Breakfast of Champions

by Kurt Vonnegut

  *

  When Robert and Francine were in Midland City, there weren't any other military people around, so they made their first civilian friends. And Francine took a job with Dwayne Hoover, in order to augment her husband's salary and fill her days.

  But then Robert was sent to Viet Nam.

  Shortly after that, Dwayne's wife ate Drano and Robert was shipped home in a plastic body bag.

  *

  "I pity men," said Francine, there in the Quality Motor Court. She was sincere. "I wouldn't want to be a man--they take such chances, they work so hard." They were on the second floor of the motel. Their sliding glass doors gave them a view of an iron railing and a concrete terrace outside--and then Route 103, and then the wall and the rooftops of the Adult Correctional Institution beyond that.

  "I don't wonder you're tired and nervous," Francine went on. "If I was a man, I'd be tired and nervous, too. I guess God made women so men could relax and be treated like little babies from time to time." She was more than satisfied with this arrangement.

  Dwayne snuffled. The air was rich with the smell of raspberries, which was the perfume in the disinfectant and roach-killer the motel used.

  Francine mused about the prison, where the guards were all white and most of the prisoners were black. "Is it true," she said, "that nobody ever escaped from there?"

  "It's true," said Dwayne.

  *

  "When was the last time they used the electric chair?" said Francine. She was asking about a device in the basement of the prison, which looked like this:

  The purpose of it was to kill people by jazzing them with more electricity than their bodies could stand. Dwayne Hoover had seen it twice--once during a tour of the prison by members of the Chamber of Commerce years ago, and then again when it was actually used on a black human being he knew.

  *

  Dwayne tried to remember when the last execution took place at Shepherdstown. Executions had become unpopular. There were signs that they might become popular again. Dwayne and Francine tried to remember the most recent electrocution anywhere in the country which had stuck in their minds.

  They remembered the double execution of a man and wife for treason. The couple had supposedly given secrets about how to make a hydrogen bomb to another country.

  They remembered the double execution of a man and woman who were lovers. The man was good-looking and sexy, and he used to seduce ugly old women who had money, and then he and the woman he really loved would kill the women for their money. The woman he really loved was young, but she certainly wasn't pretty in the conventional sense. She weighed two hundred and forty pounds.

  Francine wondered out loud why a thin, good-looking young man would love a woman that heavy.

  "It takes all kinds," said Dwayne.

  *

  "You know what I keep thinking?" said Francine.

  Dwayne snuffled.

  "This would be a very good location for a Colonel Sanders Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise."

  Dwayne's relaxed body contracted as though each muscle in it had been stung by a drop of lemon juice.

  Here was the problem: Dwayne wanted Francine to love him for his body and soul, not for what his money could buy. He thought Francine was hinting that he should buy her a Colonel Sanders Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise, which was a scheme for selling fried chicken.

  A chicken was a flightless bird which looked like this:

  The idea was to kill it and pull out all its feathers, and cut off its head and feet and scoop out its internal organs--and then chop it into pieces and fry the pieces, and put the pieces in a waxed paper bucket with a lid on it, so it looked like this:

  *

  Francine, who had been so proud of her capacity to make Dwayne relax, was now ashamed to have made him tighten up again. He was as rigid as an ironing board. "Oh my God--" she said, "what's the matter now?"

  "If you're going to ask me for presents," said Dwayne, "just do me a favor--and don't hint around right after we've made love. Let's keep love-making and presents separate. O.K.?"

  "I don't even know what you think I asked for," said Francine.

  Dwayne mimicked her cruelly in a falsetto voice: "'I don't even know what you think I asked you for,'" he said. He looked about as pleasant and relaxed as a coiled rattlesnake now. It was his bad chemicals, of course, which were compelling him to look like that. A real rattlesnake looked like this:

  The Creator of the Universe had put a rattle on its tail. The Creator had also given it front teeth which were hypodermic syringes filled with deadly poison.

