Breakfast of Champions

10






KILGORE TROUT was released by the Police Department of the City of New York like a weightless thing—at two hours before dawn on the day after Veterans’ Day. He crossed the island of Manhattan from east to west in the company of Kleenex tissues and newspapers and soot.
He got a ride in a truck. It was hauling seventy-eight thousand pounds of Spanish olives. It picked him up at the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel, which was named in honor of a man who had had the courage and imagination to make human slavery against the law in the United States of America. This was a recent innovation.
The slaves were simply turned loose without any property. They were easily recognizable. They were black. They were suddenly free to go exploring.


The driver, who was white, told Trout that he would have to lie on the floor of the cab until they reached open country, since it was against the law for him to pick up hitchhikers.


It was still dark when he told Trout he could sit up. They were crossing the poisoned marshes and meadows of New Jersey. The truck was a General Motors Astro-95 Diesel tractor, hooked up to a trailer forty feet long. It was so enormous that it made Trout feel that his head was about the size of a piece of bee-bee shot.
The driver said he used to be a hunter and a fisherman, long ago. It broke his heart when he imagined what the marshes and meadows had been like only a hundred years before. “And when you think of the shit that most of these factories make—wash day products, catfood, pop—”


He had a point. The planet was being destroyed by manufacturing processes, and what was being manufactured was lousy, by and large.
Then Trout made a good point, too. “Well,” he said, “I used to be a conservationist. I used to weep and wail about people shooting bald eagles with automatic shotguns from helicopters and all that, but I gave it up. There’s a river in Cleveland which is so polluted that it catches fire about once a year. That used to make me sick, but I laugh about it now. When some tanker accidently dumps its load in the ocean, and kills millions of birds and billions of fish, I say, ‘More power to Standard Oil,’ or whoever it was that dumped it.” Trout raised his arms in celebration. “‘Up your ass with Mobil gas,’” he said.
The driver was upset by this. “You’re kidding,” he said.
“I realized,” said Trout, “that God wasn’t any conservationist, so for anybody else to be one was sacrilegious and a waste of time. You ever see one of His volcanoes or tornadoes or tidal waves? Anybody ever tell you about the Ice Ages he arranges for every half-million years? How about Dutch Elm disease? There’s a nice conservation measure for you. That’s God, not man. Just about the time we got our rivers cleaned up, he’d probably have the whole galaxy go up like a celluloid collar. That’s what the Star of Bethlehem was, you know.”
“What was the Star of Bethlehem?” said the driver.
“A whole galaxy going up like a celluloid collar,” said Trout.


The driver was impressed. “Come to think about it,” he said, “I don’t think there’s anything about conservation anywhere in the Bible.”
“Unless you want to count the story about the Flood,” said Trout.


They rode in silence for a while, and then the driver made another good point. He said he knew that his truck was turning the atmosphere into poison gas, and that the planet was being turned into pavement so his truck could go anywhere. “So I’m committing suicide,” he said.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Trout.
“My brother is even worse,” the driver went on. “He works in a factory that makes chemicals for killing plants and trees in Viet Nam.” Viet Nam was a country where America was trying to make people stop being communists by dropping things on them from airplanes. The chemicals he mentioned were intended to kill all the foliage, so it would be harder for communists to hide from airplanes.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Trout.
“In the long run, he’s committing suicide,” said the driver. “Seems like the only kind of job an American can get these days is committing suicide in some way.”
“Good point,” said Trout.


“I can’t tell if you’re serious or not,” said the driver.
“I won’t know myself until I find out whether life is serious or not,” said Trout. “It’s dangerous, I know, and it can hurt a lot. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s serious, too.”


After Trout became famous, of course, one of the biggest mysteries about him was whether he was kidding or not. He told one persistent questioner that he always crossed his fingers when he was kidding.
“And please note,” he went on, “that when I gave you that priceless piece of information, my fingers were crossed.”
And so on.
He was a pain in the neck in a lot of ways. The truck driver got sick of him after an hour or two. Trout used the silence to make up an anticonservation story he called “Gilgongo!”
“Gilgongo!” was about a planet which was unpleasant because there was too much creation going on.
The story began with a big party in honor of a man who had wiped out an entire species of darling little panda bears. He had devoted his life to this. Special plates were made for the party, and the guests got to take them home as souvenirs. There was a picture of a little bear on each one, and the date of the party. Underneath the picture was the word:
GILGONGO!

In the language of the planet, that meant “Extinct!”


People were glad that the bears were gilgongo, because there were too many species on the planet already, and new ones were coming into being almost every hour. There was no way anybody could prepare for the bewildering diversity of creatures and plants he was likely to encounter.
The people were doing their best to cut down on the number of species, so that life could be more predictable. But Nature was too creative for them. All life on the planet was suffocated at last by a living blanket one hundred feet thick. The blanket was composed of passenger pigeons and eagles and Bermuda Erns and whooping cranes.


“At least it’s olives,” the driver said.
“What?” said Trout.
“Lots worse things we could be hauling than olives.”
“Right,” said Trout. He had forgotten that the main thing they were doing was moving seventy-eight thousand pounds of olives to Tulsa, Oklahoma.


The driver talked about politics some.
Trout couldn’t tell one politician from another one. They were all formlessly enthusiastic chimpanzees to him. He wrote a story one time about an optimistic chimpanzee who became President of the United States. He called it “Hail to the Chief.”
The chimpanzee wore a little blue blazer with brass buttons, and with the seal of the President of the United States sewed to the breast pocket. It looked like this:


Everywhere he went, bands would play “Hail to the Chief” The chimpanzee loved it. He would bounce up and down.


They stopped at a diner. Here is what the sign in front of the diner said:


So they ate.
Trout spotted an idiot who was eating, too. The idiot was a white male adult—in the care of a white female nurse. The idiot couldn’t talk much, and he had a lot of trouble feeding himself. The nurse put a bib around his neck.
But he certainly had a wonderful appetite. Trout watched him shovel waffles and pork sausage into his mouth, watched him guzzle orange juice and milk. Trout marveled at what a big animal the idiot was. The idiot’s happiness was fascinating, too, as he stoked himself with calories which would get him through yet another day.
Trout said this to himself: “Stoking up for another day.”


“Excuse me,” said the truck driver to Trout, “I’ve got to take a leak.”
“Back where I come from,” said Trout, “that means you’re going to steal a mirror. We call mirrors leaks.”
“I never heard that before,” said the driver. He repeated the word: “Leaks.” He pointed to a mirror on a cigarette machine. “You call that a leak?”
“Doesn’t it look like a leak to you?” said Trout.
“No,” said the driver. “Where did you say you were from?”
“I was born in Bermuda,” said Trout.
About a week later, the driver would tell his wife that mirrors were called leaks in Bermuda, and she would tell her friends.


When Trout followed the driver back to the truck, he took his first good look at their form of transportation from a distance, saw it whole. There was a message written on the side of it in bright orange letters which were eight feet high. This was it:


Trout wondered what a child who was just learning to read would make of a message like that. The child would suppose that the message was terrifically important, since somebody had gone to the trouble of writing it in letters so big.
And then, pretending to be a child by the roadside, he read the message on the side of another truck. This was it: