Kurt

I met Kurt Vonnegut one summer in the late 80s, when I was about 11 years old. He happened to be old friends with my uncle Bob, a doctor. I'm not sure how they met, but they maintained a bro-mance-like bond until KV's death.
I don't remember too much from that visit, but here's what I do remember:

KV smoked, copiously, unfiltered Pall Malls. I've no clue how the Hell he lived as long as he did. He almost died once from smoking, but not from internal charring or cancers. He fell asleep while smoking, setting his house on fire and nearly burning himself to death.

His wife seemed uptight and crazy.

He had a very young daughter, probably at the time about 7 years old, which was odd because KV already seemed very old to me. But I was 11. Anyone over 30 seemed old.

He talked about Woody Allen, saying that he met him once (this was around the time the whole Soon-Yi thing happened) and thought him to be 'weird'.

He was wearing a sweater vest of some sort. So writery.

Uncle Bob often lined the walls of his apartment with KV's prints and drawings. They were almost always goofy self-portraits in profile with a cigarette protruding, dashed off in wiggly lines.

The one thing I remember the most in Bob's stories about KV was that he was convinced that the rattlesnake couldn't have been a product of evolution. It seemed to be the only lifeform with an instrument attached to its body. He theorized that aliens came one day and slapped some kind of marraca on its tail and let it loose to breed.