Breakfast of Champions

by Kurt Vonnegut

  He told Trout about people he'd heard of in the area who grabbed live copperheads and rattlesnakes during church services, to show how much they believed that Jesus would protect them.

  "Takes all kinds of people to make up a world," said Trout.

  *

  Trout marveled at how recently white men had arrived in West Virginia, and how quickly they had demolished it--for heat.

  Now the heat was all gone, too--into outer space, Trout supposed. It had boiled water, and the steam had made steel windmills whiz around and around. The windmills had made rotors in generators whiz around and around. America was jazzed with electricity for a while. Coal had also powered old-fashioned steamboats and choo-choo trains.

  *

  Choo-choo trains and steamboats and factories had whistles which were blown by steam when Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout and I were boys--when our fathers were boys, when our grandfathers were boys. The whistles looked like this:

  Steam from water boiled by burning coal was sent raging through the whistles, which made harshly beautiful laments, as though they were the voice boxes of mating or dying dinosaurs--cries such as woooooooo-uh, wooooo-uh, and torrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrnnnnnnnnnnnn, and so on.

  *

  A dinosaur was a reptile as big as a choo-choo train. It looked like this:

  It had two brains, one for its front end and one for its rear end. It was extinct. Both brains combined were smaller than a pea. A pea was a legume which looked like this:

  Coal was a highly compressed mixture of rotten trees and flowers and bushes and grasses and so on, and dinosaur excrement.

  *

  Kilgore Trout thought about the cries of steam whistles he had known, and about the destruction of West Virginia, which made their songs possible. He supposed that the heartrending cries had fled into outer space, along with the heat. He was mistaken.

  Like most science-fiction writers, Trout knew almost nothing about science, was bored stiff by technical details. But no cry from a whistle had got very far from Earth for this reason: sound could only travel in an atmosphere, and the atmosphere of Earth relative to the planet wasn't even as thick as the skin of an apple. Beyond that lay an all-but-perfect vacuum.

  An apple was a popular fruit which looked like this:

  *

  The driver was a big eater. He pulled into a MacDonald's Hamburger establishment. There were many different chains of hamburger establishments in the country. MacDonald's was one. Burger Chef was another. Dwayne Hoover, as has already been said, owned franchises for several Burger Chefs.

  *

  A hamburger was made out of an animal which looked like this:

  The animal was killed and ground up into little bits, then shaped into patties and fried, and put between two pieces of bread. The finished product looked like this:

  *

  And Trout, who had so little money left, ordered a cup of coffee. He asked an old, old man on a stool next to him at the table if he had worked in the coal mines.

  The old man said this: "From the time I was ten till I was sixty-two."

  "You glad to be out of 'em?" said Trout.

  "Oh, God," said the man, "you never get out of 'em--even when you sleep. I dream mines."

  Trout asked him what it had felt like to work for an industry whose business was to destroy the countryside, and the old man said he was usually too tired to care.

  *

  "Don't matter if you care," the old miner said, "if you don't own what you care about." He pointed out that the mineral rights to the entire county in which they sat were owned by the Rosewater Coal and Iron Company, which had acquired these rights soon after the end of the Civil War. "The law says," he went on, "when a man owns something under the ground and he wants to get at it, you got to let him tear up anything between the surface and what he owns."

  Trout did not make the connection between the Rosewater Coal and Iron Company and Eliot Rosewater, his only fan. He still thought Eliot Rosewater was a teenager.

  The truth was that Rosewater's ancestors had been among the principal destroyers of the surface and the people of West Virginia.

  *

  "It don't seem right, though," the old miner said to Trout, "that a man can own what's underneath another man's farm or woods or house. And any time the man wants to get what's underneath all that, he's got a right to wreck what's on top to get at it. The rights of the people on top of the ground don't amount to nothing compared to the rights of the man who owns what's underneath."

