Breakfast of Champions

by Kurt Vonnegut

  "The Creator of the Universe would now like to apologize not only for the capricious, jostling companionship he provided during the test, but for the trashy, stinking condition of the planet itself. The Creator programmed robots to abuse it for millions of years, so it would be a poisonous, festering cheese when you got here. Also, He made sure it would be desperately crowded by programming robots, regardless of their living conditions, to crave sexual intercourse and adore infants more than almost anything."

  *

  Mary Alice Miller, incidentally, the Women's Breast Stroke Champion of the World and Queen of the Arts Festival, now passed through the cocktail lounge. She made a shortcut to the lobby from the side parking lot, where her father was waiting for her in his avocado 1970 Plymouth Barracuda fastback, which he had bought as a used car from Dwayne. It had a new car guarantee.

  Mary Alice's father, Don Miller, was, among other things, Chairman of the Parole Board at Shepherdstown. It was he who had decided that Wayne Hoobler, lurking among Dwayne's used cars again, was fit to take his place in society.

  Mary Alice went into the lobby to get a crown and scepter for her performance as Queen at the Arts Festival banquet that night. Milo Maritimo, the desk clerk, the gangster's grandson, had made them with his own two hands. Her eyes were permanently inflamed. They looked like maraschino cherries.

  Only one person noticed her sufficiently to comment out loud. He was Abe Cohen, the jeweler. He said this about Mary Alice, despising her sexlessness and innocence and empty mind: "Pure tuna fish!"

  *

  Kilgore Trout heard him say that--about pure tuna fish. His mind tried to make sense of it. His mind was swamped with mysteries. He might as well have been Wayne Hoobler, adrift among Dwayne's used cars during Hawaiian Week.

  His feet, which were sheathed in plastic, were meanwhile getting hotter all the time. The heat was painful now. His feet were curling and twisting, begging to be plunged into cold water or waved in the air.

  And Dwayne read on about himself and the Creator of the Universe, to wit:

  "He also programmed robots to write books and magazines and newspapers for you, and television and radio shows, and stage shows, and films. They wrote songs for you. The Creator of the Universe had them invent hundreds of religions, so you would have plenty to choose among. He had them kill each other by the millions, for this purpose only: that you be amazed. They have committed every possible atrocity and every possible kindness unfeelingly, automatically, inevitably, to get a reaction from Y-O-U."

  This last word was set in extra-large type and had a line all to itself, so it looked like this:

  *

  "Every time you went into the library," said the book, "the Creator of the Universe held His breath. With such a higgledy-piggledy cultural smorgasbord before you, what would you, with your free will, choose?"

  "Your parents were fighting machines and self-pitying machines," said the book. "Your mother was programmed to bawl out your father for being a defective moneymaking machine, and your father was programmed to bawl her out for being a defective housekeeping machine. They were programmed to bawl each other out for being defective loving machines.

  "Then your father was programmed to stomp out of the house and slam the door. This automatically turned your mother into a weeping machine. And your father would go down to a tavern where he would get drunk with some other drinking machines. Then all the drinking machines would go to a whorehouse and rent fucking machines. And then your father would drag himself home to become an apologizing machine. And your mother would become a very slow forgiving machine."

  *

  Dwayne got to his feet now, having wolfed down tens of thousands of words of such solipsistic whimsey in ten minutes or so.

  He walked stiffly over to the piano bar. What made him stiff was his awe of his own strength and righteousness. He dared not use his full strength in merely walking, for fear of destroying the new Holiday Inn with footfalls. He did not fear for his own life, Trout's book assured him that he had already been killed twenty-three times. On each occasion, the Creator of the Universe had patched him up and got him going again.

  Dwayne restrained himself in the name of elegance rather than safety. He was going to respond to his new understanding of life with finesse, for an audience of two--himself and his Creator.

  He approached his homosexual son.

  Bunny saw the trouble coming, supposed it was death. He might have protected himself easily with all the techniques of fighting he had learned in military school. But he chose to meditate instead. He closed his eyes, and his awareness sank into the silence of the unused lobes of his mind. This phosphorescent scarf floated by:

  *

  Dwayne shoved Bunny's head from behind. He rolled it like a cantaloupe up and down the keys of the piano bar. Dwayne laughed, and he called his son "... a God damn cock-sucking machine!"

