Breakfast of Champions

by Kurt Vonnegut

  *

  The letter was from the Festival's chairman, Fred T. Barry. He was respectful, almost reverent about Kilgore Trout. He beseeched him to be one of several distinguished out-of-town participants in the Festival, which would last for five days. It would celebrate the opening of the Mildred Barry Memorial Center for the Arts in Midland City.

  The letter did not say so, but Mildred Barry was the late mother of the Chairman, the wealthiest man in Midland City. Fred T. Barry had paid for the new Center of the Arts, which was a translucent sphere on stilts. It had no windows. When illuminated inside at night, it resembled a rising harvest moon.

  Fred T. Barry, incidentally, was exactly the same age as Trout. They had the same birthday. But they certainly didn't look anything alike. Fred T. Barry didn't even look like a white man anymore, even though he was of pure English stock. As he grew older and older and happier and happier, and all his hair fell out everywhere, he came to look like an ecstatic old Chinaman.

  He looked so much like a Chinaman that he had taken to dressing like a Chinaman. Real Chinamen often mistook him for a real Chinaman.

  *

  Fred T. Barry confessed in his letter that he had not read the works of Kilgore Trout, but that he would joyfully do so before the Festival began. "You come highly recommended by Eliot Rosewater," he said, "who assures me that you are perhaps the greatest living American novelist. There can be no higher praise than that."

  Clipped to the letter was a check for one thousand dollars. Fred T. Barry explained that this was for travel expenses and an honorarium.

  It was a lot of money. Trout was suddenly fabulously well-to-do.

  *

  Here is how Trout happened to be invited: Fred T. Barry wanted to have a fabulously valuable oil painting as a focal point for the Midland City Festival of the Arts. As rich as he was, he couldn't afford to buy one, so he looked for one to borrow.

  The first person he went to was Eliot Rosewater, who owned an El Greco worth three million dollars or more. Rosewater said the Festival could have the picture on one condition: that it hire as a speaker the greatest living writer in the English language, who was Kilgore Trout.

  Trout laughed at the flattering invitation, but he felt fear after that. Once again, a stranger was tampering with the privacy of his body bag. He put this question to his parakeet haggardly, and he rolled his eyes: "Why all this sudden interest in Kilgore Trout?"

  He read the letter again. "They not only want Kilgore Trout," he said, "they want him in a tuxedo, Bill. Some mistake has been made."

  He shrugged. "Maybe they invited me because they know I have a tuxedo," he said. He really did own a tuxedo. It was in a steamer trunk which he had lugged from place to place for more than forty years. It contained toys from childhood, the bones of a Bermuda Ern, and many other curiosities--including the tuxedo he had worn to a senior dance just prior to his graduation from Thomas Jefferson High School in Dayton, Ohio, in 1924. Trout was born in Bermuda, and attended grammar school there. But then his family moved to Dayton.

  His high school was named after a slave owner who was also one of the world's greatest theoreticians on the subject of human liberty.

  *

  Trout got his tuxedo out of the trunk and he put it on. It was a lot like a tuxedo I'd seen my father put on when he was an old, old man. It had a greenish patina of mold. Some of the growths it supported resembled patches of fine rabbit fur. "This will do nicely for the evenings," said Trout. "But tell me, Bill--what does one wear in Midland City in October before the sun goes down?" He hauled up his pants legs so that his grotesquely ornamental shins were exposed. "Bermuda shorts and bobby socks, eh, Bill? After all--I am from Bermuda."

  He dabbed at his tuxedo with a damp rag, and the fungi came away easily. "Hate to do this, Bill," he said of the fungi he was murdering. "Fungi have as much right to life as I do. They know what they want, Bill. Damned if I do anymore."

  Then he thought about what Bill himself might want. It was easy to guess. "Bill," he said, "I like you so much, and I am such a big shot in the Universe, that I will make your three biggest wishes come true." He opened the door of the cage, something Bill couldn't have done in a thousand years.

  Bill flew over to a windowsill. He put his little shoulder against the glass. There was just one layer of glass between Bill and the great out-of-doors. Although Trout was in the storm window business, he had no storm windows on his own abode.