  He remembered out loud when he and other miners used to try to force the Rosewater Coal and Iron Company to treat them like human beings. They would fight small wars with the company's private police and the State Police and the National Guard.

  "I never saw a Rosewater," he said, "but Rosewater always won. I walked on Rosewater. I dug holes for Rosewater in Rosewater. I lived in Rosewater houses. I ate Rosewater food. I'd fight Rosewater, whatever Rosewater is, and Rosewater would beat me and leave me for dead. You ask people around here and they'll tell you: this whole world is Rosewater as far as they're concerned."

  *

  The driver knew Trout was bound for Midland City. He didn't know Trout was a writer on his way to an arts festival. Trout understood that honest working people had no use for the arts.

  "Why would anybody in his right mind go to Midland City?" the driver wanted to know. They were riding along again.

  "My sister is sick," said Trout.

  "Midland City is the asshole of the Universe," said the driver.

  "I've often wondered where the asshole was," said Trout.

  "If it isn't in Midland City," said the driver, "it's in Libertyville, Georgia. You ever see Libertyville?"

  "No," said Trout.

  "I was arrested for speeding down there. They had a speed trap, where you all of a sudden had to go from fifty down to fifteen miles an hour. It made me mad. I had some words with the policeman, and he put me in jail.

  "The main industry there was pulping up old newspapers and magazines and books, and making new paper out of 'em," said the driver. "Trucks and trains were bringing in hundreds of tons of unwanted printed material every day."

  "Um," said Trout.

  "And the unloading process was sloppy, so there were pieces of books and magazines and so on blowing all over town. If you wanted to start a library, you could just go over to the freight yard, and carry away all the books you wanted."

  "Um," said Trout. Up ahead was a white man hitchhiking with his pregnant wife and nine children.

  "Looks like Gary Cooper, don't he?" said the truck driver of the hitchhiking man.

  "Yes, he does," said Trout. Gary Cooper was a movie star.

  *

  "Anyway," said the driver, "they had so many books in Libertyville, they used books for toilet paper in the jail. They got me on a Friday, late in the afternoon, so I couldn't have a hearing in court until Monday. So I sat there in the calaboose for two days, with nothing to do but read my toilet paper. I can still remember one of the stories I read."

  "Um," said Trout.

  "That was the last story I ever read," said the driver. "My God--that must be all of fifteen years ago. The story was about another planet. It was a crazy story. They had museums full of paintings all over the place, and the government used a kind of roulette wheel to decide what to put in the museums, and what to throw out."

  Kilgore Trout was suddenly woozy with deja vu. The truck driver was reminding him of the premise of a book he hadn't thought about for years. The driver's toilet paper in Libertyville, Georgia, had been The Barring-gaffner of Bagnialto, or This Yearns Masterpiece, by Kilgore Trout.

  *

  The name of the planet where Trout's book took place was Bagnialto, and a "Barring-gaffner" there was a government official who spun a wheel of chance once a year. Citizens submitted works of art to the government, and these were given numbers, and then they were assigned cash values according to the Barring-gaffner's spins of the
wheel.

  The viewpoint of character of the tale was not the Barring-gaffner, but a humble cobbler named Gooz. Gooz lived alone, and he painted a picture of his cat. It was the only picture he had ever painted. He took it to the Barring-gaffner, who numbered it and put it in a warehouse crammed with works of art.

  The painting by Gooz had an unprecedented gush of luck on the wheel. It became worth eighteen thousand lambos, the equivalent of one billion dollars on Earth. The Barring-gaffner awarded Gooz a check for that amount, most of which was taken back at once by the tax collector. The picture was given a place of honor in the National Gallery, and people lined up for miles for a chance to see a painting worth a billion dollars.

  There was also a huge bonfire of all the paintings and statues and books and so on which the wheel had said were worthless. And then it was discovered that the wheel was rigged, and the Barring-gaffner committed suicide.

