Breakfast of Champions

by Kurt Vonnegut

  "Why would anybody name a fire extinguisher Excelsior?" Trout asked the driver.

  The driver shrugged. "Somebody must have liked the sound of it," he said.

  *

  Trout looked out at the countryside, which was smeared by high velocity. He saw this sign:

  So he was getting really close to Dwayne Hoover. And, as though the Creator of the Universe or some other supernatural power were preparing him for the meeting, Trout felt the urge to thumb through his own book, Now It Can Be Told. This was the book which would soon turn Dwayne into a homicidal maniac.

  The premise of the book was this: Life was an experiment by the Creator of the Universe, Who wanted to test a new sort of creature He was thinking of introducing into the Universe. It was a creature with the ability to make up its own mind. All the other creatures were fully-programmed robots.

  The book was in the form of a long letter from The Creator of the Universe to the experimental creature. The Creator congratulated the creature and apologized for all the discomfort he had endured. The Creator invited him to a banquet in his honor in the Empire Room of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City, where a black robot named Sammy Davis, Jr., would sing and dance.

  *

  And the experimental creature wasn't killed after the banquet. He was transferred to a virgin planet instead. Living cells were sliced from the palms of his hands, while he was unconscious. The operation didn't hurt at all.

  And then the cells were stirred into a soupy sea on the virgin planet. They would evolve into ever more complicated life forms as the eons went by. Whatever shapes they assumed, they would have free will.

  Trout didn't give the experimental creature a proper name. He simply called him The Man.

  On the virgin planet, The Man was Adam and the sea was Eve.

  *

  The Man often sauntered by the sea. Sometimes he waded in his Eve. Sometimes he swam in her, but she was too soupy for an invigorating swim. She made her Adam feel sleepy and sticky afterwards, so he would dive into an icy stream that had just jumped off a mountain.

  He screamed when he dived into the icy water, screamed again when he came up for air. He bloodied his shins and laughed about it when he scrambled up rocks to get out of the water.

  He panted and laughed some more, and he thought of something amazing to yell. The Creator never knew what he was going to yell, since The Creator had no control over him. The Man himself got to decide what he was going to do next--and why. After a dip one day, for instance, The Man yelled this: "Cheese!"

  Another time he yelled, "Wouldn't you really rather drive a Buick?"

  *

  The only other big animal on the virgin planet was an angel who visited The Man occasionally. He was a messenger and an investigator for the Creator of the Universe. He took the form of an eight hundred pound male cinnamon bear. He was a robot, too, and so was The Creator, according to Kilgore Trout.

  The bear was attempting to get a line on why The Man did what he did. He would ask, for instance, "Why did you yell, 'Cheese'?"

  And The Man would tell him mockingly, "Because I felt like it, you stupid machine."

  *

  Here is what The Man's tombstone on the virgin planet looked like at the end of the book by Kilgore Trout:

  17

  BUNNY HOOVER, Dwayne's homosexual son, was dressing for work now. He was the piano player in the cocktail lounge of the new Holiday Inn. He was poor. He lived alone in a room without bath in the old Fairchild Hotel, which used to be fashionable. It was a flophouse now--in the most dangerous part of Midland City.

  Very soon, Bunny Hoover would be seriously injured by Dwayne, would soon share an ambulance with Kilgore Trout.

  *

  Bunny was pale, the same unhealthy color of the blind fish that used to live in the bowels of Sacred Miracle Cave. Those fish were extinct. They had all turned belly-up years ago, had been flushed from the cave and into the Ohio River--to turn belly-up, to go bang in the noonday sun.

  Bunny avoided the sunshine, too. And the water from the taps of Midland City was becoming more poisonous every day. He ate very little. He prepared his own food in his room. The preparation was simple, since vegetables and fruits were all he ate, and he munched them raw.

  He not only did without dead meat--he did without living meat, too, without friends or lovers or pets. He had once been highly popular. When he was at Prairie Military Academy, for instance, the student body was unanimous in electing him Cadet Colonel, the highest rank possible, in his senior year.

