk about it. There was a complete forgetting of what it was like. There were all kinds of information surrounding the event, but as far as my memory bank was concerned, the center had been pulled right out of the story. There was nothing up there to be recovered -- or in the heads of my friends, either.

PLAYBOY: Even if you don't remember it, did the experience of being interned -- and bombed -- in Dresden change you in any way?
VONNEGUT, JR.: No. I suppose you'd think so, because that's the clichè. The importance of Dresden in my life has been considerably exaggerated because my book about it became a best seller. If the book hadn't been a best seller, it would seem like a very minor experience in my life. And I don't think people's lives are changed by short-term events like that. Dresden was astonishing, but experiences can be astonishing without changing you. It did make me feel sort of like I'd paid my dues -- being as hungry as I was for as long as I was in prison camp. Hunger is a normal experience for a human being, but not for a middle-class American human being. I was phenomenally hungry for about six months. There wasn't nearly enough to eat -- and this is sensational from my point of view, because I would never have had this experience otherwise. Other people get hit by taxicabs or have a lung collapse or something like that, and it's impressive. But only being hungry for a while -- my weight was 175 when I went into the Army and 134 when I got out of the P.O.W. camp, so we really were hungry -- just leads to smugness now. I stood it. But one of my kids, at about the same age I was, got tuberculosis in the Peace Corps and had to lie still in a hospital ward for a year. And the only people who get tuberculosis in our society now are old people, skid-row people. So he had to lie there as a young man for a year, motionless, surrounded by old alcoholics -- and this did change him. It gave him something to meditate about.

PLAYBOY: What did your experience in Dresden give you to meditate about?
VONNEGUT, JR.: My closest friend is Bernard V. O'Hare. He's a lawyer in Pennsylvania, and he's in the book. I asked him what the experience of Dresden meant to him and he said he no longer believed what his Government said. Our generation did believe what its Government said -- because we weren't lied to very much. One reason we weren't lied to was that there wasn't a war going on in our childhood, and so essentially we were told the truth. There was no reason for our Government to lie very elaborately to us. But a government at war does become a lying government for many reasons. One reason is to confuse the enemy. When we went into the war, we felt our Government was a respecter of life, careful about not injuring civilians and that sort of thing. Well, Dresden had no tactical value; it was a city of civilians. Yet the Allies bombed it until it burned and melted. And then they lied about it. All that was startling to us. But it doesn't startle anybody now. What startled everybody about the carpet bombing of Hanoi wasn't the bombing; it was that it took place at Christmas. That's what everybody was outraged about.

PLAYBOY: As an ex-prisoner of war, how do you feel about the P.O.W.s returning from Vietnam?
VONNEGUT, JR.: Well, they were obviously primed to speak as they did by our own Government. But that shouldn't surprise us. In any case, these men have blatantly vested interests: They were highly paid technicians in this war. Our 45,000 white crosses in Vietnam were the children of lower-class families. The casualties have been hideous in the coal fields of Pennsylvania and in the ghettos. These people didn't make a lot of money out of the war, don't have lifetime careers. War was hell for them, and these highly paid executives are coming back saying, "Yes, it's a wonderful business." They get paid as much, some of them, as the managing editor of a big magazine gets paid. They're professional warriors who'll go anywhere and fight any time.

PLAYBOY: You don't seem particularly sympathetic about their internment.
VONNEGUT, JR.: I'm pigheaded about certain things. I'm pigheaded about the difference between the Air Force and the Infantry. I like the Infantry. If there were another war, and if I were young enough, and if it were a just war, I'd be in the Infantry again. I wouldn't want to be in anything else. Before the Calley thing, I thought that infantrymen were fundamentally honorable -- and there was that feeling among infantrymen of other countries at war, too. That much about war was respectable and the rest was questionable -- even the artillery, you know, hiding in the woods and lobbing shells. That's foolish, but I still feel it. Also, I hate officers.

PLAYBOY: Why?
VONNEGUT, JR.: They're all shits. Every officer I ever knew was a shit. I spoke at West Point on this subject and they found it very funny. But all my life I've hated officers, because they speak so badly to the ground troops. The way they speak to lower-ranking persons is utterly unnecessary. A friend of mine was here the other day and he had bought a new overcoat he was very proud of. But I didn't like it, because it had epaulets -- and I think he's going to take them off.