  Bunny did not resist him, even though Bunny's face was being mangled horribly. Dwayne hauled his head from the keys, slammed it down again. There was blood on the keys--and spit, and mucus.

  Rabo Karabekian and Beatrice Keedsler and Bonnie MacMahon all grabbed Dwayne now, pulled him away from Bunny. This increased Dwayne's glee. "Never hit a woman, right?" he said to the Creator of the Universe.

  He then socked Beatrice Keedsler on the jaw. He punched Bonnie MacMahon in the belly. He honestly believed that they were unfeeling machines.

  "All you robots want to know why my wife ate Drano?" Dwayne asked his thunderstruck audience. "I'll tell you why: She was that kind of machine!"

  *

  There was a map of Dwayne's rampage in the paper the next morning. The dotted line of his route started in the cocktail lounge, crossed the asphalt to Francine Pefko's office in his automobile agency, doubled back to the new Holiday Inn again, then crossed Sugar Creek and the Westbound lane of the Interstate to the median divider, which was grass. Dwayne was subdued on the median divider by two State Policemen who happened by.

  Here is what Dwayne said to the policemen as they cuffed his hands behind his back: "Thank God you're here!"

  *

  Dwayne didn't kill anybody on his rampage, but he hurt eleven people so badly they had to go to the hospital. And on the map in the newspaper there was a mark indicating each place where a person had been injured seriously. This was the mark, greatly enlarged:

  *

  In the newspaper map of Dwayne's rampage, there were three such crosses inside the cocktail lounge--for Bunny and Beatrice Keedsler and Bonnie MacMahon.

  Then Dwayne ran out onto the asphalt between the Inn and his used car lot. He yelled for Niggers out there, telling them to come at once. "I want to talk to you," he said.

  He was out there all alone. Nobody from the cocktail lounge had followed him yet. Mary Alice Miller's father, Don Miller, was in his car near Dwayne, waiting for Mary Alice to come back with her crown and scepter, but he never saw anything of the show Dwayne put on. His car had seats whose backs could be made to lie flat. They could be made into beds. Don was lying on his back, with his head well below window level, resting, staring at the ceiling. He was trying to learn French by means of listening to lessons recorded on tape.

  "Demain nous allons passer la soiree au cinema," said the tape, and Don tried to say it, too. "Nous esperons que notre grand-pere vivra encore longtemps," said the tape. And so on.

  *

  Dwayne went on calling for Niggers to come talk to him. He smiled. He thought that the Creator of the Universe had programmed them all to hide, as a joke.

  Dwayne glanced around craftily. Then he called out a signal he had used as a child to indicate that a game of hide-and-seek was over, that it was time for children in hiding to go home.

  Here is what he called, and the sun was down when he called it: "Olly-olly-ox-in-freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee."

  The person who answered this incantation was a person who had never played hide-and-seek in his life. It was Wayne Hoobler, who came out from among the
used cars quietly. He clasped his hands behind his back and placed his feet apart. He assumed the position known as parade rest. This position was taught to soldiers and prisoners alike--as a way of demonstrating attentiveness, gullibility, respect, and voluntary defenselessness. He was ready for anything, and wouldn't mind death.

  "There you are," said Dwayne, and his eyes crinkled in bittersweet amusement. He didn't know who Wayne was. He welcomed him as a typical black robot. Any other black robot would have served as well. And Dwayne again carried on a wry talk with the Creator of the Universe, using a robot as an unfeeling conversation piece. A lot of people in Midland City put useless objects from Hawaii or Mexico or someplace like that on their coffee tables or their livingroom end tables or on what-not shelves--and such an object was called a conversation piece.

  Wayne remained at parade rest while Dwayne told of his year as a County Executive for the Boy Scouts of America, when more black young people were brought into scouting than in any previous year. Dwayne told Wayne about his efforts to save the life of a young black man named Payton Brown, who, at the age of fifteen and a half, became the youngest person ever to die in the electric chair at Shepherdstown. Dwayne rambled on about all the black people he had hired when nobody else would hire black people, about how they never seemed to be able to get to work on time. He mentioned a few, too, who had been energetic and punctual, and he winked at Wayne, and he said this: "They were programmed that way."