  *

  When Bunny played the piano bar at the Holiday Inn, he had many, many secrets. One of them was this: he wasn't really there. He was able to absent himself from the cocktail lounge, and from the planet itself, for that matter, by means of Transcendental Meditation. He learned this technique from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who once stopped off in Midland City during a world-wide lecture tour.

  Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, in exchange for a new handkerchief, a piece of fruit, a bunch of flowers, and thirty-five dollars, taught Bunny to close his eyes, and to say this euphonious nonsense word to himself over and over again: "Aye-eeeeem, aye-eeeeem, aye-eeeeem." Bunny sat on the edge of his bed in the hotel room now, and he did it. "Aye-eeeeem, aye-eeeeem", he said to himself--internally. The rhythm of the chant matched one syllable with each two beats in his heart. He closed his eyes. He became a skin diver in the depths of his mind. The depths were seldom used.

  His heart slowed. His respiration nearly stopped. A single word floated by in the depths. It had somehow escaped from the busier parts of his mind. It wasn't connected to anything. It floated by lazily, a translucent, scarf-like fish. The word was untroubling. Here was the word: "Blue." Here is what it looked like to Bunny Hoover:

  And then another lovely scarf swam by. It looked like this:

  *

  Fifteen minutes later, Bunny's awareness bobbed to the surface of its own accord. Bunny was refreshed. He got up from the bed, and he brushed his hair with the military brushes his mother had given him when he was elected Cadet Colonel so long ago.

  *

  Bunny was sent away to military school, an institution devoted to homicide and absolutely humorless obedience, when he was only ten years old. Here is why: He told Dwayne that he wished he were a woman instead of a man, because what men did was so often cruel and ugly.

  *

  Listen: Bunny Hoover went to Prairie Military Academy for eight years of uninterrupted sports, buggery and Fascism. Buggery consisted of sticking one's penis in somebody else's asshole or mouth, or having it done to one by somebody else. Fascism was a fairly popular political philosophy which made sacred whatever nation and race the philosopher happened to belong to. It called for an autocratic, centralized government, headed up by a dictator. The dictator had to be obeyed, no matter what he told somebody to do.

  And Bunny would bring new medals with him every time he came home for vacation. He could fence and box and wrestle and swim, he could shoot a rifle and a pistol, fight with bayonets, ride a horse, creep and crawl through shrubbery, peek around corners without being seen.

  He would show off his medals, and his mother would tell him when his father was out of hearing that she was becoming unhappier with each passing day. She would hint that Dwayne was a monster. It wasn't true. It was all in her head.

  She would begin to tell Bunny what was so vile about Dwayne, but she always stopped short. "You're too young to hear about such things," she'd say, even when Bunny was sixteen years old. "There's nothing you or anybody could do about them anyway." She would pretend to lock her lips with a key, and then whisper to Bunny, "There are secrets I will carry to my grave."

  Her biggest secret, of course, was one that Bunny didn't detect until she knocked herself off with Drano. Celia Hoover was crazy as a bedbug.

  My mother was, too.

  *

  Listen: Bunny's mother and my mother were different sorts of human beings, but they were both beautiful in e
xotic ways, and they both boiled over with chaotic talk about love and peace and wars and evil and desperation, of better days coming by and by, of worse days coming by and by. And both our mothers committed suicide. Bunny's mother ate Drano. My mother ate sleeping pills, which wasn't nearly as horrible.

  *

  And Bunny's mother and my mother had one really bizarre symptom in common: neither one could stand to have her picture taken. They were usually fine in the daytime. They usually concealed their frenzies until late at night. But, if somebody aimed a camera at either one of them during the daytime, the mother who was aimed at would crash down on her knees and protect her head with her arms, as though somebody was about to club her to death. It was a scary and pitiful thing to see.

  *

  At least Bunny's mother taught him how to control a piano, which was a music machine. At least Bunny Hoover's mother taught him a trade. A good piano controller could get a job making music in cocktail lounges almost anywhere in the world, and Bunny was a good one. His military training was useless, despite all the medals he won. The armed forces knew he was a homosexual, that he was certain to fall in love with other fighting men, and the armed forces didn't want to put up with such love affairs.

