News of Kurt Vonnegut’s death reminded me of my encounter with the author in 1990. I had just moved to New York six month before when David Talbot, who was then working at the SF Examiner’s Sunday magazine, Image, asked if I would interview him on the occasion of the publication of his 13th novel, Hocus Pocus.

Like most children of the sixties, I came of age reading Vonnegut. His early books — Cat’s Cradle, Slaughterhouse Five — were the I-can-read books for the stoned generation, and their simple prose belied a more complicated amalgam of despair and humor. Meeting him would be like meeting Joseph Heller, or Ken Kesey — absurd and wonderful, like his best novels.

As a green kid from California, I was amazed at how easy it was: I called his publisher and they gave me his home number. He answered and in a voice thick with alcohol and Pall Malls invited me over to his house the next morning. He lived in the little neighborhood of Turtle Bay (his neighbors included Katharine Hepburn and William Paley, if I’m not mistaken) and he was sitting on the stoop, nursing a Coke at nine in the morning when I arrived.

I had done my homework, reread most of his canon and some interviews, and he was in fine form for most of our talk. When I asked him what he said to the college kids he was lecturing to he replied, “I’m telling them the human experiment is over and we’re a failed species.” A beat. “Of course, you could always hire a lawyer to argue the other side.”

That kind of gag sums up his outlook: a scientist’s certainty in our unregenerate ways mixed with a cynic’s hard-won knowledge of how the world works for most people. Money and illusion may not set you free but it can keep your mind off the score through much of the game. His mother was a suicide, and think he approached his life — smoking and drinking with no sign of letting up — with a kind of grim determination at times. I heard a clip of him in a more recent interview this morning, imagining Beethoven at the end of his run saying, “Okay, can I quit now?”

My most lasting memory of that morning was how, at the end of an hour, I turned the tape over and all the life seemed to go out of him. My next question concerned the bombings he witnessed at Dresden, the central event of Slaughterhouse Five and some say of his life, and he waved it away. “It’s absurd to say one event is any more important than another,” and then he stood up. “I’ve got to quit,” he said, “I can’t talk anymore.” I later learned he had thrown a reporter from Entertainment Weekly out that same week, saying, “It doesn’t seem to me we’re on the same wavelength.” At least I didn’t get the bum’s rush. I was on his wavelength there, for a moment.

You can quit now, Mr. Vonnegut.

My definition of the optimist is the Mr. Softee man who patrols our neighborhood in his ice cream truck, playing his maddening jingle and hoping for customers at the first sign of spring — despite the snow flakes that have been appearing like radioctive waste in NY the last couple days. (My daughter said they reminded her of the days after 9.11, ashes falling from clear blue sky.) He’s out there now, combing the streets of Brooklyn, blowing on his hands as he tries to move some Sponge Bob-sicles.

Our president coined the new term for an optimist when, speaking to Juan Willliams on NPR, he called Cheney “a person reflecting a half-glass-full mentality” because of his outlook on Iraq. Even long-time Bush watchers, who count on his malapropisms the way Van Halen fans count on Eddie’s trips to rehab, were stunned. An easy lay-up and he blew it!

But listen to the link above: Was he unaware he was getting it wrong, as he did when he tried to define “dissembling” to the press corps, or was he actually, uh, dissembling as when he said, pre-invasion, “there are no war plans on my desk”? I suggest it was neither. Note the way Bush emphasizes the expression, with evident self-satisfaction. I put it to you that he is creating a new paradigm, a new language if you will, and we are all trying to decipher it.

At least I think it’s him doing it. After seeing those pictures of Cheney lurking behind the hedges, watching W at his last Rose Garden press coference, I once again wondered if this was a clear and simple case of mind control, provided that you need two minds to play that game.

Half glass full. Come on, say it with me. It has a certain je ne sais quoi, a kind of rock and roll logic, like “I am just a jeepster for your love,” or “It balances on your head just like a mattress balances on a bottle of wine.” Dig the sounds George is laying down. And give that man a Sponge Bob-sicle.