Breakfast of Champions

by Kurt Vonnegut

  *

  The Bannister Memorial Fieldhouse was named in honor of George Hickman Bannister, a seventeen-year-old boy who was killed while playing high school football in 1924. George Hickman Bannister had the largest tombstone in Calvary Cemetery, a sixty-two-foot obelisk with a marble football on top.

  The marble football looked like this:

  Football was a war game. Two opposing teams fought over the ball while wearing armor made out of leather and cloth and plastic.

  George Hickman Bannister was killed while trying to get a hold of the ball on Thanksgiving Day. Thanksgiving Day was a holiday when everybody in the country was expected to express gratitude to the Creator of the Universe, mainly for food.

  *

  George Hickman Bannister's obelisk was paid for by public subscription, with the Chamber of Commerce matching every two dollars raised with a dollar of its own. It was for many years the tallest structure in Midland City. A city ordinance was passed which made it illegal to erect anything taller than that, and it was called The George Hickman Bannister Law.

  The ordinance was junked later on to allow radio towers to go up.

  *

  The two largest monuments in town, until the new Mildred Barry Memorial Arts Center went up in Sugar Creek, were constructed supposedly so that George Hickman Bannister would never be forgotten. But nobody ever thought about him anymore by the time Dwayne Hoover met Kilgore Trout. There wasn't much to think about him, actually, even at the time of his death, except that he was young.

  And he didn't have any relatives in town anymore. There weren't any Bannisters in the phone book, except for The Bannister, which was a motion picture theater. Actually, there wouldn't even be a Bannister Theater in there after the new phonebooks came out. The Bannister had been turned into a cut-rate furniture store.

  George Hickman Bannister's father and mother and sister, Lucy, moved away from town before either the tombstone or the fieldhouse was completed, and they couldn't be located for the dedication ceremonies.

  *

  It was a very restless country, with people tearing around all the time. Every so often, somebody would stop to put up a monument.

  There were monuments all over the country. But it was certainly unusual for somebody from the common people to have not one but two monuments in his honor, as was the case with George Hickman Bannister.

  Technically, though, only the tombstone had been erected specifically for him. The fieldhouse would have gone up anyway. The money was appropriated for the fieldhouse two years before George Hickman Bannister was cut down in his prime. It didn't cost anything extra to name it after him.

  *

  Calvary Cemetery, where George Hickman Bannister was at rest, was named in honor of a hill in Jerusalem, thousands of miles away. Many people believed that the son of the Creator of the Universe had been killed on that hill thousands of years ago.

  Dwayne Hoover didn't know whether to believe that or not. Neither did Patty Keene.

  *

  And they certainly weren't worrying about it now. They had other fish to fry. Dwayne was wondering how long his attack of echolalia was likely to last, and Patty Keene had to find out if her brand-newness and prettiness and outgoing personality were worth a lot to a sweet, sort of sexy, middle-aged old Pontiac dealer like Dwayne.

  "Anyway," she said, "it certainly is an honor to have you visit us, and those aren't the right words, either, but I hope you know what I mean."

  "Mean," said Dwayne.

  "Is the food all right?" she said.

  "All right," said Dwayne.

  "It's what everybody else gets," she said. "We didn't do anything special for you."

  "You," said Dwayne.

  *

  It didn't matter much what Dwayne said. It hadn't mattered much for years. It didn't matter much what most people in Midland City said out loud, except when they were talking about money or structures or travel or machinery--or other measurable things. Every person had a clearly defined part to play--as a black person, a female high school drop-out, a Pontiac dealer, a gynecologist, a gas-conversion burner installer. If a person stopped living up to expectations, because of bad chemicals or one thing or another, everybody went on imagining that the person was living up to expectations anyway.

  That was the main reason the people in Midland City were so slow to detect insanity in their associates. Their imagination insisted that nobody changed much from day to day. Their imaginations were flywheels on the ramshackle machinery of the awful truth.