  *

  So Bunny Hoover now got ready to practice his trade. He slipped a black velvet dinner jacket over a black turtleneck sweater now. Bunny looked out his only window at the alleyway. The better rooms afforded views of Fairchild Park, where there had been fifty-six murders in the past two years. Bunny's room was on the second floor, so his window framed a piece of the blank brick side of what used to be the Keedsler Opera House.

  There was an historical marker on the front of the former opera house. Not many people could understand it, but this is what it said:

  The Opera House used to be the home of the Midland City Symphony Orchestra, which was an amateur group of music enthusiasts. But they became homeless in 1927, when the Opera House became a motion picture house, The Bannister. The orchestra remained homeless, too, until the Mildred Barry Memorial Center for the Arts went up.

  And The Bannister was the city's leading movie house for many years, until it was engulfed by the high crime district, which was moving north all the time. So it wasn't a theater anymore, even though there were still busts of Shakespeare and Mozart and so on gazing down from niches in the walls inside.

  The stage was still in there, too, but it was crowded with dinette sets now. The Empire Furniture Company had taken over the premises now. It was gangster-controlled.

  *

  The nickname for Bunny's neighborhood was Skid Row. Every American town of any size had a neighborhood with the same nickname: Skid Row. It was a place where people who didn't have any friends or relatives or property or usefulness or ambition were supposed to go.

  People like that would be treated with disgust in other neighborhoods, and policemen would keep them moving. They were as easy to move, usually, as toy balloons.

  And they would drift hither and yon, like balloons filled with some gas slightly heavier than air, until they came to rest in Skid Row, against the foundations of the old Fairchild Hotel.

  They could snooze and mumble to each other all day long. They could beg. They could get drunk. The basic scheme was this one: they were to stay there and not bother anybody anywhere else--until they were murdered for thrills, or until they were frozen to death by the wintertime.

  *

  Kilgore Trout wrote a story one time about a town which decided to tell derelicts where they were and what was about to happen to them by putting up actual street signs like this:

  Bunny now smiled at himself in the mirror, in the leak.

  He called himself to attention for a moment, became again the insufferably brainless, humorless, heartless soldier he had learned to be in military school. He murmured the motto of the school, a motto he used to have to shout about a hundred times a day--at dawn, at meals, at the start of every class, at games, at bayonet practice, at sunset, at bedtime:

  "Can do" he said. "Can do."

  18

  THE GALAXIE in which Kilgore Trout was a passenger was on the Interstate now, close to Midland City. It was creeping. It was trapped in rush hour traffic from Barrytron and Western Electric and Prairie Mutual. Trout looked up from his reading, saw a billboard which said this:

  So Sacred Miracle Cave had become a part of the past.

  *

  As an old, old man, Trout would be asked by Dr. Thor Lembrig, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, if he feared the future. He would give this reply:

  "Mr. Secretary-General, it is the past which scares the bejesus out of me."

  *

  Dwayne Hoover was only four miles away. He was sitting alone on a zebra-skin banquette in the cocktail lounge of the new Holiday Inn. It was dark in there, and quiet, too. The glare and uproar of rush hour traffic on the Interstate was blocked out by thick drapes of crimson velvet. On each table was a hurricane lamp with a candle inside, although the air was still.

  On each table was a bowl of dry-roasted peanuts, too, and a sign which allowed the staff to refuse service to anyone who was inharmonious with the mood of the lounge. Here is what it said:

  *

  Bunny Hoover was controlling the piano. He had not looked up when his father came in. Neither had his father glanced in his direction. They had not exchanged greetings for many years.

  Bunny went on playing his white man's blues. They were slow and tinkling, with capricious silences here and there. Bunny's blues had some of the qualities of a music box, a tired music box. They tinkled, stopped, then reluctantly, torpidly, they managed a few tinkles more.

  Bunny's mother used to collect tinkling music boxes, among other things.

  *

  Listen: Francine Pefko was at Dwayne's automobile agency next door. She was catching up on all the work she should have done that afternoon. Dwayne would beat her up very soon.

