Breakfast of Champions

by Kurt Vonnegut

  But then Trout hunched forward involuntarily, buckling the starched shirt bosom, forming it into a parabolic dish. This made a searchlight of the shirt. Its beam was aimed at Dwayne Hoover.

  The sudden light roused Dwayne from his trance. He thought perhaps he had died. At any rate, something painless and supernatural was going on. Dwayne smiled trustingly at the holy light. He was ready for anything.

  *

  Trout had no explanation for the fantastic transformation of certain garments around the room. Like most science-fiction writers, he knew almost nothing about science. He had no more use for solid information than did Rabo Karabekian. So now he could only be flabbergasted.

  My own shirt, being an old one which had been washed many times in a Chinese laundry which used ordinary soap, did not fluoresce.

  Dwayne Hoover now lost himself in the bosom of Trout's shirt, just as he had earlier lost himself in twinkling beads of lemon oil. He remembered now a thing his stepfather had told him when he was only ten years old, which was this: Why there were no Niggers in Shepherdstown.

  This was not a completely irrelevant recollection. Dwayne had, after all, been talking to Bonnie MacMahon, whose husband had lost so much money in a car wash in Shepherdstown. And the main reason the car wash had failed was that successful car washes needed cheap and plentiful labor, which meant black labor--and there were no Niggers in Shepherdstown.

  "Years ago," Dwayne's stepfather told Dwayne when Dwayne was ten, "Niggers was coming up north by the millions--to Chicago, to Midland City, to Indianapolis, to Detroit. The World War was going on. There was such a labor shortage that even Niggers who couldn't read or write could get good factory jobs. Niggers had money like they never had before.

  "Over at Shepherdstown, though," he went on, "the white people got smart quick. They didn't want Niggers in their town, so they put up signs on the main roads at the city limits and in the railroad yard." Dwayne's stepfather described the signs, which looked like this:

  "One night--" Dwayne's stepfather said, "a Nigger family got off a boxcar in Shepherdstown. Maybe they didn't see the sign. Maybe they couldn't read it. Maybe they couldn't believe it." Dwayne's stepfather was out of work when he told the story so gleefully. The Great Depression had just begun. He and Dwayne were on a weekly expedition in the family car, hauling garbage and trash out into the country, where they dumped it all in Sugar Creek.

  "Anyway, they moved into an empty shack that night," Dwayne's stepfather went on. "They got a fire going in the stove and all. So a mob went down there at midnight. They took out the man, and they sawed him in two on the top strand of a barbed-wire fence." Dwayne remembered clearly that a rainbow of oil from the trash was spreading prettily over the surface of Sugar Creek when he heard that.

  "Since that night, which was a long time ago now," his stepfather said, "there ain't been a Nigger even spend the night in Shepherdstown.

  *

  Trout was itchingly aware that Dwayne was staring at his bosom so loonily. Dwayne's eyes swam, and Trout supposed they were swimming in alcohol. He could not know that Dwayne was seeing an oil slick on Sugar Creek which had made rainbows forty long years ago.

  Trout was aware of me, too, what little he could see of me. I made him even more uneasy than Dwayne did. The thing was: Trout was the only character I ever created who had enough imagination to suspect that he might be the creation of another human being. He had spoken of this possibility several times to his parakeet. He had said, for instance, "Honest to God, Bill, the way things are going, all I can think of is that I'm a character in a book by somebody who wants to write about somebody who suffers all the time."

  Now Trout was beginning to catch on that he was sitting very close to the person who had created him. He was embarrassed. It was hard for him to know how to respond, particularly since his responses were going to be anything I said they were.

  I went easy on him, didn't wave, didn't stare. I kept my glasses on. I wrote again on my tabletop, scrawled the symbols for the interrelationship between matter and energy as it was understood in my day:

  It was a flawed equation, as far as I was concerned. There should have been an "A" in there somewhere for Awareness--without which the "E" and the "M" and the "c," which was a mathematical constant; could not exist.

