Breakfast of Champions

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 f*cking other men in the mouth and the a*shole, and being f*cked in the mouth and the a*shole, and jerking off—and f*cking 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 combination 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:


The lenses were silvered, were mirrors to anyone looking my way. Anyone wanting to know what my eyes were like was confronted with his or her own twin reflections. Where other people in the cocktail lounge had eyes, I had two holes into another universe. I had leaks.


There was a book of matches on my table, next to my Pall Mall cigarettes.
Here is the message on the book of matches, which I read an hour and a half later, while Dwayne was beating the daylights out of Francine Pefko:
“It’s easy to make $100 a week in your spare time by showing comfortable, latest style Mason shoes to your friends. EVERYBODY goes for Mason shoes with their many special comfort features! We’ll send FREE moneymaking kit so you can run your business from home. We’ll even tell you how you can earn shoes FREE OF COST as a bonus for taking profitable orders!”
And so on.


“This is a very bad book you’re writing,” I said to myself behind my leaks.
“I know,” I said.
“You’re afraid you’ll kill yourself the way your mother did,” I said.
“I know,” I said.


There in the cocktail lounge, peering out through my leaks at a world of my own invention, I mouthed this word: schizophrenia.
The sound and appearance of the word had fascinated me for many years. It sounded and looked to me like a human being sneezing in a blizzard of soapflakes.
I did not and do not know for certain that I have that disease. This much I knew and know: I was making myself hideously uncomfortable by not narrowing my attention to details of life which were immediately important, and by refusing to believe what my neighbors believed.


I am better now.
Word of honor: I am better now.


I was really sick for a while, though. I sat there in a cocktail lounge of my own invention, and I stared through my leaks at a white cocktail waitress of my own invention. I named her Bonnie MacMahon. I had her bring Dwayne Hoover his customary drink, which was a House of Lords martini with a twist of lemon peel. She was a longtime acquaintance of Dwayne’s. Her husband was a guard in the Sexual Offenders’ Wing of the Adult Correctional Institution. Bonnie had to work as a waitress because her husband lost all their money by investing it in a car wash in Shepherdstown.
Dwayne had advised them not to do it. Here is how Dwayne knew her and her husband Ralph: They had bought nine Pontiacs from him over the past sixteen years.
“We’re a Pontiac family,” they’d say.
Bonnie made a joke now as she served him his martini. She made the same joke every time she served anybody a martini. “Breakfast of Champions,” she said.


The expression “Breakfast of Champions” is a registered trademark of General Mills, Inc., for use on a breakfast cereal product. The use of the identical expression as the title for this book as well as throughout the book is not intended to indicate an association with or sponsorship by General Mills, nor is it intended to disparage their fine products.


Dwayne was hoping that some of the distinguished visitors to the Arts Festival, who were all staying at the Inn, would come into the cocktail lounge. He wanted to talk to them, if he could, to discover whether they had truths about life which he had never heard before. Here is what he hoped new truths might do for him: enable him to laugh at his troubles, to go on living, and to keep out of the North Wing of the Midland County General Hospital, which was for lunatics.
While he waited for an artist to appear, he consoled himself with the only artistic creation of any depth and mystery which was stored in his head. It was a poem he had been forced to learn by heart during his sophomore year in Sugar Creek High School, the elite white high school at the time. Sugar Creek High was a Nigger high school now. Here was the poem:
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.
Some poem!


And Dwayne was so open to new suggestions about the meaning of life that he was easily hypnotized. So, when he looked down into his martini, he was put into a trance by dancing myriads of winking eyes on the surface of his drink. The eyes were beads of lemon oil.
Dwayne missed it when two distinguished visitors to the Arts Festival came in and sat down on barstools next to Bunny’s piano. They were white. They were Beatrice Keedsler, the Gothic novelist, and Rabo Karabekian, the minimal painter.
Bunny’s piano, a Steinway baby grand, was armored with pumpkin-colored Formica and ringed with stools. People could eat and drink from the piano. On the previous Thanksgiving, a family of eleven had had Thanksgiving dinner served on the piano. Bunny played.


“This has to be the a*shole of the Universe,” said Rabo Karabekian, the minimal painter.
Beatrice Keedsler, the Gothic novelist, had grown up in Midland City. “I was petrified about coming home after all these years,” she said to Karabekian.
“Americans are always afraid of coming home,” said Karabekian, “with good reason, may I say.”
“They used to have good reason,” said Beatrice, “but not anymore. The past has been rendered harmless. I would tell any wandering American now, ‘Of course you can go home again, and as often as you please. It’s just a motel.’”


Traffic on the westbound barrel of the Interstate had come to a halt a mile east of the new Holiday Inn—because of a fatal accident on Exit 10A. Drivers and passengers got out of their cars—to stretch their legs and find out, if they could, what the trouble was up ahead.
Kilgore Trout was among those who got out. He learned from others that the new Holiday Inn was within easy walking distance. So he gathered up his parcels from the front seat of the Galaxie. He thanked the driver, whose name he had forgotten, and he began to trudge.
He also began to assemble in his mind a system of beliefs which would be appropriate to his narrow mission in Midland City, which was to show provincials, who were bent on exalting creativity, a would-be creator who had failed and failed. He paused in his trudge to examine himself in the rearview mirror, the rearview leak, of a truck locked up in traffic. The tractor was pulling two trailers instead of one. Here was the message the owners of the rig saw fit to shriek at human beings wherever it went:


Trout’s image in the leak was as shocking as he had hoped it would be. He had not washed up after his drubbing by The Pluto Gang, so there was caked blood on one earlobe, and more under his left nostril. There was dog shit on a shoulder of his coat. He had collapsed into dog shit on the handball court under the Queensboro Bridge after the robbery.
By an unbelievable coincidence, that shit came from the wretched greyhound belonging to a girl I knew.


The girl with the greyhound was an assistant lighting director for a musical comedy about American history, and she kept her poor greyhound, who was named Lancer, in a one-room apartment fourteen feet wide and twenty-six feet long, and six flights of stairs above street level. His entire life was devoted to unloading his excrement at the proper time and place. There were two proper places to put it: in the gutter outside the door seventy-two steps below, with the traffic whizzing by, or in a roasting pan his mistress kept in front of the Westinghouse refrigerator.
Lancer had a very small brain, but he must have suspected from time to time, just as Wayne Hoobler did, that some kind of terrible mistake had been made.


Trout trudged onward, a stranger in a strange land. His pilgrimage was rewarded with new wisdom, which would never have been his had he remained in his basement in Cohoes. He learned the answer to a question many human beings were asking themselves so frantically: “What’s blocking traffic on the westbound barrel of the Midland City stretch of the Interstate?”
The scales fell from the eyes of Kilgore Trout. He saw the explanation: a Queen of the Prairies milk truck was lying on its side, blocking the flow. It had been hit hard by a ferocious 1971 Chevrolet Caprice two-door. The Chevy had jumped the median divider strip. The Chevy’s passenger hadn’t used his seat belt. He had shot right through the shatterproof windshield. He was lying dead now in the concrete trough containing Sugar Creek. The Chevy’s driver was also dead. He had been skewered by the post of his steering wheel.
The Chevy’s passenger was bleeding blood as he lay dead in Sugar Creek. The milk truck was bleeding milk. Milk and blood were about to be added to the composition of the stinking ping-pong balls which were being manufactured in the bowels of Sacred Miracle Cave.