  *

  Sometimes I wonder about the Creator of the Universe.

  *

  Another animal invented by the Creator of the Universe was a Mexican beetle which could make a blank-cartridge gun out of its rear end. It could detonate its own farts and knock over other bugs with shock waves.

  Word of Honor--I read about it in an article on strange animals in Diners' Club Magazine.

  *

  So Francine got off the bed in order not to share it with the seeming rattlesnake. She was aghast. All she could say over and over again was, "You're my man. You're my man." This meant that she was willing to agree about anything with Dwayne, to do anything for him, no matter how difficult or disgusting, to think up nice things to do for him that he didn't even notice, to die for him, if necessary, and so on.

  She honestly tried to live that way. She couldn't imagine anything better to do. So she fell apart when Dwayne persisted in his nastiness. He told her that every woman was a whore, and every whore had her price, and Francine's price was what a Colonel Sanders Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise would cost, which would be well over one hundred thousand dollars by the time adequate parking and exterior lighting and all that was taken into consideration, and so on.

  Francine replied in blubbering gibberish that she had never wanted the franchise for herself, that she had wanted it for Dwayne, that everything she wanted was for Dwayne. Some of the words came through. "I thought of all the people who come out here to visit their relatives in prison, and I realized how most of them were black, and I thought how much black people liked fried chicken," she said.

  "So you want me to open a Nigger joint?" said Dwayne. And so on. So Francine now had the distinction of being the second close associate of Dwayne's who discovered how vile he could be.

  "Harry LeSabre was right" said Francine. She was backed up against the cement block wall of the motel room now, with her fingers spread over her mouth. Harry LeSabre, of course, was Dwayne's transvestite sales manager. "He said you'd changed," said Francine. She made a cage of fingers around her mouth. "Oh, God, Dwayne--" she said, "you've changed, you've changed."

  "Maybe it was time!" said Dwayne. "I never felt better in my life!" And so on.

  *

  Harry LeSabre was at that moment crying, too. He was at home--in bed. He had a purple velvet sheet over his head. He was well-to-do. He had invested in the stock market very intelligently and luckily over the years. He had bought one hundred shares of Xerox, for instance, for eight dollars a share. With the passage of time, his shares had become one hundred times as valuable, simply lying in the total darkness and silence of a safe-deposit box.

  There was a lot of money magic like that going on. It was almost as though some blue fairy were flitting about that part of the dying planet, waving her magic wand over certain deeds and bonds and stock certificates.

  *

  Harry's wife, Grace, was stretched out on a chaise longue at some distance from the bed. She was smoking a small cigar in a long holder made from the legbone of a stork. A stork was a large European bird, about half the size of a Bermuda Ern. Children who wanted to know where babies came from were sometimes told that they were brought by storks. People who told their children such a thing felt that their children were too young to think intelligently about wide-open beavers and all that.

  And there were actually pictures of storks delivering babies on birth a
nnouncements and in cartoons and so on, for children to see. A typical one might look like this:

  Dwayne Hoover and Harry LeSabre saw pictures like that when they were very little boys. They believed them, too.

  *

  Grace LeSabre expressed her contempt for the good opinion of Dwayne Hoover, which her husband felt he had lost. "Fuck Dwayne Hoover," she said. "Fuck Midland City. Let's sell the God damn Xerox stock and buy a condominium on Maui." Maui was one of the Hawaiian Islands. It was widely believed to be a paradise.

  "Listen," said Grace, "we're the only white people in Midland City with any kind of sex life, as nearly as I can tell. You're not a freak. Dwayne Hoover's the freak! How many orgasms do you think he has a month?"

  "I don't know," said Harry from his humid tent.

  Dwayne's monthly orgasm rate on the average over the past ten years, which included the last years of his marriage, was two and one-quarter. Grace's guess was close. "One point five," she said. Her own monthly average over the same period was eighty-seven. Her husband's average was thirty-six. He had been slowing up in recent years, which was one of many reasons he had for feeling panicky.