  *

  All of us were stuck to the surface of a ball, incidentally. The planet was ball-shaped. Nobody knew why we didn't fall off, even though everybody pretended to kind of understand it.

  The really smart people understood that one of the best ways to get rich was to own a part of the surface people had to stick to.

  *

  Trout dreaded eye contact with either Dwayne or me, so he went through the contents of the manila envelope which had been waiting for him in his suite.

  The first thing he examined was a letter from Fred T. Barry, the Chairman of the Festival of the Arts, the donor of the Mildred Barry Memorial Center for the Arts, and the founder and Chairman of the Board of Directors of Barrytron, Ltd.

  Clipped to the letter was one share of common stock in Barrytron, made out in the name of Kilgore Trout. Here was the letter:

  "Dear Mr. Trout:" it said, "It is a pleasure and an honor to have such a distinguished and creative person give his precious time to Midland City's first Festival of the Arts. It is our wish that you feel like a member of our family while you are here. To give you and other distinguished visitors a deeper sense of participation in the life of our community, I am making a gift to each of you of one share in the company which I founded, the company of which I am now Chairman of the Board. It is not only my company now, but yours as well.

  "Our company began as The Robo-Magic Corporation of America in 1934. It had three employees in the beginning, and its mission was to design and manufacture the first fully automatic washing machine for use in the home. You will find the motto of that washing machine on the corporate emblem at the top of the stock certificate."

  The emblem consisted of a Greek goddess on an ornate chaise longue. She held a flagstaff from which a long pennant streamed. Here is what the pennant said:

  *

  The motto of the old Robo-Magic washing machine cleverly confused two separate ideas people had about Monday. One idea was that women traditionally did their laundry on Monday. Monday was simply washday, and not an especially depressing day on that account.

  People who had horrible jobs during the week used to call Monday "Blue Monday" sometimes, though, because they hated to return to work after a day of rest. When Fred T. Barry made up the Robo-Magic motto as a young man, he pretended that Monday was called "Blue Monday" because doing the laundry disgusted and exhausted women.

  The Robo-Magic was going to cheer them up.

  *

  It wasn't true, incidentally, that most women did their laundry on Monday at the time the Robo-Magic was invented. They did it any time they felt like it. One of Dwayne Hoover's clearest recollections from the Great Depression, for instance, was when his stepmother decided to do the laundry on Christmas Eve. She was bitter about the low estate to which the family had fallen, and she suddenly clumped down into the basement, down among the black beetles and the millipedes, and did the laundry.

  "Time to do the Nigger work," she said.

  *

  Fred T. Barry began advertising the Robo-Magic in 1933, long before there was a reliable machine to sell. And he was one of the few persons in Midland City who could afford billboard advertising during the Great Depression, so the Robo-Magic sales message did not have to jostle and shriek for attention. It was practically the only symbol in town.

  One of Fred's ads was on a billboard outside the main gate of the defunct Keedsler Automobile Company, which the Robo-Magic Corporation had taken over. It showed a high society woman in a fur coat and pearls. She was leaving her mansion for a pleasant afternoon of idleness, and a balloon was coming out of her mouth. These were the words in the balloon:

  Another ad, which was painted on a b
illboard by the railroad depot, showed two white deliverymen who were bringing a Robo-Magic into a house. A black maid was watching them. Her eyes were popping out in a comical way. There was a balloon coming out of her mouth, too, and she was saying this:

  *

  Fred T. Barry wrote these ads himself, and he predicted at the time that Robo-Magic appliances of various sorts would eventually do what he called "all the Nigger work of the world," which was lifting and cleaning and cooking and washing and ironing and tending children and dealing with filth.

  Dwayne Hoover's stepmother wasn't the only white woman who was a terrible sport about doing work like that. My own mother was that way, too, and so was my sister, may she rest in peace. They both flatly refused to do Nigger work.

  The white men wouldn't do it either, of course. They called it women's work, and the women called it Nigger work.