  "Your second wish is about to come true," said Trout, and he again did something which Bill could never have done. He opened the window. But the opening of the window was such an alarming business to the parakeet that he flew back to his cage and hopped inside.

  Trout closed the door of the cage and latched it. "That's the most intelligent use of three wishes I ever heard of," he told the bird. "You made sure you'd still have something worth wishing for--to get out of the cage."

  *

  Trout made the connection between his lone fan letter and the invitation, but he couldn't believe that Eliot Rosewater was a grownup. Rosewater's handwriting looked like this:

  "Bill," said Trout tentatively, "some teen-ager named Rosewater got me this job. His parents must be friends of the Chairman of the Arts Festival, and they don't know anything about books out that way. So when he said I was good, they believed him."

  Trout shook his head. "I'm not going, Bill. I don't want out of my cage. I'm too smart for that. Even if I did want out, though, I wouldn't go to Midland City to make a laughing stock of myself--and my only fan."

  *

  He left it at that. But he reread the invitation from time to time, got to know it by heart. And then one of the subtler messages on the paper got through to him. It was in the letterhead, which displayed two masks intended to represent comedy and tragedy:

  One mask looked like this:

  The other one looked like this:

  "They don't want anything but smilers out there," Trout said to his parakeet. "Unhappy failures need not apply." But his mind wouldn't leave it alone at that. He got an idea which he found very tangy: "But maybe an unhappy failure is exactly what they need to see."

  He became energetic after that. "Bill, Bill--" he said, "listen, I'm leaving the cage, but I'm coming back. I'm going out there to show them what nobody has ever seen at an arts festival before: a representative of all the thousands of artists who devoted their entire lives to a search for truth and beauty--and didn't find doodley-squat!"

  *

  Trout accepted the invitation after all. Two days before the Festival was to begin, he delivered Bill into the care of his landlady upstairs, and he hitchhiked to New York City--with five hundred dollars pinned to the inside of his underpants. The rest of the money he had put in a bank.

  He went to New York first--because he hoped to find some of his books in pornography stores there. He had no copies at home. He despised them, but now he wanted to read out loud from them in Midland City--as a demonstration of a tragedy which was ludicrous as well.

  He planned to tell the people out there what he hoped to have in the way of a tombstone.

  This was it:

  4

  DWAYNE WAS meanwhile getting crazier all the time. He saw eleven moons in the sky over the new Mildred Barry Memorial Center for the Arts one night. The next morning, he saw a huge duck directing traffic at the intersection of Arsenal Avenue and Old County Road. He didn't tell anybody what he saw. He maintained secrecy.

  And the bad chemicals in his head were fed up with secrecy. They were no longer content with making him feel and see queer things. They wanted him to do queer things, also, and make a lot of noise.

  They wanted Dwayne Hoover to be proud of his disease.

  *

  People said later that they were furious with themselves for not noticing the danger signals in Dwayne's behavior, for ignoring his obvious cries for help. After Dwayne ran amok, the local paper ran a deeply sympathetic editorial about it, begging people to watch each other for
danger signals. Here was its title:

  A CRY FOR HELP

  But Dwayne wasn't all that weird before he met Kilgore Trout. His behavior in public kept him well within the limits of acceptable acts and beliefs and conversations in Midland City. The person closest to him, Francine Pefko, his white secretary and mistress, said that Dwayne seemed to be getting happier and happier all the time during the month before Dwayne went public as a maniac.

  "I kept thinking," she told a newspaper reporter from her hospital bed, "'He is finally getting over his wife's suicide.'"

  *

  Francine worked at Dwayne's principal place of business, which was Dwayne Hoover's Exit Eleven Pontiac Village, just off the Interstate, next door to the new Holiday Inn.