  And the only other person on the property with her as she typed and filed was Wayne Hoobler, the black parolee, who still lurked among the used cars. Dwayne would try to beat him up, too, but Wayne was a genius at dodging blows.

  Francine was pure machinery at the moment, a machine made of meat--a typing machine, a filing machine.

  Wayne Hoobler, on the other hand, had nothing machine-like to do. He ached to be a useful machine. The used cars were all locked up tight for the night. Now and then aluminum propellors on a wire overhead would be turned by a lazy breeze, and Wayne would respond to them as best he could. "Go," he would say to them. "Spin 'roun'."

  *

  He established a sort of relationship with the traffic on the Interstate, too, appreciating its changing moods. "Everybody goin' home," he said during the rush hour jam. "Everybody home now," he said later on, when the traffic thinned out. Now the sun was going down.

  "Sun goin' down," said Wayne Hoobler. He had no clues as to where to go next. He supposed without minding much that he might die of exposure that night. He had never seen death by exposure, had never been threatened by it, since he had so seldom been out-of-doors. He knew of death by exposure because the papery voice of the little radio in his cell told of people's dying of exposure from time to time.

  He missed that papery voice. He missed the clash of steel doors. He missed the bread and the stew and the pitchers of milk and coffee. He missed fucking other men in the mouth and the asshole, and being fucked in the mouth and the asshole, and jerking off--and fucking cows in the prison dairy, all events in a normal sex life on the planet, as far as he knew.

  Here would be a good tombstone for Wayne Hoobler when he died:

  *

  The dairy at the prison provided milk and cream and butter and cheese and ice cream not only for the prison and the County Hospital. It sold its products to the outside world, too. Its trademark didn't mention prison. This was it:

  *

  Wayne couldn't read very well. The words Hawaii and Hawaiian, for instance, appeared in c
ombination with more familiar words and symbols in signs painted on the windows of the showroom and on the windshields of some used cars. Wayne tried to decode the mysterious words phonetically, without any satisfaction. "Wahee-io," he would say, and "Hoo-he-woo-hi," and so on.

  *

  Wayne Hoobler smiled now, not because he was happy but because, with so little to do, he thought he might as well show off his teeth. They were excellent teeth. The Adult Correctional Institution at Shepherdstown was proud of its dentistry program.

  It was such a famous dental program, in fact, that it had been written up in medical journals and in the Reader's Digest, which was the dying planet's most popular magazine. The theory behind the program was that many ex-convicts could not or would not get jobs because of their appearances, and good looks began with good teeth.

  The program was so famous, in fact, that police even in neighboring states, when they picked up a poor man with expensively maintained teeth, fillings and bridgework and all that, were likely to ask him, "All right, boy--how many years you spend in Shepherdstown?"

  *

  Wayne Hoobler heard some of the orders which a waitress called to the bartender in the cocktail lounge. Wayne heard her call, "Gilbey's and quinine, with a twist" He had no idea what that was--or a Manhattan or a brandy Alexander or a sloe gin fizz. "Give me a Johnnie Walker Rob Roy," she called, "and a Southern Comfort on the rocks, and a Bloody Mary with Wolfschmidt's."

  Wayne's only experiences with alcohol had had to do with drinking cleaning fluids and eating shoe polish and so on. He had no fondness for alcohol.

  *

  "Give me a Black and White and water," he heard the waitress say, and Wayne should have pricked up his ears at that. That particular drink wasn't for any ordinary person. That drink was for the person who had created all Wayne's misery to date, who could kill him or make him a millionaire or send him back to prison or do whatever he damn pleased with Wayne. That drink was for me.

  *

  I had come to the Arts Festival incognito. I was there to watch a confrontation between two human beings I had created: Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout. I was not eager to be recognized. The waitress lit the hurricane lamp on my table. I pinched out the flame with my fingers. I had bought a pair of sunglasses at a Holiday Inn outside of Ashtabula, Ohio, where I spent the night before. I wore them in the darkness now. They looked like this: