Breakfast of Champions

by Kurt Vonnegut

  *

  Dwayne gazed over the sleeping city. He had been born there. He had spent the first three years of his life in an orphanage only two miles from where he stood. He had been adopted and educated there.

  He owned not only the Pontiac agency and a piece of the new Holiday Inn. He owned three Burger Chefs, too, and five coin-operated car washes, and pieces of the Sugar Creek Drive-in Theatre, Radio Station WMCY, the Three Maples Par-Three Golf Course, and seventeen hundred shares of common stock in Barrytron, Limited, a local electronics firm. He owned dozens of vacant lots. He was on the Board of Directors of the Midland County National Bank.

  But now Midland City looked unfamiliar and frightening to Dwayne. "Where am I?" he said.

  He even forgot that his wife Celia had committed suicide, for instance, by eating Drano--a mixture of sodium hydroxide and aluminum flakes, which was meant to clear drains. Celia became a small volcano, since she was composed of the same sorts of substances which commonly clogged drains.

  Dwayne even forgot that his only child, a son, had grown up to be a notorious homosexual. His name was George, but everybody called him "Bunny." He played piano in the cocktail lounge of the new Holiday Inn.

  "Where am I?" said Dwayne.

  7

  KILGORE TROUT took a leak in the men's room of the New York City movie house. There was a sign on the wall next to the roller towel. It advertised a massage parlor called The Sultan's Harem. Massage parlors were something new and exciting in New York. Men could go in there and photograph naked women, or they could paint the women's naked bodies with water-soluble paints. Men could be rubbed all over by a woman until their penises squirted jism into Turkish towels.

  "It's a full life and a merry one," said Kilgore Trout.

  There was a message written in pencil on the tiles by the roller towel. This was it:

  Trout plundered his pockets for a pen or pencil. He had an answer to the question. But he had nothing to write with, not even a burnt match. So he left the question unanswered, but here is what he would have written, if he had found anything to write with:

  To be

  the eyes

  and ears

  and conscience

  of the Creator of the Universe,

  you fool.

  When Trout headed back for his seat in the theater, he played at being the eyes and ears and conscience of the Creator of the Universe. He sent messages by telepathy to the Creator, wherever He was. He reported that the men's room had been clean as a whistle. "The carpeting under my feet," he signaled from the lobby, "is springy and new. I think it must be some miracle fiber. It's blue. You know what I mean by blue?" And so on.

  When he got to the auditorium itself, the house lights were on. Nobody was there but the manager, who was also the ticket-taker and the bouncer and the janitor. He was sweeping filth from between the seats. He was a middle-aged white man. "No more fun tonight, grandfather," he said to Trout. "Time to go home."

  Trout didn't protest. Neither did he leave immediately. He examined a green enameled steel box in the back of the auditorium. It contained the projector and the sound system and the films. There was a wire that led from the box to a plug in the wall. There was a hole in the front of the box. That was how the pictures got out. On the side of the box was a simple switch. It looked like this:

  It intrigued Trout to know that he had only to flick the switch, and the people would start fucking and sucking again.

  "Good night, Grandfather," said the manager pointedly.

  Trout took his leave of the machine reluctantly. He said this about it to the manager: "It fills such a need, this machine, and it's so easy to operate."

  *

  As Trout departed, he sent this telepathic message to the Creator of the Universe, serving as His eyes and ears and conscience: "Am headed for Forty-second Street now. How much do you already know about Forty-second Street?"

  8

  TROUT WANDERED out onto the sidewalk of Forty-second Street. It was a dangerous place to be. The whole city was dangerous--because of chemicals and the uneven distribution of wealth and so on. A lot of people were like Dwayne: they created chemicals in their own bodies which were bad for their heads. But there were thousands upon thousands of other people in the city who bought bad chemicals and ate them or sniffed them--or injected them into their veins with devices which looked like this:

  Sometimes they even stuffed bad chemicals up their assholes. Their assholes looked like this:

  *

  People took such awful chances with chemicals and their bodies because they wanted the quality of their lives to improve. They lived in ugly places where there were only ugly things to do. They didn't own doodley-squat, so they couldn't improve their surroundings. So they did their best to make their insides beautiful instead.

