The wonder is you didn’t catch me out more often.
For years I pretended to be one of those who claim
to be good at faces but terrible at names,
when in fact I’m good at neither. Needless to say,
once you’d cottoned on you reeled me in.
Kurt Vonnegut is standing beside me
in the baggage collection hall at JFK.
It’s the moustache that hoodwinks.
The one that has silvered with the years
on back covers of some of my favourite books.
Urged on by you, I tap him on the shoulder.
‘Excuse me, it is Kurt Vonnegut, isn’t it?’
Stiffening, he turns, weighs me up and relaxes.
‘Mr Vonnegut may be around here someplace
but you’re not talking to him.’
I mumble my apologies and rush to the carousel
where I am tempted to grab the nearest suitcase
and head for the exit. Then I see them trundle past
on the rubber autobahn, four boxes of books marked
‘Jakov Lind, c/o Chelsea Hotel, West 23rd St, New York’.
* * *
It was at the Chelsea where I was staying ten years earlier,
that I first met Jakov, an Austrian Jew
who had befriended you more than once in order to survive.
Taking pity on a fellow writer miles from home
he invited me to a party in his suite on the top floor.
They were all there: Günter Grass, Mark Twain,
Thomas Hardy, Albert Einstein, Dostoevsky,
Baden-Powell, Bismarck, Joseph Stalin,
Frank Zappa, Zapata and Zorba the Greek.
Not to mention a walrus in the bathroom.
* * *
Eventually I did get to meet Kurt Vonnegut,
but only briefly, at the Queen’s Hotel, Cheltenham,
where he was reading at the Festival in 1999.
In the lift, I told him about the embarrassing incident
of mistaken identity all those years before.
‘So it goes,’ he shrugged. ‘So it goes.’
When the lift stopped at the ground floor
he nodded and said, ‘Nice to meet you, Larry.’
Then we got out and went our separate ways.
At least, I think it was Kurt Vonnegut.