  He spoke of his wife and son again, acknowledged that white robots were just like black robots, essentially, in that they were programmed to be whatever they were, to do whatever they did.

  Dwayne was silent for a moment after that.

  Mary Alice Miller's father was meanwhile continuing to learn conversational French while lying down in his automobile, only a few yards away.

  And then Dwayne took a swing at Wayne. He meant to slap him hard with his open hand, but Wayne was very good at ducking. He dropped to his knees as the hand swished through the air where his face had been.

  Dwayne laughed. "African dodger!" he said. This had reference to a sort of carnival booth which was popular when Dwayne was a boy. A black man would stick his head through a hole in a piece of canvas at the back of a booth, and people would pay money for the privilege of throwing hard baseballs at his head. If they hit his head, they won a prize.

  *

  So Dwayne thought that the Creator of the Universe had invited him to play a game of African dodger now. He became cunning, concealed his violent intentions with apparent boredom. Then he kicked at Wayne very suddenly.

  Wayne dodged again, and had to dodge yet again almost instantly, as Dwayne advanced with quick combinations of intended kicks, slaps, and punches. And Wayne vaulted onto the bed of a very unusual truck, which had been built on the chassis of a 1962 Cadillac limousine. It had belonged to the Maritimo Brothers Construction Company.

  Wayne's new elevation gave him a view past Dwayne of both barrels of the Interstate, and of a mile or more of Will Fairchild Memorial Airport, which lay beyond. And it is important to understand at this point that Wayne had never seen an airport before, was unprepared for what could happen to an airport when a plane came in at night.

  "That's all right, that's all right," Dwayne assured Wayne. He was being a very good sport. He had no intention of climbing up on truck for another swing at Wayne. He was winded, for one thing. For another, he understood that Wayne was a perfect dodging machine. Only a perfect hitting machine could hit him. "You're too good for me," said Dwayne.

  So Dwayne backed away some, contented himself with preaching up at Wayne. He spoke about human slavery--not only black slaves, but white slaves, too. Dwayne regarded coal miners and workers on assembly lines and so forth as slaves, no matter what color they were. "I used to think that was such a shame," he said. "I used to think the electric chair was a shame. I used to think war was a shame--and automobile accidents and cancer," he said, and so on.

  He didn't think they were shames anymore. "Why should I care what happens to machines?" he said.

  Wayne Hoobler's face had been blank so far, but now it began to bloom with uncontrollable awe. His mouth fell open.

  The runway lights of Will Fairchild Memorial Airport had just come on. Those lights looked like miles and miles of bewilderingly beautiful jewelry to Wayne. He was seeing a dream come true on the other side of the Interstate.

  The inside of Wayne's head lit up in recognition of that dream, lit up with an electric sign which gave a childish name to the dream--like this:

  24

  LISTEN: Dwayne Hoover hurt so many people seriously that a special ambulance known as Martha was called, Martha was a full-sized General Motors transcontinental bus, but with the seats removed. There were beds for thirty-six disaster victims in there, plus a kitchen and a bathroom and an operating room. It had enough food and medical supplies aboard to serve as an independent little hospital for a week without help from the outside world.

  Its full name was The Martha Simmons Memorial Mobile Disaster Unit, named in honor of the wife of Newbolt Simmons, a County Commissioner of Public Safety. She had died of rabies contracted from a sick bat she found clinging to her floor-to-ceiling livingroom draperies one morning. She had just been reading a biography of Albert Schweitzer, who believed that human beings should treat simpler animals lovingly. The bat nipped her ever so slightly as she wrapped it in Kleenex, a face tissue. She carried it out onto her patio, where she laid it gently on a form of artificial grass known as Astroturf.

  She had thirty-six-inch hips, a twenty-nine-inch waist, and a thirty-eight-inch bosom at the time of her death. Her husband had a penis seven and a half inches long and two inches in diameter.

  He and Dwayne were drawn together for a while--because his wife and Dwayne's wife had died such strange deaths within a month of each other.

