Breakfast of Champions

by Kurt Vonnegut

  Trout didn't want to argue about it.

  *

  Trout had forgotten the driver's name.

  Trout had a mental defect which I, too, used to suffer from. He couldn't remember what different people in his life looked like--unless their bodies or faces were strikingly unusual.

  When he lived on Cape Cod, for instance, the only person he could greet warmly and by name was Alfy Bearse, who was a one-armed albino. "Hot enough for you, Alfy?" he would say. "Where you been keeping yourself, Alfy?" he'd say. "You're a sight for sore eyes, Alfy," he'd say.

  And so on.

  *

  Now that Trout lived in Cohoes, the only person he called by name was a red-headed Cockney midget, Durling Heath. He worked in a shoe repair shop. Heath had an executive-type nameplate on his workbench, in case anybody wished to address him by name. The nameplate looked like this:

  Trout would drop into the shop from time to time, and say such things as, "Who's gonna win the World Series this year, Durling?" and "You have any idea what all the sirens were blowing about last night, Durling?" and, "You're looking good today, Durling--where'd you get that shirt?" And so on.

  Trout wondered now if his friendship with Heath was over. The last time Trout had been in the shoe repair place, saying this and that to Durling, the midget had unexpectedly screamed at him.

  This is what he had screamed in his Cockney accent: "Stop bloody hounding me!"

  *

  The Governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller, shook Trout's hand in a Cohoes grocery story one time. Trout had no idea who he was. As a science-fiction writer, he should have been flabbergasted to come so close to such a man. Rockefeller wasn't merely Governor. Because of the peculiar laws in that part of the planet, Rockefeller was allowed to own vast areas of Earth's surface, and the petroleum and other valuable minerals underneath the surface, as well. He owned or controlled more of the planet than many nations. This had been his destiny since infancy. He had been born into that cockamamie proprietorship.

  "How's it going, fella?" Governor Rockefeller asked him.

  "About the same," said Kilgore Trout.

  *

  After insisting that Trout had a rich social life, the driver pretended, again for his own gratification, that Trout had begged to know what the sex life of a transcontinental truck driver was like. Trout had begged no such thing.

  "You want to know how truck drivers make out with women, right?" the driver said. "You have this idea that every driver you see is fucking up a storm from coast to coast, right?"

  Trout shrugged.

  The truck driver became embittered by Trout, scolded him for being so salaciously misinformed. "Let me tell you, Kilgore--" he hesitated. "That's your name, right?"

  "Yes," said Trout. He had forgotten the driver's name a hundred times. Every time Trout looked away from him, Trout forgot not only his name but his face, too.

  "Kilgore, God damn it--" the driver said, "if I was to have my rig break down in Cohoes, for instance, and I was to have to stay there for two days while it was worked on, how easy you think it would be for me to get laid while I was there--a stranger, looking the way I do?"

  "It would depend on how determined you were," said Trout.

  The driver sighed. "Yeah, God--" he said, and he despaired for himself, "that's probably the story of my life: not enough determination."

  *

  They talked about aluminum siding as a technique for making old houses look new again. From a distance, these sheets, which never needed painting, looked like freshly painted wood.

  The driver wanted to talk about Perma-Stone, too, which was a competitive scheme. It involved plastering the sides of old houses with colored cement, so that, from a distance, they looked as though they were made of stone.

  "If you're in aluminum storm windows," the driver said to Trout, "you must be in aluminum siding, too." All over the country, the two businesses went hand-in-hand.

  "My company sells it," said Trout, "and I've seen a lot of it. I've never actually worked on an installation."

  The driver was thinking seriously of buying aluminum siding for his home in Little Rock, and he begged Trout to give him an honest answer to this question: "From what you've seen and heard--the people who get aluminum siding, are they happy with what they get?"

  "Around Cohoes," said Trout. "I think those were about the only really happy people I ever saw."

  *

  "I know what you mean," said the driver. "One time I saw a whole family standing outside their house. They couldn't believe how nice their house looked after the aluminum siding went on. My question to you, and you can give me an honest answer, on account of we'll never have to do business, you and me: Kilgore, how long will that happiness last?"