  The results had been catastrophic so far--suicide, theft, murder, and insanity and so on. But new chemicals were coming onto the market all the time. Twenty feet away from Trout there on Forty-second Street, a fourteen-year-old white boy lay unconscious in the doorway of a pornography store. He had swallowed a half pint of a new type of paint remover which had gone on sale for the first time only the day before. He had also swallowed two pills which were intended to prevent contagious abortion in cattle, which was called Bang's disease.

  *

  Trout was petrified there on Forty-second Street. It had given him a life not worth living, but I had also given him an iron will to live. This was a common combination on the planet Earth.

  The theater manager came out and locked the door behind him.

  And two young black prostitutes materialized from nowhere. They asked Trout and the manager if they would like to have some fun. They were cheerful and unafraid--because of a tube of Norwegian hemorrhoid remedy which they had eaten about half an hour before. The manufacturer had never intended the stuff to be eaten. People were supposed to squirt it up their assholes.

  These were country girls. They had grown up in the rural south of the nation, where their ancestors had been used as agricultural machinery. The white farmers down there weren't using machines made out of meat anymore, though, because machines made out of metal were cheaper and more reliable, and required simpler homes.

  So the black machines had to get out of there, or starve to death. They came to cities because everyplace else had signs like this on the fences and trees:

  *

  Kilgore Trout once wrote a story called "This Means You." It was set in the Hawaiian Islands, the place where the lucky winners of Dwayne Hoover's contest in Midland City were supposed to go. Every bit of land on the islands was owned by only about forty people, and, in the story, Trout had those people decide to exercise their property rights to the full. They put up no trespassing signs on everything.

  This created terrible problems for the million other people on the islands. The law of gravity required that they stick somewhere on the surface. Either that, or they could go out into the water and bob offshore.

  But then the Federal Government came through with an emergency program. It gave a big balloon full of helium to every man, woman and child who didn't own property.

  *

  There was a cable with a harness on it dangling from each balloon. With the help of the balloons, Hawaiians could go on inhabiting the islands without always sticking to things other people owned.

  *

  The prostitutes worked for a pimp now. He was splendid and cruel. He was a god to them. He took their free will away from them, which was perfectly all right. They didn't want it anyway. It was as though they had surrendered themselves to Jesus, for instance, so they could live unselfishly and trustingly--except that they had surrendered to a pimp instead.

  Their childhoods were over. They were dying now. Earth was a tinhorn planet as far as they were concerned.

  When Trout and the theater manager, two tinhorns, said they didn't want any tinhorn fun, the dying children sauntered off, their feet sticking to the planet, comin
g unstuck, then sticking again. They disappeared around a corner. Trout, the eyes and ears of the Creator of the Universe, sneezed.

  *

  "God bless you," said the manager. This was a fully automatic response many Americans had to hearing a person sneeze.

  "Thank you," said Trout. Thus a temporary friendship was formed.

  Trout said he hoped to get safely to a cheap hotel. The manager said he hoped, to get to the subway station on Times Square. So they walked together, encouraged by the echoes of their footsteps from the building facades.

  The manager told Trout a little about what the planet looked like to him. It was a place where he had a wife and two kids, he said. They didn't know he ran a theater which showed blue movies. They thought he was doing consulting work as an engineer so late at night. He said that the planet didn't have much use for engineers his age anymore. It had adored them once.

  "Hard times," said Trout.

  The manager told of being in on the development of a miraculous insulating material, which had been used on rocket ships to the Moon. This was, in fact, the same material which gave the aluminum siding of Dwayne Hoover's dream house in Midland City its miraculous insulating qualities.