  *

  I am going to make a wild guess now: I think that the end of the Civil War in my country frustrated the white people in the North, who won it, in a way which has never been acknowledged before. Their descendants inherited that frustration, I think, without ever knowing what it was.

  The victors in that war were cheated out of the most desirable spoils of that war, which were human slaves.

  *

  The Robo-Magic dream was interrupted by World War Two. The old Keedsler Automobile Works became an armory instead of an appliance factory. All that survived of the Robo-Magic itself was its brain, which had told the rest of the machine when to let the water in, when to let the water out, when to slosh, when to rinse, when to spin dry, and so on.

  That brain became the nerve center of the so-called "BLINC System" during the Second World War. It was installed on heavy bombers, and it did the actual dropping of bombs after a bombardier pressed his bright red "bombs away" button. The button activated the BLINC System, which then released the bombs in such a way as to achieve a desired pattern of explosions on the planet below. "BLINC" was an abbreviation of "Blast Interval Normalization Computer."

  22

  AND I SAT THERE in the cocktail lounge of the new Holiday Inn, watching Dwayne Hoover stare into the bosom of the shirt of Kilgore Trout. I was wearing a bracelet which looked like this:

  WO1 stood for Warrant Officer First Class, which was the rank of Jon Sparks.

  The bracelet had cost me two dollars and a half. It was a way of expressing my pity for the hundreds of Americans who had been taken prisoner during the war in Viet Nam. Such bracelets were becoming popular. Each one bore the name of an actual prisoner of war, his rank, and the date of his capture.

  Wearers of the bracelets weren't supposed to take them off until the prisoners came home or were reported dead or missing.

  I wondered how I might fit my bracelet into my story, and hit on the good idea of dropping it somewhere for Wayne Hoobler to find.

  Wayne would assume that it belonged to a woman who loved somebody named WOI Jon Sparks, and that the woman and WOI had become engaged or married or something important on March 19th, 1971.

  Wayne would mouth the unusual first name tentatively. "Woo-ee?" he would say. "Woe-ee? Woe-eye? Woy?"

  *

  There in the cocktail lounge, I gave Dwayne Hoover credit for having taken a course in speed-reading at night at the Young Men's Christian Association. This would enable him to read Kilgore Trout's novel in minutes instead of hours.

  *

  There in the cocktail lounge, I took a white pill which a doctor said I could take in moderation, two a day, in order not to feel blue.

  *

  There in the cocktail lounge, the pill and the alcohol gave me a terrific sense of urgency about explaining all the things I hadn't explained yet, and then hurtling on with my tale.

  Let's see: I have already explained Dwayne's uncharacteristic ability to read so fast. Kilgore Trout probably couldn't have made his trip from New York City in the time I allotted, but it's too late to bugger around with that. Let it stand, let it stand!

  Let's see, let's see. Oh, yes--I have to explain a jacket Trout will see at the hospital. It will look like this from the back:

  Here is the explanation: There used to be only one Nigger high school in Midland City, and it was an all-Nigger high school still. It was named after Crispus Attucks, a black man who was shot by British troops in Boston in 1770. There was an oil painting of this event in the main corridor of the school. Several white people were stopping bullets, too. Crispus Attucks himself had a hole in his forehead which looked like the front door of a birdhouse.

  But the black people didn't call the school Crispus Attucks High School anymore. They called it Innocent Bystander High.

  And when another Nigger high school was built after the Second World War, it was named after George Washington Carver, a black man who was born into slavery, but who became a famous chemist anyway. He discovered many remarkable new uses for peanuts.

  But the black people wouldn't call that school by its proper name, either. On the day it opened, there were already young black people wearing jackets which looked like this from the back:

  *

  I have to explain, too, see, why so many black people in Midland City were able to imitate birds from various parts of what used to be the British Empire. The thing was, see, that Fred T. Barry and his mother and father were almost the only people in Midland City who could afford to hire Niggers to do the Nigger work during the Great Depression. They took over the old Keedsler Mansion, where Beatrice Keedsler, the novelist, had been born. They had as many as twenty servants working there, all at one time.