  "About fifteen years," said Trout. "Our salesmen say you can easily afford to have the job redone with all the money you've saved on paint and heat."

  "Perma-Stone looks a lot richer, and I suppose it lasts a lot longer, too," said the driver. "On the other hand, it costs a lot more."

  "You get what you pay for," said Kilgore Trout.

  *

  The truck driver told Trout about a gas hot-water heater he had bought thirty years ago, and it hadn't given him a speck of trouble in all that time.

  "I'll be damned," said Kilgore Trout.

  *

  Trout asked about the truck, and the driver said it was the greatest truck in the world. The tractor alone cost twenty-eight thousand dollars. It was powered by a three hundred and twenty-four horsepower Cummins Diesel engine, which was turbo-charged, so it would function well at high altitudes. It had hydraulic steering, air brakes, a thirteen-speed transmission, and was owned by his brother-in-law.

  His brother-in-law, he said, owned twenty-eight trucks, and was President of the Pyramid Trucking Company.

  "Why did he name his company Pyramid?" asked Trout. "I mean--this thing can go a hundred miles an hour, if it has to. It's fast and useful and unornamental. It's as up-to-date as a rocket ship. I never saw anything that was less like a pyramid than this truck."

  *

  A pyramid was a sort of huge stone tomb which Egyptians had built thousands and thousands of years before. The Egyptians didn't build them anymore. The tombs looked like this, and tourists would come from far away to gaze at them:

  "Why would anybody in the business of highspeed transportation name his business and his trucks after buildings which haven't moved an eighth of an inch since Christ was born?"

  The driver's answer was prompt. It was peevish, too, as though he thought Trout was stupid to have to ask a question like that. "He liked the sound of it," he said. "Don't you like the sound of it?"

  Trout nodded in order to keep things friendly. "Yes," he said, "it's a very nice sound."

  *

  Trout sat back and thought about the conversation. He shaped it into a story, which he never got around to writing until he was an old, old man. It was about a planet where the language kept turning into pure music, because the creatures there were so enchanted by sounds. Words became musical notes. Sentences became melodies. They were useless as conveyors of information, because nobody knew or cared what the meanings of words were anymore.

  So leaders in government and commerce, in order to function, had to invent new and much uglier vocabularies and sentence structures all the time, which would resist being transmuted to music.

  *

  "You married, Kilgore?" the driver asked.

  "Three times," said Trout. It was true. Not only that, but each of his wives had been extraordinarily patient and loving and beautiful. Each had been shriveled by his pessimism.

  "Any kids?"

  "One," said Trout. Somewhere in the past, tumbling among all the wives and stories lost in the mails was a son named Leo. "He's a man now," said Trout.

  *

  Leo left home forever at the age of fourteen. He lied about his age, and he joined the Marines. He sent a note to his father from boot camp. It sai
d this: "I pity you. You've crawled up your own asshole and died."

  That was the last Trout heard from Leo, directly or indirectly, until he was visited by two agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Leo had deserted from his division in Viet Nam, they said. He had committed high treason. He had joined the Viet Cong.

  Here was the F.B.I, evaluation of Leo's situation on the planet at that time: "Your boy's in bad trouble," they said.

  13

  WHEN DWAYNE HOOVER saw Harry LeSabre, his sales manager, in leaf-green leotards and a grass skirt and all that, he could not believe it. So he made himself not see it. He went into his office, which was also cluttered with ukuleles and pineapples.

  Francine Pefko, his secretary, looked normal, except that she had a rope of flowers around her neck and a flower behind one ear. She smiled. This was a war widow with lips like sofa pillows and bright red hair. She adored Dwayne. She adored Hawaiian Week, too.

  "Aloha," she said.

  *

  Harry LeSabre, meanwhile, had been destroyed by Dwayne.