  The manager reminded Trout of what the first man to set foot on the Moon had said: "One small step for man, one great leap for mankind."

  "Thrilling words," said Trout. He looked over his shoulder, perceived that they were being followed by a white Oldsmobile Toronado with a black vinyl roof. This four hundred horsepower, front-wheel drive vehicle was burbling along at about three miles an hour, ten feet behind them and close to the curb.

  That was the last thing Trout remembered--seeing the Oldsmobile back there.

  *

  The next thing he knew, he was on his hands and knees on a handball court underneath the Queensboro Bridge at Fifty-ninth Street, with the East River nearby. His trousers and underpants were around his ankles. His money was gone. His parcels were scattered around him--the tuxedo, the new shirt, the books. Blood seeped from one ear.

  The police caught him in the act of pulling up his trousers. They dazzled him with a spotlight as he leaned against the backboard of the handball court and fumbled foolishly with his belt and the buttons on his fly. The police supposed that they had caught him committing some public nuisance, had caught him working with an old man's limited palette of excrement and alcohol.

  He wasn't quite penniless. There was a ten-dollar bill in the watch pocket of his pants.

  *

  It was determined at a hospital that Trout was not seriously hurt. He was taken to a police station, where he was questioned. All he could say was that he had been kidnapped by pure evil in a white Oldsmobile. The police wanted to know how many people were in the car, their ages, their sexes, the colors of their skins, their manners of speech.

  "For all I know, they may not even have been Earthlings," said Trout. "For all I know, that car may have been occupied by an intelligent gas from Pluto."

  *

  Trout said this so innocently, but his comment turned out to be the first germ in an epidemic of mind-poisoning. Here is how the disease was spread: a reporter wrote a story for the New York Post the next day, and he led off with the quotation from Trout.

  The story appeared under this headline:

  PLUTO BANDITS

  KIDNAP PAIR

  Trout's name was given as Kilmer Trotter, incidentally, address unknown. His age was given as eighty-two.

  Other papers copied the story, rewrote it some. They all hung on to the joke about Pluto, spoke knowingly of The Pluto Gang. And reporters asked police for any new information on The Pluto Gang, so police went looking for information on The Pluto Gang.

  *

  So New Yorkers, who had so many nameless terrors, were easily taught to fear something seemingly specific--The Pluto Gang. They bought new locks for their doors and gratings for their windows, to keep out The Pluto Gang. They stopped going to theaters at night, for fear of The Pluto Gang.

  Foreign newspapers spread the terror, ran articles on how persons thinking of visiting New York might keep to a certain few streets in Manhattan and stand a fair chance of avoiding The Pluto Gang.

  *

  In one of New York City's many ghettos for dark-skinned people, a group of Puerto Rican boys gathered together in the basement of an abandoned building. They were small, but they were numerous and volatile. They wished to become frightening, in order to defend themselves and their friends and families, something the police wouldn't do. They also wanted to drive the drug peddlers out of the neighborhood, and to get enough publicity, which was very important, to catch the attention of the Government, so that the Government would do a better job of picking up the garbage and so on.

  One of them, Jose Mendoza, was a fairly good painter. So he painted the emblem of their new gang on the backs of the members' jackets. This was it:

  9

  WHILE KILGORE TROUT was inadvertently poisoning the collective mind of New York City, Dwayne Hoover, the demented Pontiac dealer, was coming down from the roof of his own Holiday Inn in the Middle West.

  Dwayne went into the carpeted lobby of the place not long before sunrise, to ask for a room. As queer as the hour was, there was a man ahead of him, and a black one at that. This was Cyprian Ukwende, the Indaro, the physician from Nigeria, who was staying at the Inn until he could find a suitable apartment.

  Dwayne awaited his turn humbly. He had forgotten that he was a co-owner of the Inn. As for staying at a place where black men stayed, Dwayne was philosophical. He experienced a sort of bittersweet happiness as he told himself, "Times change. Times change."