  *

  When Dwayne left Patty Keene and his Burger Chef, when he got into his demonstrator and drove away, Patty Keene was persuaded that she could make him happy with her young body, with her bravery and cheerfulness. She wanted to cry about the lines in his face, and the fact that his wife had eaten Drano, and that his dog had to fight all the time because it couldn't wag its tail, about the fact that his son was a homosexual. She knew all those things about Dwayne. Everybody knew those things about Dwayne.

  She gazed at the tower of radio station WMCY, which Dwayne Hoover owned. It was the tallest structure in Midland City. It was eight times as tall as the tombstone of George Hickman Bannister. It had a red light on top of it--to keep airplanes away.

  She thought about all the new and used cars Dwayne owned.

  *

  Earth scientists had just discovered something fascinating about the continent Patty Keene was standing on, incidentally. It was riding on a slab about forty miles thick, and the slab was drifting around on molten glurp: And all the other continents had slabs of their own. When one slab crashed into another one, mountains were made.

  *

  The mountains of West Virginia, for instance, were heaved up when a huge chunk of Africa crashed into North America. And the coal in the state was formed from forests which were buried by the crash.

  Patty Keene hadn't heard the big news yet. Neither had Dwayne. Neither had Kilgore Trout. I only found out about it day before yesterday. I was reading a magazine, and I also had the television on. A group of scientists was on television, saying that the theory of floating, crashing, grinding slabs was more than a theory. They could prove it was true now, and that Japan and San Francisco, for instance, were in hideous danger, because that was where some of the most violent crashing and grinding was going on.

  They said, too, that ice ages would continue to occur. Mile-thick glaciers would, geologically speaking, continue to go down and up like window blinds.

  *

  Dwayne Hoover, incidentally, had an unusually large penis, and didn't even know it. The few women he had had anything to do with weren't sufficiently experienced to know whether he was average or not. The world average was five and seven-eighths inches long, and one and one-half inches in diameter when engorged with blood. Dwayne's was seven inches long and two and one-eighth inches in diameter when engorged with blood.

  Dwayne's son Bunny had a penis that was exactly average.

  Kilgore Trout had a penis seven inches long, but only one and one-quarter inches in diameter.

  This was an inch:

  Harry LeSabre, Dwayne's sales manager, had a penis five inches long and two and one-eighth inches in diameter.

  Cyprian Ukwende, the black physician from Nigeria, had a penis six and seven-eighths inches long and one and three-quarters inches in diameter.

  Don Breedlove, the gas-conversion unit installer who raped Patty Keene, had a penis five and seven-eighths inches long and one and seven-eighths inches in diameter.

  *

  Patty Keene had thirty-four-inch hips, a twenty-six-inch waist, and a thirty-four-inch bosom.

  Dwayne's late wife had thirty-six-inch hips, a twenty-eight-inch waist, and a thirty-eight-inch bosom when he married her. She had thirty-nine-inch hips, a thirty-one-inch waist, and a thirty-eight-inch bosom when she ate Drano.

  His mistress and secretary, Francine Pefko, had thirty-seven-inch hips, a thirty-inch waist, and a thirty-nine-inch bosom.
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  His stepmother at the time of her death had thirty-four-inch hips, a twenty-four-inch waist, and a thirty-three-inch bosom.

  *

  So Dwayne went from the Burger Chef to the construction site of the new high school. He was in no hurry to get back to his automobile agency, particularly since he had developed echolalia. Francine was perfectly capable of running the place herself, without any advice from Dwayne. He had trained her well.

  So he kicked a little dirt down into the cellar hole. He spat down into it. He stepped into mud. It sucked off his right shoe. He dug the shoe out with his hands, and he wiped it. Then he leaned against an old apple tree while he put the shoe back on. This had all been farmland when Dwayne was a boy. There had been an apple orchard here.

  *

  Dwayne forgot all about Patty Keene, but she certainly hadn't forgotten him. She would get up enough nerve that night to call him on the telephone, but Dwayne wouldn't be home to answer. He would be in a padded cell in the County Hospital by then.

  And Dwayne wandered over to admire a tremendous earth-moving machine which had cleared the site and dug the cellar hole. The machine was idle now, caked with mud. Dwayne asked a white workman how many horsepower drove the machine. All the workmen were white.