  They bought a gravel pit together, out on Route 23A, but then the Maritimo Brothers Construction Company offered them twice what they had paid for it. So they accepted the offer and divided up the profits, and the friendship petered out somehow. They still exchanged Christmas cards.

  Dwayne's most recent Christmas card to Newbolt Simmons looked like this:

  Newbolt Simmons' most recent Christmas card to Dwayne looked like this:

  *

  My psychiatrist is also named Martha. She gathers jumpy people together into little families which meet once a week. It's a lot of fun. She teaches us how to comfort one another intelligently. She is on vacation now. I like her a lot.

  And I think now, as my fiftieth birthday draws near, about the American novelist Thomas Wolfe, who was only thirty-eight years old when he died. He got a lot of help in organizing his novels from Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Charles Scribner's Sons. I have heard that Perkins told him to keep in mind as he wrote, as a unifying idea, a hero's search for a father.

  It seems to me that really truthful American novels would have the heroes and heroines alike looking for mothers instead. This needn't be embarrassing. It's simply true.

  A mother is much more useful.

  I wouldn't feel particularly good if I found another father. Neither would Dwayne Hoover. Neither would Kilgore Trout.

  *

  And just as motherless Dwayne Hoover was berating motherless Wayne Hoobler in the used car lot, a man who had actually killed his mother was preparing to land in a chartered plane at Will Fairchild Memorial Airport, on the other side of the Interstate. This was Eliot Rosewater, Kilgore Trout's patron. He killed his mother accidentally in a boating accident, when a youth. She was Women's Chess Champion of the United States of America, nineteen hundred and thirty-six years after the Son of God was born, supposedly. Rosewater killed her the year after that.

  It was his pilot who caused the airport's runways to become an ex-convict's idea of fairyland. Rosewater remembered his mother's jewelry when the lights came on. He looked to the west, and he smiled at the rosy loveliness of the Mildred Barry Memorial Arts Center
, a harvest moon on stilts in a bend of Sugar Creek. It reminded him of how his mother had looked when he saw her through the bleary eyes of infancy.

  *

  I had made him up, of course--and his pilot, too. I put Colonel Looseleaf Harper, the man who had dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan, at the controls.

  I made Rosewater an alcoholic in another book. I now had him reasonably well sobered up, with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous. I had him use his new-found sobriety, to explore, among other things, the supposed spiritual and physical benefits of sexual orgies with strangers in New York City. He was only confused so far.

  I could have killed him, and his pilot, too, but I let them live on. So their plane touched down uneventfully.

  *

  The two physicians on the disaster vehicle named Martha were Cyprian Ukwende, of Nigeria, and Khashdrahr Miasma, from the infant nation of Bangladesh. Both were parts of the world which were famous from time to time for having the food run out. Both places were specifically mentioned, in fact, in Now It Can Be Told, by Kilgore Trout. Dwayne Hoover read in that book that robots all over the world were constantly running out of fuel and dropping dead, while waiting around to test the only free-willed creature in the Universe, on the off-chance that he should appear.

  *

  At the wheel of the ambulance was Eddie Key, a young black man who was a direct descendant of Francis Scott Key, the white American patriot who wrote the National Anthem. Eddie knew he was descended from Key. He could name more than six hundred of his ancestors, and had at least an anecdote about each. They were Africans, Indians and white men.

  He knew, for instance, that his mother's side of the family had once owned the farm on which Sacred Miracle Cave was discovered, that his ancestors had called it "Bluebird Farm."

  *

  Here was why there were so many young foreign doctors on the hospital staff, incidentally: The country didn't produce nearly enough doctors for all the sick people it had, but it had an awful lot of money. So it bought doctors from other countries which didn't have much money.

  *

  Eddie Key knew so much about his ancestry because the black part of his family had done what so many African families still do in Africa, which was to have one member of each generation whose duty it was to memorize the history of the family so far. Eddie Key had begun to store in his mind the names and adventures of ancestors on both his mother's and father's sides of his family when he was only six years old. As he sat in the front of the disaster vehicle, looking out through the windshield, he had the feeling that he himself was a vehicle, and that his eyes were windshields through which his progenitors could look, if they wished to.