  Fred's father got so much money during the prosperity of the twenties as a bootlegger and as a swindler in stocks and bonds. He kept all his money in cash, which turned out to be a bright thing to do, since so many banks failed during the Great Depression. Also: Fred's father was an agent for Chicago gangsters who wanted to buy legitimate businesses for their children and grandchildren. Through Fred's father, those gangsters bought almost every desirable property in Midland City for anything from a tenth to a hundredth of what it was really worth.

  And before Fred's mother and father came to the United States after the First World War, they were music hall entertainers in England. Fred's father played the musical saw. His mother imitated birds from various parts of what was still the British Empire.

  She went on imitating them for her own amusement, well into the Great Depression. "The Bulbul of Malaysia," she would say, for instance, and then she would imitate that bird.

  "The Morepark Owl of New Zealand," she would say, and then she would imitate that bird.

  And all the black people who worked for her thought her act was the funniest thing they had ever seen, though they never laughed out loud when she did it. And, in order to double up their friends and relatives with laughter, they, too, learned how to imitate the birds.

  The craze spread. Black people who had never been near the Keedsler mansion could imitate the Lyre Bird and the Willy Wagtail of Australia, the Golden Oriole of India, the Nightingale and the Chaffinch and the Wren and the Chiffchaff of England itself.

  They could even imitate the happy screech of the extinct companion of Kilgore Trout's island childhood, which was the Bermuda Em.

  When Kilgore Trout hit town, the black people could still imitate those birds, and say word for word what Fred's mother had said before each imitation. If one of them imitated a Nightingale, for instance, he or she would say this first: "What adds peculiar beauty to the call of the Nightingale, much beloved by poets, is the fact that it will only sing by moonlight."

  And so on.

  *

  There in the cocktail lounge, Dwayne Hoover's bad chemicals suddenly decided that it was time for Dwayne to demand from Kilgore Trout the secrets of life.

  "Give me the message," cried Dwayne. He tottered up from his own banquette, crashed down again next to Trout, throwing off heat like a steam radiator. "The message, please."

  And here Dwayne did something ex
traordinarily unnatural. He did it because I wanted him to. It was something I had ached to have a character do for years and years. Dwayne did to Trout what the Duchess did to Alice in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. He rested his chin on poor Trout's shoulder, dug in with his chin.

  "The message?" he said, digging in his chin, digging in his chin.

  Trout made no reply. He had hoped to get through what little remained of his life without ever having to touch another human being again. Dwayne's chin on his shoulder was as shattering as buggery to Trout.

  "Is this it? Is this it?" said Dwayne, snatching up Trout's novel, Now It Can Be Told.

  "Yes--that's it," croaked Trout. To his tremendous relief, Dwayne removed his chin from his shoulder.

  Dwayne now began to read hungrily, as though starved for print. And the speed-reading course he had taken at the Young Men's Christian Association allowed him to make a perfect pig of himself with pages and words.

  "Dear Sir, poor sir, brave sir:" he read, "You are an experiment by the Creator of the Universe. You are the only creature in the entire Universe who has free will. You are the only one who has to figure out what to do next--and why. Everybody else is a robot, a machine.

  "Some persons seem to like you, and others seem to hate you, and you must wonder why. They are simply liking machines and hating machines.

  "You are pooped and demoralized," read Dwayne. "Why wouldn't you be? Of course it is exhausting, having to reason all the time in a universe which wasn't meant to be reasonable."

  23

  DWAYNE HOOVER read on: "You are surrounded by loving machines, hating machines, greedy machines, unselfish machines, brave machines, cowardly machines, truthful machines, lying machines, funny machines, solemn machines," he read. "Their only purpose is to stir you up in every conceivable way, so the Creator of the Universe can watch your reactions. They can no more feel or reason than grandfather clocks.