  The workman said this: "I don't know how many horsepower, but I know what we call it."

  "What do you call it?" said Dwayne, relieved to find his echolalia was subsiding.

  "We call it The Hundred-Nigger Machine," said the workman. This had reference to a time when black men had done most of the heavy digging in Midland City.

  *

  The largest human penis in the United States was fourteen inches long and two and a half inches in diameter.

  The largest human penis in the world was sixteen and seven-eighths inches long and two and one-quarter inches in diameter.

  The blue whale, a sea mammal, had a penis ninety-six inches long and fourteen inches in diameter.

  *

  One time Dwayne Hoover got an advertisement through the mail for a penis-extender, made out of rubber. He could slip it over the end of his real penis, according to the ad, and thrill his wife or sweetheart with extra inches. They also wanted to sell him a lifelike rubber vagina for when he was lonesome.

  *

  Dwayne went back to work at about two in the afternoon, and he avoided everybody--because of his echolalia. He went into his inner office, and he ransacked his desk drawers for something to read or think about. He came across the brochure which offered him the penis-extender and the rubber vagina for lonesomeness. He had received it two months before. He still hadn't thrown it away.

  The brochure also offered him motion pictures such as the ones Kilgore Trout had seen in New York. There were still photographs taken from the movies, and these caused the sex excitation center in Dwayne's brain to send nerve impulses down to an erection center in his spine.

  The erection center caused the dorsal vein in his penis to tighten up, so blood could get in all right, but it couldn't get out again. It also relaxed the tiny arteries in his penis, so they filled up the spongy tissue of which Dwayne's penis was mainly composed, so that the penis got hard and stiff--like a plugged-up garden hose.

  So Dwayne called Francine Pefko on the telephone, even though she was only eleven feet away. "Francine--?" he said.

  "Yes?" she said.

  Dwayne fought down his echolalia. "I am going to ask you to do something I have never asked you to do before. Promise me you'll say yes."

  "I promise," she said.

  "I want you to walk out of here with me this very moment," he said, "and come with me to the Quality Motor Court at Shepherdstown."

  *

  Francine Pefko was willing to go to the Quality Motor Court with Dwayne. It was her duty to go, she thought--especially since Dwayne seemed so depressed and jangled. But she couldn't simply walk away from her desk for the afternoon, since her desk was the nerve center of Dwayne Hoover's Exit Eleven Pontiac Village.

  "You ought to have some crazy young teen-ager, who can rush off whenever you want her to," Francine told Dwayne.

  "I don't want a crazy teen-ager," said Dwayne. "I want you."

  "Then you're going to have to be patient," said Francine. She went back to the Service Department, to beg Gloria Browning, the white cashier back there, to man her desk for a little while.

  Gloria didn't want to do it. She had had a hysterectomy only a month before, at the age of twenty-five--after a botched abortion at the Ramada Inn down in Green County, on Route 53, across from the entrance to Pioneer Village State Park.

  There was a mildly amazing coincidence here: the father of the destroyed fetus was Don Breedlove, the white gas-conversion unit installer who had raped Patty Keene in the parking lot of the Bannister Memorial Fieldhouse.

  This was a man with a wife and three kids.

  *

  Francine had a sign on the wall over her desk, which had been given to her as a joke at the automobile agency's Christmas party at the new Holiday Inn the year before.

  It spelled out the truth of her situation. This was it:

  Gloria said she didn't want to man the nerve center. "I don't want to man anything," she said.

  *

  But Gloria took over Francine's desk anyway. "I don't have nerve enough to commit suicide," she said, "so I might as well do anything anybody says--in the service of mankind."

  *

  Dwayne and Francine headed for Shepherdstown in separate cars, so as not to call attention to their love affair. Dwayne was in a demonstrator again. Francine was in her own red GTO. GTO stood for Gran Turismo Omologato. She had a sticker on her bumper which said this:

  It was certainly loyal of her to put that sticker on her car. She was always doing loyal things like that, always rooting for her man, always rooting for Dwayne.