  Grace now spoke loudly and scornfully about Dwayne's marriage. "He was so scared of sex," she said, "he married a woman who had never heard of the subject, who was guaranteed to destroy herself, if she ever did hear about it." And so on. "Which she finally did," she said.

  *

  "Can the reindeer hear you?" said Harry.

  "Fuck the reindeer," said Grace. Then she added, "No, the reindeer cannot hear." Reindeer was their code word for the black maid, who was far away in the kitchen at the time. It was their code word for black people in general. It allowed them to speak of the black problem in the city, which was a big one, without giving offense to any black person who might overhear.

  "The reindeer's asleep--or reading the Black Panther Digest," she said.

  *

  The reindeer problem was essentially this: Nobody white had much use for black people anymore--except for the gangsters who sold the black people used cars and dope and furniture. Still, the reindeer went on reproducing. There were these useless, big black animals everywhere, and a lot of them had very bad dispositions. They were given small amounts of money every month, so they wouldn't have to steal. There was talk of giving them very cheap dope, too--to keep them listless and cheerful, and uninterested in reproduction.

  The Midland City Police Department, and the Midland County Sheriff's Department, were composed mainly of white men. They had racks and racks of sub-machine guns and twelve-gauge automatic shotguns for an open season on reindeer, which was bound to come.

  "Listen--I'm serious," said Grace to Harry. "This is the asshole of the Universe. Let's split to a condominium on Maui and live for a change."

  So they did.

  *

  Dwayne's bad chemicals meanwhile changed his manner toward Francine from nastiness to pitiful dependency. He apologized to her for ever thinking that she wanted a Colonel Sanders Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise. He gave her full credit for unflagging unselfishness. He begged her to just hold him for a while, which she did.

  "I'm so confused," he said.

  "We all are," she said. She cradled his head against her breasts.

  "I've got to talk to somebody," said Dwayne.

  "You can talk to Mommy, if you want," said Francine. She meant that she was Mommy.

  "Tell me what life is all about," Dwayne begged her fragrant bosom.

  "Only God knows that," said Francine.

  *

  Dwayne was silent for a while. And then he told her haltingly about a trip he had made to the headquarters of the Pontiac Division of General Motors at Pontiac, Michigan, only three months after his wife ate Drano.

  "We were given a tour of all the research facilities," he said. The thing that impressed him most, he said, was a series of laboratories and out-of-doors test areas where various parts of automobiles and even entire automobiles were destroyed. Pontiac scientists set upholstery on fire, threw gravel at windshields, snapped crankshafts and drive-shafts, staged head-on collisions, tore gearshift levers out by the roots, ran engines at high speeds with almost no lubrication, opened and closed glove compartment doors a hundred times a minute for days, cooled dashboard clocks to within a few degrees of absolute zero, and so on.

  "Everything you're not supposed to do to a car, they did to a car," Dwayne said to Francine. "And I'll never forget the sign on the front door of the building where all that torture went on." Here was the sign Dwayne described to Francine:

  "I saw that sign," said Dwayne, "and I couldn't help wondering if that was what God put me on Earth for--to find out how much a man could take without breaking."

  *

  "I've lost my way," said Dwayne. "I need somebody to take me by the hand and lead me out of the woods."

  "You're tired," she said. "Why wouldn't you be tired? You work so hard. I feel sorry for men, they work so hard. You want to sleep for a while?"

  "I can't sleep," said Dwayne, "until I get some answers."

  "You want to go to a doctor?" said Francine.

  "I don't want to hear the kinds of things doctors say," said Dwayne. "I want to talk to somebody brand new. Francine," he said, and he dug his fingers into her soft arm, "I want to hear new things from new people. I've heard everything anybody in Midland City ever said, ever will say. It's got to be somebody new."

  "Like who?" said Francine.

  "I don't know," said Dwayne. "Somebody from Mars, maybe."