  *

  The night clerk was new. He did not know Dwayne. He had Dwayne fill out a registration in full. Dwayne, for his part, apologized for not knowing what the number of his license plate was. He felt guilty about that, even though he knew he had done nothing he should feel guilty about.

  He was elated when the clerk let him have a room key. He had passed the test. And he adored his room. It was so new and cool and clean. It was so neutral! It was the brother of thousands upon thousands of rooms in Holiday Inns all over the world.

  Dwayne Hoover might be confused as to what his life was all about, or what he should do with it next. But this much he has done correctly: He had delivered himself to an irreproachable container for a human being.

  It awaited anybody. It awaited Dwayne.

  Around the toilet seat was a band of paper like this, which he would have to remove before he used the toilet:

  This loop of paper guaranteed Dwayne that he need have no fear that corkscrew-shaped little animals would crawl up his asshole and eat up his wiring. That was one less worry for Dwayne.

  *

  There was a sign hanging on the inside doorknob, which Dwayne now hung on the outside doorknob. It looked like this:

  Dwayne pulled open his floor-to-ceiling draperies for a moment. He saw the sign which announced the presence of the Inn to weary travelers on the Interstate. Here is what it looked like:

  He closed his draperies. He adjusted the heating and ventilating system. He slept like a lamb.

  A lamb was a young animal which was legendary for sleeping well on the planet Earth. It looked like this:

  10

  KILGORE TROUT was released by the Police Department of the City of New York like a weightless thing--at two hours before dawn on the day after Veterans' Day. He crossed the island of Manhattan from east to west in the company of Kleenex tissues and newspapers and soot.

  He got a ride in a truck. It was hauling seventy-eight thousand pounds of Spanish olives. It picked him up at the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel, which was named in honor of a man who had had the courage and imagination to make human slavery against the law in the United States of America. This was a recent innovation.

  The slaves were simply turned loose without any property. They were easily recognizable. They were black. They were suddenly free to go exploring.
>
  *

  The driver, who was white, told Trout that he would have to lie on the floor of the cab until they reached open country, since it was against the law for him to pick up hitchhikers.

  *

  It was still dark when he told Trout he could sit up. They were crossing the poisoned marshes and meadows of New Jersey. The truck was a General Motors Astro-95 Diesel tractor, hooked up to a trailer forty feet long. It was so enormous that it made Trout feel that his head was about the size of a piece of bee-bee shot.

  The driver said he used to be a hunter and a fisherman, long ago. It broke his heart when he imagined what the marshes and meadows had been like only a hundred years before. "And when you think of the shit that most of these factories make--wash day products, catfood, pop--"

  *

  He had a point. The planet was being destroyed by manufacturing processes, and what was being manufactured was lousy, by and large.

  Then Trout made a good point, too. "Well," he said, "I used to be a conservationist. I used to weep and wail about people shooting bald eagles with automatic shotguns from helicopters and all that, but I gave it up. There's a river in Cleveland which is so polluted that it catches fire about once a year. That used to make me sick, but I laugh about it now. When some tanker accidently dumps its load in the ocean, and kills millions of birds and billions of fish, I say, 'More power to Standard Oil,' or whoever it was that dumped it." Trout raised his arms in celebration. "'Up your ass with Mobil gas,'" he said.

  The driver was upset by this. "You're kidding," he said.

  "I realized," said Trout, "that God wasn't any conservationist, so for anybody else to be one was sacrilegious and a waste of time. You ever see one of His volcanoes or tornadoes or tidal waves? Anybody ever tell you about the Ice Ages he arranges for every half-million years? How about Dutch Elm disease? There's a nice conservation measure for you. That's God, not man. Just about the time we got our rivers cleaned up, he'd probably have the whole galaxy go up like a celluloid collar. That's what the Star of Bethlehem was, you know."