  And Dwayne tried to reciprocate in little ways. For instance, he had been reading articles and books on sexual intercourse recently. There was a sexual revolution going on in the country, and women were demanding that men pay more attention to women's pleasure during sexual intercourse, and not just think of themselves. The key to their pleasure, they said, and scientists backed them up, was the clitoris, a tiny meat cylinder which was right above the hole in women where men were supposed to stick their much larger cylinders.

  Men were supposed to pay more attention to the clitoris, and Dwayne had been paying a lot more attention to Francine's, to the point where she said he was paying too much attention to it. This did not surprise him. The things he had read about the clitoris had said that this was a danger--that a man could pay too much attention to it.

  So, driving out to the Quality Motor Court that day, Dwayne was hoping that he would pay exactly the right amount of attention to Francine's clitoris.

  *

  Kilgore Trout once wrote a short novel about the importance of the clitoris in love-making. This was in response to a suggestion by his second wife, Darlene, that he could make a fortune with a dirty book. She told him that the hero should understand women so well that he could seduce anyone he wanted. So Trout wrote The Son of Jimmy Valentine.

  Jimmy Valentine was a famous made-up person in another writer's books, just as Kilgore Trout was a famous made-up person in my books. Jimmy Valentine in the other writer's books sandpapered his fingertips, so they were extrasensitive. He was a safe-cracker. His sense of feel was so delicate that he could open any safe in the world by feeling the tumblers fall.

  Kilgore Trout invented a son for Jimmy Valentine, named Ralston Valentine. Ralston Valentine also sandpapered his fingertips. But he wasn't a safe-cracker. Ralston was so good at touching women the way they wanted to be touched, that tens of thousands of them became his willing slaves. They abandoned their husbands or lovers for him, in Trout's story, and Ralston Valentine became President of the United States, thanks to the votes of women.

  *

  Dwayne and Francine made love in the Quality Motor Court. Then they sta
yed in bed for a while. It was a water bed. Francine had a beautiful body. So did Dwayne. "We never made love in the afternoon before," said Francine.

  "I felt so tense," said Dwayne.

  "I know," said Francine. "Are you better now?"

  "Yes." He was lying on his back. His ankles were crossed. His hands were folded behind his head. His great wang lay across his thigh like a salami. It slumbered now.

  "I love you so much," said Francine. She corrected herself. "I know I promised not to say that, but that's a promise I can't help breaking all the time." The thing was: Dwayne had made a pact with her that neither one of them was ever to mention love. Since Dwayne's wife had eaten Drano, Dwayne never wanted to hear about love ever again. The subject was too painful.

  Dwayne snuffled. It was customary for him to communicate by means of snuffles after sexual intercourse. The snuffles all had meanings which were bland: "That's all right ... forget it ... who could blame you?" And so on.

  "On Judgment Day," said Francine, "when they ask me what bad things I did down here, I'm going to have to tell them, 'Well--there was a promise I made to a man I loved, and I broke it all the time. I promised him never to say I loved him.'"

  This generous, voluptuous woman, who had only ninety-six dollars and eleven cents a week in take-home pay, had lost her husband, Robert Pefko, in a war in Viet Nam. He was a career officer in the Army. He had a penis six and one-half inches long and one and seven-eighths inches in diameter.

  He was a graduate of West Point, a military academy which turned young men into homicidal maniacs for use in war.

  *

  Francine followed Robert from West Point to Parachute School at Fort Bragg, and then to South Korea, where Robert managed a Post Exchange, which was a department store for soldiers, and then to the University of Pennsylvania, where Robert took a Master's Degree in Anthropology, at Army expense, and then back to West Point, where Robert was an Assistant Professor of Social Sciences for three years.

  After that, Francine followed Robert to Midland City, where Robert oversaw the manufacture of a new sort of booby trap. A booby trap was an easily hidden explosive device, which blew up when it was accidentally twiddled in some way. One of the virtues of the new type of booby trap was that it could not be smelled by dogs. Various armies at that time were training dogs to sniff out booby traps.