  *

  It was an amazing coincidence that the truck driver had read a book by Kilgore Trout. Trout had never met a reader before, and his response now was interesting: He did not admit that he was the father of the book.

  *

  The driver pointed out that all the mailboxes in the area had the same last name painted on them.

  "There's another one," he said, indicating a mailbox which looked like this:

  The truck was passing through the area where Dwayne Hoover's stepparents had come from. They had trekked from West Virginia to Midland City during the First World War, to make big money at the Keedsler Automobile Company, which was manufacturing airplanes and trucks. When they got to Midland City, they had their name changed legally from Hoobler to Hoover, because there were so many black people in Midland City named Hoobler.

  As Dwayne Hoover's stepfather explained to him one time, "It was embarrassing. Everybody up here naturally assumed Hoobler was a Nigger name."

  15

  DWAYNE HOOVER got through lunch all right that day. He remembered now about Hawaiian Week. The ukuleles and so on were no longer mysterious. The pavement between his automobile agency and the new Holiday Inn was no longer a trampoline.

  He drove to lunch alone in an air-conditioned demonstrator, a blue Pontiac Le Mans with a cream interior, with his radio on. He heard several of his own radio commercials, which drove home the point: "You can always trust Dwayne."

  Though his mental health had improved remarkably since breakfast, a new symptom of illness made itself known. It was incipient echolalia. Dwayne found himself wanting to repeat out loud whatever had just been said.

  So when the radio told him, "You can always trust Dwayne," he echoed the last word. "Dwayne," he said.

  When the radio said there had been a tornado in Texas, Dwayne said this out loud: "Texas."

  Then he heard that husbands of women who had been raped during the war between India and Pakistan wouldn't have anything to do with their wives anymore. The women, in the eyes of their husbands, had become unclean, said the radio.

  "Unclean," said Dwayne.

  *

  As for Wayne Hoobler, the black ex-convict whose only dream was to work for Dwayne Hoover: he had learned to play hide-and-seek with Dwayne's employees. He did not wish to be ordered off the property for hanging around the used cars. So, when an employee came near, Wayne would wander off to the garbage and trash area behind the Holiday Inn, and gravely study the remains of club sandwiches and empty packs of Salem cigarettes and so on in the cans back there, as though he were a health inspector or some such thing.

  When the employee went away, Wayne would drift back to the used cars, keeping the boiled eggs of his eyes peeled for the real Dwayne Hoover.

  The real Dwayne Hoover, of course, had in effect denied that he was Dwayne. So, when the real Dwayne came out at lunch time, Wayne, who had nobody to talk to but himself, said this to himself: "That ain't Mr. Hoover. Sure look like Mr. Hoover, though. Maybe Mr. Hoover sick today." And so on.

  *

  Dwayne had a hamburger and French fries and a Coke at his newest Burger Chef, which was out on Crestview Avenue, across the street from where the new John F. Kennedy High School was going up. John F. Kennedy had never been in Midland City, but he was a President of the United States who was shot to death. Presidents of the country were often shot to death. The assassins were confused by some of the same bad chemicals which troubled Dwayne.

  *

  Dwayne certainly wasn't alone, as far as having bad chemicals inside of him was concerned. He had plenty of company throughout all history. In his own lifetime, for instance, the people in a country called Germany were so full of bad chemicals for a while that they actually built factories whose only purpose was to kill people by the millions. The people were delivered by railroad trains.

  When the Germans were full of bad chemicals, their flag looked like this:

  Here is what their flag looked like after they got well again:

  After they got well again, they manufactured a cheap and durable automobile which became popular all over the world, especially among young people. It looked like this:

  People called it "the beetle." A real beetle looked like this:

  The mechanical beetle was made by Germans. The real beetle was made by the Creator of the Universe.

  *

  Dwayne's waitress at the Burger Chef was a seventeen-year-old white girl named Patty Keene. Her hair was yellow. Her eyes were blue. She was very old for a mammal. Most mammals were senile or dead by the time they were seventeen. But Patty was a sort of mammal which developed very slowly, so the body she rode around in was only now mature.

