Breakfast of Champions

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.
Francis Scott Key was only one of thousands back there. On the off-chance that Key might now be having a look at what had become of the United States of America so far, Eddie focussed his eyes on an American flag which was stuck to the windshield. He said this very quietly: “Still wavin’, man.”


Eddie Key’s familiarity with a teeming past made life much more interesting to him than it was to Dwayne, for instance, or to me, or to Kilgore Trout, or to almost any white person in Midland City that day. We had no sense of anybody else using our eyes—or our hands. We didn’t even know who our great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers were. Eddie Key was afloat in a river of people who were flowing from here to there in time. Dwayne and Trout and I were pebbles at rest.
And Eddie Key, because he knew so much by heart, was able to have deep, nourishing feelings about Dwayne Hoover, for instance, and about Dr. Cyprian Ukwende, too. Dwayne was a man whose family had taken over Bluebird Farm. Ukwende, an Indaro, was a man whose ancestors had kidnapped an ancestor of Key’s on the West Coast of Africa, a man named Ojumwa. The Indaros sold him for a musket to British slave traders, who took him on a sailing ship named the “Skylark” to Charleston, South Carolina, where he was auctioned off as a self-propelled, self-repairing farm machine.
And so on.


Dwayne Hoover was now hustled aboard Martha through big double doors in her rear, just ahead of the engine compartment. Eddie Key was in the driver’s seat, and he watched the action in his rearview mirror. Dwayne was swaddled so tightly in canvas restraining sheets that his reflection looked to Eddie like a bandaged thumb.
Dwayne didn’t notice the restraints. He thought he was on the virgin planet promised by the book by Kilgore Trout. Even when he was laid out horizontally by Cyprian Ukwende and Khashdrahr Miasma, he thought he was standing up. The book had told him that he went swimming in cold water on the virgin planet, that he always yelled something surprising when he climbed out of the icy pool. It was a game. The Creator of the Universe would try to guess what Dwayne would yell each day. And Dwayne would fool him totally.
Here is what Dwayne yelled in the ambulance: “Goodbye, Blue Monday!” Then it seemed to him that another day had passed on the virgin planet, and it was time to yell again. “Not a cough in a carload!” he yelled.


Kilgore Trout was one of the walking wounded. He was able to climb aboard Martha without assistance, and to choose a place to sit where he would be away from real emergencies. He had jumped Dwayne Hoover from behind when Dwayne dragged Francine Pefko out of Dwayne’s showroom and onto the asphalt. Dwayne wanted to give her a beating in public, which his bad chemicals made him think she richly deserved.
Dwayne had already broken her jaw and three ribs in the office. When he trundled her outside, there was a fairsize crowd which had drifted out of the cocktail lounge and the kitchen of the new Holiday Inn. “Best f*cking machine in the State,” he told the crowd. “Wind her up, and she’ll f*ck you and say she loves you, and she won’t shut up till you give her a Colonel Sanders Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise.”
And so on. Trout grabbed him from behind.
Trout’s right ring finger somehow slipped into Dwayne’s mouth, and Dwayne bit off the topmost joint. Dwayne let go of Francine after that, and she slumped to the asphalt. She was unconscious, and the most seriously injured of all. And Dwayne went cantering over to the concrete trough by the Interstate, and he spat Kilgore Trout’s fingertip into Sugar Creek.


Kilgore Trout did not choose to lie down in Martha. He settled into a leather bucket seat behind Eddie Key. Key asked him what was the matter with him, and Trout held up his right hand, partly shrouded in a bloody handkerchief, which looked like this:


“A slip of the lip can sink a ship!” yelled Dwayne.


“Remember Pearl Harbor!” yelled Dwayne. Most of what he had done during the past three-quarters of an hour had been hideously unjust. But he had spared Wayne Hoobler, at least. Wayne was back among the used cars again, unscathed. He was picking up a bracelet which I had pitched back there for him to find.
As for myself: I kept a respectful distance between myself and all the violence—even though I had created Dwayne and his violence and the city, and the sky above and the Earth below. Even so, I came out of the riot with a broken watch crystal and what turned out later to be a broken toe. Somebody jumped backwards to get out of Dwayne’s way. He broke my watch crystal, even though I had created him, and he broke my toe.


This isn’t the kind of book where people get what is coming to them at the end. Dwayne hurt only one person who deserved to be hurt for being so wicked: That was Don Breedlove. Breedlove was the white gas-conversion unit installer who had raped Patty Keene, the waitress in Dwayne’s Burger Chef out on Crestview Avenue, in the parking lot of George Hickman Bannister Memorial Fieldhouse out at the County Fairgrounds after Peanut University beat Innocent Bystander High School in the Regional Class High School Basketball Playoffs.