  When Harry presented himself to Dwayne so ridiculously, every molecule in his body awaited Dwayne's reaction. Each molecule ceased its business for a moment, put some distance between itself and its neighbors. Each molecule waited to learn whether its galaxy, which was called Harry LeSabre, would or would not be dissolved.

  When Dwayne treated Harry as though he were invisible, Harry thought he had revealed himself as a revolting transvestite, and that he was fired on that account.

  Harry closed his eyes. He never wanted to open them again. His heart sent this message to his molecules: "For reasons obvious to us all, this galaxy is dissolved!"

  *

  Dwayne didn't know anything about that. He leaned on Francine Pefko's desk. He came close to telling her how sick he was. He warned her: "This is a very tough day, for some reason. So no jokes, no surprises. Keep everything simple. Keep anybody the least bit nutty out of here. No telephone calls."

  Francine told Dwayne that the twins were waiting for him in the inner office. "Something bad is happening to the cave, I think," she told him.

  Dwayne was grateful for a message that simple and clear. The twins were his younger stepbrothers, Lyle and Kyle Hoover. The cave was Sacred Miracle Cave, a tourist trap just south of Shepherdstown, which Dwayne owned in partnership with Lyle and Kyle. It was the sole source of income for Lyle and Kyle, who lived in identical yellow ranch houses on either side of the gift shop which sheltered the entrance to the cave.

  All over the State, nailed to trees and fence posts, were arrow-shaped signs, which pointed in the direction of the cave and said how far away it was--for example:

  Before Dwayne entered his inner office, he read one of many comical signs which Francine had put up on the wall in order to amuse people, to remind them of what they so easily forgot: that people didn't have to be serious all the time.

  Here was the text of the sign Dwayne read:

  YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE CRAZY

  TO WORK HERE, BUT IT SURE HELPS!

  There was a picture of a crazy person to go with the text. This was it:

  Francine wore a button on her bosom which showed a creature in a healthier, more enviable frame of mind. This was the button:

  *

  Lyle and Kyle sat side-by-side on the black leather couch in Dwayne Hoover's inner office. They looked so much alike that Dwayne had not been able to tell them apart until 1954, when Lyle got in a fight over a woman at the Roller Derby. After that, Lyle was the one with the broken nose. As babies in crib, Dwayne remembered now, they used to suck each other's thumbs.

  *

  Here is how Dwayne happened to have stepbrothers, incidentally, even though he had been adopted by people who couldn't have children of their own. Their adopting him triggered something to their bodies which made it possible for them to have children after all. This was a common phenomenon. A lot of couples seemed to be programmed that way.

  *

  Dwayne was so glad to see them now--these two little men in overalls and work shoes, each wearing a pork-pie hat. They were familiar, they were real. Dwayne closed his door on the chaos outside. "All right--" he said, "what's happened at the cave?"

  Ever since Lyle had had his nose broken, the twins agreed that Lyle should do the talking for the two. Kyle hadn't said a thousand words since 1954.

  "Them bubbles is halfway up to the Cathedral now," said Lyle. "The way they're coming, they'll be up to Moby Dick in a week or two."

  Dwayne understood him perfectly. The underground stream which passed through the bowels of Sacred Miracle Cave was polluted by some sort of industrial waste which formed bubbles as tough as ping-pong balls. These bubbles were shouldering one another up a passage which led to a big boulder which had been painted white to resemble Moby Dick, the Great White Whale. The bubbles would soon engulf Moby Dick and invade the Cathedral of Whispers, which was the main attraction at the cave. Thousands of people had been married in the Cathedral of Whispers--including Dwayne and Lyle and Kyle. Harry LeSabre, too.

  *

  Lyle told Dwayne about an experiment he and Kyle had performed the night before. They had gone into the cave with their identical Browning Automatic Shotguns, and they had opened fire on the advancing wall of bubbles.

  "They let loose a stink you wouldn't believe," said Lyle. He said it smelled like athlete's foot. "It drove me and Kyle right out of there. We run the ventilating system for an hour, and then we went back in. The paint was blistered on Moby Dick. He ain't even got eyes anymore." Moby Dick used to have long-lashed blue eyes as big as dinner plates.