  She was a brand-new adult, who was working in order to pay off the tremendous doctors' and hospital bills her father had run up in the process of dying of cancer of the colon and then cancer of the everything.

  This was in a country where everybody was expected to pay his own bills for everything, and one of the most expensive things a person could do was get sick. Patty Keene's father's sickness cost ten times as much as all the trips to Hawaii which Dwayne was going to give away at the end of Hawaiian Week.

  *

  Dwayne appreciated Patty Keene's brand-newness, even though he was not sexually attracted to women that young. She was like a new automobile, which hadn't even had its radio turned on yet, and Dwayne was reminded of a ditty his father would sing sometimes when his father was drunk. It went like this:

  Roses are red,

  And ready for plucking.

  You're sixteen,

  And ready for high school.

  Patty Keene was stupid on purpose, which was the case with most women in Midland City. The women all had big minds because they were big animals, but they did not use them much for this reason: unusual ideas could make enemies, and the women, if they were going to achieve any sort of comfort and safety, needed all the friends they could get.

  So, in the interests of survival, they trained themselves to be agreeing machines instead of thinking machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking, and then they thought that, too.

  *

  Patty knew who Dwayne was. Dwayne didn't know who Patty was. Patty's heart beat faster when she waited on him--because Dwayne could solve so many of her problems with the money and power he had. He could give her a fine house and new automobiles and nice clothes and a life of leisure, and he could pay all the medical bills--as easily as she had given him his hamburger and his French fries and his Coke.

  Dwayne could do for her what the Fairy Godmother did for Cinderella, if he wanted to, and Patty had never been so close to such a magical person before. She was in the presence of the supernatural. And she knew enough about Midland City and herself to understand that she might never be this close to the supernatural ever again.

  Patty Keene actually imagined Dwayne's waving a magic wand at her troubles and dreams. It looked like this:

  She spoke up bravely, to learn if supernatural assistance was possible in her case. She was willing to do witho
ut it, expected to do without it--to work hard all her life, to get not much in return, and to associate with other men and women who were poor and powerless, and in debt. She said this to Dwayne:

  "Excuse me for calling you by name, Mr. Hoover, but I can't help knowing who you are, with your picture in all your ads and everything. Besides--everybody else who works here told me who you were. When you came in, they just buzzed and buzzed."

  "Buzzed," said Dwayne. This was his echolalia again.

  *

  "I guess that isn't the right word," she said. She was used to apologizing for her use of language. She had been encouraged to do a lot of that in school. Most white people in Midland City were insecure when they spoke, so they kept their sentences short and their words simple, in order to keep embarrassing mistakes to a minimum. Dwayne certainly did that. Patty certainly did that.

  This was because their English teachers would wince and cover their ears and give them flunking grades and so on whenever they failed to speak like English aristocrats before the First World War. Also: they were told that they were unworthy to speak or write their language if they couldn't love or understand incomprehensible novels and poems and plays about people long ago and far away, such as Ivanhoe.

  *

  The black people would not put up with this. They went on talking English every which way. They refused to read books they couldn't understand--on the grounds they couldn't understand them. They would ask such impudent questions as, "Whuffo I want to read no Tale of Two Cities? Whuffo?"

  *

  Patty Keene flunked English during the semester when she had to read and appreciate Ivanhoe, which was about men in iron suits and the women who loved them. And she was put in a remedial reading class, where they made her read The Good Earth, which was about Chinamen.

  It was during this same semester that she lost her virginity. She was raped by a white gas-conversion unit installer named Don Breedlove in the parking lot outside the Bannister Memorial Fieldhouse at the County Fairgrounds after the Regional High School Basketball Playoffs. She never reported it to the police. She never reported it to anybody, since her father was dying at the time.

  There was enough trouble already.