  "We could go to some other city," said Francine.

  "They're all like here. They're all the same," said Dwayne.

  Francine had an idea. "What about all these painters and writers and composers coming to town?" she said. "You never talked to anybody like that before. Maybe you should talk to one of them. They don't think like other people."

  "I've tried everything else," said Dwayne. He brightened. He nodded. "You're right! The Festival could give me a brand new viewpoint on life!" he said.

  "That's what it's for," said Francine. "Use it!"

  "I will," said Dwayne. This was a bad mistake.

  *

  Kilgore Trout, hitchhiking westward, ever westward, had meanwhile become a passenger in a Ford Galaxie. The man at the controls of the Galaxie was a traveling salesman for a device which engulfed the rear ends of trucks at loading docks. It was a telescoping tunnel of rubberized canvas, and it looked like this in action:

  The idea of the gadget was to allow people in a building to load or unload trucks without losing cold air in the summertime or hot air in the wintertime to the out-of-doors.

  The man in control of the Galaxie also sold large spools for wire and cable and rope. He also sold fire extinguishers. He was a manufacturer's representative, he explained. He was his own boss, in that he represented products whose manufacturers couldn't afford salesmen of their own.

  "I make my own hours, and I pick the products I sell. The products don't sell me," he said. His name was Andy Lieber. He was thirty-two. He was white. He was a good deal overweight like so many people in the country. He was obviously a happy man. He drove like a maniac. The Galaxie was going ninety-two miles an hour now. "I'm one of the few remaining free men in America," he said.

  He had a penis one inch in diameter and seven and a half inches long. During the past year, he had averaged twenty-two orgasms per month. This was far above the national average. His income and the value of his life insurance policies at maturity were also far above average.

  *

  Trout wrote a novel one time which he called How You Doin'? and it was about national averages for this and that. An advertising agency on another planet had a successful campaign for the local equivalent of Earthling peanut butter. The eye-catching part of each ad was the statement of some sort of average--the average number of children, the average size of the male sex organ on that particular planet--which was two inches long, with an inside diameter of thre
e inches and an outside diameter of four and a quarter inches--and so on. The ads invited the readers to discover whether they were superior or inferior to the majority, in this respect or that one--whatever the respect was for that particular ad.

  The ad went on to say that superior and inferior people alike ate such and such brand of peanut butter. Except that it wasn't really peanut butter on that planet. It was Shazzbutter.

  And so on.

  16

  AND THE PEANUT BUTTER-EATERS on Earth were preparing to conquer the shazzbutter-eaters on the planet in the book by Kilgore Trout. By this time, the Earthlings hadn't just demolished West Virginia and Southeast Asia. They had demolished everything. So they were ready to go pioneering again.

  They studied the shazzbutter-eaters by means of electronic snooping, and determined that they were too numerous and proud and resourceful ever to allow themselves to be pioneered.

  So the Earthlings infiltrated the ad agency which had the shazzbutter account, and they buggered the statistics in the ads. They made the average for everything so high that everybody on the planet felt inferior to the majority in every respect.

  And then the Earthling armored space ships came in and discovered the planet. Only token resistance was offered here and there, because the natives felt so below average. And then the pioneering began.

  *

  Trout asked the happy manufacturer's representative what it felt like to drive a Galaxie, which was the name of the car. The driver didn't hear him, and Trout let it go. It was a dumb play on words, so that Trout was asking simultaneously what it was like to drive the car and what it was like to steer something like the Milky Way, which was one hundred thousand light-years in diameter and ten thousand light-years thick. It revolved once every two hundred million years. It contained about one hundred billion stars.

  And then Trout saw that a simple fire extinguisher in the Galaxie had this brand name:

  As far as Trout knew, this word meant higher in a dead language. It was also a thing a fictitious mountain climber in a famous poem kept yelling as he disappeared into a blizzard up above. And it was also the trade name for wood shavings which were used to protect fragile objects inside packages.