Don Breedlove was in the kitchen of the Inn when Dwayne began his rampage. He was repairing a defective gas oven in there.
He stepped outside for some fresh air, and Dwayne came running up to him. Dwayne had just spit Kilgore Trout’s fingertip into Sugar Creek. Don and Dwayne knew each other quite well, since Dwayne had once sold Breedlove a new Pontiac Ventura, which Don said was a lemon. A lemon was an automobile which didn’t run right, and which nobody was able to repair.
Dwayne actually lost money on the transaction, making adjustments and replacing parts in an attempt to mollify Breedlove. But Breedlove was inconsolable, and he finally painted this sign in bright yellow on his trunk lid and on both doors:


Here was what was really wrong with the car, incidentally. The child of a neighbor of Breedlove had put maple sugar in the gas tank of the Ventura. Maple sugar was a kind of candy made from the blood of trees.
So Dwayne Hoover now extended his right hand to Breedlove, and Breedlove without thinking anything about it took that hand in his own. They linked up like this:


This was a symbol of friendship between men. The feeling was, too, that a lot of character could be read into the way a man shook hands. Dwayne and Don Breedlove gave each other squeezes which were dry and hard.
So Dwayne held on to Don Breedlove with his right hand, and he smiled as though bygones were bygones. Then he made a cup out of his left hand, and he hit Don on the ear with the open end of the cup. This created terrific air pressure in Don’s ear. He fell down because the pain was so awful. Don would never hear anything with that ear, ever again.


So Don was in the ambulance, too, now—sitting up like Kilgore Trout. Francine was lying down—unconscious but moaning. Beatrice Keedsler was lying down, although she might have sat up. Her jaw was broken. Bunny Hoover was lying down. His face was unrecognizable, even as a face—anybody’s face. He had been given morphine by Cyprian Ukwende.
There were five other victims as well—one white female, two white males, two black males. The three white people had never been in Midland City before. They were on their way together from Erie, Pennsylvania, to the Grand Canyon, which was the deepest crack on the planet. They wanted to look down into the crack, but they never got to do it. Dwayne Hoover assaulted them as they walked from the car toward the lobby of the New Holiday Inn.
The two black males were both kitchen employees of the Inn.


Cyprian Ukwende now tried to remove Dwayne Hoover’s shoes—but Dwayne’s shoes and laces and socks were impregnated with the plastic material, which he had picked up while wading across Sugar Creek.
Ukwende was not mystified by plasticized, unitized shoes and socks. He saw shoes and socks like that every day at the hospital, on the feet of children who had played too close to Sugar Creek. In fact, he had hung a pair of tinsnips on the wall of the hospital’s emergency room—for cutting off plasticized, unitized shoes and socks.
He turned to his Bengali assistant, young Dr. Khashdrahr Miasma. “Get some shears,” he said.
Miasma was standing with his back to the door of the ladies’ toilet on the emergency vehicle. He had done nothing so far to deal with all the emergencies. Ukwende and police and a team from Civil Defense had done the work so far. Miasma now refused even to find some shears.
Basically, Miasma probably shouldn’t have been in the field of medicine at all, or at least not in any area where there was a chance that he might be criticized. He could not tolerate criticism. This was a characteristic beyond his control. Any hint that anything about him was not absolutely splendid automatically turned him into a useless, sulky child who would only say that it wanted to go home.
That was what he said when Ukwende told him a second time to find shears: “I want to go home.”
Here is what he had been criticized for, just before the alarm came in about Dwayne’s going berserk: He had amputated a black man’s foot, whereas the foot could probably have been saved.
And so on.


I could go on and on with the intimate details about the various lives of people on the super-ambulance, but what good is more information?
I agree with Kilgore Trout about realistic novels and their accumulations of nit-picking details. In Trout’s novel, The Pan-Galactic Memory Bank, the hero is on a space ship two hundred miles long and sixty-two miles in diameter. He gets a realistic novel out of the branch library in his neighborhood. He reads about sixty pages of it, and then he takes it back.
The librarian asks him why he doesn’t like it, and he says to her, “I already know about human beings.”
And so on.


Martha began to move. Kilgore Trout saw a sign he liked a lot. Here is what it said:


And so on.
Dwayne Hoover’s awareness returned to Earth momentarily. He spoke of opening a health club in Midland City, with rowing machines and stationary bicycles and whirlpool baths and sunlamps and a swimming pool and so on. He told Cyprian Ukwende that the thing to do with a health club was to open it and then sell it as soon as possible for a profit. “People get all enthusiastic about getting back in shape or losing some pounds,” said Dwayne. “They sign up for the program, but then they lose interest in about a year, and they stop coming. That’s how people are.”
And so on.
Dwayne wasn’t going to open any health club. He wasn’t going to open anything ever again. The people he had injured so unjustly would sue him so vengefully that he would be rendered destitute. He would become one more withered balloon of an old man on Midland City’s Skid Row, which was the neighborhood of the once fashionable Fairchild Hotel. He would be by no means the only drifter of whom it could be truthfully said, “See him? Can you believe it? He doesn’t have a doodley-squat now, but he used to be fabulously well-to-do.”
And so on.
Kilgore Trout now peeled strips and patches of plastic from his burning shins and feet in the ambulance. He had to use his uninjured left hand.