  *

  "The organ turned black, and the ceiling turned a kind of dirty yellow," said Lyle. "You can't hardly see the Sacred Miracle no more."

  The organ was the Pipe Organ of the Gods, a thicket of stalactites and stalagmites which had grown together in one corner of the Cathedral. There was a loudspeaker in back of it, through which music for weddings and funerals was played. It was illuminated by electric lights, which changed colors all the time.

  The Sacred Miracle was a cross on the ceiling of the Cathedral. It was formed by the intersection of two cracks. "It never was real easy to see," said Lyle, speaking of the cross. "I ain't even sure it's there anymore." He asked Dwayne's permission to order a load of cement. He wanted to plug up the passage between the stream and the Cathedral.

  "Just forget about Moby Dick and Jesse James and the slaves and all that," said Lyle, "and save the Cathedral."

  Jesse James was a skeleton which Dwayne's stepfather had bought from the estate of a doctor back during the Great Depression. The bones of its right hand mingled with the rusted parts of a .45 caliber revolver. Tourists were told that it had been found that way, that it probably belonged to some railroad robber who had been trapped in the cave by a rock-slide.

  As for the slaves: these were plaster statues of black men in a chamber fifty feet down the corridor from Jesse James. The statues were removing one another's chains with hammers and hacksaws. Tourists were told that real slaves had at one time used the cave after escaping to freedom across the Ohio River.

  *

  The story about the slaves was as fake as the one about Jesse James. The cave wasn't discovered until 1937, when a small earthquake opened it up a crack. Dwayne Hoover himself discovered the crack, and then he and his stepfather opened it with crowbars and dynamite. Before that, not even small animals had been in there.

  The only connection the cave had with slavery was this: the farm on which it was discovered was started by an ex-slave, Josephus Hoobler. He was freed by his master, and he came north and started the farm. Then he went back and bought his mother and a woman who became his wife.

  Their descendants continued to run the farm until the Great Depression, when the Midland County Merchants Bank foreclosed on the mortgage. And then Dwayne's stepfather was hit by an automobile driven by a white man who had bought the farm. In an out-of-court settlement for his injuries
, Dwayne's stepfather was given what he called contemptuously "... a God damn Nigger farm."

  Dwayne remembered the first trip the family took to see it. His father ripped a Nigger sign off the Nigger mailbox, and he threw it into a ditch. Here is what it said:

  14

  THE TRUCK carrying Kilgore Trout was in West Virginia now. The surface of the State had been demolished by men and machinery and explosives in order to make it yield up its coal. The coal was mostly gone now. It had been turned into heat.

  The surface of West Virginia, with its coal and trees and topsoil gone, was rearranging what was left of itself in conformity with the laws of gravity. It was collapsing into all the holes which had been dug into it. Its mountains, which had once found it easy to stand by themselves, were sliding into valleys now.

  The demolition of West Virginia had taken place with the approval of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the State Government, which drew their power from the people.

  Here and there an inhabited dwelling still stood.

  *

  Trout saw a broken guardrail ahead. He gazed into a gully below it, saw a 1968 Cadillac El Dorado capsized in a brook. It had Alabama license plates. There were also several old home appliances in the brook--stoves, a washing machine, a couple of refrigerators.

  An angel-faced white child, with flaxen hair, stood by the brook. She waved up at Trout. She clasped an eighteen-ounce bottle of Pepsi-Cola to her breast.

  *

  Trout asked himself out loud what the people did for amusement, and the driver told him a queer story about a night he spent in West Virginia, in the cab of his truck, near a windowless building which droned monotonously.

  "I'd see folks go in, and I'd see folks come out," he said, "but I couldn't figure out what kind of a machine it was that made the drone. The building was a cheap old frame thing set up on cement blocks, and it was out in the middle of nowhere. Cars came and went, and the folks sure seemed to like whatever was doing the droning," he said.

  So he had a look inside. "It was full of folks on roller-skates," he said. "They went around and around. Nobody smiled. They just went around and around."

  *