  Here is what made Francine think he was becoming happier: Dwayne began to sing songs which had been popular in his youth, such as "The Old Lamp Lighter," and "Tippy-Tippy-Tin," and "Hold Tight," and "Blue Moon," and so on. Dwayne had never sung before. Now he did it loudly as he sat at his desk, when he took a customer for a ride in a demonstrator, when he watched a mechanic service a car. One day he sang loudly as he crossed the lobby of the new Holiday Inn, smiling and gesturing at people as though he had been hired to sing for their pleasure. But nobody thought that was necessarily a hint of derangement, either--especially since Dwayne owned a piece of the Inn.

  A black bus boy and a black waiter discussed this singing. "Listen at him sing," said the bus boy.

  "If I owned what he owns, I'd sing, too," the waiter replied.

  *

  The only person who said out loud that Dwayne was going crazy was Dwayne's white sales manager at the Pontiac agency, who was Harry LeSabre. A full week before Dwayne went of this rocker, Harry said to Francine Pefko, "Something has come over Dwayne. He used to be so charming. I don't find him so charming anymore."

  Harry knew Dwayne better than did any other man. He had been with Dwayne for twenty years. He came to work for him when the agency was right on the edge of the Nigger part of town. A Nigger was a human being who was black.

  "I know him the way a combat soldier knows his buddy," said Harry. "We used to put our lives on the line every day, when the agency was down on Jefferson Street. We got held up on the average of fourteen times a year. And I tell you that the Dwayne of today is a Dwayne I never saw before."

  *

  It was true about the holdups. That was how Dwayne bought a Pontiac agency so cheaply. White people were the only people with money enough to buy new automobiles, except for a few black criminals, who always wanted Cadillacs. And white people were scared to go anywhere on Jefferson Street anymore.

  *

  Here is where Dwayne got the money to buy the agency: He borrowed it from the Midland County National Bank. For collateral, he put up stock he owned in a company which was then called The Midland City Ordnance Company. It later became Barrytron, Limited. When Dwayne first got the stock, in the depths of the Great Depression, the company was called The Robo-Magic Corporation of America.

  The name of the company kept changing through the years because the nature of its business changed so much. But its management hung on to the company's original motto--for old time's sake. The motto was this:

  GOODBYE, BLUE MONDAY.

  *

  Listen:

  Harry LeSabre said to Francine, "When a man has been in combat with another man, he gets so he can sense the slightest change in his buddy's personality, and Dwayne has changed. You ask Vernon Garr."

  Vernon Garr was a white mechanic who was the only other employee who had been with Dwayne before Dwayne moved the agency out to the Interstate. As it happened, Vernon was having trouble at home. His wife, Mary, was a schizophrenic, so Vernon hadn't noticed whether Dwayne had changed or not. Vernon's wife believed that Vernon was trying to turn her brains into plutonium.

  *

  Harry LeSabre was entitled to talk about combat. He had been in actual combat in a war. Dwayne hadn't been in combat. He was a civilian employee of the United States Army Air Corps during the Second World War, though. One time he got to paint a message on a five-hundred-pound bomb which was going to be dropped on Hamburg, Germany. This was it:

  *

  "Harry," said Francine, "everybody is entitled to a few bad days. Dwayne has fewer than anybody I know, so when he does have one like today, some people are hurt and surprised. They shouldn't be. He's human like anybody else."

  "But why should he single out me?" Harry wanted to know. He was right: Dwayne had singled him out for astonishing insults and abuse that day. Everybody else still found Dwayne nothing but charming.

  Later on, of course, Dwayne would assault all sorts of people, even three strangers from Erie, Pennsylvania, who had never been to Midland City before. But Harry was an isolated victim now.

  *

  "Why me?" said Harry. This was a common question in Midland City. People were always asking that as they were loaded into ambulances after accidents of various kinds, or arrested for disorderly conduct, or burglarized, or socked in the nose and so on: "Why me?"

  "Probably because he felt that you were man enough and friend enough to put up with him on one of his few bad days," said Francine.

  "How would you like it if he insulted your clothes?" said Harry. This is what Dwayne had done to him: insulted his clothes.

  "I would remember that he was the best employer in town," said Francine. This was true. Dwayne paid high wages. He had profit-sharing and Christmas bonuses at the end of every year. He was the first automobile dealer in his part of the State to offer his employees Blue Cross-Blue Shield, which was health insurance. He had a retirement plan which was superior to every retirement plan in the city with the exception of the one at Barrytron. His office door was always open to any employee who had troubles to discuss, whether they had to do with the automobile business or not.

  For instance, on the day he insulted Harry's clothing, he also spent two hours with Vernon Garr, discussing the hallucinations Vernon's wife was having. "She sees things that aren't there," said Vernon.

  "She needs rest, Vern," said Dwayne.

  "Maybe I'm going crazy, too," said Vernon. "Christ, I go home and I talk for hours to my fucking dog."

  "That makes two of us," said Dwayne.

  *

  Here is the scene between Harry and Dwayne which upset Harry so much:

  Harry went into Dwayne's office right after Vernon left. He expected no trouble, because he had never had any serious trouble with Dwayne.

  "How's my old combat buddy today?" he said to Dwayne.

  "As good as can be expected," said Dwayne. "Anything special bothering you?"

  "No," said Harry.

  "Vern's wife thinks Vern is trying to turn her brains into plutonium," said Dwayne.

  "What's plutonium?" said Harry, and so on. They rambled along, and Harry made up a problem for himself just to keep the conversation lively. He said he was sad sometimes that he had no children. "But I'm glad in a way, too," he went on. "I mean, why should I contribute to overpopulation?"

  Dwayne didn't say anything.

  "Maybe we should have adopted one," said Harry, "but it's too late now. And the old lady and me--we have a good time just horsing around with ourselves. What do we need a kid for?"

  It was after the mention of adoption that Dwayne blew up. He himself had been adopted--by a couple who had moved to Midland City from West Virginia in order to make big money as factory workers in the First World War. Dwayne's real mother was a spinster school teacher who wrote sentimental poetry and claimed to be descended from Richard the Lion-Hearted, who was a king. His real father was an itinerant typesetter, who seduced his mother by setting her poems in type. He didn't sneak them into a newspaper or anything. It was enough for her that they were set in type.

  She was a defective child-bearing machine. She destroyed herself automatically while giving birth to Dwayne. The printer disappeared. He was a disappearing machine.

  *

 
; It may be that the subject of adoption caused an unfortunate chemical reaction in Dwayne's head. At any rate, Dwayne suddenly snarled this at Harry: "Harry, why don't you get a bunch of cotton waste from Vern Garr, soak it in Blue Sunoco, and burn up your fucking wardrobe? You make me feel like I'm at Watson Brothers." Watson Brothers was the name of the funeral parlor for white people who were at least moderately well-to-do. Blue Sunoco was a brand of gasoline.

  Harry was startled, and then pain set in. Dwayne had never said anything about his clothes in all the years he'd known him. The clothes were conservative and neat, in Harry's opinion. His shirts were white. His ties were black or navy blue. His suits were gray or dark blue. His shoes and socks were black.

  "Listen, Harry," said Dwayne, and his expression was mean, "Hawaiian Week is coming up, and I'm absolutely serious: burn your clothes and get new ones, or apply for work at Watson Brothers. Have yourself embalmed while you're at it."

  *

  Harry couldn't do anything but let his mouth hang open. The Hawaiian Week Dwayne had mentioned was a sales promotion scheme which involved making the agency look as much like the Hawaiian Islands as possible. People who bought new or used cars, or had repairs done in excess of five hundred dollars during the week would be entered automatically in a lottery. Three lucky people would each win a free, all-expenses-paid trip to Las Vegas and San Francisco and then Hawaii for a party of two.

  "I don't mind that you have the name of a Buick, Harry, when you're supposed to be selling Pontiacs--" Dwayne went on. He was referring to the fact that the Buick division of General Motors put out a model called the Le Sabre. "You can't help that." Dwayne now patted the top of his desk softly. This was somehow more menacing than if he had pounded the desk with his fist. "But there are a hell of a lot of things you can change, Harry. There's a long weekend coming up. I expect to see some big changes in you when I come to work on Tuesday morning."

  The weekend was extra-long because the coming Monday was a national holiday, Veterans' Day. It was in honor of people who had served their country in uniform.